‘Odd if the wind settles it,’ said Conn.
‘There’s nowt you could do about it. But it might drop altogether now or blow in their face and we’d be even better off.’
A horse intelligencer arrived and ran up to the two men, slipping on the icy ground and landing heavily on his poor arse. Embarrassed and in pain, he got to his feet. ‘We sighted the rest of the Redeemers at the far end of the Vaud, heading the wrong way. They’ve turned for us now but they won’t be here before mid-afternoon.’
‘Should we divide and go to meet them?’ said Fauconberg. ‘We don’t need to stop them, just slow them down. Three thousand could keep them away long past them being of any use here.’
Conn thought about it.
‘Is that Cale oik in camp?’ Fauconberg went on. ‘We could send him off to squeeze them at Bagpuize – they’ve got to come that way. His glorious death would be jolly useful all round.’
‘He’s not here. It’s a damn good idea, Fauconberg, but I’m going to stick. Triple the intelligencers – I want to know every mile they make towards us. We can send Vennegor or Waller if things go all right here.’
‘If the wind settles going down from us towards them, we’ll win.’
‘And what if it doesn’t?’ said Conn.
Conn was right to ask. By five in the morning the wind was driving constantly into their faces like a blast from a furnace for forging ice. All the advantages won by Conn’s speed and grasp were blown away in a cold wind from the worst cold snap in thirty years.
‘They won’t wait,’ said Little Fauconberg. ‘If the wind can change once it can change twice. They’ll take the advantage while they can. Bloody bollocks and damn our luck!’
There was nothing he could say to improve on Fauconberg’s assessment so Conn just ordered the massed ranks up into line. With the wind so bitter he ordered the men at the front to swap with the men behind, seven deep, every ten minutes. What may sound a tricky manoeuvre was easy enough: for all the romantic heroics of tall tales of warfare in the penny-dreadfuls of Geneva and Johannesburg and Spanish Leeds, the man never lived who could fight for ten or five or even two hours at a stretch. Men were in ranks so that they could replace the men in front not just if they died or were wounded, but mostly to give them a breather and to be given one in their turn. Depending on circumstances a man in pitched battle might fight for no more than ten minutes in every hour. Now, like the emperor penguins of the northern pole, they shuffled side to side into the numbing sleet.
Little Fauconberg was right. Santos Hall ordered his archers forward. So hard was the ground they could not grab even a pinch of earth to eat to make it clear to God that they were ready to be buried for his sake. This put many Redeemers into a state of hysteria, so terrified were they of dying in a state of sin yet hardly terrified at all of death itself. An exasperated Santos Hall had to send non-militant priests up and down the ranks issuing pardons, something that took ten minutes. A more practical matter of concern was that the earth was so hard they couldn’t stick their arrows into the ground for ease of use.
Once forgiveness for sins of omission had calmed them down, the Redeemer archers moved forward into position to shoot. As they did so they began to call out to their enemies.
‘Baaaa! Baaaa! Baaaa! Baaaa! The sleet wind blew the sound across the four hundred yards that separated them.
‘Isn’t that sheep?’ asked Little Fauconberg. ‘Why are they making the sound of sheep?’
‘Baaaa! Baaaa! Baaaa!’ The call came louder and softer with the rhythm of the wind.
‘They’re saying we’re lambs to the slaughter,’ said Conn.
‘Are they?’ said Fauconberg. ‘Hand out sprigs of mint to the men and when we come together we’ll shove it up their arse.’
‘Shouldn’t that be arses, Fauconberg?’ said one of the knights-in-arms standing just behind.
‘Shut your gob, Rutland, or I’ll use you to show the men how it’s done.’
Much laughter at this.
‘If you must shove something up my bottom,’ said Rutland, ‘I’d prefer a nice hot pepper. It might have a warming effect in this fucking wind.’
Then it began and in a few seconds the first stage of the battle was lost. The wind against them blew with so much power that the Swiss arrows lost fifty yards in range and those of their enemy gained the fifty they’d lost. They might just as well have used harsh words. It hardly mattered that the thick sleet blinded them and they kept losing sight of their opponents, now dim, now completely obscured by the driving mixture of snow and freezing rain, because everything they shot fell short. But the first volley from the Redeemers no longer fell from the sky but was driven by the wind with malice into knee and chest, mouth and nose at such speed not even the highest quality of steel could defend against a full strike. Rutland, pierced through the ear, no longer worried about the cold.
There were ten thousand Redeemer archers shooting, at a less than usual rate of about seven arrows in every minute because of the hard ground. The thirty-two thousand Swiss on the steeper hill were hit by nearly seventy thousand arrows every sixty seconds, each weighing a quarter of a pound and, with the wind behind each one, travelling nearly a hundred yards every second. There was nothing coming back at the Redeemers to frighten or harm them. After twenty minutes more than a million arrows landed on a space half a mile wide and ten yards deep. In all, one hundred and fifty-eight tons of malignant rain pissing it down on men, none of them with shields and more than half of them with no more armour than a heavy jacket with metal discs sown into it. To retreat out of range would have meant rout – an army cannot turn its back and live – and to stay was impossible, but to advance made for a probable defeat.
‘We’ve to attack!’ shouted Fauconberg over the hideous rattle of iron on steel. PINGAPINGAPINGAPINGAPINGAPINGAPINGAPING! The racket merging with screams of pain and the roaring shouts of the sergeants trying to stop their men from running away. Few die well or quickly on a battlefield.
Shocked and more astonished by the collapse of his clever and wonderfully executed plans, Conn looked at Fauconberg. ‘Yes, I agree.’ Despite himself, Fauconberg, fifty-five years old and bad-tempered, as dismissive as any thirty-year mercenary, was impressed by Conn: Not bad, sonny, in a shit-storm like this.
How many of us have a finest hour? The moment when everything you were made for, everything you have become, arrives; the great event that opens you up and calls out, ‘This is for you.’ With his carefully laid plans in wind-driven ruin, Conn Materazzi gathered himself up and caught fire. He bellowed the order to advance and its tone of power and conviction was picked up by each of the sergeants in their turn as it echoed down the line. The great army afflicted by the squall of sharps moved forward to come to grips. Four hundred yards will take an army moving with care to keep its shape more than three minutes – an age under the arrows pelting into feet and knees and mouths and throats. But now the murder of arrows had to end because the Swiss were closing. The Redeemer archers had to leave off and retreat behind the infantry standing still behind them and who would now have to bar the way of the advancing Swiss hand-to-hand. The arrows stopped falling like a sudden squall suddenly over. But the real wind grew more blustery as they advanced, the sleet more blinding. As both sides moved in the storm, the slack visibility and the confusion of movement of so many men so quickly meant that the left side of Conn’s attacking line and the right side of the Redeemers overlapped as they finally met. Seeing the problem, the centenars and sergeants on either side threw in reserves to seal up the edges and to prevent their opponents coming around the sides to take them from behind. But these uneven counter pushes began to skew the line of battle so that it slowly began to rotate against the clock.