Out of the Dark (3 page)

At which point, at a range of three hundred yards, they opened fire.

•  •  •  •  •

Every one of the watching Barthoni flinched, almost in unison, as the first flights of arrows streaked into the French formation. The audio pickups Joraym and Kurgahr had requested brought them the screams and cries of wounded humans and their four-footed riding beasts—their “horses”—with hideous clarity. And no Barthon could have witnessed the sudden eruption of blood from rent and torn bodies without feeling physically ill. Yet, for all their revulsion, they couldn’t look away, either. It was like watching some natural catastrophe—an avalanche, perhaps, sliding down to engulf and destroy. But this “natural catastrophe” was the result of willfully perverted intelligence, and somehow that made it even more mesmerizing.

“There!” Kurgahr said suddenly, pointing at the display. “I wondered
when they’d do that!” He twitched his head in the Barthon gesture of resignation. “Insane or not, what’s about to happen to those English is going to be ugly.”

The historian had a pronounced gift for understatement, Garsul thought grimly, watching the better part of two thousand mounted knights charge the English line. It occurred to him that it probably would have been better to attack the English before they could settle into their new position, but the French charge began only after the English had begun pelting them with arrows. Still, it shouldn’t matter all that much. It was clear from the display that the knights’ armor was more than sufficient to turn the vast majority of the arrows sleeting towards them.

•  •  •  •  •

Charles d’Albret swore viciously as his heavy cavalry pelted towards the English line.
Now
they attacked!

Yet even as he swore, the Constable knew it would have been foolish to expect any other response. That heavy rain of arrows was unlikely to kill or even wound many of those heavily armored men, but their horses were quite another matter. No cavalry in the world could stand in place under the aimed fire of seven thousand longbows, each firing as many as twelve shafts a minute. Its only options were to attack or run away to get out of range of those deadly horse-killing bows, and these were French knights. Running away was out of the question.

Not that attacking was any better option, when all was said.

The muddy field slowed the charging horsemen, and the English arrows continued to slash into them. Unlike their riders, only the horses’ heads were truly armored, and they began to go down. Each fallen animal formed its own individual obstacle for its companions, but the wounded and panicked horses were almost worse. Many of them were uncontrollable, rearing and bolting with the maddening pain of their injuries, and the charge came apart in confusion, mud, mire, blood, and bodies. Unable to close with the English, the cavalry retreated back the way they’d come, which churned the already muddy earth into a slick, slithery morass dotted with dead and wounded horses like reefs in a sea of muck.

•  •  •  •  •

Henry watched the French cavalry recoil and smiled thinly. He knew all about the goading, maddening effect of archery. Even the best armored knight or man-at-arms could be killed or wounded under the wrong circumstances. The scars on his own face were the result of a Welsh rebel’s
arrow which had hit a sixteen-year-old Prince Henry in the face at the Battle of Shrewsbury. For that matter, Sir Henry Percy, the rebels’ commander at Shrewsbury, had also been hit in the face. In his case, however, the experience had proved fatal.

The king saw very few armored bodies lying about in the mud, and most of those he did see appeared to be pinned by dead horses or injured when their mounts went down, rather than felled by arrow fire. But it was unlikely the French would simply stand there and take the English fire, and even if they managed to reorder their formation to get their own archers into position to engage, crossbowmen could never match the combination of his longbows’ range and rate of fire. Which meant. . . .

•  •  •  •  •

Garsul felt the others’ shocked disbelief. It seemed ridiculous—impossible!—that such a thundering mass of heavily armored warriors could have been routed by nothing more than arrows propelled by muscle-powered bows.

Still, the French mounted troops were only a portion of their total force, and it was obvious the mounted men’s comrades intended to avenge their repulse.

•  •  •  •  •

Charles d’Albret’s original battle plan had become a thing of the past. There was no way he could have reorganized his own forces under that plunging arrow fire. Partly because of the arrows themselves, but even more because of the nature of his army. The nobles and knights arrayed on the field had too many defeats to avenge, their numerical advantage was too overwhelming, and the taunting yells and yelps of contempt from the commoner longbowmen which had pursued the retreating cavalry were too much for men of blood to stomach.

And so they advanced.

The first French line, with almost five thousand dismounted knights and men-at-arms, was personally commanded by Constable d’Albret, along with Marshal Boucicault and the Dukes of Orléans and Bourbon, while the Count of Vendôme and Sir Clignet de Brebant commanded its supporting cavalry wings. The second line was commanded by the Dukes of Bar and Alençon and the Count of Nevers, following in the first line’s wake, and a third line, under the Counts of Dammartin and Fauconberg, was ready behind the second. All told, ten thousand armored men-at-arms, including the very flower of the French aristocracy, stood poised to crush the mere fifteen hundred
English men-at-arms arrayed against them, and once those English men-at-arms had been disposed of, the archers would be easy meat.

Except. . . .

•  •  •  •  •

“I don’t believe it,” Kurgahr said flatly.

“Perhaps that’s because we’ve had technology for so long,” Garsul replied, still unable to look away from the display. “How long has it been since a few thousand Barthoni tried to walk across a muddy field together?” He snorted harshly. “Especially a muddy field like
this
one!”

The rain-soaked, plowed earth had been churned into mud by the French cavalry; now the marching feet of thousands of men-at-arms turned the mud into watery muck. What would have been slow going under any circumstances became a nightmare ordeal for men wearing fifty and sixty pounds of unventilated, sunbaked armor. Some of the men in the center of the field found themselves wading through liquid mud that was literally knee-deep, and even as they slogged slowly forward, the drumbeat of English arrows continued to slam into them.

•  •  •  •  •

Henry watched through merciless eyes, fingering the scars on his face, as the French struggled forward. Their heavy mail and plate armor might defeat his archers’ arrows, but those same arrows forced the advancing French to close their helmet visors and keep their heads down lest the same thing happen to them as had happened to Henry and Percy at Shrewsbury. Visibility, as Henry knew from harsh personal experience, was hugely restricted under those circumstances, and just breathing through a visor’s airholes could become a tortuous ordeal, especially for someone fighting his way through knee-deep mud in the hot, sweaty prison of his armor. Exhaustion was going to be a factor, he thought coldly, and so was crowding. As they advanced towards him, the field narrowed. They piled in on one another, packing closer and closer together, and the more congested their formation became, the more it slowed.

And not even the best armor could stop
all
arrows. Men
were
going down—dead, wounded, sometimes simply fallen and unable to rise in the mud—and those still on their feet became even more tightly packed, their formation even more confused, as they tried to avoid treading the casualties yet deeper into the mire. Even those still upright were being battered by the incessant impacts of thousands of arrows. They might not penetrate their targets’ armor, but arrows driven from longbows with pulls of a hundred
and forty and even two hundred pounds hit a man like the blows of a sledgehammer. The painful battering, added to all of the advancing Frenchmen’s other miseries, had to have an effect.

•  •  •  •  •

Garsul’s skin twitched in disbelief. It was no longer shock; he was beyond that by now. No, this was duller than that. Almost numbing.

Despite everything, the lurching French advance had finally reached the English lines. They were so tight packed by the time they did that none of them could even take a full stride forward any longer. By Garsul’s estimate, they’d probably been slowed by at least seventy percent simply because of the crowding. Yet, despite that, they’d covered the three hundred agonizing yards between them and their enemies somehow.

•  •  •  •  •

The french men-at-arms were exhausted; Henry’s were rested and ready. The short English line of men-at-arms was four deep, and their supporting archers continued to fire—now into the French flanks—until they literally ran out of arrows. Yet even so, when the first line crunched into the English position, the outnumbered English were driven back by sheer weight of numbers. Not far, but back. Yet they fought savagely for each yard they were forced to yield, and the French formation was so crowded that many of its individual soldiers could find no room to use their personal weapons. Then the
second
French line drove into the melee, and the congestion got only worse.

At which point the longbowmen, arrows exhausted, swarmed over the French flanks and rear with hatchets, swords, daggers, mauls, pickaxes, and hammers. They were unarmored, true, but that meant they were far more mobile than their heavily armored, mud-mired opponents, and if they lacked the protective visored helms of their foes, they also had unimpaired vision. Worse, they were fresh, while many of the French were so exhausted from their long slog through the mud, the heat, and the lack of oxygen in their closed helmets that they could scarcely even lift their weapons. The situation could have been specifically designed—indeed, it
had
been, by Henry—to negate the heavily armored men-at-arms’ advantages in close combat, and when a Frenchman went down, even if he’d only stumbled and fallen, he couldn’t get back up under the longbowmen’s mercilessly murderous attack.

•  •  •  •  •

“Clahdru!” Hartyr muttered the better part of three human hours later. “It doesn’t seem . . . How could anyone . . . ?”

His voice trailed off, and Garsul shook himself. “Humans” weren’t Barthoni. In fact, despite his own decades-long commitment to Survey and his belief that all sentient species should be treated with dignity and respect, he couldn’t really think of them as “people” at all. Joraym was right about that, and it shamed Garsul somewhere deep down inside to admit the xenoanthropologist was correct about his prejudices. But even so, they
were
sentients, and what these “English” and “French” had done to one another was going to leave him with nightmares for the rest of his life.

He didn’t envy the Council when it read the confidential report he was going to have to file, either.

There were literal heaps of bodies, some taller than Garsul himself, piled in front of the “English” position. Clahdru only knew how many of the French had simply suffocated, drowned in mud, or been crushed to death by the weight of their own dead, and the third and final French line had declined to advance. Sensibly, in Garsul’s opinion, given what had already happened to three-quarters of their armored warriors. It seemed incredible, preposterous, that such an outnumbered force could have so decisively defeated such an overwhelming foe, yet the English had, and the evidence of their ferocity and bloodthirstiness was horrifying.

“Do you still think they’re simply ‘juvenile’ and ‘immature,’ Joraym?” he heard Ship Commander Syrahk ask bitingly.

“I don’t know.” The xenoanthropologist sounded badly shaken. “I mean, they
are
juvenile and immature—they couldn’t be any other way at their current level of advancement. But
this
—!” Joraym tossed his head in a Barthon gesture of bafflement. “I’ve never read anything in the literature about this kind of brutality.”

“Let’s not get too carried away,” Kurgahr put in. The ship commander and xenoanthropologist both looked at him disbelievingly, and he snorted. “I’m not trying to make excuses for anything we’ve just seen, but I’ve read enough history to know this sort of conduct isn’t entirely unheard of among other species. For that matter, there were periods in our own pretechnic era when
we
did some things we’d be horrified to admit to today. Not over simple political disagreements, perhaps, and nothing remotely as bad as
this,
but when herds were faced with starvation conditions and forced to fight for range, they were capable of some pretty horrific actions. And I think if you looked into the histories of some of our omnivorous fellow citizens you might find some pretty bloody episodes there, as well.”

“And then there’s the Shongairi,” Garsul pointed out. A symphony of
scowls greeted the remark, and he shrugged his upper shoulders. “I’m just saying these creatures at least have the excuse of their social and technical primitivism. The Shongairi don’t.”

“Well, true,” Joraym said in the tone of someone trying very hard to be detached, “but the Shongairi are bound to be a little . . . twisted, you know. I mean, they
are
. . . carnivores.” The xenoanthropologist’s distaste for the near-obscene term was evident. “I hate to say it, but these ‘humans’ are
omnivores
. They don’t have that excuse, Garsul.”

“I know, but—”

“Wait!” Syrahk interrupted. “Something’s happening!”