The Fell Sword (92 page)

‘What is he doing?’ the Red Knight asked. He put spurs to his great black charger, and he started forward. The Red Knight was thinking of giving this one a name, instead of a number. He’d killed seven chargers so far. But the horse Count Zac had given him—

Father Arnaud cursed. ‘He’s trying to prevent the battle,’ he said, and followed the Red Knight, equally helmetless.

The Red Knight threw himself forward on his horse’s neck and the giant horse leaped into a gallop as if they were in a tiltyard. He rode like a jockey in a race, not like a man in full harness on a battlefield. His magnificent warhorse did its best to carry him at breakneck speed.

‘Majesty!’ he shouted.

The Emperor stopped his horse and waved.

The Red Knight reined in to save his horse’s wind and trotted up. ‘Majesty?’

‘I want them to see me,’ the Emperor said. ‘If they see me alive they won’t fight.
I am their Emperor.
My person is sacred.’ He nodded decisively.

The Red Knight felt as if he were arguing with a gifted child. ‘Yes, Majesty. But these men have already hurt you.’

The beautiful man turned his head and favoured the Red Knight with the full weight of his magnificent smile. ‘No, my lord Duke. Those men are dead. You killed them, and quite justly, before my very eyes. That is the banner of Demetrius, son of Duke Andronicus, one of my most trusted lords. He is my wife’s brother.’

‘He took you prisoner,’ the Red Knight said gently.

The Emperor thought a moment.

Behind them, the centre of the Imperial line started forward.

‘He did, did he not?’ the Emperor asked slowly. ‘How could that have happened? The Logothete warned me – I don’t remember. Therefore it cannot be important. Let us ride over and see those gentlemen—’

The Red Knight didn’t know why his own company was advancing at the double, but all he could see was disaster. And the unravelling of his plan – his over-complex plan. He took the Emperor’s bridle, and turned his horse. ‘Those men will try to kill you, Majesty. Come with us – with your friends.’

They trotted along, parallel to the two armies, for a hundred paces, and then the Red Knight turned and led the Emperor towards his own lines. After another hundred paces, he dropped the Emperor’s reins, and the man followed him willingly enough.

The Red Knight rode until he met Ser Jehan, leading the company, under his own black banner.

‘Looked like trouble,’ Jehan said. ‘We can turn about.’

The Red Knight shook his head. ‘We can’t. The city stradiotes only need a feather’s touch to cut and run.’ He looked at the sun and swore. ‘Damn it, Jehan! Now we’ll start sooner. I needed
time
!’

Ser Jehan looked away.

The Red Knight looked around. Men were staring at him.

He thought back to his first encounter with them, in Arles, and he laughed. ‘Look at yourselves,’ he said. He left the Emperor to Toby and trotted to the head of the company. All the men-at-arms except Gelfred’s were there, in the front rank, with their squires in the second rank, their archers in the third and spear-armed pages in the fourth. The old way. They were all dismounted, their horse holders well to the rear. Their armour was polished as well as could be expected after a three-week campaign in winter weather, and their scarlet surcoats were fading to a ruddy brown. But their weapons glittered like malevolent ice.

‘Look at yourselves,’ he shouted again. ‘Think of who you were last year. And who you are now.’ He turned back to where the enemy lay, having caught in a relieved glance the approach of the Nordikans and Vardariotes, who were reforming the line.

The Scholae came forward at a trot.

He pointed at the enemy, who was marching steadily at them over the frozen fields. ‘An archaic scholar once said that the Thrakians would conquer the world, if only they would stop fighting among themselves.’ He grinned. ‘But he never met you, gentlemen. I will not lie and say this will be easy. I’ll merely say that if you hang together for three hours you will be victorious, and the whole of the Morea will be ours.’

They cheered him like a new messiah.

Long Paw, in the third rank behind Ser Alison, said, ‘Three hours, against all that? Christ, we’re doomed.’

‘He’s coming right at us!’ Aeskepiles said.

Demetrius watched the enemy advance and shook his head. ‘He’s moving his line forward. What does that mean? He has traps set
behind
him?’ He watched. ‘Is his line in confusion? Now his left is trailing away – those are the Scholae. And the Vardariotes. I see.’

Ser Christos appeared and raised his visor. ‘My lord, many of the levies are anxious. That was the
Emperor.
’

‘Merely a usurper,’ Demetrius said.

Ser Christos narrowed his eyes. He looked at Count Stefano, who looked away. He turned his horse and faced golden Demetrius. ‘Where is your father, my lord?’ he asked.

‘He is sick, but bravely holding the walls of Lonika with a handful of worthy men,’ Demetrius said.

Ser Christos looked at Aeskepiles.

Aeskepiles ignored him. ‘Here they come,’ he said. He raised himself in his stirrups to cast, but the distance was greater than he had expected and the angle was poor. He put spurs to his horse and went forward.

‘Do your duty,’ Demetrius told his father’s best knight.

Ser Christos nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. He took the banner and followed Demetrius into the field beyond the low stone wall, and was the last man to leave the crossroads.

Aeskepiles opened the battle with a set of workings – an illusion of a fireball, a second illusion of a complex net spell weaving its way forward from his feet to the enemy lines, and a third spell, a sweeping organic scythe aimed at bowstrings.

His illusions struck with dramatic intensity, shocking new recruits and peasant levies all over the field. The fireball floated slowly, roaring like a blast furnace, to burst like a terrifying entertainment over the centre of the enemy army.

His string cutter left his hand and vanished into a protection.

The enemy archers raised their bows.

Annoyed, he cast again.

They loosed, and a volley of arrows rose.

He swatted them to earth with a simple wind harness he had prepared, to be safe.

The Thrakian infantry marched slowly forward. Their footsteps raised no dust from the frozen ground, but the ground shook with their matched step. Over to the left, the Thrakian peasants had no order, but they flowed over the ground like thirst-maddened wolves scenting water. The competing wind workings – from both sides of the field – created small vortexes, tiny hurricanes that buzzed as they moved and raised old leaves and mulch into the air.

Demetrius watched the infantry go forward, unscathed, and laughed.

‘Oh, Pater. How I wish you’d been here to see this.’

Wilful Murder stood a few feet behind the Red Knight, who had now dismounted and taken his place: at the centre of the line, with the banner.

The line didn’t shuffle. The lance points projecting from the pages in the fourth rank wavered – it took real strength to hold a heavy spear this long. And the archers moved. The order had come down to cease fire, but every man had a dozen livery arrows stuck point down in the ground by his back foot.

The enemy spearmen – the same hard bastards who’d almost pounded them at Liviapolis – were coming in untouched by long-range archery while the warlocks and sorcerers fought it out in the air over his head. The Captain had a pair of glowing shields – one of the reasons Wilful liked to be the Captain’s archer was that in battle he was covered by the Captain’s sorcerous crap.

When the fireball detonated, it was right on top of them. Wilful cringed away – and in the moment after it imprinted itself on his retinas, he patted his forehead and his arms. Then he laughed at the smell.

‘Someone pissed their pants!’ he called.

Rough laughter. The Captain turned his helmeted head. ‘That was just an illusion. There will be more.’

His eyes glowed red. The enemy spearmen were about a hundred Alban cloth yards away.

Bent roared, ‘Nock!’

I need you to get closer to Aeskepiles.

Harmodius had been decorously silent since his last burst of humour. The Red Knight had begun to hope – or fear – that the entity was gone. His words were immediately followed by a spike of pain, as if a sword thrust had gone in between his eyes.

Nothing I can do about that just now, old man.

In the palace, things were calm, and Harmodius stood decorously, younger than ever, like a page waiting to serve. He had the Fell Sword in his hand. Aeskepiles has increased in power – again. He has access to something, or someone. He’s swatting my wind workings around like a child killing moths, and—

I knew it was mistake to send Mag away.

You said yourself – only Mag can guarantee the safety of our women. Now let me take over.

Don’t keep hold of my body when I need to be fighting. Oh – Harmodius, the pain.

Never fear, boy. I’m leaving you soon. I promise. We need to get closer to Aeskepiles. Sweet saviour, where did he get all that power?

Harmodius took control of the Red Knight’s body. Without the other presence as an intermediary, he could cast more quickly – more cleanly. And he’d had six months to prepare for this moment. He knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get there.

‘Loose!’ roared Bent.

The front-rank knights and men-at-arms knelt. The archers leaned forward and loosed. At this range, their shafts had a travel time of about four heartbeats and required very little loft.

Bent was shooting needle point bodkins, cut square, sixpence a head from Master Pye in Cheapside. Hardened steel. The heads were five fingers long and tapered away to a wicked point like an ice pick. He chose his target carefully – the banner man in the front rank. Scale armour, and a magnificent gold helmet. Plate arms and legs.

The arrow weighed three Alban ounces and flew almost two hundred feet in a second. The head struck one finger to the outside of its target’s shield and passed
through
a bronze scale and between two iron scales beneath – through the elk hide base, through a layer of linen, through a finger of tightly packed sheep’s wool, through a second layer of linen canvas. Through a thin linen shirt.

Through skin into fat, and through fat to muscle. To bone. Slid along the bone almost half a finger and then into fat – and more muscle.

The man fell. The heavy banner fell forward, and twenty hands reached to pluck it up. But the arrow had not arrived alone—

Bent’s second arrow was on his bow before the first pierced the banner man’s heart. And his third . . .

Fourth . . .

The space between the centres of the two armies was a blizzard of archery, and all the shafts went in one direction. On the Red Knight’s left, Demetrius held back his mercenary cavalry for the death stroke – so that the ground in front of the Nordikans was empty.

They began to advance. At a shouted order, three hundred guardsmen raised their axes, screamed a shrill and very ancient cry, and started forward at the distant enemy cavalry. The Nordikans were packed so tightly that the man on the right of the line was scraping his magnificent gilded shield against the man-high stone wall of the main Liviapolis-Lonika road at his left shoulder. The Nordikans were only two deep and their line moved with a kind of supernatural precision. Each one of them had a heavy throwing spear – a lonche – with a head that weighed almost a pound, often inlaid in silver or gold or both, the shaft covered in gilded runes, the point of the best steel, blued, running out to a needle. Most of them also had a pair of darts behind their shields – lead weighted, on two-foot shafts. A practised man could hurl them eighty paces.

Fifth—

Sixth—

The Nordikans passed the end of the company line and continued forward, with Darkhair calling time in his own language. His voice had an eerie singing quality to it that rose over the vicious humming of the arrow shafts and the screaming that came from the spearmen.

The enemy spearmen came on through the hail of bodkins and broad heads, despite heavy losses.

The Red Knight was singing in High Archaic, and he had three different moving shields – one lavender, one a very heraldic red, one a blinding gold.

Directly across the field from him was an unarmoured man on a tall grey horse who also wore a succession of shields – green, purple, lavender, red, black. The black shield rose in response to a bolt of levin that came across the field like a cavalry charge. The black absorbed the lightning and it returned precisely down its line of attack.

And met a buckler of the same black stuff – a small shield not much bigger than the palm of a man’s hand, precisely focused.

The bolt spat back – to strike the front rank of the spearmen, where a man exploded, his guts emerging as superheated steam and boiled meat. A second man was killed by a piece of his skull.

Seventh shaft.

Eighth.

To the Red Knight’s right, the Vardariotes swept forward at the Thrakian peasant infantry until they were less than fifty paces away from the charging mass, and began to loose their own, lighter, cane shafts. Three hundred Vardariotes spread out across the flat plain and emptied their first quivers into men who could not make a reply. And as they charged faster in brave desperation, sprinting at the hornets stinging them with arrows, the Vardariotes slipped away – turning and riding a few paces and loosing another shaft at a range too close for a veteran to miss.

And again.

The peasants were flayed. Twenty of them died with every volley, and the shafts were rolling off the Vardariotes’ fingers like coins from a mountebank’s trick.

Nine.

Ten.

The spearmen were going to close. They were too brave, too confident to break, or to lie down and die out there on the frozen ground. They’d been shocked at Liviapolis, at the intensity of the archery and the power of the great yew bows, but they’d had six months to chew on their rage and boast of their glory. They took their losses and stepped over them – and over men they’d known for twenty years.