Jarre, squeezing his pikestaff, looked around. There was nothing to indicate that the soldiers were rejoicing at the prospect of the imminent battle, and if they were bursting with pride by virtue of the honour of closing the breach, they were skilfully disguising it. Melfi, standing on the boy’s right, was mumbling a prayer under his breath. On his left, Deuslax, a hardened professional soldier, sniffed, swore and coughed nervously.
Bronibor reined his horse around and sat up straight in the saddle.
‘I can’t hear you!’ he roared. ‘I asked if you’re bursting with fucking pride?’
This time the pikemen, seeing no alternative, roared with one, great voice that they were. Jarre also roared. If everyone was he might as well too.
‘Good!’ The voivode reined back his horse before the front. ‘And now stand in an orderly array! Centurions, what are you waiting for, for fuck’s sake? Form a square! The first rank kneels, the second stands! Ground your pikes! Not that end, ass! Yes, yes, I’m talking to you, you horrible little man! Higher, hold your pikestaffs higher, you wretches! Close ranks, close up, close ranks, shoulder to shoulder! Well, now you look impressive! Almost like an army!’
Jarre found himself in the second rank. He pushed the butt of his pike into the ground and gripped the pikestaff in his hands, sweaty from fear. Melfi was muttering indistinctly, repeating various words over and over, mainly concerning the private lives of the Nilfgaardians, dogs, bitches, kings, constables, voivodes and all their mothers.
The cloud in the battlefield grew.
‘Don’t fart there, don’t chatter your teeth!’ roared Bronibor. ‘Thoughts of frightening the Nilfgaardian horses with those noises are misguided! Let no man deceive himself! What is heading for you are the Nauzicaa and 7th Daerlanian Brigades; splendid, valiant, superbly trained soldiers! They can’t be scared! They can’t be defeated! They have to be killed! Hold those pikes higher!’
From a distance the still soft but growing thud of hooves could now be heard. The ground began to shudder. Blades began to glint like sparks in the cloud of dust.
‘It’s your good fucking fortune, Vizimians,’ the voivode roared once more. ‘That the standard infantry pike of the new, modernised model is twenty-one feet long! And a Nilfgaardian sword is three-and-a-half feet long. Can you reckon? Know that they can too. But they are counting on your not holding out, that your true nature will emerge, that it will be confirmed and revealed that you are shitheads, cowards and mangy sheep shaggers. The Black Cloaks are counting on you to throw down your poles and start running, and they will pursue you across the battlefield and hack you on the backs, heads and necks, hack you comfortably and with no difficulty. Remember, you little shits, that although fear lends the heels extraordinary speed, you won’t outrun cavalrymen. Whoever wants to live, whoever wants glory and spoils, must stand! Stand firm! Stand like a wall! And close ranks!’
Jarre looked back. The crossbowmen standing behind the line of pikemen were already winding their cranks, and the interior of the square was bristling with the points of gisarmes, ranseurs, halberds, glaives, partizans, scythes and pitchforks. The ground trembled more and more distinctly and powerfully, and it was already possible to discern the shapes of horsemen in the black wall of cavalry hurtling towards them.
‘Mamma, dear mother,’ repeated Melfi through trembling lips. ‘Mamma, dear mother—’
‘—fucker,’ mumbled Deuslax.
The hoof beats intensified. Jarre wanted to lick his lips, but he couldn’t. His tongue had gone stiff. His tongue stopped behaving normally, it had stiffened strangely and was as dry as a bone. The hoof beats intensified.
‘Close ranks!’ roared Bronibor, drawing his sword. ‘Feel your comrade’s shoulder! Remember, none of you is fighting alone! And the only remedy for the fear you are feeling is the pike in your fist! Prepare to fight! Pikes aimed at the horses’ chests! What are we going to do, Vizimian brigands? I’m asking!’
‘Stand firm!’ roared the pikemen with one voice. ‘Stand like a wall! Close ranks!’
Jarre also roared. If everyone was he might as well too. Sand, grit and turf sprayed from beneath the hooves of the advancing wedge of cavalry. The charging horsemen yelled like demons, brandishing their weapons. Jarre leaned onto his pike, buried his head in his shoulders and shut his eyes.
*
Jarre shooed away a wasp circling above his inkwell with a violent movement of his stump, without interrupting his writing.
Marshal Coehoorn came to nothing. His flanking troop was stopped by the heroic Vizimian infantry under Voivode Bronibor, paying in blood for his heroism. And at the moment the Vizimians resisted, Nilfgaard fell into confusion on the left wing – some of them began to take flight, others to pull together and defend themselves in groups, surrounded on all sides. Soon after the same thing happened on the right wing, where the doggedness of the dwarves and condottieri finally overcame Nilfgaard’s assault. A single great cry of triumph went up along the entire front, and a new spirit entered the royal knights. And the spirit fell in the Nilfgaardians, their hands weakened, and our men began to shell them like peas so loudly it echoed.
And Field Marshal Menno Coehoorn understood that the battle was lost, saw the brigades perishing and falling into confusion around him.
And then his officers and knights ran to him, giving him a fresh horse, calling for him to flee and save his own life. But a fearless heart beat in the breast of the Nilfgaardian field marshal. ‘That will not do,’ he called, pushing away the reins held out towards him. ‘It will not do for me to flee like a coward from the field on which so many good men under my command have fallen for the emperor.’ And the doughty Menno Coehoorn added . . .
*
‘Besides, now there’s nowhere to fuck off to,’ Menno Coehoorn added calmly and soberly, looking around the battlefield. ‘They’re surrounding us on all sides.’
‘Give me your cloak and helmet, sir.’ Captain Sievers wiped blood and sweat from his face. ‘Take mine, sir! Dismount your steed, and take mine . . . Don’t protest! You must live, sir! You’re indispensable to the empire, irreplaceable . . . We Daerlanians will strike the Nordlings, we’ll draw them to us, you meanwhile try to break through down there, below the fishpond . . .’
‘You won’t get out of that alive,’ muttered Coehoorn, taking the reins being offered to him.
‘It’s an honour.’ Sievers straightened up in the saddle. ‘I’m a soldier! Of the 7th Daerlanians! To me! Have faith! To me!’
‘Good luck,’ mumbled Coehoorn throwing over his back a Daerlanian cloak with a black scorpion on the shoulder. ‘Sievers?’
‘Yes, sir, marshal, sir?’
‘Nothing. Good luck, lad.’
‘And may luck be on your side, sir. To horse, have faith!’
Coehoorn watched them ride off. For a long while. Until the moment Sievers’ small group rode with a bang, a yell and a thud into the condottieri. Into a troop considerably outnumbering them, to whose aid, indeed, other troops hurried at once. The Daerlanians’ black cloaks vanished among the greyness of the condottieri; all was lost in the dust.
The nervous coughing of de Wyngalt and the adjutants brought Coehoorn to his senses. The marshal adjusted the stirrup leathers and flaps. He brought the restless steed under control.
‘To horse!’ he commanded.
At first things went well for them. In the mouth of the valley leading to the riverlet a dwindling troop of survivors of the Nauzicaa Brigade was doggedly defending itself, forced into a circle bristling with blades, onto which the Nordlings had concentrated all their momentum and force, making a breach in the ring. Naturally, they didn’t get away totally unscathed – they had to hack their way through a row of light volunteer horse, probably Bruggean, judging by their insignia. The skirmish was very short, but furiously fierce. Coehoorn had already lost and discarded all remains and appearances of lofty heroism and now just wanted to survive. Not even looking back at his escort trading vicious blows with the
Bruggeans, he rushed towards the stream with his adjutants, pressing himself to and hugging the horse’s neck.
The way was clear; beyond the little river, beyond the crooked willows, a barren plain spread out, on which no enemy troops could be seen. Ouder de Wyngalt, galloping beside Coehoorn, also saw it and yelled triumphantly.
Prematurely.
A meadow covered in bright-green knotgrass separated them from the sluggish, murky little river. When they charged into it at full gallop the horses suddenly plunged up to their bellies in the bog.
The marshal flew over his steed’s head and fell headfirst into the bog. All around, horses were neighing and kicking, and men covered in mud and green duckweed were yelling. Menno suddenly heard another sound amidst this pandemonium. A sound that meant death.
The hiss of fletchings.
He dashed for the current of the small river, wading up to his hips in the thick marsh. An adjutant forcing his way through beside him suddenly tumbled face first into the mud, and the marshal saw a bolt stuck into his back up to the fletchings. At that same moment he felt a terrible blow to the head. He staggered but didn’t fall, stuck in the mud and swamp. He wanted to scream, but only managed to splutter. I’m alive, he thought, trying to wriggle out of the clutch of the sticky slime. A horse struggling out of the marsh had kicked him in the helmet, and the deeply dented metal had shattered his cheek, knocked out some teeth and cut his tongue . . . I’m bleeding . . . I’m swallowing blood . . . But I’m alive . . .
Once again the slap of bowstrings, the hiss of fletchings, the thud and crack of arrowheads penetrating armour, yells, the neighing of horses, squelching, and blood splashing. The marshal looked back and saw bowmen on the bank; small, stocky, pot-bellied shapes in mail shirts, basinets and pointed chichaks. Dwarves, he thought.
The slap of bowstrings, the whistle of bolts. The squeal of horses threshing around. The yelling of men choking on water and mud.
Ouder de Wyngalt, turning towards the marksmen, cried in a high, squeaky voice that he was surrendering, asked for mercy and compassion, promised a ransom and begged for his life. Aware that no one understood his words, he raised his sword, held by the blade, above his head. He held the weapon out towards the dwarves in the international, outright cosmopolitan gesture of surrender. He wasn’t understood, or was misunderstood, for two bolts slammed into his chest with such force that the impact hurled him up out of the bog.
Coehoorn tore the dented helmet from his head. He knew the Common Speech of the Nordlings quite well.
‘I’m Marfal Coeoon . . .’ he mumbled, spitting blood. ‘Marfal Coeoon . . . I furrender . . . Merfy . . . Merfy . . .’
‘What’s he saying, Zoltan?’ one of the crossbowmen asked in surprise.
‘Bugger him and his chattering! Do you see the embroidery on his cloak, Munro?’
‘A silver scorpion! Haaaa! Wallop the whoreson, boys! For Caleb Stratton!’
‘For Caleb Stratton!’
Bowstrings clanged. One bolt hit Coehoorn straight in the chest, the second in the hip and the third in the collar bone. The Nilfgaardian field marshal fell over backwards in the watery mush, the knotgrass and swamp yielding under his weight. Who the bloody hell could Caleb Stratton be? he managed to think, I’ve never heard of any Caleb . . .
The murky, viscous, muddied and bloodied water of the River Chotla closed over his head and gushed into his lungs.
*
She went outside the tent to get some fresh air. And then she saw him, sitting beside the blacksmith’s bench.
‘Jarre!’
He raised his eyes towards her. There was emptiness in those eyes.
‘Iola?’ he asked, moving his swollen lips with difficulty. ‘How come you’re—’
‘What a question!’ she interrupted him at once. ‘You’d better tell me how you’ve ended up here!’
‘We’ve brought our commander . . . Voivode Bronibor . . . He’s wounded—’
‘You’re also wounded. Show me that hand. O goddess! But you’ll bleed to death, lad!’
Jarre looked at her, and Iola suddenly began to doubt whether he could see her.
‘It’s a battle,’ said the boy, teeth chattering slightly. ‘You must stand like a wall . . . Steady in the line. The lightly wounded are to carry the heavily wounded to the field hospital. It’s an order.’
‘Show me your hand.’
Jarre howled briefly, his clenching teeth snapping in a wild staccato. Iola frowned.
‘Oh my, it looks dreadful . . . Oh, dear, Jarre, Jarre . . . You’ll see, Mother Nenneke will be angry . . . Come with me.’
She watched him blanch when he saw it. When he smelled the stench hanging beneath the roof of the tent. He staggered. She held him up. She saw him looking at the bloodied table. At the man lying there. At the surgeon, a small halfling, who suddenly leaped up, stamped his feet, cursed foully and threw a scalpel on the ground.
‘Dammit! Fuck it! Why? Why is it like this? Why does it have to be like this?’
No one replied to the question.
‘Who was it?’
‘Voivode Bronibor,’ explained Jarre in a feeble voice, looking straight ahead with his empty gaze. ‘Our commander . . . We stood firm in the line. It was an order. Like a wall. And they killed Melfi . . .’
‘Mr Rusty,’ Iola asked. ‘This boy’s a friend of mine . . . He’s wounded . . .’
‘He’s on his feet,’ the surgeon assessed coldly. ‘And here there’s a dying man waiting for a trepanation. There’s no room here for any sentimental connections . . .’
At that moment Jarre – with excellent timing – fainted dramatically and fell down on the dirt floor. The halfling snorted.
‘Oh, very well, on the table with him,’ he commanded. ‘Oho, a nicely smashed arm. I wonder what’s holding it on. His sleeve, I think? Tourniquet, Iola! Tightly! And don’t you dare cry! Shani, give me a saw.’
The saw dug into the bone above the crushed elbow joint with a hideous crunching. Jarre came to and bellowed. Horribly, but briefly. For when the bone gave way he immediately fainted again.
*
And thus the might of Nilfgaard was reduced to dust on the Brenna battlefields, and an end was put to the march of the Empire northwards. Either by being killed or taken captive the Empire lost four and forty thousand men at the Battle of Brenna. The flower of the knighthood and the élite cavalry fell. Leaders of the stature of Menno Coehoorn, Braibant, de Mellis—Stoke, van Lo, Tyrconnel, Eggebracht and others whose names have not survived in our archives, fell, were taken prisoner or disappeared without trace.
Thus did Brenna become the beginning of the end. But it behoves me to write that that battle was but a small stone in the building, and superficial would have been its importance had the fruits of the victory not been wisely taken advantage of. It behoves us to recall that instead of resting on his laurels and bursting with pride, and awaiting honours and homage, Jan Natalis headed south almost without stopping. The cavalry troop under Adam Pangratt and Julia Abatemarco destroyed two divisions of the Third Army that had brought belated relief to Menno Coehoorn, routing them such that nec nuntius cladis. At news of this, the rest of the Centre Army Group took miserable flight and fled in haste to the far side of the Yaruga, and since Foltest and Natalis were on their heels, the imperial forces lost entire convoys and all their siege engines with which, in their hubris, they had meant to capture Vizima, Gors Velen and Novigrad.
And like an avalanche rolling down from the mountains, becoming covered in more and more snow and becoming greater, so also Brenna caused more and more severe results for Nilfgaard. Hard times came for the Verden Army under Duke de Wett, whom the corsairs from Skellige and King Ethain of Cidaris sorely vexed in a guerrilla war. When, meanwhile, de Wett learned about Brenna, when news reached him that King Foltest and Jan Natalis were marching briskly to him, he immediately ordered the trumpeting of the retreat and fled to Cintra, strewing the escape route with corpses, because at the news of the
Nilfgaardian defeats an insurrection in Verden flared up anew. Only in the undefeated strongholds of Nastróg, Rozróg and Bodróg did powerful garrisons remain, for which reason only after the Peace of Cintra did they leave honourably and with their standards intact.
Whereas in Aedirn, the tidings about Brenna led to the feuding kings Demavend and Henselt shaking each other’s right hands and taking arms against Nilfgaard together. The East Army Group, which under the command of Duke Ardal aep Dahy marched towards the Pontar valley, did not manage to challenge the two allied kings. Strengthened by reinforcements from Redania and Queen Meve’s guerrillas, who had cruelly plundered Nilfgaard, Demavend and Henselt drove Ardal aep Dahy all the way to Aldersberg. Duke Ardal wanted to give battle, but by a strange twist of fate he suddenly fell ill, having eaten something. He came down with the colic and diarrhoea miserere, and thus in two days he died in great pain. And Demavend and Henselt, without delay, attacked the Nilfgaardians, also there at Aldersberg, evidently for the sake of historical justice, and they routed them in a decisive battle, though Nilfgaard still had a significant numerical advantage. Thus do spirit and artistry usually triumph over dull and brutal force.
It behoves me to write about one more thing: what exactly happened to Menno Coehoorn himself at the Battle of Brenna no one knows. Some say: he fell and his body, unrecognised, was buried in a common grave. Others say: he escaped with his life, but fearing imperial wrath did not return to Nilfgaard, but hid in Brokilon among the dryads, and there became a hermit, letting his beard grow down to the ground. And there shortly after expired amidst his worries.
A story circulates among simple folk that the marshal returned at night to the Brenna battlefield and walked among the burial mounds, wailing ‘Give me back my legions!’, until finally he hanged himself on an aspen spike on the hill, called Gibbet Hill because of that. And at night one can happen upon the ghost of the celebrated marshal among other apparitions that commonly haunt the battlefield.
The Saga of the Witcher Page 187
