Five miles northwest, on a ridge a little south of Caldbeck Hill, Shef watched the Franks moving toward him. His banner flew from an ox-cart, the Hammer and Cross athwart each other. He knew the scouts would already have picked it up, told King Charles where he was. He had moved forward at dusk the day before, after the marauding Frankish light horsemen had pulled back to their base. His men—and women—had taken up their positions at night. Almost none of them were with him. This was a battle he could control no more. The real question, he knew, was whether his army could act according to plan—and keep on acting after they had lost touch with him and with each other.
One thing Shef was sure of: there were more people in his army than he knew about. All day the day before, he had overtaken little groups of men heading toward the battleground, churls with spears, woodsmen with their axes, even grimy charcoal-burners out of the Weald, called out by Alfred’s summons of the fierd, the ancestral levy of Wessex and its dominions. All were told the same thing. Do not stand up to them. Do not form a line. Wait round the edges. Press in if you see your chance. It was a simple order, and they had taken it gladly, the more gladly from their king in person.
But the rain, thought Shef. Would it help or hinder? He would know soon enough.
The first shot came from the shelter of a half-burned hamlet. Fifty Frankish light horsemen, well forward and to the flank of the army’s main advance, crossed the sights of “Dead Level.” Oswi squeezed the trigger, felt the thump of release, saw the great dart flash half a mile. Driving clear into the solid target of horsemen. Instantly the team—seven men and four women—were rewinding, dropping the next bolt into its slot. Thirty slow heartbeats before it could shoot again.
The leader of the hobbelars saw his man on the ground, shaft driven below his ribs, and bit his lip with surprise. Siege-engines, in the open. Yet the answer was clear. Spread out, scatter the targets, ride round behind them. The shot must have come from the right, the open flank. He spurred his horse, shouting, sent his men pouring across the fields.
Thick hedgerows, designed to keep the cattle in and the wild pigs out, channeled his rush into a sunken lane. As the hobbelars swept by, faces looked out from the thorns. At ten-foot range, the crossbow bolts thumped into leather-jerkined backs. As soon as the boots left the stocks, the shooters turned and ran, not even waiting to see if they had hit. In instants they too were astride ponies, spurring hard for cover.
“Ansiau’s in trouble,” remarked the leader of another conroy of horsemen, watching the growing turmoil. “An ambush. We’ll hook round behind it and catch them between him and us. Teach ’em a lesson; they won’t try it again.”
As he began to lead his men round in a wide sweep, there came a thud in the air and a sudden terrible shrieking behind him: a great dart from nowhere, striking a man in the thigh, driving through, pinning the screaming man to his dead horse. Not from the ambush. From somewhere else. The leader stood up in his stirrups, searching round the featureless landscape for something to show him where to charge. Trees, fields of standing wheat. Hedges everywhere. As he hesitated, a crossbow-bolt, shot from a steady rest by a man under a hedge a hundred and fifty yards off, caught him full in the face. The marksman, a poacher from Ditton-in-the-Fen, made no attempt to leap to his feet and run. In ten heartbeats he was twenty yards away, crawling like an eel in a half-filled ditch. The waxed and twisted gut of his crossbow, he had already discovered, had took little harm from the wet. As the horsemen hesitated, spurred in the end toward the place where they thought the shot might have come from, the sights of another twist-shooter trained round.
Slowly, without horns or trumpets, like a cogwheel tightening a rope, twenty separate skirmishes began to grow into battle.
From his vantage point on the ridge, Shef saw the Frankish main force still riding forward: but slowly, at no more than a walk, with many checks. They did not like to advance without their flanks secured. And on the flanks, for long moments, there was scarcely anything to be seen. Then horsemen would appear, spurring round a copse, or charging a burned-out village in extended line. What they were charging or spurring after was usually invisible. Then, as Shef strained his one eye in the blurring rain, he caught a flash of movement far out to one side: a pair of horses side by side at full gallop, one of the twist-shooters bouncing behind, its team drumming their ponies with their heels in a long trail behind. Oswi and “Dead Level” pulling out at one end of a hamlet as the Franks poured in the other, the flanking movement that was meant to cut him off delayed and confused by shots from other directions. The catapult disappeared behind a dip in the ground. In seconds it would be unlimbered again, once more menacing a wide arc anywhere within its half-mile range.
Shef’s strategy depended on three things. One was local knowledge: only those who lived, farmed and hunted over the landscape knew where there were passable tracks, safe lines of retreat. Every group he had sent out had attached to it a man or boy picked from those who had fled the area. Others were scattered in hiding places everywhere over twenty square miles, told not to fight but to guide and pass messages. The second thing was the shooting-power of the torsion-catapults with their great darts, and the new crossbows. Both were slow to load, but even the crossbows would pierce mail at up to two hundred paces. And they were best shot by men lying down in cover.
The most important part of Shef’s strategy was his realization that there are two ways to win a battle. Every battle he had ever seen—every battle fought in the Western world for centuries—had been won one way. By shock. By forming lines and clashing till one line broke. The line might be broken by axe and sword, as the Vikings preferred; by horse and lance, in the Frankish style; or by stone and dart, as Shef had introduced. Breaking the line meant winning the battle.
This might be a completely new way to win a battle. To have no line, to produce no shock, but to wear and shred the enemy away by missile attack. Only Shef’s unprofessional and unwarlike troops would do it: it went against too many ingrained habits of lifetime warriors. Ground was not important. It was there to be yielded. Face-to-face courage was not important. It was a mark of failure. But there could be none of the usual battlefield boosts to morale—the horns, war-songs, leaders shouting, most of all the sense of comrades alongside you. In a battle like this one it would be easy to desert, or simply to hide, to come out when all was over. Shef hoped his teams would keep on covering each other: they had gone out in bands of about fifty—a catapult, twenty crossbows, a few halberdiers together. But it was in the nature of the battle that they would split up. Once that happened, would they come back again?
Remembering the dogged, snarling attacks that the Yorkshire peasants had put in against him in the snow outside York, he thought they might. The men and women out there could see the country over which they were fighting, see its unreaped crops, its burned barns and cut-down orchards. To the children of the poor, food and land were sacred. They had too many hungry winters to remember.
As he watched the battle develop, Shef felt an odd sense of—not of freedom, but freedom from care. He was only a cog now. Cogs had to turn when they were wound. But they did not have to think about the rest of the machine. That would wind, or it would break, and the cog could do nothing about it. It had only to perform its part.
He dropped a hand on Godive’s shoulder, standing beside him. She looked sideways at his ravaged face, allowed his hand to lie there.
King Charles, still moving forward toward the ridge of Caldbeck Hill—where from time to time through the rain he could see the taunting banner of his enemies displayed—held up his hand for the twentieth time for his main battle to halt. The leader of his light horse cantered up to him, rain now soaking through his wool and leather.
“Well, Rogier?”
The hobbelar shook his head disgustedly. “It’s like fifty dogfights out there all at once. No one stands up to us. We chase them out and chase them out. Then when we reform and fall back they come back after us, or they come in beh
ind.”
“What would happen if we just held together and rode forward? Up there.” The king jerked his thumb at the banner on the skyline a mile away.
“They’d shoot the hell out of us all the way.”
“But only as long as it takes us to ride a mile. All right, Rogier. Discourage these varlets and their bows as much as you can, but tell your men to ride forward in line with the main battle now. Once we have broken their center we can turn and deal with the flanks.”
Turning, the king raised his lance and swept it forward. His riders cheered hoarsely, once, and began to push their horses into a trot.
“They’re coming now,” said Shef to Alfred, standing next to Godive. “But it’s soft ground and they will save their speed for the last rush.” Barely fifty people stood by the three leaders on the ridge, mostly runners and message-bearers, but he had kept one pull-thrower team by him, with its clumsy, immobile machine.
“Swan-stones,” he ordered.
Glad to move after hours of inactivity, the team—men and women together—sprang to their places. They too had only one role to play today. Early in their practicing, Shef’s English machinists had discovered that chipping grooves in the stones their engines lobbed produced a strange warbling note as they flew through the air, like the noise of a swan. For their own amusement they had competed to see who could carve out the loudest. Now Shef meant to send a signal to his scattered troops that all could recognize.
His team loaded, braced, loosed. Launched one eerily whistling stone to one flank, heaved the machine round, launched to another. The dart-thrower and crossbow teams still lurking in ambush in front of the Frankish advance heard the signal, hitched up, retreated and swung round to join their leaders for the first time that day. As they appeared one by one, Shef pushed aside the farm-carts which he had set on the skyline, set the machines in the gaps, posted crossbows inside the carts. For every man, woman and machine, a horse or a horse-team stood no more than five yards away, horse-holders ready.
Shef walked up and down the line, repeating the order. “Three shots from each catapult, no more. Start at extreme range. One shot from each crossbow, on the word.”
As King Charles reached the foot of the ridge, his spirits rose in spite of the rain. His enemy had tried to harass and delay him, and now he was counting on the slope and the mud to take the force out of his charge. But the hobbelars had done their job in taking the casualties of skirmishing. And the English still did not appreciate the plan of the Frankish charge. Setting spurs to his horse, he drove up the hill at a canter rising to a gallop, overtaken in seconds by the counts of his bodyguard pulling ahead.
The catapults twanged, black lines streaking through the air, swirls in the massive body of metal plunging up the hill. Still they came on as the levers twirled behind the farm-carts. Again the musical notes, the streaks, the cries of pain from men and horses, the rear ranks hurdling over those who fell. Strange, Charles thought as the obstacle in front of him came into focus. A barricade, but no shields, no warriors. Did they think to stop him with wood alone?
“Shoot,” said Shef as the front ranks of the charge reached the white sticks he had planted that morning. Then, instantly, in a Brand-like roar, drowning the simultaneous thump of the crossbows, “Now run! Hitch up and run!”
In moments the slope behind the ridge was a flood of ponies, crossbows well in the lead, catapults taking seconds to hitch up, one team-leader cursing a sticking toggle. Then they too were away. Last of the throng, Godive suddenly turned back, jerked the Hammer and Cross from its frame, swung astride her gelding, and pounded off, banner dragging behind her like a lady’s train.
Eyes glaring, lances poised, the Frankish cavalry swept up to the ridge-line, furious to strike at their harassers. A few drove their horses straight at the gaps in the enemy line, whirled round, stallions rearing to strike with their steel hooves at the foot soldiers who must be lurking there.
No one. Carts. Hoofprints. One single siege-engine, the pull-thrower Shef had abandoned. More and more squeezed through the gaps between carts, some finally dismounting and hauling the obstacles away. The king gaped up at the stout wooden frame from which Godive had hauled the Hammer and Cross. As he did so, tauntingly, the same banner rose again, on another ridge-line above a tangle of wood and gully, a long half-mile away. Some of the hotheads in his ranks, fury undispersed by action, yelled and began to spur again toward it. Sharp orders brought them back.
“I have brought a knife to cut beef,” the king muttered to his constable Godefroi. “But what is set before me is soup. Thin soup. We will go back to Hastings and think again.”
His eye fell on Alfgar. “I thought you said this rain of yours would stop.”
Alfgar said nothing, looked at the ground. Charles glanced again at the high frame from which the Hammer and Cross had been torn, still standing sturdily on its cart. He jerked a thumb at it. “Hang the English traitor,” he ordered.
“I warned you about the machines,” shrieked Alfgar as the hands seized him.
“What’s he say?” asked one of the knights.
“I don’t know. Some gabble in English.”
On a knoll well to one side of the track of the Franks, Thorvin, Geirulf and Farman conferred.
“What do you think?” asked Thorvin.
Geirulf, priest of Tyr, chronicler of battles, shook his head. “It is something new. Completely new. I have never heard of such a thing before. I have to ask: who puts it in his mind? Who but the Father of Warriors? He is a son of Othin. And such men are dangerous.”
“I do not think so,” said Thorvin. “And I have talked to his mother.”
“We know what you told us,” said Farman. “What we do not know is what it means. Unless you have a better explanation, I must agree with Geirulf.”
“This is not the time to give it,” said Thorvin. “See, things are moving again. The Franks are retreating.”
Shef watched the heavy lancers turn back from the ridge, with foreboding. He had hoped they would come on again, take more losses, weary their horses and exhaust themselves. If they pulled back now, there was too much chance that they would reach their base and come out another day of their choosing and renew the attack. Instinctively he knew that an irregular army cannot do one thing: defend territory. He had not tried to do so today, and the Frankish king had not tried to make him, sure that both sides desired the traditional, decisive clash. But there must be a way to make him attack. An undefended population all over southern England stood at the king’s mercy.
He needed victory today. It meant taking greater risks for greater gains. Fortunately, retreating armies are vulnerable in a way that advancing ones are not. So far, hardly half of Shef’s forces had been engaged. Time to commit the rest. Calling his errand-lads around him, Shef began to pass his orders.
Down on the sodden slopes rising from the sea to the downlands, the Frankish hobbelars were learning sense. No longer did they ride in bunched groups presenting easy targets. Instead they too lurked in cover, moving only when they had to and then in short gallops. By a path through a dripping copse, one group tensed as they heard running feet. As the barefoot lad rushed by, intent only on his message, one rider spurred out, slashed savagely with his saber.
“He had no weapon,” said one of the Franks, looking down at the body draining blood in the rain-pocked puddles.
“His weapon was in his head,” grunted the sergeant in charge. “Get ready to move again.”
The boy’s brother, running fifty paces behind, hid quiet as a vole behind a red-berried rowan tree, watched them go. Slipped off to find avengers.
The Frankish archers, so far, had done nothing but endure random shot, their bowstrings long since so wet as to be valueless. Their commanders, now, were using them to hold strategic spots as the army fell back. They, too, were starting to use woodcraft.
“Look.” One pointed to a conroy of hobbelars falling back over a field, one of them suddenly clutching his side
and tipping from his horse. The archers, behind a wrecked barn, saw a figure suddenly slip from a hedgerow, seize a pony, and ride off unseen by its victims. But straight toward their ambush. As it came round the edge of the barn at full gallop, two men drove their short swords into the pony’s chest, seized the marksman as the pony collapsed.
“What devil’s work is this?” asked one, snatching the crossbow. “See, a bow, arrows. What is this at the belt?”
“Never mind the belt, Guillaume,” shouted one of his mates. “Look, it’s a girl.” The men stared at the slight, short-kilted figure.
“Women shooting men from cover,” muttered Guillaume. “All right. We’ve time to teach her a lesson. Give her some memories to take to Hell with her.”
As the soldiers crowded round the writhing, splayed-out figure, a dozen churls of the Kentish fierd crawled closer, wood-axes and billhooks ready. They could not stand up to mailed horsemen. Mere prowlers and robbers they could deal with.
Leaking men and horses, the great steel reptile oozed sullenly back toward its base.
King Charles, sunk in thought, did not notice the check in front of him till he was almost on his own archers. Then he paused, looked down. A sergeant caught his stirrup, pointed. “Sire, they are in front of us. Standing, for once.”
The village reeve Shef had found was positive that a day’s rain and the passage of thousands of horses would turn the brook between the Brede and Bulverhythe into a quagmire. Shef had decided to take the chance and believe him. His runners had got through—most of them. The pull-thrower teams with their heavy guards of halberdiers had closed in from the far flanks where they had waited immobile. Assembled their weapons, lined up five yards apart along a hundred and fifty yards of front. On a fine day, in the open, against cavalry, suicide.
The Hammer & the Cross Page 47
