'Raiders,' someone said.
'Or Feron Amathy,' someone else suggested, 'pretending to be the raiders. Not that it matters, I suppose.'
Cronan stopped the cart and climbed out to take a look. He didn't seem shocked or revolted, just curious. 'Actually,' he said, 'it doesn't look like either of them to me. I guess we may just have tripped over a good old-fashioned private murder, nothing to do with the destiny of nations and none of our business.' He knelt down and stared up at the base of the neck. 'It's a clean cut,' he said. 'Just one cut; which could mean a backsabre, I suppose. Or a sword-monk; they're supposed to be able to chop off heads with one mighty blow, in fact I think it's on the syllabus. Or it could just be some lunatic loose with a felling axe.' He stood up and looked round. 'This is Vistock? The map says it's a medium-sized town.'
'Raiders,' the pioneer captain told him. 'Forty-odd years ago.' Something caught his eye and he stooped to pick it up: a single bone button. 'Let me see that map of yours a minute.'
Cronan reached up into the cart for it and handed it over. 'And some of you bury that,' he said, pointing to the head, 'before the crows get at it. I don't know about you people, but I find this place depressing.'
He walked over to the barn and told a couple of his guards to help him on to the roof, where the rafters were bare and he could hold on and look around. From there he could see a fair way up and down the road. The obvious point was the ford, but he wasn't convinced, so he called down to some scouts and told them to look for crossing places a couple of miles in each direction. If not the ford, then what? He'd been assuming there would be a town: houses, walls, gates, a wide variety of obstacles to break up a charge, cover behind which he could hide reserves. Instead he'd committed himself to fighting on a level plain, with nothing to play with except a river that he suspected wasn't deep enough to slow down a determined advance, let alone block it. His suspicion proved to be correct.
'Wonderful,' he said. 'All right, if there's nothing here, we'll have to make something of our own. Somebody help me down, there's a lot to get done.'
They weren't finished by nightfall, so Cronan called for big fires and all the available lamps and torches. The men weren't in the mood, not after a long march, and it was fairly obvious they didn't have any faith in what Cronan was doing. He couldn't really blame them; he was being thorough and workmanlike but unimaginative; there was nothing in his plans that another general couldn't have thought of and carried out just as well. If he was going to be the first man in the history of the empire to beat the raiders in a pitched battle, he was going to have to come up with something better than that. Unfortunately he couldn't think of anything; and besides, they were running out of time.
'You look awful,' someone told him. 'You want to get your head down and sleep for a few hours, or you'll be no good to anybody when they do show up.'
'Yes, Mother,' Cronan grunted, but he couldn't think of anything else to do, and he was very tired. They offered to pitch his tent for him but he told them he couldn't be bothered; he'd just lie down in the cart for a while and go over the maps one last time, in case he'd missed something. When they came back with the lantern he'd asked for, he was fast asleep.
Monach woke up with a start, and wondered if he was dead. He was feeling much better, almost no pain-entirely consistent with death, from what he'd read about it, rather less likely if he was still alive, considering the gravity of his injuries.
But he was alive. He was also alone, in a cart, about four hundred yards away from a great deal of noise and movement. They'd started the battle while he was still asleep, and nobody had thought to wake him up. Bastards!
It hurt a lot when he raised himself on one elbow, to where he had a view of what was going on, but it was worth it. He could only see about a third of the action, because the units in the centre of the battle were blocking his view of both wings to some extent; however, not only was the imperial centre still there, it was moving forward at a calm, brisk walk, and the bodies being stepped over weren't all imperial soldiers, by any means.
Intriguing development. He resolved to make the effort, and dragged himself up on to the box of the cart. That really did hurt, and for a moment or so he thought it'd be the death of him, since breathing became almost more trouble than it was worth. But that passed, and he found that he was looking at a fairly straightforward three-sides-of-a-square envelopment procedure, with the raiders penned in the middle, a massive central block of infantry herding them back, and two hedges of cavalry on either side doing the killing and the wounding Cavalry. Far more cavalry than General Cronan had had at his disposal on the way here. Another, more careful look at the backs of the infantry in front of him confirmed it; at least a quarter of the centre weren't wearing Cronan's arms or livery. He squinted (the sun was inconveniently placed) until he recognised the flamboyant outfits of the Amathy house, and old-fashioned imperial patterns, which could only be the foot soldiers from Tazencius' garrisons.
Very strange indeed, he thought; Feron Amathy and Prince Tazencius were fighting with General Cronan against the raiders. How on earth had that happened?
There hadn't been one single factor that turned the tide, simply the cumulative effect of small, common-sense precautions and preparations, combined with a certain amount of flair in the leading and handling of troops.
It was, of course, pure Cronan, all of it. His basic idea was to fool the raiders into thinking that he was planning to defend the ford. They'd know perfectly well that the river could be crossed in at least two other places, and they'd split into two units and make a rush for them, with the aim of getting across the river and round behind Cronan's infantry before he could withdraw or react. They'd meet brief, futile resistance from the cavalry on the wings; they'd charge through them, scattering them, and rush down on the infantry-only to find that the cavalry had deliberately given up too easily and were coming back to take the raiders in flank and rear, while the heavy centre unfolded to receive them with prejudice. That was good tactical thinking; the part that might almost qualify as genius was the caltrops.
('Caltrops?' the colonel of engineers had said, when he got his orders. 'Oh, you mean those little three-legged wire things about the size of your fist, with spikes sticking out, the ones you hide in long grass or something, and when the enemy treads on them-yes, I suppose we could, if we had enough wire.' Cronan had, of course, seen to it that there was plenty of wire suitable for improvising caltrops out of in the field, using only basic tools.)
Genius, because Cronan had guessed that what gave the raiders the edge was their unstoppable charge, the impetus that carried them on, through and over any obstacle, no matter how dense or determined. Unstoppable, he'd said to himself, but supposing they wanted to stop. Could they?
In the event, it turned out that they couldn't. As the dozen or so men in the lead suddenly collapsed to the ground, screaming with pain, the main body of the raiders guessed something wasn't right. But they were committed to the charge and couldn't stop; they ploughed on into the caltrop field, driving the finger-long tines of the caltrops clean through bootsole and foot, and fell to the ground like ripe corn under the thin slice of a sharp scythe. When they fell, they landed on more caltrops, which stabbed them in the stomach and the chest and the face, and the boots of the men behind them landing on their backs and necks drove the tines in further still. As the charge continued to falter and pile up, still a dozen yards or so short of the enemy line, the cavalry crashed into the rear of the mob, stampeding them, and now the great wave of the raiders was smashing into the sea wall and disintegrating into fine spray, vaporised by its own impetus. Cronan saw that and muttered a quick prayer under his breath, to Poldarn the Destroyer; at the heart of all inspirational tactics lurks a small kernel of poetic justice, of the strong undone by their own strength. Then he looked up and saw the Amathy house, heading straight at him.