Fallen Eagle

Chapter 90: A Shit Pile of Mistakes and Regrets

They sallied out into a world burning at their backs.Across the river, the forest burned in a ravening inferno that seemed to exceed the bounds of reason. The Royal Forest, where Theodoran Princes had hunted for prestige and clout ever since their break from the Great Roman Empire, was being reduced before Silvanus’s eyes to a blackened sea of ash.

He could almost picture the aghast faces of the nobles watching from the safety of Mangup’s walls, and the thought pleased him far more than it ought to have.

He had always hated those hunts. The pomp of them. The endless need to present the finest version of oneself for no greater cause than vanity. Lords strutting in bright colours, ladies praising a clean kill as though slaughter were made nobler by velvet sleeves and silver cups.

What he hated most, though, was how dearly he had once cared for such things.

Life on this barren little rock had a way of sanding the shine off a man. War did that too. It stripped away ornament and left behind the crude iron beneath. In many ways, his time since arriving on this barren little rock had dulled him to the grim necessities of war - necessities he’d once lived and breathed for all his code of honour amounted to.

There were corners of his past he would gladly have buried forever, and for a time he had tried precisely that. By losing himself in pageantry, in gallant displays, in tournaments that would have seemed a child’s jest compared to those of his homeland.

He had barely scraped through the early rounds in those grand affairs, but here he was a champion, loved and adored. That taste of small victory was enough to grow drunk on applause and smiles from dames and peers alike. Trying to relieve the days before everything had fallen apart.

Thirty years was a long life for a knight. And Silvanus had known too many boys who hadn’t seen half as many before they’d gone to heaven.

And now again, riding at the head of half-starved peasants through mud and churned earth, gambling lives for enough grain to keep the army breathing another fortnight, Silvanus was reminded that war had a foul sense of humour.

Every time one of the men following the gallant Copper Sword folded into the dirt with a Genoese bolt jutting from him, Silvanus was reminded anew of the price hidden behind every tale of noble charges and honourable advance. Bards liked to sing of courage. They sang less often of the men left twitching in trampled fields, of the stink of opened bowels, of the quiet last breath of a man who’d died full of regrets.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement on the western side of the formation. A dozen of their men, seeing the front ranks crumple under crossbow fire, broke and made for the river. They splashed toward it in panic, using the present chaos to try to desert before they could be similarly culled.

Silvanus could not blame them.

They had marched the length of the Principality, fought hard at Kalamita Hills, endured bombardment, harassment, hunger, and fear, all for a Prince most of them had never once laid eyes upon. There was only so far honour could sustain men with empty bellies and no training for war. Nobles liked to speak of loyalty as if it were iron. In truth, hunger made short work of it.

And that was why Silvanus hoped they would not blame him for doing what was necessary.

“There’s a group making for the river!” he shouted through the din, turning in the saddle and fighting for his lieutenant’s attention.

The man looked at him. Between veterans, no words were needed. The question in his face was hard enough already.

Silvanus answered it with a stare of his own, grave and unflinching.

“Make an example of them.”

The lieutenant held his gaze for only a heartbeat, then nodded. The order passed outward by shouted relay over the ragged advance, travelling through the line like a dark current.

Moments later, a volley of crossbow bolts from the Crown’s Guard, held in reserve behind the main body, tore into the backs of the fleeing men.

Several dropped at once, pitching face-first into the mud before they even understood what had struck them. Others stumbled on a few more steps before collapsing into the churned earth. Men who had not realized anyone was breaking looked on in stunned disbelief, while those who had been weighing the same choice swallowed hard and fell back into line beneath the hoarse shouts of their sergeants.

That was one of the reasons armies kept part of their elites behind the main assault. Some discipline had been hammered into the host over the past weeks, but beneath the drills and shouted orders they still thought like farmers more than soldiers. One had to expect cowardice to flare up now and then.

Their advance had always been meant to move as a single, solid block, with the heavy pavises framing the front and offering what little shelter they could as the men slogged toward the Genoese fortification. The inferno raging across the Belbek had bought them precious confusion, and the first stage of their march had unfolded under the cover of deepest night, catching the Italians unprepared. But surprise was a fleeting ally, and every minute spent dragging themselves through mud was another minute for it to abandon them.

The fort they had chosen was located on hilly, broken terrain, poor enough that any Genoese relief force would need half an hour to reach it.

That was all the time they had to storm a fortified position with half their numbers, a daunting task for any force foolish enough to be attacking.

Weeks under siege had worn them down badly. The eight hundred survivors from Kalamita Hills had become a little over seven hundred through wounds, sickness, and desertion. The Italians were unlikely to have fared much better, and the officers reckoned perhaps three hundred and fifty men held each of the lesser forts, perhaps only three hundred now, once one accounted for patrols, skirmishes, and attrition.

Even so, the position before them was ugly work. A double line of driven stakes, inner scaffolding, and a deep ditch made it hateful enough to look at, let alone assault. Fill it with Italian crossbows and men in good armour, and it quickly became the kind of place that sapped courage before the first assault.

Unluckily for the enemy, this was no ordinary assault.

Between the slithering lines of soldiers, men shoved forward three dozen modified war wagons. Silvanus had to bow his head to the carpenter they had pressed into remaking those poor wagons for the umpteenth time, and to his madman of a friend who kept finding new ways to turn humble transports into weapons.

The last week and a half had not been spent idly. Hemmed inside their camp, the Theodorans did not need every man they had repairing their walls from the Genoese bombardment, and so they had drilled this plan in the secrecy of the inner ditches, where Italian scouts could not see it.

Now the thing unrolled in the chaotic brawl that was true combat. Men heaved the reinforced wagons forward while the warhorses harnessed to them strained through the mud, every beast burdened in whatever scrap of armour could be fashioned for it. They were the last of the horses not yet eaten back in camp. The wagons themselves carried nothing that was not essential to the attack, but even stripped so bare, they were miserable things to force across soaked ground.

The vanguard finally reached the edge of the ditch, forcing its way through the gaps in the chevaux de frise the Genoese had hammered into the ground. At a signal, the men at the wagons gave way to a fresh, pre-selected team, the strongest and steadiest in the army. As they plunged down into the ditch with the palisade looming ahead, Silvanus knew the battle would narrow to this single moment.

Everything rested with them now.

Christos ran after the wagon as it plunged down the steep side of the ditch, the thing near going into a full tumble as he fought to keep it from smashing forward into the lone horse ahead.

One of the beasts had already gone down, shot clean through the chest despite all the fancy cloth and patchwork armour they had strapped over it. So now the whole damned load dragged crooked, heavier on one side and harder to keep straight.

Going down into the ditch was the easy part. It was getting the thing back up the other side that would kill them.

Christos grabbed at one of rough wooden beam fixed at the side the wagon. They were little more than thick logs fastened in place for the six men assigned to shove at the cursed thing, with a slab of cover above it for ducking under when the bolts started coming in. Fine idea, that, in principle. Fat load of good it did for the poor bastard ahead of Christos, who caught a bolt through the helmet for the crime of glancing uphill.

The push was savage work. It took every scrap of brute strength Christos had, and he could not help thinking, not for the first time, how he got handed the most dangerous jobs by virtue of being a bigger loaf than most.

He grinned, teeth flashing white through mud and sweat in the orange-dark night.

He would not have had it any other way.

“Nearly there!” one of the men shouted right before the second horse went down under the hail.

The strain nearly doubled. The wagon lurched, slowed, and for one dreadful moment Christos thought they would lose all their pace before they reached the lip where the ground flattened near the palisade.

“HYEAAAGH!”

He drove forward with everything inside him, boots slipping in the muck, arms shaking, and the wagon jolted up and over at last, bounding clear of the ditch and crashing onto the flatter ground by the wall.

Christos barely had time to suck in a breath.

The plan drilled into them called for steps, one after another, not dawdling and certainly not thinking.

“Set it on fire!” somebody bellowed.

At once, three men took to doing just that to the bundles of damp hay packed into the wagon while two more hammered wooden pegs into the rear wheels to lock the thing in place. The hay caught almost immediately, and thick black smoke came billowing up in ugly, greasy clouds.

Christos had no idea what they had soaked the stuff in, only that it was some sort of mix of tar and lard. He didn’t know for sure, but it had all the makings of being another one of the Captain’s witchcrafts.

What mattered, though, was that the smoke rolled upward in a quick surge, swallowing that whole stretch of wall.

Christos felt the pressure on their section ease, the crossbow fire slackening as the men on the battlements either recoiled from the choking cloud or wasted shots into the smoke, loosing bolts into the blackness with no aim worth a damn.

With their men wearing the looted armour from Kalamita Hills, blind crossbow fire wouldn’t scythe them down, even fancy Italian crossbows.

Across the line, Christos saw that not every wagon had fared as well as theirs.

Most had made it up to the lip of the ditch and into place beneath the wall, smoke already boiling from them in thick black sheets. But others had fared worse. One sat crooked at the bottom of the ditch, both horses dead in the traces, its first crew sprawled around it in ugly shapes, crossbow bolts jutting from necks, backs, and shoulders. Fresh men had already rushed in to take their place, boots slipping in the mud as they threw themselves against the wheels and beams, straining to force the thing uphill while bolts hissed down through the smoke.

Another wagon had nearly reached the top before it lost purchase. Christos saw it shudder, hang for one awful instant, then roll backward down the incline. It crushed the men behind it before they could get clear, snapping limbs and flattening bodies beneath it. Their screaming barely carried over the din.

Half-empty bellies and failing strength were poor companions for this type of work, but it would have to do.

Under the cover of their smoke, the men set to the next part. They hauled leather bellows from a lower compartment in the wagon, rough things stitched together from scraps of wood and the hides of the pack animals they’d been forced to butcher. They were ugly tools, but sturdy enough to do something close to pushing air.

Charcoal was piled at the base of the palisade. More hay was heaped over it and set alight, and then the men worked the bellows hard, feeding air into the smouldering bed until the timber began to darken and hiss. The Italians had smeared the wall in a coating to keep it from catching flame, so fire tactics were left by the wayside.

Funnily enough, though, that also meant the wood did not burn now, allowing them to do their work. It only sat there and drank in the heat, blackening, weakening, cooking from within.

Men pumped until their arms ached, sweat running into their eyes. The timber turned dark and ugly, a widening scar spreading through the stakes.

After some minutes, one of the men crouched close, judged it, and shouted, “Water, now!”

Two buckets were thrown onto the smouldering patch, and the air itself seemed to crack. Steam and smoke burst out in a violent hiss, and men flinched back from the sudden blast.

Christos stepped forward at once. The wood looked wrong now - black, split, almost rotten where the heat had bitten deepest.

He hefted the heavy hammer they had given him, planted his feet, and swung with all his strength.

The blow landed with a brutal crack, shattering the charred section into flying splinters with a hollow thud that spoke of wood breaking at the core.

A great breath went out from the men around him, half disbelief, half savage joy. It had worked. It was another bit of sorcery they’d scarcely believed when they’d seen the officers demonstrating it before their eyes. But it worked then, and it worked here and now. The wall was coming apart.

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Another burly warrior joined Christos at the blackened base of the wall, and the two of them fell into a brutal rhythm with their hammers. Blow after blow crashed into the weakened timber, each strike knocking splinters and chunks of charred wood loose. They had broken through five of the thick logs in half as many minutes when the wall began to give.

The great timbers did not fall cleanly or quickly, but with a groaning, horrible slowness, as though the fortification itself were reluctant to admit defeat. As they came down, knocking ash loose and nearly crashing into the wagon, men had to be dragged out of the way in the nick of time. The broken logs landed among them like the limbs of some wounded beast, heavy enough to pulp a man flat if he was too slow.

There was no time to stare as they turned to the second line of timber, pumping the bellows with renewed force now that they had seen the first section break. Men leaned into the work with savage urgency. They all knew they were on a time limit.

Up above, the ever-present rain of bolts thickened.

The Genoese understood that something was being done at the base of the wall, and now they poured down everything they had to stop it. Men dropped all around Christos. One of the fellows working the bellows jerked suddenly, a bolt buried deep in the side of his throat. He made a wet choking sound and pitched sideways into the mud, hands still clawing weakly at the leather handle.

“Shields!” Christos roared. “Get the damned shields over us!”

He lunged for a pavise lying beside a dead Theodoran and hauled it up with both hands. Men caught his meaning and dragged the heavy shields together over the workers’ heads, making a rough slanted roof while bolts slammed into the wood above with ugly, splintering thuds. More men crowded in to help, bracing the pavises with shaking arms and bent backs. It held, but every impact ran through their shoulders and down their spines like a hammerblow.

That was when the second line of wagons reached the fortification.

They rolled into place between the burning wagons, in the gaps where the smoke still boiled thickest overhead. The Genoese shot at the pullers, thinking it was more burning hay coming to pelt them. They were utterly confused when the ramps suddenly lurched upward from the wagon beds and slammed over the crest of the palisade.

Crown Guard veterans came surging across in pairs and triplets, armed to the teeth and half-hidden behind leather face coverings soaked in vinegar. They burst through the smoke like fiends from a furnace, roaring as they hit the battlements. Through the black haze, Christos glimpsed crossbowmen caught flat-footed by the sudden assault. Men threw down their bows and snatched at sidearms as the Theodorans crashed into them at close quarters.

The line above turned into a butcher’s melee. The Genoese were driven back from the parapet by the sheer press of men coming over the ramps, and the crossbow fire wavered badly.

The bellows finished their work. Water was thrown onto the heated wood, and the air cracked again with steam and violence. Christos stepped in and hammered at the base until the second line began to split apart.

Then he saw the logs shifting wrong.

They were tilting toward him.

He strode forward at once and shoved against one of the heavy timbers, trying to force it the other way, but it did not move.

Damn those bastards.

“They’re on the other side!” Christos bellowed. “Push, you fools! Push the wood!”

Men sprang to him, set their shoulders to the blackened log, and quickly understood what he meant. The Genoese were on the far side, shoving back, trying to make the whole broken section collapse outward and crush every man at the base of the wall.

Christos and the others threw themselves against the blackened timber with everything they had left.

The beam was half-burnt through, cracked and weakened, but it was still a monstrous thing, thick as a man’s chest and hot enough to make the air around it waver. Christos set both hands against it and pushed.

He cursed aloud as fire burned clean through his palms. There had been no proper gauntlet to fit his damned hands from the looted equipment so all he had to protect himself from the scorching was a simple leather glove.

He grit his teeth through it, leaning into the wood even harder.

Around him, more men saw what was happening and crowded in with desperate force, shoulder to shoulder, boots grinding into the churned earth outside the palisade. Their footing was worse than that of the Genoese on the far side. Mud sucked at their feet. Splintered wood rolled beneath them. But they had numbers and desperation over the defenders, and here that was what seemed to matter the most.

Christos roared, half in pain, half in fury as he surged upwards.

The timber shuddered. For one hideous instant it seemed to hold suspended between them, as if deciding where to fall. Then, with a splintering groan like a ship breaking apart, the whole section gave.

Christos stumbled back as the shattered beam and broken stakes crashed down into the fort. Men on the Genoese side who had been shoving against it vanished beneath the fall. He saw one mailed figure turn too late, arms flung up in instinctive defense, before half a wall came down on him. Another was struck at the shoulder and driven screaming into the mud. More disappeared under the mass of timber and ash. A score of them, maybe more, crushed or trapped before they could scramble clear.

“Inside!” someone bellowed.

Christos did not wait to hear it twice. He turned, seized hold of his glaive from where it had been lashed to the side of the nearest wagon, and charged through the broken palisade with the others howling at his back.

The first Genoese he met was still trying to rise from his knees amid the wreckage. Christos drove the butt of the glaive into the man’s face hard enough to send him sprawling, then yanked the blade around and hacked into another who came lunging through the smoke with a short sword raised. The curved edge bit into the man’s collar and neck with a wet crunch, throwing him down in a spray of blood.

Those were all the clean hits he managed to get through before the crush hit him.

The defenders understood the looming disaster that was the breach. Men came surging toward it from every direction, trying to plug the gap with their own bodies before more Theodorans could pour through. The press was immediate and enormous, a wall of iron, leather, curses, and open mouths. Christos was shoved sideways by the impact of it, shoulder slamming against one of his own men, boots slipping in the mud and broken timber underfoot.

All around him, the fight became close and ugly.

There was no room for elegance. Men stabbed low into bellies and groins. Spears bit into arms raised too slowly. One Theodoran was dragged down screaming and vanished under stamping feet. A Genoese crossbowman, trapped too near the breach to reload, tried to club a peasant down with the stock of his weapon and took a knife under the jaw for it.

Bolts began to fall from the higher scaffolding inside the fort, sent down by men who had found firing angles from above, but not many did, and Christos could see why. The fight on the upper walkways had turned gruesome in its own right. The Crown Guard veterans who had come over the ramps were still battling there, blackened by soot and smoke. Firing from below didn’t work as the Genoese packed so tightly around the breach that their own crossbowmen could not arc their shots over them.

The thudding footsteps of steel man broke Christos out of his revelry.

He was fully mailed, broad in the shoulders, visorless helm gleaming dully through soot, a two-handed sword clenched in both fists. The man moved like someone trained from youth, and did not waste time shouting. He came straight at Christos and swung.

Christos barely got the shaft of the glaive across in time. The impact jarred through his arms so hard he thought his burned hands would split open. The Italian stepped in, trying to force him back, sword shearing in brutal, practiced cuts. Christos was forced into a clumsy retreat over corpses and shattered timber.

The second blow slipped past his guard enough to bite into his mailed upper arm, deep enough to make his whole side flare white with pain.

The swordsman came in for another overhead cut, thinking he had him. But this time Christos did not try to meet it high. He stepped inside it.

The descending blade glanced off his shoulder guard, bringing with it a burst of pain, but Christos moved past it, ramming the glaive’s shaft forward like a spear and driving its butt end hard into the mailed man’s face. The blow snapped his head back and before he could recover, Christos wrenched the weapon loose, reversed his grip, and hacked sideways with all the strength in his back and wounded arm.

The glaive’s blade punched through the rings beneath the man’s raised arm, causing the swordsman to make a harsh, shocked sound. Christos ripped the weapon free and struck again at the neck, smashing him down into the bloody mire.

More Theodorans were flooding through the breach now, roaring as they came. The gap was theirs, and Christos, burned hands screaming and arm half-numb from the cut, bared his teeth and plunged deeper into the fort.

Through the smoke and chaos, Christos saw that theirs was not the only breach. All along the palisade, in scattered sections, other teams had done their work. Here and there, blackened timbers had been smashed inward where bellows and hammers had broken the wall apart.

The Genoese were being forced to answer attacks from too many directions at once, men shouting over one another, officers roaring themselves hoarse, crossbowmen abandoning good positions to rush toward one gap only to hear cries from another. For a few moments, it looked as though the whole fort might come apart.

Then the advance faltered, meeting a wall of Genoese steel.

Italian officers and veterans dragged the disorder into shape, hauling men back from the swirl of the brawl and planting them in steady ranks, spears down and bristling.

Christos hit it like a bull charging a thorn hedge. His glaive knocked one spear aside, then another, but there were too many. He could not get close without risking his guts on the points. The Theodorans tried to force it by sheer weight, shoving and roaring, but the Genoese line bent without breaking and stabbed back with a cold, methodical rhythm.

Christos saw one of the Royal Guard veterans take a spear in the thigh when his foot slipped in the muck while another caught a blade under the arm as he raised his shield. These were well trained men, but they had withstood the brunt of the assault’s punishing start and were tiring.

Behind the thin line of men-at-arms came the peasant militia. They had armour and some discipline now, but were far outclassed compared to proper killers. Christos watched militia men crowd in without order, thrusting badly, leaving gaps between themselves, and the Genoese punished every mistake. Men went down in ugly heaps, and those behind tripped over them and died in turn.

The fight above had stalled as well. Christos could hear it on the scaffolding overhead. The Theodorans who had stormed the ramps had not been thrown back, but neither were they breaking through.

He could feel it in his gut then, that sick, sinking dread no man wanted to name. The assault was slipping away from them, and somewhere beyond all this, the relief force was coming for them.

He turned to shout, to drag more men forward, and in that instant of distraction, a spear punched into his side, sending him crashing to the ground.

Lying there in the mud, with the fight raging above and around him, he could not help the bitter thought that came.

It was hopeless.

A half-starved, tired rabble of peasants couldn’t break disciplined elites head-on, no matter how brave they appeared.

Christos hung his head and stared at the dirt.

It looked too much like the churned, earthy foam of Kalamita Hills, where he had seen Leonidas lying still, all life gone from him. The same mud. The same filth. The same stupid, ugly ground that swallowed good men and kept the wrong ones breathing.

If Leonidas had been here instead of him, they might have had a chance.

That was the thought that kept circling back through all of his sleepless nights. Leonidas had fallen, and Christos had lived. It made no sense. None at all.

He’d moved past the frozen grief, made himself do the work. To honour his memory. But he had never found a way to make it make sense. That someone like that titan, someone he modeled himself after, had died without doing anything. Was that all he wanted to be? Did it matter what he did at all?

“Goddamnit.”

The word came out weak. Drops of sweat fell from his brow and spattered into the muck beneath him. The world seemed to tilt and sink, the noise of battle pulling farther away as though he were already being swallowed down into the mud.

Then a hand seized him hard and yanked him back.

“Get up, you fuckin’ idiot.”

The voice was rough, boyish, full of anger. Christos lifted his head and found Kratos glaring down at him, face twisted with fury.

“Don’t you dare fuckin’ give up now,” the younger man snarled.

“It’s over for us,” Christos muttered. “Leonidas. If he were here…” His voice trailed off.

Kratos glanced around at the slaughter hemming them in on every side, then looked back at him with open disgust. “You picked now to do this?” he demanded. “Now?”

Christos had no answer.

“If Leonidas were here,” Kratos snapped, crouching lower, “he’d whoop your sorry ass till it looked like somethin’ with a spine.”

Then he caught Christos by the chin and jerked his head up hard. Christos was too spent to fight him off.

“Leonidas is dead,” Kratos said.

He said it brutally, with no softness in it at all.

“War ain’t fair. It ain’t choosy either. Saints die same as bastards. Life’s no better. It’s a shit pile of mistakes and regrets.” His grip tightened, nails digging into Christos’s chin. “I’ve wondered plenty why a rotten little shit like me crawled out alive and not Agapios. He had dreams. He had hope. Me? I’ve got a black lump of hate sittin’ in my chest.”

Christos saw the hollow hurt in the boy’s eyes, and the flinty stubbornness that told it to fuck off.

Kratos let go and rose to his feet.

“Just because it ain’t right don’t mean I’ll stop livin’,” he said, breathing hard. “I’ll claw and bite and drag myself through another second, then another. Even if I had nothin’ left to live for, they did.” His face hardened again, turning his angry snarl towards the enemy line. “So I’ll live for them.”

And with that he broke into a sprint, charging toward the Genoese with a madman’s howl.

Christos stared after him as the skinny boy shoved his way back toward the front. He looked hopelessly outmatched against the mailed Genoese ahead, but he did not seem to care in the slightest. He fought like a man who had already made peace with death and meant to spite it anyway.

Christos looked down at his burnt hands.

They were rough, blunt things, thick with old callus and new blood, the sort of hands made for hauling, hammering, killing. He had chosen this path. No one had dragged him to it in chains. When the Captain had spoken to him after the Giant’s Tear, he had been warned well enough what this road would cost. Men would die. Good men. Friends.

And he still chose to walk it.

Slowly, Christos clenched his fists, savouring the sharp burn.

There was no dragging the dead back. No rage, no tears would change that. He would carry them with him for the rest of his life. That was the price.

But to lie here in the mud, drowning in grief while the living bled around him? None of them would have wanted that. Not Leonidas least of all.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

The sound tore out of Christos like something dragged from the pit of his belly. With a great, staggering surge of strength, he forced himself upright. He rose like some wounded giant from the earth, one hand dragging up his glaive, boots stomping forward through blood and broken timber as he shoved past faltering Theodorans to reach the front again.

His side burned where the spear had struck him. Warm blood ran down his hip beneath the armour. Every few paces he felt as though his legs might buckle under him, but he kept going. It hurt to breathe. It hurt worse to shout. So he shouted anyway, louder than he thought he had strength left for.

He swung the glaive in a great, brutal arc.

The heavy blade crashed against the forward hedge of spears, shearing through a pair of heads and knocking others wildly aside. The Genoese line recoiled for a moment, more from the force of the blow than the damage itself.

“Form up!” Christos bellowed. “Form the fuck up!”

Men turned at the sound of him.

Kratos, still fighting like a mad dog near the front, glanced back over one shoulder. A dangerous grin spread across his face at the sight of Christos standing again, bloodied and roaring. Christos found the same grin pulling at his own mouth.

“We’re not finished yet!” he roared.

He shoved a wavering militiaman by the shoulder and planted him back into place. Dragged another into the line by the scruff of his neck. It was ugly work, but ugly was all they had. They were not polished men-at-arms. They would not beat the Genoese with better swordplay or finer drill. All dirty peasants like them could offer was stubbornness and the refusal to give ground.

And, little by little, that began to matter.

The line tightened, not into anything a noble captain would have admired, perhaps, but into something that could hold. Christos anchored the center by sheer bulk, battering away spearpoints with the shaft of his glaive and punishing any Genoese who stepped too far ahead of the rest.

The struggle remained hideous. Men died every few breaths, but the Genoese were no longer cutting through them as easily as before. Their advance slowed and their neat wall of discipline began to fray under the constant, ugly pressure of men too desperate to break.

Slowly, so slowly it was almost impossible to see at first, the tide of battle began to shift.

Apostolos had been on the verge of retiring to his tent when the pandemonium began.

It started as a tremor in the enemy camp, a disturbance too large and too sudden to be mistaken for the ordinary churn of an army at dusk. Then came the trumpet, sharp and urgent, cutting through the night like a blade across taut silk.

All around the Genoese lines, men-at-arms began to form up.

“What the-” Michail started beside him, startled enough to lose the rest of the sentence. He leaned forward, squinting through the restless torchglow. “Are they sorting out for a night raid on the Theodorans?”

At first Apostolos had thought the same. It was the natural answer. But the longer he watched, the less it resembled an army preparing to strike and the more it looked like one scrambling to answer a blow already landed.

Men moved not in the measured fashion of soldiers answering a routine order, but with a frantic haste that stripped away military composure. Half-buckled breastplates were dragged into place as their wearers trotted, and helmets were thrust onto heads without ceremony.

“No,” he said, the word leaving him almost as a breath. “No… the Theodorans must be the ones sallying out.” Even as he spoke it, part of him struggled to believe it.

Michail turned sharply to him, and for a brief moment the two exchanged the same incredulous look. To sally out against the Genoese at night, with the field soaked and the army half-starved, was the act of either a genius or a lunatic.

Perhaps, Apostolos thought, the distinction had ceased to matter.

Into that charged lull, a figure seemed to materialize from the shifting ranks like something drawn from the dark itself.

His tattoos were covered, his clothes plain enough to let him vanish among common men if he wished, but Apostolos knew him at once. Some men carried danger about them too naturally to be mistaken for ordinary, however they dressed. And this one was done pretending he was anything but dangerous.

“Arslan.”

Apostolos turned fully to face him, his expression hardening. If the man had come here now, then there was only one reason for it.

“Little cub,” Arslan said, and smiled. The words were soft, almost amused, but there was menace in the drawl.

He gestured toward the uproar spreading through the camp, toward the shouts, the trumpet-calls, the sudden marshaling of armed men.

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

His smile widened then into something unmistakably predatory, all jagged promise and feral delight, the smile of a creature who had scented blood in the dark.

“It is time to hunt.”