The marching song of a Kalaran Legion became discernible across the mountainside.
Gaius turned to face upslope, narrowed his eyes, and raised his right hand above his head. There was a flash, and then a rippling tongue of fire licked up from his fingers. He closed his hand on the hilt of a sword made of stationary flame.
Amara recovered her sword and hurried to his side. Bernard followed suit, setting an arrow to his bow.
In the pass above, a second body of troops appeared-several cohorts of legiotiares, marching together in a swift, cohesive formation. The Kalaran Legion pressed forward at a quick step, moving steadily toward Gaius's blazing blade.
"Stay behind me," Gaius cautioned them. "Directly behind me."
And then, with a cry of challenge, the suicidally outnumbered First Lord and his retainers charged the oncoming Legion.
Chapter 46
In two years of fighting since the Battle of the Elinarch, Marcus and the First Aleran had never seen the Canim resort to the use of their bizarre sorceries. In the absence of other evidence, they had concluded that the enemy's ability to use them had died with Sari and the majority of his ritualist compatriots.
The conclusion was incorrect.
The first shock of the Canim charge was repelled by the massed ranks of the three Aleran Legions. The palisade wall was a light defensive emplacement, as such things were reckoned, but it was critical that the outer wall hold until the engineers could fortify the partial wall remaining around the ruined town at the crown of the hill.
"Now we know why they didn't fortify the ruin," Crassus murmured.
"Why do our work for us?" Marcus grunted. He raised his voice, and shouted, "Third Cohort, dress those ranks!"
The Canim had withdrawn in good order after their first charge, but a second and larger force of raiders was already in position. In two years, Nasaug had drilled his own conscripts into something that resembled an actual military force, and the mass movements of the raiders, which had originally been slow, confused, almost tidal, had become disciplined and precise.
Their armament had changed as well, Marcus noted. They had taken the handheld scything swords (originally harvesting implements, for goodness' sake) the Canim raiders had used and mounted them on thick wooden shafts, effec-tively changing what had been a close-fighting implement into a weapon with far greater reach, one more suited to assaulting a defended position.
Marcus watched the assault coming and felt his heart pounding in fear as the oncoming Canim let out howls and bellowed battle cries. The raiders smashed into the palisade like a living tide of muscle and steel. The Canim raiders fought with far more skill and tenacity than they had at the Battle of the Elinarch, and the new hafted weaponry proved deadly.
Over and over, Marcus saw the same brief, hideous tableau repeated: A Cane raider would swing his hafted scythe overhead and straight down in a smashing, two-handed blow. The tip of the scythe would land hard against the top of a legionare's helmet, and with the power and weight and leverage of a full-sized Cane behind the blow, the tip of the simple weapon would pierce even Aleran steel, straight down through the top of the helmet and into the skull of the doomed legionare beneath.
It was a deadly tactic. The foe could adjust his aim with relative ease, and there was no practical way for a legionare fighting in close formation to dodge the diving tip of the Canim scythes.
Marcus brought his own shield up in time to catch the inner edge of a scythe falling toward his skull, and dropped to one knee. The scythe's edge managed to carve straight down through the steel of his shield, despite the strength of the standard Legion battlecraft that strengthened it. Marcus grunted, summoning strength from the earth to twist the shield, trapping the weapon, and with a powerful blow of his gladius, he parted the wooden haft from the scythe head, drove a wounding blow into the Cane before him, and fell back, trying to clear the weapon head from his shield while another legionare shouldered into his position-and was promptly felled by a falling scythe as the Cane Marcus had wounded was replaced just as swiftly as he had been.
After that, it became a desperate nightmare of a battle. The Legion spears were not long enough to outreach the Canim haft-scythes, and their comparatively slender wooden shafts were easily shattered by the sharpened inner curves of the scythes. The legionares, fighting on raised mounds of earth behind the palisades, fought nearly eye to eye with the Canim, and it did them no favors. The second rank could not press up onto the earthworks and employ their shields to shelter their compatriots in the first rank, and the Legion's favored tactic-the steady press forward with murderous swords thrusting and chopping between miniscule openings in the shieldwall-was simply not an option from the defensive position.
It was, Marcus reflected grimly, a tactic that would have made short work of the Canim. A steady press inside the reach of the Canim haft-scythes would leave the weapons all but useless-but fighting from a static position, the foe's new armament was taking a savage toll on the Legion.
The Canim broke the ranks on the earthworks almost at will, but never pressed their advantage. Why should they? More and more legionares stepped up to fight, and more and more went down, helms shattered. Even the heavily layered shoulders of their body armor could not wholly turn aside the force of a well-swung Canim haft-scythe, and the toll of dead and wounded steadily mounted.
"Sir!" Marcus shouted at Crassus. The young officer was near the front ranks of the battle, and as Marcus watched, he stepped up over a wounded legionare, his face a mask of determination as a Cane swung a haft-scythe in a finishing blow. Crassus's sword lashed out, and the young Citizen's blade shattered the steel of the Canim weapon in one swing and wounded the Cane holding it in another. Crassus seized the fallen man and dragged him back, while other legionares pressed up to take his place.
"Sir!" Marcus screamed. "We've got to press them, sir! We've got to push them back before they cut the men apart!"
"No!" Crassus bellowed. "Hold the line! You hold that wall until the engineers signal us, First Spear!"
Marcus's instincts and experience screamed that Crassus was making the wrong choice-that his naturally conservative tendencies as a commander, which were so ideal in other circumstances, were fatally flawed this day. The First Aleran could ill afford such a mistake in leadership.
But it could afford a loss of unity even less.
"You heard the man!" Marcus bellowed, urging his men forward. "Hold the wall! Hold! Hold!"
He had no idea how much time went by. He was briefly blinded twice- once by the blood of a Cane, and again by the blood of a veteran legionare named Barus. He was once caught off guard by a haft-scythe, and only the raised crest of his centurion's helmet kept him from sharing Barus's fate. The Cane weapon left a deep crease in his shoulder armor, and the straps and edges beneath cut into his flesh, but he kept fighting, kept supporting his men, desperately clearing the wounded from the line and urging fresh legionares into the fight.