Exile

XIX

‘They’re here!’ someone cried.

Wren looked up. Everyone did. Yulan had set his few hundred levymen in a line, laying a thicket of spears and shields along the edge of the sodden, marshy ground. Behind them, the far fewer of the Free waited. Wren was standing beside the wagon that carried Ena Marr. Kerig was in there, cross-legged on the wagon’s bed close by his fellow Clever. Hamdan and his twenty or so archers sat on horseback. Yulan and a dozen or more swordsmen were sitting together on a hummock, quiet and calm. There were axemen and slingers scattered about. Wren would have called it a fearsome, mighty warband had she not known what was coming towards them.

It was some of the Huluk Kur outriders who had appeared. They crested the low hill on the far side of the mire, dark shapes against the white of the clouds. Five, then ten, then thirty. All along the shieldwall there was a shifting and a clattering as men set their spears and shuffled their feet in search of the firmest footing. Yulan stood up and walked steadily forward.

‘They do not reach the Hervent,’ he cried out. ‘Know that and remember it. The Free stand with you, and the Huluk Kur do not reach the Hervent.’

The horsemen on the horizon began to descend, spreading out as they came. A hundred or more of them now. Wren did not understand their intent. They were surely still too few to challenge Yulan’s defence. But then it might be that the Huluk Kur did not think of such things quite as others would.

As the riders began to pick their way through the bog, Wren could hear the splash of hoofs in water, the sucking gulps of mud. They were brandishing spears and clubs and bows above their heads. They bared their teeth and howled and spat as they came closer.

‘Folk like these always enjoy making a noise,’ she heard Kerig mutter.

Some of the horsemen held aloft objects Wren could not quite make out. Sacks or bags perhaps. They whirled them about their heads. Their stout little horses jumped forwards beneath jabbing heels and came cantering through showers of spray straight towards the line of spears.

‘Stand fast,’ Yulan was shouting.

Wren found herself tensing in anticipation of the terrible sounds and sights that would come when those riders crashed madly against the shieldwall. But they did not come. Not yet. The Huluk Kur drew their horses up and wheeled them about, churning the soft ground. They barked out guttural yells. The men carrying those strange objects spun them and hurled them in high looping arcs.

Wren realised what they were while they were still in flight. Heads. Twenty, thirty of them came tumbling down, thudding to the ground. Some fell short, some long. A few fell among the men of the line. Shields were raised and the severed heads smacked against them and rolled away.

More and more horsemen were flowing over the hill, picking their way through the marsh to join the mass of their fellows that seethed before the wall of spears and shields. Taunts and abuse flew. Then, without any warning sign that Wren could see, riders were streaming away to one side. Dozens of them rushed across the front of the defenders, seeking to turn the end of the line.

‘Retreat the right flank!’ Yulan cried.

The spearmen there hurried to put an angle in their wall.

‘Hamdan!’ Yulan shouted without looking round, and almost before the sound of his voice had faded there were arrows in the air. A tight little flock of them vaulted out and fell chattering into the knot of Huluk Kur horsemen out on the right just as they began to charge in. Men fell. Horses pitched over in the mud. More arrows came, faster than Wren would have thought possible, and the charge became a chaos of tumbling, stumbling, lurching bodies. It reached the shieldline, even so.

A wild melee engulfed the spearmen. The end of their wall buckled and broke and there were Huluk Kur among them, hacking downwards with clubs and axes. Hamdan’s archers kept flicking arrows into the tumult, somehow picking out targets from all the confusion. Still, it seemed the end could be neither long nor kind in coming. Wren blew out a long breath as she felt the Autumnal rising, felt it answering a call she had not even been aware of giving.

Then Yulan and the swordsmen of the Free were rushing in. They plunged into the madness and cut through it. Wren had not known such measured violence was possible in the midst of battle. They pulled down horses and unseated riders. They turned aside every blow that came at them and danced where others were staggering and flailing. They killed as if killing were a craft refined over a lifetime of labour. They turned back the Huluk Kur, and not one of them fell in doing it.

Wren let the entelech slip away, trembling at the release of so much tension.

‘That was the easy part,’ she heard Kerig saying.

She glanced at him and then followed the line of his gaze. The Huluk Kur host was arriving. Their multitudes were colouring the high ground grey and black.