Battle
I saw them first as a scattering of colored
dots on the farther side of the wide valley, skirmishers who seemed
to move and mix, as bubbles do that dance upon the surface of a mug
of cider. We were trotting through a grove of shattered trees whose
white and naked wood was like the living bone of a compound
fracture. Our column was much larger now, perhaps the whole of the
irregular contarii. It had been under fire, in a more or less
dilatory way, for about half a watch. Some troopers had been
wounded (one, near me, quite badly) and several killed. The wounded
cared for themselves and tried to help each other—if there were
medical attendants for us they were too far behind us for me to be
conscious of them.
From time to time we passed corpses
among the trees; usually these were in little clusters of two or
three, sometimes they were merely solitary individuals. I saw one
who had contrived in dying to hook the collar of his brigandine
jacket to a splinter protruding from one of the broken trunks, and
I was struck by the horror of his situation, his being dead and yet
unable to rest, and then by the thought that such was the plight of
all those thousands of trees, trees that had been killed but could
not fall.
At about the same time I became aware
of the enemy, I realized that there were troops of our own army to
either side. To our right a mixture, as it were, of mounted men and
infantry, the riders helmetless and naked to the waist, with red
and blue blanket rolls slung across their bronzed chests. They were
better mounted, I thought, than most of us. They carried lancegays
not much longer than the height of a man, many of them holding them
aslant their saddle-bows. Each had a small copper shield bound to
the upper part of his left arm. I had no idea from what part of the
Commonwealth these men might come; but for some reason, perhaps
only because of their long hair and bare chests, I felt sure they
were savages.
If they were, the infantry that moved
among them was something lower still, brown and stooped and
shaggy-haired. I had only glimpses through the broken trees, but I
thought they dropped to all fours at times. Occasionally one seemed
to grasp the stirrup of some rider, as I had sometimes taken
Jonas’s when he rode his merychip; whenever that occurred, the
rider struck at his companion’s hand with the butt of his
weapon.
A road ran through lower ground to our
left; and down it, and to either side of it, there moved a force
far more numerous than our column and the savage riders and their
companions all combined: battalions of peltasts with blazing spears
and big, transparent shields; hobilers on prancing mounts, with
bows and arrow cases crossed over their backs; lightly armed
cherkajis whose formations were seas of plumes and
flags.
I could know nothing of the courage of
all these strange soldiers who had suddenly become my comrades, but
I unconsciously assumed it to be no greater than my own, and they
seemed a slender defense indeed against the moving dots on the
farther side. The fire to which we were subjected grew more
intense, and so far as I could see, our enemies were under none at
all,
Only a few weeks before (though it felt
like at least a year now) I would have been terrified at the
thought of being shot at with such a weapon as Vodalus had used on
the foggy night in our necropolis with which I have begun this
account. The bolts that struck all around us made that simple beam
appear as childish as the shining slugs thrown from the hetman’s
archer’s pellet bow.
I had no idea what sort of device was
used to project these bolts, or even whether they were in fact pure
energy or some type of missile; but as they landed among us, their
nature was that of an explosion lengthened into something like a
rod. And though they could not be seen until they struck, they
whistled as they came, and by that whistled note, which endured no
longer than the blink of an eye, I soon learned to tell how near
they would hit and how powerful the extended detonation would be.
If there was no change in the tone, so that it resembled the note a
coryphaeus sounds on his pitch pipe, the strike would be some
distance off. But if it rose quickly, as though a note first
sounded for men had become one for women, its impact would be
nearby; and though only the loudest of the monotonal bolts were
dangerous, each that rose to a scream claimed at least one of us
and often several.
It seemed madness to trot forward as we
did. We should have scattered, or dismounted to take refuge among
the trees; and if one of us had done it, I think all the rest would
have followed him. With every bolt that fell, I was almost that
one. But again and again, as if my mind were chained in some narrow
circle, the memory of the fear I had shown earlier held me in my
place. Let the rest run and I would run with them; but I would not
run first.
Inevitably, a bolt struck parallel to
our column. Six troopers flew apart as though they themselves had
contained small bombs, the head of the first bursting in a gout of
scarlet, the neck and shoulders of the second, the chest of the
third, the bellies of the fourth and fifth, and the groin (or
perhaps only the saddle and the back of his destrier) of the sixth,
before the bolt struck the ground and sent up a geyser of dust and
stones. The men and animals opposite those who were destroyed in
this way were killed too, wracked by the force of the explosions
and bombarded with the limbs and armor of the others.
Holding the piebald to a trot, and
often to a walk, was the worst of it; if
I could not run, I wanted to press forward, to get the fighting
begun, to die if I was in fact to die. This hit gave me some
opportunity to relieve my feelings. Waving to Daria to follow, I
let the piebald lope past the little group of survivors who had
been riding between us and the last trooper to die, and moved into
the space in the column that had been the casualties’. Mesrop was
there already, and he grinned at me. “Good thinking. Chances are
there won’t be another one here for quite a while.” I forbore to
disabuse him.
For a time it seemed he was correct
anyway. Having hit us, the enemy gunners diverted their fire to the
savages on our right. Their shambling infantry shrieked and
gibbered as the bolts fell among them, but the riders reacted, so
it appeared, by calling on magic to protect them. Often their
chants sounded so clearly that I could make out the words, though
they were in no language I had ever heard. Once one actually stood
on his saddle like a performer in a riding exhibition, lifting a
hand to the sun and extending the other toward the Ascians. Each
rider seemed to have a personal spell; and it was easy to see, as I
watched their numbers shrink under the bombardment, how such
primitive minds come to believe in their charms, for the survivors
could not but feel their thaumaturgy had saved them, and the rest
could not complain of the failure of theirs.
Though we were advancing, for the most
part, at the trot, we were not the first to engage the enemy. On
the lower ground, the cherkajis had streaked across the valley,
crashing against a square of foot soldiers like a wave of
fire.
I had vaguely supposed that the enemy
would be provided with weapons far superior to anything we had in
the contarii—perhaps pistols and fusils, such as the man-beasts had
carried—and that a hundred fighters so armed would easily destroy
any quantity of cavalry. Nothing of the kind happened. Several rows
of the square gave way, and I was close enough now to hear the
riders’ war cries, distant yet distinct, and see individual foot
soldiers in flight. Some were casting aside immense shields,
shields even larger than the glassy ones of the peltasts, though
they shone with the luster of metal. Their offensive arms seemed to
be splay-headed spears no more than three cubits long, weapons that
could produce sheets of cleaving flame, but short in
range.
A second infantry square emerged behind
the first, then another and another, farther down the
valley.
Just as I was sure we were about to
ride to the assistance of the cherkajis, we received the order to
halt. Looking to the right, I saw that the savages had already done
so, stopping some distance behind us, and were now driving the
hairy creatures that had accompanied them toward the side of their
position farthest from us.
Guasacht called, “We’re blocking! Sit
easy, lads!”
I looked at Daria, who returned a look
equally bewildered. Mesrop waved an arm toward the eastern end of
the valley. “We’re watching the flank. If nobody comes, we ought to
have a good enough time of it today.”
I said, “Except for the ones who’ve
already died.” The bombardment, which had been diminishing, now
seemed to have stopped altogether. The silence of its absence lay
all about us, almost more frightening than its screaming bolts had
been.
“I suppose so.” His shrug announced
eloquently that we had lost a few dozen from a force of
hundreds.
The cherkajis had recoiled, retreating
behind a screen of hobilers who directed a shower of arrows at the
leading edge of the Ascians’ checkerboard battle line. Most seemed
to glance off the shields, but a few must have buried their heads
in the metal, which took fire from them and burned with a flame as
bright as theirs and billowing white smoke.
When the arrows slackened, the squares
of the checkerboard advanced again with a mechanical jerkiness. The
cherkajis had continued to fall back and were now in the rear of a
line of peltasts, very little in advance of us. I could see their
dark faces clearly. They were all men and bearded, and numbered
about two thousand; but they had among them a dozen or so bejeweled
young women borne in gilded howdahs on the backs of caparisoned
arsinoithers.
These women were dark-eyed and dark
complexioned like the men, yet in their lush figures and
languishing looks they reminded me of Jolenta. I pointed them out
to Daria and asked if she knew how they were armed, since I could
see no weapons.
“You’d like one, would you? Or two.
I’ll bet they look good to you even from here.”
Mesrop winked and said, “I wouldn’t
mind a couple myself.”
Daria laughed. “They’d fight like
alraunes if either of you tried to have anything to do with them.
They’re sacred and forbidden, the Daughters of War. Have you ever
been around those animals they’re riding?”
I shook my head.
“They charge easy and nothing stops
them, but they always go the same way—straight at whatever it is
that bothers them and past it for a chain or two. Then they stop
and go back.”
I watched. Arsinoithers have two big
horns—not spreading horns like the horns of bulls, but horns that
diverge about as much as a man’s first and second fingers can. As I
soon saw, they charge head down, with those horns level with the
ground, and these did just as Daria had said. The cherkajis rallied
and attacked again with their slender lances and forked swords.
Trailing far behind that lightning dash, the arsinoithers lumbered
forward, gray-black heads down and tails up, with the deep-bosomed,
dark-faced maidens standing erect under their canopies and gripping
the gilded poles. One could see from the way these women held
themselves that their thighs were as full as the udders of milch
cows and round as the trunks of trees.
The charge carried them through the
swirling fight and deep—but not too deep—into the checkerboard. The
Ascian foot soldiers blasted the sides of their beasts, which must
have been like burning horn or cuir boli;
they
tried to mount their heads and were tossed into the air; they
struggled to climb the gray flanks. The cherkajis came crashing to
the rescue, and the checkerboard flowed and ebbed and lost a
square.
Watching it from such a distance, I
recalled my own thoughts of battle as a game of chess, and I felt
that somewhere someone else had entertained the same thoughts and
unconsciously allowed them to shape his plan.
“They’re lovely,” Daria continued,
teasing me. “Chosen at twelve and fed on honey and pure oils. I’ve
heard their flesh is so tender they can’t lie on the ground without
being bruised. Bags of feathers are carried about for them to sleep
on. If those are lost, the girls have to lie in mud that shapes
itself to support their bodies. The eunuchs who care for them mix
it with wine warmed over a fire, so they will sleep and not be
cold.”
“We should dismount,” Mesrop said.
“It’ll spare the animals.”
But I wanted to watch the battle and
would not get down, though soon only Guasacht and I remained in the
saddle out of our entire bacele.
The cherkajis had been driven back once
again, and now came under a withering bombardment from unseen
artillery. The peltasts dropped to the ground, covering themselves
with their shields. New squares of Ascian infantry emerged from the
forest on the north side of the valley. There seemed to be no end
to them; I felt we had been committed against an inexhaustible
enemy.
The feeling grew stronger when the
cherkajis charged a third time. A bolt struck an arsinoither,
blowing it and the lovely woman it had carried to bloody ruin. The
infantry was firing at those women now; one crumpled, and howdah
and canopy vanished in a puff of flame. The infantry squares
advanced over brightly clad corpses and dead
destriers.
By each step in war the winner loses.
The ground the checkerboard had won exposed the side of its leading
square to us, and to my astonishment we were ordered to mount,
spread into line, and wheeled against it, first trotting, then
cantering, and at last, with the brass throats of all the graisles
shouting, in a desperate rush that nearly blew the skin from our
faces.
If the cherkajis were lightly armed, we
were armed more lightly still. Yet there was a magic in the charge
more powerful than the chants of our savage allies. The wildfire of
our weapons played along the distant ranks as scythes attack a
wheat field. I lashed the piebald with his reins to keep from being
outdistanced by the roaring hoofs I heard behind me. Yet I was, and
glimpsed Daria as she shot past, the flame of her hair flying free,
her contus in one hand and a sabre in the other, her cheeks whiter
than the foaming flanks of her destrier. I knew then how the custom
of the cherkajis had begun, and I tried to charge faster still so
that she should not die, though Thecla laughed through my lips at
the thought.
Destriers do not run like common
beasts—they skim the ground as arrows do air. For an instant, the
fire of the Ascian infantry half a league away rose before us like
a wall. A moment later we were among them, the legs of every mount
bloody to the knee. The square that had seemed as solid as a
building stone had become only a crowd of frantic soldiers with big
shields and cropped heads, soldiers who often slew one another in
their eagerness to slay us.
Fighting is a stupid business at best;
but there are things to be learned about it, of which the first is
that numbers tell only in time. The immediate struggle is always
that of an individual against one or two others. In this our
destriers gave us the upper hand—not only because of their height
and weight, but because they bit and struck out with their
forefeet, and the blows of their hoofs were more powerful than any
man save Baldanders could have delivered with a mace.
Fire cut through my contus. I dropped
it but continued to kill, slashing left, then right, then left
again with the falchion and hardly noticing that the blast had laid
open my leg.
I think I must have cut down half a
dozen Ascians before I saw that they all looked the same—not that
they all had the same face (as the men in some units of our own
army do, who are indeed closer than brothers), but that the
differences among them seemed accidental and trivial. I had
observed this among our prisoners when we had retrieved the steel
coach, but it had not really impressed itself upon my mind. In the
madness of battle it did so, for it seemed a part of that madness.
The frenzied figures were male and female: the women had small but
pendulous breasts and were half a head shorter, but there was no
other distinction. All had large, brilliant, wild eyes, hair
clipped nearly to the skull, starved faces, screaming mouths, and
prominent teeth.
We fought free as the cherkajis had;
the square had been dented but not destroyed. While we let our
mounts catch breath it reformed, the light, polished shields to the
front. A spearman broke ranks and came running toward us waving his
weapon. At first I thought it mere bluster; then, as he came nearer
(for a normal man runs much less swiftly than a destrier), that he
wished to surrender. At last, when he had almost reached our line,
he fired, and a trooper shot him down. In his convulsions he threw
his blazing spear into the air; I remember how it twisted against
the dark blue sky.
Guasacht came trotting over. “You’re
bleeding bad. Can you ride when we charge them again?”
I felt as strong as I ever had in my
life and told him so.
“Still, you’d better get a bandage on
that leg.”
The seared flesh had cracked; blood was
oozing out. Daria, who had not been hurt at all, bound it
up.
The charge for which I had been
prepared never took place. Quite unexpectedly (at least as far as I
was concerned) the order came to turn about, and we went trotting
off to the northeast over open, rolling country whisperous with
coarse grass.
The savages seemed to have vanished. A
new force appeared in their place, on the flank that had now become
our front. At first I thought they were cavalry on centaurs,
creatures whose pictures I had encountered in the
brown book. I could see the heads and shoulders of the riders above
the human heads of their mounts, and both appeared to bear arms.
When they drew nearer, I saw they were nothing so romantic: merely
small men—dwarfs, in fact—upon the shoulders of very tall
ones.
Our directions of advance were nearly
parallel but slowly converged. The dwarfs watched us with what
seemed a sullen attention. The tall men did not look at us at all.
At last, when our column was no more than a couple of chains from
theirs, we halted and turned to face them. With a horror I had not
felt before, I realized that these strange riders and strange
steeds were Ascians; our maneuver had been intended to prevent them
from taking the peltasts in the flank, and had now succeeded in
that they would now have to make their attack, if they could,
through us. There seemed to be about five thousand of them,
however, and there were certainly many more than we had fit to
fight.
Yet no attack came. We had halted and
formed a tight line, stirrup to stirrup. Despite their numbers,
they surged nervously up and down before it as though attracted
first by the thought of passing it on the right, then on the left,
then on the right again. It was clear, however, that they could not
pass at all unless a part of their force engaged our front to
prevent our striking the rest from behind. As if hoping to postpone
the fight, we did not fire.
Now we saw repetitions of the behavior
of the lone spearman who had left his square to attack us. One of
the tall men dashed forward. In one hand he held a slender staff,
hardly more than a switch; in the other, a sword of the kind called
a shotel, which has a very long,
double-edged blade whose forward half is curved into a semicircle.
As he drew nearer he slowed, and I saw that his eyes were
unfocused; that he was in fact blind. The dwarf on his shoulders
had an arrow nocked to the string of a short, recurved
bow.
When these two were within half a chain
of us, Erblon detailed two men to drive them off. Before they could
close with the blind man, he broke into a run as swift as any
destrier’s but eerily silent, and came flying toward us. Eight or
ten troopers fired, but I saw then how difficult it is to hit a
target moving at such speed. The arrow struck and burst in a blaze
of orange light. A trooper tried to parry the blind man’s wand—the
shotel flashed down, and its hooked blade laid open the trooper’s
skull.
Then a group of three of the blind men
with three riders detached itself from the mass of the enemy.
Before they reached us, there were clusters of five or six coming.
Far down the line, our hipparch raised his arm; Guasacht waved us
forward and Erblon blew the charge, echoed to right and left—a
bellowing note that seemed to have deep-mouthed bells in
it.
Though I did not know it at the time,
it is axiomatic that encounters purely between cavalry rapidly
degenerate into mere skirmishes. So it was with ours. We rode at
them, and though we lost twenty or thirty in doing so, we rode
through them. At once we turned to engage them again, both to
prevent their flanking the peltasts and to regain contact with our
own army.
They, of course, turned to face us; and in a short time neither we
nor they had anything that could be called a front, or any tactics
beyond those each fighter forged for himself.
My own were to veer away from any dwarf
who looked ready to shoot and try to catch others from behind or
from the side. They worked well enough when I could apply them, but
I quickly found that though the dwarfs appeared almost helpless
when the blind men they rode were killed under them, their tall
steeds ran amok without their riders, attacking anything that stood
in their path with frantic energy, so that they were more dangerous
than ever.
Very soon the dwarfs’ arrows and our
conti had kindled scores of fires in the grass. The choking smoke
rendered the confusion worse than ever. I had lost sight of Daria
and Guasacht—of everyone I knew—sometime before. Through the acrid
gray haze I could just make out a figure on a plunging destrier
fighting off four Ascians. I went to him, and though one dwarf
turned his blind steed and sent an arrow whizzing by my ear, I rode
over them and heard the blind man’s bones snap under the piebald’s
hoofs. A hairy figure rose from the smoldering grass behind the
other pair and cut them down as a peon hews a tree—three or four
strokes of his ax to the same spot until the blind man
fell.
The mounted soldier I had come to
rescue was not one of our troopers, but one of the savages who had
been on our right earlier. He had been wounded, and when I saw the
blood I recalled that I had been wounded too. My leg was stiff, my
strength nearly gone. I would have ridden back toward the south
crest of the valley and our own lines if I had known which way to
go. As it was, I gave the piebald his head and a good slap from the
reins, having heard that these animals will often return to the
place where they last had water and rest. He broke into a canter
that soon became a gallop. Once he jumped, nearly throwing me from
the saddle, and I looked down to glimpse a dead destrier with
Erblon dead beside him, and the brass graisle and the black and
green flag lying on the burning turf. I would have turned the
piebald and gone back for them, but by the time I pulled him up, I
no longer knew the spot. To my right, a mounted line showed through
the smoke, dark and almost formless, but serrated. Far behind it
loomed a machine that flashed fire, a machine that was like a tower
walking.
At one moment they were nearly
invisible; at the next they were upon me like a torrent. I cannot
say who the riders were or on what beasts they rode; not because I
have forgotten (for I forget nothing) but because I saw nothing
clearly. There was no question of fighting, only of seeking in some
way to live. I parried a blow from a twisted weapon that was
neither sword nor ax; the piebald reared, and I saw an arrow
protruding from his chest like a horn of fire. A rider crashed
against us, and we fell into the dark.