Where Conn had shone before, he now burned. Rage stoked his talent and focused it to break, blow, smash and maim so that everywhere he went the Redeemer line fell back and sent the message of strain like weakening magic along the line, which now lost its rhythm for a second time and began to fail again, shifting back towards the woods and murderous defeat.
Then, desperate and panic-stricken, the ten thousand missing Redeemers, under the command of Holy Gaffer Jude Stylites, stumbled upon the fight that was almost lost and found themselves as if by means of the most cunning intelligence not just on the battlefield but at exactly the right place at exactly the right time to save the day. What Stylites had been sensibly trying to do was to approach the Redeemers who’d been fighting all day long from the rear, at a point where his men could be used as replacements for the exhausted men in the front line. Instead, their run of accidents and the anti-clockwise turn of the battle line brought them into the side of the Swiss line, forcing it to bend into an L-shape to prevent being taken from behind. Now the pressure was on the Swiss and slowly the Redeemers began to push back from the line of trees and the certainty of defeat.
Then, late in the afternoon, after whatever it is that controls a battlefield moved first with one side and then the other, the Swiss line broke – a man slipped, perhaps, and took down his neighbour as he fell and he in turn hampered another. Perhaps a Redeemer, with one late surge of strength, pushed into this gap and others, seeing the space opening, followed – and so from one slip a battle was lost, a war, a country, the lives of millions. Or perhaps it was that the confused arrival of the Redeemers’ reserve was just too much for the tired Swiss and that from the moment they stumbled into the exact weak point of the Axis the matter was decided.
Whatever the cause, in minutes the Axis line crumbled and the few who ran became the many – and seeing them run, the many became the mass. Like a great building whose foundations had slowly been demolished underground, the collapse was great and sudden. Face to face, armour to armour, side by side, it’s not easy to kill an enemy. Perhaps only three or four thousand died in the seven hours of battle that preceded the collapse. Now was when the slaughter began.
20
The Swiss and their allies had only two lines of escape: up the slope to the side from where they’d attacked or back and down a muddy slope into a meadow contained in the meander of a river not much more than ten foot wide, but moving fast for being swollen by mountain rain. This glorified stream might just as well have been the Mississippi. Men in armour jumped into its waters and were dragged under by the weight. The exhausted ordinary soldiers in padded jackets struggled across the stream getting in each other’s way. Slipping and falling, they found the water soaked into the hand-painted mix of cotton and metal discs, which then pulled them under too. Meanwhile, the Redeemers were following at their heels, slicing and cutting and killing. Men they’d fought all day and could not harm were now easier to kill than herds in a knacker’s yard. From the top of the forty-foot slope the Redeemer archers formed a line and now, invulnerable, loosed ten a minute into the thousands packed in a space no bigger than a paddock, trapped not just against the almost impossible-to-cross stream but against each other as more and more panicked and terrified running men added to the crushing press.
Those who’d seen what was happening and looked for escape elsewhere did no better. Most ran further along the river, heading for the bridge at Glane, but were easily caught by the mounted infantry of the Redeemers. Seeing they weren’t going to make the crossing, many tried to swim for it. But here the swollen stream was even deeper and they drowned again in their thousands. Realizing there was no escape across the river, those who turned back were slaughtered on the banks. Perhaps a thousand made it to the bridge and safely across. They would have died once the Redeemers made it over the bridge but they were stopped. Someone with foresight set the bridge alight as soon as they saw the Redeemers coming. It was a cold decision because a thousand men were still trying to cross when it began to burn. Fire in front and Redeemers behind, the terrified men had no choice but to try, and fail, to swim across this deepest part of the river. It was claimed that some survived because the numbers of the drowned packed into the river were so great they were able to walk across the bodies to escape.
Thousands more had run away along the uplands to the rear of the position where they had begun the day, discarding armour as they went. The mounted Redeemers followed them – they were as vulnerable as little boys. Now the sky had cleared and the brightest of moons began to rise and take away what help the dark could bring. When the sun came up at six the dead lay everywhere, for ten miles from the battle and for six miles wide. More than a hundred of the great and the good were captured but not for ransom or as useful hostages. Santos Hall established first who they were and what degree of power they held and then executed them. For the second time in little more than a year the Redeemers had destroyed a ruling class inside a single day – and also finished most of what they’d started in the destruction of the Materazzi at Silbury Hill. But Conn lived, even if Fauconberg had needed to practically drag him onto a horse to make his getaway. ‘There’s nothing you can do except survive,’ the old man had shouted at him. ‘Living is the best revenge.’
Mostly heroes die, mostly heroes fail. The darkest hour is not before dawn and nor does every cloud have a silver lining. Life is not a lottery: in a lottery, finally, there is a winner. But it is also the case that no news is ever as good or as bad as it first seems. In this instance, the hideous defeat at Bex did have a silver lining and more than that. What kind of disaster it was – and for those involved it was certainly that – depended very much on who you were. For Artemisia Halicarnassus and Thomas Cale it worked out very well. Within sixteen hours it became clear there were only some two thousand survivors from the Swiss and their allies, half of whom had made it over the Glane bridge before it was set alight. But the survivors were very far from safe – mostly unarmed and unarmoured, they were still a long way from the protection of the Schallenberg Pass some eighty miles away. The burnt bridge had slowed their pursuers but not stopped them. In a matter of hours the Redeemers were over the stream and intent on finishing what they’d started.
But it was precisely on this kind of rearguard action that Artemisia had cut her teeth. Adding to her own guerrilla militia of three hundred with a small number of escapees still able to fight – less than two hundred – she divided her forces with Cale, who made it clear he expected not to take orders but to do as he saw fit; she made it equally clear that he would not.
‘Do as I say or you can bugger off back to Leeds. I know what I’m doing and these are my men.’
Cale thought about this.
‘There’s no need,’ he said at last, ‘to use such bad language.’
The ground between Bex and the Schallenberg Pass was always rising and the roads passed through any number of woods and over small hills. From these positions, always retreating slowly and avoiding a direct fight, Artemisia plagued the Redeemers as they began to catch the exhausted and often wounded Swiss with volleys of arrows and individual snipers in an endless hit and run. While sacrifice and martyrdom were enthusiastically pursued by the Redeemers in general, even they had a limited taste for being struck by someone they couldn’t even see in pursuit of the scraggy remnants of a defeated army. They backed off and contented themselves with murdering the occasional straggler. In short order they lost their enthusiasm even for this when Artemisia started setting traps for them using carefully placed men pretending to be wounded in places where the Redeemers could be easily ambushed. Over the following two days, nearly fifteen hundred men made it back to the Schallenberg Pass and safety. Among them were Conn Materazzi and Little Fauconberg.