The Iron Wars

Minhraib are about to counter-attack.” The general glanced northwards, to where the sound of battle was rising to a roar in the smoke. “In fact they may well be doing so already. He advises us to withdraw at once. I concur, and have already given the necessary orders.”

“You have what? You exceed your authority, General. We are on the edge of a famous victory. One more push will see the day ours. We need Cear-Inaf’s reserve here, now.”

“Sire, listen to me. We have shot our bolt. According to General Cear-Inaf, thirty to forty thousand of the Minhraib have reformed on the northern edge of the camp and will be about our ears any minute. Aras is fighting for his life on the right, and Corfe must keep the reserve ready to face any new eventualities. We must fall back at once.”

“By God, General—”

But his words were drowned. The clatter out in the smoke had risen to a crescendo, and men were appearing in ones and twos, running. Torunnan arquebusiers in confused flight, throwing away their weapons as they ran. And behind them the formless clamour of a great host of men, shouting.

“Too late,” Menin said. “Here they come. Men! Prepare to repel an attack!”

The exhausted soldiers braced themselves.

“Sire, you should go to the rear,” Menin urged Lofantyr. “I do not know if we can hold.”

“What? Nonsense! I’ll lead another charge. We’ll see who—”

The western line erupted in a ragged volley as the lead elements of the enemy came thundering into view. Too soon—the Merduks were still out of range. But they were bowling forward, an unstoppable wave of armoured infantry under the bobbing horsetail standards. Tens of thousands of them.

The King’s face paled at the sight. “My God! I did not think there were so many left,” he croaked.

The two armies met in an appalling roar. It was hand-to-hand at once all down the line, the Torunnan arquebusiers unable to reload their weapons fast enough to keep the Minhraib at a distance.

Murderous, lunging chaos around the King as an entire enemy regiment homed in on the Royal standard. The more lightly armed Torunnans there were swept away by the fury of the Merduk onset, leaving the ironclad cuirassiers standing alone like an island, swinging their heavy cavalry sabres to terrible effect. In moments the entire Torunnan battle-line had been thrown back. Menin and Lofantyr found themselves surrounded, cut off from the main body of the army.

Lofantyr’s mind froze. He sat his terrified horse and watched as the Merduks flung themselves upon the ranks of his bodyguard with suicidal abandon. The heavily armoured knights were slaughtering their attackers, but they were being overwhelmed. Three or four of the enemy would throw themselves upon each armoured Torunnan, bear him down to the ground under their bodies, then rip off his helm and slit his throat.

“We are finished,” Menin said.

Lofantyr read the words on his lips, though the din of battle suffocated the sound of his voice. Menin was smiling. Panic rose like a cloud in Lofantyr’s throat. He would die? He, the King? It was impossible.

One of the enemy broke through the shrinking cuirassier cordon and dived at the King’s horse. A tulwar glittered and the animal screamed as it was hamstrung. Menin decapitated the man, but the King was down. The warhorse crashed, kicking, on to its side, trapping Lofantyr’s leg beneath it. He felt the bones wrench and shatter, and screamed, but his shriek was lost in the cacophony that surrounded him.

Menin was standing over him, hewing like a titan. Bodies were falling everywhere, men squirming in the snow and muck. An unbelievable tumult, a pitch of savagery and slaughter Lofantyr had not believed men could endure. He scrabbled feebly for the sword that had been his father’s, a Royal heirloom, but it was gone. He felt no pain or fear, only a kind of crazed incredulity. He could not believe this was happening.

He saw four Merduks bring Menin down, the old general fighting to the last. They stabbed a poniard through one of his eyes and finally quelled his struggles. Where were the rest of the bodyguard? There was no line now, only a few knots of men in a sea of the enemy. The last of the cuirassiers were being torn down like bears beset by hounds.

Someone ripped off Lofantyr’s helm. He found himself looking into a man’s face. A young man, the eyes dark and wild, foam at the corners of the mouth. Lofantyr tried to raise an arm, but someone was standing on his wrist. He saw the knife and tried to protest, but then the swift-stabbing blade came down and his life was over.

TWENTY-FOUR

O F the eighteen thousand Torunnans who had charged into the enemy camp that morning, perhaps half made it back out again. They withdrew doggedly, stubbornly, contesting every bloody foot of ground. The word of the King’s death had not yet spread, and there was no panic despite the incessant fearfulness of the Minhraib counter-attack. Field officers and junior officers took over, for the entire High Command lay dead upon the field, and brought their men out of the Merduk camp in a semblance of order. The Minhraib—once more disorganized, but this time by advance, not retreat—surged on regardless to the edge of what had been their encampment, and were astonished by the sight that met their eyes.

There on the high ground to their right, where they had been promised the Nalbenic cavalry would support them, they saw instead a steady unbroken line of five thousand grim Torunnan arquebusiers. And behind them in silent rank on rank were the dread figures of the red horsemen who had wreaked such havoc at the North More, their lances stark against the sky, their armour glinting like freshly spilled blood.

The Merduk advance died. The men of the Minhraib had been fighting since dawn. They had acquitted themselves well and they knew it, but nearly forty thousand of their number lay dead behind them, and thousands more were scattered and leaderless over the field. The unexpected sight of these fresh Torunnan forces unnerved them. Where had the Nalbeni disappeared to? They had been promised that their counter-attack would be supported on the Torunnan left.

As if in answer, a lone horseman came galloping out of the ranks of the scarlet riders. He brought his horse to within three hundred yards of the Minhraib host and there halted. In his hand he bore a horsetail standard which was surmounted by the likeness of a galley prow. It was the standard of a Nalbenic general. He stabbed the thing into the ground contemptuously, his destrier prancing and snorting, and as he did the cavalry on the hill behind him began to sing some weird, unearthly chant, a barbaric battle-paean, a song of victory. Then the horseman wheeled and cantered back the way he had come.

The song was taken up by the ranks of the Torunnan arquebusiers, and in their throats it became something else, a word which they were repeating as though it had some kind of indefinable power. Five thousand voices roared it out over and over again.

Corfe.

• • •

T HE gunfire died, and a tide of silence rolled over the tortured face of the hills. The winter afternoon was edging into a snow-flecked twilight. Two armies lay barely a league from one another, and between them sprawled the gutted wreck of what had once been a mighty encampment, the land about it littered with the dead. Two armies so badly mauled that as if by common agreement they ignored each other, and the shattered men which made them up strove to light fires and snatch some sleep upon the hard ground, hardly caring if the sun should ever rise on them again.

A single battered mule cart came trundling off the battlefield bearing a cloak-wrapped bundle. Besides its driver, four men on foot accompanied it. The four paused, doffed their helms and let it trundle into the Torunnan camp below, the wheels cracking the frozen snow like a salute of gunshots, whilst they stood amid the stiffened contortions of the dead and the first stars glimmered into life above their heads.

Corfe, Andruw, Marsch, Formio.

“Menin must have died defending him to the end,” Andruw said. “That old bugger. He died well.”

“He knew this day would be his last,” Corfe said. “He told me so. He was a good man.”

The foursome picked their way across the battlefield. There were other figures moving in the night, both Torunnan and Merduk. Men looking for lost comrades, brothers searching for the bodies of brothers. An unspoken truce reigned here as former enemies looked into the faces of the dead together.