Выбрать главу

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.