The Fell Sword (29 page)

The Red Knight didn’t have to dispose of his troops – every section rode to their place as they had practised twice in the last week, and dismounted.

The Red Knight joined hands with Mag the seamstress and Gelfred and the three of them threw a working over the company, and then tossed in a little ground fog at the bottom of the dale. The Captain, aided by Harmodius, placed the whole working inside a deep green peridot, a fine stone he’d picked up from a peddler. A good jewel helped focus a complex casting; the crystal also gave the complex working stability and thus durability.

Half an hour later, Gelfred rode back to the Captain and opened his visor. ‘Nothing behind us, m’lord. They haven’t passed this way.’

Twenty long minutes later, a great black and white eagle the size of a warhorse began to circle overhead.

Ser Alcaeus rode up to the Red Knight. ‘M’lord – that bird is for us. It can’t see through your
phantasm.
But it will mark our place to any Morean.’

The Captain sighed.

Working with Harmodius, he extracted the working from the jewel. With careful control, he adjusted the casting to open a sight line into the top of the illusion.

The bird spied them and stooped.

He closed the working and replaced it in the jewel. ‘That cost me more than half the working I can do in a day,’ he said sulkily. ‘The next crisis will have to be met the old-fashioned way.’

Alcaeus read the note while every horse within eyeshot shied away from the gigantic bird. ‘The Vardariotes are on the move,’ he said. ‘Last night – after midnight. They are armed and mounted in formation at the Gate of Ares.’

The Captain nodded. ‘Well, we did our part,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ve been too subtle?’

His men had begun to fidget. The sun rose; flies came. Horses grew fractious. The women with the baggage began to talk, and a low mutter came to the command group from the soldiers.

Dan Favour rode in just as the monks in the city began to celebrate matins.

‘Two thousand men,’ he said happily. ‘Less than a mile away.’

The Captain failed to hide his sigh of relief. He grinned ruefully.

‘Of course, we still have to win the fight,’ he reminded them.

The Morean stradiotes came down the road in good order, with a strong vanguard of almost six hundred men, and a hundred Eastern horse bowmen. They were late, and they were moving fast. Their main body was several hundred yards to the rear, almost two thousand horse, no infantry, no baggage. There were no banners, but in the centre of the main body were two great icons, held aloft by strong men on lances.

The Captain dismounted and put his peridot on a rock. Toby handed him a war hammer and stood by, holding his helmet and lance.

‘If we stay here, I’m going to want a straw hat,’ he said. The sun was hot
.

The Moreans came at a trot, right along the road. From time to time, groups of Easterners would break off from the column and ride to look at something, but the column was in a hurry, and crossing safe terrain.

When the enemy vanguard was at short bow shot, the Captain raised his hammer and brought it down smartly on the peridot, which blew apart into a thousand tiny green pieces. The complex
phantasm
collapsed with the death of the stone, allowing every man covered by the working to see clearly.

Whistles sounded, and the archers nocked.

Before the Red Knight had his aventail over his head, the first flight of livery arrows leaped from his archers’ great white bows. Two hundred bowmen loosed five shafts apiece in rapid succession – most men were drawing their last shaft before the first one hit home.

The arrows struck, and the Morean vanguard disintegrated.

A group of horse bowmen who had ridden clear of the column to investigate the farmhouse were greeted by the combined bolts and shafts of all of Gelfred’s scouts. The survivors drew their bows from the cases at their hips and stood in their stirrups to loose, then turned and bolted for the safety of the main body, loosing further shafts over the rumps of their horses.

The battle was not quite two minutes old when the Red Knight stood in his own stirrups and roared, ‘Mount!’

Expecting the order, most of the archers were already up, as were all the men-at-arms – pages scrambled to find their own mounts after passing horses to their men-at-arms and archers. Inexperience showed; the older pages were ahead of the order and the new ones were behind it, and to the left of centre, in Ser Alcaeus’s lances, there was chaos. The Red Knight couldn’t see what was causing it. Nor could he wait.

‘
En avant!
’ he called, and his whole company began to move forward in three mounted ranks, men-at-arms in front, pages to the rear.

The Morean vanguard broke. A third of them were down or dead, and they’d done their job – the ambush hadn’t fallen on the main body.

The company closed up and went forward at a trot – the men-at-arms and squires were mailed leg to steel-clad leg, the line almost three hundred yards long. Gelfred’s huntsmen and scouts went wide to the right, angling towards the rear of the column’s main body.

‘Charge me or don’t,’ muttered the Red Knight, inside his helmet. He had the element of surprise but he was still outnumbered three to one; he needed his opponent to lose his nerve.

As if responding to this challenge, the icons in the centre of the enemy column went up and down, and the enemy column began to unroll – very professionally – from a column to a line, companies cantering to the right and left as the line unfolded.

The Red Knight raised his lance. ‘Halt!’ he roared.

The trumpeter made a noise much like a mating moose – twice – but the company knew what to expect. The line halted. They began to dress, the trailing left centre catching up, the wings unbowing, the centre already dismounting.

To the untrained eye, it looked like a disordered mess.

Tom flipped up his visor. ‘We could ha’e just charged them,’ he said.

The Captain shrugged. At his feet, Wilful Murder was handing his horse to Toby’s replacement, Nell, who got five sets of reins in her skinny little fist and led the brutes out of the line. Wilful got his bow in hand, nocked an arrow, looked left and right, and called, ‘Ready!’

The horses were coming out of the ranks.

More ‘ready!’ calls floated along the morning breeze.

The enemy line was almost formed, and the icons were moving up into the centre.

‘They are damned good,’ the Red Knight said.

Wilful Murder shook his head. ‘Pretty, but no plate armour and no infantry?’ he said. ‘It’s the archer’s dream.’ His questing eye found Bent, far to the right – the master archer raised his bow.

Wilful raised his own bow, saw Cully off to one flank and Bent off to the other.

‘Fast as you can, now, boys,’ he said.

And they loosed.

The end of the fight was messy.

The heavy shafts slaughtered the Moreans, whose charge was shattered before it was fully under way. But the Moreans were veterans of hundreds of fights, and if they had never faced such concerted, disciplined longbow fire before, they had good leaders and long experience of both victory and defeat. The shredded Morean line retired out of bow shot, and reformed. Some few of the Morean stradiotes carried Eastern bows, and they returned a few shafts.

‘Mount,’ said the Captain. He had never dismounted himself. He turned to Bad Tom, who was close at his heels. ‘This time we go right over them. I want to end this; we don’t want that force snapping at our heels tonight.’

Tom grinned and motioned at Ranald, who pumped a fist in the air to show his men that this was it.

Wilful Murder demurred. ‘My lord, I’d give ’em another dose of goosefeather before I put my horse’s head at them. They ain’t broke – look at ’em.’

The Captain watched their adversaries reforming. ‘Men are so much more complicated than facing the creatures of the Wild,’ he said. ‘I want to leave as many of them alive as possible. We’re killing our employers’ taxpayers and soldiers.’

The horse holders were getting a workout – little Nell came shoving by. ‘Take your fucking horse,’ she spat at Wilful, who was standing at the Captain’s horse’s head.

This time Ser Alcaeus’s division was better ordered, and they started forward together.

A hundred paces from the enemy line the Moreans turned and began to ride away, expecting another arrow shower.

‘Charge!’ shouted the Captain.

From a fast trot to a gallop took three strides for a trained horse, and the men-at-arms were off. The trumpeter got the call right, and it rolled on and on – clearly it was the only one he’d really practised.

The Moreans took fifty paces to understand what was happening.

They were out-shot, and out-armoured, and now, all of a sudden, they were going to be out-ridden.

Their discipline came apart. It is almost impossible to rally troops who have already turned their backs on the enemy; it is harder to do it a second time, and even harder when the enemy is already charging with murderous intent. As a result, when the strategos reined in, faced his company about, and launched a counter-charge right at the Red Knight and Mad Tom’s lances, his red and purple clad stradiotes were alone. The rest had scattered, leaning low on their horses’ necks and riding flat out for the safety of the distant hills, or their farms, or the city.

Very few were caught. The heavier Gallish warhorses were lumbering after a hundred paces, and most were down to a canter after two hundred paces.

In the centre, however, the knights came together with the enemy general’s bodyguard with a crash that they could hear in the palace.

The strategos was a small man in heavy scale armour with bright red-dyed hardened leather covering his limbs and hard horn scales over his horse. He couched his lance like a Galle and aimed for the Red Knight, who lowered his own lance in response.

The strategos did not intend a knightly encounter – two paces from impact, his lance dipped, and he plunged his lance tip deep into the Red Knight’s gelding, killing the great animal instantly, but not before the Red Knight’s lance caught in the Morean’s shield rim and ripped him from his saddle. Knight, strategos, and horses all crashed to earth, and the dust rose as the melee spread around them.

Bad Tom unhorsed three Moreans in a row, crushing their leather armour and sending them crashing to the earth until his lance point caught in the mail of his third victim and spiked through it – mail, leather, padded linen, flesh, ribs, and lungs. The man fell, spitted like a capon, and dragged Tom’s lance with him so that the big man had to let it go. He was turning his horse, drawing his great sword, when he realised that his Captain was nowhere to be seen.

He turned his horse back into the rising dust.

The Red Knight got slowly to one knee and wrenched in a breath. The fall had taken him by surprise and he’d screamed as he struck a rock – only his back armour had saved him from a boken hip or spine. His sword was gone, his belt snapped in the fall.

He realised that his purse was under his foot, and his roundel dagger, a knife like a short iron spike, was strapped to it. He got it in his right fist. Then, peering through the dust and the slits of his visor, he searched for his sword as horses pounded past him in both directions and the rising dust choked him. He only had moments – there were hoof beats all around him, and the kettlepot rattling sound of a hundred men in armour beating away at each other with swords.

He pushed with his right leg and got his feet under him. A spike of cold pain pulsed in his right hip.

The Morean strategos came out of the dust like the inevitable villain of a romance. He had a heavy short sword in his right fist and a scarred shield with a beautifully painted figure of the Virgin Mary on his left arm.

‘Yield,’ shouted the Red Knight in High Archaic.

The strategos stopped. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘Your army is beaten. Yield.’ The Red Knight flexed his hip carefully like a man testing a bad tooth. It wasn’t good.

No, there’s nothing I can do.

Thanks for that, old man.

A few feet away Ser Jehan hacked one of the icon bearers to the ground, swinging his long sword over and over into the man’s guard until he slipped and took the sword in his unarmoured face.

‘Heretic barbarian!’ the strategos shouted. ‘I am Michael Tzoukes. My ancestors fought the infidel and the irk when yours lived in straw huts and worshipped idols. I will not yield to
you
.’

The Red Knight sighed and stepped forward into the guard called ‘All gates are iron’. He crossed his wrists, held his dagger reversed in his right hand and grabbed it by the tip with his left. The roundel was a foot and a half long, triangular in cross section, and had steel rounds which neatly filled the top and bottom of his closed and armoured fist, making the hand a single, seamless steel surface to an enemy blade.

The dust of the melee was settling and sight lines were improving. The Moreans were utterly beaten – routed or, in the centre, smashed flat. More than a dozen of the Red Knight’s men-at-arms were closing in on the strategos.

They were still six feet apart. The Red Knight stepped back, tried and failed to open his visor and got a nasty pain in the back of his right leg for his trouble. He had to shout from within his helmet.

‘Stay back,’ he managed.

The strategos looked around him, growled, and leaped. His heavy sword fell like a lightning bolt—

—onto the Red Knight’s crossed hands and the steel bar that was his dagger. Cursing his hip, the Red Knight powered forward, slipped the dagger from his left hand for a moment, caught his opponent’s blade, and rolled on his hips – a sudden and unintended intake of breath and a stumble marked how much pain the hip could cause – before he uncrossed his hands, stripping the sword from the Morean and breaking the man’s elbow in a single fluid movement.

Ruthless to his own hip and to his opponent alike, the Red Knight stepped in again, holding the man by his broken arm, and rolled him – put a foot between his armoured legs and forced him to the ground through pain and the power of his leg lock – against his own steel-clad legs.