Colours in the Steel (34 page)

The wedge of men behind him forced a breach in the enemy line - not so much a line as a mob, jammed tight by weight of their own numbers, certainly no longer in the mood to fight after they’d decided in their minds that they’d already won. If you’ve won, why risk getting killed? More amateur thinking. At long last, something resembling a survival instinct led his column to push through the gap. The enemy let them go, too busy with their own sudden and unexpected panic to initiate any further hostilities. They wanted to be left alone now, and Loredan was happy to oblige them. When he looked back over his shoulder at the ragged stream of horsemen emerging from the slaughter of the ford, he was pleasantly surprised to see that he’d managed to get nearly four-fifths of his people out. The rest were as good as dead; the hell with them.

Still in business
, he congratulated himself.
Now then
.

His assumptions held good. The last thing the enemy were expecting him to do was attack, and so when he rode up between the head of the ridge and the southernmost of the two little copses, he had a clear run straight into the rear of the happy throng of slaughtermen who were surrounding what was left of his flanking party. Once they realised what was happening, they cleared off without even making a pretence of a fight, heading upriver to cut him off from the high-river ford across which they were expecting him to go. Reasonable guess, but amateur thinking nonetheless. What he needed most at this point in the proceedings was time, space, peace and quiet; they were going to let him have some, and that ought to be enough grace to save all their lives. As soon as he was sure he’d got as much of his flanking party with him as he was likely to get, he signalled a right wheel and led the column off east at the double.

 

 

Having realised he was still alive, Temrai opened his eyes and yelled. After a minute or so, his dead horse was pulled off him and he was lifted up out of the water. It occurred to him that he was shaking like a man having a fit, but there was nothing he could do about it.

‘What happened?’ he gasped. ‘I thought we’d won.’

‘We have,’ replied the man who was holding his right arm. ‘They’ve got away from us, and they’re running for it. Are you all right?’

Temrai nodded. ‘What happened?’ he repeated. ‘Everything went like we wanted it to, and then the next minute they were all over us.’ He shuddered, remembering the sudden terror that had paralysed him as the other man, the one who’d started it all, burst out through a solid wall of Temrai’s guard and came straight at him, his face so completely calm, almost serene, that for a moment Temrai had taken him for Death itself.

He remembered how there had been no time at all - the man was on him, his sword-arm through with the thrust before Temrai could even make up his mind what to do, but it had all gone so slowly, so that he’d had time to think all sorts of things before the other man’s sword-tip came out through the other side of his horse’s neck, and he’d felt both of them gradually toppling over into the water. He remembered the extraordinary feeling of calm and resignation after that -
oh, well, here goes, that was that
- as he waited to hit the stony bed of the ford, feel the hooves of the oncoming enemy landing on his face and chest—And here he was, apparently alive and not hurting, nothing broken, no blood he could definitely say was his own. Just like Jurrai had said: a mess . . .

‘Where’s Jurrai?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.

‘Didn’t make it,’ the man replied. ‘Same man as got you got him. I think he was trying to save you—’

Nice thought, Temrai said to himself, but I was there, remember? He simply didn’t know what hit him, same as me. So Jurrai’s dead. Well, we’ll have to deal with that later. Dammit, the battle isn’t even over yet, I ought to be doing something—

‘Are they safely away from the camp?’ he asked.

The man nodded. ‘Far as I can see. They lit out for the upper ford; maybe we’ll catch them there, I don’t know. Do you want to stay here talking in the middle of the river or shall we move on?’

Temrai allowed himself to be frogmarched onto dry land. They had to step over bodies - some dead, rather more still alive but probably past saving. That was a bad thing; all these men in the most desperate moment of their lives, scrabbling with their hands for help because they’re too weak to cry out, their voices won’t work any more, and we step over them as if they were cowshit in the road. ‘Get a message through, call it all off.’ Temrai’s voice was harsh, as if he was attributing blame. ‘I want everybody back to the camp, and then let’s see about clearing this lot up.’

The man who’d hit him - hadn’t he seen that face before? Quite possible; after all, it as less than six months ago that he’d been working in the city arsenal, perhaps some of these swords that were lying discarded on the grass were ones he’d made himself. Maybe even the one that had killed Jurrai, and nearly done for him. That’d be an amusing coincidence; but all that seemed so long ago and far away as to be part of some dream-time, and he was as different now as the moth is from the caterpillar. The hell with all that, too. Right now, there was work to be done.

Someone brought him a fresh horse -
oh, hell, Thunder’s dead, my poor old friend, and I didn’t even think of that until now; I used to cry myself to sleep about losing a horse when I was a kid
- and he hauled himself up into the saddle, suddenly aware of bruises, wrenched muscles, traumatised and shredded skin where he’d been ground against the stony bed of the ford. As he looked round he was subconsciously collecting faces, every face recognised a further piece of salvage, one less dagger in his conscience when the time came for him to face up to what he’d deliberately set in motion. But there wasn’t time for all that now; too much to organise, so many things to be sorted out before he could say this day was over.

‘Kossanai.’ The Chief Engineer was a sorry sight; soaked to the skin, one of the shoulder straps of his boiled-leather breastplate flapping loose and a raw cut underneath. But he was a reliable man and still on his feet; someone else could do some work for a change. ‘Get yourself over to the higher ford, make sure we’re pulling out and nobody’s gone dashing off in pursuit. Tell whoever’s in charge up there I need those men down here now.’ Kossanai nodded, wearily hauled himself into the saddle. ‘Stilchai, you’re in charge of picking up the wounded. Get hold of Nimren, tell her to organise the healers. And put someone in charge of prisoners. The sooner they’re rounded up the better, just in case there’s any that don’t know the battle’s over yet. Maltai, get some scouts out and let’s know for sure where everybody is instead of guessing.’

It was some time before the scouts came back. The enemy were long gone; they’d doubled back behind the ridge and disappeared downriver, presumably heading for the lower crossing. Nobody had shown the slightest inclination to chase after them.

Casualty figures gradually came in; for the enemy, nine hundred killed and a further three hundred and fifty captured, half of them cut up to a greater or lesser extent, as against the clan’s losses, currently standing at a hundred and seven dead and seventy-odd wounded, twenty or so seriously. It was, by any standards, a glorious victory; and if it should have been more glorious still as regards the body count, nobody seemed in too much of a hurry to dwell on that. On the contrary; for the first time in living memory, the clan had taken on the dreaded riders from the city and seen them off in no uncertain terms. Men and women whose mothers had terrified them into obedience with the threat of Maxen and his raiders had seen those same bogeymen pinned down and surrounded, caught in a pitfall and tethered for the slaughter. The fact that somehow they’d managed to slip away before their throats were actually cut was something the clan could afford to overlook; and besides, the more survivors who went home to tell the tale, the greater the panic and confusion of their enemies. A wholesale slaughter would only have served to stiffen their resolve, and made the rest of the job that much harder. As for Temrai; well, they’d always known he had the right stuff, hadn’t they? It was good to know they’d been right all along, but it came as no surprise.

(There was also the somewhat discordant note struck by the families and friends of the hundred and seven dead, and the rather ungrateful attitude of the badly injured, who would rather have had their legs and hands back than all the generous praise of a grateful nation; Temrai wondered if he had time to deal with all that yet, and decided it would have to wait until the burial details had reported in and the horses had been seen to.)

The final task of the day was to finish dismantling the last seven trebuchets, so as not to fall too badly behind schedule. There were any number of willing volunteers, most of whom got under the engineers’ feet and made the job take half as long again as it should have done. Once that was out of the way, everybody was at liberty to go back to their tents and campfires; except for Temrai and his heads of department, who had the long and tedious business of thinking the whole thing through and deciding what had to be done about it.

‘They may try again,’ Uncle Anakai said, ‘but I doubt it. Not immediately, anyway. They’ll be too busy deciding whose fault it was, if I know the city people.’

He was talking slowly because of the ball of cotton waste pressed to the side of his face; an arrow had slit his cheek open for three inches directly in line with his mouth. It had almost certainly been friendly fire, since the enemy had loosed off relatively few arrows.

‘Let’s assume they don’t,’ Ceuscai replied. ‘I had a good look at them, after all. They didn’t know what hit ’em.’ He shook his head, as if unable to accept what he’d seen. ‘That can’t be their real army,’ he went on. ‘For all we know, it could just have been some privateer outfit; you know, if the Emperor won’t do anything about it, we will. I can’t believe the city’s main field army’s as easy to beat as that lot was.’

Ceuscai was reasonably undamaged; slightly stiff in one knee after an awkward fall from his horse (he’d led the ambush party at the higher ford; his misadventure had come about when he was caught in the press of his own men surging forward to massacre the encircled enemy.)

Temrai grunted in agreement, nodded slightly. ‘I think you may well be right on the first count,’ he said, ‘not so sure about the second. Whether or not that was their proper army, I reckon we’ve got to expect some sort of attempt on the engines when we unload them at the final camp downstream. That’s what I would do; strike hard and close to home. We can’t rely on that, however. From now on we’ll have to work on the principle that they could come at us at any time, which’ll mean having to take people away from making and moving the engines and put them on escort duty. That’ll slow us down, and won’t that make us still more vulnerable?’

‘What about a punitive expedition?’ Shandren interrupted. ‘Think about it. They’ve just been badly beaten in the field, for almost the first time ever. Isn’t it likely they’ll want to set the record straight, if only for the sake of their own self-image? They’ll need to do something to restore morale.’

Anakai shook his head. ‘Far more likely to take it out on their own people,’ he said. ‘Punishing the General’ll make it so they can feel good about themselves again, and they won’t have to risk a second defeat. No, I think that if they want to intercept the engines, they’re most likely to do it while they’re on the water. There’s several places where the river’s pretty wide between here and the final camp, and they know how we feel about boats. If they launch a few barges full of soldiers, they could sink the rafts or tow them off without ever coming within bowshot. We’d pursue along the bank, and either fall into an ambush or leave the construction camp exposed for a hit-and-run attack. Thinking about it, that was the obvious thing to have done instead of what they actually did; more support for your theory, Ceuscai, about this lot not being the regular army.’

‘I don’t think there is a regular army,’ Temrai put in. ‘I’ve said this before and nobody’s paid any attention.’ He shifted his weight off his painful side before continuing. ‘There’s a few permanent guards on the walls, and a part-time levy who’re supposed to be trained men and aren’t. As far as most of them are concerned, the part-timers treat their training allowance as a sort of state handout to the needy and feckless, and the rest of them look on it as a sort of drinking club. Oh, I’m not saying they won’t do their best when the walls are actually under attack; I just don’t see them being used as a field army away from the city. It’d be lunacy, and they know it.’

‘Maybe,’ Ceuscai conceded. ‘But so was this.’

The glow of the fire lit up the ring of faces; twelve people who knew each other well, talking calmly and rationally about something that might well have been the end of the world. There were also places where someone should have been, but wasn’t; Jurrai as leader of the horse archers, Pegtai and Sorutai as members of the chief’s household -
I broke Sorutai’s flute when we were children, and now I’ll never be able to make it up to him; he doted on that flute, and I broke it because I was jealous. Why did I do that?
- but the gaps could be filled with others just as good, it was in the order of business for tonight’s meeting, together with formal thanks to the gods for letting our losses be so light. Had Sasurai ever had to do this, Temrai wondered, carry on as if nothing had happened, accept a loss because it couldn’t be helped and things might have been a whole lot worse? And what were his friends in the city thinking, as the first reports came in? Nine hundred empty beds in the city tonight; would they be filled so easily, and without the comforting reassurance of victory to let the rest of them declare that it had all been worthwhile? To die for one’s people is bad enough; to die for one’s people and lose as well must be a dreadful thing.

‘Let’s sum up then, shall we?’ Temrai said, swallowing a yawn. ‘We don’t think they’ll attack again, or at least not for a while, but it’d still be sensible to have a mobile reserve just in case. I’m not sure that’s quite the answer; a reserve that’s too small to make any difference is worse than no reserve at all, because it’s taking people away from the jobs they should be doing. My own view is that they’re not going to risk another humiliation by attacking us here, but they might have a go at the camp downstream, simply because it’s nearer, it’s got less people to defend it and - let’s face it - that’s where all the finished engines are, or will be soon enough. So I’ve decided that we’ll have a fairly strong force down at the bottom camp, which can serve both as a guard and an early-warning post to let us know if a substantial army’s on its way here. Ceuscai, I’d like you to think it over tonight and let me know tomorrow what you’ll want by way of men and supplies; once I know what you’re taking down there, I’ll be able to reassign people here to cover.’ He yawned again and stretched, wincing as his stiffening muscles protested. ‘I think that covers it, don’t you? Right, next, we’ve got vacancies on this council to fill. Nominations, please.’