The Proof House (69 page)

 

I hadn’t thought it’d be as bad as this
, Temrai thought, as they hustled him away.
I thought winning might be enough. But just knowing he’s there -

He forced himself to dismiss the image from his mind; Bardas Loredan walking towards him, armed. He wasn’t sure how he’d known who it was - a man in armour, with his bevor up; but he’d known all right. It was all he could do to keep from wetting himself.

‘Where’s Sildocai?’ he asked.

‘With the reserve,’ somebody answered. ‘Iordecai’s bringing up the main attack. Once we commit the reserve, it’ll be the hammer and the anvil.’

Whatever
, Temrai thought. His mind didn’t seem able to hold on to a coherent train of thought; it slipped off, like a chisel point on tool steel. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘What about the lower level? Any word from Gollocai and his people?’

‘Last I heard, it was all under control.’ He couldn’t see who was talking to him, and he couldn’t recognise the voice. ‘The rest of the army’s fallen back on the camp, and there’s absolutely no way this lot are going anywhere. It’s only a matter of time now.’

Temrai shivered. ‘Make it as quick as you can,’ he said. ‘And whatever else you do, make sure you get
him
, understood?’

‘Sure. Alive?’

‘Good gods, no. As dead as possible. I want to know his head’s been cut off before I go anywhere near him.’

Someone laughed, assuming Temrai had meant it as a joke.

‘By the way,’ someone else said. ‘That kid who made the suicide run just now; you know who that was?’ Nobody said anything, and the voice continued, ‘I recognised him; it was Loredan’s nephew. You know, the one who showed up a while back with the wizard.’

‘He wasn’t Loredan’s nephew,’ someone else pointed out. ‘I don’t think they were related at all, actually.’

‘Theudas Morosin,’ Temrai said.

‘That’s him. Anyway, that was him.’

‘Fine,’ Temrai said. ‘Now get me out of here.’

 

The line of spearpoints crowded in close, probing and groping for the joints and gaps in the Imperials’ armour - the inside of the elbow joint, the gap between breastplate and gorget, gorget and helmet, the inside of the thigh, the armpit. For their part, the halberdiers were fighting hard (the anvil proves the hammer), crushing helmets and smashing bones and blood vessels under the proof skin of mail. But the line had momentum, impetus; and as they advanced over the dead and fallen, like the sea washing round rocks on the sea-shore, the axemen and hammermen cracked open helmets and armour like thrushes knocking open snails, or a man at a good dinner-party prising open oysters. If Anax had been alive to hear them he could have told the story of the battle from the sounds alone; the clear ringing of the blade on sound armour, the duller clack on compromised armour, the wet crunch when there was no armour left. The battle was mostly in the dark now; Bardas’ men fought with their backs to the camp-fires, masking the light. There wasn’t much need to see when the enemy was all around, precisely a spear-length away.

As the enemy closed around him like a gallery collapsing, Bardas swung and cut to dig himself out. His helmet was long gone, the rivets of his gorget and pauldrons cut through by deflected axe-blows glancing off the convex surfaces, so that the plates sagged from the points and straps like overripe fruit bending the branches of a tree. His right gauntlet had become so distorted with the shock of the blows he delivered that its lames had bent and jammed, so he’d discarded it at the first opportunity. Behind him and on either side the bodies and parts of bodies fell; he was carving and jointing, as skilful and quick with his blade as a cook preparing for a banquet, and the blows of his enemies planished his steel skin. It was almost like old times, fighting in the dark; this was dull, hard work, like kicking clay, the cutting out of waste and spoil from the wall in front of him. The sounds and smells, though, were so rich and varied that they bewildered him, a banquet for the senses; sweet blood and piquant steel, heady sweat, garlic and coriander on the last breath of a man falling across him, and all the Imperial music of the proof house.

There was a man who was wearing an old-fashioned four-panel helmet, crossed with straps; having parried his spear, Bardas took the obvious shot, an over-the-shoulder cut to the man’s temples. But the noise as the man dropped was wrong, there was a tiny flaw in the crisp ring of the Guelan. He noticed it, but then he had to step across and parry a halberd-cut, which left an opening across the side of a captured Imperial kettle-hat. He made the blow, and the sword snapped in two, a handspan and a half up from the quillons.
Not again
, he thought, as he dropped the hilt; then a man came at him with a spear, and he had nothing to parry the blow with. Instead he turned sideways, using the contour of his breastplate to deflect the blow, reached out with his left hand and drove his gauntleted fist into the man’s face. He saw blood well up along the lines scored by the edges of the lames, straight as a well-ploughed field (Clefas was best at ploughing, but lazy; Gorgas was almost as good, and always willing to do his share) but the man didn’t drop; he drew the spear back for another lunge, which would’ve gone home if Bardas hadn’t managed to grab the spearhead around the socket and pull it clear. He tried to hold on, but the man jerked back hard, drawing the sharp edges of the spearblade across Bardas’ palm and the base of his fingers -

(
Well; there’s no such thing as proof, just an infinite variety of ways of failing
.)

He let go, and just had time to stamp on the man’s kneecap. Down he went this time, and all Bardas could do was grind his heel in the man’s face, there simply wasn’t time to pick up the spear and do a proper job. There were more of them pressing in on him, and he was unarmed. A pity; he’d dug three quarters of the way through the enemy line, the seam, to the point where he could see still darkness above the moving shadows. Without something to fight with, however, he was only an anvil. He backed away until he could turn round, and started to run -

Which wasn’t as easy as it should have been. His greaves and cuisses were mangled and jammed, and the hinge-pin of his left knee-cop was curved so wide that he knew he’d have to cut the thing off piecemeal, if ever he got out of this. Even without the armour, he wouldn’t have got far before tripping and falling.

He landed badly, cracking the side of his head. When he opened his eyes again, he saw what he’d fallen against - a supply wagon with a high bed and not much in the way of suspension. He knew without needing to prove the matter that he wasn’t going to be able to pull himself upright for a while, so he flattened himself on his belly and crawled painfully under the cart.

He was so tired he shut his eyes for a moment -

- And he was back in the mines, as usual; but he could see (it was pitch dark) an abandoned dolly-truck; and underneath it, staring up at him with all the fear there ever had been, was a boy’s face. Sure enough it was Temrai who was staring at him, but it was also Theudas, whom he’d pulled out from under a cart during the Fall.
Why are you frightened of me, Theudas?
he asked, but the boy didn’t move or say a word -

- ‘There he is.’ Bardas’ eyes snapped open; and there, across twenty yards or so of the battle, was Temrai’s face again. ‘Over there,’ Temrai was screaming, ‘under the wagon, see? Kill him, for gods’ sakes. Kill him now!’

They came for him; three plainsmen with pikes and scimitars, men of Temrai’s personal guard. When they were right up close to the cart, fishing for him under the bed with their spears like a man trying to reach a coin that’s rolled under a table, he convulsed away; a spear-blade stroked his cheek, slitting the skin, as he shuffled backwards (he’d learned how to do it in the mines) and then he was out the other side, with the cart between him and them. He pulled himself up against the cart’s rear wheel and started to run. When he looked over his shoulder he could see them clambering over the cart, following him up with a degree of professional zeal that he’d not come across since Maxen’s war, when the young man who’d eventually grown into this snake’s second skin had followed up a group of running plainsmen into the dire and noisy nightmare of the dark, while all around the firelight roared and smelled at him like the gatekeepers of paradise.

Time to do something clever
. He slowed right down, waited till the first of his pursuers was almost on top of him, then dropped down into a crouch. The plainsman crashed into him and went tumbling over his shoulder in a tangle of arms and legs, as Bardas stood up and smacked the second man smartly across the face with his remaining gauntlet. He could feel the man’s nose crack, the failure of the bone transmitted to his own bones through the steel; the look on the poor man’s face was priceless, a sort of dumbstruck horror. Then he took away the man’s scimitar and chopped open his neck with it.

Now that he had a weapon again, he wasn’t bothered about the third man, whose pike he parried in a preoccupied sort of way before slashing off his left ear and bringing the scimitar back horizontal to cut his throat. It wasn’t a class of weapon he was terribly familiar with - the curved blade wasn’t meant for thrusting, the hilt was too small for his hand and the large flat pommel chafed his wrist - but it had all sorts of advantages over nothing at all. He took half a second to decide what to do, then headed back towards Temrai at a comfortable trot.

A couple of optimists got in his way, but not for very long. Temrai looked as if he’d taken root; even in the red glow of the camp-fires, his face was as pale as death and his eyes were wide open, like a rabbit’s. Bardas was only a few yards away by now; a guards-man blunted a scimitar on his left rerebrace and earned his thanks, leaving only two men between him and the enemy king. Of course, killing Temrai wouldn’t solve anything (it’d probably win the war, but that was the last thing on his mind) but at least he’d restore the symmetry of the situation a bit. He had nothing better to do. A high right parry, wrist turned, blade down, followed by a flicked cut just under the chin; that was one less.
Thank you
, he muttered; and then he saw something that made him forget all about Temrai, the war and patterns in history. He saw a gap.

It was only a very little gap, between the tail end of one line and the front of another, and it was closing fast; but if he was very quick, he might just be able to slip through and get down the path without having to fight for every step.

‘After him,’ someone was screaming (Temrai, probably). An arrow glanced off his left elbow-cop and jagged sideways into the advancing line. He nearly lost his balance twice - once when he trod on a dead man’s head he hadn’t noticed was there, once when he stumbled on the lip of a trebuchet-shot crater - but the weight of his armour gave him so much momentum that he was able to correct the errors and keep going, almost bouncing off the ground (like a hammer on an anvil). In the event, he had to push one man out of his way and carve a chunk off the shoulder of another, but he made it. He was on the path -

- Which was, of course, in a deplorable state after days on end of constant bombardment. The crumbling dirt gave way under his weight and suddenly he was sliding on his backside down the slope. He managed to slow himself down by digging into the piled-up spoil with his heels before he veered off the verge and over the drop, and used the momentum to bounce himself back on to his feet and on to the path. After that he took it rather more slowly; his pursuers were doing the same, so it didn’t matter much. He crashed into one fool of a plainsman who didn’t get out of the way in time, sending him sprawling over the edge.
Clumsy
, he thought, as he wobbled himself back upright.
A menace to traffic, that’s what I am.

At the bottom of the path there was a confused mess of bodies, like sandbags piled up to keep the rainwater out of the house; he had to stop and lift his legs over with his hand. That gave the two men chasing him time to catch up, an opportunity they didn’t live long enough to regret. They were still fighting down in the lower circle. There were too many bodies lying about to allow for organised manoeuvres (it reminded Bardas of the parts of the plains where the tussocks of couch-grass made it nearly impossible to walk) and the combatants were picking their way through the litter towards each other and then trading blows from a standstill. The gate, of course, was shut and barred; but he could see a clear path to the ramp that led up to the catwalk running around the inside of the stockade. He shuffled his way towards it, fending off a few half-hearted attacks, and dragged himself wearily up the ramp. He couldn’t see anybody else up there with him, so he leaned the scimitar against the log wall and set about unbuckling his armour.

A full set of plate is far easier to get out of than into, and where a buckle was jammed or twisted, he simply cut the strap. He’d just discarded the breastplate and was sawing through the vambrace hanger when he heard shouts not far away. There were a dozen plainsmen on the ramp, pointing at him and yelling to another group threading their way through the battle. Bardas swore under his breath and carried on sawing, cutting himself as the blade slid off a rivet. By the time they reached him he was free of all his burdens.

They stopped abruptly and stared at him down the length of their spears. He could almost taste the fear they brought with them, and he was sure that if he’d clapped his hands and shouted, at least two of them would have run away. He didn’t blame them; in the middle of what was possibly the greatest victory in their nation’s history, they’d been detailed to chase after defeat, humiliation and certain death. ‘It’s all right,’ he called out cheerfully, ‘I’m not stopping,’ then he jumped up from a standstill, got his fingers over the edge of the stockade, hauled himself up and sat astride the fence for a moment before swinging his leg over and pushing off. He landed in the river in a sitting position and hit the water with a comically loud splash and a great plume of spray.