The Iron Wars

mingled his pikemen with Aras’s arquebusiers and Rosio’s guns. The position was enveloped in a pall of smoke which the flickering stabs of gunfire lit up red and yellow, but the westerners were holding. Corfe knew that Formio would not retreat a yard. The right flank was safe, for the time being.

So the left—the left was where disaster loomed most clearly. How to cripple this new threat with the few men he had remaining to him . . .

It came to him all at once. Guile, not force. And he knew exactly what he had to do. He jerked his horse round to face Andruw.

“We’re moving out. I want Ranafast’s men to lead the way, at the double. Andruw, you take the Cathedrallers off to their left. I’ll explain as we go along.”

TWENTY-THREE

A VAST cavalcade of horsemen, numerous as a locust swarm. There was no order in their ranks and as they trotted along they jostled one another and expanded and contracted with ever dip in the terrain. They had a frontage of half a mile, but as they advanced the rear ranks broke into a canter and began to move up to left and right, extending that yard by yard. By the time they had come within sight of the Minhraib camp and the battle that was tapering off there, they had expanded into a great arc, a shallow new-moon sickle which stretched almost half a league from tip to tip and whose coming seemed to make the frozen earth quake and quiver below their hooves. Twenty thousand of Nalbeni’s finest men, come here in alliance with the Sultanate of Ostrabar to close the trap on the enemy and grind the Torunnans into the snow.

Corfe watched them from the trees, and could not help but feel a kind of admiration. They were a magnificent sight. In these days of cannon and gunpowder they were like something out of the barbaric past, but he knew that their powerful compound bows had virtually the range of an arquebus, and were easier to reload. They had teeth in plenty.

Behind him, hidden in the line of trees which extended all the way to the rear of the Torunnan line, his Cathedrallers waited with growing impatience. The Nalbenic horsemen would sweep past them on their way to take the King’s forces in the flank. He in turn would attack them in the rear, and hit them hard. But first they had to be halted. They had to meet the anvil before the hammer could fall.

And the anvil was in place, awaiting their arrival.

Clouds and spumes of powdery snow were blowing across the slopes of the hills. The sky had lightened a little, but the day had become much colder and Corfe’s breath was wreathing a white filigree about the front of his helm. The blowing snow would cover the fume of four thousand coils of burning match. Ranafast and his men, in two ranks over a mile long, lying out there somewhere in the snow, waiting. Corfe’s anvil.

He had found them a long reverse slope where they could lie hidden until the last moment, and the blowing snow had quickly broken up the stark blackness of their uniforms. It would be cold out there on the hard ground with the rime blowing in their faces, but they would have warm work soon enough. How long had the fighting been going on? It seemed to have lasted for ever, and yet Corfe’s sword had not yet cleared its scabbard. That was part of the price of command: ordering other men to die while you watched.

Not for much longer, by God. Soon the enemy—

A huge tearing sound, like heavy fabric being ripped. Off to the right a wall of smoke rose. Ranafast’s men had fired.

Corfe sat up in the saddle. His horse was dancing under him. He drew out Mogen’s sword and held it upright. He could feel the eyes of his men on him in anticipation of the signal. It was like sitting with one’s back to a bulging dam, waiting for it to burst.

The lead ranks of the Nalbenic horsemen looked as though they had simultaneously hit a tripwire. Ranafast had fired at point-blank range—less than a hundred yards. As Corfe watched, the second rank fired. He could faintly hear the commands in the brief moments between volleys: “Ready your pieces! Prime your pieces! Give fire!”

The enemy had been halted as if they had slammed into a stone wall. They milled there for a few deadly minutes with the heavy lead bullets snicking and ripping and slamming into them. Horses screaming, rearing, kicking, tumbling to the snow, men jerking as the heavy balls impacted, flying out of the saddle, shrieking, grasping at bloody holes. The press of animals was so great that the riders who were being decimated at the front could not retreat from the murderous fire. Showers of arrows were fired, but Ranafast’s men were lying down and presented a minuscule target. The thousands of horsemen in the fore of the Nalbenic host were caught there like a beetle on a pin, the victim of their own numbers. In the space of a hundred heartbeats a veritable wall of writhing bodies built up, hundreds, thousands of them. It was one of the most ghastly things Corfe had ever seen. With a flash of intuition he realized he was looking at the death of cavalry—of all cavalry.

But it was not enough. The work had to be completed. The Nalbenic formation was beginning to become more fluid. They were backing away, rear ranks streaming in retreat so the wretches at the front could get clear of the withering barrage. Soon they would open out, find the ends of Ranafast’s line and envelop him. They had to be packed together again, forced back upon the anvil.

Corfe brought down Mogen’s sabre. “Charge!”

The hammer fell.

 

T HE King of Torunna wiped the soot from his face and, grimacing, realized that his gauntlet had been dripping with blood. He was trembling with fatigue and his armour seemed twice its normal weight. He was mounted on his third horse of the day, his ankle so badly twisted by the headlong fall of the first that he could no longer walk. His crowned helm had given him an almighty headache and below it the sweat ran in streams. His throat was dry as sand, and his voice had become a croak.

Around him the remains of his three thousand cuirassiers clustered. Two thirds of them were dead or too injured to lift a sword, and nine tenths of them were afoot. They had been in the forefront of the attack all morning and had performed wonders. He was proud of them—he was secretly proud of himself. His first battle, his first charge, and he had acquitted himself as a king should, he thought.

The rest of the army was reforming, crowds of men being harangued into line by their surviving officers. The Minhraib had withdrawn for the moment, and the camp was his, what was left of it. It was a dreary, smoking wasteland strewn with mounded corpses, collapsed tents and dead horses, shrouded in smoke. Here and there the wounded writhed and wailed, but there were not many of those. No quarter had been asked or given, and when a man on either side fell helpless he would find his throat cut soon after. There was a sputtering of arquebus fire where the perimeter tercios were still contending with the enemy out in the smoke, but for the most part the army had fallen back to reform and prepare for the final push. Now where were those damned reinforcements he had ordered?

Lofantyr could hear the glorious, sullen rumble of war continuing off to the right, where Aras and his men were fighting off the Merduk relief column. Nothing on the left as yet. Or was that arquebus fire he heard out there? No, it was too far away. An echo, no doubt. He had been right not to worry about the left flank. And they thought he was no strategist!

General Menin trudged wearily over, saluted. His sword arm was bloody to the elbow.

“Ah, General, what is the delay? Where is General Cear-Inaf and our reserve? The courier went out an hour ago.”

An enormous clatter of musketry to their front, the roaring of a host of men in onset. The ranks of the Torunnans stiffened, and they strained to see through the murk and reek. Of the eighteen thousand the King had led into the camp, perhaps twelve thousand remained, but they had inflicted four or five times their own casualties on the enemy. Those twelve thousand were now arrayed in an untidy line a mile long. In some places the line was only two ranks deep, in others a veritable mob would gather, exhausted and injured men drawing together, taking reassurance out of the proximity of others. The army was spent, and it was hardly midafternoon on the longest day most of them had ever known.

“The courier returned a few minutes ago, sire.”

“I see. And why did he not report to me?”

Menin leaned against the flank of the King’s horse. He spoke quietly.

“Sire, Corfe is witholding the reserve. He fears for the left flank. Also, he informs me that the