Now the king’s army moved; for the first time, Gird saw the royal standard that he had heard about, a great banner that barely moved in the morning breeze, then suddenly floated out, showing its device. Gird had been told it was a seadragon; by himself he would have thought it was a snake with a fish’s tail. Each of the lords with the king had his own banner, his or her own colors repeated in the uniforms of the soldiers—and, if the gnomes were right, his or her own separate battle plan. That was supposed to be another advantage to his side. They looked pretty enough, like the models the gnomes had shown him: one hundred all in yellow and green, then two hundreds in blue and gold, then a block of orange, and a block of green and blue. Gird assumed that the lords were in the rear, those mounted figures in brilliant colors that seemed to glow with their own light. Even as he watched, he saw bright-striped tents go up, servants hanging on the lines. Smoke rose from cookfires newly lit. For some reason, that show of confidence infuriated Gird. Win it before you celebrate it, he told them silently.
The cavalry screen drew aside on either flank, and the foot soldiers advanced. Most of them still carried sword and shield; some units had pikes; a few had long spears. Gird frowned; those could cause him a lot of trouble. But watching them advance, he realized that they were not accustomed to that extra length. Evidently someone had decided to make a weapon that would outreach his pikes, but the men carrying them had not had enough drill. Behind the swordsmen and pikemen came the archers. Over the winter, Gird had tried many versions of a shield that would stop arrows but be light enough to carry, and easily dropped when both arms were needed for the pike. Nothing worked perfectly. His foremost cohorts had small wooden shields that might protect their faces from arrows near their utmost range, but most trusted to their stolen—no, salvaged—helmets and bits of body armor.
The first enemy flights of arrows went up; Gird’s marshals shouted their warnings, and all but the stupidest looked down. The enemy made a rush forward, discovering a moment too late the pits Gird’s army had dug. These were not deep enough or large enough to keep the enemy back, but they slowed the rush just as the archers, following it, came within range of Gird’s archers.
More angry than hurt, the enemy foot soldiers floundered through the mud, hauled themselves out of the pits and flung themselves on at Gird’s unmoving cohorts. The enemy lines were no longer lines, and behind them their own archers were falling to Gird’s. They did not care; they looked, to Gird on his old gray horse, like any young men who have made fools of themselves in public. Their officers, bellowing at them from the rear, didn’t seem to have much effect; a second and third line staggered into the pits, tried to jump across and failed, and fought their way out, to storm up the gentle slope toward Gird’s cohorts.
The marshals watched Gird; he watched the straggling but furious advance. Those few seconds seemed to stretch endlessly, as if he had time to notice the expression on every face, whether the oncoming eyes were blue or grey or brown. Then the first ones reached the mark he had placed, and he dropped his hand, with the long blue streamer that served as their banner.
His cohorts moved. One step, two: cautious, controlled, their formations precise, he thought smugly, as any gnome’s. Where the king’s soldiers had expected last year’s sharpened wood stakes, they met instead the steel pike heads that Marrakai gold had bought. The first died quickly, almost easily, a flick of the pike it seemed, from where Gird sat on the gray horse. He knew better, from having been there himself. Then the ragged lines caught up with each other, and the slaughter began.
Pikes outreach swords, but swordsmen and axemen can form a shield wall hard for pikes to breach, if all are brave. Whether it was courage, or the kind of magicks Gird had seen at work at Blackbone Hill, the soldiers of the king were brave. At first Gird’s cohorts advanced, step by step, down that gentle slope, pushing the king’s men back into the trampled mud and treacherous pits. Then the king’s cavalry swept east, toward Gird’s right flank, and back down the near side of the creek, avoiding the pits he’d dug at that end of the meadow.
This was not what he’d hoped they would do. He had hoped they’d be seduced by the apparent gap on his left flank, between that and the westmost hill. It should have looked like an easy way to get right round behind him. But apparently they’d been looking for something more quick than easy. And if he didn’t do something—quickly—they’d be on attacking his flank with only the archers uphill to hinder them.
The gray horse seemed to understand this almost as quickly as Gird; he was picking his way neatly but rapidly across the gap between the center and the eastmost hill without jolting his rider at all. Gird looked around him. There—that cluster of bright colors up under the trees must be the lords and the king. So far they’d done nothing magical, but he had no doubt they would. And there, across the creek and coming his way, were the enemy cavalry.
Gird bellowed loud enough that the gray horse flattened his ears; the nearest cohort marshals turned, and caught his signal, then saw the rushing horses. He would have wheeled the gray horse around, but the gray horse leaped onward, straight at the oncoming cavalry. Gird hauled on the reins, to no avail.
“I know I said it would be nice to slow them down, but we can’t—one horse—one rider— ” Was this to be his destined death, charging uselessly an entire wing of cavalry? But they were almost on them; Gird shrugged, and swung the pole his blue banner was tied to.
Pole and rag took one horse in the face; Gird nearly lost the pole, and his seat, but managed to keep both, and duck a swipe from a curved blade. The gray horse swerved under him; he grabbed for mane and hung on. All around were horses, most of them swerving aside and one frankly running backwards before it slipped and fell, rolling on its rider.
Then they were in the clear, Gird with his banner and the gray horse with a disgustingly smug cock to its ears.
“I want to go back,” Gird said between his teeth, as if the horse were a recalcitrant child. It shook its head, blew a long rattling snort, and picked up an easy lope back toward the battle. He saw a dozen or more horses down, some with arrows in them. He saw the back of the enemy cavalry, trying to charge again and again into two of his cohorts of pikes. The armor on the horses, heavy padded canvas, would have protected them from sword-strokes of other mounted fighters—not from pikemen on foot. Gird wondered if they realized that, or simply never thought of it. He felt the gray horse tense under him, and braced himself for whatever it might do.
What it did was outflank the enemy cavalry, working its way up and over the knee of the eastmost hill without putting a hoof wrong, and return Gird to his observation post on the central hill. From here he could see that that particular cavalry sortie would be thrown back without much danger. His own center was not advancing now, holding place to support the right flank under pressure, but that did not concern him. More worrying, some of that bright-clad group of nobles who had been back under the trees were moving forward. Several of them, clustered together, raised their arms.
He had not expected the well to spout water, the year before, and he did not expect the storm that gathered like a boil atop the ridge behind him, and spat lightning into the trees. Wind rushed irrationally down the slope, bringing fire and smoke with it. Shrill screams rose from both sides, louder from Gird’s camp followers, who found themselves caught between a forest fire and a battle. Then the wind stilled, as suddenly as it had started, and Gird saw that the little group of mages had fallen to the ground. Behind him, the fires still burned, but less fiercely, and the new wind direction took the smoke and flame upslope, away from him.
His eyes still stung and watered; he could barely see across the meadow to the king’s party. Had it been his hidden archers who killed those nobles, or someone else? The momentary lull caused by the onrushing fire had given way to renewed din of battle. His cohorts were inching forward again, by the half-step now, the wounded shifting back as they had practiced, the fallen trodden underfoot. He could do nothing about that
, not yet.
The enemy spearmen had finally made it to the front of their lines; they proved as clumsy as Gird had hoped.
Even so, they made rents in the cohort they faced, and it could not advance. For hours, it seemed almost for days, the two armies were knotted in battle. Their lines staggered back and forth, gaining and losing an armlength, a footpace. The noise was beyond anything Gird had imagined, so loud that individual screams and blows merged into a hideous roar.
He concentrated his attention on the details of it, sending his own voice above the rest when necessary. The enemy’s reserve archers, mounted, tried a sweep past his left wing. This was the maneuver he’d been looking for: would they support it? At least half the remaining enemy cavalry, and—yes—behind the screen of battle, a cohort or two of infantry. They thought the west hill empty, available; Gird smiled to himself. He might be only a stupid peasant, but he had learned a few things. That trap would spring itself, but he had to set the main one now.
Once before, the arrival of his camp-followers bearing almost useless “weapons” had convinced an enemy that he had vast reserves. The lords had been telling themselves that the peasants were all rebels at heart; they had only to count to know how many peasants were on their own lands, and fear the worst. Gird had taken the chance that the king and his advisors would follow the trails they had followed through the ridges, trails where horses and pack animals could go, where armies could march without fighting their way through prickly undergrowth. Gird marched that way where he could, and he knew they had trailed him back to this meadow. So they would think that what they saw, and what might be behind the little hills, was the worst of what they faced. That was, in fact, the truth, but would they believe the truth when a pretense fit their deepest fears?
He rode the gray horse a little up the slope, above the dust of the battle, to where he had a clear view across the meadow to that forested ridge behind the king. The king would have scouts atop it, for a certainty —if his people had not found them yet. But that would do him no good. Gird waved the pole with its long blue streamer twice. An arrow whirred past his head as the horse neatly sidestepped. Evidently some archers had decided he was worth hitting—well, he’d told his own to take out archers first, and anyone on horseback next.
Shrill yips from the western hill told him that the first part of his plan was working. His archers were falling back, coming around the slope into the hollow between the two hills—not a deep hollow, but one with its own peculiarities. The enemy archers should be making for the hilltop; he thought the cavalry would swing around, trying to take him in the rear, and so came the signal he had been waiting for.
It was amazing how many pits five thousand yeomen could dig in less than a day. Gird thought they could have dug a trench all across the meadow, but trenches could be jumped, and pits cleverly placed where horses must go between rocks of a rockfall—pits just too wide to jump easily—are a most effective cavalry trap. Thanks to the land and the Lady, he thought piously, for that fortuitously placed rockfall between the hill and the ridge behind it, where many horsemen could get into trouble out of sight of the rest of their army. His archers, having slipped around the hill to the rock-fall, were busy; the enemy archers above them, on the hilltop, found themselves unable to see what was going on. Those that tried to come down the south face of the hill to support the cavalry found the scour of the rockfall dangerous in more than one way. The others could—and did—let fly into the backs of the cohorts Gird had between the west and the central hill. He had anticipated this; those cohorts gave way, bending back around the hill; the archers found themselves having to shoot downhill into a confused mass of their own and Gird’s troops.
One unwary captain in the king’s forces saw that withdrawal as weakening, and urged his own cohorts on to flank those retreating. Gird smiled grimly. His left flank was now anchored by a wall of rock three men high—out of sight of that rash captain, up the little creek that looked so innocent. His troops stood on rock ledges, while their opponents were in the creek, or the mud on its other side. When they reached what they thought was his flank, they would find themselves standing on the far side of a pool of deep water, with no way out but the way they had come in. His archers would find them easy targets.
Meanwhile, the knot of bright-clad nobles across the field was moving again—perhaps it been only exhaustion that felled them. Gird squinted; he was sure he saw someone still on the ground. Out of the trees across from him came yet more cohorts of infantry, more squadrons of cavalry, and some—he squinted, shook his head, and looked again—some did not look human. Magicks, he told himself firmly. It’s only magicks. Masks and costumes and fancy ways of frightening people into doing what you want. He wished he knew if the king’s whole reserve was committed now.
Below him, the main forces contended as they had all morning, in a heaving, sweating, bloody, snarling mass. If it comes to plain fighting, he had told his marshals, if it comes to simple pounding each other, we win: we’ll pound harder, and take more pounding. The king’s army now outnumbered his in the center, but his center had not given back at all. They leaned into their pikes with every thrust, grunting with the effort.
Then the king’s new reserves hit the back of his force, giving it that extra weight—man against man, those in front were forced forward by that pressure, onto the waiting pikes. They died, had to be shaken from the pikes, and others were already there, already being killed—and again, and again. Gird saw the shiver in his ranks, the realization that something new had entered. The marshals looked aside, trying to find Gird; he caught their eyes and waved with his free hand. Then he took the long pole and signalled his last reserve, across the meadow and up on the ridge behind the king’s camp.
It seemed to take forever for that reserve to appear; he had told them to hide neither on the ridgetop nor near the bottom. In the meantime, his center sagged backward, and the enemy, heartened, drove forward with renewed energy. Gird had hardly time to see the first of his reserves clear the trees, yelling their heads off and sprinting downhill toward the enemy rear, before he was down in the thick of his own battle, supporting the center.
Fighting on horseback was completely different, he found. He had dropped the banner-pole, no longer needed—from here they would fight to the death, win or lose; he had no more decisions to make—and pulled his hauk from his belt. It was good for bashing heads, and bashing heads from above worked as well as when he was afoot. For one moment he thought of Amisi, and shoved the thought aside.
Later, when he heard it in songs, the battle of Greenfields (as the meadow became known) sounded much tidier than it had been in reality. The songs didn’t mention the several times he was knocked off the horse, and remounted by some helpful soldier, or the blow to his knee that had him limping for a quarter year, or the near-rout when the enemy’s last cohort of reserves turned out to be masked magelords with their power in hand. The songs certainly did not mention that long and miserable night after the battle, with the forest fire still burning its way south, or the cries of the wounded that never ceased. And somehow in the songs, that gray horse turned white. Gird was sure he had not aged that much in one day.
He remembered stumping through what had been the enemy’s camp, swarming now with squads of his own yeomen gathering up supplies and weapons. The king’s tent had gone up first, larger than many houses Gird had seen, with interior rooms walled in fluttering embroidered panels. He had had musicians with him (two had been killed, almost accidentally, when Gird’s reserves tore through the camp; the others had been found crouched around their instruments), and a man who painted pictures on lengths of fabric. He had started a picture of the king, victorious, returning with Gird’s head, but offered to change the faces for only ten gold pieces. Gird shook his head, and wondered what kind of king would take musicians and painters to battle.
The king was dead. He did not look much like Selamis, but fathers and sons did not have to look alike. He had been a tall ma
n, dark haired as many magelords were, and in death his eyes had only the dull color of a fish found dead on the shore. Gird had found Sier Segrahlin’s body, spiked with arrows from behind; he felt no guilt at that, but wished he could have talked to that brown man. They had almost understood each other, across a gulf no one else wanted to bridge. He still wondered, occasionally, if the sier had charmed him that night.
The songs listed the dead magelords, as if to remind the listener that these were all real. Gird did not even look at all of them; he had seen bodies enough. They had killed the wounded as quickly and painlessly as they could; they had killed all the magelords they captured; they dared not do less. At least there were no children with them.
He did not understand why he was still alive; his vision of the morning had been so clear, so certain. He felt curiously suspended, as he had after the Norwalk Sheepfolds, unable to rejoice in the same way as the others, though he felt a deep contentment. So many had died, and he had not, yet he had been sure he would— he had been almost promised he would. Nor had Rahi died, or Pidi; he found them both alive, marked but certainly not mortally wounded. But when he touched them he felt no more and no less than he felt for any of his yeomen: they were all his children, in some way he could not define.
He remembered coming back to his own encampment, holding the wounded and dying, speaking what comfort he could, until he fell asleep and woke to find that someone had covered him with a stolen piece of the king’s tent. All that day and the next, as the crows and flies fought with them, he tried to bring order and restore health to that trampled and discolored ground. “Bury them all,” he said, “Or burn them—even the magelords, yes: we had the gods’ gift of victory, we owe them respect.”
The songs began that first night, with the talk around the fires of those who could talk, and by the next night a few were trying to fit words to familiar tunes. The dead king’s surviving musicians were glad to help. Gird was more than a little amused that the first version he heard of what became “Gird at Greenfields” was set to “The Thiefs Lament”—the very song with which he had been taunted for cowardice.
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