And, even worse for the invaders, they would have to do so while the archers from the galley companies camped in the enclosures on either side of the road were pushing arrows down on them from atop the interior walls that ran all along both sides of the road.
In other words, the roadway between its one remaining gate in its outer defensive wall and the one remaining gate in its inner defensive wall would be death trap if Orthodox army charged into it—which is exactly why my lieutenant commander, Henry Soldier, the Company’s master at fighting on land, had insisted that interior walls be built all along both sides of the roadway.
As you might imagine, we intended to do everything possible to lure the Orthodox army into trying to fight its way through the city’s one usable gate where they would be particularly vulnerable, as opposed to launching its attacks on the gates which had been rendered unpassable by the removal of their bridges and the piling up of huge amounts of dirt and rubble to block them.
What concerned us was that the Greek spies in the city might have reported that all of the city gates in the outer wall had been blocked and the bridges over their moats destroyed. Hopefully, the Orthodox spies knew and reported that food supplies and firewood were still coming into the city through the Farmers Gate, and that meant that its draw bridge was still down.
In any event, in the unlikely event the captains of the huge Greek-led army did not already know the Farmers Gate was still usable, they soon would—when the men of the Empress’s vassal states sortied out of it and fell upon their newly established camp.
Of course the enclosure where the states’ forces were camped was where we wanted the Greeks to attack. It is always better to have someone other than our archers do as much of the fighting as possible.
******
It was midway through the afternoon by the time we were ready to launch our sally. And it was only after there had been a heated dispute between Henry, Richard and me—we had each claimed the right to lead the riders of the states’ forces into the Orthodox camp. There were only a few of our horse archers in the city, my guards and a few who had either stayed behind to act as couriers, and a few of Richard’s wounded and poxed from the mountain who had recovered enough to be returned to active duty.
Richard said it was his right as the leader of the Company’s horse archers to lead them, and Henry said it was his right to lead them because he was the commander of the state troops; I said that it was mine as the Company’s commander. Reason prevailed and the dispute was finally settled in the best tradition of the Company—I won the argument because I had more stripes on my tunic.
Henry and Richard both had important roles and accompanied me to the sally gate. Henry remained there to organize the return of the sally force and lead any rescues; Richard and his apprentice, as soon as I led the sally force out of the gate, were to ride through the enclosures along the outer wall to make sure the archers in each enclosure had gone over the wall to attack the Greeks camped directly in front of them.
******
It took a while for me to lead the available horse archers, twenty-three in all including my apprentice and all sixteen of my personal guards, to the encampment of the states’ forces. All the rest of our horse archers were somewhere beyond the Greek encampment harassing the Greek forage parties and raiding the columns and camps of those who were still inward bound from Adrianople.
I led the way to the sally gate with Nicholas Greenway, my apprentice, riding immediately behind me. We rode in a long single file from one enclosure to the next through the narrow openings in the new interior walls until we finally reached the walled roadway where the states’ forces were camped. It, the main roadway into the city, ran all the way from the city’s outer wall to its inner wall and was jammed full of people, a surprising number of whom were camp-following women and merchants. There were even some women with babies and children. As you might imagine, it smelled most foul and I was glad not to be on foot.
We were watched and cheered, and people rushed to look at us, as we came through the narrow passageway in the final interior wall and began picking our way up the crowded road to the Farmers Gate. A translator provided by Henry rode ahead of us waving his arms about and shouting the same refrain over and over again.
“Make way. Make way. The commander of the Empress’s army is coming to lead the attack in person.”
The last half mile took even longer than it had taken us to get through the baggage trains and camp followers because the state troops were already being formed up on the road itself.
We reached the states’ foot soldiers first, and they were hard to miss even though they wore a wide variety of gowns and tunics—for Henry had given each of them a circle of blue linen to sew on the front and back of whatever clothes they were wearing and a hat of woven straw to help shield them from the sun.
The purpose of both items was to help identify the states’ foot soldiers to the archers, and to each other and their own knights. The Company of Archers had provided them in an effort to reduce the friend on friend casualties that were inevitable in the confused and chaotic fighting that was about to begin.
We did not, of course, provide the hats and circles out of the goodness of our hearts. Rather we provided them so the state troops would be more likely to fight more with our enemies and less with each other—so that our archers would not have to fight as much and our losses would be less.
*******
My arrival to lead the sally in person seemed to give the state troops and their captains a great deal of satisfaction. There was no surprise in that—my leading the sortie meant, or so the state troops undoubtedly hoped, that they were not going to be sacrificed in some kind of “forlorn hope” assault that was doomed to fail.
And the state troops were partially right. I would not be leading a “forlorn hope;” it was an effort to inflict serious damage on the invaders. I would, in fact, be leading them through the gate, over the moat bridge, and into the Orthodox camp.
What they did not yet know, however, was that after we got a little ways into the Greek camp, I would merely wave them on, and then stop and wait with my little band of horse archers for them to return—for that was what I had to promise my lieutenants I would do in order to get their agreement on my participation.
Chapter Sixteen
The Commander leads the sally.
The Commander’s horse and some of the horses of the men riding with him had somehow caught the excitement of the moment despite the stifling heat. They were skittish and prancing about. I was on my horse and next to the Commander. It was my proper place as his apprentice sergeant. There were about twenty of the Company’s horse archers just behind us, and then the Bulgarian commander and his knights and those of the other states.
The Bulgarian commander led the largest contingent of knights and would be right behind us when we passed through the gate and over the moat bridge. His name was Ivan something or other. The other states’ riders and their foot soldiers were immediately behind the Bulgarians and, at least so far as I could see, they too looked ready to go.
My horse and many of the other horses sensed something was about to happen. They were snorting and anxiously moving about as Commander Courtenay looked over his shoulder at the Bulgarian commander, and raised his eyes in an unspoken question.
The Bulgarian nodded his readiness and similarly raised his hand and shouted words I could not understand to get the attention of his men. The captains and sergeants of the various groups behind him had seen their moves and did the same.
I could hear orders rippling down the close-packed ranks of the riders behind me, and watched as the Bulgarian commander and his knights put on their helmets, pulled their visors down to protect their faces, and drew their swords. It was both a hot and sunny day and time to ride. We were already warm and about to be very warm. I, at least, was not wearing armour as many of the riders behind us were wearing. Hopefully, the Greeks were not ready to receive us.
My
horse was still anxiously dancing about when the Commander nodded to Henry Soldier who was standing next to the windlass that raised and lowered the gate. The two men with Henry, both veteran foot archers who had been helping him train the states’ soldiers, immediately began enthusiastically cranking. The rusty chains rattled and the huge gate slowly rose. Behind us I could hear the sound of many horses stamping their feet and much talking and shouted orders.
As soon as the gate was high enough for Commander Courtenay to ride under it, he raised his bow over his head, kicked his horse in the ribs and shouted “FORWARD.” As he did, he pointed his bow at the moat bridge immediately in front of the gate and the densely packed camp of the Greek-led army that began only a hundred paces or so beyond the bridge.
I was right behind him as he galloped towards them.
****** George Courtenay
The thundering rumble of horses’ hooves and the battle cries of the riders behind me were loud as we surged through the now-open gate. They remained loud even though the sound of our horses’ hooves changed as we clattered over the wooden bridge over the moat. I was guiding my horse with my knees, and by the time I cleared the bridge I had an arrow nocked and my bow drawn.
We swept into the crowded Orthodox camp and my archers began fanning out abreast of me as they had previously been ordered. Nicholas was the man riding nearest to me. He was about ten paces away and to my right.
Surprised and suddenly desperate people immediately began running about in every direction as soon as we came out of the gate. We had to ride this way and that to get around the haphazardly placed and closely packed tents and wagons. Our horses chose the path we rode because our hands were full of our longbows and the arrows nocked in our bowstrings.
Almost instantly I came upon a young man who had paused with a look of surprise on his face as he was in the process of lifting some kind of sack out of the back of a wagon. I had ridden around one side of the wagon and Nicholas the other. The young Greek did not even have time to drop the sack.
It would have been embarrassing to miss at such a short range, and I did not. I pushed an arrow straight into the middle of him and kept going as I quickly reached over my shoulder for an arrow from my quiver and immediately nocked it.
My horse was running as fast as she could and constantly turning and twisting to avoid the closely packed tents and wagons ahead of us. All about me were the sights and sounds of chaos, surprise, and desperation. Shouting and screaming people were suddenly running about in every direction in a desperate effort to escape.
I had already ridden past a number of surprised and panic stricken men and women by the time I finished nocking my second arrow and picking out my next target. He was large, heavily whiskered man who came rushing out of a tent pulling up his Greek trousers. I saw the spurt of blood that came out of his back when the point of my arrow went all the way through him.
A boy wearing no clothes, probably due to the heat and possibly his grandson, was standing behind him. I sometimes still remember him with his hand raised to his mouth in surprise and a look of horror on his face.
All around me the Bulgarian riders were leaning out of their saddles to chop on the Greeks with their swords and the Company’s archers were pushing arrows into them. I could not see what was happening behind me, of course, but I somehow knew that the first of the men on foot, the Bulgarians, were already across the bridge.
Nicholas and I were galloping between a cart and the tent next to it when my horse swerved slightly to avoid running into a fleeing woman, but not enough. She went tumbling down as the shoulder of my horse hit her, and I felt the bump as I rode right over her and my horse stepped on her.
I was nocking another arrow a moment later when Nicholas came right up alongside of me in such a way as to change the direction my horse was moving. It was a deliberate move and it annoyed me. My displeasure must have showed for he promptly shouted out an explanation over the noise and chaos.
“It is time to stop and wait for the foot to reach us, Commander. You ordered me to make sure you stopped and waited for them.”
******
Nicholas and I pulled up our excited horses and turned aside into a small open area beyond a collapsed tent and an overturned wagon. A dead man lay in the middle of it with a terrible wound to his head, obviously a sword cut from a man with a very strong arm. To my surprise, I was breathing hard and almost out of breath.
Six or seven archers had been riding abreast of us on either side. They pulled up their horses and joined us as the last of the Bulgarians and state riders flooded past. The Bulgarians were brandishing their swords and looked red-faced and excited. There was already blood on the swords of some of them. The rest of my horse archer guards must have been caught up in the excitement and ridden on. All around us were dead, wounded, and terrified Greeks.
Two more archers soon weaved their way through the tents and wagons of the chaos-filled camp to join us, and then another three. They reached us whilst I was standing on my stirrups trying to see what I could see.
What I saw was that the Latin states’ foot soldiers, a great shouting and running horde of them, all totally disorganized, had passed over the bridge and were just now beginning to enter the Greek camp. It was easy to understand how the missing archers had lost sight of us in the chaos and not seen us stop.
When the Latin foot entered the camp, they would find some of the Greeks who were still alive trying to hide in their tents and under the wagons, and probably under the tents that were down and everywhere else as well. Most of the still-living Greeks who could run, however, seemed to be running, and some of them were carrying swords and spears they had grabbed up when they realized what was happening. Our about-to-arrive men of the Latin foot would have to deal with them.
We sat together on our horses and watched the massacre of the Greeks as it unfolded all around us. It was as if we were holding a small island of calm amidst a sea of horror.
After a while we rode back to the gate and received a warm welcome from Henry and my father. Four of the horse archers who had sallied out with us were still missing, and one of the returnees had a nasty slice in his leg that needed sewing.
****** Major Captain Daniel Tenn.
I was up on the parapet of the city’s the outer wall and getting anxious. Sam Ridley was with me. Sam was the four-stripe galley captain of the fifty or so archers standing on the wall with us. The rest of his archers were waiting on the stairs and in the enclosure below us. We were anxious because the signal for the archers to start their attack was overdue.
We were particularly anxious because the city’s outer defensive wall curved such that we ourselves could not see the gate through which Commander Courtenay would lead a sortie involving a handful of our archers and all the available soldiers of the Latin states. What we could see, however, were the archers posted further on down the wall in that direction as lookouts.
The lookouts able to see the gate were ordered to energetically wave a linen flag tied to a stick as soon as the commander led the state forces out of the gate. Each subsequent enclosure’s lookout, upon seeing the waving flags of the others, was to wave his own flag stick. In that way the signal to attack would pass rapidly down the outer wall so that every galley captain would know it was time for him and his archers to climb down from the outer wall, cross the moat immediately in front of them, and begin pushing out arrows to kill or wound the Greeks in the camp across from them.
We waited impatiently. Finally, there it was—the signal; vigorous flag waving came rolling along the top of the wall towards us like a great wave.
“Follow me, lads; follow me. And remember that a badly wounded Greek is even better than a dead one.”
I shouted out my orders as the ladders which had been lying atop the wall were being grabbed up and hurriedly lowered into place. One of the archers assigned to the ladders helped put one over the side and then he and another archer grabbed it to hold it steady.
An instan
t later Sam swung himself on to the ladder and began to climb down to the narrow piece of land between the city’s outer wall and its moat. He went first with his lieutenant, Edwin Draper, and a two stripe archer from Dover named Bill Street following close behind. I followed them.
The lieutenant was carrying a line. When he got to the little strip of land between the wall and the moat, he would hand one end of the line to Bill and then follow Sam as he waded across the moat on a narrow foot causeway that had been installed when the moat had been drained so the rest of it could be dug deeper.
Lieutenant Draper and Bill Street would then hold the line tight over the foot causeway so the seventy-six archers who were to follow Sam into the enemy camp would have something to hold and would know where they could safely put their feet down when they walked across.
Before we started down the ladder, Sam had once again loudly reminded his men that no arrows were to be pushed into the Greek camp by the archers who were on the wall. That was because we did not yet want the Greeks to know the distance arrows pushed out of longbows could reach—we would wait for another time to let them learn about the range of our weapons, such as when their army was formed up in front of us and getting ready for a major assault. At least that was the plan according to Commander Courtenay.
There is nothing more likely to ruin a man’s day, and cause him to turn back from an attack, than a shower of arrows raining down on him and his mates when they least expect them.
****** Daniel Tenn
I followed Sam, Edwin and Bill down the ladder and my apprentice, Edward Fast as he was called, followed right behind me. A long line of anxious archers and their auxiliaries followed us down file by file. Each archer had his longbow strung and slung over his shoulder along with four quivers of arrows; the auxiliaries were carrying the bladed pikes produced by the Company’s smiths at our stronghold on Cyprus.
The Alchemist's Revenge Page 12
