These were very different circumstances, however, it had to be admitted. No one was wearing a sash, not even him. And there was the blood, the corpses, the spreading panic. The unearthly wailing of the Northmen, who were flooding through the gaps between the stones and into the trampled circle of grass at their centre. Virtually a constant press of them now, as far as Wetterlant could see. The difficulty with a ring of standing stones as a defensive position is undoubtedly the gaps between them. The Union line, if you could use the phrase about an improvised clump of soldiers and officers fighting desperately wherever they stood, was bulging back under the pressure, in imminent danger of dissolving all together. Even now men were fleeing for the rear, clutching at wounds or, appallingly, entirely healthy.

Orders. He was in command, and had to give orders. “Er!” he shouted, brandishing his sword. “Er…” It had all happened so very, very fast. What orders would Lord Marshal Varuz have given at a time like this? He had always admired Varuz. Unflappable.

Culfer gave a thin scream. A narrow split had appeared in his shoulder, right down to his chest, splinters of white bone showing through it. Wetterlant wanted to tell him not to scream in a manner so unbefitting of an officer in the King’s Own. A scream like that might be good enough for one of the levy regiments, but in the Sixth he expected a manly roar. Culfer fell gently, blood bubbling from the wound, almost gracefully subsided to the ground, and a large Northman stepped up with an axe in his fist and began to cleave him into pieces.

Wetterlant was vaguely conscious that he should have jumped to the aid of his second-in-command. But he seemed unable to move, fascinated by the Northman’s expression of business-like calm as he hacked Culfer apart. Like a bricklayer getting a difficult piece of wall to fit his high standards. Eventually satisfied by the number of pieces he had made of Culfer, who still, impossibly, seemed to be making a quiet squealing sound, he turned to look at Wetterlant.

The far side of his face was crossed by a giant scar, a bright ball of dead metal in his eye socket. When he saw Wetterlant the ruined side twisted faintly like old leather, but the other broke out in a smile. Not a vicious, menacing, killing smile at all. A beatific, ecstatic smile. A smile of pure joy while behind him men screamed and roared and died, metal flashed and blood flew in spots and sprays against the sky.

Wetterlant ran. There was not the slightest thought involved. His mind was turned off like a candle snuffed out. He ran faster than he had in thirty years or more, faster than he thought a man of his years possibly could have. He sprang between two of the great stones and jolted down the hillside, boots thrashing at the grass, vaguely conscious of other men running all around him, of screams and hisses and threats, of arrows whipping through the air about his head, shoulders itching with the inevitability of death at his back. His foot found a small depression and the shock made his knee buckle. He bit his tongue, flew headlong, wailing, hit the ground and tumbled over and over, no way of stopping himself. He rolled into shadow, slid to an ungainly stop in a shower of leaves, twigs, dirt. It smelled of rotten apples.