I set off down the hill, the others following, as murmurs spread throughout the army, soldiers wondering aloud what we were doing now. We’d told only our General; Feltock needed to know so that he could keep them from chasing after us. We couldn’t take a chance that word of what we planned might reach the other side. For this to work, it had to come out of the blue, leaving no chance for Morn to devise any counter-move.
The first inkling either side had that something had changed, that today wouldn’t simply begin with two armies charging at each other once again, was when Nehra brought forward one of her Bardatti singers. The girl looked barely thirteen, but she wore her troubadour’s colours proudly. She stood up on the hill and opened her mouth to sing the first notes of a song no Tristian had ever sung. Well, except for Brasti, sort of. It was called ‘Seven for a Thousand’, and as first our soldiers and then the Avareans across the field looked up in wonder, the people I loved best in the world joined me in a final act of reckless daring to fulfil not the heroic tales of our own people, but those of our enemy..
‘Any final commands, First Cantor?’ Brasti asked, his bow in hand and an arrow at the ready.
‘Just one,’ I replied, as the seven of us set off at a run straight for the four thousand warriors across the field. ‘Don’t die.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
The War of Seven
It took the Avareans a few seconds to understand what was happening, but when they did, it was as if the very ground beneath our feet was coming apart, cracked open by the strange, almost obscene mix of rage and joy we’d aroused in them. As the Bardatti musicians took up the song, the pipes and horns on the melody, the drummers pounding the fierce beat and the guitarists strumming so loud I could hear them echoing across the field, the horde watching from the cliff-top above cheered so loudly I thought the entire mountain would fall beneath them.
Soon the rest of Nehra’s war singers had joined in, stacking harmony upon harmony, their voices rising above the instruments, intermingling and stirring all of us as if we too were strings to be plucked by their nimble hands. However many centuries the song had been sung in Avares, surely it had never been performed like this.
Soon even Morn’s warriors were shaking their fists and raising their weapons, their faces taking on fierce, proud grins even as a thousand of them came for us.
We had shown them the kind of respect that they had never anticipated from us, but one they understood, and they were going to return it in kind.
Now we just needed to survive – not for long, just long enough.
The first problem, of course, was the difference in terrain. ‘Seven for a Thousand’ told the tale of the small, half-starved band of Avareans who’d held a mountain pass near the Western Sea against the thousand soldiers who’d come from across the water intending to raid their lands. The pass in question was narrow – barely six feet across – with seventy-foot cliffs on either side, which meant no more than twenty of the enemy could attack them at one time. Since the field upon which we fought was rather barren, save for the few outcroppings of rock we’d already marked, Kest, Brasti, Valiana, Ethalia, Darriana, Quil and I had to pretend there were cliff walls on either side of us, and hope the Avareans would do the same.
Come on, you bastards, I thought, as the seven of us stood there while the enemy charged at us. Show me how much you hold to your songs and legends. Show the horde above your rokhan.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Quil said in awe. ‘I think they’re—’
Her words were cut off when an Avarean axe came spinning in the air towards her, but Kest’s shield went up and the axe blade bit into it and got no further. But she was right.
Suddenly the Avareans were upon us, and there was no more time for words, no more time for anything except this one last fight, this final act of defiance the seven of us performed in the name of a King long dead, of his daughter taken too soon, and of the dream that had been the Greatcoats.
‘Nuria,’ Brasti said, firing an arrow in the name of the daughter of a woman who’d died in the infirmary last night. ‘Lida. Iphissa.’ I couldn’t tell how he knew which names were carved into each arrow he nocked and fired at the enemy, but perhaps he’d simply memorised them all and called each out in turn, regardless of which arrow was in his hand at that moment.
Quillata fought in a heavy-handed style, swinging her longsword to help keep as many of the Avareans at bay at one time as she could while Darriana and I used our lighter weapons to deliver thrusts and lunges that sent warriors falling to the ground until they were stacked like cordwood and their fellow Avareans were forced to push them aside to get to us. Ethalia fought beside me, using her sticks with surprising grace and speed. Her blows never killed – that wasn’t her way – but they broke noses and sent blood into men’s eyes, blinding them and making them as much a danger to their own fellows as to us.
‘Falcio . . .’ Kest warned, ‘it needs to happen soon.’
‘It will,’ I promised. After all, it wasn’t as if he’d be able to say I told you so if I turned out to be wrong.
We were relying heavily on Kest’s speed and skill with his shield, blocking the arrows and spears that came hurtling our way. The Avareans were going half-mad with joy and bloodthirst, and those with bows were shooting more of their arrows into their own men than at us. Some got through, though; Quil was the first to take an arrow, when the bone plates in her coat failed to block the narrow point; it stuck in her left shoulder, rendering that arm useless. Of course she continued to fight with the longsword in her right hand.
It wouldn’t be long now, but we needed more time. ‘Valiana,’ I said, ‘it has to be now.’
Even as she batted away a spear coming for her, she glanced at me uncertainly. ‘Falcio, I don’t know if—’
‘Do it,’ Kest said. He was the only one who had some sense of what we were asking of her. ‘I will watch over you. Let the red flow.’
Kest had been dealing with the Saint’s Fever and not the Adoracia fidelis which was still coursing through Valiana’s veins, but the effect was not dissimilar. The instant she let the adoracia take over, you could see the red rage inside her eyes. Suddenly the heavy blade she’d brought with her looked almost too light in her hands and within seconds she was cutting into our enemies with so much speed and force that the first man barely had time to see that he’d lost his left arm at the shoulder before Valiana took his head. Again and again she swung without regard for the Avareans’ armour or weapons, oblivious to everything around her. It was enough to shake the confidence even of the war-mad Avareans, but before long they began focusing their attacks on her.
‘Kest!’ I shouted as an archer from their rear took aim.
‘I see it.’ He leaped up high, just to Valiana’s right and raised his shield over her head, but even as he deflected the arrow, Kest had to spin away – in Valiana’s uncontrolled rage she’d nearly sliced him with her blade.