by Rob Preece
Although the knights groaned about being forced to leave their armor and lances behind, they looked good compared to the rest of the army. Nothing Ellie and Mark could say convinced the soldiers to abandon anything. They didn't have enough mules to pull their wagons and long rows of soldiers ended up dragging all of their belongings behind them.
Ellie was still getting used to this world, so much like the Earth of her own dimension, but different in strange ways. The air always felt richer, although whether the atmosphere was denser or had more oxygen, she didn't know. Rather than the countless miles of cultivated and irrigated monoculture she was used to in California, farming here seemed to be little more than a losing battle against encroaching forests.
Only a few miles from Morray, they were marching through a shadowed forest.
"Sort of makes you feel like the Teutoburg disaster, doesn't it.” Mark was riding more easily now. Probably Arnold's sisters had helped him with that, too.
"I hope that one worked out well."
"Three Roman legions massacred in a German forest. Not very well for the invaders."
They didn't have three legions. In fact, they didn't have much of an army at all. Still, it stretched for over a mile behind Ellie. A snail would have had a good chance of beating it in a footrace. As part of her father's training Ellie was used to twenty-mile hikes. If this army made ten miles between sunrise and sunset, it would be a miracle. Getting to Dinan would take a week—assuming that they didn't meet any opposition at all. A series of well-organized enemy raids could mean never making it at all.
Five hours after they set off, Arnold galloped into camp with the bad news. “Bandits. Maybe five hundred of them. Straight ahead."
He wheeled but Dafed caught his bridle before he could return to his band of young nobles. “Slow down, Baronet. How far are they? Are they connected to the Rissel or one of the uncles? Do we need to fight them or will they run away?"
Arnold was disgusted. “Give us our armor and we'll smash through them like wolves through sheep."
This was the second time a large group of bandits had gathered to stop Ellie and Arnold. Ellie didn't think it was coincidence. Someone knew something. In a world where magic worked, there were plenty of ways their enemies could be tracking them but Ellie suspected the obvious. The uncles had been given plenty of time. By now, half their army was probably getting a second paycheck from one of the uncles.
"How far?” She repeated the question Arnold had ignored.
Arnold shrugged. “Maybe five miles. Who knows?"
The army could go another five miles that day but they'd arrive exhausted and worthless as a fighting unit. And if the bandits had any sense at all, they'd melt into the forest during the night, after stopping the army, and then harass the army's flanks rather than stand and fight.
Five hundred bandits was a significant force. That sized force could expect to beat an advance guard and use guerilla tactics against the full army. The army couldn't beat them without deploying, but every time the army deployed for battle, it would cost them a day of marching. The bandits couldn't win a battle, but they could slow the army enough to let Sullivan bring up his forces—or simply let the army melt away when they didn't get paid.
Still, a group of informal and lightly armed bandits could be hit hard, could be destroyed, if they could just bring a hammer-stroke to bear.
"Give us our armor and lances and we'll go straight through them,” Arnold insisted. “We'll clean out the maggots and your army won't have to do a thing."
It was tempting. Most bandits wouldn't stand against armored knights. If the knights won, the army could advance unhindered and might even be able to resupply from the bandit camp. If they lost, nobody was going to cry about a few obnoxious noble brats getting killed.
"Excellent plan,” Sergius said. “We will ride with the knights. It will be our first great victory as King."
Now that was different. If they lost their King, they wouldn't have anything. “But—"
He held up a hand. “If I am to be King, I will be King. Besides, we can't afford to delay. Every hour gives my uncle, the traitor Duke of Sullivan, more time to prepare."
If heavy cavalry is good for anything, it should be good for riding down lightly armed peasants. Still, Sullivan knew that. He had to know about Sergius's relatively weak force of knights. In the end, though only Mark and Ellie opposed the plan. The only compromise they got was that Mark's dragoons were enlisted to back up the knights’ charge.
Lawgrave and Ellie went along as magical support.
The army would keep marching. If the plan worked, they would march right through the bandit encampment late in the afternoon, help themselves to any loot left behind, and keep going. If it didn't, the war would be over in a hurry.
* * * *
The dragoons, with Mark along as technical advisor, left first. The plan was that they would stop about a mile short of the brigand camp, tether their mounts, and form along the road. Mark also planned to use them to scout out the area. Although the knights meant well, they'd been trained as armor rather than as reconnaissance. They might have missed a lot.
The knights went to their wagons, armored up, and replaced their light horses with heavy chargers.
Ellie and Lawgrave traveled with the dragoons. They'd need the extra time to give them the feel for any opposing magic.
As Ellie, Mark, and Lawgrave crept into eye-range of the bandits, the brigands had pulled back behind a makeshift barricade. The banner of Sergius's uncle, the Duke of Sullivan, hung over the camp. That was something of a relief for Ellie as she had halfway suspected that Arnold's knights might have found a country fair and decided they wanted practice with their lances.
Mark sent a few mercenary scouts to clear out any sentries while Lawgrave and Ellie used their magic to see whether Sullivan's brigands had sent out flanking forces.
"Surely they wouldn't divide their army like that.” Lawgrave wanted to know. “Isn't concentration the essence of warfare?"
Ellie had struggled with her medieval tactics book herself but she had her martial arts training to fall back on. “Face an opponent directly and victory goes to the force with the most weight and strength behind it. If you are able to work the angles, you can strike from the side, or even behind. A wise general might leave enough forces to hold his enemy, then strike from behind with his main effort."
"But that's dishonorable."
"It's war,” she reminded him.
A part of her stood back and reminded her that this wasn't her war, that she was an American. But the same people who were trying to overthrow Sergius had killed her parents. Supporting him was the best revenge—at least until she had the chance to face down the man responsible for sending the assassins.
Lawgrave muttered to himself, but he helped her lay out the pattern to detect enemy magic.
The spell showed nothing.
It seemed that their scouts had been right. The only forces they could detect were the men crouched behind the barricades.
The brigand camp was in the middle of large clearing that was too narrow to allow deployment of their entire army but was practically a parade ground for the knights. Trees on either side protected the camp from a mass flank attack but would let the knights concentrate while protecting them from ambush. And although the bandits were busy working on the barricade, it wasn't yet strong enough to hold off the knights.
It was going to be easy.
Maybe Ellie was getting cynical, but easy victory sounded like a trap.
Chapter 6
It took longer than Ellie would have guessed for the knights to catch up with the dismounted dragoons.
The descending sun was in their eyes and their massive animals were already breathing hard from carrying the weight of two hundred pound knights and another couple hundred pounds of armor and weaponry.
They hadn't brought Sergius's original armor out of Moray but it appeared that Mark hadn't gotten all of the blacksmith's att
ention after all. Sergius gleamed with gold and white enameled armor.
Mark's dragoons had cleared out the few bandits they'd found in the woods and in the half-mile between their horses and the brigand camp so the entire group, less those delegated to guard the extra mounts, edged forward until the camp came into sight.
Ellie and Lawgrave staked out a small rise that gave them a view of the bandit camp. They'd need that if they were to cast any magic.
"More impressive than Arnold's report led me to believe,” Mark murmured. “Well over five hundred."
"More for us to kill,” Arnold scoffed. “We'll ride through them and hunt them down."
But Mark was right. In the hour between the dragoons’ arrival and that of the heavy knights, the peasants had dragged in additional trees and brush and overturned several carts to strengthen what had been only a rough sketch of a wall.
They knew Sergius's army was out there but they didn't know that the time for attack had finally come. Ellie could only hope that they'd been waiting anxiously since they'd spotted Arnold's knights hours earlier.
"Sound the trumpets,” Sergius announced.
"No!"
But it was too late. The trumpeter, a family retainer Ranolf had sent when his son had taken command of the king's heavy cavalry, raised his horn and blew a long and musical challenge.
The bandit camp stirred into action.
"No quarter,” Sergius shouted over the trumpet's dying wail. “Let them reap the rewards of treason."
Very poetic, maybe, but Ellie didn't care much about treason's rewards. She was more interested in information, and in giving bandits a reason to surrender rather than fight to the last man. And while some of these men might be professional outlaws, many figured to be local peasants pressed into the campaign.
Not that her opinions mattered much. The knights trotted off in a disciplined knot.
"Four lines, now.” Mark ignored the knights and went to work with his dragoons. In four lines, the two hundred mercenaries covered a frontage of about a hundred yards.
"At ease."
The mercenaries relaxed in place. For now, they were spectators. If all went according to Arnold's plan, they'd continue in that role.
Which was all right with the mercenaries. For Arnold and Sergius, battle could be about glory. For professional soldiers, war was about staying alive and getting enough loot to support their families.
It was an attitude that Ellie thought her father would have understood.
"Shouldn't we be shooting someone?” Ellie asked as the knights closed the distance to the bandits and a few clumsy firearms started banging away.
"You're thinking about riflemen,” Mark said. “With muskets like these, we'd be more likely to hit the knights than do them any good."
"If you hadn't made us leave our horses, we could have charged in after them,” a mercenary sergeant pointed out.
"If charging is going to do the day, we've got enough men already doing it,” Mark said.
The knights still had a way to go so Ellie focused her attention on the enemy camp. Surely the bandits had a plan. Sergius's uncles weren't incompetent. While bandit allies might be disposable, they couldn't be obviously disposed of. Not if Sullivan wanted any more signing up.
It was well disguised, protected by rough camouflage and a haze of campfire smoke, but she finally spotted a flurry of activity to the far right of the bandit palisade—a spot where a couple of overturned wagons protruded out past the main line of the redoubt.
It had looked like another tree trunk.
She used her magic to give her clear sight, and the black log spun into high focus. It wasn't a tree trunk at all. It was a cannon.
The weapon was a muzzle-loader. On Earth, that type of ordinance had been outdated before the end of the nineteenth century. Heavy, awkward, and difficult to aim, the bandits they faced would be lucky to get off more than a single shot before the knights hit their wall. But one shot could do plenty. Loaded with canister and fired in enfilade, just one single shot from a cannon that size could punch a hole through the knights that would destroy their momentum and kill or unhorse perhaps a quarter of them outright. The knights’ armor was proof against iron-tipped arrows, virtually any peasant weapon, and even musket fire from longer than point-blank range. It wouldn't even slow heavy canister.
She pointed the cannon out to Lawgrave. “Magic time."
The old priest nodded.
They'd already set up their wards and Ellie knelt by the stones. Since she'd put out the fire, she'd been afraid of the power of magic. “Help me, Lawgrave. I have a feeling the backwash is going to be strong."
"I'm ready."
She didn't dare try to put out the gunpowder. But she could try to explode it early. The pattern was only a minor modification from her fire shape. She added a penny to stand for the cannon and pressed the stones into the pattern.
She didn't know if it was Lawgrave's help, her greater experience, or the greater energy potential of all that gunpowder, but moving the stones felt easier this time.
She pressed the last stone into place, focusing her intent on the cannon and the keg of gunpowder behind it.
The explosion was a wave of energy more than a simple sound. The force of the blast hit her just as the backwash crested and she fell back from her crouch scattering magic stones everywhere.
Mark and Lawgrave caught her arms. “Steady."
Cold surged through her like an artic wind.
"Hold her.” Mark turned her over to Lawgrave, then returned and dumped a helmet full of hot water over her head.
"Freezing,” she muttered.
The magic swirled inside of her, crackling when the water hit her, until flakes of ice dropped off her skin.
"Oh, hell.” Mark picked her up carried her down the hill, and wrapped her in a blanket.
When the worst of the cold abated, she struggled out of the blanket and looked at what he'd done.
The force of the explosion had pushed the cannon off of its caisson and burst a hole through the palisade wall.
The bandits, or whoever they were because Ellie didn't think real bandits had access to artillery, were running around shouting at each other—except for those who had been closest to the explosion. They wouldn't be running anywhere any time soon.
The knights saw the hole in the palisade and gave a cheer—even naive young nobles are smart enough not to want to charge a defended wall on horseback. A few blurts on the bugle shifted the focus of their ponderous charge from a frontal assault on the manned wall to the spot where the cannon had been—and where only a few bandits stood, still confused and dazed by the force of the explosion.
Lawgrave hadn't fallen but his face looked gray. “First time I've seen battle magic. No wonder it's so hated."
Mark handed him the canteen but Lawgrave waved it aside. “Ellie took the brunt. Now we need to get back to work. They've got mages after all. They must have been too well protected for us to pick them up. I can feel the pressure of their magic now."
Ellie hadn't done defensive magic before, so she let Lawgrave take the lead adding her strength to his aging hands as he pressed stones into place.
The pattern Lawgrave built was strange. The focusing pentagrams were a bit open, defocusing the energy being cast at the knights rather than attacking someone.
The backwash was strong, but it felt like human punches—and martial arts training had given Ellie plenty of experience in shrugging off powerful gut blows.
Someone must have realized the danger the breach in their wall meant because a line of bandits quickly filled it—before Arnold's knights reached it.
She'd thought that the cannon meant organized soldiers but it looked as if Arnold had been right about the peasant weapons. The line that formed seemed armed only with long staves.
Which was strange. Why would the Duke of Sullivan arm his brigands with a cannon and give them at least one battle mage, yet not even bother equipping them with halfway decent
spears?
* * * *
The knights were close now, urging each other on.
On a signal Ellie couldn't see, they lowered their lances in unison and spurred their horses into something faster than a trot, if closer to a canter than a real gallop.
Still, the weight of the horses’ hooves was enough to shake the ground, even at half a mile of distance.
The cannon would have torn a hole through that rank of Lubica's young nobility. With it gone, it looked like they'd rip through the bandits like a katana through a tub of lard.
"Uh-oh.” Mark suddenly sounded worried.
"What?” She could sense a difference in the enemy line but she couldn't see it. Yet.
Instead of explaining, Mark turned back to his dragoons. “Dragoons will prime."
You could load a matchlock musket an hour or more before you used it. But you wouldn't prime it until the last minute. The danger of the match dripping a bit of burning fire, or of the wind blowing away expensive primer powder was too great. Priming meant Mark thought the backup would be needed—soon.
She glanced at the grimfaced dragoons, then back at the knights’ charge.
"Crap."
What had looked like peasants with staves was now revealed to be footmen with pikes. They had kept the payoff ends of their weapons hidden, counting on Sergius's youth and her own inexperience to drive their army into a trap.
And she'd let Sergius and Arnold ride straight into it.
If she and Lawgrave hadn't destroyed the cannon, the battle would already be over. As it was, it looked as if their magic had mere delayed the inevitable. Cavalry can't charge prepared pikemen. For one thing, their horses won't let them. A horse may not be the most brilliant animal in the world but it's smart enough to know that it doesn't want to run up on a row of sharp, steel-tipped sticks. For another thing, pikemen would simply slaughter any knights who managed to convince his animal to ignore its instincts and charge.
It was too late for the knights to stop, but these weren't hardened heavy cavalry. They were a bunch of twenty-something men with more testosterone than sense who suddenly faced every horseman's greatest fear—unbroken pikemen. They couldn't stop but they could slow and spread—and they did.
