The Iron Wars

TWENTY-ONE

Dawn over Northern Torunna. In the Merduk camps the sentries were being changed and men were stirring the embers of their campfires in preparation for breakfast. Along the horse-lines thousands of animals were champing on hay and oats and generating a steam of damp warmth into the frigid air. Supply wagons came and went in sluggish convoys. Over the tented cities of the Merduks a haze of smoke and vapour rose skywards, visible for many miles despite the low cloud. The conical tents sprawled for hundreds of acres, and streets had been laid down between their rows, fashioned of corduroyed logs. Women and children were visible, and there were market places and bazaars in the midst of the encampments where canny traders which followed the armies had set up their stalls. The three vast winter camps of the Merduks were as peaceful looking as military settlements could possibly be. It was commonly known that the cowardly Torunnans were lurking behind the walls of their capital, preparing for the inevitable siege. There were no enemy formations for leagues around, apart from a few isolated bodies of cavalry. In a week or two the tent cities would be broken up and the armies would be on the move again, but for now the soldiers of the Sultan were more preoccupied with the problems of keeping warm and dry and well fed in the barbarous Torunnan winter.

Shahr Indun Johor, senior khedive of the Sultan’s forces, had his headquarters tent in the midst of the encampments of the Hraibadar and the Ferinai, the elite of the army. Rank had its privileges, and he was dozing with his head between the breasts of his favourite concubine when his subadar, or head staff officer, poked his head around the heavy curtains of the tent.

“Shahr Johor.” And again when there was no answer: “Shahr Johor!”

He stirred, a young, lean man, dark and quick as an otter. “What? What is it, Buraz?”

“It may be nothing, my Khedive. Some of the perimeter guards report gunfire coming from the west.”

“I’ll be a moment. See my horse is saddled.” Shahr Johor threw aside his grumbling concubine and hauled on his breeches and tunic. He wrapped a sash about his middle, thrust a poniard in the folds and pulled on his heavy knee-high riding boots. Then he kissed his scented bed partner. “Later, my dove,” he murmured, and strode out of the tent into the raw half-light of dawn.

Buraz awaited him with two saddled horses, their breaths steaming in the cold. The two officers mounted and cantered off to the perimeter of the vast camp, scattering soldiers and camp followers as they clattered along the timbered road. He sat in the saddle, breathing hard, staring at the empty horizon. It was still so gloomy that he could see the glare of the Minhraib’s campfires against the cloudy sky, three miles away. Thin flakes of snow had begun to fall, and there was more in the lowering nimbus overhead.

“I hear nothing. Who reported this?”

A Hraibadar sergeant stepped forward, a veteran with a hard, seamed face and black eyes. “I did, my Khedive. It comes and goes. If you wait, you have my word, you will hear it.”

They sat still, listening, whilst behind them the great camp and its tens of thousands of occupants came to life in the growing light. And at last Shahr Johor caught it. A distant, intermittent thunder rolling in from the west, the fainter crackle of what might have been volley fire.

“Artillery,” Buraz said.

“Yes. And massed arquebusiers. There is a battle going on out there, Buraz.”

“It may be only a raid, a skirmish.”

They both listened again. The Hraibadar sergeant angrily called for silence and around the two officers hundreds of men stopped what they were doing and paused, listening also.

The faraway thunder intensified. Everyone could hear it now. It seemed to echo off the face of the very hills.

“That is no skirmish,” Shahr Johor said. “It is a full-scale engagement, Buraz. The Unbelievers have attacked the Minhraib camp.”

“Would they dare?” his subordinate asked incredulously.

“It would seem so. Get me a trumpeter. Sound the alarm. I want the army ready to move immediately. And send a courier off to the Sultan in the northern camp. We will chastise these infidels for their impertinence. I shall come down on their flank with the Ferinai. You follow with the infantry. Make haste, Buraz!”

The Minhraib camp was a rough square, a mile and a half to a side. It lay on a gently undulating plain criss-crossed with small watercourses and dotted with copses of alder and willow where the ground was wet. To the east of it a small range of hills rose to perhaps four or five hundred feet, and on these heights a smaller camp of perhaps a thousand men had been pitched to dominate the ground below and safeguard communications with the other Merduk camp to the east. The main encampment was a huge sea of tents bisected by muddy roads, with corrals for the pack animals to the north. South-west of it, on a slight rise, was a long string of scattered woods, perhaps two miles from the first lines of tents. In these woods, the Torunnan army shook out from column into line of battle.

Three great formations of men emerged from the woods as the sky lightened steadily above their heads. They were late. The approach to the enemy was meant to be made under cover of the pre-dawn darkness, but it had, inevitably, taken longer than expected to reform thirty thousand men in the dark, and now they had two flat and open miles to march at the quick-time before they would come to blows with the Merduks.

Out in front of the main body, batteries of galloper guns under Colonel Rusio had dashed ahead and were unlimbering a mile from the enemy lines. Soon the little six-pounders were barking and smoking furiously, generating bloody chaos in the camp, flattening tents, shattering men.

Behind them the King’s formation, eighteen thousand strong, advanced at the double. The battle-line was on average six ranks deep, and it stretched for almost two miles, a dark, bristling, clanging apocalypse of heavily armoured men and horses. The earth shook under their feet, and in the centre the heavy sable-clad cuirassiers were ranged under the banners of the King and his noble bodyguard.

Off to the east, perhaps a mile from the main body, Colonel Aras’s five thousand were advancing also, their target the small Merduk camp on the hills. They were to take the camp, and hold the heights against the arrival of any enemy reinforcements. Aras’s men were lightly armoured, swift moving, and they trailed streamers of smoke from the slow-match of their arquebusiers so that it looked as though they were burning a path across the land as they came.

And behind the main fighting line, another formation. Seven thousand foot and a thousand horse-Corfe’s men, in a deep body only some two thirds of a mile long. He was stationed on the left of his line with the Cathedrallers, the Fimbrians were on the right, ten deep, and his dyke veterans were in the centre. Behind them, in the woods, were the hundreds of wagons which comprised the baggage train. Field surgeons and their assistants were busy amid the vehicles setting out their instruments, and crowds of wagoneers were frantically unpacking crates of shot, barrels of gunpowder. Scores of light galloper carts stood in their midst, ready to start the ferrying forward of ammunition and the ferrying backwards of casualties to the rear aid stations. A thousand men worked busily there, and Corfe had also left behind two hundred arquebusiers in case small bodies of the enemy should break through the front lines.

He halted his command when it was a mile from the Merduk camp. The roar of the artillery had begun to intensify. He could see the frenzied activity in the midst of the tented city, officers trying to get clotted crowds of men into battle-line only to have the artillery blow them apart as soon as they had dressed their ranks. The main Torunnan line advanced inexorably to the dull thunder of the infantry drums and a braying of army bugles. It looked as though nothing on earth would be able to stop it. Corfe felt a moment of pure, savage exultation, a fierce, dizzying joy at the sight of the advancing Torunnan army. If there was any glory in war, it was in spectacles such as this, neat lines of men advancing like chess pieces on the gameboard of the world. Once you took a closer look the glory died, and there was only the scarlet carnage, the agonizing misery of men dying and being maimed in their thousands.

The King’s formation was passing through the galloper batteries now. The squat guns fired only on a flat trajectory and thus were masked by their own troops as the advance continued. The gunners leaned on their pieces and cheered as their comrades passed by. Had they no further orders? Corfe scowled. Thirty guns left sitting idle. It was an incompetent oversight, and technically he outranked Colonel Rusio, the artillery commander. He reached in his saddlebag for pencil and paper, scrawled a message and sent it off to the idle batteries. A few minutes later, the gunners began limbering their pieces and withdrawing up the slope towards Corfe’s command. He could see Rusio in their midst, shouting orders, helmless. The grey-haired officer looked furious. Too bad. Corfe would find him something better to do than sit on his hands for the remainder of the battle.

Farther away on the plain, the main Torunnan formation had halted a scant two hundred yards from the Merduk camp, and the entire battle-line erupted with smoke as the massed arquebusiers let off a volley. A second later, the stuttering crackle of it could be heard. Then there was a huge, formless roar as the line charged, eighteen thousand men shouting their heads off as they slammed into the Merduk camp at a run.

Corfe could see the wedge of three thousand heavy cavalry, the King’s banner at its head, forging ahead of the rest. Horses going down already, no doubt tripping on downed tents and guy-ropes. The disorganized unfortunates of the Minhraib had no chance. They presented a ragged line, which disintegrated into a howling mob, then a crowd of fleeing individuals. In minutes, the Torunnans had smashed deep into the enemy encampment and were carrying all before them. But now their own lines had become splintered and disorganized. The fighting inside the complex of tents degenerated into a massive free-for-all, and in the thick of it the King and his cuirassiers rampaged like dreadful animated engines of slaughter. Lofantyr had courage, Corfe thought. You had to give him that.

Corfe looked at the right, where another, smaller struggle had begun on the eastern hills. Aras had his men advancing in a perfect line, firing as they went. The Merduks in the hill camp, outnumbered five to one, nevertheless rushed down to meet them. They had few or no firearms and so had to try and engage at close quarters. They were cut down in windrows by exact volleys, and the survivors, a beaten rabble, fled the field. Aras advanced his men up to the hilltops and arranged them for defence.

“I hope he digs in,” Corfe muttered. He felt uneasy about the small size of Aras’s force. Soon they would have to cover the withdrawal of the King’s formation, and if the enemy came in any strength from the east they would have a hard time of it.

“Colonel Rusio reporting, as ordered,” a voice spat. Corfe turned. Rusio and his guns had reached his position. The older officer was glaring at him, but there was no time to massage his ego.

“Take your guns over to Aras’s position and make ready to repel an attack on the hills, Colonel,” Corfe said briskly. “How much ammunition is left in your limbers?”

“Ten rounds per gun.”

“Then I suggest you send galloper carts back to the baggage for resupply. You’ll need every round you can muster in a little while.”

“With respect, sir, we seem to be driving them beautifully. I was given no such orders in my briefing. I don’t see why-”

“Do as you’re damn well told!” Corfe snapped, his patience fraying. “This is an army, not a debating chamber. Go!”

Rusio, Corfe’s elder by thirty years, glared venomously again, then spun his horse off without another word and began bellowing at his gun teams. Thirty guns, each pulled by eight horses, pounded off eastwards.

The Merduk camp was wreathed in a pall of smoke. Flames glowed sullenly at its base and tiny black figures flickered in mobs like throngs of ants. It would be utter chaos in there, Corfe thought, as bad for the attackers as the defenders. But chaos favoured the smaller army. It was easier to control eighteen thousand in that toiling hell than ninety thousand. So far, so good.

It was full daylight now, a dull morning low with cloud, the snow showers coming and going. The trained warhorses of the Cathedrallers were restless and sweating despite the cold; they could smell the stink of battle, and their blood was up. The men were much the same, and the ranks of horsemen buzzed with talk. In the centre of Corfe’s line the dyke veterans had their arquebuses primed and ready, laid on the Y-shaped gunrests they had stabbed into the ground before them. And on the far right the black-armoured Fimbrians stood like raven statues, their pikes at the vertical.

Andruw cantered over and doffed his helm. “What’s our job in all this, Corfe?” he asked. “To make notes?” He had to shout to be heard over the titanic din of battle.

“Hold your water, Andruw. This thing is only just begun.”

Andruw joined his general in staring out at the left of the battlefield, to the west of the Merduk camp. Men were streaming away there, fleeing enemy trying to escape the murderous hell within the tent lines, tercios of Torunnans firing at their backs as they ran. But beyond them there was only a huge stretch of empty hill and moorland, completely deserted.

“You think they’ll hit the left?” Andruw asked.

“Wouldn’t you? We’re killing conscripts at the moment. The professionals have yet to arrive. Aras will hold on the right I think, what with Rusio’s guns and the terrain. But the left is another thing entirely. We have nothing there, Andruw, nothing. If the Sultan makes even a cursory reconnaissance, he’ll realize that and he’ll come roaring down on us there.”

“And then?”

“And then-well, we’ll have a fight on our hands.”

“That’s why you’ve kept us so far back. You think we’ll have to move up to support the left.”

“I hope not, but it’s as well to be prepared.”

“Aye. At any rate, the King is doing his job. Another hour and he’ll have wiped half the Merduk army off the map.”

“Getting into the fight is one thing, getting out is something else.”

“Do I detect a note of envy, Corfe?” Andruw grinned.

“It’s a glorious charge, but I wish he’d stop and take stock for a minute. The army is hopelessly disorganized in there. It’ll take hours to reform them and withdraw.” Corfe smiled. “All right, maybe I envy him his glory a little.”

“Give him his due, he took them in there like a veteran. I’d best get back to my wing. Cheer up, Corfe! We’re making history, after all.” And he galloped off.

Corfe sat his restive horse another half an hour. The fighting in the Minhraib camp went on unabated, though it had spilled out on to the plain beyond the tents. He could see Torunnan arquebusiers and cuirassiers fighting intermingled, banners flashing bright through the smoke. Beyond the camp a great cloud of men took shape as the Minhraib abandoned the tent lines and strove to reform in the open ground to the north-west. Twenty, thirty thousand of them dressing their ranks unmolested whilst the Torunnans were embroiled in the terrible struggle within the camp. The enemy had taken huge losses, but he had the numbers to sustain them and he was bringing some order out of chaos at last. It was time to get out. The Merduk reinforcements would be on the march by now.

A courier emerged from the cauldron, beating his half-dead horse up the slope towards Corfe’s line. Corfe cantered out to meet him. The man was a cuirassier. His mount was slashed in half a dozen places and his armour was a pitted mass of dents and scrapes. He saluted.

“Beg pardon, sir-” He fought for breath. “But the King, the King-”

“Take your time, trooper,” Corfe said gently. “Cerne! Give this man some water.”

His trumpeter handed the man his waterskin and the courier squirted half a pint into his smoke-parched mouth. He wiped his lips.

“Sir, the King wants your men in the camp right away. The enemy is fleeing before him but his own men are exhausted. He wants you to take up the pursuit. You must bring the entire reserve into the enemy camp and finish the buggers off-begging your pardon, sir.”

Corfe blinked. “The King, you say?”

“Yes, sir, at once, sir. He says we’ll bag the whole lot if only you make haste.”

Just then a heavy fusillade of gun and artillery fire broke out on the right. Aras’s men had opened up on an unseen enemy below them. Corfe called for Andruw.

“Have a courier sent to Aras. I want to know the strengths and dispositions of the enemy he’s firing at, and his best estimate as to how long he can hold them. And Andruw, tell Marsch to take a squadron out on the left a mile or two. I want advance warning if they start coming in on us from there.” Andruw saluted and sped off towards the ranks. Corfe fished out his pencil and grubby paper again and used the thigh-guard of his armour as a desk.

“What’s your name, soldier?” he asked the battered courier.

“Holman, sir.”

“Well, Holman, take a look at the land beyond the Merduk camp, to the north. What do you see?”

“Why, General, it’s an army, another Merduk army forming. Looks like it’s going to attack our lads in the tents!”

“It’s not another army, it’s the one you’ve been fighting, but so far you’ve only tackled the half of it. The other half has withdrawn and has been reorganizing for the better part of an hour. Soon, it’ll be ready to charge back into its camp and retake it. And now Merduk reinforcements have arrived on the right, also. You must tell the King that his position is untenable. I cannot reinforce him-he must withdraw at once. And I want you to take this to General Menin first, Holman. It’s absolutely vital this message gets through. The army must withdraw, or it will be destroyed. Do you understand me, soldier?”

Holman was wide-eyed. “Yes, General.”

“My command will cover the retreat for as long as we can, but the main body has to fall back at once.”

“Yes, sir.” Holman was eager and appalled. Down in the hellish melee of the Merduk camp no one had noticed the Merduk thousands beyond preparing for a counter-attack. Corfe did not envy the young man his errand. The King would explode, but Menin would probably see sense.

Holman thundered off, his tired mount rolling like a ship on a heavy swell. At the same time Marsch and his squadron set off north-westwards to keep an eye on the left flank. Corfe slammed one gauntleted fist into another. To sit here, doing nothing, galled him beyond measure. He half wished he were a junior officer again, doing as he was told, in the thick of it.

The courier from Aras, a tribesman whose mount was blowing foam, stamping and snorting. He handed his general a scrap of paper, saluted awkwardly and rejoined the ranks.

6-8000 to my front, all cavalry-the Ferinai I believe. A body of infantry visible several miles behind. Artillery keeping them at a distance for now. They are massing for general assault. Can hold another hour or two, not more. Aras.

“Lord God,” Corfe said softly. The Merduk khedive had been quick off the mark.

He kicked his mount into motion and cantered along the battle-line until he reached the Fimbrians. His men cheered as he passed and he waved a hand absently at them, his mind turning furiously.

“Formio? Where are you?”

“Here, General.” The slim Fimbrian officer stepped out from the midst of his men. Like them, he bore a pike. Only the sash about his middle differentiated him from a private soldier.

“Take your men out to the hills in the east and reinforce Colonel Aras. He’s up against heavy cavalry-your pikes will keep them at bay. You have to buy us time, Formio. You must hold that position until you hear otherwise from me. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly, General.”

“Good luck.”

A series of shouted commands, a bugle call, and the Fimbrians moved into march column and then stepped off as smoothly as a great machine, every component perfect. Corfe hated splitting his command, but Aras would not be able to hold for long enough by himself. He felt like a man trying frantically to repair a leak in a dyke, but every time he plugged a hole in one place, the water erupted out of another.

Andruw joined him again. “I have a feeling there’s hot work approaching,” he said, almost merry. Action always did that to him.

“They’ll hit the left next,” Corfe told him. “And if they hit it hard, I’ll have to commit the rest of the command. There are no more reserves.”

“You think we’ve bitten off more than we can swallow?”

Corfe did not answer. He could feel time slipping away minute by minute as though it were his lifeblood ebbing from his veins. And with the passing of that time, the army’s chances of survival grew ever slimmer.