Fall of a Kingdom (The Farsala Trilogy) (25 page)

The banner! He had to raise the banner so the others would know that the commander lived, that they had to fight on. The command—was his father all right?

Jiaan dragged himself to his knees, gripping his left arm with his right hand, groaning behind locked teeth as broken bones grated. His helmet had fallen off.

The commander was fighting on foot, several yards away. He parried a Hrum’s sword and launched a counterblow with a skill and strength Rostam himself might have envied. Rakesh stood behind him, blood streaming from a deep gash in his shoulder, one hoof lifted completely off the ground—not good, but at least he lived, unlike many other chargers who lay dead or dying on the broken lances.

The lances were down, now that they’d served their purpose. The Farsalan deghans, afoot, were fighting the finest infantry in the known world.

So let’s get our own infantry into it!

Jiaan let go of his left arm, gasping as his shoulder moved, and groped for the staff. It was his collarbone that had broken, he realized. Like a boy falling out of a pear tree. Who’d have thought it would hurt so much?

He found the staff, half buried in the churned-up earth left by the chargers’ hooves. It was a struggle to raise the heavy banner one-handed, but he managed. Then he used the staff as a cane to pull himself to his feet.

“To us!” he shouted. “To us!” His voice could no more penetrate the clamor of battle than a sparrow’s chirp. All up and down the line men shouted in rage or pain. Metal rang on metal or thudded on the wood of the Hrum’s shields. But Jiaan had done some good.

The Farsalan foot soldiers, as always, had fallen behind the horses. They could keep up at a trot, but not with the heat of the charge. They were running toward the battle, but when they saw the simarj banner rise, a cheer broke from them and they doubled their pace. Half a dozen men dashed past Jiaan and launched themselves at the Hrum line beside his father. Jiaan wouldn’t have believed the battle could become louder, but it did.

Why was he standing here, holding a stupid stick?

The need to move, fight, strike back, fizzed in Jiaan’s blood, but he couldn’t abandon the banner! It was his responsibility—a responsibility he had to honor, to prove himself worthy…

The Hrum soldier in front of the commander fell, but two others stepped forward to take his place. The commander staggered back, slipping on the wet, torn grass. He recovered himself before Jiaan even had time to gasp, but he could have been wounded. Killed. It might have happened. It still might.
Djinn take the honor!
Jiaan was going to fight!

But he couldn’t abandon the banner.

His dilemma was solved when a Farsalan soldier stumbled away from the line, blood streaming from a cut on his forehead. Jiaan walked to where he knelt, trying to wipe the blood from his eyes. Walking hurt his shoulder, but Jiaan didn’t care.

“Here. Hold this.” He pushed the staff into the man’s hands. Did the soldier even know what he held? It hardly mattered, as far as Jiaan was concerned. His place was at his father’s side.

It took long moments searching through the jumbled ground to find a sword. Jiaan wondered what had happened to its owner.

When he turned back to the battle, his father was winning. The Hrum line in front of him was beginning to fall back—not much, just a few inches at a time, but the commander was pushing forward.

The sword’s smooth grip wasn’t as familiar to Jiaan as his bow, but his father had taught him to fight with all kinds of weapons. With a broken collarbone, Jiaan couldn’t have shot his bow anyway; with a sword, he could fight…if he could find a place to get in.

Jiaan stared in bafflement at the tight row of jostling backs. There was no space for him. Did real deghans ever have this problem?

Then a soldier cried out and fell back, clutching a bloody gash on his knee.

Jiaan yelled and threw himself into the man’s place, cutting high, trying for the exposed flesh where the Hrum’s neck met his shoulder.

The Hrum’s sword swept up. The shock of the parry jarred the bones of Jiaan’s arm, and sparked a fresh wave of pain from his collarbone, forcing him to blink back sudden tears.

The Hrum Jiaan faced was far older than he was, perhaps in his early forties, with a long, weathered face. His light brown eyes held nothing but professional attentiveness. If he was afraid, his expression didn’t show it.

Jiaan hadn’t realized he would see his opponent’s face so clearly.

He tried again, this time a low strike at the man’s exposed knee. The Hrum dropped his shield a few inches and blocked the blow. Jiaan remembered his training and let the rebound carry his sword up, sliding the Hrum’s thrust away from his ribs.

They were coming back now, the lessons his father had taken so much time and trouble to impart. Jiaan slid his blade around the Hrum’s with a screech of steel on steel and tried for the neck again, faster and harder than before. This time the Hrum’s parry didn’t jar his arm, though the two swords met with a ringing crash.

Jiaan stared at the handspan of blade that was all that was left of his sword, shattered on the Hrum’s blade like cheap bronze.

Their swords were stronger.

The Hrum laughed, genuine amusement in his voice, but there was a hard note beneath it. He raised his blade for a killing thrust. Jiaan barely managed to catch it on his hilt and shunt it aside.

But having blocked the blade, he had no way to protect himself from the man’s shield as it rose and smashed into his face.

JIAAN NEVER LOST CONSCIOUSNESS, not entirely. His eyes were closed, his body limp on the trampled ground, but he could still hear the chaotic din of the battle. He heard the Hrum’s signal drum begin to beat a different cadence, though he couldn’t speculate on what that might mean. He was aware of feet stepping on him, of pain when his shoulder was kicked, but he couldn’t move to save himself.

When his thoughts were clear enough to consider anything at all, he worked on movement, and eventually, on the fourth or fifth or sixth try, he opened his eyes. Light seared his brain, but before his eyes snapped shut, he saw that no one was fighting where he lay. No one had stepped on him for some time. But he could still hear the battle, not too far off.

His head ached even worse than his shoulder, and he couldn’t open his eyes again. He had to do something, though he wasn’t certain what. He had to clear his head. To think.

The stream. It wasn’t too far back. Just the thought of cold water was enough to get his limbs in motion. Squinting painfully whenever he had to open his eyes, Jiaan dragged himself back, just a few inches at first, then a few feet. He stopped often, to rest his swimming head on the cool dirt, but finally his groping hand plunged over a lip of earth and down onto damp gravel. The streambed. Jiaan thrust himself forward with his knees and his one working elbow and slithered down the small bank and into the stream.

He laid the sore side of his face in the cold, shallow water. For a moment the pain that throbbed in his temples wiped out thought, but then it began to ease. He lifted his head and drank, then laid his face in the water again, and the pounding headache slowly diminished.

He could still hear the battle, but it wasn’t nearby. So where was it? Jiaan dragged himself to his knees and looked around.

The sun was high, which amazed him—surely at least a day had passed.

The Farsalans had been forced back, past the stream, almost to the point where they’d begun the charge. The field between Jiaan and the battle, several hundred yards away, was strewn with fallen weapons and armor, fallen horses, fallen men. Very few of them were Hrum. Jiaan shuddered.

The Farsalans were losing. Not surprising, since their charge had been broken. But the simarj banner swayed in the midst of the thickest fighting, so Jiaan knew his father still lived. What djinn had possessed Jiaan to abandon it and take up a sword? No, not a djinn. Battle fever. Just like a deghan. How absurd.

What could he do to help his father now? The commander had to get out of there, to retreat and gather the remains of his army. But with the Hrum pressing them…Horses. Many of the horses had probably survived, the archers’ mounts at least. Jiaan had to find the archers and tell them to bring in all the horses so the deghans could escape. But how to find them?

Thinking made Jiaan’s head ache again, and he lowered himself to the stream, splashing cold water on his face. Then he lay so that the water ran over his broken collarbone and swollen shoulder. As good as a cold compress, once the padded silk of his armor became soaked.

If he left the hollow of the stream, he’d never make it. Besides, the banks would give him cover from wounded Hrum returning to their own camp or from anyone searching for Farsalan survivors on the field. There were some hills to the south, where the archers might have sought refuge. Upstream.

The water helped. Jiaan took off his belt and strapped his useless left arm to his body. He crawled past two broken swords in the streambed, broken just as his had been. Their owners’ blood flowed in faint pink wisps over Jiaan’s hand, but he didn’t have the strength to leave the water to avoid it. The banks grew higher as they approached the hills, but it seemed an eternity before the stream twisted behind the first low rise.

Gritting his teeth, Jiaan dragged himself to his feet and started climbing the shallow slope. Ordinarily, he could have reached the top in a handful of strides, but he was crawling again by the time he reached the crest and looked over it, down on the battlefield, now some distance away.

The Hrum were winning. Jiaan couldn’t tell if the tide of combat had turned more swiftly as he crawled up the creek or if the change in viewpoint made the difference, but the Farsalan line, which had commanded the length of the field this morning, had been compressed into a single knot of men. All but a few wore the ringed armor of deghans; perhaps it was their armor that had let them survive so long.

The Hrum surrounded them, fighting on all sides, and the deghans were so outnumbered that for every Hrum who fought, half a dozen stood resting, awaiting their turn.

Horses!
With horses, someone could break through to the embattled deghans, to the tall commander beneath the simarj banner, whose sword still rose and fell like a scythe. But Jiaan knew he couldn’t find them in time.

Even as he realized this, the clarioneer sounded the long, low note of surrender. The clamor of sword against sword began to die as the surviving Farsalans stepped back, dropping their weapons.

But Commander Merahb did not.

Jiaan was too far away to make out the words he shouted, but then the commander took two long strides into the center of the ground the deghans had held so desperately and lowered the tip of his sword to draw a circle in the earth at his feet.

Jiaan’s breath caught. No commander since the time of legends had declared himself his army’s champion, staking victory or defeat on his own life or death. For combat of champions was always to the death.

His father had been fighting all morning—he had to be exhausted. But the Hrum commander had probably been fighting too—either that, or he was one of those who directed his men from some point of safety, behind the lines. He might not even have lifted a sword in years. And the Commander, standing alone, with Azura’s sun waking sparks on the rings of his armor, was the same towering, invincible figure he had been in Jiaan’s childhood. Jiaan’s mind told him that any man could lose, could die, but his heart knew that the commander couldn’t be defeated.

The Hrum debated for what seemed a very long time, though Jiaan’s shadow didn’t move over the grass. They were arguing. Did they know the significance of the circle? They fought in units. Did they even have a champion to send forth?

Jiaan was soon answered, for the five men who finally stepped forward held bows, not swords, and they fired from a distance.

The commander saw them coming, saw them nock their arrows and pull. He didn’t move from the circle, didn’t even turn aside as the arrows struck his chest, hurtling him to the ground. If he made a sound, Jiaan didn’t hear it. It was Jiaan who screamed, but the sound was lost in the roar of anger from the remaining deghans, who dived for their abandoned weapons and hurled themselves at the Hrum.

But Jiaan’s attention was on his father, struggling to stand. The arrow shafts protruded, obscenely, from his chest. Circles of red stained the silk around them. He rose to his knees, almost to his feet again. Then the second flight of arrows came, knocking him to the earth once more. This time he didn’t rise.

Jiaan’s vision blurred, and he let his head drop. He listened to the end of the battle, to the deghans’ screams as the last of those still willing to fight died on the Hrum’s superior swords.

Even if his father had fought, the sword in his hand had been Farsalan made. It would have shattered, like so many swords had shattered. Like the charge had shattered. He had never had a chance; he must have known it. And he had been Farsala’s only chance.

Now it was over, for all of them.