He looked the other way and saw an ashen-faced Aeskepiles doing what looked like shadow boxing. He turned away in disgust.
Close at his side, Ser Christos, remounted, shook his fist at the city. ‘Look! Ungrateful fools!’
The Gates of Ares had opened.
Clad in scarlet, mounted on matched bay horses, the Vardariotes were riding out of the city in a compact column of fours.
One scarlet figure detached itself from the enemy and rode, with a single companion, through the sun-drenched late afternoon, raising a line of dust. He met the red column emerging from the iron gates – and was swallowed by it.
The Red Knight rode to the head of the Vardariotes with only his trumpeter for company.
The officer of the Vardariotes was himself an Easterner – with deeply set eyes and leathery skin that had seen the endless winds and sun of the steppes. The man’s kaftan was red silk embroidered in gold flowers and trimmed in dark brown fur, and he carried a magnificently laquered Chin bow in a case that seemed to be made of pure gold, as well as a gold and enamel mace surmounted with a double-headed eagle worked in blued steel.
He smiled and circled his horse, and he and the Red Knight rode all the way around each other like two birds beginning a complex mating dance.
‘Your horse is crap,’ said the Easterner. ‘You have money?’
‘Your horse is beautiful. And I have money.’ The Red Knight turned his borrowed destrier’s head in and rode at the other man, who did the same, so that they met in a mathematical middle.
‘Radi and Vlach watched your little fight from the walls,’ said the little man. ‘You beat the Moreans hours ago. Where have you been?’
‘Looting,’ said the Red Knight. ‘How do you think I can afford to pay you?’
The Easterner snorted. If it was meant to be a laugh, it sounded more like the bark of a dog. ‘Just so you know, Steel Man. We are loyal to our salt. Some of my Aviladhars might choose to be offended that you think we could be bought.’
The Red Knight flipped up his visor. ‘I didn’t offer to buy you. I offered to cover your arrears of pay. Can we get to business? I want to hand the Duke his arse. Where have you been?’
The mace bearer grinned. ‘I’ve been right on the other side of the gate, watching you. You have a lot to learn about war.’ He barked a cruel laugh. ‘But your people are brave like fuck, eh?’ He extended his hand, and they embraced, hand to elbow. The Vardariotes let out a very un-Morean shriek.
‘Call me Zac,’ said the Easterner.
The Red Knight shook his head. ‘Call me Captain,’ he said.
The Easterner grinned. ‘Cap-tan?’ he asked. ‘Strange name. But sure. Listen, Cap-tan. You want us to do something about our cousins, busy riding around your flank?’
The Red Knight stood in his stirrups, looked at the dust and nodded sharply. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Kill them?’ asked the Easterner. ‘Or recruit them?’
The Captain smiled. ‘It could be a busy summer, Zac,’ he said. ‘I’d rather you recruited them.’
‘Sure,’ said Zac. ‘Listen, Cap-tan. We’ll clear them away. What will you do? They have a powerful shaman.’
No argument there, Harmodius said inside the Red Knight’s palace.
More puissant than the mighty Harmodius?
You haven’t seen any lightning strike your knights, have you? I’ll need whatever little reserves of power you have available, if I might.
‘I plan to roll straight forward into bow range, put some arrows into his horses, and make him retreat – now that I can count on my flanks. I’d appreciate your support.’ The Red Knight bowed.
‘Good!’ said the smaller Easterner. ‘I’ll ride around, kill fucking Krulla, who I hate, and then I’ll fall on the Duke’s northern flank, may that fucking traitor rot in the ancient frozen hell of my people. Take good care of our back pay.’ He saluted with his mace, raising the back of his right hand to his forehead in an oddly graceful movement.
‘Krulla?’ asked the Red Knight.
‘My cousin’s brother-in-law, over there pretending to be a great khan. It is a grass matter, not a stone house matter.’ The smaller man smiled, and his eyes twinkled. ‘Then we go back to the city and maybe I sell you a horse. Not a crap horse. Yes?’
‘Sure,’ said the Captain.
The Vardariotes moved like a flock of birds who rise all together from a tree at the approach of a predator. But they were the pack of lions, and not the prey.
Duke Andronicus watched the Vardariotes leap from a stand to a gallop in a dozen strides – flow like water along the back of the enemy box formation, and then fly like an arrow from a particularly powerful bow at his son’s Easterners. The more lightly mounted Easterners turned like a school of fish and fled, hotly pursued by the scarlet-clad Vardariotes.
‘Son of a fucking whore,’ he spat. ‘Marcos! Christos! On me. Kronmir! Take your useless trick-riders and find me a path north and east.’ He backed his horse.
The aurochs horns roared out.
Kronmir turned his horse, so his mount and the Duke’s were nose to tail. ‘You can still beat him,’ he said. ‘If we march away from the city now, we will lose most of our support inside the walls. And we leave—’ He looked both ways. ‘She will benefit at our expense.’
Duke Andronicus shrugged. ‘If I retreat today and I am wrong, I lose nothing. If I fight today and I am wrong, I lose everything. Aeskepiles says this foreigner has powerful sorcery. He’s already beaten Tzoukes. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.’ He looked at the other man. ‘As for that bitch, let her rot. She wanted to stab us in the back? Leave her to it.’
Kronmir fingered his beard. ‘I fear she may have planned it this way.’ He shrugged. ‘We did try to kill her,’ he said quietly. When the Duke had no answer, Kronmir saluted with his whip and led his scouts north, away from the battle lines.
Before the sun settled another finger, Demetrius rode up in a roil of sun-reddened dust and gold hair and gilt armour.
‘We’re retreating?’ he cried.
Duke Andronicus shrugged, suddenly very tired. ‘Look for yourself,’ he said.
His son’s face worked. His skin grew mottled, red and white, and his jaw jutted out like that of a very small boy whose wooden sword has just been taken away by an angry parent.
But he mastered himself with an effort. ‘On your head be it,’ he said.
‘That’s right, boy. When you are Duke – or Emperor – you can make these decisions. But today, I make them. And I say, let’s take ourselves out of here.’ He turned in the saddle. ‘Aeskepiles! Wake up, old man.’
The magister was grey, his ascetic eyes heavily lidded as if he was near sleep.
‘They have blocked my every casting,’ he muttered.
The Duke shook his head. ‘Don’t give me that crap, Aeskepiles. I need a little help. How about a fog?’
Aeskepiles sighed. ‘Not crap, my lord. I’ve made three efforts and failed on each.’
The Despot shook his blond head. ‘Why can we never see these great efforts?’ he asked.
Aeskepiles pursed his lips. ‘Fog,’ he said.
‘Saint Basil and all the phalanx of saints,’ said Lykos Dukas, the Duke’s standard bearer and a veteran of fifty fights. He pointed with his sword.
The Vardariotes were mounted on magnificent blood horses and the Despot’s Easterners had steppe ponies. The better mounted men were, even as Dukas pointed, riding down their enemy, closing on them, catching them.
There was a moment where the two forces met – a swirl of dust, and all of the horses seemed to stop altogether.
Then dust rose, obscuring the whole fight.
Duke Andronicus spat. ‘We have fifteen minutes until they are around our flank and cutting us off from home,’ he said. ‘Lykos, get the wagons moving. Anything that can be saved. Damn it, Aeskepiles, raise me some fog! Conjure the sun from the sky! Make it dark!’
Despot Demetrius put an elbow against his waist and t
urned in the saddle. He was a magnificent horseman, and his body and his horse’s seemed to flow together, as if they were one creature. ‘This flight is unseemly. Let us fight.’
Ser Lykos ignored him and rode for the baggage wagons.
Aeskepiles entered into the cool darkness of his basilica of power and prepared a complex working, moving from pillar to column, aligning the distant stars in his carefully ordered sky. A cooling; a force of attraction, an enhancement of moisture; binding, losing, and empowering.
It was very complex, and Aeskepiles enjoyed building the edifice that would support it, even as another part of his working mind gathered power from his staff and his ring of lapis. He still hoarded his own reserve of power.
He’s about to cast again, Harmodius said in the aether. I could use some help, here.
Instead of responding immediately, the Captain touched his horse’s sides with his spurs and cantered up the last low, round hill – so round that it appeared artificial – at the edge of the Field of Ares. Ser Jehan and Ser Milus followed him, while just ahead of him, the sides of his shallow box formations broke open and wheeled into line, extending his front by another three hundred paces. The tangle of wagons was left behind to the right and left.
From the top of his little hill, he could see from the city wall at his right, all the way across the Field of Ares to his left, some four leagues. He spared a moment for his own awe. He was on the Field of Ares, and the Empire had once been powerful enough to fill this field with soldiers.
Closer to hand, the Duke’s army was half again the size of his own, and it stretched off to the left, so that the enemy left far overreached his own right – except that out beyond the furthest fringes of the enemy line, the Vardariotes and the Despot’s Easterners had merged in a single dust cloud.
He’s raising a fog, Harmodius said.
Stop him.
I could use any small reserves you can spare.
Bad Tom had rallied the wedge and returned to the company’s line – now he cantered up like the embodiment of war itself, his huge black horse snorting foam. He raised his bloody axe and saluted. Then he pointed at the Moreans.
‘There is drill for ye and a’! Look at ’em!’ Tom’s waving axe sprayed droplets of brown red, but the awe in his voice spoke for them all. The Duke’s cavalry was wheeling by sections and retreating. It was a beautiful manoeuvre. The still afternoon air brought the sound of trumpets.
The Red Knight slipped into his palace and opened the door, so that a warm green breeze blew over the black and white marble floor to mix with the golden rays that soaked in through the distant clerestory windows to make a haze of power.
That’s better, said Harmodius. He made no use of the Red Knight’s palace – he was doubtless deep within his own working place.
Is he more puissant than you?
No, muttered Harmodius. But he’s cautious, careful, and capable. And we spent potentia like a sailor spends gold this morning on concealment, the river crossing and a dozen other extravagances—
Spare me.
‘They’re going to run,’ said Tom.
‘Let them!’ Ser Jehan managed a rare smile. ‘Jesus Saviour, we almost lost the whole line. Letting them march away would be good for everyone, wouldn’t it, Captain?’
‘Let’s see if we can fix them in place,’ said the Captain. ‘Double time. Trot!’ he shouted. His new trumpeter managed to get the call out, but the corporals had heard his shout and the company, already remounted, surged forward.
Behind the Red Knight, his new page, Nell, swung up onto her tall pony and swore. ‘On and off! On and off!’ she spat in fourteen-year-old disapproval.
Across the grass, five hundred paces away, the Duke’s army was wheeling into columns of march. The manoeuvre was complicated, and well executed, and despite that it was slow. Men began to look over their shoulders at the advancing wave of scarlet and steel.
‘Couldn’t we just let them go?’ asked Jehan.
The Captain shook his head. ‘If we let them go, we’ll have to fight them all winter. If we smash them now, we’re done.’ He looked under his hand, and then roared, ‘On! Canter! Dress the line!’ and threw himself forward.
Duke Andronicus sighed so hard that his cheeks blew up like a bladder and then deflated. ‘Why’s he so aggressive?’ he asked. ‘Aeskepiles!’
‘Watch, my lord,’ said the magister. He raised his arms, carefully balancing powers in his head.
Fog began to rise from the damp grass – first wisps, and then tendrils.
‘I still say that with one charge – envelop their flanks – we could roll them back to their barbarous homes,’ Demetrius said. ‘Pater – listen to Kronmir. We’ll lose support in the city—’
‘Christos Pantokrator!’ spat the Duke. ‘Demetrius! You are last out, since you are so full of fire.’
But even as the fog began to thicken, the mass of Easterners to the north started to move, and the hooves of their horses shook the earth. They were riding to cut the Duke off from his line of retreat. The first of his baggage wagons were only starting to move.
‘Marcos! Take the last Tagma and clear the Vardariotes out of our path,’ called the Duke. He turned to his son. ‘Do not – I repeat, do not – die here. What I do, I do for you and your own sons. Cover us, and then ride away.’
The fog rose like smoke.
And then the wind hit. It blew straight from their enemies into their faces, picking up dust and bits of grass. The first gust was like the breath of a tired man, but the second gust was as harsh as a mid-winter storm.
The fog broke like glass.
Across the field, the enemy was dismounting. Demetrius stroked his beard. ‘They’re out of range,’ he said aloud. ‘How can they—’
‘Look at their horse holders,’ said his father. ‘Once, the Empire put every man on a horse or mule – every infantryman, every archer.’
Just to his left, their own infantry were retreating in columns, well closed up, their shields lapped and their spears held high, the small wind-sock standards of the Thrakian border holdings suddenly rigid in the new wind.
‘Draw!’ roared Cully.
The better archers measured the distance by eye and sneered.
Kandy, the fattest man in the company, shook his head. ‘On my best day I couldn’t hit yon,’ he muttered. But he grunted and got his string to his ear.
‘Loose!’ Cully roared. A few men had already loosed – no man could keep a great war bow at full draw for longer than a moment or two.
Twenty paces behind the archery line, the Captain felt the surge of power. It was odd, vaguely upsetting even, to be both a participant and an observer in an arcane contest.
Even as the volley of arrows leaped into the air, the gust of wind off Harmodius’s working overpowered the enemy’s hermetical defence.
Borne on a massive pulse of air, three hundred arrows fell like a well-aimed hail on the nearest block of retreating infantry. The heavy quarter-pound shafts punched through the scale or leather of the mountaineers. In one gust of air, forty men fell—
The enemy volley of arrows did more damage than the Duke had thought possible. More men – his men, his own trained soldiers, veterans of a dozen campaigns – died. The screams of the wounded told every other man on the field that the enemy arrows were in range, and they were caught with their shields facing away from the enemy.
His men panicked.
Far off to the right, where Ser Bescanan had rallied part of the Latinikon, the mercenary Albans and Galles and Occitans broke and ran, leaning far out over the necks of their wretched heavy horses as they galloped away.
Demetrius didn’t mutter imprecations at his father. Instead, he turned to the magister. ‘Do something!’ he snapped.
Aeskepiles took a deep breath and flung up a hand.
A carpet of flame, so thin as to be transparent, flowed over the field from his hand to the enemy, crossing the four hundred or so paces in the time it took a man’s h
eart to beat three times.
The carpet of white flame ran at the archers like a rising tide – a tide moving at the speed of a galloping horse.
‘Stand fast! Nock!’ ordered Cully. Most of the archers obeyed, but some awkward sods were flinching away.
Cully watched the fire and hoped it was an illusion.
But just short of his position it parted as if cut by a knife and flowed away to the left and right, rolling along the front of the archers’ positions.
The fire was not wholly without effect, as it panicked the horses. One small page was only enough to hold six strong cobs under ideal conditions, and with a wall of fire bearing down on them, dozens of the stronger – or more wicked – horses put their heads down, pulled their reins right out of their handler’s hands, and ran free over the grass.
Nell lost the Captain’s wicked roan, was bitten, and punched the horse in savage frustration. The horse looked at her in surprise and she recaptured his reins. Cully’s nag tried to rip free, and reared, and she was carried into the air. Then the Captain’s roan pulled his head, and she was down, face first in the bloody dirt. She didn’t let go, and the roan dragged her right over the corpse of a Thrakian. She screamed when the man – not yet dead – screamed.
Then Long Paw, the nicest of the archers, was dragging her to her feet. She still had the horses. He smiled at her and turned back to the line.
‘Draw!’ Cully roared.
‘Loose!’ he shouted as the wind rose behind them.
The second volley rose ragged and lost more shafts as the wind struck. The archers were shaken by the fire. But more than a hundred shafts received the full lift of Harmodius’s working and they fell on the centre tagma of stradiotes; Morean gentlemen in chain hauberks, with lances and bows and small steel shields. At the range, few of them were killed through their mail, but their horses suffered cruelly and the small band seemed to explode away from the point of impact as men rode in all directions.
The Red Knight raised his hand and snapped a single coherent beam of emerald light at the source of the enemy’s magery.
Aeskepiles raised a shield like a mirror, the size of three mounted men.