The Book of the Crowman (30 page)

Through a battered and scratched pair of binoculars, Dempsey watched the storm of the Ward’s barrage with dismay at first. The Green Men stood to lose thousands of men.

They had dug no trenches: the predominantly civilian troops were too tired on arrival and they’d had neither the time nor the equipment. There was no cover other than drainage ditches, hedges, sparse stands of trees and the depressions between natural rises in the landscape. But the fighters were ranged so far and wide across the countryside that the shelling from the Ward could not be concentrated effectively. Green Men cowered in the places where they’d woken, able only to pray for survival.

The bombardment ended within half an hour. As their scouts had reported, the Ward were throwing all their stockpiled weapons into this conflict but their ordnance was limited. Following the raids and skirmishes of the previous forty-eight hours, much of that ordnance had been destroyed or sabotaged.

Dempsey’s own raid had been a more subtle affair. Armed only with bows and knives, his twenty men had come to an encampment of Ward troops two miles south of Junction 18. Reconnaissance had shown this camp to be heavily defended. It was a mobile ammunition station, complete with horses and carts to transport rifle bullets and tank shells to the front lines. His group had found most of the guards asleep – exhausted by their own journey, probably. Those men woke into death by the blade. The rest of the watchmen were silently dispatched by longbowmen.

Dempsey’s men surrounded the camp and began to steal the horses. At some point a Wardsman raised the alarm and two dozen sleepy, terrified troops struggled from their tents and bivvy bags. There was no close quarter confrontation; every Wardsman was taken down by arrows. A couple of rifle shots came out of the Ward encampment, killing one of their own horses. Dempsey’s men piled the ammunition they couldn’t use – everything but shotgun shells – together and set fire to it as they left, destroying everything. No one followed them back to the village.

Dempsey’s only disappointment was that Gordon Black had not made good on his promise to join them. His opinion of the man – well, the boy if truth be told – had plummeted. Yet he’d known from their first meeting that Gordon was wild and untameable. Such an individual didn’t really fit with the Green Men’s operations, even if they were only quasi-military in nature. Despite Gordon’s weird personal agenda there’d been something about him that Dempsey liked. Wherever his search for the mythical Crowman had taken him, it had given him a depth that most of Dempsey’s brothers in arms didn’t possess. And Gordon had killed many men along his way. That much was clear in his stark grey eyes, eyes that spoke silently of sights seen and deeds done that would never be uttered by his tongue.

As Dempsey rode to the head of his sub-command, a body of two thousand infantry and longbowmen, he hoped he’d see the boy again. He raised his field glasses once more to survey the land, checking positions and weak points but always on the lookout for a singular, black-clad figure.

Between the village of Clay Coton and the M1 was a mile and a half of open fields. Conglomerating into ranks out there now, in the aftermath of the shelling, were a good fifty or more sub-commands of similar size. From this distance, to see so many troops coming into formation made Dempsey feel strong and proud. This may not have been a trained army, in the main, but it was vast and it was committed to this fight by the utter extremity of its circumstances. If they won, there was a chance they could rebuild their lives. If they lost, they lost everything. The Ward offered no hope any more, only tyranny and blind consumption of every resource. They would rape the world to death.

A mile or so to the south the first physical engagement of the battle had begun as the Ward advanced into the first scattered forces of the Green Men. Some of them were ready, others were not. Those nearest ranks of Green Men were not longbowmen. They were the simplest, most poorly equipped infantrymen. Dempsey could see columns of Wardsmen leaving their formations to chase these swiftly routed troops. Once each blood-hungry Ward breakaway was free of the main columns, the Green Men’s longbowmen, waiting in cover, stepped clear and loosed their arrows, cutting down swathes of grey uniforms at very little cost.

In this manner the early part of the plan was more of a success than Dempsey could have hoped for but the Ward quickly learned not to chase weak-looking troops other than with tanks. Within minutes of defeating five or six rogue Ward units, ten grey tanks accelerated away from the Ward columns and into the Green Men’s weakling infantry. They didn’t fire their guns. They merely chased down the larger groups, crushing as many troops under their tracks as they could. It was a grim dance to watch, almost grotesquely comical, as the tanks pursued small groups of tiring runners, scattering them like sheep and mowing down the slowest of them.

This action sparked a genuine retreat of the Green Men’s infantry. They ran stumbling and staggering back towards the now ready ranks of sub-commands. As they fled, volleys of rifle fire from the front lines of Wardsmen brought hundreds of them down. Figures both grey and camouflaged lay dead and dying on the grass. Dempsey couldn’t honestly tell through his binoculars which side had come off better in the first part of the engagement.

It was then that Dempsey glimpsed a singular figure sprinting through the massed units of Green Men, his black coat flicking around him like wings of rag, his top hat still firmly on his head. It could be no other person and seeing him there, moving with such unnatural speed and energy, sent a charge of eagerness and pride through Dempsey’s heart. He wanted nothing more than to follow that dark figure into combat, to release the souls of the enemy and anoint the earth red with their blood.

Something happened as Gordon passed through the vast ranks of Green Men. From this distance it was as though he were a tiny magnet moving between iron filings. His passage sent ripples of attraction through the columns of his comrades. The mounted sub-commanders seemed drawn by him and they trotted off after him. Behind each sub-commander came two thousand starving troops, armed with axes and flick-knives, shovels and gardening forks. Some of them carried sawn off shotguns, others wielded pieces of martial arts equipment – nunchuks and katanas, throwing stars and wooden staffs.

All of them followed Gordon down towards the enemy.

The tanks had returned to the head of the Ward’s vast cohorts. Now they turned and led the entire army further into battle. Ten unstoppable chunks of grey metal, their phallic guns pointed into the unprotected ranks of the Green Men. Despite the power of the attraction to join Gordon on the field, Dempsey held his own sub-command back.

At some invisible command, the tanks opened fire simultaneously sending ten explosive shells through the marching columns of the Green Men. The angle of firing was so flat, each shell killed fifty or more men before impacting, exploding and taking at least twenty or more. Pale smoke billowed from each grey carapace and, at the site of each blast crater, black smoke and a mist of obliterated dirt and flesh wafted down over those still marching. Hundreds of fighters taken out in a single volley. Not yet engaged with the enemy, the Green Men faltered. Ranks piled into the backs of the stalled, stunned troops in front of them.

Between the first lines of the Green Men and the tanks was a distance of only two or three hundred yards, closing all the time as the Ward advanced. At the centre of this body-strewn no-man’s-land, facing the entire Ward army alone, stood Gordon Black.

His figure, tiny even through Dempsey’s binoculars, now ran back to the faltering Green Men. At his mere gestures, ripples of force passed through the hesitant troops. Dempsey couldn’t hear what Gordon was saying but the fighters could. They stiffened and closed rank. Once more Gordon faced the enemy and began to cover the space between them at a run.

A noise from the field swept back towards Dempsey and his horse bucked at the strangeness and power of it. The sound buffeted Dempsey’s troops. It washed over the other sub-commanders and their columns ranged to Dempsey’s right and left. The battle-cry of a hundred thousand men, women and children passing a psychological point of no return. No matter what happened, he knew they’d follow Gordon Black into glory or death.

Dempsey nudged the flanks of his horse and moved forward. He caught the eyes of the sub-commanders to either side of him and they nodded their assent. The remaining columns of Green Men followed marched down towards the field of battle.

It was a long run from the wood to the place where the fighters had gathered but Gordon felt no cost to his muscles or energy along the way. If anything, his entire being had filled up with power as the battlefield beckoned. His desire to savage the foot-soldiers of the Ward became almost sexual in intensity.

As he approached the rear of the Green Men’s ranks of civilian troops he was choked with pride. They
could
win but many of them were going to die today. Some because they were too weak to fight well, some because they were too inexperienced to do anything more than poke a hoe at a Wardsman before being shot, cut down or disabled. Thousands would die by being in the wrong place at the wrong moment and still more would exhaust themselves to the point at which death would be nothing worse than a release from pain. But they were here and that meant something. It meant the heart of the land was still beating in each and every one of these people. They would bleed and die for her. They would do whatever was necessary to win her back from the choking grasp of the Ward.

Beyond these nearest formations, Gordon could hear the sounds of battle already begun – shouting, the clash of weapons, the swoosh of arrows flying and the grumble of tank engines – and he ran through the ranks to join those who’d engaged the Ward.

As he passed between the columns he shouted what he knew each fighter needed to hear:

“I’ve seen the Crowman! He’s with us! Pass the word!”

Even as he spoke the words he could feel the effect they had on the people nearest to him. Risking a glance behind as he ran, he saw the shining behind the eyes of the fighters, how they clasped each other, how some unrealised force rose up within them at the sound of that name.

“The Crowman fights with us today! The victory is ours!”

As he burst forth from the front ranks, Gordon saw the carnage wrought by the roving Ward tanks and the Green longbowmen. Bodies, some pierced or cut, many crushed, others showing shafts of hazel, lay all over the shell-cratered fields.

Gordon stopped for a moment, watching the tanks retreat back to the front of the Ward’s lines. A few feet in front of him was the body of a boy. His legs and lower abdomen were flattened into the dirt and bore the prints of caterpillar tracks. The weight of the tank had caused his limbs to split under pressure and blood had sprayed outwards to darken the already dark, exposed earth. The force had pushed the boy’s innards through his mouth. His eyes stared upwards, his lips stretched wide around his reversed stomach and one lung which bore the scrape-marks of his own teeth. Clutched in his right hand was a lock knife, its worn, curved blade unmarked by the blood of the enemy. Gordon knelt, closed the boy’s shock-wide eyes and retrieved the weapon.

He rose up, held the blade high for those behind him to see, and ran forward towards the enemy, drawing the army of the Green Men in his wake.

When the tanks fired, the air to either side of him superheated briefly, screaming protest at the passage of the low-flying projectiles. He turned and saw the corridors of blood and bone they’d torn through the forwardmost columns and the depressions in the earth where dozens more fighters had been vaporised by each ensuing explosion.

The entire Green Man army stopped in its tracks, stunned into terror by that single volley of tank fire. Halfway across the space between the two front lines already, Gordon had no option but to go back for his people. If they turned away now, both the battle and the war were lost. Every death since the Ward had taken power would be in vain. He sprinted back to the heads of the stalled columns, near enough that they could hear, far enough that most of them could see him. He drew breath and gathered power from where his boots met the earth.

His voice carried out to the petrified fighters.

“The Ward have always had more power than we have and that’s no different today. Many of us are going to die right here in these fields. We’ll die because we believe in something greater than ourselves. We believe in this land and we believe in its future. To turn away from the Ward now and save your skin will be to do nothing more than die slowly and take the future with you. If you don’t fight now, there won’t be another chance. Today is either the end of everything or the beginning of something beautiful beyond your ken. What you do now, right now, is all that can decide whether the land lives or dies. The land has sent us a leader, a man who has fought for us all along. She sent us the Crowman. He is not a myth. He is not a rumour. He is a living breathing man. And I tell you this, he fights alongside us today. He is here. I have seen him. With the Crowman among us WE CANNOT LOSE. Let us march forward and lay down our lives together.”

Gordon raised his knife hand high.

“For the land!”

The Green Men raised their weapons to the sky and responded:

“FOR THE LAND!”

Gordon raised his blade again.

“For the future!”

The Green Man army replied as one:

“FOR THE FUTURE!”

Gordon faced the enemy and walked forward. United under the power of the Crowman, many of them wearing his wondrous black feathers, the last of the land’s faithful marched into battle, howling for the blood of their enemies.

Gordon’s body quaked with rage and power.

The Ward’s tanks fired again, ending hundreds more lives in seconds. The columns marched through the destruction, steadfast behind Gordon Black. When he leapt onto one of the central tanks, those in the front ranks came forward and did the same. The Chieftain had expected armoured vehicles to form part of the Ward’s assault. They couldn’t stop the tanks and they certainly couldn’t destroy them. But they could stop them from firing. A few of the Green Men carried sacks of stones small enough to fit inside the barrel of each turret gun. A few of these inserted and held in place with tar and a simple plug of hessian sacking would cause devastation when the gun was fired. If any of the tank crews tried to get out and clear the blockage, they would be swamped by Green Men.

Gordon now initiated this process, though it was costly. Many of the tanks fired as Green Men shinned along the barrels or before they’d pushed their stones inside. Rifle fire from the approaching Wardsmen picked off dozens of fighters from each of the ten tanks. Two tank commanders tried to fire. Their guns exploded, killing them, their crews and those assailing their vehicles. The other eight tanks managed one more volley before their guns were disabled. All the tanks were good for now was cover for slowly advancing Wardsmen. Chasing the Green Men into their own ranks was too costly to their rapidly diminishing fuel. Gordon watched with pride and satisfaction as the tanks retreated from the field to clear their guns.

The ranks of Green Men flowed forwards and Gordon took up his position at their head once more. Following him were the mounted sub-commanders, leading the first much-depleted columns. Behind them, more sub-commanders and their vast units were also moving forward. The Ward army began to spread to the left and right, stretching the line of imminent contact. The Green Men’s sub-commanders responded. Rifle fire was already cutting down swathes of the Green Men’s front ranks but now each sub-command split into infantry and longbowmen. The bowmen began to loose volleys of arrows over the heads of their own fighters and into the deeper ranks of Wardsmen in the distance.

Finally, the Green Men and the men of the Ward came among each other.

Gordon was first to sweep into the enemy lines. Those nearby him saw the young man become a furious warrior and they were inspired. He didn’t engage any of the Wardsman singly; he slashed at arms and legs and faces and moved on before any soldier could retaliate. Those who saw him coming raised their swords or their crossbows but Gordon anticipated every attack. He swooped between the grey uniforms, a black figure leaving a wide red trail behind him. His rage and energy spread from Green Man to Green Man and Ward troops began to fall like dry stalks to the scythe.