The repair did not take long, and so I reluctantly dragged on the buff coat and let the armorers strap the cuirass over it, and then returned to the war. I stopped along the way at Lord Utterback’s camp by the stone huts, and devoured another pâté, scooping it up with hard bread and wishing I’d had more barley wine to accompany it.
During this entire time, the guns continued their work. I had overrun only two of the rebels’ five batteries, and the rest had continued their duel with Lipton uninterrupted, if a bit shorthanded after my attack with the handgunners. I had been unable to damage the guns or other gear of the batteries I had captured, and they had been reoccupied as soon as we’d been forced to withdraw. Eventually, all five batteries were back in operation, though only a few guns were firing from the batteries that I had taken, and their fire was slow. Lipton seemed to have dismounted a couple of enemy guns, but their crews were detailed elsewhere, and the fire kept up uninterrupted.
Despite the damage I had done to the enemy, the numbers told. Lipton fought on until a dozen of his men were killed and one of his guns was dismounted, but then he withdrew, and he carried his flag from the field to make it clear to all that he had abandoned his battery. Enemy jeers wafted up from the field, and the gun barrels were lowered to begin firing into our men behind the hedge.
At this point I rode down to rejoin Lord Utterback, thinking I might be needed. He looked at me as I rode up. “We are about to have some pounding, I fear.”
“The men in the road will be safe,” I said. “But the pikemen standing behind may suffer.”
“I fear so.”
His fears were proved at that instant, as one of the enemy’s batteries opened their fire, and I saw a ball plow through one of Bell’s companies on our left, bodies and pikes flying. It struck me as a purposeless sacrifice, and I turned to Utterback.
“Why should they stand and receive the enemy’s fire to no purpose? May we not have them lie down?”
Lord Utterback seemed surprised by the question. “It is not the custom,” he said. “Our men take heart when they can see the enemy.”
“They can see nothing, standing behind the hedge. They only know they are being killed by something they cannot fight.”
Lord Utterback considered the matter, then flapped a hand. “The men may lie down.”
I rode to each regiment in turn to give the order. In this I met some resistance, as many of the men—and all of the officers—considered it best to stand in the face of peril and bid defiance to the enemy. But the shot, howling through the air and beating down the hedge, made them reconsider, and in time the entire line was stretched upon the turf, and the reserve companies as well. I also bade the bands to play, as a way to keep the soldiers’ minds from descending too far into a contemplation of their own mortality, and I told the standard-bearers and their escorts, who could not lie down without neglecting their duty, to march about, so as not to become stationary targets.
After seeing the order obeyed, I rode up to Lipton’s abandoned battery, where I could see the whole field, and found there the captain himself with a few men, quietly loading the demiculverins one by one and training them down on the field. “ ’Twill save a few minutes when we return,” he said.
“You are a practical fellow,” I said.
“And so you are, sure. With my glass I saw you leading those attacks. It was fine work, and you saved many of my men.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. I smiled. “Rock-paper-scissors.”
He gave a weary laugh. “Never before has anyone listened to, let alone profited by, my ramblings.”
I looked down at the field, the guns firing out of a pall of their own smoke, the iron shot bounding over the field, lofting higher than a man. “If you can ramble us out of this fight,” I said, “I will buy you another bottle of claret.”
The rebel artillery continued their barrage, the shot bashing its way through the hedge and for the most part flying far over the heads of the soldiers. The hedge suffered, but little blood was spilled. Deep in the pall of gunsmoke I could see movement, and deployed my cardboard telescope—I saw that the cavalry supporting the guns was being withdrawn, and their place taken by solid blocks of foot soldiers. The same regiments, I thought, that had attacked the line last time.
We were well into the afternoon when the guns fell silent—not all at once, but slowly, as they exhausted their ready ammunition. There was silence, and then the foot broke their formations and began to filter forward through the guns, to re-form on the other side.
It was worth informing Lord Utterback of this, so I spurred down the scales, and as I rode, Lipton called his men to the guns and opened fire, his shot plunging down into the thick hedges of forming pikes, creating bloody ripples in the swelling sea of enemy bodies. I found Lord Utterback aware of the enemy movement, and he bade me tell the soldiers to rise and prepare to repel a charge. This I did, riding down the line, but the regimental commanders had seen the enemy preparing to come on and had anticipated me.
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.”