‘Companions!’ he roared. ‘These foreigners are more of the same – barbarians who come to take our wealth and our daughters and leave us with nothing but the right to be slaves when our fathers were lords. This mercenary has nothing but his arrogance to sustain him. We have God on our side. Go with God!’
His men roared. The spearmen in the centre – his veterans from his first days – raised gilded helmets on their spearheads and bellowed his name, calling him Imperator.
Duke Andronicus cantered back to his small command group and gestured to his son. ‘We overlap him on both flanks. See to it that your Easterners turn his left so my Hetaeroi can finish him.’
Golden-haired Demetrius saluted smartly. ‘As you say, Pater!’ he shouted cheerily and cantered away to the right.
Kronmir sat comfortably on his horse’s back, watching the distant city gate. ‘It seems to me he is expecting help,’ he said.
‘He is merely arrogant. Galles and Albans – I’ve beaten them both.’ The Duke smiled soberly. ‘That sounds too much like hubris. But with God’s help—’ He looked west, towards his enemies.
The enemy baggage train was rolling forward.
As the Duke watched, walking his horse at the same pace that his marching spearmen were crushing the long grass, he saw the enemy baggage train split into two. There was confusion somewhere in the middle, and he smiled.
The enemy was in the process of dismounting. But their trumpet calls sounded tuneless, and the men at either end of the line were obviously unclear as to what to do. They were still three hundred paces distant, and Duke Andronicus watched his textbook attack roll into the barbarians. He looked to his left – the mercenary knights were drifting to the left, intentionally improving their flanking position and cutting the enemy off from the gate. Ser Bescanon knew his business.
On the right, his son was carefully maintaining the line. He wouldn’t swing wide until the fighting had started. Barbarians never saw anything beyond immediate threat.
Two hundred and seventy-five paces. The capture of his most faithful vicar and two battle icons was annoying, but Andronicus intended to rescue all three before the sun set. The sun was beginning to set now, so if the contest ran longer than an hour the rays would fall in the eyes of his men. A small thing, but the sort of detail that Imperial commanders were careful about.
The last of the barbarians were dismounted. He had to admire the discipline of their horse holders, and he cursed that the barbarians were rich enough to mount every man while the Empire scrabbled to afford a few hundred professional cavalry of their own.
The enemy infantry were archers. He’d known it – but he was still a little surprised by the density of their first volley, especially considering the range.
Men went down.
As his men stolidly marched forward, Andronicus strove to understand what had happened. Men in the armoured infantry had gone down.
The second, third, and fourth volley struck so close together that he lost track. The centre was staggered – it slowed, and the line bowed.
Ser Christos, one of his best officers and the Count of the Infantry, spurred out of the centre, took two arrows on his heavy shield, and still managed to raise his sword. ‘Forward, companions!’ he called, his high-pitched voice carrying like song, and the infantry surged forward, any momentary hesitation forgotten.
‘Now that’s an army,’ said Bad Tom with satisfaction. ‘Good thing irks don’t react like that, eh?’
Three horse lengths in front of Tom, the company archers were grunting and releasing their shafts as fast as they could, and the Imperial infantry were soaking up the volleys on their shields. There were men down, but their huge round shields were three boards thick and formed of leather and bronze as well, and the men behind them were big, tough louts wearing heavy mail or scale, and they were still coming – close enough now that the archers could see their faces.
The Captain looked to the right, where, instead of covering his flank with a wagon wall, he had a snarl of panicked wagoners.
Even as he watched, Mag the seamstress leaped up on a wagon and began to yell at the men around her. She did something hermetical – he felt the odd hollowness that practioners could always sense before another cast – and he saw a wagon freeze in place, horses vibrating like lute strings.
He wished her well, but whatever she did was going to be too late, because five hundred enemy knights were intending to turn that flank.
She’s using a great deal of power, and she’s attracting the enemy magister’s attention.
Shut up, Harmodius! The Captain put a hand to his head. If you make me sick now, we’re lost.
He turned. ‘Tom – there.’ He pointed with his lance.
Bad Tom grinned his mad grin. ‘With me, boys!’ he shouted. He must have seen Sauce, because he said, ‘And girls! Hah! Wedge, now – on me.’
The Captain had a third of the company’s men-at-arms gathered around him – Ser Gavin, Ser Michael, Ser Alcaeus, Ranald and all the Hillmen, and others.
‘Go!’ shouted the Captain.
In a moment he was alone behind the line of archers, and Tom’s wedge was forming, and Mag was still screaming at the men and women of the baggage train.
His hip hurt.
To no one in particular, he said, ‘I’ve fucked this up.’
He backed his horse and turned the plug’s head to look off to his left. There, the wagons had formed better, and Bent already had the end of the line covered by wagon bodies while the wagoners unhitched horses and hitched chains. They’d practised this, but it was obvious they hadn’t practised it enough.
He looked at the oncoming wall of Morean infantry. There were holes in their line, and it looked a little like a waving flag. If he had another hundred men-at-arms, he could—
‘Gelfred!’ he called. ‘Go all the way past Tom’s wedge and do what you can.’
Gelfred’s scouts, well behind his command, were all he had of a reserve. The rest of the men-at-arms and squires were dismounted with the archers.
Off to their front left, ops swelled. He could feel the working emanating from someone very powerful indeed—
Harmodius . . .
I knew you’d need me.
Whatever the enemy cast, it sliced the grass on its way to the archers’ line. Men flinched, and then the great scythe was lifted as if it had never been there. A few men on the left felt an icy cold at their knees, and then they nocked and loosed.
Harmodius gathered power. Harmodius and the Red Knight had a shared problem – they seemed to have tangled whatever matrix of habit and aethereal training allowed them to access ops, so that instead of being two mages with two sets of power, they were two mages at the mercy of one another’s expenditures.
The Captain watched most of his ops crackle off across the scythe-cut grass and crash into the centre block of enemy infantrymen. Men burst into flame. One man stumbled clear, screaming, a horrible parody of a person.
Another flight of arrows hissed into the enemy charge.
They kept coming.
Duke Andronicus could see his line flanking the enemy’s, but he could also see the wagon wall the mercenaries had formed. He turned to Ser Stefanos, his personal champion. ‘To my son. Tell him to ride further around the enemy flank.’
Ser Stefanos saluted and galloped away.
Far off towards the city, Ser Bescanon’s men were starting to trot.
Andronicus began to look for the spot to place his killing blow. ‘Close up, Hetaeroi!’ he called.
The Captain dismounted next to Ser Milus with the standard and Ser Jehan, in the centre of the line. Ser Jehan still had his visor open, although the enemy was only fifty paces away.
‘We’re over-extended, and you were right,’ the Captain said to his senior officer.
Ser Jehan looked at him – a glance of pure disgust that ever so briefly reminded him of his father’s contempt.
He was stung by it.
‘Three more!’
Cully roared.
The last three flights did more damage than all the shafts loosed until then. The Captain had never, in fact, seen his company’s archers loose into men at point-blank range before.
At that range, the arrows went through shields, and men’s bodies. Through light helmets. Through horn scales. Through Wyverns’ hide.
A hundred Morean veterans died with each flight – men who had served for ten or fifteen years. The Duke of Thrake’s best men fell.
The two centre blocks of infantry shuffled, hesitated and were shredded.
On their flanks, the spearmen put their heads down and ran the last few paces into the teeth of the arrow storm.
Duke Andronicus couldn’t believe the evidence of his eyes as his handpicked veterans hesitated and then broke. His position on the right wing limited his line of sight and so he couldn’t see the intensity of the arrow storm, only the result – his centre breaking.
They were the men he’d commanded since he was the most junior centurione in the army, and he left his bodyguard and rode to them, rode among them. ‘On me! On me, companions!’ he roared – and they came. They turned and raised their heads – his men were crying in shame.
Duke Andronicus looked down the path of their charge and saw how few of them were left. ‘Christ Pantokrator,’ he said.
Ser Christos, wearing Gallish plate and mail and well mounted, had six arrows in his horse and two more in his breastplate. Even as Andronicus watched, the horse collapsed, feet rolling high, and the Count of the Infantry took too long to rise.
The barbarians immediately attacked from their centre, where their archery had proven so triumphant.
‘Charge,’ shouted the Captain. He had his sword in his fist and he started forward. Jehan shouted something, but the Captain saw their salvation and all around them archers threw down their bows and plucked out their swords and the dismounted men-at-arms went forward – the Captain ran towards the left. The men in front of him were not the immediate threat.
They caught the enemy infantrymen by surpise in their shielded flank and then all was chaos.
The Red Knight ran full tilt into the flank of the enemy block, hip forgotten. He knocked a man flat at impact, kicked him savagely with an armoured foot, stepped on the man’s shield and broke his arm then lunged with the point of his sword, which went between the scales of the next man’s flank, behind his shield, while he tried to turn and was hampered by the length of his own spear. He took a blow to his head, a spear blow that rocked him, and fell.
He started to rise – a spearshaft rang against his helmet and then he got his left hand on it and pulled, cut down without science, and his blade rang off the man’s helemet and he stepped in and crushed the man’s face with his pommel. To his right, Ser Jehan had cleared a space the length of his pole-hammer. Long Paw was cutting hands from spearshafts, and Ser Milus was using the company banner to shield himself from cuts while he crushed men with a mace. Cully tackled a spearman and Wilful Murder ran the prone man through with his side sword. Kanny fell with a spearpoint through the meat of his right leg, Big Paul died with a spearpoint in his throat, and John le Bailli stepped on his corpse and buried the point of his pole-axe in his killer . . . And as they pressed forward, the enemy infantry flinched back.
Bent’s archers and Ser George Brewe’s men-at-arms charged into the front of the spearmen and they broke.
‘Halt! Halt!’ roared Ser Jehan, while the Red Knight slumped, panting, to his left knee – his hip wouldn’t support him any further. They were far beyond the line of the wagons and just a hundred paces away they could see the enemy commander’s standard as he rallied the remnants of his broken centre.
The Red Knight looked around but Ser Jehan was herding the victors back to their own lines, leaving their dead and wounded intermingled with the enemy.
He got his feet under him, found an abandoned spear, and used it to limp back to their lines. As he turned, he saw the enemy’s knights begin their own charge, into his open right flank.
And his headache began with a pulse that nearly blinded him, as Harmodius cast again.
Andronicus watched his attack fail and, like a farmer who has seen bad weather before, put his head down and kept rallying his men. To his own right he could see his son swinging wide of the enemy wagons. To his left, he watched his own mercenaries begin their charge.
But his son was going too far. Perhaps worried by the flights of arrows, his son’s Easterners had gone off almost half a league in the high grass, and were only now turning their deep hook into the enemy flank.
‘Steady, my friends!’ Andronicus bellowed. ‘Steady! We’re not done yet!’
He looked around for the magister, but the man had stayed with his stradiotes, hundreds of paces away. Andronicus wished the man would do something.
In the aethereal, gouts of power spat back and forth over the battlefield like fireflies on a summer evening – and were extinguished. Aeskepiles had allowed one strike through into the Duke’s precious infantry, but he couldn’t be everywhere, and it was far more difficult to project a deflection than it was to deploy one closer to hand.
His adversary was nimble and subtle, and after attempting too many heavy blows Aeskepiles had to acknowledge that he was facing a peer. He prepared a layered attack, murmuring a reassuring invocation while using one of the rings on his left hand to power what he hoped would be a decisive strike.
In that moment between initiation and action, the enemy’s second magus revealed himself again and laid some kind of complex working – Aeskepiles couldn’t read it, but the potency of the caster caused him to alter his tactics yet again.
Self-protection was always Aeskepiles’s first priority. He raised a layered shield and allowed his own complex attack to dissipate, unpowered.
Bad Tom was the point of the wedge, with almost sixty knights and men-at-arms hastily arrayed behind him – two in the second rank, three in the third, and so on. He watched the enemy knights lower their lances and come forward at a trot, then a canter, and he grinned.
‘That’s more like it,’ he said. He put spurs to his horse.
The wedge emerged from behind the tangle of wagons Mag was trying bring to order out of equine and bovine chaos and turned east towards the charging knights. The ground shook beneath their charge.
The enemy knights had to wheel to face the unexpected threat, and their loose formation began to fall apart.
The right flank archers got several flights into the enemy, and the heavy arrows tore through them, striking the unarmoured rumps of their warhorses. Then Tom put his lance down, tucked his head, and the whole world became the point of his lance and the man in red and gold he had chosen as his target. He roared as his lance struck home, knocking his opponent down, the horse falling sideways, and Tom released his lance – hopelessly tangled in the man’s guts – and took the axe from his pommel as he ducked a lance aimed at him. His axe cut, rose to cover him against the shaft of another lance, and then he was deep into the enemy, past the lance shafts, his axe smashing into them, his battlecry a palpable thing inside his faceplate. He rose in his stirrups, caught a knight unawares with a smashing blow from above that caused the welds in the crown of the helmet to split and his brains to leak out like juices from a split melon. Tom roared joy and his mad laughter rang with his battlecry. Behind him, the picked knights of the company made a hole as large as their wedge, crushing the centre of the enemy charge, and then the wedge split open like a steel bud coming to flower and the enemy mercenaries, pinned between a wagon wall and a madman with an axe, chose the better part of valour and retreated.
Standing on a wagon box, Mag watched the enemy charge develop, tried to cast a single working to force all the horses to her will and lost the thread of it, and then saw the company’s mounted reserve hurl themselves onto the more numerous foe like a palpable salvation. The earth shook. The wagoners hid under their wagons and horses reared and kicked, bit each other – a wagon overturned, panickin
g the teams on either side, and somewhere a boy was screaming.
Somewhere off in the aethereal a familiar voice asked her to channel power and she reponded before she had time to think but Harmodius is dead.
‘Make what terms you can,’ Jehan growled. ‘Now, while we’ve stung them.’
The Red Knight’s armour was covered in dust and his red surcoat was dirty and he had several wounds he could feel. His hip didn’t seem to be broken, but something was very wrong and he couldn’t face mounting. He could see Duke Andronicus, patiently rallying his men.
But Tom had done it – not just held the enemy knights, but beaten them.
He looked off to his left, and saw the enemy flankers far out on the grass.
‘When he comes again, he’ll gut us.’ Ser Jehan had his visor open, and he panted every word. ‘By Saint George, Captain. Perhaps he won’t. But we can’t stop another charge like that.’
The Red Knight looked at his mentor in the art of war and made himself walk to his horse. ‘You have to. We have to. Whatever mistakes I’ve made today, the company held. We have to win this thing. Hold on.’
Jehan spat.
Cully was looking at his bow. ‘Sixteen shafts left, Cap’n,’ he announced.
The Captain eyed his ugly gelding and then with a desperate and inelegant lunge powered by his left leg, managed to get his right leg mostly over the saddle. The horse didn’t revolt – the Captain waited out the moment of agony and then got his arse into the seat and his right foot into the stirrup. He was up.
‘Jehan, you’re in command. I’m going for the Vardariotes. Don’t lose.’ He managed a smile. ‘That’s all I ask.’
The Duke had rallied the infantry line and men had collected their dropped shields and armed themselves. The enemy archers stood in dangerous silence, shafts visible on their bows, but loosing nothing.
The Duke watched the shattered remnants of the mercenary knights organise themselves, but he knew they wouldn’t charge again. They were unpaid, and fickle at best. He could see Ser Bescanon riding towards him across the crushed grass.