CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

In the Soup

The line of chartassa appeared out of the night with spear-tips raised and shields interlocked, their eyes and teeth gleaming within the curves of their plumed helms, each man shouting in time to the drumbeats that were helping time their steps.

The purple-cloaked Hoo marched at the fore of the advancing Khosian army, forming the chartassa at the very tip of its warhead formation, while the Red Guards formed the flanks and the rear. In the first two ranks of each chartassa, the men bore short stabbing swords with leaf-shaped blades, designed for the intimate butcher’s work of the front line; in the ranks behind the swords were sheathed, and the men carried their massively long chartas raised in the air, ready to lower them once the enemy was close enough to engage.

Behind the line of phalanxes, and in the spaces in between them known as the gutters, step sergeants jogged to and fro with staves in their hands, bawling at those who were stepping out of time, lashing with their sticks at sections of men bulging outwards, maintaining the mobile coherence of their chartassa. Command flags appeared above the heads of the men. Shrill whistles blew.

The bristling forest of spears descended as one with a unified hoo.

Panic sounded from the enemy soldiers scattering before them. With the steady, unstoppable momentum of a ship cutting through water, the Khosian formation carved its way into the imperial camp.

Time was crucial here, and all knew it. With each collective step they took they thrust deeper into the disorganized encampment, leaving a swathe of dead and wounded in their wake. Given long enough the Mannians would rally, and the imperial predoré would crush against the flanks of the many chartassa like a vice. Already, action was occurring at the front, while imperial battle colours were being raised all around them, men massing in ranks and files.

Bahn trod behind the centremost reserve chartassa, keeping in close step with its captain and General Creed. He wiped sweat from his eyes and watched their three skyships flying overhead, scattering grenades onto the imperials below. Beneath his armour, his whole body shook from head to toe in its usual physical response to violence. His movements were awkward, clumsy even. It felt like a dream, walking ever deeper into the imperial encampment, like stepping into the sea until your feet lost the bottom and the riptide caught hold; too late to turn back.

At least General Creed was in his element here. The Lord Protector was surrounded by his personal bodyguards, their shields held high to protect him from the occasional incoming arrow. Creed was hardly making it easy for them. He wore a pair of Owls over his eyes like the other high officers of the army, and he strode from one side of the chartassa to the other, spotting along the gutters between it and the next one, spying out the lie of the land ahead.

‘What of the Specials?’ Bahn heard himself ask as the general returned to his position.

Creed’s eyes left the growing intensity of the fighting ahead and settled on his lieutenant. ‘What?’ he shouted through the noise.

‘The Specials, sir,’ repeated Bahn, and almost tripped on something – the body of an imperial soldier. ‘They should be heading back by now.’

‘No sign of them,’ replied the general, distracted. He was looking for something amongst the imperial masses.

‘Nidemes!’ he hollered to the commander of the Hoo. The old general was ranging behind the line of chartassa much in the same way as Bahn and Creed. He turned at the sound of his name.

General Creed chopped his hand sideways, telling him to veer his men left. Nidemes acknowledged and shouted the commands. Flag bearers waved the change in direction for the benefit of the captains. Within moments, whistles were blowing to inform the men. The entire line began to shift about.

Bahn caught a glimpse ahead and saw what they were turning towards. A small mound of ground in the distance backlit with stars; tiny glimmers of tents with the Matriarch’s personal banner flying high above them, a black raven on white.

The general was aiming the army straight for Matriarch Sasheen herself.

On the plain of Chey-Wes, Ché saw how the Expeditionary Force was rallying at last, thanks to the arrival of Archgeneral Sparus. While the Khosian formation thrust its way deeper through the camp like a glistening warhead, imperial squares of predoré engaged them now on all flanks, stretching and pushing them out of shape. Even though surrounded, they continued to push closer towards the Matriarch’s position – for it was clear now that here was their intended destination, and it was Sasheen herself whom they wished to confront.

‘Leave me be,’ came Sasheen’s sleepy voice amidst the splash of water, her aides dragging her from the wooden bathtub filled with snowmelt.

‘Matriarch,’ Sool tried again. ‘We are under attack.’

‘Yes, I heard you the first time,’ mumbled the Matriarch.

Sasheen stood naked on a rug with the wet cast of plaster on her arm. She swayed in her half sleep as they dried her roughly with towels, trying to revive her as best they could.

‘Some rush oil,’ she said to Heelas, her caretaker. ‘Fetch me some.’ Heelas already had a pot of the stuff in his hand, and he opened it and handed it to her. With a grimace, Sasheen rubbed the white cream onto her lips.

Ché stood at the entrance of her great tent. His sword was belted around his waist, as was a large knife and a pistol that he had already loaded with a single, poisoned shot.

Outside, Acolytes and priests were hurrying back and forth through the Matriarch’s encampment. Her personal honour guard, fitted out for battle, had already gathered with their mounts. One of them held the reins of her white war-zel. The creature was twitching with impatience.

‘For my son,’ he heard Sasheen say from within, and her voice already sounded a little firmer. ‘I will dedicate this victory to my son.’

Alarum came marching into the tent, wrapped in a heavy wool cloak. He clapped Ché on the arm as though glad to see him. ‘They had to choose tonight, didn’t they?’ he said as he stomped the snow from his boots.

Ché watched him as he went inside to speak to the Matriarch, then turned back to the night plain beyond. He was intent on the distant action, though in a detached way, removed from it by distance and lack of sentiment, so that he felt like a spectator at the Shay Madi, watching two gladiators competing to win and live. What held him so rapt was the obvious skill and discipline of the Khosians. He possessed some vague understanding of what it must take to move so many men in unison and fight at the same time, even more so to change their direction during a battle.

Watching them roar and shift their heading earlier had caused his lips to part and his pulse to beat faster. He hadn’t thought such things were possible.

I don’t care who wins this fight, Ché realized with a start. And then it struck him how that was a lie: he did have a preference in that moment.

It was only that it was the wrong side.

Something rattled off Bull’s helm, and he looked up from behind his shield and saw the man in the file to his left go down in the darkness and the jostling scrum that was the belly of the chartassa.

Bull shook his head to clear his eyes of sweat. Another man stepped forward to take the space of his fallen comrade. The soldier stumbled over the fellow on the ground as he set his shield against the Red Guard in front of him, and leaned into his back and began to shove. He was partially covered by Bull’s broad shield, and he looked up at him, and widened his eyes in recognition. The man bared his teeth in a crazy grin.

Bull nodded his head by way of a greeting.

With ease Bull was shoving too, pushing his shield against the back of young Wicks as his feet slipped in the thick mud. Missiles were clattering all around them, and the lad was hunching down as though naked in a hailstorm, offering little protection for Bull, who stood a good foot and a half above him.

His height had always been a disadvantage in the inner ranks; he had to bend low to get properly behind the shield of the man next to him, so that already his back was screaming from the pain of it. Not like the old days, he reflected bitterly. Back then he’d been trusted enough to be a point man, the soldier at the very front who could be relied upon to stand and fight; even eventually a file closer, the leader of the file who stood at the very back, maintaining order.

At least his present vantage gave him a view of what was happening near the front, though a passing bank of clouds was now scudding across the Sisters of Loss and Longing, diminishing what he could see. In the last few minutes the fighting had grown fiercer.

Over the bronze rim of his shield he could just make out the three men before him in the file. Wicks, close enough to the front now to jab wild and blind with his charta over the shoulders of those ahead of him, as much a danger to his own comrades as to the enemy infantry; the man before Wicks, thrusting with more composure as though he had done this before; and the man at the very front, only a vague shape in the darkness, standing over the Red Guard who had just been there, distant flames glinting off his helm and his sword as he swerved and thrust with his life depending on it.

Bull could barely see beyond to the mass of enemy infantry they were fighting, save for how their spearheads poked and probed amongst the men to either side of him. Even so, over the chorus of the battle he could hear the shouts and grunts of collision up there. The enemy were doing damage, whoever they were. In quick succession he’d stepped forwards over three men, all of whom were dead, their helms and shields caved in, their faces pulped, their arms snapped like branches. It was the same in the file on either side of him too. They were moving up the ranks faster than the chartassa itself was moving.

For a moment, moonlight shone down from a break in the clouds. Sweet Mercy, Bull thought, as he caught a glimpse of something, a figure too tall to be believed, visible for an instant before it was smothered in darkness.

And then the file moved forward again against Bull’s pressure, and he was stumbling once more over another body on the ground, a Red Guard with a dent in his helm the size of his skull.

Young Wicks glanced over his shoulder, his mouth open in a wide O. Only a single Red Guard stood between the lad and the enemy. Bull lowered his own charta over the young man’s shoulder and waited a moment for the balance of the point to settle, counter-weighted by the spike on its base known as the toe-clipper. The Red Guard behind Bull did the same.

He could see them now. Three giants – there was no other word for them – three men standing side by side and at least eight feet tall, their heights increased yet further by crests of wild blond hair. Northern tribesmen, he realized, seeing the warpaint on their faces. Some were said to grow this tall.

For an instant, Bull did something that he’d not done since he was a young man in the ranks. He froze in shock at what he was facing. With a dry mouth he watched the swing of a great warhammer come down like the falling of a tree, and the point man disappear beneath it.

The warhead of the man’s charta behind him tore open Wicks’s cheek as the lad tried to push back against Bull. The lad had dropped his own charta. He was cowering beneath his shield as the giant raised his hammer above his head.

In desperation, Bull thrust his charta against the giant. The warhead struck off his great rectangular shield and Bull pulled it back for another lunge.

More chartas licked out at the giant. Come on then, someone bloody poke him one.

He tried to find a target beyond the great shield, but his aim was blown when a man to his right jostled him.

Wicks went down with a muffled shout and a crump of metal.

Bull stepped forwards with his legs on either side of the lad, stabbing as he moved. He was taller than any that stood in the whole chartassa, yet still he was dwarfed by the three mammoth tribesmen, brothers for all he knew. In the moment he took to draw a breath, he saw the black silhouette that faced him flash its teeth in a grin.

A man fell against his left side, struggled to keep his feet. Bull lifted his shield and thrust blindly from behind it. His warhead punched through the giant’s own shield and scraped along armour. The giant swung his warhammer down on Bull’s charta, snapping it in two and knocking the broken shaft from his grasp. Movement between his legs. Wicks, still alive down there.

Bull swept the shortsword from its scabbard and dug his feet firmer into the mud. ‘Go, lad!’ he hollered down at Wicks, with his spit flying. ‘Go!’

The medico bag slapped against Curl’s hip as she followed Kris across the frozen ground. They were jogging through the screen of Volunteers and Red Guard light infantry that protected the flanks and rear of the formation as it ground its slow way onwards. The soldiers were exposed out here in their looser formations beyond the protection of the main body, and their casualties were mounting fast.

Kris gestured to a fallen man and kept running, not looking back to see if Curl acknowledged her or not.

A flare shrieked into the night air as Curl squatted down next to the wounded Volunteer, lighting the scene for a few lingering moments in shades of harsh green. The man’s eyes were rolling in their sockets. Blood flowed from his hip just beneath the edge of his cuirass. She couldn’t tell what had caused the wound. There could be a bullet lodged in there for all she knew.

‘Kris!’ she yelled, but the woman was already out of sight, lost amongst the fighting groups of men.

This is insane, she thought as she stared down at the wound. I’m not trained for this. I’m not ready for it.

She squatted there, frozen amidst the madness of the night with the cries of dying men filling her ears and the violence all about her, hating it with every fibre of her being, hating this need in men to fight and conquer, to tear the world asunder to sate their childish desires.

The wounded soldier groaned in pain and muttered something from his dry lips. She looked down at him. He was bearded, middle-aged. Someone’s father. Someone’s husband. Curl remembered what she was supposed to be doing here.

She checked his pulse, found it was still beating strongly. With haste she fumbled through her medico bag for the glass dropper of sanseed. She squeezed his mouth open and shook a few drops against his tongue. He groaned again, and she poured a dribble of water into his mouth from her flask. ‘Thank you,’ he gasped, and tried to roll onto his side.

‘Don’t move,’ she said to him, and took out a compress bandage and held it against his wound.

Around them the light infantry were being pressed back by an approaching formation of Imperials. Men fired darts at the enemy, grenades, arrows. Squads rushed past her, trying to outflank the approaching mass. An explosion ripped through the night. A man fell facedown in the snow not ten paces away.

‘Press hard!’ she shouted into the Volunteer’s face, and she took his clammy, hairy hand in her own and pressed it against the bandage. His eyes rolled again and then refocused on her. ‘Press!’ she told him. He blinked to show he understood.

Curl yanked one of the thin poles from the quiver on her back. It was fitted with an arrowhead on one end, and she cleared away some snow and stabbed it into the ground until it held firm. She unfurled the little white flag on the top of the pole, so that the stretcher-bearers would see the wounded man more easily. She glanced across at the other wounded man lying nearby.

Hand over her head, she ran towards him.

‘General!’ Bahn shouted as they walked step by step with the front line of chartassa. ‘General Reveres requests reinforcements on the left. He says the Seventh Chartassa has been lost and the Sixth is being pushed back.’

‘Lost?’

‘They were detached from the main force somehow. He’s not sure where they are.’

The general stormed towards Bahn with his bodyguards in tow, his long hair hanging wet about the shoulders of his bearskin coat. In anger, the man seemed to loom larger than life.

‘The bloody fools, what are they playing at over there?’

Bahn had no answer for him.

Creed straightened with a snort and clasped his hands behind his back. He looked behind to the archers and the boy slingers loosely positioned in the long corridor of space within the tight formation of the army. They had no shields to protect themselves from incoming fire, and were taking losses as a consequence. Behind them, beyond the medicos and stretcher-bearers running back and forth, it was too dark and distant to see the light infantry who held the rear of the formation, marching backwards in step to the army’s drums. The general scanned ahead again to the front lines.

A dart struck one of the outstretched shields that protected him. The bodyguard looked sceptically at the barbed tip protruding through his shield, the third one so far. They were coming down like a hard rain now.

Not more than six paces from Bahn a flying spear skewered a medico to the ground. The young man floundered, screaming, a pink froth bubbling from his wound.

Bahn panted, numbed to all that was occurring around him. The advance had slowed badly. They were still pushing forwards, though only marginally, and now it seemed the Imperials were forcing them back on the left. Worse, the entire army was surrounded now, with no hope of escape.

Captains and step sergeants swore at their chartassa and shouted to push harder. Close to his left, a captain was physically shoving at the backs of his men as he screamed obscenities over their heads.

‘Send a runner to Ocien in the Ninth,’ Creed shouted into his ear, and nodded to the few remaining reserve chartassa barely visible on the right. ‘Have him send a chartassa over to bolster the left.’

Bahn marvelled again at the general’s ability to store the names of every officer under his command.

‘And, Lieutenant,’ Creed hollered as Bahn turned to find a nearby runner. ‘Inform General Reveres that if he gives away any more ground, I will go over there personally and sort out his affairs.’

‘Sir.’

As he dispatched a runner to Ocien, Bahn wiped his face with a trembling hand. An explosion nearby made him jolt.

Nothing could prepare a man for the sheer noise of a pitched battle. He recalled the first time he’d ever heard such a thing, the first day the Mannians had assaulted the Shield; how his bowels had turned to water and his mind to mud. It was like being in the midst of a thunderstorm: your bones shivering, your ears hurting even more than your throat that was screaming itself raw just to be heard.

The sounds from the front ranks were unimaginable now. It was bloody murder out there on the fringes, and he witnessed the action only as its consequences emerged in the form of bodies beneath the rear boots of the advancing lines. The stench too was hard to cope with. Blood soaked the muddy ground, mixing with everything else that bodies released at such times as these; a reeking, slippery mess that he’d fallen into more than once so far.

In the middle of the army’s formation, the open space was piling up with the dead and wounded. Stretcher-bearers ran back and forth over-burdened by the rate of casualties, struggling to move them all in pace with the army’s momentum. Monks helped where they could. The medicos fought their own battles trying to hold men together. The injuries were hard on the eyes; even to Bahn, who had witnessed his own share of gore on the walls. Open wounds bled with profusion, the exposed flesh shockingly vivid. Feet slipped on grey intestines lying unravelled across the mud. Skin flapped. Eye sockets gaped empty. Bodies shorn of limbs jetted blood.

On the ground some of the men seemed entirely unhurt, and simply sat sobbing or staring dazed into space. One man was trying to pull his armour off. He’d been at it for several minutes, and still he couldn’t manage the simple task of removing his breastplate. Worst of all were those unable to walk. Some were being left behind as the entire warhead-shaped formation advanced in step, trampled where they lay by the rearguard.

Bahn turned away from it all. He sought out the reassuring bulk of General Creed, saw that Koolas, the war chattēro, was bending his ear.

‘We seem to be grinding to a halt!’ the man was saying.

‘What?’

‘I said we seem to be grinding to a halt! Is there anything we can do?’

‘Do?’ replied the general. ‘If there was something we could do, man, we’d be doing it.’

Koolas looked as though he’d been hoping for something more inspiring than this. He glanced at Bahn, and Bahn could see that he was visibly shaking.

‘We still have one advantage,’ declared the general, and both Koolas and Bahn leaned closer to hear him. ‘Since we’re entirely surrounded, our men have nowhere to run. We will not be routed, in any case.’

Bahn blinked rapidly. Creed slapped his arm, almost bowling him over with the force of it.

‘We grabbed hold of the bear! Now we must suffer its grip while we work our way to its throat.’

Even now, Koolas had his mind on his story. ‘And what if she runs for it, General? The Matriarch. What then?’

‘Then her own people might finish her for us. These Mannians hold great store in their leader’s courage.’

‘And you think – if we kill her – they will break?’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps Sparus will succeed in holding them together. Who knows?’ General Creed flashed his teeth, a rare display. Perhaps it was only for the benefit of this man and his writings. He turned away and started to holler more orders.

Despite what the general had just claimed, men were starting to break from the front ranks to the left. Officers struck the fleeing soldiers down or screamed in their faces, shoving them back into the lines.

‘Where are you running to?’ Bahn imagined the officers shouting. ‘Where is there to run, you fools?’

Koolas was feigning his composure well, for all the trembling of his body. Bahn warmed to him a little in that moment, and he offered a nod of the head as the chattēro fixed his cloak tighter about his belly then strode off towards the troubled ranks.

Another runner approached Bahn from the forward chartassa. He stood to attention, his reddened cheeks blowing in and out as he gasped for air. ‘Chartassa Three – they’ve been stopped – by a fresh assault. Acolytes, they’re saying.’

Chartassa Three, thought Bahn with a twist of fear in his belly. That was a square of Hoo, in the vanguard of the formation just to the right of centre. Their very best.

Sweet Dao, they were no longer even advancing.

He took a deep breath before he approached the general with the news.

‘Acolytes,’ Creed spat. And he put his hands to his hips, feet wide apart, and looked for inspiration somewhere high up in the night sky.