Random nodded. ‘I’ll go. Because if I turn this convoy back,’ he shrugged. ‘Well, I’ll lose a great deal of money.’ And I’ll never be mayor.
Lissen Carak – Michael
The Siege of Lissen Carak. Day Two
Michael licked his pen nib, absently painting the corner of his mouth in tree-gall and iron.
Today, all of the small folk dug at the trench. I append a small sketch of the work; it runs from the gate of the Lower Town to the out-wall of the Bridge Fort, a distance of four hundred and twenty-four paces. With just under a thousand working men and women, we dug the ditch in two days. The upcast of the ditch has been made into low walls on either side, and the captain has ordered us to plant stakes from our stores – the palisades we use when we encamp – along the edge of the ditch.
All the day a heavy fog stayed over the length of the ditch – today’s phantasm cast by the Abbess and is maintained by the good sisters, who can be heard praying at all hours in their chapel.
The enemy has sought all day to search out our new work. The air is thick with birds – starlings and crows and doves, but they dare not enter the fog, and the area close in to the castle walls seems abhorrent to them.
The Enemy has wyverns, and they ride the air currents high above us all day. Even now, there is one above me.
In the woods to the west, we can hear the sound of axes. Twice today, large bands of men advanced from the wood’s edge to within bowshot of the fog, and lofted arrows into it. We did not respond, except that our own archers crept close and retrieved the arrows.
Nigh on sunset, we released three sorties; one north, one west, and one westerly, but right along the river.
The captain rode west into the setting sun, his armour gathering what little light penetrated the sun. Grendel had a cote of barding today – two layers of heavy chain falling to the mighty horse’s fetlocks.
It took four valets to lift the cote and get it over the big horse’s back. Grendel hated it, but the captain was confident that the Jacks would rise to his raid.
He had a dozen men-at-arms, fully harnessed, and their archers behind him, and as soon as Grendel’s hooves were clear of the Lower Town – empty and sullen but for the two archers on the stone gate towers – he put his spurs gently to the great horse’s sides, and Grendel began a heavy canter over the spring fields. The fog hid the light, and the terrain. It was possible to be ambushed in the fog, as he was aware.
But this was his own fog, and it had some special properties.
He rode south along the trench, going slowly, looking down to see the work that had been accomplished. It was a broad, deep ditch with a wooden floor. He had hidden a surprise under the wooden floor, but in ground this wet, the floor had its own essential purpose.
The palisades were too few to stop a determined enemy but, given time, he’d have the workers weave brambles and vines among them, and make a stouter barrier.
He shook his head. It didn’t matter a damn, because the whole thing was a ruse anyway.
There were five bridges across the trench, each wide enough for two fully armed horsemen to ride abreast without making their horses shy. Again, given more time, he’d arrange mechanisms to raise and lower them.
Given time, he’d make his opponent look like a complete fool. But he didn’t think he was going to get any more time. He could feel – no better explanation that that – his opponent’s frustration. He didn’t have much experience fighting men. He was arrogant.
Me too. The captain grinned and turned Grendel to cross the last bridge before Bridge Castle. Grendel’s hooves sounded hollowly, as if he were riding over a coffin.
Where’d that thought come from?
He’d walked down to the apple tree at sunset the night before. She hadn’t come. He wondered why. He remembered the touch of her lips on his.
Best concentrate on the matter at hand, he reminded himself.
He’d left her a note at the tree. She hadn’t answered it.
He was running out of fog. Beyond, the spring fields were green with new grass that would eventually be hay and fodder – or weeds – all tinged red as the sun set.
He reined Grendel in, and waited for his company to sort themselves out.
Tom was at his shoulder, and he raised a gauntleted hand. ‘Everyone look around. The fog makes it hard to see, but look at how the ground is clear from here all the way to the wood’s edge – not a ditch, not a hedgerow, not a stone wall. Keep that in mind. It we make another sortie it’ll be along this path.’
Tom nodded.
Ser Jehannes shook his head. ‘Let’s survive today before we borrow trouble for tomorrow.’
The captain looked back at his senior officer. ‘On the contrary, messire. Let us plan today for tomorrow’s triumph.’
Anger touched the older knight’s face.
‘Peace!’ the captain said. ‘We’ll discuss this later.’ He kept his voice light, as if the issue were of no moment. ‘If we contact the enemy, we ride through them, rally on the trumpet, and retreat into the fog immediately. No more. If we find boats, we destroy them. Is that clear?’
He listened carefully. If he was nervous, it didn’t show – he seemed merely attentive.
Horses fidgeted. Men spat and tried to appear as unconcerned as their captain.
The fog seemed too thin to cover so many men. But nothing happened.
And then, well to the north, there were the sounds of men cheering, and horses neighing, and the clash of steel on steel.
‘There they are,’ muttered the captain; three words to express fifteen minutes of nervous impatience. Tom grinned. Jehannes reached up and hit the catch on his visor. The sound was repeated all along their line.
But now the captain seemed in no hurry.
The cries were redoubled.
And then there were coarse bugle calls behind them, and high-pitched horn calls to the north.
It was all happening as he’d expected, and there, on the edge of battle, he had a moment of panic. What if this is a trap? How can I expect to predict what they’ll do? I’m pretending to know what I’m doing but this can’t be so simple.
His tutor in the art of war had been Hywel Writhe, his father’s master of arms. His supposed father’s master of arms. A brilliant swordsman, a magnificent jouster. Madly in love with the Lady Prudentia, and to no avail.
A memory crept into place.
Right there, on the edge of battle, the captain realised that he’d been had. His two tutors had been lovers. Of course they had been lovers.
Why do I think of this sort of thing when I’m about to fight? he thought.
Laughed aloud.
Hywel Writhe used to say, War is simple. That’s why men prefer it to real life.
And his lesson for all six of the boys who would grow to be great lords, masters of armies: Never make a plan more complicated than your ability to communicate it.
The captain reviewed his plans one more time.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
They rode out of the fog at a canter. About half a league to the north, Sauce led the northern sortie out of the shower of arrows sent by the now fully alerted Jacks, boglins and the irks who were gathering like clouds before a storm around her small force.
The captain led his men west into the setting sun, out of the fog, and right along the river bank.
There was a unmanned barricade on the road and he rode around it, and up the bank above the road, and round the first bend, and there they were.
Boats.
Sixty boats, or more. Farmers’ boats, dug-outs, canoes. Rafts of lashed branches. All pulled up out of the water.
Every archer threw a linen wrapped parcel into a boat. Some got none – some got two – and he heard horns, and trumpets, and some shrill calls to the north.
They were taking too long.
The archers down at the far end of the beach received some arrows and charged into the woods on their horses, scattering the enemy archers. Tom
set off in pursuit with half the men-at-arms, and the captain suddenly feared he‘d been trapped after all. He was over-extended and the size of the bank beneath the ancient trees dwarfed his paltry raid. And now half his men were getting too far—
More shouts behind him.
He turned to Michael. ‘Sound the recall,’ he said.
Michael’s trumpet playing wasn’t his strongest suit. He was on his third try when the trumpet rang out clearly, against the sound of screams and heavy crashes from the west of the bank. The captain sat on Grendel’s back in a rage of indecision – desperate to get his men back, afraid to commit the rest to the sortie all the way down the bank.
Tom emerged from the lowering trees, his sword raised.
The captain began to breathe again.
More and more of the men-at-arms and archers emerged from beneath the trees, swords a ruddy green in the failing light.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ the captain said. He wheeled Grendel just as two arrows hit the horse’s withers, and he reared and grunted and then they were around.
There were Jacks at the edge of the trees, just to the north, their dirty white cotes shining in the last light of day. The polished heads of their war arrows seemed to flicker as they loosed.
Bootlick, one of the foreign horn-bow archers, took a shaft in the neck, right through his aventail. He went down without a croak, and his horse, well trained, kept formation.
Bill Hook – Bootlick’s man-at-arms – was off his charger in a flash of white armour, lifting the fallen archer onto his crupper. He was struck twice – both blows at long range, falling on his breastplate, and he didn’t even stagger.
The captain pointed Grendel’s armoured head at the edge of the wood. If someone didn’t stop the Jacks from shooting, his column was going to be dead in heartbeats. Most of the archer’s light horses weren’t even armoured.
Grendel rose from a heavy canter to a flowing gallop, apparently unemcumbered by a hundred pounds of double mail.
An arrow struck his visor, and two more struck his helmet. The steel heads screamed against his bascinet and were gone, but each blow rocked him in his high-backed saddle. Another heavy arrow struck the bow of his saddle and another whanged off his right knee cop and then it was like riding through hail, and he put his armoured head down and pressed his long spurs to Grendel’s sides.
He had no way of knowing whether anyone was behind him, and his whole world was narrowed to what he could see from the two eye slits of his helm.
Not much. Mostly, Grendel’s armoured neck.
Clang.
Clang-clang-clang-whang-ping.
All hits on his helmet and shoulders.
Thwak-tick-tock-clang!
He sat up in the saddle. Got a hand on the hilt of his war sword and drew, and an arrow caught the blade, shivering it in his hand.
He got his eyes up, and there they were.
Even as he watched, they broke and ran. There were only six of them – All those arrows came from six men? and they ran with a practised desperation in six different directions.
His sword took the nearest neatly, because killing fleeing infantryman was an essential part of knightly training, taken for granted, like courage. He let his arm fall, and the man died, and he used his spurs to guide Grendel after the second man, the smallest of the group. One of his mates stopped, drew, and shot.
Cursed when his arrow glanced harmlessly off the captain’s right rerebrace, and died.
Grendel was slowing, and the captain turned him. If he exhausted the war horse he’d be stranded and dead. Besides, he loved Grendel. He felt he and the horse had a great deal in common.
A healthy desire to live, for example.
The four surviving Jacks didn’t run much farther than they had to, as they heard the hooves pause.
Whang, came the first arrow off his helmet.
It was a matter of time before one of those shots found his underarm, his throat, or his eye-slits.
Ser Jehannes came out of the woods to the archer’s left, at a full gallop. He rode around the great bole of an ancient tree, and the ruddy-haired Jack lost his head in one swing of the knight’s great blade.
The other three ran west, into a thicket.
‘Thanks!’ the captain called.
Jehannes nodded.
He’s never going to like me, let alone love me, the captain thought.
He gathered Grendel under him, turned his head, and started moving east.
The fields to the north of him seemed to ripple and flow – boglins running in their odd hunched posture, low to the ground, irks, their brown bodies like moving mud.
But they were too late, and the handful of boglins who paused to loft arrows were ineffective.
At the edge of his effective casting range, the captain reined Grendel in. He stripped the gauntlet off his right hand, and pulled a small patch of charred linen from the palm.
He stepped into his palace.
‘He’s waiting for you,’ Prudentia said.
‘He doesn’t know what I can do, yet,’ the boy said. He’d already aligned his symbols. He walked to the door, but instead of opening it, he merely raised the tiny iron plate that covered the keyhole, and a waft of fierce green shot through.
‘He’s waiting for you,’ Prudentia said again.
‘He’s going to have to keep waiting,’ the boy said. He was proud of his work, and his careful preparation. ‘Look, it’s sympathetic Hermeticism. The wicks on the fire bundles are all made from the same piece of linen and soaked in oil. I have a scrap here, too, already charred.’
The breath of green touched his symbols.
‘You are the cleverest boy,’ Prudentia said.
‘Were you and Hywel lovers, Prude?’ the boy asked.
‘None of your business,’ she shot back.
He rose in his stirrups, and his charred piece of linen caught and burned red hot.
On the bank, forty-four firebombs made of oiled tow and old rags and wax and birch bark burst into flame with one, simultaneous roar.
Harndon City – Edward
Edward cast the first of the master’s tubes in the yard. He cast it in sand, and used the same mandril, polished to a mirror shine, as the model for the wax tongue he put in the mould to make it hollow. He cast the walls of the tube a finger’s width thick, as the master requested.
When it was done it wasn’t much to look at. Edward shrugged. ‘Master, I can do better. The hole would be better if I bored it, but that would require—’ he shrugged ‘—a week to make the drills and other tools. I’d like to add decoration.’ He felt incompetent.
The master picked it up and held it in his hands for a long time. ‘Let’s try,’ he said.
He bored a small hole in the base of the bronze with a hand drill, and Edward was fascinated to watch his careful patience, coaxing the fine steel drill through the heavy bronze. Then he took the tube out of the shop and into the yard, and packed it with his burning mixture – four scoops. He searched for something to put down atop the powder.
Silently, Edward handed him a one-inch hawk bell. It wasn’t perfectly round, and it was hollow, but it fitted well enough for purpose.
The master tied it to the oak tree, put wick in the hole, and lit it. They both hid behind the brick wall of the stable.
Which was just as well.
The fizzing, burning mixture made a flash and a bang like – like something hermetical.
It stripped a handspan of bark from the tree.
The tube had torn loose from its bindings and had smashed through a horse trough – a solid wood horse trough – flooding the yard with dirty water . . . and it was a day before the apprentices found the hawk’s bell. Even then, they didn’t find the bell itself, just the neat round hole it had punched through the tile roof of the forge building.
Edward looked at the hole and whistled.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain had six magnificent bruises from the arche
ry. Other men had worse. Bootlick was dead, despite Bill Hook – known to the gentles as Ser Willem Greville – despite his best efforts at rescue. Francis Atcourt had a Jack’s arrow right through the join in his cote of plates – through his gut. Wat Simple and Oak Pew both had arrows in their limbs and were screaming in pain and mortal afraid the heads were poisoned.
If they hadn’t had the nuns, all of them might have died of their wounds.
As it was, the skill and power of the nuns seemed to mean that any man who wasn’t killed outright would be healed. The captain, who was just coming to terms with the idea of a convent of women of power, was staggered by the healing power they poured into his men – Sauce had six badly wounded men, including Long Paw – one of their best men in every respect.
But the barrage of phantasm was more effective than the barrage of arrows had been.
The captain walked through the hospital ward in his arming clothes. The wounded were cheerful – as any man or woman might be, waking to find an ugly wound completely banished. Oak Pew, a woman whose dark wood-coloured skin and heavy muscles had given her the name, lay laughing helplessly at one of Wilful Murder’s stories. Wat Simple was already gone, the captain had seen him playing at piquet. Long Paw lay watching Oak Pew laugh.
‘Thought I was a goner,’ he admitted, when the captain sat on his counterpane. He showed the captain where a shaft had gone into his chest.
‘I coughed up blood,’ he said. ‘I know what that means.’ He raised himself, coughed, and looked at the nun in the corner. ‘Pretty nun says if it’d been a finger’s width lower, I’d ha’ been dead.’ He shrugged. ‘I owe her.’
The captain squeezed Long Paw’s shoulder. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked. He knew it was a stupid question, but it was part of the job of being captain.
Long Paw looked at him for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I feel like I was dead, and now I’m not. It’s not all bad – not all good.’ He smiled, but it wasn’t one of the archer’s usual smiles. ‘Ever ask yourself what we’re here for, Captain?’