Nor did the enemy wait long. There was a great roll of drums and blare of trumpets, and hundreds of male voices cried, “Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah, the King!,” cheering the infant that Clayborne had placed upon the throne. This cheer was repeated thrice, and then the pikes came on.
They did not pause, as they had before, but charged straight in, the first four lines of pikemen with their weapons leveled at the charge. Our own handgunners had a chance to fire but a single shot before they were forced to fly from the sunken road. The rebel regiment on our right, receiving flanking fire from the dragoons behind the hedge on the Peckside road, shied away and sidled toward the center, but elsewhere the enemy hurled themselves through the hedge and into the road and slaughter.
It was a repetition of the first attack, but this time the enemy were more determined, and the fight went on longer, the sunken road filling with blood and bodies. I did not participate this time, but followed Lord Utterback’s example and rode behind the lines, shouting encouragement.
The attackers on the right failed first, caught between our spears to the front and a hail of flanking fire, and they began to grudgingly give way, and the other regiments followed their example, their pikes dragging on the ground as they backed from the fight. We cheered then, our drums beating and our trumpets blaring out Lord Utterback’s tucket while Lipton’s guns saluted their withdrawal with murderous iron shot.
His lordship and I rode up the field to look over the hedges and spy what the enemy next intended. The foot withdrew past the guns, drifting into the gaps between new enemy columns that were coming on. These were cavalry, and as I watched them deploy behind the guns, they formed into a long, shimmering wall of steel.
I heard Utterback give a cry of something that might have been surprise, yet may have been despair. “It is the Gendarmes,” he said.
The Gentlemen-at-Arms of the Royal Household, familiarly the “Gendarmes,” were men of good family sworn to guard the sovereign, the knightly equivalent of the Yeoman Archers, and who had joined Clayborne’s rebellion at the behest of Lord Rufus Glanford, their general. They were encased in steel cap-a-pie, all polished to a perfect gleam, and they rode enormous horses who were themselves plated in proof. From their lances floated pennons, each bearing the device of the rider, and they wore brave cloaks of leopard or lion skin.
Lipton’s artillery began to fire, but the Gendarmes were not so thickly packed as those deep squares of pikemen, and if he struck them, I failed to see it.
I stared at the enemy. These Gendarmes were impressive, pricking along under their banners, but I found myself clinging to a degree of skepticism.
“Surely these are relics of a former time,” I said. “Playing at being knights of old, like the Court of the Teazel Bird at home.”
A sardonic smile played about Utterback’s lips. “You may so inform them, if you like.”
“But,” I protested, “but it’s rock-paper-scissors. Cavalry cannot attack our pikes.”
“Again,” said Utterback, “it is the Gendarmes themselves whose knowledge of this point seems to be deficient.” He looked down at our soldiers, and sadness touched his expression. “I wish our men were not so tired.”
“We should tell them to be prepared to receive cavalry,” I said. I was about to spur down the scales to our men, but another thought occurred to me, and I turned to Utterback.
“If they break through,” I said, “you must lead our own horse against them.”
He looked uneasily over his shoulder, far up the sett to where our demilances had rallied. “Ay,” he said. “I’ll have to do that.”
The Gendarmes were coming forward, breaking ranks, like the pikemen, to filter through the artillery, then re-forming on the other side. Lipton’s fire kept plunging down, and this time I saw horses and riders fly. Lord Utterback and I rode down to the line to tell them what was coming.
“They send their horse against us!” Utterback scorned. “We’ll turn the road into their grave, and the hedge their monument!”
In this business of raising the heart of the soldiers, it has to be said he did well.
The pikemen, who had been engaged in looting the enemy dead, clambered out of the road and readied their long spears. I rode to the far right to warn both Ruthven and Frere that Frere’s dragoons might soon have to take shelter behind Ruthven’s pikes. For I had seen the enemy begin to stretch out to the far right, beyond the Peckside road, and the dragoons were unlikely this time to have their unmolested flank shots into the enemy.
Frere pulled out his spyglass, and looked at the horsemen forming up opposite his men. “Ah,” he said. “The Esquires.”
The Esquires were the servants to the Gendarmes and apprentice knights, as well-born as the latter. The riders were fully armored, but their horses lacked the barding that protected them against shot and spear.
Two full regiments now opposed us, the Gendarmes and the Esquires, each of two squadrons composed of two troops. We had three troops to oppose them, none as well armored, and the dragoons having no protection but their buff coats, and their dragons a dubious weapon at best.
“I’ll bring my men back,” Frere decided. “No vantage in getting ’em skewered.”
The dragoons were happy to leave the sunken lane that was no longer a sanctuary, and they retired behind Ruthven’s pikemen, where the horse-holders had been stationed with their mounts. Frere had them in the saddle just as the trumpets blared, and sixteen hundred elite rebel horsemen began their advance in their shining, blinding armor, the Gendarmes in the center, and flanked by the two squadrons of Esquires.
The earth shook to the trampling hooves, and hackbuts and calivers cracked from the hedges. The handgunners leaped to safety just as the big horses broke through the torn hedge and plunged down into the sunken road. Again there rose that great hammering sound as steel met steel, but this time with the nightmare screams of horses added to the din.
On the far right, I was compelled to withdraw as the Esquires rode in to meet the company of pikes that had been standing, unmolested, since the battle began. The horsemen swarmed around the bristling square, jabbing with theirs lances or firing their pistols, while the foot fought grimly back, thrusting at the unprotected faces and chests of the horses while handgunners, sheltered in the square, shot into the mass of cavalry. I had worried that the Esquires would ride clear of the pikemen and attack our line from the rear, or ride on to plunder our camp; but Frere’s dragoons, drawn up two hundred yards to the rear—and who probably looked more menacing than in fact they were—deterred any such adventures.
I rode on down the line to where Lord Utterback was shouting encouragement at the men. “Well struck! I saw that blow, there! Admirable!” As if he were cheering a game of bats-and-balls.
I rode ahead and added my own voice to the din. And then, mere yards in front of me, one of the Gendarmes broke out of the hedge, his red-eyed steed trumpeting a challenge as it heaved itself from the road in a clatter of armor. The rider swung a battle-hammer at the foot soldiers, who reeled away from the rider, or from the horse with its flashing iron-shod hooves. Spear-points flashed as they thrust at him, and either he dodged them or they skated off his steel. A pikeman dropped to the turf, his helmet crushed beneath the hammer’s spike.
I felt my blood surge, and I drew my sword and dug my spurs into my courser, and the animal, responding to the neighing challenge of the rebel’s stallion, leaped forward. We, Phrenzy and I, crashed into the enemy charger just behind the shoulder, all our combined weight driving into the enemy. The impact threw me forward over the saddle, but I managed to keep my seat. The rebel rider and his animal, wrapped in heavy steel, lurched to the side as the horse took a frantic step to regain its balance. The step missed. The great weight of the armor carried with it both horse and rider, and the two were dragged down like a mariner drawn into the sea by a siren. There was a vast crash, and Phrenzy made a leap, dainty as a dancer, to spring over the fallen foe.
The Gendarme was
helpless now, trapped by the weight of steel and the great horse that pinned his leg. The pikemen closed in, drawing swords and daggers for the final act of butchery, and I rode on out of the press and turned about to view the line, and only then could I spare a moment for amazement, both at myself for what I had done, and at my horse for following my commands.
Fights between horsemen are won more by the spur than by the sword. I had known that—I had heard it, at least—but how had Phrenzy known it?
But I had little time to contemplate these mysteries, for in another part of the line I saw more armored horsemen breaking through the hedge and our line, and I rode for the nearest reserve company. They were a battered group, for they’d been pulled out of the line after having withstood two attacks, but they understood the gravity of the Gendarmes’ breakthrough, and had already assumed a defensive formation, hedged in all directions with pikes.
“That way! That way! To your left!”
I did not lead them so much as drive them, but once in motion, they understood well enough what I intended, and pikes were lowered to the charge as the company came to close the gap through which the Gendarmes were vaulting. There was a crash as pikes met armor, and a steel-clad horse ran free as its master was lofted by pikes from the saddle and fell to his present doom. Pikemen swarmed the hedge and the passage swung shut, barring further entry.
But those Gendarmes who had already got through the hedge now turned to cut a new path for their comrades, and my company was beset front and rear. As the only defender on horseback, and outside the circuit of pikes, I found myself assailed and so I with a murmured apology to the horse, I slipped from the saddle and sought shelter within the company of foot. There I found my sword unable to reach the enemy, and sheathing it, found on the sward a pollaxe, and I picked it up only to feel its weight settle into my hands like an old lover. For a pollaxe was a weapon I’d wielded all my life, and I knew its usages as well as I knew the poems of Tarantua.
“Hold them! Hold them!” I cried as the horsemen swirled around us, and as one Gendarme fenced with his lance against a brace of pikes, I left the shelter of the company and swung the axe with all my strength, letting the haft slide through my top hand as the blade rose, until I held onto the very end of the shaft and the blade blurred through the air. The steel crescent on the end of the haft took the enemy in the armpit and sheared right through the armor. He gave a cry and dropped his lance, the blood already staining the shining steel of his armor as I drew my weapon back, and as he clutched at the wound with his free hand, one of the pikemen put the point of his weapon through the slit of his helmet and into his eye. The horse bounded away, its rider already a corpse, and I retired again into the safety of the formation.
I found two more opportunities to attack with the underarm strike, and succeeded once and missed cleanly the other; after which I realized the pollaxe was best used to hamstring the horses, slicing below the skirts of the armor; and so I brought a pair of enemy down, the giant noble horses lamed and destroyed by the weapon of a Butcher’s apprentice.
Then I heard Lord Utterback’s trumpet call, and on the echo of the tucket came another of the reserve companies led by Utterback beneath his blue flag, so that now the Gendarmes were caught between two lines of pikes. Some died, and the rest scattered. I saluted Lord Utterback from my place in the ranks, and he saw me and waved at me in the most pleasant, gentlemanly way, so strange to see on a battlefield.
The combat rattled on between the hedges for a time. A few more horsemen broke through, were hunted down or set to flight. In time, the fight reached a point of exhaustion, like a clock with its spring run down, and then the two sides glowered at each other while handgunners fired over the gap; and by and by, the Gendarmes and their Esquires drew back, and then rode their heavy, weary horses back the length of that long, sere field.
We were too tired to cheer. Behind the hedge, for the first time, I could see a long unbroken line of our own dead, and there was a steady swarm of wounded limping up the slope toward the tents of the surgeons. As I trudged with them, I feared we would not survive another attack.
I found my horse quietly grazing a hundred paces up the slope, and while I dragged myself after the beast, Lord Utterback came riding past, and as I mounted, he came riding back, and I joined him. I still had the pollaxe in hand.
“I’ve ordered up more food down to the men,” he said.
“We have earned our dinner, to be sure.”
He cocked an eye at me. “None of that blood is yours, I hope.”
“Is my face bleeding again?”
“I can’t tell what is bleeding exactly. But there is a good deal of scarlet on you. And on that poll-cutter of yours.”
I took a mental inventory of my parts. “I seem reasonably intact. Though I am hungry and thirsty both, and if I may stop by our camp . . .”
“I think we may both spend a pleasant hour there, an Clayborne permits.”
And so, we took off our armor and our buff coats and had more of the hard biscuit with preserved tongue and brawn, and slathered with the jelly and fat that by now we desperately craved. We opened a jar of pickles and a package of smoked sausages and a bottle of wine, and I ate ravenously, and Utterback with scarcely less appetite. I more than half expected that Clayborne would interrupt our feast with another attack, because he had little choice—he had staked the entire war on this march over Exton Pass, and if he failed here, he might be lost.
But Clayborne’s men did not come, and I began to feel the wine dragging at my limbs, and my eyelids began to fall. But Utterback jumped to his feet.
“Once again I must cheer the soldiers,” he said. “And my praise shall not be feigned.”
“Truly,” I said.
I put on my gear and rode up to Lipton’s battery. The captain, drinking from a leather jack filled with what looked and scented like malmsey, greeted me.
“The enemy are doing nothing,” he said, “and that suits Bill Lipton, Esquire.”
“Long may they suit you thus,” I said. I dropped off my horse and stuck my pollaxe in the ground. My entire body ached. When I viewed the enemy with my glass, I found nothing of note. The Gendarmes and Esquires were gathered in dispirited clumps, and I supposed they were done for the day. Some handgunners were thrown forward of the battery to protect it, but the cannoneers simply stood near their guns without firing. I suspected that the Guild of Carters and Haulers were resisting the idea of bringing up more powder and ammunition, or the reserve ammunition was caught so far back in the train that the road would have to be cleared ahead of it before it could come up.
Seeing nothing worthy of my attention, I dropped my armor and burgonet to the ground, took off my buff coat, and sat on the turf with my glass to my hand.
Now, sated, my worn body and exhausted mind could afford the luxury of emotion, and as I observed our poor battered soldiers clustered about their dinner, or tending their injured, the feeling that rose in me was disgust. What was Queen Berlauda to me, or to any of these people? What was Clayborne, or his ambitious mother? Who were they to bring about the ignoble death of thousands, death by gunshot, or pike-thrust, or by the surgeon’s knife, or by drowning in the sunken road?
And who, for that matter, was I? My own ambition had brought to here, to this killing-place, and all my cleverness had accomplished was to add to the great accounting of the dead. That we had killed more of the enemy than they of us made little difference to the worms that would consume the bodies.
If I possessed true wit, I would be bent over my law-books in Selford.
The world seemed to whirl before my eyes, and I remembered Orlanda’s words: Love you will have, but it will thrive only in the shadow of death, and the grave will be its end. I wondered if I would find my end here, and lie rotting beneath the turf of Exton Scales while the sheep cropped the grass above my eyeless head.
Weariness took me, and I stretched out on the ground, measuring myself perhaps for my grave.
�
�Let me know if aught occurs,” I said.
“Why should I stay awake?” Lipton said. I did not answer him, but closed my eyes.
Hours passed. The sun was hanging low over Exton Pass by the time Lipton nudged me awake with his foot.
“Lo,” he said. “The ill-fledged didappers come.”
I could hear drums rattling over the sett. Lipton offered his telescope, and I saw masses of men moving forward, pikes aloft and shining in the setting sun as they arranged themselves behind the enemy guns.
I felt soreness in every limb as I donned my armor again, and the burgonet settled on my head like a permanent headache. The plates that covered the back of my neck clanked as they fell into place. I returned Lipton’s glass and mounted my horse.
“Do them mischief if you can,” I said, but his gunners were already busy laying guns on the enemy.
“At this range,” Lipton said, with something approaching cheer, “they can see the balls coming at ’em, and it’s most diverting to see them jump about.”
Again I reported to Lord Utterback what he already knew perfectly well, and so we went up the scales to have a better view of the enemy. More and more men kept coming onto the field, and I saw no less than six regiments formed against us, nearly a solid block of pikes that stretched from the bluff on the north to the ravine on the south. Lipton began to fire, and indeed the enemy tried to dance away from the falling shot, and I could hear the sergeants-major bawling at them to stay in line.
“I must fight them,” Utterback murmured. “I must hold here.” He was giving orders to himself, and behind his eyes I could see the cogwheels of his mind spinning free, unable to find or hold or turn an idea. For he was unable to think of a way to save his army from the attack that was to come, and I, similarly bereft, could not help him.
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