The Tale of Krispos (97 page)

“Shall we send one of our champions against him?” Mammianos asked.

“Why risk a champion?” Krispos said. “Enough arrows will take care of him. Give the archers word to shoot at him till he goes down.”

“That’s not sporting,” Mammianos said with a laugh, “but it’s the right way to go about war. Let’s just see how long Svenkel the hero lasts.”

But along with being a warrior bold even by Haloga standards, Svenkel the hero was far from a fool. When three or four arrows in quick succession pincushioned his shield and another glanced off his helm, he knew he was a marked man. Instead of drawing back among his comrades, as most might have done, he led a wedge of northerners into the center of the imperial line against his countrymen who warded Krispos. They were axemen like himself; when they tried to slay him, he could strike back.

The imperial guards had seen hard fighting in all the clashes since the campaign began south of Imbros. The Halogai who were hale still fought as fiercely as ever, but their ranks had been thinned. Svenkel’s wedge punched deep. If it broke through, it would cut the imperial army in half.

Krispos drew his saber. He looked at Mammianos. The fat general also had his sword out. He shrugged. “Ah, well, Your Majesty, sometimes we have to be sporting, whether we want to or not.”

“So we do.” Krispos raised his voice and cried, “Videssos!” He spurred Progress toward the sagging line of guardsmen. Mammianos rode with him. So did the couriers who had congregated around them.

By then, only a handful of Halogai in imperial service stood in Svenkel’s way. He must have seen victory just ahead. His mouth flew open in a great snarl when horsemen rode up to aid the guards. Then he realized who led the makeshift band. In Videssian, he shouted to Krispos: “Leader to leader, then!”

It didn’t quite work that way; war was too chaotic a business to conform to anyone’s expectations, even a hero’s. Krispos got into the battle a few feet to Svenkel’s right, against a Haloga almost as big as the northern chieftain. The fellow swung up his axe to chop at Progress. Before he could, Krispos slashed at his face. He missed, but made the Haloga shift his weight backward so his own stroke fell short. Krispos slashed again. This time he felt his blade bite. The Haloga howled and reeled away, clutching a forearm gashed to the bone.

Seeing Krispos in the fight made his surviving guardsmen redouble their efforts. Svenkel’s men still battled for all they were worth, but could push forward no farther. The guards threw themselves at Svenkel, one after another. One after another he beat them back. His strokes never faltered; he might have been a siege engine himself, powered by twisted cords rather than flesh and sinew.

As the guardsmen sought to cut down Svenkel, so his warriors went for Krispos. Krispos fought desperately, trying for nothing more than staying alive. He knew he was no great master of the soldier’s art and was very glad when Geirrod came up to stand by Progress’ right flank and help him beat back the foe.

Step by step, some of Svenkel’s men began to give ground. Others, stubborn with the peculiar Haloga stubbornness, preferred dying where they stood to falling back. Die they did, one after another, along with the imperial guardsmen and Videssian troopers they slew before they went down.

There at the forefront of the fighting, what scholarly chroniclers would later call a line hardly deserved such a dignified name. It was more like knots of grunting, cursing, sweating, bleeding men all entangled with one another. Krispos struck and struck and struck—and knew most of his strokes were useless, either because they clove only air or because they rebounded from mail. He did not much mind; no one in that crush could have hoped to do better.

Then he saw a Haloga close by swing up an axe to chop at one of the guardsmen. He lashed out with his saber. It cut deep into the northerner’s wrist. The axe flew from his hand. The Haloga bellowed in pain and whirled around.

Krispos was startled to see it was Svenkel. Svenkel looked startled, too, but was neither too startled nor too badly hurt to raise his shield before Krispos could cut at him again. But that did not save him for long. Geirrod’s axe bit into the shield, once, twice…on the third blow, the round slab of wood split in two. Geirrod struck once more. Blood sprayed. Svenkel’s armor clattered as he fell.

The imperials raised a great cheer. The Halogai still fought ferociously, but something at last went out of them with their chieftain’s death. Now the fighters in the wedge that had been his drew back more quickly. As they did so, Geirrod turned to Krispos and said, “Out of the line for you now, Majesty. You did what was needful; we’ll go on from here.”

Krispos was not sorry to obey. He’d never been an eager warrior. He’d also learned that the Emperor, like any other high-ranking officer, usually was more useful directing the fighting than caught in the thick of it.

He looked round for Mammianos and was relieved to see the general had also got out of the press. But Mammianos had not come through unscathed; he bared his teeth in a grimace of pain as he awkwardly tried to tie a strip of cloth around his right forearm. The cloth was soaked with red.

“Here, let me help you,” Krispos said, sheathing his saber. “I have two free hands.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty. Aye, get it good and tight. There, that should do it.” The fat general shook his head. “I’m lucky it’s not a bloody stump, I suppose. Been too long since I last tried trading handstrokes.”

“What was it you said? Sometimes we have to be sporting? But trooper’s not your proper trade anymore.”

“Too right it isn’t. And a good thing, else I’d long since be dead.” Mammianos grimaced. “As is, this arm’s the only thing that’s killing me.”

Shouts rang out, far off at the end of the imperial army’s left wing. Krispos and Mammianos both stared in that direction. For the moment, that was all they could do—their couriers were still battling to drive back Svenkel’s men. Some of the shouts were full of excitement, others of dismay. From several hundred yards off, Krispos could not tell which came from the Halogai, which from the imperials.

He kept his neck craned leftward, fearing above all else to see the Videssians driven back in rout. He saw no soldiers fleeing on horseback, which he took as a good sign. All the same, he fidgeted atop Progress for the next several minutes, until at last a rider came galloping his way from the left.

The horseman’s grin told him most of what he needed to know before the fellow began to speak. “Majesty, we’ve flanked them! Sarkis got his scouts round their right and now we’re rolling ’em up.”

“The good god be praised,” Krispos said. “That’s what I most wanted to hear. Go back there and tell all the officers on that wing to pour as many men after Sarkis as they can spare without thinning their line too much.”

“Majesty, they’re already doing it,” the messenger said.

“They’re good soldiers, most of them,” Mammianos put in. The rider’s news banished pain from his face. “A good soldier doesn’t wait for orders when he sees a chance like that. He just ups and grabs it.”

“It’s all right with me,” Krispos said. His grin stretched wider than the one the messenger was wearing. “In fact, it’s better than all right.”

Faster even than he’d dared hope, the Haloga right came to pieces. The northerners faced a cruel dilemma. If they turned at bay and formed an embattled circle, nothing would keep the Videssians from simply riding into Pliskavos. But if they fell back toward the gates, they risked fresh breakthroughs as the imperials probed flimsy, makeshift lines.

Some turned at bay, some fell back. The Videssians did break through, repeatedly, forcing more and more Halogai to make the unpalatable choice. Sarkis could easily have seized Pliskavos. Instead, with even deadlier instinct, he urged his men—and the other imperials in their wake—all around the rear of the Haloga army. Krispos traced their progress by the panic-filled yells that rose first from the northerners’ shattered right, then the center, and then their left—the imperial right. A few minutes later, the imperials on the right yelled, too, in triumph.

“By the lord with the great and good mind, they’re in the sack,” Mammianos said. “Now we slaughter them.” He did not sound as if he took any great joy in the prospect, merely as if it was a job that needed doing. The imperial headsman plied his trade in that matter-of-fact, deadly fashion.

The Videssian army went about its business the same way, methodically using bows, lances, and sabers against the northerners. As Mammianos had said, it was a slaughter. Then all the Halogai suddenly turned round and rushed against the Videssians who stood between them and Pliskavos. That part of the imperial line remained thinner than the rest. Shouting wildly, the northerners hacked their way through.

“After them!” Krispos yelled. Quite without orders, the musicians played
Charge.
They were soldiers, too, and out to grab the chance.

The Videssians surged forward in pursuit of their fleeing foes. Here and there a Haloga stood and fought. Those who did were beset by several men at once and quickly fell. Many more were cut down or speared from behind. And more than one, rather than dying at the imperials’ hands or doffing his helm in token of surrender, plunged a sword into his own belly or a knife between his ribs. The way the northerners so deliberately killed themselves chilled Krispos.

“Why do they do that?” he asked Geirrod.

“We Halogai, we think that if a man be slain by an enemy, he serves him in the world to come,” the guardsman answered. “Some of us, we would liefer live free after we die, if you take my meaning, Majesty.”

“I suppose I do.” Krispos sketched the sun-sign over his heart. He wished the Halogai could be persuaded to follow Phos. Every so often zealous priests went to preach the good god’s doctrines in Halogaland. If they were fearless men, the northerners generally let them live. But they won few converts; the Halogai stubbornly clung to their false gods.

Such reflections ran through his mind and then were gone, lost in the chase. Now he wished Sarkis had sent men to secure Pliskavos’ gates. A few Videssians made for them, but the rush of Halogai overwhelmed the riders. The big blond men streamed into the town. More turned at bay, to give their comrades the chance to save themselves.

Krispos swore. “If we had ladders ready, we could storm the place. It would fall at the first rush.”

“Aye, likely so, Your Majesty,” Mammianos said, “but ladders aren’t of much use in a pitched battle, which is what we were set to fight. This isn’t one of those minstrels’ romances, where the bold hero always thinks of everything ahead of time. If it were, I wouldn’t have this.” He held up his bandaged arm.

The imperials charged again and again at the Haloga rear guards. Then some of the northerners gained the walls of Pliskavos and began shooting at their foes and pelting them with stones. Under the cover of that barrage, most of the Halogai managed to withdraw into the city. Portcullises slammed down in the Videssians’ faces.

Only when the fighting finally died away did Krispos notice how far toward the east his shadow stretched. The sun was nearly set. He looked over the battlefield and shook his head in wonder. Softly he said, “How many Halogai are down!”

“That’s the way of it when one side breaks,” Mammianos said. “Remember, Agapetos and Mavros paid in this coin for us.”

“I remember,” Krispos said. “Oh, yes, I remember.”

The Videssians ranged over the field. They dragged and carried their wounded countrymen back to their healer-priests. Most of the Halogai not yet dead got shorter shrift. Some—those who had been seen to fight with special bravery and those who looked rich enough to be worth ransoming—were spared.

Horse leeches went here and there, doing what they could for injured animals. Other soldiers went here and there, too, plundering the dead. Piles of Haloga shields, too big and bulky to be of use to horsemen, grew and grew. Krispos saw so many that he ordered a count made, to give him some idea of how many northerners had fallen. He also wondered what his horsemen would do with the war axes and heavy swords they were happily taking away.

“Some will be inlaid with gold, and so worth something,” Geirrod said when he spoke that thought aloud. “As for the others, well, Majesty, even you southrons deem it worth recalling that you overcame brave men.” Krispos had to nod.

Burial parties began their work—a pit that would make a mass grave for the fallen Halogai, individual resting places for the far smaller number of Videssians who had died. Krispos told the soldiers to dig a special grave for Tanilis, apart from all the others. “Set a wooden marker over it for now,” he said. “When this land is ours and peaceful once more, the finest marble will be none too good for her.”

The men counting northern shields came to him with their total: over twelve thousand. He knew fewer Halogai than that had died; some would have discarded their shields to flee the faster. It was still a great total, especially when set against imperial losses, which were under two thousand.

That evening, as the army rested in camp, Krispos went to see some of the Haloga prisoners. Archers stood guard over them as they dejectedly sat around in their linen drawers and undertunics—their armor was already booty. They stirred with interest as he approached. Some of them glowered at their countrymen who guarded him.

He ignored that, announcing “I need a man who understands Videssian to listen to my words and take them to your comrades in Pliskavos. Who will do this for me?” Several northerners raised their hands. He chose a solid-looking fellow with gray mixed in his golden hair and beard. He asked the man, “What is your name?”

“I am Soribulf, Videssian emperor,” the Haloga said, politely but without the elaborate respect imperials used.

“Well, Soribulf, tell this to your chiefs in Pliskavos: if they yield the city and set free any Videssian prisoners they are holding, I will let them cross to the north shore of the Astris without ordering my fleet to burn their boats.”

“We are the Halogai,” Soribulf said, drawing himself up proudly. “We do not yield.”