'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.
Aras ran down the great stairs to the curtain wall, and became enmeshed in the fog of battle smoke. Grimy, soot-stained men were still working the guns maniacally and the air in the casemates seemed to scorch his lungs. Finally he made it out to the courtyard in the centre of the redoubt where the cavalry were still streaming in through the tall double gates.
'Where is Sarius?' he demanded of a bloody-browed officer, only to be met with a mad vacancy. The man's mind was still fighting out in the trenches.
'Where is Sarius?' he asked another, but was met with blankness again. At last he caught sight of Sarius's banner-bearer being carried away and halted the litter-bearers.
'Where is your colonel?'
The man opened his eyes. He had lost his arm at the elbow and the stump spat and dribbled blood like a tap. 'Dead on the field,' he croaked.
Aras let the litter-bearers carry him away. The courtyard was a milling crowd of bloody men and lacerated horses. Beyond them, he heard even over the roar of the artillery the gates of Gaderion boom shut as the last of the rearguard came in. He wiped his face, and began to make his way back up to the fuming storm of the battlements.
Cartigella, like many of the Ramusian capitals, had started life as a port. The chief city of the tribal King Astar, it had fallen to the newly combined Fimbrian tribes over eight hundred years before, and Astarac, as the region about it became known, had become the first conquest of what would one day be the
Fimbrian Empire. The city rebelled against its northern conquerors within a hundred and fifty years of its fall, but was besieged and crushed by the great Elector Cariabus Narb, who had also founded Charibon. Those rebels who survived the sack scattered southwards for the most part, into the jungles of Macassar, and their descendants became the Corsairs. Some, however, kept together and under a sea captain named Gabor they sailed through the Malacar Islands, seeking some place they might live in peace, untroubled by fear of Fimbrian reprisals. They settled a large island to the south-west of Macassar, and that place became Gabrion.
It would be almost four hundred years before Astarac finally threw off the decaying Fimbrian yoke, and in those centuries the Fimbrians made of ruined Cartigella a great city. But they deliberately refused to fortify it, remembering the agonies of the year-long siege it had taken to reduce the place. So Cartigella's walls were later constructs of the Astaran monarchy - for Astar's bloodline had somehow survived the long years of vassalage - and they were perhaps not so high or formidable as they might have been, had they been constructed by the imperial engineers.
And now Cartigella was besieged again.
The Himerian army had started out from Vol Ephrir at midwinter, and by the time the first meltwaters were beginning to swell the rivers tumbling out of the Malvennors, they were on the borders of East Astarac, the hotly contested duchy which King Forno had wrested from the Perigrainians scarcely sixty years before. So well had they hidden their movements with Dweomer-kindled snowstorms, and so unexpected was this midwinter march, that King Mark had left with the fleet for his rendezvous with the rest of the allied navy off Abrusio unaware that his kingdom was about to be invaded.
The Astaran army, left under the command of Mark's son Cristian, was caught completely by surprise. The Himerians advanced deep into East Astarac before they were challenged, and in a confused battle which took place in a blizzard in the Malvennor foothills the Astrans were worsted, and thrown into retreat. Their retreat became a rout as they were harried night and day by Perigrainian cavalry and packs of huge wolves. Most fell back in disorder upon the city of Garmidalan, and there prepared to fight to the last. But the Himerians merely surrounded the city and began casually to starve it into submission.
The main body of the Empire's forces had not joined in the pursuit. Instead, they struck off westwards for the Malvennor passes, which were lightly guarded by an Astaran rearguard. As the first spring meltwaters began to swell the mountain rivers, they marched down from the heights largely unmolested, and carved a bloody swathe across King Mark's kingdom, driving the Astaran troops and their inexperienced Crown Prince before them, until finally they came to a halt before the walls of Cartigella, the capital.
Outnumbered many times over by an army which employed weather-working and legions of beasts, Prince Cristian nonetheless held out some hope. The sea lanes had not yet been closed, and thus Cartigella might yet be saved by reinforcements from her ancient ally Gabrion, or perhaps even the Sea-Merduks. He sent out swift dispatch-runners to every free kingdom of the west, and strengthened his walls, and waited, whilst the Himerians brought up siege artillery and began to bombard the city from the surrounding hills.
On the day of Sultan Aurungzeb's death, the first breach was made in Cartigella's defences, and fighting began to rage in the wall districts of the city. The Astarans, soldiers and civilians alike, fought with savage heroism but were pushed back from the outer fortifications by Inceptine warrior-monks leading companies of werewolves. Thousands died, and Cristian withdrew to the citadel of Cartigella itself. There the Himerian advance was halted, foiled by the impregnable fortress on its high crag which dominated the lower city. From there the Astaran gunners poured a torrent of artillery fire into the ranks of the Himerian beasts that even werewolves could not withstand. The Himerians drew back, and the garrison of the citadel under their young Prince dared to believe that they might hold out.
But the next morning a vast fleet appeared in the bay below, and from the holds of its vessels there issued a foul swarm of flying creatures. These descended upon the citadel like a cloud of locusts, and overwhelmed the defenders. Cristian was slain and his bodyguard died in ranks around him. Cartigella was sacked with a brutality which surpassed even the legendary excesses of the Fimbrians, and the smoke of its burning climbed up in a black pillar which could be seen for many miles in the clear spring air.
Within three days, Astarac had capitulated, and was incorporated into the Second Empire.
Seventeen
' "And now is Hell come to earth,
And in the ashes of its burning will totter
All the schemes of greedy men.
The Beast, in coming, will
Tread the cinders of their dreams."
'Thus spake Honorius the Mad, four and a half centuries ago, and he was never wrong in his predictions - though he was cursed in that they were fated to be dismissed in his lifetime as the ravings of an insane anchorite. My friends, we are tools of history, instruments in the hands of God. What we have done, and what we will do in the time to come is but a fulfilment of His vision for the good of the world. So set your minds at rest. Out of blood and fire and smoke shall dawn a new sunrise, and a second beginning for the scattered peoples of the earth.'