Authors: Miles Cameron
‘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, panicking 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.
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.