Ships from the West (27 page)

‘Our adversary is on the move, it seems,’ Colonel Sarius, the keen-eyed Fimbrian, remarked. ‘I see infantry formations, but nothing else as yet’

‘What strength?’ Aras asked him.

‘Hard to gauge; there are still hordes of them forming up in front of their camps. Two or three grand tercios at the least. A mile of frontage - but that’s only the front ranks. I do believe it’s a general assault.’ The Fimbrian’s hard eyes sparkled as though some great treat were in store for him.

‘Horse teams coming up from the rear - yes, he’s bringing forward his guns. That’s what it is. He’s decided to begin siting his batteries. And in broad daylight! What can he be thinking?’

‘Ensign Duwar,’ Aras barked. ‘Run up to the signallers. Have them hoist
“General Engagement, Fire at Will”.’

‘Aye, sir!’ The young officer took off at a sprint for the signal station on top of the Spike.

‘Gentlemen,’ Aras said to the more senior officers remaining, ‘to your posts. You all know what to do. Rusilan and Sarius, remain with me. We shall repair to the upper battlements, I think, and get ourselves a better view. It’s apt to grow somewhat busy down here once the action starts.’

There was a strange gaiety in the air, Aras realised. Even the common soldiers of the gun crews were grinning and chattering as they loaded their pieces, and their officers seemed afire with anticipation. For days, weeks even, they had been harried and beaten back by the enemy until they had no option but to retreat behind the stout walls of Gaderion. Now that those walls were about to be assaulted, they knew they would be able to wreak a bloody revenge.

On the topmost battlement of the donjon, with the blank stone of the Spike’s towering menace at their back, Aras and his remaining colleagues halted, breathless from having run up several flights of stairs. They could see the entire valley spread out below them, the sharp-angled shape of the redoubt, the snaking curtain wall, the sun glinting on the iron barrels of the Eyrie’s guns as they were run out of the rock of the very mountain opposite. And all along that intricate and formidable series of defences, thousands of men dressed in Torunnan sable were labouring in the casemates or loading their arquebuses or running here and there in long lines bearing powder and shot and wads for the batteries. ‘Here they come,’ Sarius said dryly.

‘I wish I had your eyes, Colonel,’ Aras told him. ‘What are they?’

‘Rabble from Almark. He won’t waste good troops in the first wave. He’s got to know we have that entire valley ranged. ‘Look at their dressing! They’ve never so much as smelled a drill square, this lot’

A mile and a half away Aras could now see that the crowd of men which darkened the face of the land was moving in a broad line. Behind that line there came another, this one more ordered. And behind that, the beetling mass of scores of horse teams hauling guns and limbers and caissons.

The first wave came on very swiftly, keeping no formation beyond that of a broad, ragged line. They were clad in Almarkan blue, some carrying pikes and swords, others jogging along with arquebuses resting on their shoulders. On the valley floor before them, a scattered line of thin saplings had been planted years before with a half-furlong between each tree. This marked the extreme range of the Torunnan guns. Aras held his breath as the host approached them. His men had been trained to hold their fire until the enemy was well beyond the line of trees.

All along the walls of Gaderion’s fortresses the crowded activity gave way to an intent stillness. The smell of slow-match drifted about the valley. ‘The perfume of war’, old soldiers called it.

A puff of smoke from one of the redoubt casemates, followed a second later by the dull boom of the explosion. Right in the middle of the enemy formation a narrow geyser of earth went up, flinging aside the ragged remains of men, tearing a momentary hole in the carpet of tiny figures.

A second later every gun in the entire valley opened up. The air shook, and Aras felt the massive stone of the battlements trembling under the soles of his boots. The noise of that opening salvo was experienced by the entire body rather than just heard by the ears. Waves of hot air and smoke came billowing up from the embrasures like a wind passing the gates of hell.

And hell came to earth instants later for the men of the Himerian vanguard. The valley floor seemed to erupt in bursting fountains of stone and dirt. It reminded Aras of the effect a heavy rainstorm has on bare soil. The lead enemy formations simply disappeared in that tempest of explosions. The Torunnan gunners were using hollow shells packed with powder for the most part. When these detonated they sent wicked showers of red-hot metal spraying in a deadly hail, tearing men apart, maiming them, tossing them through the air. In the lower embrasures, however, the batteries were loaded with solid shot, and these skimmed along at breast height, cutting great swathes of bloody slaughter through the close-packed enemy, each shot felling a dozen or a score of men and sending their sundered fragments flying among their fellows. Aras found he was beating his fist on the stone of the merlon as he watched, and his face had frozen open in a savage grinning rictus. There were perhaps fifteen thousand men in that first wave, and they were being torn to pieces while still a mile from Gaderion’s mighty walls. From those walls he could hear a hoarse roaring noise. The gunners were cheering, or baying rather, even as they reloaded and ran out the culverins again. A continuous bellowing thunder rang out, magnified and echoed by the encircling mountains until it was almost unbearable and could hardly be deciphered from the hammering beat of the blood in Aras’s own heart. The smoke of the bombardment reared up to blot out the morning sunlight and cast a shadow on the heights of the Cimbrics in the west. It seemed impossible that such a noise and such a shadow could be made by the agency of men.

‘They’re coming on!’ Colonel Sarius shouted in disbelief.

Out of the broken, smoking ground the enemy were struggling onwards, leaving behind them the shattered corpses of hundreds of their comrades; and now the massed roar of their voices could be heard amid the thunder of the guns.

‘They’re going to make it to the walls,’ Aras said, incredulous. What could make men move forward under that murderous fire?

The entire valley floor seemed covered with the figures of running men, and among them the shells rained down unceasingly. It could be seen now that many of them carried spades and baulks of wood and others had the wicker cages of empty gabions strapped to their backs. In their midst armoured Inceptines urged them on from the backs of tall horses, waving their maces and shouting furiously.

Back up the valley, a second assault wave started out. This one was heavily armoured, disciplined, and it moved with forbidding alacrity. Tall men in long mail coats with steel cuirasses. They bore two-handed swords or battleaxes, and all had matchlock holsters slung at their backs. Gallowglasses of Finnmark, the shock infantry of the Second Empire.

The men of the first wave had now halted well short of arquebus range, and there they went to ground as if by prior order. The Almarkan soldiers began digging frantically amid the shellbursts, throwing the frozen soil up over their shoulders and shoring up the sides of their scrapes with slats of wood and hastily filled gabions. Hundreds more died, but the shells that killed them broke up the ground and aided them in their digging. As the holes grew deeper, the Torunnan artillery had less effect. The culverins of Gaderion fired on a flat trajectory, so once the enemy was below ground level it was almost impossible to depress the guns low enough to bear.

Aras fumbled in his pouch for pencil and parchment. Leaning on the merlon, he hastily scratched out and signed a note, then turned to one of the couriers who stood waiting, as they had throughout the assault. ‘Take this along the walls and show it to all the battery commanders. They are to switch fire - do you understand me? They are to switch fire to the second wave. Go quickly.’

The young man sped off with the note in one fist and his sword scabbard held high in the other.

‘I see it now,’ Sarius was saying. ‘The enemy is cleverer than we thought. He’s sacrificing the first wave to gain a secure foothold for the second. But it still won’t do him any good -they’ll just sit there and get plastered by our guns.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Aras said. ‘Look up the valley, beyond the gallowglasses.’

Sarius whistled soundlessly. ‘Horse artillery, going full tilt. He can’t mean to bring them all the way up to the front! It’s madness.’

‘I believe he does. Whoever the enemy general is, he is an original thinker. And a gambler too.’

As the courier’s message went along the walls the guns of Gaderion shifted their aim, and began to seek out the second enemy wave, which was making steady and relatively unhindered progress up the valley. As soon as the first shells began to land in the midst of the gallowglasses their orderly formation scrambled and began to open out. They increased speed from a slow jog to an out-and-out sprint. Aras could see many of them falling, tripped by the broken ground and the weight of their armour. There were perhaps eight thousand of them, and they had half a mile to run before they gained the shelter of the trenches their Almarkan comrades were so frantically digging.

‘Sarius,’ Aras said. ‘Go down to the redoubt. We will attempt a sortie. Take half the heavy cavalry, no more, and hit the Finnmarkans. They’ll be winded by the time they reach you.’

‘Sir!’ Sarius took off, running like a boy.

Aras turned to another of his young aides. ‘Run along the walls. All battery commanders. We are about to make a sortie. Be prepared to hold fire as soon as our cavalry leaves the gates.’

Minutes passed, while Aras stood chafing and the gallowglasses struggled closer to the line of crude trenches. They were taking casualties, but not so many as the first wave had, a tribute to their superior armour and more open ranks. The roar of the battle was a dull thumping in the ear now, for every man in the valley was partially deafened.

The great gates of the redoubt swung open and files of Torunnan cavalry began to ride out and form up beyond the covering redan. The Himerian troops in the southern half of the valley seemed to pause, and then redouble their efforts, though Aras saw many throw aside their spades to pick up arquebuses.

Sarius formed up his men on sloping ground before the redoubt. Four lines of horsemen some half a mile long. As soon as they were in position Aras saw Sarius himself together with a trio of aides and a banner-bearer place themselves square in the front rank. Then there was the flash of a sword blade, the bright gleam of a bugle-call in the smoke-ridden murk, and the first line of four hundred horsemen began to move. When it had gone a few horse lengths the second started out, and then the third, and the fourth. Sixteen hundred heavy cavalry in sable armour with matchlock pistols held cocked and ready at their shoulders.

In the makeshift trenches three furlongs to their front the Almarkans dropped their spades and reached for weapons instead. The guns of the redoubt and the curtain wall had ceased fire, masked by the cavalry, but those up in the Eyrie and the donjon were still pouring a storm of shot and shell into the ranks of the gallowglass infantry who were now almost at their goal. Fully five hundred of them had fallen but the remainder knew their only hope of survival was to gain the shelter of the line of trenches. If they had to retreat the way they had come they would be destroyed.

Aras watched the Torunnan cavalry charge forward. The instant before impact there was a sudden eruption of smoke all along their line as they fired their matchlocks at point-blank range. They were answered by the arquebuses of the Almarkans, and horses began to stumble and fall, men toppling from their saddles.

Into the trenches. Some riders leapt their steeds across the line of earthworks, some halted at the lip, and not a few tumbled cartwheeling into them. The second line reined in and fired their matchlocks where they could. Sarius’s banner was waving, but Aras could not make him out in that terrible maelstrom of men and horses and jetting smoke. He had been busy though: the third and fourth ranks of cavalry broke off and wheeled to the flanks before charging home in their turn.

All across the floor of the valley the fighting was savage and hand-to-hand. The Almarkans were no match for the peerless heavy cavalry of Torunna, but what they lacked in training and morale they made up for in numbers. Sarius was outmatched nine to one, and the gallowglasses were forging along that last quarter-mile relentlessly. Once they joined battle the cavalry would be swamped.

Men in blue livery running in one and twos, then by squads and companies out of the killing floor of the trenches. The Almarkans were beginning to break. Too late.

The gallowglasses joined the line, swinging their great swords or two-handed axes. Aras saw a destrier’s head cut clean from its neck by a swing from one of the huge blades. Sarius’s banner was still waving, pulling out of the scrum. Riderless horses were screaming and galloping everywhere. Faint and far-off in the huge tumult of battle there sounded the silver notes of a bugle. Sarius was sounding the retreat.

The cavalry broke off, firing their second matchlock over the rumps of their steeds as they went. There was little attempt to dress the ranks; the gallowglasses pressed them too closely for that. A formless mob of mounted men streamed away from the mounded dead of the earthworks and began a retreat up the slope to the redan where two hundred arquebusiers of the garrison were waiting to cover their return. Sarius’s banner, scarlet and gold, was nowhere to be seen.

The cavalry thundered up the incline, many two to a horse. Other unhorsed troopers hung on to tails or stirrups and were dragged along. The great guns of Gaderion began to thunder out again, the gunners maddened by the slaughter of their comrades in the cavalry. The Himerian earthworks became a shot-torn hell of flying earth and bodies. The gallowglasses and Almarkans broke off the pursuit and cowered in their trenches as the sky turned black above them and the very earth screamed below their feet. But the rage of the Torunnans was impotent. The Almarkans had held on just long enough for the trenches to be reinforced in strength, and the enemy would now be impossible to dislodge. Perhaps fifteen thousand men were now dug in within a half-mile of Gaderion’s walls.