insufferably heavy, though when running he had not even noticed its weight.
“Only a few seconds now,” Baffarin said. He was still grinning, but there was no humour on his face; it was like a rictus. Sweat carved runnels down his black temples.
Then the charges went off.
Not a noise, just a flash, an immense . . . impression. A sense of a huge happening that the brain could not quite grasp. Corfe felt the air sucked out of his lungs. He shut his eyes and buried his face in his arms, but he heard the secondary explosions distantly, as though he were separated from them by thick glass. Then there was the rain of rubble and wood and more terrible things falling all around him. Something heavy clanged off his backplate. Something else hit his hand as it gripped the back of his head, hard enough to numb. Rolling concussions, a swift-moving thunder. Water raining, men moaning. The echoes of the detonations reverberated off the face of the hills, faceted thunder, at last dwindling.
Corfe looked up. The bridge was gone, and the very earth seemed changed. Of the eastern barbican, that great, high-walled fortress, there was little left. Only stumps and mounds of smoking stone amid a huge series of craters. The catacombs laid bare to the sky. Fire flickering—the smell of powder and blood and broken soil, a reek heavier and more solid than any he had ever experienced before, even at Aekir.
“Holy God!” Andruw said beside him.
The slopes leading down to the site of the barbican were black with men, some alive and cowering, others turned into corpses. It was as if they had simultaneously experienced a vision, witnessed an apparition of their prophet, perhaps. The carcasses of elephants lay like outcrops of grey rock, except where they had been mutilated into something else. The entire battlefield seemed frozen in shock.
“I’ll bet they heard that in Torunn,” Baffarin said, the end of the slow-match still gripped in an ivory-knuckled hand.
“I’ll bet they heard it in fucking Hebrion,” a nearby trooper said, and there were automatic chuckles, empty humour. They were too shocked.
The air clicked in Corfe’s throat. He found his voice, and surprised himself with its steadiness.
“Who have we got here? Tove, Marsen, good. Get the men spread out along the earthworks. I want weapons primed. Ridal, get you to the citadel and report to Martellus. Tell him—tell him the eastern barbican and bridge are blown—”
“In case he hadn’t noticed,” someone put in.
“—And tell him I have some . . .” He glanced around. Sweet Saints in heaven! So few? “I have some tenscore men at my disposal.”
The survivors of Corfe’s first command busied themselves carrying out his orders.
“They’re fighting along the river,” someone said, standing and peering to the north. The boom of artillery and crackle of arquebus fire had shattered the momentary silence.
“That’s their fight. We’ve a job to do here,” Corfe said harshly. Then he sat down quickly with his back to a revetment, lest his rubber legs turn traitor and buckle under him.
M ARTELLUS watched the climax of the battle from his usual vantage point on the heights of the citadel. Not for him the hurly-burly of trying to command his men from the thick of things. John Mogen had been the man for that. No, he liked to stand back and study the layout of the developing conflict, base his decisions on logic and the dispatches that he received minute by minute, borne by grimed and bloody couriers. A general could direct things best from afar, distanced from the shouting turmoil of his battle. Some men, it was true, could command an army whilst fighting almost in the front rank, but they were rare geniuses. Inevitably Mogen came to mind again.
The roar of the explosion was a distant echo of thunder rolling back and forth between hills ever further away. A huge plume of smoke rose up from the centre of the battlefield where the eastern barbican had once been. The assault had been blunted there, perhaps even crippled. Young Corfe had done a good job. He was someone to watch, despite the cloud hanging over his past.
But to north and south of the smoke two fresh Merduk formations, each perhaps twenty-five thousand strong, had closed on the river. The artillery on the Long Walls and the island had peppered their ranks unceasingly with shells, but they came on regardless. Now they were unloading the flat puntlike boats from the elephant wains and preparing to brave the foaming current of the swollen Searil River.
Once they cross the river in force, Martellus thought, it is only a matter of time. We may destroy them in their thousands as they cross the dyke, but cross it they will. The river is our best defence, at least while it is running this full.
He turned to an aide.
“Is Ranafast standing ready with the sortie force?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then go to him. Give him my compliments and tell him he is to take his command out to the island at once. He can also strip the walls of every fourth man except for gunners, and all are to be arquebus-armed. He is to contest the crossing of the river. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
A scribe nearby had been scrawling furiously. The written order was entrusted to the aide after Martellus had flashed his signature across it, and then the aide was gone, running down to the Long Walls.
There was not much time for Ranafast to scratch together his command and get into position. Martellus cursed himself. Why had he never envisaged a mass boat crossing? They had been busy, the Merduk engineers, in the weeks they had been stalled at Aekir.
The first of the boats were already being shoved down the eastern bank and into the water. They were massive, crude affairs, propelled by the paddles of their passengers. Fourscore men at least manned each one, and Martellus counted over a hundred of them lining the eastern bank like southern river lizards basking in a tropical sun. Shellbursts were sprouting up in their midst like momentary fungi, shattering boats, sending men flying, panicking the elephants.
The Searil was three hundred yards across at the dyke, a wide brown river that was churning wild and white in many places and was thick with debris from its headwaters. No easy task to paddle across it at the best of times. To do it under shellfire, though . . . These men excited Martellus’ admiration even as he plotted their destruction.
The first wave was setting out. To north and south of the ruined bridge the Searil suddenly became thick with the large, flat boats, like a stream clogged with autumn leaves near its banks.
A thunder of hooves, and Ranafast was leading his horsemen—the vanguard of his command—across the dyke bridges to the island. A column of marching men followed on after the cavalry. With luck, there would be over seven thousand on the western bank to contest the crossing, supported by artillery from the walls.
And yet when he looked at the size, the teeming numbers, of those who clogged the eastern bank, Martellus could not help but feel despair. For miles the edge of the Searil was crawling with enemy soldiers, boats, elephants, horses and waggons. And that was only the assaulting force. On the hills beyond the reserves, the cavalry, the artillery, the countless camp-followers darkened the face of the land like some vast blight. It was inconceivable that the collective will of such a multitude should be thwarted.
And yet he must do it—he
Globes of smoke, tiny with distance, appeared along the length of the walls. After a few seconds the boom of the cannon salvoes came drifting up to the citadel, and soon the guns of the citadel itself were firing. The noise was everywhere, together with the blood-quickening smell of gunpowder.
White fountains of exploding water began to burst amid the Merduk boats. Martellus could make out the men in the craft straining like maniacs at their paddles, but remaining in time. They had their heads bowed and shoulders hunched forward as though they were braving a heavy shower of rain. Martellus had seen the same position assumed by most men advancing against heavy fire; it was a kind of instinct.
One, two, then three of the boats were struck in quick succession as the Torunnan artillery began to range in on their targets. Martellus had the best gunners in the world here at the dyke, and now they were fulfilling his faith in them.
