I found two more opportunities to attack with the underarm strike, and succeeded once and missed cleanly the other; after which I realized the pollaxe was best used to hamstring the horses, slicing below the skirts of the armor; and so I brought a pair of enemy down, the giant noble horses lamed and destroyed by the weapon of a Butcher’s apprentice.
Then I heard Lord Utterback’s trumpet call, and on the echo of the tucket came another of the reserve companies led by Utterback beneath his blue flag, so that now the Gendarmes were caught between two lines of pikes. Some died, and the rest scattered. I saluted Lord Utterback from my place in the ranks, and he saw me and waved at me in the most pleasant, gentlemanly way, so strange to see on a battlefield.
The combat rattled on between the hedges for a time. A few more horsemen broke through, were hunted down or set to flight. In time, the fight reached a point of exhaustion, like a clock with its spring run down, and then the two sides glowered at each other while handgunners fired over the gap; and by and by, the Gendarmes and their Esquires drew back, and then rode their heavy, weary horses back the length of that long, sere field.
We were too tired to cheer. Behind the hedge, for the first time, I could see a long unbroken line of our own dead, and there was a steady swarm of wounded limping up the slope toward the tents of the surgeons. As I trudged with them, I feared we would not survive another attack.
I found my horse quietly grazing a hundred paces up the slope, and while I dragged myself after the beast, Lord Utterback came riding past, and as I mounted, he came riding back, and I joined him. I still had the pollaxe in hand.
“I’ve ordered up more food down to the men,” he said.
“We have earned our dinner, to be sure.”
He cocked an eye at me. “None of that blood is yours, I hope.”
“Is my face bleeding again?”
“I can’t tell what is bleeding exactly. But there is a good deal of scarlet on you. And on that poll-cutter of yours.”
I took a mental inventory of my parts. “I seem reasonably intact. Though I am hungry and thirsty both, and if I may stop by our camp . . .”
“I think we may both spend a pleasant hour there, an Clayborne permits.”
And so, we took off our armor and our buff coats and had more of the hard biscuit with preserved tongue and brawn, and slathered with the jelly and fat that by now we desperately craved. We opened a jar of pickles and a package of smoked sausages and a bottle of wine, and I ate ravenously, and Utterback with scarcely less appetite. I more than half expected that Clayborne would interrupt our feast with another attack, because he had little choice—he had staked the entire war on this march over Exton Pass, and if he failed here, he might be lost.
But Clayborne’s men did not come, and I began to feel the wine dragging at my limbs, and my eyelids began to fall. But Utterback jumped to his feet.
“Once again I must cheer the soldiers,” he said. “And my praise shall not be feigned.”
“Truly,” I said.
I put on my gear and rode up to Lipton’s battery. The captain, drinking from a leather jack filled with what looked and scented like malmsey, greeted me.
“The enemy are doing nothing,” he said, “and that suits Bill Lipton, Esquire.”
“Long may they suit you thus,” I said. I dropped off my horse and stuck my pollaxe in the ground. My entire body ached. When I viewed the enemy with my glass, I found nothing of note. The Gendarmes and Esquires were gathered in dispirited clumps, and I supposed they were done for the day. Some handgunners were thrown forward of the battery to protect it, but the cannoneers simply stood near their guns without firing. I suspected that the Guild of Carters and Haulers were resisting the idea of bringing up more powder and ammunition, or the reserve ammunition was caught so far back in the train that the road would have to be cleared ahead of it before it could come up.
Seeing nothing worthy of my attention, I dropped my armor and burgonet to the ground, took off my buff coat, and sat on the turf with my glass to my hand.
Now, sated, my worn body and exhausted mind could afford the luxury of emotion, and as I observed our poor battered soldiers clustered about their dinner, or tending their injured, the feeling that rose in me was disgust. What was Queen Berlauda to me, or to any of these people? What was Clayborne, or his ambitious mother? Who were they to bring about the ignoble death of thousands, death by gunshot, or pike-thrust, or by the surgeon’s knife, or by drowning in the sunken road?
And who, for that matter, was I? My own ambition had brought to here, to this killing-place, and all my cleverness had accomplished was to add to the great accounting of the dead. That we had killed more of the enemy than they of us made little difference to the worms that would consume the bodies.
If I possessed true wit, I would be bent over my law-books in Selford.
The world seemed to whirl before my eyes, and I remembered Orlanda’s words: Love you will have, but it will thrive only in the shadow of death, and the grave will be its end. I wondered if I would find my end here, and lie rotting beneath the turf of Exton Scales while the sheep cropped the grass above my eyeless head.
Weariness took me, and I stretched out on the ground, measuring myself perhaps for my grave.
“Let me know if aught occurs,” I said.
“Why should I stay awake?” Lipton said. I did not answer him, but closed my eyes.
Hours passed. The sun was hanging low over Exton Pass by the time Lipton nudged me awake with his foot.
“Lo,” he said. “The ill-fledged didappers come.”
I could hear drums rattling over the sett. Lipton offered his telescope, and I saw masses of men moving forward, pikes aloft and shining in the setting sun as they arranged themselves behind the enemy guns.
I felt soreness in every limb as I donned my armor again, and the burgonet settled on my head like a permanent headache. The plates that covered the back of my neck clanked as they fell into place. I returned Lipton’s glass and mounted my horse.
“Do them mischief if you can,” I said, but his gunners were already busy laying guns on the enemy.
“At this range,” Lipton said, with something approaching cheer, “they can see the balls coming at ’em, and it’s most diverting to see them jump about.”
Again I reported to Lord Utterback what he already knew perfectly well, and so we went up the scales to have a better view of the enemy. More and more men kept coming onto the field, and I saw no less than six regiments formed against us, nearly a solid block of pikes that stretched from the bluff on the north to the ravine on the south. Lipton began to fire, and indeed the enemy tried to dance away from the falling shot, and I could hear the sergeants-major bawling at them to stay in line.
“I must fight them,” Utterback murmured. “I must hold here.” He was giving orders to himself, and behind his eyes I could see the cogwheels of his mind spinning free, unable to find or hold or turn an idea. For he was unable to think of a way to save his army from the attack that was to come, and I, similarly bereft, could not help him.
I touched his arm. “It will be the same as before. We must hold out till night, and the sun is already setting.”
“Ay,” he said. “Ay, we must fight.” And shaking off my arm, he rode down to the crossroads, and there we awaited the onset.
The field was in shadow by the time the enemy made their assault, but even though we were in twilight, the sky above remained a brilliant, cloudless blue, as if reflecting the majesty of an unseen god, and we were wrangling with the enemy in the great cockpit of heaven. The enemy thrice intoned their battle-cry, “Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah, the King!” and then the pikes came down and the great mass of men swung forward. Again our handgunners got off but a single shot before the enemy were in the ditch, and wading across that river of corpses that awaited them in the sunken road. Again the clamor rose, as steel met steel, or pike-haft clattered against pike-haft, or blade plunged into flesh, and men staggered away from the fight screaming and clutching their vitals.