Sunset Mantle (10 page)

Off in the distance, there was the sound of a tribal horn, little different from those that were sounding out the orders in the field before him. Perhaps . . . it was a hope born of desperation, but it was what he had. Cete set his own horn to his lips, and blew the charge.

It echoed along the line, horns held up to bruised, astonished lips, and men awoke to its sound, pushing forward against the line which had been pushing them back for what seemed like their entire lives. Legs unlocked from defensive poses, spears were lowered, and they stepped forward. One step, another. This was the last of the reserves they had. If the tribesmen rallied, the line would not again hold.

A third step, a fourth. Cete nearly tripped over Alband’s body; the last of his fifty, and Cete had not seen him fall. Forward, more, beyond where the lines had stood. The tribesmen fell back, surprised. They had expected easy meat, and fine things taken from a burning reach. They knew as well as Cete that these were not fighting men who opposed them. It could not last; they would rally, and his line would be crushed.

The main line could not sustain a push, let alone a charge. But on the flanks, there were the fifties of axe and sword to the left, and the Antach clan army to the right. There, they took one terrace, and then another. The tribes in the center wavered. If they pushed back, they might reach the gates of the Reach, might have the treasure they were promised. But if they could not break through, they would be encircled, killed like sheep in the springtime, when the shepherds make their cull.

A cheer came up, along the line. One terrace, two. The tribesmen showed their heels. Those who did not run were slain, and some of those who did run could not outpace the spears that followed them. They bled too, they feared too, they too called out in anguish from the dirt, and did not rise again.

A third terrace. Cete looked back, and there was a fifty marching out from the gate, the banners of the Reach army floating over their ranks. The Antach clan army was two terraces down, killing well, but with no men left behind to secure the rear. He blew the halt, and it was not heeded. Blew again, louder, giving everything to it. A few of the men remembered enough of their discipline to come to a stop, a few others picked up the call, and the lines of spear gradually re-formed, as the chance they saw vanished, the tribesmen flying down into the valley below.

This was a test of discipline that Cete had never anticipated giving his troops, and would never have expected them to pass. To maintain discipline when at grips was difficult. To maintain it in the face of defeat, when the troops were sure they would die if they stood, and live if they fled, that was more difficult. But to follow orders in the face of triumph, to allow cold reason to douse the flames of glory—there were veteran troops who would not have obeyed the order Cete had given.

But there was no time for pride in the accomplishments of his army. Cete turned, leapt up a terrace wall into the ranks of women and children who had been following. There was confusion, and he had to swat aside a spear to get to the rear of his army before the fifty-command fell on their backs.

But the men who had come down from the wall did not come with weapons bared. Mase was at their head, and he bowed to Cete as he came forward. “It seems the Reach army is lost,” said Mase. “And you are the captain general of the Antach. We wish to volunteer our service.”

“These are not the orders you’ve been given, Fifty-Commander Mase,” said Cete, cautiously, his hand still on his axe. “Should I accept your service, I would fear for your safety in a court of law.”

There was a long pause, as Mase seemed to look for words to say, and Cete for reasons to believe. “Army’s all I know, Cete,” said Mase. “Radan Termith isn’t going to be repeating his orders in a court of law, you can believe that. But the Termith won’t back up what he did say, not for a mess like this. Not with money, not with anything.”

He shrugged, looked around at Cete’s army, at the tribesmen making their way down to their camp. “I tried to warn you off,” he said. “It was all arranged by then. No need to add another damn fool corpse to the pile. But you fought, and damn if you didn’t wreck everything they’d planned. It’s all gone to hell. Maybe not for Radan, but for everyone who swore the liar’s oaths on his behalf. Army is all I know, and you’ve made a line worth dying on.”

Cete let go his axe, pulled close the man who had scarred him for disobedience to orders, wept on the shoulder of the man who had beaten him near to death. “Good and well,” he said. “You come in good time.”

He turned back to the men who waited for his orders. “Back up to the wall,” he said.

“Not the wall,” said Mase. “The captain of the Reach army may still live. He, and his chief engineer. There are weak places known only to them; if the tribesmen come up against the wall, it will not slow them.”

Cete blew “re-form lines” on his horn, and the command was echoed all along the line. His army of bakers and shopkeepers marched back up the narrow stairways of the terraces in good order, as the tribesmen formed up below. If he had not stopped then, regardless of the wall fifty, the battle would have been lost on those lower terraces. The men had been spreading out in their pursuit, the fast outstripping the slow. When the tribesmen turned on them, it would have been a slaughter.

If the wall had not been undermined, they would have been able to hold. That it had been undermined meant that the only reason the tribes were coming after them rather than making for the weak points of the wall was because they did not wish to start the plunder while an organized troop still opposed them. Scatter the men across a weakened wall, and the battle was already lost.

At the base of the wall, the men and women took their rest, took long draughts of water and wine, tied cloth over wounds they had not noticed in the heat of battle. Some had left, wounded or heartsick or simply unable to continue, and more had died. It was a smaller company by far than that which had started the day below the walls of the Reach Antach.

Marelle was with them. A friend had died on her shoulder; there was blood on her leather coat, and pain on her face, but she still intended to stand and fight, and still had the strength to hold her spear. Cete looked down at the tribesmen in the valley. There were fewer of them as well, and while they were no longer fleeing, they were slow in arranging their lines. Another two hundred men, and he could have smashed them, ended the threat to the Reach in the blood of its enemies.

He didn’t have two hundred more men. He did not have nearly as many men as he needed. Cete turned to arranging his own lines. The fifty of sling and javelin had become ten slingers, whose arms ached with constant effort. The three fifties of sword and axe he had set on his left flank had become a single fifty-command, and of the nine fifties of spearmen, there were four remaining, each of them a patchwork of men from the militia and from the Reach army and from those who had come to Cete’s call. Added to that was another fifty of women of the Reach; there had been four times that number at the start of the battle, but most had left with wounds, or carrying off the wounded. He could have used them back on the field, but he could not fault them for leaving. It had been the sort of field that even ten-year veterans would be glad to leave, if they could. Marelle was among the women, a neighbor at her side. Cete did not go to her, because if he had, he would have asked her to leave the field, and by her pained look, she might have. It would not be right for him to take strength away from her, not even to save her life.

The Antach clan army had not fared so poorly; they had started with five fifties, and five banners still flew beneath the Antach clan’s crest. Not that they were full fifties—they had lost perhaps half the strength they had started with—but the organization remained.

It was no longer possible to leave the ends of the line strong enough to mount a charge. Cete arranged his troops on a higher terrace than he had before, in shorter lines. The Antach’s men were in the center, with the wall fifty on the right flank, and Cete to the left, with the rest of the units stringing between, men and women together, arrayed in three lines; a two-line spear hedge, a third line to fill in the gaps, and the fifty of axe and sword as the only reserve.

Cete picked up his mantle, shook the dust from its hem, and folded it again. It had been trampled in the back and forth of battle, but it was still whole and perfect. The tribesmen below were forming up into lines, each man to the flag of his tribe. No longer bound by the will of the city clans, they had to decide if they wanted to attempt the Reach again. The conclusion was fore-ordained. There was too small a force protecting too great a treasure, and they had lost too much in the attempt to leave the plunder and their dead behind. But all the voices would be heard, and rivalries would force argument even when logic called for an immediate march.

Again, the distant voice of strange horns. It was too much to hope, so Cete put it from his mind. They would hold against one more charge. Maybe two; they were men who had been tested, who had stood against a horde three times their own numbers, and who had not broken. They might not be veterans, but they knew who they were, and what they faced.

As the tribesmen formed up into lines and made ready to attempt the Reach again, a few more men came out from the gates of the Reach Antach, among them the Antach himself. He found Cete where he stood in the line, laid an arm across his shoulders. “You have done more than was possible,” he said. “And it seems that you shall earn rewards similar to those your service to me has earned you in the past.”

Cete turned his head away. “I have no complaints,” he said. “Though it is possible that my contract is a little light.”

The Antach laughed. “Perhaps,” he said. “But one does not become the head of a clan by paying more than the seller requires. It is to be hoped that next year, you shall require more, and I shall have more to spend.”

Below, the drums began again, and the horns. They were ready. “They will come soon, Lord,” said Cete. “Perhaps you should—”

“I cannot stand at the head of the army of my clan,” said the Antach, “according to the terms of my contract with the Termith.”

“Does that still matter?” asked Cete.

“It may,” replied the Antach. “There have been no messengers from my brother, and none of the men who I have sent out have returned. But I have not yet given up hope.”

“Of course,” said Cete. Hope was all the Antach had left, and he would not leave it behind unless forced.

“As I was saying, I cannot stand with my own sworn men. But there is nothing in the contract that forbids me from taking up an axe with the volunteers, and doing the work of a fighting man. I would put myself under your orders, captain general, if you will have me.”

Cete bowed. “Can you have any rank, or—”

“None,” said the Antach. “Not even a sergeant’s.”

If the tribes did not take the Reach, but the Antach was killed, he did not know how Kern would react. Once the fighting was over, he would need the favor of the nobles of the Reach to stay alive, and either denying the Antach his request or granting it could imperil that.

“The fifty of axe and sword are a reserve,” he said. “If you would join them, they could use the aid of a man trained for war.” There was no policy in that, no calculation. The man wanted to fight, and that was where he was most needed. He would live or die depending on the fortunes of battle, his skill in arms, and upon the will of God, the same as any man on the line.

The Antach saluted and headed to his station, and Cete turned to watch the tribesmen come up the hill, clambering up terrace walls, axes slung behind their backs, knives held in their teeth. They were a terrible sight, and he could feel the tension all along the line; muscles tensing, the fear clenching stomachs. He could see lips and knuckles going white, men and women looking as though they were about to vomit, or faint.

“Steady!” yelled Cete. Then he started singing the battle hymn. They were not fighting men, most of them, and they had never heard the hymn sung with readied weapons, on a field that was stained and splotched with blood. Enough knew the hymn that the chorus carried through, and though the words were sometimes broken, they all could feel its power.

It worked. It worked so well that the lines took two steps forward when the tribesmen came to grips. Forward, by God, though by all rights they should have broken. The wave of tribesmen was pushed back to the edge of the terrace and beyond, pushed over the edge onto those still climbing, so that they all fell below, breaking bones and necks. A step back, as the tribesmen came up again, and another step forward, pushing them back again.

Again and again, the wave of the tribes lapped against the weapons of the men of the city, and again and again, they were forced back in blood and anguish. It could not last. It didn’t. The tribesmen carved out for themselves beachheads, flowed up where their footing was secure. Gaps appeared in the spear thicket, gaps which pushed back against the reserves which tried to fill them.

The man at Cete’s left fell to a tribal sword, flat-bladed and wide, and the man who stepped up to replace him fell soon after. Then, nobody stepped to fill the gap, and Cete left his spear behind, switching to his axe and his hook-bladed tribal knife. He killed, killed again, and was forced back, back to where his mantle lay folded on the blood-speckled grass. Marelle was there, still fighting, and he found himself in the ranks beside her.

For all that she was blind, it was good to fight by her side. She kept her spear point forward, as he had taught her, using it to feel for targets, and striking out with flurries which seldom hit, but which forced her opponents to step back, to guard against her rather than strike her down.

The doctor who had sewn up Cete’s back, after Mase had cut it open, rolled up against Cete’s leg, her face loose in death, her uncalloused hands red with blood. The press of men beyond was too great for Cete to push the corpse off him, and if he took another step back, the mantle would be lost. He braced himself, struck out against the tribesman who was hounding him, and took a cut across the forehead in exchange. Not enough to break the bone, but there was blood there, coming down into his eyes. Another cut. This time, Cete anticipated, got in underneath the tribesman, jabbed his knife into the man’s eye before he could bring his sword down.

They fell together, the tribesman trying to recover until Cete forced the knife in deeper, pressing against the hilt with the palm of his hand, until the tribesman convulsed, stiffened, and then was still. Another man came over them, where they lay together. Marelle’s side was undefended, and she could not see the axe swinging into her side.

Cete rose up from beneath the corpse, caught the man by groin and neck, so that the blow merely glanced off Marelle’s ribs, rather than cutting through leather coat, meat and bone. Cete lifted him and threw him up and over, back into the press of tribesmen. His spear was abandoned; the knife would not come out from where he had left it, and his axe was pinned beneath the dead tribesman. Marelle wore a knife at her belt. Cete grabbed it, turned like a cat, ready to strike out. It wasn’t a fighting knife; the blade would snap at the least resistance. But if it would find a throat, it would be enough, and it was what he had.

Just then, there was confusion in the tribal ranks, and horns rang out the charge from their rear. Horns and drums, and the sounds of slaughter. Cete lifted his horn to his lips and blew out the charge, and again the men of the Reach responded, coming forward, weapons lowered.

Again, the tribesmen started back, but this time it was not merely giving way in the face of a foe who showed unexpected strength. They were assailed from the rear, and they knew it, and this time, their rout was complete. It gave enough space for Cete to find his axe, to see that Marelle’s wound was not mortal. Then he was leaping forward in pursuit, catching tribesmen from behind and leaving them dead, like a leopard leaping from the back of one sheep to the next, killing and killing again, as the White Horn tribe, the tribe of the Antach’s brother, came up the valley, sweeping aside anything that lay in their path.

Again the charge, the hunting charge, knowing that the tribesmen would not be able to turn at bay, paying back in kind and more every death since the day by that dry riverbed. The Antach clan army came down the hill as well, their armor golden and terrible in the sun, and running among them were men of the Reach, who had not lived as fighting men, but who had become fighting men when the need of their homes was upon them. It was a glory like unmixed wine, like the sun when it touches the peaks of the mountains, like the first rains of winter on a dry and hungry land.