Aleksandr Nevskiy grabbed for his sword, but stopped abruptly when the Grey Wolf snarled eloquently at him with a sound like a sheet of metal torn in half. Nevskiy took just one look at the ragged expanse of ivory displayed for his education and slapped his half-drawn blade pettishly back into its scabbard. “Do you always let animals do your fighting, Prince Ivan?” he said, producing a fairly credible snarl himself.
“Birds, beasts, men, women. Those who think well of me will always defend me. How many will defend you?”
“Enough of this!” Mar’ya Morevna slapped her hand so hard on the map-laden trestle table around which they all sat that it wobbled and all but collapsed. “It’s as well we have the Teutonic Knights to contend with, or we’d be at one another’s throats. And I meant what I said about the crossbows. I’m glad the Teutons are using them and not ordinary bows. Crude jokes aside, the weapon’s only real advantage is penetration. It can put a bolt through the heaviest mail, so a vassal can strike down his armoured master from a safe distance. That’s the only reason for the Papal ruling. It has nothing to do with wounds, because…” She hesitated briefly, remembering the two guards struck down by Dieter Balke. “Because I’ve seen what an approved, accepted mace can do.”
“But that means it can penetrate our armour too!” said Pavel of Novgorod.
“Our arrows do that already, if they’re shot straight and true from a good horn-and-sinew bow, and I’m sure a sergeant’s mail is no stronger. Besides… Tell me, Vanya, how many arrows can you loose in, say, one minute?”
Ivan pulled a goose-fletched arrow from the crammed quiver on his right hip and balanced the missile on his finger before returning it. “Carefully aimed, about eight. If aiming doesn’t matter, twelve or more.”
“Quite so. And Highnesses, we all know archers among our forces who can better that. In the same minute, because of its great power and the effort needed to draw it, a crossbow shoots twice or maybe three times. Under such a storm of arrows as we can lay on them, they won’t be shooting fast or straight.”
“But it doesn’t do anything against mounted knights,” persisted Pavel Mikhaylovich. “We still can’t pierce their mail, and they’ll ride right over us!”
“Not if we shoot their horses.” Ivan glanced at Sivka and Chyornyy tethered nearby. Both had put their ears back, and Chyornyy in particular was giving him a white-eyed sidelong glare. A bottle of ink, red ink, chose that moment to slide from the unsteady table. It fell to the ground and spattered scarlet blotches all across the snow.
Ivan watched the splashes soak in, red on white. “A reminder,” he said softly. “Whatever our differences today, be lucky and safe tomorrow.”
*
The morning dawned clear and still and very cold, so that although there were no clouds in the hard blue sky, there was a fog of breath hanging above each Prince’s small host as they moved into position.
Prince Ivan Aleksandrovich Khorlovskiy was halfway up the southern slope, and he leaned forward to pat Sivka on the neck before sighting between the horse’s ears down towards the River Nemen, or rather, where the river would have been. Now its crust of ice was so covered with packed snow that it was impossible to see where the bank ended and the frozen water began. It would also be impossible to tell when the Teutonic Knights actually crossed the border, for what that was worth. Aleksandr Nevskiy was hot for exact times and exact places, all the paraphernalia of history, since his father’s archivist had ridden with the army and would be chronicling the victory.
Ivan hoped it would be a victory, but he had no doubt that only the valiant deeds of Prince Aleksandr Yaroslavich Nevskiy would be mentioned more than once. The rest of them, Yuriy, the Mikhaylovichi, Mar’ya Morevna and himself, would be spear-carriers, names listed only to show what notable personages followed Nevskiy’s leadership in the defence of Mother Russia. For a man so friendly with the Tatars, that was ironic.
Ivan was mildly vexed at all the glory-hunting but nothing more. Given Nevskiy’s personality, as abrasive as a burr caught inside armour, it was remarkable. Mild dislike followed him everywhere he went, though the chronicler seemed impervious to it, which said something about how much he was being paid. Ivan’s disinterest in what was being written down and who was being left out had more to do with preoccupation than envy.
This would be his first battle, and though he hoped it would also be his last, there was a double meaning about the phrase that made him shy away from considering it. If Landmeister Balke was an example of the Teutonic Knights, then despite Mar’ya Morevna’s reassurances, they would be hard to beat. All Prince Ivan wanted to know from a history of the Battle on the Nemen was that he and his wife lived long and happy lives after it was won.
He shuffled his shoulders inside their layers of padding, leather, mail, and the various plates riveted to the hauberk over chest and shoulders. It was his own armour and it fitted well, unlike the last time, and his ribs no longer hurt except for a complaining twinge if he moved the sorcery-healed muscles too suddenly. It all made for a certain amount of comfort, if he could only set aside the cold, the remarkable nastiness of field rations that he could still taste at the back of his throat, and the prospect of someone beyond the river who was going to shoot or throw or swing something with sharp edges at him. That individual attention was actually more bearable than an impersonal bow loosed at a venture; it was easier to do something about the man who faced you than one who just shot into the thick of a crowd.
He would be doing that before long, unless Mar’ya Morevna stopped him. There had already been a lecture on personal safety in battle, mostly about keeping out of it and letting the professionals like Guard-Captain Akimov do what they did best, and a proviso that the succession in Khorlov hadn’t yet been secured with an heir, something so like one of Dmitriy Vasil’yevich’s homilies that Ivan almost ignored it.
Almost, but not quite.
Despite the thinness of their own tent walls and the proximity of far too many others, he and Mar’ya Morevna had made love very gently, quietly and tenderly far into the night. If a child was quickened by that or by the warm nights they had spent together in the Summer Country, so much the better. If not, well, it was a better way to spend the night before a battle than in fretting about what the morning would bring.
Or in dictating how the battle yet unfought had been won, and who had been most instrumental in the victory, as he had heard Aleksandr Nevskiy do. Ivan smiled a thin smile. Except for little details like his own lack of status, he was entirely willing to have Nevskiy’s prophecy come true.
Then he stiffened in his saddle as the low sun struck a glint from something metal in the wooded hills beyond the river, and even though more than a mile of open snowfield lay between that ominous small twinkle and himself, Ivan fumbled for the helmet at his saddlebow.
Sivka blew out plumes of steamy vapour from his nostrils like a dragon, and stamped once. “Here they come,” he said.
Those were the first distinct words spoken aloud since Ivan had ridden up here. There was a constant background mutter floating up from the ranks of infantry, sharpened now and then by a sergeant’s grated opinion of just how crookedly their lines were dressed, and the brittle chatter of high-born horsemen was a counterpoint to the clink of harness, but those had been noises, not voices. The hill had been quiet, a place where a man could think. Not any more.
Ivan slapped the top of his helmet to settle it onto the padded mail hood he wore beneath, then buckled the chin-strap and snapped down nasal and cheek flaps. His vision dropped at once to almost straight in front and his hearing became distorted by the echoes of his own breath, but there was something reassuring about the layers of steel and sturdy leather between himself and harm. He turned Sivka’s head towards the army, and cantered down to join Mar’ya Morevna.
The baggage train went rumbling past, heading towards the river. Each massively constructed wagon had a cargo of stout stakes cut earlier that morning from the pine-trees beyond the ri
dge. Once at their appointed site on the Rus side of the river, the stakes would be driven into the ground between each wagon and the wagons themselves, weighted with logs and their double sides opened into loop-holed wooden shields, would be chained together in a circle. It was almost a portable kremlin, the whole thing was called a gulyagorod, a ‘walking city’, and it had been tested in battle many times against raiding Tatars.
Whether it could withstand a charge of mounted knights was a question yet unanswered, but from what Ivan had heard at last night’s final council of war, anything was better than being caught by them in the open.
*
“God and all the Saints damn them to Hell,” said Hermann von Salza. The words almost a formal request rather than a curse.
“Why weren’t we told they have a Wagenburg?” muttered Kuno von Buxhövden. He sounded almost plaintive, like an overgrown child shown good reason why he can’t play with a favourite toy. “That puts paid to any sort of charge.”
“By no means.” Von Salza, already straight-legged in the long-stirruped knightly saddle, put both hand on the pommel and craned himself a little higher against the weight of his mail. “Look, man, and see for yourself. They’re planting stakes between the wagons. That means a fixed ’Burg, not a mobile one, while we remain as mobile as our horses allow. And if we can entice them out…” He slapped his destrier’s shoulder, and the horse flinched snorting from the impact of the mailed mitten. “Then we’ll grind them through the ice beneath our hoofs, and let the river wash the mess away.”
Albrecht von Düsberg trotted towards them. He was wearing full harness even to his helm, in the presumed hope it would restore something of his old valiant appearance as a Crusader in Palestine. If his weight now was what it was then, that hope might have been justified. Instead he just looked like a fat man in tight armour, and von Salza was privately glad this battle was being fought in winter. Too much heat, too much dust, too much strain, and von Düsberg would be dead before he ever saw an enemy or raised his sword for the glory of God and the Order.
Albrecht removed his helm with its dramatic transverse crest of black feathers, and von Salza frowned. Even now the Treasurer was panting and red-faced, his chin – or the uppermost of them – compressed by the edge of his mail coif in a manner that looked far from comfortable. If an hour’s march on horseback to the field made him like this, what in Heaven’s name would he look like at the end of the day?
“The sergeants are mustered, Grand Master,” said von Düsberg, once he recovered enough breath to make the announcement in a single sentence. “They await the order to advance.”
Von Salza looked once more towards the Wagenburg, now edged with sparks as the infantry who manned it took up their positions. Then he walked his horse forward to the edge of the trees and looked down at his own foot-soldiers. The crossbows were there, flanked and screened by spearmen. They were to have remained in place, harassing the Rus with long-range shots until their commander’s patience wore thin and he committed his infantry to the assault, but thanks to that accursed fort of carts the position had reversed.
Now von Salza would have to advance and press the Wagenburg, otherwise the Rus would just sit secure behind their wooden walls and wait until, as was inevitable in battle, someone made a mistake.
The rest of the Order’s men-at-arms were still under cover in the woods further up the slope, from where they would advance at a run once the Rus foot had been engaged. All of the cavalry, both knights and mounted sergeants, were up here. The sergeants would act as a mobile reserve, sent to cover weak places in the Order’s line or probe at the Rus, but the knights would be held back – whether they liked it or not, von Salza reminded himself – until the proper opening appeared, and then, only then, would they burst from the forest in an irresistible flood and sweep the enemy from the field.
Hermann von Salza looked up towards the sky. “In nomine Patris…” he began, then changed his mind and his language. “Im Namen des Vaters und des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes, amen,” said the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, and crossed himself, and then waited while his castellan and treasurer did likewise. “Sound the trumpets. We go.”
*
“There!” cried Mar’ya Morevna. “Coming out of the woods! Spearmen!”
Everyone paused for the merest instant to look across the Nemen, where shadowy blocks of grey-clad men topped with twinkling steel marched from the shadow of the pine trees and down the slope towards the river. Then all those people not already in assigned battle positions abandoned whatever they’d been doing and ran in a sort of controlled chaos to their places.
Ivan sat on Sivka’s back and tried to look unruffled until he realized nobody was paying attention. Then he noticed a gaggle of banner-bearing figures further up the hill, gathered around where Aleksandr Nevskiy stood with one arm extended in a dramatic gesture and a stern but noble expression on his face. Prince Ivan said something under his breath, then slumped his shoulders and went back to looking comfortable instead.
“It’s all right, Vanyushka,” said Mar’ya Morevna with a tight grin that betrayed the lack of colour in her lips, “they’ll get your pose right when they do the painting.” She vaulted into Chyornyy’s saddle and tugged her bow from its case. “Just make sure it’s not a carving for your tombstone.”
“You watch what you’re doing too,” he said, jerking his chin at the bow. “I thought you were commanding, not fighting.”
“I am. But I don’t want to waste the time in getting this thing ready if I need it in a rush.” She stood up high in her stirrups and peered at the approaching German men-at-arms. “If the sky stays as clear as this, the glare’s going to be far from pleasant. It’s a pity there won’t be heat as well as light, to make the Teutons sweat a little. Well, there are other ways to make them sweat than sunshine.” She plumped back into the saddle and turned for a brief consultation with Prince Yuriy of Kiev, then laughed. It sounded hoarse, as though her throat was already too dry.
“No, not yet,” she said. “They’re safe enough behind the gulyagorod; safer than out in the open, at least until after—”
“What’s that?” Directly Ivan asked the question, he knew its answer. The advancing Teutonic sergeants were chanting a psalm, the deep-throated roar of their voices drifting eerily across the silent snow. “Dear God,” he said, and crossed himself, “they really are regarding us as heathens, aren’t they?”
“They follow their orders,” said Prince Yuriy, “just as our soldiers do. And if being told the enemies are heathens or heretics or Jews makes the killing a little easier, their commanders will have done that too. Noble Lady, the cavalry…?”
“I said ‘not yet’. I’m waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
As the Teutonic formation reached the bank of the frozen River Nemen, the singing stopped as if the soldiers had paused to draw breath. Their spears shifted apart, there was a movement in the ranks behind them, and then the silence was burst apart by a great whack as though a wet hide had been slapped against the ground. There was a convulsion among the wagons, and men spilled out of them as crossbow bolts ploughed through wood and mail and flesh.
“Waiting for that,” Mar’ya Morevna finished. The fingertips of her left hand tapped against its palm as she counted, and stopped when the singing and the advance began again. “Fifteen seconds to reload. Faster than I’d hoped. They’ll stop and shoot twice more as they close the distance, and the gorod can withstand that much. After that the spearmen will attack. That’s when the cavalry goes out to take them in flank.”
“How many will we lose from the crossbows?” demanded Yuriy. “Have you considered that?”
“Of course I have, and the answer is ‘not as many as we might from other tactics’. We can take it better than they think we can.”
Yuriy Vladimirovich stared at her with a mixture of respect and distaste. “You’re a cold one, Mar’ya Morevna. I’m glad you’re on our side.”
&nb
sp; Mar’ya Morevna smiled at him, no more than a stretching of lips over teeth. In the distance, the psalm fell away again to silence, there was another whack! and more Rus soldiers tumbled from the wagons. “Remember that for later, Prince Yuriy,” she said quietly, “and send the horsemen out…” She hesitated, counting again, then closed her fist. “Now!”
The whack of the final crossbow volley was almost lost in a blare of trumpets, and that too was swallowed by the sound of hammering hoofs as two hundred horses went from a standstill to a flat-out gallop. Their riders plied nagayka whips with a will, knowing how little time they had to cross the distance between shelter and shooting range before the crossbows were ready again.
Unable to see the horsemen pouring from their snow-covered defile, the sergeants closed ranks in front of the crossbowmen, the deep-voiced music of the psalm began again as they resumed their advance, and a glitter rippled all down the front of the formation as their big spears swept down to the horizontal. They met the gulyagorod’s wooden wall with a rustling crash that sounded like a wave striking a shingle beach, and like a wave they lapped around it, not quite enough of them to close the circle.
The horsemen of the Rus swept down on them, curving around the rear of the stabbing, shouting, killing, dying foot-soldiers, and launched a blizzard of arrows at anything in the tau-crossed grey surcoat of a Teutonic sergeant. Crossbows shot and emptied saddles, but they shot by ones and threes and fives rather than the deadly volleys of before. Mar’ya Morevna had been right; it needed a special sort of man to aim and loose his single missile when there were a dozen or a score coming back at him. Those special men died faster than the ordinary ones who dived for cover, because by standing up to shoot they exposed unarmoured legs and faces to the whirring steel-tipped hornets.
Sivka jerked his head and jigged sideways, muttering, and Ivan was suddenly aware that the Grey Wolf had slipped up silently beside him and was watching with what looked like disapproval. It puzzled him. “I thought wolves enjoyed battles…” he began to say in his most unfeeling voice, then let the rest of the sentence die unspoken. Sounding unfeeling was easy; being so was hard.
Firebird (Tales of Old Russia Book 2) Page 32
