Chapter 51: They Keep Sending Men

The second wave did not come the way the first had come.

The first had been an experiment. Forty men behind doors and hurdles, walking up a slope at a measured pace to find out what was on the bank and how much of it there was, and it had cost the man in the dark coat nine dead to buy an answer, and he had paid it without any evident distress.

The second was the answer being used.

They came in from everywhere at once.

Not a line. Not a rank. There was no formation of any kind and there was not meant to be, and by the time Osric understood that, there were Khesari on three faces of the bank simultaneously and men going over the wall in four separate places and a rain of arrows coming in flat from the western scrub where nobody had been standing four minutes earlier.

They had spent the lull sending men out into the dark.

That was what nobody on the bank had seen and everybody afterward understood. While the forty had walked up the slope and been bloodied and walked back down again, thirty more had gone out wide, north and west, along the treeline and round the back of the old workings, and had lain down in the scrub and waited for the horn.

So when it came, it came from the front and both flanks and the rear at the same moment, and it came with archery on top of it, and the archery did not stop when their own men closed.

That was the part that broke it.

Osric had fought Khesari for thirty years and had never once seen them shoot into their own. They did it that night. Shafts came in flat and fast into a mêlée forty paces wide with their own men inside it, and men on both sides went down to them, and the Khesari kept doing it, and somewhere down at the fires a voice was calling the volleys.

He's spending them. He was counting all evening and now he's stopped counting.

Which means he's been told there's a clock on this, and it isn't ours.

The line went in the first ninety seconds.

The low end went first, where Eckhard held it, and it went because eleven men cannot hold thirty yards against forty coming at them from two angles, and it did not matter in the slightest how good any of them were.

Osric heard it go. He heard Eckhard shouting something down there, twice, and then the shouting moved and did not stop moving, and then the sounds of fighting were behind the wall as well as in front of it.

After that there was no bank and no line and no plan whatever.

There was a hump of earth in the dark with about seventy men on it trying to kill each other, and the fighting broke into knots of three and four, and each knot fought its own war and knew nothing about any of the others.

Osric lost sight of Alden in the first two minutes and did not see him again for eleven.

He lost Baldewin at about the same moment. He heard him once, later, somewhere off to the right, shouting at somebody in a voice gone entirely hoarse.

He never once saw Voss or Doran, and did not know for some while that Doran had come back over the eastern lip at a dead run with his spear gone and Voss over his shoulder, and had put him down in the trench behind the dead horses and gone straight back into it with a Khesari sabre he had taken off the man who had cut him.

The bank was lit from below by the fires and from nowhere else, so that everybody on it fought against the light and could not see faces, and there were about nine minutes in the middle of that fight where Osric could not have told friend from enemy at more than four feet and killed on shape and cloak and the sound a man makes.

He was hit twice in that stretch and did not know it until afterward.

Something came off a helm rim across his brow and opened it and he fought the rest of the night with his left eye full of blood. Something else went into his side under the ribs, a knife or a spear butt or the corner of a shield, and cracked something in there that would trouble him for a year.

He got a man's thumb in his mouth at one point and bit down until it stopped being a problem.

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His leg had gone entirely. He fought that battle on one leg and a prop, and it made him slow and it made him predictable and it very nearly killed him three

times, and the only reason it did not was that he had spent thirty years learning what to do when he could not move.

He set his back against something and stayed there. That was all he did all night. He found something solid, a cart wheel, the earth wall, the ribs of a dead horse, and he put his back into it and made them come to his front, and he killed a very great number of men that night in about a four-foot arc directly in front of himself.

Tertius fought beside him for part of it.

The old man had lost the banner pole somewhere and had got it back, and had it strapped across his back now, and the cloth of it hung in ribbons and dragged and swung as he moved and got in his way and he would not put it down.

He fought with the spatha the way a man does something he has done for fifty years. Nothing wasted. Very little of it fast. A great deal of it simply being in the right place with the point out at the moment somebody arrived, and Osric watched him kill three men that way in about a minute without ever once taking a full step.

At some point in the middle of it Tertius was hit in the leg, and went down onto one knee, and went on fighting from the knee, and shouted something at Osric that Osric could not hear over the noise and never learned.

Argilac and Theo fought together.

They had not planned it and nobody had ordered it and by the second minute of that wave they had found each other in the dark and had not been apart since.

It should not have worked. Argilac had been trained and Theo had not, and Argilac fought light and quick and Theo fought like a man moving iron, and there is no manual anywhere that puts those two side by side.

It worked because Theo did one job and did it enormously.

He stood where his brother put him, and he swung.

That hammer had a two-foot haft and a head that weighed what it weighed, and Theo had three years of drawing out billets at a forge behind every stroke, and by the time that wave was ten minutes old there was not a Khesari on that bank who wanted to be in front of him. He broke a man's arm through a bracer. He hit a shield and the shield stopped being a shield. He caught a man coming up over the wall and hit him in the chest, straight on, with the flat face, and the man went back off the bank and did not get up.

He was not fast. He did not need to be, because Argilac would not let anybody get to his side.

The boy fought all of that wave on his brother's flank and did nothing else. He did not chase. He did not go forward. He stood at Theo's right shoulder and took the men who came at the open side and put them down, one after another after another, and shouted a warning every time the hammer went up so that Theo would know he could swing.

Osric saw perhaps twenty seconds of that, from thirty feet away, over the top of another man's shoulder.

They've never once stood in a line together. They were five and seven when they last saw each other every day.

He did not have time for any more of it than that.

He got to the wall at about the twelfth minute and put his back to it and looked out over what was left of the top of it, and saw the man in the dark coat.

He had come up.

That was the change. For a day and a half and all through the first wave he had stood down at the fires with his hands behind his back, and now he was up on the slope thirty yards below the bank with about six men round him, and he was directing it from there, close, in a raised voice, and every so often he pointed with a flat hand and men went where he pointed.

Osric looked at him and made the only decision he made in that entire fight.

Him.

Everything on this bank turns on that man. Take him and the rest of it slows, and slow is all we want.

He went over the wall.

He went over it badly, because of the leg, and half fell down the other side of it and landed hard on the slope among the dead of the first assault, and got up, and started down.

Thirty yards.

It took him about four minutes.

He did not go straight at it. He could not have; there were forty men between him and that dark coat and most of them were fighting somebody. He went

down the slope from body to body and from knot to knot, and he killed the men who came into his way, and he did not stop for any of it.

A Khesari came at him from the left with a short axe and Osric took it on the forearm guard and drove the messer up under the man's jaw.

Two came together and he got his back to a dead horse and killed one and the other went away.

He went down once, on the leg, in the churned earth, and a man got on top of him and Osric got a thumb into the socket of his eye and rolled him and put the messer through his neck and lay there for about a second and a half before he could get up.

He got up.

Twenty yards.

Somewhere behind him he could hear Theo's grunt, over and over, and could pick it out of the whole noise of that hill because he had been listening for it since the first assault, and every time he heard it he knew where his sons were and did not look round.

Ten yards.

The man in the dark coat saw him coming at about eight.

He had a curved blade and he did not draw it. He turned his head and looked at Osric coming down that slope on a bad leg with his face black with blood, and said something short to the men round him, and two of them stepped into the gap.

The first one Osric killed in about two seconds because the man came at him high and Osric had stopped being able to duck three hours ago and had therefore stopped trying, and simply took the blow on his shoulder where the mail was and put four inches of messer into the man's belly while he was doing it.

The second was better and took longer, and Osric was extremely tired.

They fought for perhaps forty seconds and Osric was losing it, and would have lost it, and did not, because Alden arrived out of the dark from the left with a face like a butcher's floor and took the man across the back of the neck with the axe.

Then Alden was gone again, back up the slope, shouting for Baldewin.