Byzantium (76 page)
The band signalled the attack with the characteristic blaring of trumpets and pounding of drums and cymbals. ‘The cross has conquered!’ bellowed the units of the Imperial Scholae - five ranks of mounted archers and lancers - as they lurched forward, picked up speed, and began their thundering charge on the Bulgar centre. The Scholae quickly reached bowshot of the Bulgar lines and the first volley rose like a dense flock into the air, then abruptly alighted; here, there, a horse went down. The Scholae stampeded the Bulgars’ outermost cordon of pack animals and wagons, then veered sharply towards the Bulgar flanks to divert the enemy’s attention away from the centre they had just left vulnerable. Soon the flanks were heavily engaged; Bulgar standards could be seen moving towards the left and right perimeters of their enormous encampment. After perhaps a quarter of an hour, hundreds of akrites rode from a small copse just beyond the Bulgars’ left flank, directly through the remnants of the Bulgars’ mule-and-wagon wall. Puffs of flame appeared as the akrites hurled clay shells filled with liquid fire into the wagons. The fire and smoke drove most of the remaining pack animals away. Visible behind the black pillars of smoke was the vast mass of the Bulgar army.
‘Domestic of the Hyknatoi!’ shouted the Emperor. The Imperial Hyknatoi charged off as the Scholae had before them. This time many horses and men went down as the charge hit the exposed centre of the Bulgar formation. After several volleys of arrows and spears the Hyknatoi retreated to join the flank attacks; in the wake of their assault, wounded and dying horses could be seen kicking the air like toppled clockwork miniatures. A mandator came galloping back towards the Roman ranks, his horse steaming in the cold rain and his face bright red. ‘Majesty, the flanks are fully engaged.’
‘Domestic of the Numeri!’ Haraldr felt fear, as if awakening to a knife in his ribs. The Numeri were the infantry division of the Taghmata; they would support the Varangian assault once -if- the breakthrough was made. ‘Hetairarch! Manglavite!’ Haraldr ordered his men to dismount; batmen circulated among the ranks of the Middle Hetairia and led the horses to the rear. Haraldr walked to the horses of the Emperor and his aides. Mar, also dismounted, came to his side. His ice-hard eyes already glimmered with Odin’s gift.
‘Proceed in ranks, Hetairarch.’ Before Mar could turn and give the order, the Emperor astonished everyone within seeing by arduously dismounting from his towering white Arabian. If he felt pain upon standing, he did not display it; there was only a furious resolution on his powerful features.
‘Majesty . . .’uttered the Droungarios helplessly.
‘Send my horse for me when our attack has been successful, Droungarios,’ said the Emperor. ‘These men fight on foot, and as I am joining them, so will I.’
Mar led the Grand Hetairia out in two relatively narrow ranks; the Middle Hetairia followed, also in two ranks of two hundred and fifty men abreast. The Emperor walked alongside Mar, beneath the dragon standard of the Grand Hetairia, his step heavy, purposeful. Fifty paces out of bowshot. Mar turned and shouted ‘Boar!’ The ranks of the Grand Hetairia folded like wings against the Middle Hetairia, creating a layered flesh-and-metal pyramid, with Mar’s men on the outside and Haraldr’s men forming a compact, solid inner wedge. The Emperor took his place just ahead of Haraldr at the snout of the boar-within-a-boar. Mar stood alone at the apex of the outer boar, his face twitching with fury.
The guttural cries of the Bulgars stilled as the Varangian formation, a huge lethal arrow, pointed directly at their centre. It was possible to hear a dying man wail ‘Theotokos’ over and over. The rain fell in large, clear drops. Mar raised his gilded axe. In unison the Varangians slammed their axe blades flat against the hard oak planks of their shields; the sound was like the breathing of some colossal beast. Again, again, mesmerizing, terrifying. The boar advanced to this deadly cadence.
The Bulgar arrows descended in buzzing swarms but largely clattered harmlessly off byrnnies, helms and shields. Shouts came back to watch for the rows of sharpened stakes, and the wedge rocked and surged as men manoeuvred round the crude barriers. Two Varangians in the first rank tumbled into a shallow, concealed pit; one scrambled up but the other screamed as he was impaled on a stake. The Bulgars became individual faces, stubbled chins, red noses, bad teeth.
Mar’s oath could be heard, curiously muted, above the almost deafening din. He pounded the canvas-clad infantrymen at the Bulgar front with huge, bludgeoning strokes, so relentlessly that it seemed his foes were ritualistically kneeling before him, except that these supplicants had been anointed with brilliant blood as Mar split their skulls and hacked off their arms. Mar stepped over his writhing, butchered victims, and before he had killed half a dozen men the Bulgars fell back without even offering him resistance, shoving and trampling their own in an effort to escape the Varangian scythe. The rest of the boar followed Mar into the frantic, scrambling Bulgar retreat, moving almost as steadily as it had when unopposed.
In the middle of the boar, Haraldr and his men had little more to do than protect themselves against arrows and step over the grotesque, akimbo corpses, most of them with gaping axe wounds. At first the bodies lay in only a few inches of dark, watery muck, but soon the dead and dying were virtually submerged in the clinging ooze. Both the Varangian advance and the Bulgar retreat slowed inexorably. The hail of arrows and spears became heavy and steady. Now Varangians fell into the mud. The boar stopped. Haraldr stood on a dead man’s back and looked ahead. Mar was immobilized in muck up to his knees, crouched behind his shield as the archers and javelin throwers pelted him. Mar’s men surged up to protect
him, but many of them were forced back by spear-thrusting phalanxes of Bulgar infantry. Haraldr quickly ascertained that the men of the Grand Hetairia, hindered by their clumsy boots, could no longer advance. He relayed the commands back through Ulfr and Halldor: the Middle Hetairia will now move to the front. Haraldr shouted his plan to the Emperor, who fearlessly joined him in slogging to the mired snout.
‘I’m taking the snout!’ Haraldr yelled in Mar’s ear. ‘When we have passed, your men will have time to take off their boots and can come in behind us.’ Mar nodded drunkenly. He is deep in the spirit world, Haraldr thought. ‘Did you hear me!’ screamed Haraldr.
‘Yes! We will fall in behind!’
Haraldr strapped his axe to his back and unsheathed his sword. The Rage seized him like an angry wolf. He leapt out at a short, stout Bulgar infantryman in a metal-studded leather jerkin and slashed him across his torso, severing an arm and crumpling his chest. The dead man’s comrades fell back at the appearance of this new Norse titan, and Haraldr lifted his knees high to keep moving, to keep pressing them. His Varangians stayed tightly behind him. The Bulgars made a brief stand with long spears, but Haraldr and his men fended off the metal-tipped shafts with their shields, then with swords and axes made the Bulgars pay for their resistance.
Haraldr looked back across the corpse-strewn bog to make certain that Mar’s men were following. Alarm swept through him in a nauseating wave. Mar had not advanced a step and clearly had no intention to; he had drawn his men into a tight, circular shield fort. They were waiting for the Numeri to rescue them. In an instant Haraldr knew what had happened, though he probably would be unable to convince anyone who did not share Odin’s gift: Mar was deliberately abandoning Haraldr and the men of the Middle Hetairia.
And if Odin gives me another day,
Haraldr vowed,
I will kill him for that betrayal.
The Valkyrja hovered, preparing to snatch away that day. Bulgar infantry by the many hundreds, the vanguard of thousands, were now trudging into the muck that separated the two Varangian forces, intending to encircle them both. They were armed with long spears and good steel helms and metal-plated canvas byrnnies. Haraldr knew that if his men were stopped and forced to form a shield fort, the Numeri would never reach them. The Middle Hetairia would dwindle to a pile of twitching corpses over a long, desperate afternoon. There was only one escape: to continue relentlessly forward, to the very heart of the Bulgar army, and pierce it with Hunland steel.
Haraldr fought forward with a renewed frenzy and a solid front of Bulgars, spears set, panicked and ran. Their retreat exposed a muddy little creek running perpendicular to Har-aldr’s advance. And behind the creek was a wall of wide-eyed, jittery horses, crowded flank to flank, their chests covered with quilted batting. The riders wore mail byrnnies and heavy steel greaves. This was the vaunted Bulgar heavy cavalry.
What had Maria said? The king beyond the creek. But the creek was not safety. In her dream he had died before he reached the creek. As he would here. But if he could cross that creek, could he defeat that fate? He screamed at Ulfr and Halldor. ‘Those men are not afraid, but their horses are! We must let them know the axe and push beyond the creek!’ And for some reason he could not fathom, he added, ‘The Bulgar Khan is just beyond it!’
The little creek was muddied by the rain, not diamond-faceted as Maria had seen it in her dream, and the water was blood-russet. Haraldr waded in, prayed to Odin to accept these innocent animals as sacrifice, and buried his axe blade into a horse’s quilted chest; the scream of the poor dumb beast sickened him. The horse toppled and Haraldr pushed forward to yet another slaughter; as he killed his second horse he realized that his feet were no longer in water. And the men behind him were now able to start coming across the creek.
Their masters brought the horses to what seemed unending slaughter; for a time the sky almost seemed to rain equine blood. Soon the shallow slope rising from the creek was littered with dead beasts and their riders. But Haraldr knew that the torturous ascent was rapidly draining his reserves; the axe was a weapon for short bursts, not this sustained butchery. Haraldr prayed to all the gods that this cavalry was the Khan’s last line of defence.
The head-flinging frantic horses retreated. Haraldr looked back and saw most of his men advancing well up the slope. When he looked ahead, he saw the Khan’s last defence and knew that he would never see the king beyond the creek. At the top of the rise waited another wall, not terrified animals but huge, fierce-eyed, red-faced men in long mail coats, armed with Hunland steel: the Khan’s elite guard. And they were so many, they blocked the horizon.
Haraldr knew that there was nothing left but to take as many of these souls as possible with him to the Valhol. They came forward eagerly, grunting, thrusting spears, hammering at Emma’s silky invulnerability; his ribs ached with the blows that had yet to break the links but were breaking him up inside. His men were dying all around him, and in some strange, reflexive requiem he silently tolled their names as they fell: Joli Stefnirson, Kolskeg Helgison; Thorvald Kodranson. A javelin glanced off his neck and he could feel the blood immediately. That was what her dream had promised him, that was the destiny he had seen in her eyes the first night she had drawn him into them.
He was isolated; it seemed that even the final desperate shield-fort had collapsed. His arm seared with every stroke, and yet the furiously cursing metal demons still could not overwhelm him. He had no idea where his men were - Ulfr, Halldor, the Emperor. Was he tolling their names because they, too, had fallen? A blow from behind almost knocked his helm off, a light flashed before his eyes. He shook his head to clear it but the light still glared. The sun. The sun had burst through the clouds and driven a slender, brilliant shaft into the Bulgar horde just ahead of him. He knew that he must reach it. He hurled himself forward in one last, desperate assault before that light, like Odin’s voice, faded beneath the black wings of the last dragon. He sent a jaw flying in a crimson spray. His sword crunched a byrnnie so hard, he could feel the bones shatter beneath the steel skin. He went forward on faith and courage, not knowing why he had to reach the light, and he realized that other men had joined him, the men he had thought lost: first the Emperor, and then Ulfr, and Halldor, and Joli’s brother, Hord. He could look back now and see hundreds of his men still with him, still advancing, questing with him for the light. The push from behind was now the blood lust of the Middle Hetairia.
Something fractured in the great body of the Bulgar army. For a moment the Khan’s guard hesitated, stunned at the resilience of the bloodied yet still furious beast that had penetrated to the living heart of their great horde, to the last human redoubt of their Khan. And then they gave in to some collective, primal fear. Many dropped their weapons and ran towards the encircling skeins of the Roman cavalry, preferring capture to a less certain fate on the tusks of the beast they could never kill. Some of those too close to the boar to think they could outrun it had simply dropped to their knees to beg for mercy. Among those terrified petitioners was the Bulgar Khan.
Haraldr looked around, wondering. He stood within the shaft of sunlight now, a light reflected off the helms and byrnnies of the Bulgars as they humbled themselves in sun-glazed mud. All around them was a litter of discarded weapons, as if a ghost army had vanished, leaving behind only artefacts borrowed from the living. Far to the left and right, the horsemen of the Scholae, Hyknatoi and Excubitores could be seen, standards proudly aloft as they herded huge, ragged groups of Bulgar prisoners. Behind the bloody, horribly diminished ranks of the Middle Hetairia were nothing but corpses.
The Emperor stepped in among the kneeling Bulgars. ‘Alounsianus!’ he commanded: the name of the Bulgar Khan. A desperate-looking, medium-sized man, whatever cleverness or courage he had employed to gain his throne utterly blanched from his face, rose up from the mud and clasped his trembling hands in supplication. The tossing clouds closed on the sun and the dimming light flickered over the defeated Khan. Then the clouds rolled aside, the sun exploded in its full radiance, and as he swooned from loss of blood, Haraldr was certain that he was floating up towards a golden dome.
