Kingmaker (11 page)

Mark and Lawgrave caught her arms. “Steady."

Cold surged through her like an artic wind.

"Hold her.” Mark turned her over to Lawgrave, then returned and dumped a helmet full of hot water over her head.

"Freezing,” she muttered.

The magic swirled inside of her, crackling when the water hit her, until flakes of ice dropped off her skin.

"Oh, hell.” Mark picked her up carried her down the hill, and wrapped her in a blanket.

When the worst of the cold abated, she struggled out of the blanket and looked at what he'd done.

The force of the explosion had pushed the cannon off of its caisson and burst a hole through the palisade wall.

The bandits, or whoever they were because Ellie didn't think real bandits had access to artillery, were running around shouting at each other—except for those who had been closest to the explosion. They wouldn't be running anywhere any time soon.

The knights saw the hole in the palisade and gave a cheer—even naive young nobles are smart enough not to want to charge a defended wall on horseback. A few blurts on the bugle shifted the focus of their ponderous charge from a frontal assault on the manned wall to the spot where the cannon had been—and where only a few bandits stood, still confused and dazed by the force of the explosion.

Lawgrave hadn't fallen but his face looked gray. “First time I've seen battle magic. No wonder it's so hated."

Mark handed him the canteen but Lawgrave waved it aside. “Ellie took the brunt. Now we need to get back to work. They've got mages after all. They must have been too well protected for us to pick them up. I can feel the pressure of their magic now."

Ellie hadn't done defensive magic before, so she let Lawgrave take the lead adding her strength to his aging hands as he pressed stones into place.

The pattern Lawgrave built was strange. The focusing pentagrams were a bit open, defocusing the energy being cast at the knights rather than attacking someone.

The backwash was strong, but it felt like human punches—and martial arts training had given Ellie plenty of experience in shrugging off powerful gut blows.

Someone must have realized the danger the breach in their wall meant because a line of bandits quickly filled it—before Arnold's knights reached it.

She'd thought that the cannon meant organized soldiers but it looked as if Arnold had been right about the peasant weapons. The line that formed seemed armed only with long staves.

Which was strange. Why would the Duke of Sullivan arm his brigands with a cannon and give them at least one battle mage, yet not even bother equipping them with halfway decent spears?

The knights were close now, urging each other on.

On a signal Ellie couldn't see, they lowered their lances in unison and spurred their horses into something faster than a trot, if closer to a canter than a real gallop.

Still, the weight of the horses’ hooves was enough to shake the ground, even at half a mile of distance.

The cannon would have torn a hole through that rank of Lubica's young nobility. With it gone, it looked like they'd rip through the bandits like a katana through a tub of lard.

"Uh-oh.” Mark suddenly sounded worried.

"What?” She could sense a difference in the enemy line but she couldn't see it. Yet.

Instead of explaining, Mark turned back to his dragoons. “Dragoons will prime."

You could load a matchlock musket an hour or more before you used it. But you wouldn't prime it until the last minute. The danger of the match dripping a bit of burning fire, or of the wind blowing away expensive primer powder was too great. Priming meant Mark thought the backup would be needed—soon.

She glanced at the grimfaced dragoons, then back at the knights’ charge.

"Crap."

What had looked like peasants with staves was now revealed to be footmen with pikes. They had kept the payoff ends of their weapons hidden, counting on Sergius's youth and her own inexperience to drive their army into a trap.

And she'd let Sergius and Arnold ride straight into it.

If she and Lawgrave hadn't destroyed the cannon, the battle would already be over. As it was, it looked as if their magic had mere delayed the inevitable. Cavalry can't charge prepared pikemen. For one thing, their horses won't let them. A horse may not be the most brilliant animal in the world but it's smart enough to know that it doesn't want to run up on a row of sharp, steel-tipped sticks. For another thing, pikemen would simply slaughter any knights who managed to convince his animal to ignore its instincts and charge.

It was too late for the knights to stop, but these weren't hardened heavy cavalry. They were a bunch of twenty-something men with more testosterone than sense who suddenly faced every horseman's greatest fear—unbroken pikemen. They couldn't stop but they could slow and spread—and they did.

It was the worst thing they could have done.

The explosion had left their enemies in disarray and the pikemen had been slow to get organized. If the knights had spurred their horses, accepted the casualties, and put their weight into the charge, they might have broken through before the pikemen were prepared for them.

Instead, too many slowed, trying to fence with their lances against pikes, protecting their hugely expensive warhorses at the cost of their momentum.

Of the fifty knights, perhaps ten fell instantly to the pikes. Another thirty slowed to a walk and tried to find gaps between the pikes. Only ten made it through the wall of spears into the heart of the enemy.

Where they were swarmed.

A gap opened in the palisade and a group of light cavalry trotted out. Against organized knights, they would have been ridden down. Against what was left of the charge, they could swerve in, pick off distracted knights, and slaughter them.

These weren't bandits. They'd run into a disguised element of Sullivan's army.

"Sound the retreat,” Ellie shouted.

The idiot trumpeter who'd followed Sergius's orders and blown the charge had been killed in the knights’ first rush. Nobody in the mercenary ranks was about to talk about honor. Instead, one of the mercenaries nodded, then blew a mournful bleat.

When nobody responded, he blew again.

That was enough. The knights disengaged and headed back toward the line of dragoons.

If they'd been facing pikemen alone, they could have trotted away faster than the pikemen could advance. It is one of the reasons peasant revolts always fails—unmounted men are too slow to follow up their advantages when they win a battle and too slow to get away when they lose.

But a disorganized rout of slow-moving and heavily armed knights is a perfect target for wheel-lock-pistol-armed light cavalry.

The light horsemen harried the knights mercilessly.

By the time they made it back to the line of mercenaries, they'd lost another five knights.

The King was bleeding from a cut to his face and Arnold's horse was limping. Still, the two who had been responsible for the disastrous plan were among its survivors.

Lawgrave hastened to the king to handle any magical healing and Ellie decided to pretend she didn't notice. She didn't feel like healing the king, she wanted him to suffer a little first. Besides, she didn't have much time to think because the pikemen were coming after them and there were a lot of them.

"Make way.” Mark's firm voice cut through the chatter.

The dragoons created a gap in their line to let the last of the straggling knights through.

A group of heavily armored sergeants filled the gap, keeping the light cavalry away with halberds and Saxon-style battleaxes.

"They'll kill us. We've got to run.” The king ignored Lawgrave's attempts to help him.

"Reform.” Arnold might be an idiot but he wasn't a coward. “Your Majesty, they're still only peasants."

Ellie decided correcting that error would be bad psychology. She kept her mouth shut.

The pikemen advanced slowly in a thick phalanx—a unit as wide as the waiting columns of dragoons, but more tightly packed, a dozen rows deep to the dragoon's four, and with long pikes that had a huge reach advantage over the dragoons’ bayonets.

There were a lot of them. Ellie wasn't sure whether more had arrived, or whether their mage's magic had hidden them but there had to be at least a thousand pikemen marching toward them now. Sullivan's banner flew in the center of the line.

If Sullivan's men could capture the king or kill him, the war would be over and Ellie's chance to find her parents’ killers would vanish.

She gripped her katana. The time for magic was over. But she wasn't going to give up—she intended to do some damage before they finished off the last of her family.

For a moment, it looked like she might be fighting all by herself. The dragoons had seen the King's panic and weren't happy. A few shuffled their feet, their heavy muskets wavering.

If they broke, their entire force would be eliminated. The pikemen would keep them from reforming and the light cavalry would ride them down and destroy them.

"Straighten your lines.” Sergeants screamed men back into place.

Training and professionalism won over fear and panic and the dragoons stiffened.

Arnold was still yelling at the King so Ellie didn't think they would get much help from the spent knights. But at least they'd stopped running.

The enemy's light cavalry had done their job for the moment and backed off to the flanks of the pike phalanx. Unlike Sergius's knights, they knew better than to attack organized infantry.

They'd give their horses a chance to rest while their pikemen disorganized and destroyed the dragoons. Then they'd swoop back in and hunt down the survivors as they attempted to flee.

By the standards of local warfare, the battle was over. The musketmen would get off a shot, do their damage, but then they'd be hammered by the massed weight of the pikemen. Worse, both the pikemen and the dragoons knew it.

One of the sergeants walked in front of the four rows of mercenaries, straightened an occasional collar and pointing out the odd bit of rust on a musket. He seemed indifferent to or ignorant of the organized pikemen now only about fifty feet behind him and closing as fast as their steady march could carry them.

"First row, will take aim. Second row, will stand ready.” Mark called out the orders as if he had all the time in the world.

"Shouldn't we be shooting?” Ellie loosened her katana and got ready to die.

"Second row, will aim. First row, fire."

Fifty muskets crashed together creating a wall of sound almost as solid as the lead bullets they spat.

"First row, behind and reload. Second row, kneel."

The pikemen shrugged off their losses. Mark had the second and third rows fire simultaneously.

"Second row, back. Third row, move back. Fix bayonets."

The two columns that had just fired slipped behind the fourth column and fumbled with their unfamiliar bayonets. They were near the moment of truth. Despite the cold under the shaded trees of an old-growth forest, many of the mercenaries were sweating. Nobody had used a bayonet against a pike before in this world, but the simple arithmetic was bad. A bayoneted musket is a six-foot spear. A pike is at least twelve feet long. Which meant her side would get stuck six feet before they could stick their enemy. Plus they were still outnumbered.

The pikemen were only about ten yards away now. En mass, they lowered their pikes.

"Row four, kneel. Row one, forward.” Mark was using hand signals as well as spoken commands. Sergeants echoed his orders.

"Row four, row one, fire."

One hundred shots tore holes through the pikeman line. At point-blank range, the heavy musket bullets couldn't miss. Many went through the front man and continued on, killing the man behind him as well.

Ellie could see Mark's mouth moving but she couldn't hear a sound over the scream of pikemen.

Mark's organized musketwork had cost the enemy dearly—but it was payback time and the pikemen knew it.

By then, rows two and three musketeers had fixed bayonets. They moved forward to guard their comrades who had just fired and weren't ready to engage the enemy.

The older soldiers were right about one thing. A disciplined row of pikemen would simply chew the musketeers up before they knew what hit them.

But the attacking pikemen weren't fully organized any longer. They'd lost some of their cohesion when two hundred and fifty heavy musket balls had shredded their ranks. Well over a hundred of them, including most of the experienced front row, were down. The pikemen coming behind them stumbled over their dead and wounded comrades and their pikes wavered.

But they kept on coming. Their enemy didn't have pikes. Therefore, they were dead.

The disorganization didn't mean that Mark's dragoons could win. But it gave them a chance. There weren't as many pikes facing them, and there were holes in the row of spears.

Mark's dragoons took advantage of the disorganization in the pikeman ranks. They batted pikes out of their way and closed in with their shorter-range bayonets.

Some made it. Many didn't. The pikemen had started in a phalanx many rows deep and their casualties hadn't affected that. Although the musketeers could avoid some of the pikes, pikes from rows behind prodded forward to pick them up, to protect the pikemen in the front rows.

Ellie drew her katana and waded into the fight. The samurai who had perfected sword techniques had done so against armies much like the one they faced now. It was time to discover whether Ellie was up to the high standards those ancient samurai had set.

A martial artist learns balance points—places where the slightest push can send their opponent off balance. Against a phalanx, the balance point is to the side or rear—pikes point in only one direction and turning their axis is difficult. Turning while fully engaged is impossible.

The enemy light cavalry had pulled back from the phalanx's flanks, looking for a chance to exploit a breakthrough. That didn't mean the pikemen were undefended, of course. Rankers—swordsmen and halberdiers guarded the phalanx's vulnerable flank. But these soldiers simply lacked the experience that Ellie brought and they too had suffered from the hail of musket fire.