“See, Englis, how the road passes through the marsh,” he added, “the enemy foot will get bogged down there. Our guns can play havoc among them as they struggle to get out.”
I doubted it. The hot weather had dried up the marshy ground, save for a a few boggy patches. It would prove no more than a temporary obstacle.
“Even if they are halted for a while,” I argued, “weight of numbers must tell in the end. The Praguers can afford to soak up casualties. Everything depends on the resolve of their generals.”
Hynek shook his head. “You're wrong, Englis. None of their generals are worth a spent piss. Fat merchants and burghers and cowardly Utraquist barons who haven't lifted a sword in anger for years. Everything depends on Zizka. You'll see.”
I had no wish to dent his confidence by arguing. Instead I fell silent and looked fearfully to the north, where a storm of dust over the trees marked the approach of the enemy.
28.
Our army hurriedly deployed on the hill. Zizka arranged his troops in the normal fashion, wagons in the centre, infantry behind, cavalry on the wings. On the march he had ordered his soldiers to gather up loose rocks and pile them in the wagons, so now the horses strained to drag their heavily laden burdens up the road. The infantry were obliged to lend a hand, and after much sweat and struggle the damned things were finally shoved into position. Afterwards the horses were unharnessed and taken inside the compound of the fort, to be kept there until needed.
“Much will depend on you today, Englis,” Zizka said to me at our brief council of war, held under the gates of the empty fort, “when I give the signal, your cavalry will charge down the slope and kill as many of the enemy as possible. Keep them busy, but stay clear of the road. Understand?”
I glanced at the wooded slopes of the hill flanking the road. The trees clustered thickly, and the hill was dangerously steep. Difficult ground for cavalry to fight in.
“The enemy vanguard will advance up the road,” he explained, “they'll also send men through the trees. Your task is to stop them.”
“My lord,” I said, “give me a thousand armoured lancers and I’ll chase the enemy all the way back to Prague. As it is, I have fourteen knights and less than two hundred light horse. We might delay the enemy for a while, but....”
He held up a hand. “Delay is all I ask for,” he grunted, “when the time is right, your men will retreat.”
If any of them are still alive, I added silently. I couldn't see what Zizka hoped to gain by sacrificing his cavalry, or me into the bargain. Still, I had left it far too late to desert. My life depended on his judgement.
Above us the copper orb of the sub, suspended in a clear azure sky, beat down relentlessly. Trapped inside my cocoon of leather and steel (for once, I wore full plate) the sweat rolled in slick waves down my skin. I toyed with the hilt of my sabre, wishing the bloody work of the day would begin.
The steady throb of drums echoed through the valley below. From our position on the summit, we had a superb view of the terrain to the north. And the enemy. Long columns of infantry, armour glistening in the sun, snaked through the valley in their thousands: dismounted nobles and their retinues of men-at-arms, Prague militia, disciplined bodies of peasant-soldiers, a moving forest of spears and pikes and banners.
“Look at them,” snarled Lord Hynek, “treacherous dogs. We once fought alongside those men against Sigismund. What for? Why did we take up arms in the first place? So we might destroy each other in the end?”
“For God,” Zizka said quietly, “all was for God.”
Hynek turned on him. “For God?” he yelled, “why should He choose to punish us like this? Bohemia is finished, Lord Zizka! Thousands of our people are dead. The countryside is littered with unburied corpses. Dogs gnaw at their bones. Our villages and towns lie in ruins, the crops go untended, there is no law and order anywhere. No king, no government, no church. Nothing but endless war, misery piled on misery.”
Hynek was a tough fighting soldier, yet there were tears in his eyes. “After this last fight, the Devil may take Bohemia.”
I swallowed uncomfortably. Lord Hynek's nerve had snapped. The young esquires in Zizka's retinue who heard his speech looked ready to bolt.
The general was unmoved. “No,” he said with conviction, “we are God's chosen people. The Lord means to test us, as He tested the people of Israel, to gauge the depth of their love for Him.”
His voice rose to a husky shout. “Thus far we have passed every test,” he roared, “destroyed every one of our enemies, and given the thanks for our victories to Him. Always to Him. In return God has sustained us. He will not abandon us at the last. Have faith, my children.”
Zizka, like me, had a touch of the play-actor about him. As he finished speaking he ripped out his broadsword and held it high. Golden sunlight rippled down the length of the blade. The glow reflected off his burnished steel plate, and for a moment the general's burly figure was surrounded by a crescent of fire.
“Zizka!” chanted the ragged files of Táborite footsoldiers, who had never lost their love for him, “holy warrior! Warrior of God!”
Their impassioned voices drowned out the thunder of enemy drums. I saw Ralf among the Táborites, bawling his head off and brandishing a spiked club. More cheers broke from the rest of our army, chants and hymns and prayers, while the Hussite standards were raised and the field guns wheeled into position.
I looked at Lord Hynek. He gave me a dark look, dashed away his tears and galloped away to join his company.
“You relit the fire in his belly, my lord,” I remarked. Zizka laughed and rammed his sword back into its sheath.
“Go to your command, Englis,” he ordered cheerfully, “God grant we see each other again.”
I twitched my reins and rode left, past the shallow lines of Hussite foot. Jana stepped out from their ranks and reached out with her free hand. The other gripped a mace. I touched her fingers as I passed and gave her an encouraging smile. She wore no armour, the stupid wench, not even a scrap of mail, only the same everyday woollen smock and linen coif. Yet she carried my child in her belly!
We had argued the night before. Nothing I said, no threats or pleas or curses, could persuade her to leave the army.
“Our son will be born into a hard world,” she said proudly (Jana was convinced the child would be a boy), “he will need to be a fighter. Born into battle.”
“Just so long as he is not killed in battle,” I answered sourly, “the world's first unborn warrior.”
“Promise me,” I said, “if the battle goes ill, you will get away. Run. Run as far and as fast as you can. Not for my sake. Or yours. Or even for God. Run, for the sake of the life you carry. He deserves a chance in this world, even if his parents have squandered theirs.”
Her jaw clenched. I was familiar with that stubborn look, and readied myself for another fight.
To my surprise, she relented. “I promise,” she replied softly, “for his sake, I will live.”
We both knew Jana said this just to comfort me, nothing more. To run away from a fight was alien to her nature.
I joined my cavalry on the left wing of our little army. Zizka had divided my command in two, and placed the other half on the right of his position. Apart from the knights, these men were the survivors of the raw youths I had trained at Caslav. Their numbers had thinned out since. Perhaps a third had died in the battles at Strachov and Skalice and elsewhere, leaving just over two hundred hard-faced young veterans.
They gave me a ragged cheer. I saluted in response, and felt a touch of pride as I looked over them. They were good boys, even if their horses were poor screws and their equipment was crude, hand-me-down stuff, inherited from their fathers or looted from battlefields.
“We have a job to do, lads” I cried when the cheers had died down, “Lord Zizka reckons the enemy are going to send men through the woods. He wants us to kill them. Can we do that?”
Another cheer, this time with real venom behind it.
My pride was replaced by shame. They were proper fighters, yet to taste defeat in battle. Full of youthful courage, bolstered by absolute confidence in me, Lord Zizka, and God. The unholy trinity, if you like. All three of us would soon fail them.
The Praguers wasted no time. Their dismounted nobles advanced down the road, Utraquists marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Catholics, led by a huge knight in black armour bearing aloft the standard of Prague. The standard was magnificent, a swallow-tailed banner of red silk displaying the city gates worked in silver thread and a golden sun with rays. Behind the nobles tramped the lesser men, compact blocks of retainers in colourful household livery and numberless hordes of civilian and peasant footmen.
I looked to my right, where Zizka had set up his cannon under the walls of the old fort. The smaller cannon were set up behind pavises in the gaps between the wagons, which formed a chain further down the slope.
Recent desertions and casualties had taken their toll. Zizka had just fifty wagons left, compared to the three hundred he commanded at Kutna Hora, and eight big field guns. This was the rump of the army he had commanded with such unlikely success for almost five years, repeatedly humbling the greatest princes in Christendom.
Until, that is, our enemies learned to step back and wait for the Hussites to destroy each other. “Only the Bohemians can defeat the Bohemians,” Sigismund is reputed to have said. For once the Dragon spoke true.
The guns roared into life, belching their roundshot at the mass of Praguers tramping steadily up the road. My horse started at the noise. I calmed him and beckoned at one of my young sergeants.
“Go to our men on the right,” I yelled at the lad over the din, “tell Boleslav to charge the enemy foot directly below his position when Zizka gives the signal. I will do the same. Our task is to delay them, that's all. The instant Zizka sounds the recall, he is to withdraw at once. Understood? Good – ride!”
He drove in his spurs and took off, galloping across the narrow space between our guns and wagons. Boleslav was my second-in-command, an impoverished country knight who had sold all his worldly goods, such as they were, to take up arms for the Hussites.
I glanced down at the enemy. The road was scarcely wide enough for fourteen men to march abreast, and their ranks were all bunched together. It was hard not to wince at the dreadful execution committed by our gunners, who must have slavered at such a choice target. A fine spray of red mist rose into the air as the deadly iron missiles bounced and slashed through the Prague nobles, pulping their armoured bodies with frightful ease.
Perhaps thirty Praguers died, or suffered crippling injury, in the first barrage. “Not enough,” I muttered, chewing my lip. Cannons require precious minutes to reload, even with the best crews to service them. While our men worked feverishly to swab out the barrels and pack in fresh shot, the enemy closed ranks and marched on.
Their vanguard reached the marshland at the foot of the hill. As I feared, it only slowed them a little. A few nobles, weighed down by heavy steel plate, sank to their knees in pools of watery muck, and were helped out by their esquires. Not a single man was drowned. The Praguers pushed confidently up the slope, still led by the huge figure of the black knight.
“Look, sir,” cried one of my sergeants, “down there, in the trees!”
I wrenched my gaze from the road to the woods directly below. At first I saw nothing, then caught a glint of steel among the green, the flash of red and yellow banners. As Zizka predicted, the enemy had sent men to fight their way up the wooded slopes of the hill. Restricted by the terrain and the narrowness of the road, it was the only way to bring their superior numbers to bear.
Men started to emerge from the treeline, light infantry with spears and round shields, creeping forward in nervous silence. I measured the distance between them and my position. Thirty paces of steep ground, broken up by tree roots, clumps of trees and bushes and some old wooden stakes half-buried in the soil, the remains of an outer palisade. Enough for my cavalry to work up the momentum of a charge.
“Give the order,” I muttered, glancing anxiously at Zizka's banners, “now, damn you!”
Zizka's timing was perfect. A pennon waved, signalling the charge, accompanied by a trumpet.
“After me,” I shouted, raising my sabre, “stay close together, and out of the woods. Forward!”
I urged my gelding down the incline at a canter. He was a sure-footed beast and made short work of the treacherous ground, leaping or sidestepping every obstacle. My heart raced with him, merging with the drumming of hoofs into a single wild pulse.
The battle-fury swept over me. I gave a wordless shout and bent low over my horse's neck, sabre outstretched, point levelled at the nearest foeman.
The Praguers below us were citizen levies, tailors and drapers and cobblers and the like, given shields and spears and thrown into battle. They had barely any training, maybe an hour's drill one day a week. Nor had they faced cavalry before. Half of them turned and ran back into the woods, howling in fear. The remainder tried to shuffle together into a spear-ring. Their officer, a fat man in a rusting brigandine, was still shouting at them to close ranks and present spears when my gelding rode straight over him.
His skull crunched under the hoofs. I struck out, knocked off one man's helm and split another's face open. A spear rasped against my armoured thigh. Snarling, I wrenched my horse to the left and cut down a third soldier. Dark blood streamed from the rent I opened in his throat.
The Praguers fell back. Seconds later my cavalry smashed into them and burst their pathetic shieldwall to pieces, bawling “Hus! Hus!”, spearing and riding them down, hurling the survivors back down the hill. Seeing the Praguers run, my lads gave chase, caught them at the edge of the woods and sabred down the last of the fugitives. Within moments not a single enemy soldier remained alive.
“Back! Back!” I shouted, striking at the blood-crazed fools with the flat of my sabre, “withdraw! Stay out of the trees!”
The discipline I had flogged into them at Caslav, hardened by months of war, came into play. Growling like hounds whipped away from the kill, they turned and rode back up the hill. One insolent swine – my young Achilles, it was, whom I had disciplined at the siege of the Karlstein – winked at me as he rode past, and licked the blood from his sabre.
We retreated just in time. More Praguers came streaming through the woods behind us, baying for revenge. I turned to get a quick look at them.
My throat dried. We had killed forty Praguers. Hundreds more burst from the trees, armed with spears and axes and flails and spiked clubs, supported by archers and slingers and God knows what else.
To charge into that teeming mass of bodies was suicide. Yet I had my orders. Zizka needed me to hold back the enemy in the woods until he saw fit to sound the recall. If we lost the hill, the battle was lost with it.
“Turn about!” I shouted, “close ranks – form up – charge!”
My men, still drunk on death, needed no encouragement. Several overtook me as we urged our horses back down the hill, screaming like maniacs. My Achilles was at their head, his cropped blonde hair shining like gold in the merciless June sun.
He hurtled straight into the Praguers, sabre dancing in his hand. The enemy ranks opened and closed around him. I heard him shriek in agony, saw his fair head flung back, teeth bared in agony, neck impaled by a spear. His horse screamed, reared onto its haunches, twisted and vanished in the press.
Enraged, my men flung themselves at the enemy. The sheer weight and venom of their charge shoved the mass of the Praguers back into the trees. We cut deep lanes in their ranks, trampled men under-hoof, hacked them up like so many sides of beef. I sensed them waver and shouted in triumph, brandishing my reeking sabre.
The moment passed. More troops stormed through the darkened woods below. Their drums and pipes drowned out the screams of my men, clawed from their saddles and knifed or beaten to death on the ground. We were forced back, split up, all discipline gone, shattered by the remorseless
tidal wave of bodies rolling through and over us.
We could only retreat. Retreat or die. My blade shivered and almost snapped as I sliced downward at a bearded peasant jabbing at me a spear. He fell, skull carved open, brains dribbling over his astonished eyes.
Where in hells was the signal? What was Zizka doing? I wrenched my horse about and put her to the slope. Praguers snapped at our heels.
I was already on the verge of panic. Now cold terror seized me as the ominous silence from above hit home.
Our guns had stopped firing.
29.
I quickly took in the scene. While my men fought and died, our crews had abandoned their guns to help the infantry wheel some of the largest wagons out of the defensive chain. Together they pushed the cumbersome things to the top of the road and dragged them around so their front ends pointed downward.
Zizka finally gave the signal to retreat. My cavalry were already streaming up the slope, closely pursued by the vengeful Praguers. Even before the trumpet notes died away, our footsoldiers gave a mighty shout and shoved the wagons down the hill.
Packed with heavy stones, the massive timber boxes quickly gathered speed. They clattered and freewheeled down the road and crashed straight into the tightly bunched ranks of Prague nobles, who stood rooted, unable to avoid or flee their doom. Scores of men were crushed under the iron-shod wheels of the wagons, proud banners flattened, limbs and heads and bodies ground to pulp. The cream of the Bohemian warrior nobility, swatted aside by a dozen farm carts filled with rocks.
I reached the summit just in time to witness the carnage. Below us the Prague infantrymen had stopped dead, gaping in dumbstruck horror at the fate of their lords. All eyes were fixed on the wagons, which continued to barrel unstoppably down the road, flinging aside armoured bodies like dolls or crashing over them, until they finally ploughed into the marsh at the foot of the hill and came to rest. One or two wobbled and overturned, splashing into the mud and spilling their cargo of stones.
The Heretic Page 19
