"Onward, then," Sharbaraz said with decision. "Once the capital is in our hands, all the realm will come to see who properly belongs at its head."
"Onward," his captains echoed, Abivard among them. As Zal had said, all other choices looked worse-and one more victory would give Sharbaraz Mashiz and all of Makuran. Viewed thus, chances looked good enough to bet on.
Mashiz! Till he had rescued Sharbaraz, Abivard had never imagined seeing the capital of the realm. He had been born on the frontier and expected to live out his life and die there. But now, tiny in the distance but still plain, his eyes picked out the spreading gray mass of the palace of the King of Kings, and not far from it the great shrine to the God: in all the world, only the High Temple in Videssos the city was said to be a match for it.
Seeing the wonders of Mashiz, though, was not the same as entering the city in triumph. Between those wonders and Abivard stood Smerdis' army in a position its leaders had chosen for making a stand. The closer Abivard got to that position, the more his stomach griped him, the more misgiving grew in his mind. By the look of things, no army made up of mere mortals was going to force its way through Smerdis' host. Yet the effort had to be made.
Horns blared. "Forward the archers!" officers cried. Heavy horse, usually the cream of a Makuraner force, could not play its normal role today, for Smerdis' captains, perhaps learning from their failure in the recent battle to the south, had posted unmounted bowmen behind a barrier of stones and dirt and timber. What the lancers could not reach, they could not overwhelm.
And so the horse archers, men wearing leather rather than costly mail and splint armor, rode ahead of the lancers to try to drive Smerdis' infantry back from its sheltering barricade. Shafts flew in both directions. Men and horses screamed as they were pierced. Mounted detachments brought fresh sheaves of arrows from the supply wagons to help the horsemen keep shooting.
Smerdis' barricade did not quite cover the entire width of the approach to Mashiz. The usurper's heavy cavalry waited at either wing. When Sharbaraz's archers were well involved in their duel with the foot soldiers, Smerdis' lancers thundered forth.
In that narrow space, the mounted archers could not stand against the charge of their ironclad foes. Some were speared out of the saddle; more fell back in confusion. But Sharbaraz had been waiting for that. "Forward the lancers!" he cried, a command echoed by his officers and the martial musicians in the army.
At last, the chance to fight, Abivard thought, with something between eagerness and dread. He swung down his lance, booting his horse in the side. The foe he struck never saw him coming; his lance went in just below the fellow's right shoulder. The luckless warrior gave a bubbling scream when Abivard jerked out the lancehead. Blood poured from the wound and from his nose and mouth as he slumped over his horse's neck.
The melee in front of the barricade became general. Smerdis' archers kept shooting into the milling crowd of warriors even though some of them were on their side. All of Smerdis' horsemen and horses in the fight were armored in iron, while many of Sharbaraz's were not, so their arrows remained more likely to hurt foe than friend.
Abivard was in the thick of the melee. "Sharbaraz!" he shouted again and again. Riders on both sides cried out the name of the King of Kings they favored; in such a mixed-up fight, that was the only way to tell Smerdis' backers from those who followed Sharbaraz.
A man yelling "Smerdis!" cut at Abivard. He took the blow on his shield, then returned it. Iron sparked against iron as their swords clanged against each other. They traded strokes until the tide of battle swept them apart.
Little by little, Smerdis' cavalry gave ground, retreating back toward either end of the barricade that sheltered the archers. Some of Sharbaraz's riders raised a cheer. Abivard yelled, too, until he took a good look around the field. Driving those horsemen back meant nothing. As long as the barrier kept Sharbaraz's men from breaking through and advancing on Mashiz, victory remained out of reach.
Sharbaraz's mounted archers went back to trading shafts with Smerdis' foot soldiers. That wouldn't do what needed doing if the battle went on for the next week. As long as those archers held their ground behind the barrier, Sharbaraz's men couldn't get close enough to tear it down. That was what had to happen for victory, but Abivard didn't see how it could.
Sharbaraz had another idea. Pointing to the left of the barrier, he cried, "We'll force our way through there-we have more lancers than Smerdis can throw against us. Then we can take those cursed bowmen in flank instead of banging our heads against their wall."
Horns and yelling officers slowly began to position Sharbaraz's army for the charge he had in mind. Abivard didn't know if it would work, but it held more promise than anything he had come up with himself. He swung almost out of the saddle to grab an unbroken lance that had fallen from someone's hands.
Smerdis' horsemen gathered themselves to withstand the assault. Before the charge was signaled, though, the horns on the right wing of Sharbaraz's host rang out in confused discord. Shouts of dismay and fear rose with the alarmed horn calls. "What's gone wrong now?" Abivard cried, twisting his head to see.
All at once, he understood why Smerdis' army had seemed so light in cavalry. It was light in cavalry, for the usurper's generals had divided it, sending part of the force to emerge from one of the narrow canyons and take Sharbaraz's men in the flank, much as Abivard had done against Smerdis' troops earlier in the civil war.
The results were much the same here, too. The right wing of Sharbaraz's army crumpled. Even Zal, who commanded there, could do little to stem the collapse. And with their enemy in disarray, Smerdis' men, who had been about to receive a charge, made one instead. They shouted with fresh confidence and fury. Sharbaraz also shouted. Fury filled his voice, but not confidence. "Fall back!" he ordered, sounding as if he hated the words. "Fall back and regroup. Rally, by the God, rally! The day may yet be ours."
His men did not give way to panic or despair. Most of them were raw troops who had gone from victory to victory; Abivard had wondered how they would face defeat if ever it came. The answer was what he had hoped but hadn't dared expect-they kept fighting hard.
But fighting hard was not enough. With their line broken on the right, under simultaneous attack from flank and front, they had to retreat and keep retreating so they would not have whole bands of men cut off and captured or slain. After a while, retreat took on a momentum of its own.
Smerdis' men did not push the pursuit as hard as they might have. What point? They had the victory they had needed. Sharbaraz would not parade into Mashiz: Sharbaraz would not go into Mashiz at all, not now. And as soon as word of that spread through Makuran, many who had been sitting on the fence between the two rival Kings of Kings would decide in favor of the man who held the capital.
Three farsangs east of the battlefield, Sharbaraz ordered his men to halt for the night. The bulk of the army, or what was left of it, obeyed, but a flow of men, less than a flood but more than a trickle, kept on streaming east and south. "The first ticks dropping off the horse that fed 'em," Abivard said bitterly.
"Bad choice of metaphor," Sharbaraz answered with the air of someone criticizing a bard's work. "Ticks leave a horse when it's dead, and we still have life in us."
"Aye, Majesty," Abivard said. Inside, though, he wondered how much of Sharbaraz's defiance consisted of keeping up a brave front, maybe more for himself than for anyone else. A lot of it, he feared. A rebel needed win after win until power was his. Now the rightful King of Kings had to be wondering how to rally his men and turn his right to the throne into real possession of it.