Toby saved his life as an enemy second ranker got a hand on the haft of his weapon – the haft didn’t seem to have any special properties – and reached for him with a wicked dagger. It flashed past the bottom of his vision, limited behind his visor, and he felt the blow only as pressure.
Toby rammed his short spear into the man’s head. His skull went backwards, Toby passed his knight, stepped long, rotated the spear end for end and pushed the iron at the base of the shaft into the man’s aventail and crushed his throat.
The two sides were stable – pushing at each other. Here and there, men fought, but this was what older veterans called the press. A deadly shoving match, where the cost of failure was rout and death. The spearmen were deeper. The company had better armour.
There was a titanic flash of yellow-white light in the Red Knight’s right peripheral vision.
He tapped Toby with his right gauntlet – not trusting his weapon – and the squire pivoted on his hips, parried a last thrust from their new opponent, and passed back. The Red Knight got his body low and set his feet wide. And cut – small passes. All as precise as dagger flicks. He severed the spear shaft pressing at him, and severed a man’s hand at the wrist with the kind of motion that a man might use when fishing.
Then, as his next adversary stumbled back, hand severed and cauterised, the Red Knight stepped forward and swung.
Spears were severed. Men fell forward as they lost the support of their weapons pinned against opponents in the press.
He cut again, as if his sword-like long spearhead was a huge axe, carried by a giant Nordikan.
Everything the spearhead touched was cut – armour, leather, wood, and flesh.
A hole, the width of his swing, opened in the enemy phalanx.
He stepped forward again, and swung at five cringing men. Two died.
The weapon lodged deep in the body of the third. He pulled – and a spear shaft struck him in the back. Desperate, he wrenched at the thing and it slid out like any weapon, shimmering blue red in the spring sunlight.
Whatever properties it had had were used up. And he was six steps deep in the enemy phalanx.
Blows began to fall on him like hail, and he was driven to his knees by a crashing, two-handed blow by a desperate man wielding a spear shaft like a two-handed flail.
The press closed around him.
Another man stripped his weapon from his hands – they were all around him, too close – but he got his right hand on his new dagger hilt and flicked it out.
And then it was just the fighting.
In full plate, he was lighter and more mobile then his adversaries in calf-length chain and scale. They had heavy shields and long spears – some were discarding them and others were not – and as they pressed him down, he burst into the frenzied routines his father’s master-at-arms had taught him since boyhood. He caught the right arm of the man who had stripped his spear, rolled him, broke his arm and stabbed him in his unarmoured neck below his ear. Grabbed the next man, slamming his steel fist into the unprotected face, caught his shoulders and used the point of his beaked visor to smash the man’s teeth even while his steel sabatons mangled the man’s feet and shins. Blows fell on his back – on his right shoulder, exposed in the melee – two blows so hard they moved his whole body and struck his helmet. He was dazed.
His hands and feet kept killing. He kicked a spearman between the legs, the steel point of his sabaton crushing the man’s testicles even as he held the man’s spear – his right arm shot out, and the hardened steel flange of his own elbow joint ripped the nose from the face of another spearman who was trying to climb his back.
His left leg was caught in something. It threatened his balance, and he was fighting so many men he had no time to spare to free it.
He knew, with awful clarity, that he was going down. The loss of balance was incremental. He got his dagger, point down, into a man’s scale-protected back – and the triangular point punched through like an awl through hardened leather.
He tried to use the dagger as a sort of climbing iron to hold himself erect.
Then something gave in his left knee.
Damn it. I tried, he thought, and down he went.
The mercenary cavalry watched the madmen come at them. It was a well-known fact that infantry cannot charge cavalry – that it was suicide to do so.
They came on anyway.
The lead knight – a Southerner from distant Occitan – pointed his lance. ‘Sweet friends,’ he said, in the language of romance. ‘These are brave men and worthy foes. If they want a contest-’ He smiled. ‘Let us give them their wish.’
He reached up and closed his visor – tossed his head to make sure his great helm was firmly seated in his steel cap. Lowered his lance into his rest. ‘For Saint James!’ he roared.
The mercenaries were not all from Occitan, and a polyphony of war cries emerged. The knights lowered their lances and rumbled towards the axe-wielding madmen.
The moment of impact was like an explosion of flesh. Axes severed the front legs of warhorses even as lances punched through layered byranies. A generation of Nordikans died in the front rank – a fifth of their number reaped by death in a single instant.
The survivors didn’t flinch. The great axe heads swept up again. The horses fought – hooves flashed – and in the centre four friends stood together, the axes had hewn two horses to the ground and the other horses couldn’t get past them. That firm point in the centre of the Nordikan line became like the prow of a ship in a storm.
As the knights slowed, their horses became more vulnerable. Lances were dropped, swords swept out.
No shield on earth can stop an axe wielded by a man as tall as your horse. And even when your hardened plate stops the cut of the weapon, the force of the blow can still rip you from your saddle.
But while the murderous giant shifts his weight and sweeps the axe up for another crushing blow, he is very vulnerable.
Great men died. Knights and warriors, veterans of a dozen wounds, died in heartbeats, without even knowing their killers.
The horses pressed on. And the Nordikans stumbled back.
The Thrakian peasants broke.
They’d lasted longer than anyone had a right to expect, their bravest men running at a full sprint after the laughing Vardariotes, and dying with carefully aimed arrows in their bodies. The best were killed, and the hesitant and the slow were left. In the end, like scavengers beaten off a corpse, they turned and ran.
The Vardariotes – old hands at this kind of fight – had allowed themselves to retreat all the way back to the stone outbuildings of the isolated farm. They rallied, and changed quivers, and let the remaining Thrakian peasants live.
Count Zac counted the horses. He had lost one man.
‘Where’s Khengiz?’ he called.
‘Girth snapped!’ an avildahr called out. Men laughed.
Opposite them, they could see the enemy’s main cavalry force forming. They had to open the centre of their line to let the peasants through, and that wasn’t going well. It was a missed opportunity, but following the peasants too closely could have been a disaster.
Zac shrugged. ‘Ready, my loves?’
Their shouts rang in the air.
He glanced left. The Nordikans were in it – they’d die where they stood. The centre of the line seemed to be winning. He frowned.
Ser Giorgios rode over from the head of the magnificent Scholae. ‘That was like a textbook exercise.’ He shrugged. ‘The skirmishing. The-’
Count Zac beamed with pleasure. ‘High praise indeed from the Count of the Scholae.’
The enemy was still having trouble with the terrified peasants clumped up in front of their cavalry. Alas, thought Count Zac.
‘But now,’ Giorgios said.