The Captain dismounted and put his peridot on a rock. Toby handed him a war hammer and stood by, holding his helmet and lance.
‘If we stay here, I’m going to want a straw hat,’ he said. The sun was hot.
The Moreans came at a trot, right along the road. From time to time, groups of Easterners would break off from the column and ride to look at something, but the column was in a hurry, and crossing safe terrain.
When the enemy vanguard was at short bow shot, the Captain raised his hammer and brought it down smartly on the peridot, which blew apart into a thousand tiny green pieces. The complex phantasm collapsed with the death of the stone, allowing every man covered by the working to see clearly.
Whistles sounded, and the archers nocked.
Before the Red Knight had his aventail over his head, the first flight of livery arrows leaped from his archers’ great white bows. Two hundred bowmen loosed five shafts apiece in rapid succession – most men were drawing their last shaft before the first one hit home.
The arrows struck, and the Morean vanguard disintegrated.
A group of horse bowmen who had ridden clear of the column to investigate the farmhouse were greeted by the combined bolts and shafts of all of Gelfred’s scouts. The survivors drew their bows from the cases at their hips and stood in their stirrups to loose, then turned and bolted for the safety of the main body, loosing further shafts over the rumps of their horses.
The battle was not quite two minutes old when the Red Knight stood in his own stirrups and roared, ‘Mount!’
Expecting the order, most of the archers were already up, as were all the men-at-arms – pages scrambled to find their own mounts after passing horses to their men-at-arms and archers. Inexperience showed; the older pages were ahead of the order and the new ones were behind it, and to the left of centre, in Ser Alcaeus’s lances, there was chaos. The Red Knight couldn’t see what was causing it. Nor could he wait.
‘En avant! ’ he called, and his whole company began to move forward in three mounted ranks, men-at-arms in front, pages to the rear.
The Morean vanguard broke. A third of them were down or dead, and they’d done their job – the ambush hadn’t fallen on the main body.
The company closed up and went forward at a trot – the men-at-arms and squires were mailed leg to steel-clad leg, the line almost three hundred yards long. Gelfred’s huntsmen and scouts went wide to the right, angling towards the rear of the column’s main body.
‘Charge me or don’t,’ muttered the Red Knight, inside his helmet. He had the element of surprise but he was still outnumbered three to one; he needed his opponent to lose his nerve.
As if responding to this challenge, the icons in the centre of the enemy column went up and down, and the enemy column began to unroll – very professionally – from a column to a line, companies cantering to the right and left as the line unfolded.
The Red Knight raised his lance. ‘Halt!’ he roared.
The trumpeter made a noise much like a mating moose – twice – but the company knew what to expect. The line halted. They began to dress, the trailing left centre catching up, the wings unbowing, the centre already dismounting.
To the untrained eye, it looked like a disordered mess.
Tom flipped up his visor. ‘We could ha’e just charged them,’ he said.
The Captain shrugged. At his feet, Wilful Murder was handing his horse to Toby’s replacement, Nell, who got five sets of reins in her skinny little fist and led the brutes out of the line. Wilful got his bow in hand, nocked an arrow, looked left and right, and called, ‘Ready!’
The horses were coming out of the ranks.
More ‘ready!’ calls floated along the morning breeze.
The enemy line was almost formed, and the icons were moving up into the centre.
‘They are damned good,’ the Red Knight said.
Wilful Murder shook his head. ‘Pretty, but no plate armour and no infantry?’ he said. ‘It’s the archer’s dream.’ His questing eye found Bent, far to the right – the master archer raised his bow.
Wilful raised his own bow, saw Cully off to one flank and Bent off to the other.
‘Fast as you can, now, boys,’ he said.
And they loosed.
The end of the fight was messy.
The heavy shafts slaughtered the Moreans, whose charge was shattered before it was fully under way. But the Moreans were veterans of hundreds of fights, and if they had never faced such concerted, disciplined longbow fire before, they had good leaders and long experience of both victory and defeat. The shredded Morean line retired out of bow shot, and reformed. Some few of the Morean stradiotes carried Eastern bows, and they returned a few shafts.
‘Mount,’ said the Captain. He had never dismounted himself. He turned to Bad Tom, who was close at his heels. ‘This time we go right over them. I want to end this; we don’t want that force snapping at our heels tonight.’
Tom grinned and motioned at Ranald, who pumped a fist in the air to show his men that this was it.
Wilful Murder demurred. ‘My lord, I’d give ’em another dose of goosefeather before I put my horse’s head at them. They ain’t broke – look at ’em.’
The Captain watched their adversaries reforming. ‘Men are so much more complicated than facing the creatures of the Wild,’ he said. ‘I want to leave as many of them alive as possible. We’re killing our employers’ taxpayers and soldiers.’
The horse holders were getting a workout – little Nell came shoving by. ‘Take your fucking horse,’ she spat at Wilful, who was standing at the Captain’s horse’s head.
This time Ser Alcaeus’s division was better ordered, and they started forward together.
A hundred paces from the enemy line the Moreans turned and began to ride away, expecting another arrow shower.
‘Charge!’ shouted the Captain.
From a fast trot to a gallop took three strides for a trained horse, and the men-at-arms were off. The trumpeter got the call right, and it rolled on and on – clearly it was the only one he’d really practised.
The Moreans took fifty paces to understand what was happening.
They were out-shot, and out-armoured, and now, all of a sudden, they were going to be out-ridden.
Their discipline came apart. It is almost impossible to rally troops who have already turned their backs on the enemy; it is harder to do it a second time, and even harder when the enemy is already charging with murderous intent. As a result, when the strategos reined in, faced his company about, and launched a counter-charge right at the Red Knight and Mad Tom’s lances, his red and purple clad stradiotes were alone. The rest had scattered, leaning low on their horses’ necks and riding flat out for the safety of the distant hills, or their farms, or the city.
Very few were caught. The heavier Gallish warhorses were lumbering after a hundred paces, and most were down to a canter after two hundred paces.
In the centre, however, the knights came together with the enemy general’s bodyguard with a crash that they could hear in the palace.
The strategos was a small man in heavy scale armour with bright red-dyed hardened leather covering his limbs and hard horn scales over his horse. He couched his lance like a Galle and aimed for the Red Knight, who lowered his own lance in response.
The strategos did not intend a knightly encounter – two paces from impact, his lance dipped, and he plunged his lance tip deep into the Red Knight’s gelding, killing the great animal instantly, but not before the Red Knight’s lance caught in the Morean’s shield rim and ripped him from his saddle. Knight, strategos, and horses all crashed to earth, and the dust rose as the melee spread around them.
Bad Tom unhorsed three Moreans in a row, crushing their leather armour and sending them crashing to the earth until his lance point caught in the mail of his third victim and spiked through it – mail, leather, padded linen, flesh, ribs, and lungs. The man fell, spitted like a capon, and dragged Tom’s lance with him so that
the big man had to let it go. He was turning his horse, drawing his great sword, when he realised that his Captain was nowhere to be seen.
He turned his horse back into the rising dust.
The Red Knight got slowly to one knee and wrenched in a breath. The fall had taken him by surprise and he’d screamed as he struck a rock – only his back armour had saved him from a boken hip or spine. His sword was gone, his belt snapped in the fall.
He realised that his purse was under his foot, and his roundel dagger, a knife like a short iron spike, was strapped to it. He got it in his right fist. Then, peering through the dust and the slits of his visor, he searched for his sword as horses pounded past him in both directions and the rising dust choked him. He only had moments – there were hoof beats all around him, and the kettlepot rattling sound of a hundred men in armour beating away at each other with swords.
He pushed with his right leg and got his feet under him. A spike of cold pain pulsed in his right hip.
The Morean strategos came out of the dust like the inevitable villain of a romance. He had a heavy short sword in his right fist and a scarred shield with a beautifully painted figure of the Virgin Mary on his left arm.
‘Yield,’ shouted the Red Knight in High Archaic.
The strategos stopped. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘Your army is beaten. Yield.’ The Red Knight flexed his hip carefully like a man testing a bad tooth. It wasn’t good.
No, there’s nothing I can do.
Thanks for that, old man.
A few feet away Ser Jehan hacked one of the icon bearers to the ground, swinging his long sword over and over into the man’s guard until he slipped and took the sword in his unarmoured face.
‘Heretic barbarian!’ the strategos shouted. ‘I am Michael Tzoukes. My ancestors fought the infidel and the irk when yours lived in straw huts and worshipped idols. I will not yield to you.’
The Red Knight sighed and stepped forward into the guard called ‘All gates are iron’. He crossed his wrists, held his dagger reversed in his right hand and grabbed it by the tip with his left. The roundel was a foot and a half long, triangular in cross section, and had steel rounds which neatly filled the top and bottom of his closed and armoured fist, making the hand a single, seamless steel surface to an enemy blade.
The dust of the melee was settling and sight lines were improving. The Moreans were utterly beaten – routed or, in the centre, smashed flat. More than a dozen of the Red Knight’s men-at-arms were closing in on the strategos.
They were still six feet apart. The Red Knight stepped back, tried and failed to open his visor and got a nasty pain in the back of his right leg for his trouble. He had to shout from within his helmet.
‘Stay back,’ he managed.
The strategos looked around him, growled, and leaped. His heavy sword fell like a lightning bolt—
—onto the Red Knight’s crossed hands and the steel bar that was his dagger. Cursing his hip, the Red Knight powered forward, slipped the dagger from his left hand for a moment, caught his opponent’s blade, and rolled on his hips – a sudden and unintended intake of breath and a stumble marked how much pain the hip could cause – before he uncrossed his hands, stripping the sword from the Morean and breaking the man’s elbow in a single fluid movement.
Ruthless to his own hip and to his opponent alike, the Red Knight stepped in again, holding the man by his broken arm, and rolled him – put a foot between his armoured legs and forced him to the ground through pain and the power of his leg lock – against his own steel-clad legs.
‘Yield,’ said the Red Knight, panting with pain and trying his level best to hide it.
‘I yield,’ spat the Morean.
Ser Alcaeus took charge of the Morean prisoners while the archers brutally and efficiently looted the Morean camp. The Captain said they had one hour and none of them intended to leave a single silver solidi behind. Trunks were dumped, clothes slit, tents thrown down.
Ser Alcaeus had the forethought to inform the Captain that the women in the camp were probably the wives of stradiotes and not trulls. The men-at-arms, under Sauce’s command, rounded them up and penned them where the Moreans’ spare horses had, until a few minutes before, been kept. If the women saw this as a merciful release from the threat of rape and violent death, they didn’t show any thanks. Rather they screamed, heckled, and cursed. Luckily, very few of the men-at-arms spoke any Archaic.
The company took all of the carts and animals.
The Captain was almost the only man who was injured. He tried to bite down on the pain, and he soaked up the strong sunlight and filtered through his newfound medical workings, trying to use it to heal the injury, but either he was doing something wrong or it was getting worse.
‘Trust you to find a good fight in the middle of a wasted day,’ said Bad Tom. ‘That was pitiful. I want to go back to fighting the Wild.’
‘Tom, we were outnumbered three to one. What do you want? We surprised them. I doubt we’ll be so lucky again.’ The Captain winced.
‘He put a lance in your horse, eh? Smart.’ Tom grinned. ‘Nasty fall. You weren’t ready for that.’
‘Clean against the laws of chivalry,’ Michael said. ‘Here, I just looted some really good white wine.’
‘I don’t think yon have quite the same laws,’ Tom said.
‘Did you have to break his arm?’ asked Michael.
‘He was trying to kill me,’ said the Captain.
Tom laughed.
When the hour was up, the company marched west around the walls accompanied by a hundred prisoners and twenty new carts, chased by nothing but the imprecations of a thousand unexpectedly destitute women.
The road was excellent, but it was still late afternoon when the company came in sight of the Duke of Thrake’s main army, drawn up in battle order facing the Gate of Ares. The Moreans weren’t taken completely unaware, and even as the Red Knight’s battle line, formed up a mile away on the move, came over the low ridge that faced the ancient field, the Morean army was wheeling back, giving ground to avoid being outflanked.
The Morean line was three times the length of the company’s line, and deeper. The Duke of Thrake had four good companies of infantry, with armour, long spears, and archers in the fifth and sixth rank, and they filled the centre of his line. He had heavy Alban-style men-at-arms on his left, and stradiotes flanked by Easterners on his right.
The Despot’s company of Easterners flowed further and further to the right, out on to the apparently limitless grass of the Field of Ares, galloping around the company’s flank. In response, the company formed a shallow box with the baggage in the centre.
‘I can feel their magister,’ the Captain said to no one in particular.
Ser Jehan trotted over. ‘We need to retire and secure one of our flanks,’ he said.
‘We should give them some ash shafts and then charge ’em,’ said Ser Thomas.
The Captain rose in his stirrups and his hip screamed in protest. His ugly, borrowed horse assumed that he was at liberty to rid himself of an unwelcome rider and did a four-footed bound, which the Captain reined in savagely.
Ser Jehan coughed. ‘Captain, the men are tired, we have already faced one action today, and the enemy is both more numerous and well armed and trained. I would like to respectifully suggest—’
Tom spat. ‘Fuck that. We can take them.’
Jehan narrowed his eyes. ‘Tom, you ain’t as smart as you think you are. This is foolery. Mayhap we can win. Put a lot of our boys in the dust – and what for?’
‘The Vardariotes will come into his flank and just like that, the campaign is won,’ the Captain said.
‘Or they don’t and we get gutted. Who cares? We’re paid the same either way. Christ on the cross – we’re mercenaries. What got into you two? Retire now and tomorrow we’ll drive him off with these whatever-you-call-them on our flanks.’
The Captain looked through him. ‘We’ll use the wagons to cover our flanks. Adva
nce.’
‘You just want to say you’ve won two battles in a day, you arrogant pup. And men will die for your – your—’ Jehan was splutting with professioanl rage.
Tom laughed. ‘He’s a loon, right enough. Save your breath to cool your porridge, boyo. We’re going to fight.’
‘Look!’ shouted the Despot. He leaned out over the neck of his horse and pointed at the enemy. ‘He has both of our icons! Tzoukes has betrayed us!’
The Duke had not won every battle of his career, and he smelled a rat. He rose in his stirrups. ‘That’s crap. And saying such things aloud does you no credit.’ He looked under his hand at the glittering, steel-clad ranks of his new adversaries. The Vardariotes had thus far remained safely inside the gates of the city.
The magister began to raise power. The ops was rippled and strained. He was not the only workman in this brickyard, and the wound he’d taken from the Emperor’s spymaster and bodyguard was a distraction that weakened his casting. ‘They have a powerful mage with them,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘By the crucified Christ, my lord – they have two.’ He breathed, and then spoke as if he’d run a race. ‘No, four. Perhaps five— Parthenos, my lord!’
‘He beat Tzoukes and he has another force. He’s not showing me all his spears,’ the Duke said. ‘Nonetheless, he’s a barbarian and we are not. Let’s push him.’ He waved to his banner bearers. The trumpeters had horns made of wild aurochs, and they raised them, and the horns echoed like the cries of Wild creatures.
The Morean army marched. Their dressing was impressive – their own mercenary knights on the left, the five big blocks of infantry in the centre, and the Duke and his stradiotes on the right, with a thin second line a few hundred yards behind – mostly ill-mounted men and camp guards, but a second line nonetheless.
The army was small enough for a short speech so he rode to the centre of his line, tilted his steel cap back on his head, and stood in his stirrups.