Quest for Honour (92 page)

With an oath he stumbled toward the rear. A horse kicked its heels, its halter tangled around its dead rider. The man’s body kept the frightened animal from bolting. A vicious cut with his knife freed the rope, and Razrek jerked the halter so hard that the stunned animal ceased its frantic efforts to get away. Still, it took all his strength to pull himself onto the animal.

“Razrek! Razrek! We can’t get through!” Mattaki pulled up beside him. “Those slingers are blocking the way . . .”

“I can see, you fool! Forget Shulgi, and forget these slingers. Get our men to the rear of the Akkadian infantry. We can ride them down. They’ve no one behind them.”

“I’ll rally the men . . .”

Two stones arrived at the same time. One hit Mattaki’s horse in the chest, and the other glanced off Razrek’s forehead.

For a few moments, Mattaki fought to regain control of his bucking mount. When he finally got the animal under control, he turned toward Razrek, and saw his leader motionless, flat on his back with his forehead a mass of blood, either dead or dying. More stones hissed through the air. The accursed Akkadian slingers still had a plentiful supply of missiles.

Mattaki thought of all the gold he’d buried deep in the earth near the edge of the desert, and decided he had had enough fighting for the day. Razrek was dead and, win or lose today, Shulgi wasn’t going to be too happy with the commanders of his cavalry. Mattaki wheeled his horse around and galloped at full speed away from the battle. A few other horsemen had already reached the same conclusion. By twos and threes, then by twenty and thirty, many of the Sumerian cavalry followed, riding away from the battlefield.

G
atus heard the wild roar that signaled Eskkar’s charge. The enemy spearmen had pushed forty or fifty paces past their line of stakes, their bowmen moving up behind them. The first Sumerian arrows began to strike the Akkadian shield wall, and he knew that soon every Sumerian bowman would have the entire Akkadian force within range. But that didn’t matter any longer. The line of deadly stakes had vanished, overrun by the advancing enemy. The time had come. The anvil had to move forward.

“Spearmen. Ready to advance!” One brief moment to make sure the command reached up and down the line. “Advance! Fast march! Advance! Attack!”

Up and down the line, leaders of ten and twenty repeated the commands. The line moved forward. No slow step this time. The Akkadian infantry took full strides, moving as quickly as the ground permitted, determined to close with their enemy and get past the arrows beginning to rain down on them. Ignoring the noise and cries of battle all around them, they quick marched in silence, shields raised, spears still carried low in the right hand.

The two soldiers responsible for guarding Gatus pulled him from his horse. One handed him a sturdy shield. As the only mounted man, he
would have drawn every Sumerian arrow, and Eskkar himself had warned them about that possibility. One guard smacked the mare on the rump, sending it away from the coming battle.

Gatus had no time to do more than swear at his guards. He rushed forward, slipping his arm through the shield’s leather grip and hitching it into position. His two guards stayed in front, using their shields to protect his sides from any stray arrow. Behind him, he heard Mitrac ordering the bowmen forward as well. If the archers were going to face a Sumerian arrow storm, they’d be safer as close behind the spearmen as they could get.

Arrows now flew in both directions, and the Sumerian arrows started to take their toll. Men dropped out of the advancing line, killed or wounded, but the line kept its cohesion and those in the rear ranks moved forward to fill the spaces of those who’d fallen.

Gatus stretched his body upward, jumping every few steps so that he could see the men’s progress and gauge the remaining distance to the enemy spearmen. A dozen more paces. The approaching enemy had closed to within a hundred and fifty paces. Close enough, he decided.

“Spearmen! Ready to charge!”

Those words rippled up and down the line, the men growling impatiently. Voices called out from the ranks, to add their own encouragement to their leaders orders, as they waited for the final command that would release them to the attack. But they never stopped moving forward.

Gatus’s bellow rolled out over the battlefield. “Spearmen! Charge! Charge! Charge!” The two Akkadian drummers, silent up to this moment, now pounded the attack drumbeat.

With a roar that drew every head on the battlefield, the Akkadian spearmen broke into a run. The spears were lifted to the attack position, raised just over the shield, which they held at eye level. With their bronze helmets, only Akkadian eyes and spear points were visible to the enemy.

Everyone shouted as loud as they could. The line surged forward. They’d been silent throughout the battle so far, and now they intended to make up for it. War cries filled the air as the line rushed forward. Some parts moved a bit quicker than others, but the three-man-deep attack line remained in good order, holding its cohesion. For long months the men had trained to charge together, spears raised, shouting as loud as they could. Now all that training would be put to the real test.

The Sumerian line, which had moved at a regular marching pace,
heard the savage drumbeats and saw the enemy approaching at a run, screaming war cries as their spears moved up and down with each stride. The Sumerian line slowed slightly. They had expected the two lines to close together at the fast marching pace. No one expected a wild charge by the smaller force, still only three ranks deep.

Most of the others didn’t notice the slight slowing, the doubt creeping into the Sumerian forward line. Gatus, however, had been searching for it. By now he could see wide-eyed Sumerian faces showing the first hint of fear. The Sumerian army might win the battle, but those spearmen in the front line knew who was going to take the full brunt of the collision.

“Attack! Charge! Kill them all! Akkad! Akkad! Attack!”

Gatus’s words, bellowed with every breath within him, swept over the ranks. The frenzied spearmen repeated the war cries. They all screamed like demons possessed. Then the gap between the forces disappeared.

The Akkadian spearmen crashed into the still advancing Sumerian line. At the moment of contact, spears were driven forward with every bit of strength the men could summon. Sounds of splintering wood crackled over the deeper crash as shield wall met shield wall, both overshadowing the sudden cries of the wounded and dying. The noise drowned out every other part of the battle, as the shields smashed together up and down the line.

In the front rank, bronze spear points tore right through Sumerian shields, to impale the shrieking body behind it. The Akkadian second rank pushed their shields into the backs of the men in front of them, leaned forward, and drove their spears into the faces of the enemy, jabbing again and again at any thing that moved, any flesh that showed itself.

The Sumerian front line went down by the dozens. Despite having twice as many men in the ranks, and overlapping the Akkadians to some extent, the Sumerian countercharge slowed, and stopped.

As the Akkadian second and third ranks closed up, the six-deep Sumerian line found themselves, to their own surprise, being pushed back by the smaller force. To the Sumerians, these Akkadians were indeed demons, unafraid to attack a superior force. The Sumerian spearmen – forced to take a step or two backward to regain their momentum – found themselves incapable of moving forward again. Instead they found themselves slipping or stumbling, unable to use their weapons. Some tried to duck behind the shield of another, to gain a moment’s protection from the spears and swords now being thrust at their faces.

The Akkadians kept pushing, pushing, driving the heavier line backwards, their powerful leg muscles thrusting furiously against the earth, as they tried to shove the Sumerian line into the ground. Men tripped and stumbled over dead bodies, and live ones, too, whose howls rose up from the ground as they were trampled on.

The smell of dying men was in the air and blood now soaked the ground. Shields, helmets, faces, all were splashed in hot liquid that spurted from open veins and splattered like rain against men’s faces and shields. Soldiers shouted their battle cries into the faces of their enemy, sometimes only a hand’s width away from their own. Other men screeched in agony as sharp spear points thrust into their bodies.

Many in the Akkadian front rank had lost their spears, either splintering from the collision or hopelessly entangled with the enemy. But despite the press of bodies at their front and rear, each could still manage to draw his short sword. Some men – squeezed in front and back by the pressure of opposing shields – had no room to use a blade. Instead they smashed the pommel of the weapon into their opponents’ faces. Others jabbed the sword’s point into the heads and necks of those pressed against them, or those in the rank behind. They struck again and again, until the man in front of them went down. When that happened, the now ragged line would surge another half-step forward, bringing a new opponent into reach.

Some of the dead had no room to fall, kept upright for a few moments by the sheer press of numbers. Others, their bodies slippery with blood, slid to the ground, many still alive and gasping at the thought of what awaited them. To fall meant never to rise again. Scrambling feet from both sides trampled those underfoot, adding new pain to existing wounds or simply crushing the life from their bodies.

The battle had degenerated into individual combat, with each man pressed against the opposing man’s shield. But the Akkadians had trained hard for just such an encounter. They welcomed the pressure of their companion’s shield in their back, and as Gatus had taught them, they never stopped struggling to move forward. They knew their legs would win the battle for them, as long as they pressed ahead. The days of long and hard training under Gatus’s tutelage kept the shield wall not only intact, but moving forward, a half-step every few moments. The smaller force had not only stopped the advancing Sumerians, but now began to drive them backwards, step by step.

For the Sumerians, to reach the front rank meant death, but still they held their ground, clinging stubbornly to their position. The Sumerian commanders urged their men forward, and determined men hurled themselves against the backs of their ranks. The Akkadian advance slowed, then stopped. The greater weight of numbers on the Sumerian side began to weigh against the tiring Akkadian infantry. The battle line surged and rippled, but the Sumerians, now in a battle frenzy of their own, halted the onrush and began to push their enemy backwards.

K
lexor led his men at the charge, at first following the path of Eskkar and Hathor. Klexor’s orders were to take his men between the other Akkadian commanders. The battle plan required that the king break through the line with his men and seek out Shulgi. Hathor would attack the Sumerian left flank. Klexor’s objective was to guide his three hundred men between Eskkar and Hathor’s forces, and crumple the Sumerian spearmen’s rear, to disrupt the Sumerian infantry from behind. Only by attacking from the front and rear could the Akkadians hope to prevail over the superior numbers of their enemy. Nevertheless, this meant Klexor’s men had the greatest distance to cover before they came to grips with the enemy. To make sure his horsemen followed his lead, Klexor had the steadiest men under his command. All of them knew where to go, and what to do.

Eskkar’s men had vanished into a mob of swirling horses and screaming men. Still, Klexor found the tiniest of gaps, only a few paces wide, between Hathor and Eskkar’s fighters. Klexor raised his sword and guided his horse toward the opening. “Attack! Follow me! Attack!”

He swept past Hathor’s still struggling horsemen. In front of Klexor the enemy spears loomed up. The enemy left flank still extended beyond the line of Gatus’s spearmen, and hadn’t yet engaged in battle. Now they saw Klexor’s thundering horsemen approaching, and tried to turn to their rear to meet this new threat. But that maneuver required some doing. Men had to shift and reform ranks, a task that would take precious moments. If they could raise a wall of spear points between them and Klexor’s men, they would be able to stop the advance.

But before the Sumerians could form up, Klexor’s cavalry began hurling their javelins at the mass of men struggling to regroup. Flung with all a man’s strength, and aided by the speed of the galloping horse, the
deadly missiles rained down on the reforming ranks. Arrows, too, flew into the Sumerians, disrupting their effort to form a solid line. Some men panicked, trying to shift out of the path of the onrushing horsemen that had suddenly appeared in their rear.

Klexor saw the fear in their faces as he swung his sword down with all his might, striking right and left at anything that moved, pushing the horse ahead with all his strength.

“Attack!” he shouted. “Kill them all! Kill them all!”

H
is horse killed beneath him, Fashod broke through his own ring of attackers, and saw Eskkar a dozen paces ahead, swinging his sword and surrounded by enemies. Fashod’s bow was gone, wrenched from his hands, and he’d seen Grond go down, crushed by a mass of surging Tanukhs. Fashod saw Chinua jump his horse over the mounting bodies of the dead, to move to Fashod’s side.

“Eskkar!” Fashod used his sword to point at the Akkadian.

Chinua still had his bow. Gripping his horse hard with his knees, he fit a shaft to the string and shot it, striking a Tanukh horseman trying to ride down the king. Three more shafts followed, launched faster than any Fashod had ever seen, and the rush that threatened to overwhelm Eskkar slowed. His quiver empty, Chinua dropped his bow and snatched out his sword.

Behind them, the Ur Nammu war cry sounded, and a half dozen warriors broke through their enemies and swept past Fashod and Chinua. Kicking their horses to the gallop, they charged the Tanukhs, brushing past Eskkar as they hurled themselves into the mass of enemy horsemen. Behind them rode another shouting handful of Akkadians desperate to reach the king’s side. If Eskkar went down, the battle could still be lost.