Idrian fought the urge to race down that hill and engage them. They weren’t his responsibility.
Someone was shouting at him, and he dug the wax from his ears long enough to hear Halfwing say, “The south battery has gone quiet! There’s no communication!”
Idrian swallowed a lump in his throat, exchanged a glance with Tadeas, and then leapt from the commander’s dugout. He ran around to a spot on the back of the hill, well behind his own artillery. A thousand National Guardsmen reinforcements waited just down the slope in loose formation, probably praying they wouldn’t have to actually see combat today. From here Idrian could see across the four other hilltops that made up the core of the Ossan defense. Each had an artillery battery, and the center hilltop was marked by the large Foreign Legion flag with another, smaller flag showing General Stavri’s silic sigil.
It wasn’t that that concerned him. The farthest hill, way out on the southern flank of the Ossan defense nearly a mile away, was swarming with cuirassiers and dragoons wearing the blue and green of Kerite’s mercenary company. The standards had fallen, the artillery battery overwhelmed even as the battle had only just begun. No doubt they had been hit by the same flanking maneuver as the Ironhorns, and had been less prepared for it.
Idrian’s heart was in his throat. He turned to sprint back to Tadeas only to come up short. Around that same copse that had screened the earlier dragoons came Grent cuirassiers, the thunder of their hooves lost beneath the sound of Idrian’s own artillery. There were at least six hundred of them and they were coming hard, but not to the position their fellow cavalry had already tested. They were headed straight toward the poorly trained, poorly prepared National Guard reserves. If they fled, there would be no one to protect the rear of the hill, where Mika hadn’t planted any mines and the earthen fortifications were few.
“Tadeas!” Idrian shouted between cannon blasts. “Look to your rear!”
He didn’t wait for orders, acting on pure instinct, knowing that a single moment of hesitation would cost him his courage. He could see the National Guard officers trying to form up their troops to meet a cavalry charge, though half of them didn’t even have their bayonets fixed. The National Guard wavered.
Idrian’s feet barely touched the ground, eating up the yards, pushing himself harder and harder lest the reserves break before he could even reach them.
“National Guard, with me!” he roared, the words tearing his throat raw. He was close to their position now, and he angled himself to take the cuirassiers head-on. The ground shook from their charge and they seemed to be a wall of horses, men, and glinting breastplates adorned with blue hammerglass and the orange streamers of the Grent ducal house.
What could one breacher do to arrest that charge? But he did not stop. He could not afford to. He was the Ram, and if he relented then good soldiers would die.
He leapt the front line, coming up even with the riders for half a second, his shield clipping a cuirassier on his left and tearing her from her horse while his sword dipped and cut a jagged swath through man and horse on his right. He landed, rolled out of the way of charging hooves, then thrust out his sword like a stick through the spokes of a wagon wheel. It was a chaotic, bloody dance as he darted between the stampeding animals. He dodged horses, ducked swords, and threw himself out of the way of a lance. All the while his own sword dipped and swayed, slicing through anything that came within reach – extended arms, legs in the stirrups, and horse legs. Lots of horse legs, vivisecting themselves on his razorglass with little actual effort on his part.
The screaming of horses would stay with him for weeks. It always did.
As suddenly as the charge had arrived, it was past him, and Idrian found himself standing in the center of a bloody charnel house of the dead and dying. There were dozens of fallen cavalry around him, but was that enough? He swung around to find that the cuirassiers had hit the National Guardsmen as intended. But their charge had hesitated, the heart cut out of it, and despite the guardsmen’s disarray they had managed to keep the cuirassiers from cracking them entirely. Even as Idrian watched, the cuirassiers slowed, stopped, and then began to pull back.
They found him waiting for them, and he made them pay for their flanking gambit. By the time they had fully disengaged, less than half of them remained – and those took further losses, as over a hundred of the Ironhorns had come to Idrian’s aid. The Ironhorns marched in a tight square, rotating musketmen firing on the retreating cavalry.
Idrian found Valient in the center of the square, but his fellow captain just waved him on. “I’ll make sure the National Guardsmen hold!” Valient shouted. “Get back to Tadeas!”
Idrian did as he was told, and it didn’t take more than a glance as he joined Tadeas in the commander’s dugout to see that everything had gone wrong. The Ossan front lines … simply didn’t exist anymore. The Grent and their infantry had rolled right over them, and the secondary line, and the tertiary. Ossan soldiers fled openly, running up the hill toward the Ironhorns or across the open valley on their flank, where the fools would be run down by what remained of those cuirassiers. He couldn’t even see the brightly embroidered black uniforms of any Ossan glassdancers left down there.
Tadeas stared at Idrian’s gore-soaked armor without comment. “Just got signals from General Stavri,” he said coolly. “Both southern batteries have fallen and he’s being hard-pressed. He’s ordered us to hitch up the artillery and withdraw immediately.”
“Already?” Idrian breathed, hearing the wondrous despair in his own voice. The Foreign Legion was not some slouching provincial force. They were the best soldiers in the world, and they’d just been absolutely destroyed by a couple of Grent brigades and an equal number of foreign mercenaries. Not even at his most pessimistic had he imagined this going so badly. “If we pull out now,” Idrian said, pointing his sword down the hill, “every man and woman of ours down there will be dead by midnight.”
“We’re to take great pains to save the artillery pieces,” Tadeas said.
“Piss on the artillery pieces. What about the glassdamned soldiers?”
“Agreed.” Tadeas swung around, barking orders. “Kess, get our standard up to the top of the hill! As high as you can get it, and wave it like your glassdamned life depends on it! Halfwing, switch to grapeshot and put it just over our heads. Just over, hear me? I want our comrades to feel the breeze in their hair. Dristus, tell Valient to get his ass back here and to bring those National Guard reserves with him!”
Idrian watched the soldiers snap to their orders and then turned his gaze on Tadeas. Tadeas squared his jaw, inhaling sharply as he looked down at the swiftly collapsing battlefield. He said, “We form a wedge around the artillery and we get everyone we can inside that wedge, then we withdraw at our leisure. Understand?”
“Understood,” Idrian said, taking a shaky breath and looking down at the Grent breachers now coming up the slope, knee-deep in the gore from slaughtering fleeing Ossan infantry. “I’ll buy us time.”
“Sir,” Braileer called, “if you go down there, you might not come back.”
“That’s my job, armorer,” Idrian replied. “Horns ready, hooves steady. Give me some noise.”
“Ironhorns!” Tadeas shouted. “We have the Ram!”
“We have the Ram!” Mika repeated from her spot with the engineers.
“We have the Ram!” someone shouted. The call was repeated up and down the line until it became a chant. “Os-sa! Os-sa! Os-sa!”