Fallen Eagle Chapter 90: A Shit Pile of Mistakes and Regrets

3rd Week of May, 1460

They sallied out into a world burning at their backs.

Across the river, the forest burned in a ravening inferno that seed 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 ornant and left behind the crude iron beneath. In many ways, his ti 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 ti he had tried precisely that. By losing himself in pageantry, in gallant displays, in tournants that would have seed a child’s jest compared to those of his holand.

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 das 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 ti one of the n 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 n 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 movent on the western side of the formation. A dozen of their n, 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 bla them.

They had marched the length of the Principality, fought hard at Kalamita Hills, endured bombardnt, harassnt, hunger, and fear, all for a Prince most of them had never once laid eyes upon. There was only so far honour could sustain n 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 bla 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.

Monts 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 n.

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. n who had not realized anyone was breaking looked on in stunned disbelief, while those who had been weighing the sa 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. So discipline had been hamred into the host over the past weeks, but beneath the drills and shouted orders they still thought like farrs more than soldiers. One had to expect cowardice to flare up now and then.

Their advance had always been ant to move as a single, solid block, with the heavy pavises framing the front and offering what little shelter they could as the n 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 ti 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 beco 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 n 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 n in good armour, and it quickly beca 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, n 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 ti, 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. Hemd inside their camp, the Theodorans did not need every man they had repairing their walls from the Genoese bombardnt, 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. n 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 hamred into the ground. At a signal, the n 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 mont.

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 n 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 helt for the cri 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 ti, 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 n shouted right before the second horse went down under the hail.

The strain nearly doubled. The wagon lurched, slowed, and for one dreadful mont 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 ti 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!” sobody bellowed.

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

Christos had no idea what they had soaked the stuff in, only that it was so 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 n on the battlents 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 n 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 n 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 n 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 n set to the next part. They hauled leather bellows from a lower compartnt 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 sothing 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 n worked the bellows hard, feeding air into the smouldering bed until the timber began to darken and hiss. The Italians had sared the wall in a coating to keep it from catching fla, so fire tactics were left by the wayside.

Funnily enough, though, that also ant 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.

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

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

Two buckets were thrown onto the smouldering patch, and the air itself seed to crack. Steam and smoke burst out in a violent hiss, and n 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 hamr 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 n 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 hamrs. 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 ca down, knocking ash loose and nearly crashing into the wagon, n had to be dragged out of the way in the nick of ti. The broken logs landed among them like the limbs of so wounded beast, heavy enough to pulp a man flat if he was too slow.

There was no ti 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. n leaned into the work with savage urgency. They all knew they were on a ti limit.

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

The Genoese understood that sothing was being done at the base of the wall, and now they poured down everything they had to stop it. n 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. n caught his aning and dragged the heavy shields together over the workers’ heads, making a rough slanted roof while bolts slamd into the wood above with ugly, splintering thuds. More n 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 hamrblow.

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 slamd over the crest of the palisade.

Crown Guard veterans ca surging across in pairs and triplets, ard 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 battlents. Through the black haze, Christos glimpsed crossbown caught flat-footed by the sudden assault. n 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 lee. The Genoese were driven back from the parapet by the sheer press of n 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 hamred 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!”

n sprang to him, set their shoulders to the blackened log, and quickly understood what he ant. 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 equipnt 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 n 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 seed to matter the most.

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

The timber shuddered. For one hideous instant it seed 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. n 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 ca 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!” soone 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 t 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 ca 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. n ca surging toward it from every direction, trying to plug the gap with their own bodies before more Theodorans could pour through. The press was imdiate 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 n, boots slipping in the mud and broken timber underfoot.

All around him, the fight beca close and ugly.

There was no room for elegance. n 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 n who had found firing angles from above, but not many did, and Christos could see why. The fight on the upper walkways had turned grueso in its own right. The Crown Guard veterans who had co 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 crossbown 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 soone trained from youth, and did not waste ti shouting. He ca straight at Christos and swung.

Christos barely got the shaft of the glaive across in ti. 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 ca in for another overhead cut, thinking he had him. But this ti Christos did not try to et 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 ca. 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 hamrs had broken the wall apart.

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

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

Italian officers and veterans dragged the disorder into shape, hauling n 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, thodical 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 n, but they had withstood the brunt of the assault’s punishing start and were tiring.

Behind the thin line of n-at-arms ca the peasant militia. They had armour and so discipline now, but were far outclassed compared to proper killers. Christos watched militia n crowd in without order, thrusting badly, leaving gaps between themselves, and the Genoese punished every mistake. n 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 stord 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 na. The assault was slipping away from them, and sowhere beyond all this, the relief force was coming for them.

He turned to shout, to drag more n 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 ca.

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 sa mud. The sa filth. The sa stupid, ugly ground that swallowed good n 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 mory. But he had never found a way to make it make sense. That soone like that titan, soone 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 ca out weak. Drops of sweat fell from his brow and spattered into the muck beneath him. The world seed 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 sothin’ 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 sa 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 crawled out alive and not Agapios. He had dreams. He had hope. ? 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 an 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 ant 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, hamring, 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. n would die. Good n. 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 sothing dragged from the pit of his belly. With a great, staggering surge of strength, he forced himself upright. He rose like so 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 mont, more from the force of the blow than the damage itself.

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

n 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 sa 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 n-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 sothing 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. n 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 n 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 ca the trumpet, sharp and urgent, cutting through the night like a blade across taut silk.

All around the Genoese lines, n-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 sa. 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.

n moved not in the asured 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 helts 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 mont the two exchanged the sa 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 seed to materialize from the shifting ranks like sothing drawn from the dark itself.

His tattoos were covered, his clothes plain enough to let him vanish among common n if he wished, but Apostolos knew him at once. So n 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 co 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 nace in the drawl.

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

“You know what this ans, don’t you?”

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

“It is ti to hunt.”