Venart did his very best not to react. ‘I know Colonel – I mean, Captain Loredan,’ he said. ‘I met him during the siege of Perimadeia.’
The envoy nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘That was a factor we considered when making the recommendation. Also,’ he went on, ‘Captain Loredan is familiar with the area and the various issues, and he’s certainly earned a promotion by his conduct of the plains war, and the business at Ap’ Escatoy. He’s very highly regarded by the provincial office. You can count on the recommendation going through; assuming,’ he added, ‘that you’re minded to accept these proposals.’
Venart took a deep breath. ‘In principle,’ he said. ‘I mean, as a starting point for negotiations. Obviously there are a few details-’
‘Of course.’ The envoy stood up. ‘For the time being, however,’ he said, ‘perhaps you’d care to sign the copy I just gave you.’
‘Sign it?’ Venart looked startled. ‘But I thought we just agreed there were points of detail-’
The envoy almost smiled. Almost. ‘Indeed. But I think it would be as well to have a signed agreement in existence, if only as a holding measure. Otherwise I couldn’t absolutely guarantee that provincial office policy in this area would necessarily remain static indefinitely.’ He turned his head, looked out of the window. ‘Since the agreement would be subject to formal ratification by the regional co-ordinator, we can safely say that the terms of this draft aren’t necessarily carved in stone, so to speak. For today, however, my primary concern is to protect both our positions.’
Venart hesitated. He knew a threat when he heard one; but surely this offer, these negotiations could only mean that the Imperials felt weak. It was tantamount to desperation on their part, anything to close off one lot of problems so as to be able to concentrate on the others. ‘This extradition business-’ he began.
The envoy turned back and looked him in the eye. It was like staring for too long down a well. ‘I can give you my personal assurance,’ he said, ‘that there will be ample opportunity for discussion at all levels before any actual proceedings are put in hand.’
Bardas Loredan, Venart thought. Well, there comes a point when a man’s got to believe in something. ‘All right,’ he said. His hands shook a little as he took the top off the brass cylinder; he hadn’t put the paper back in quite right, and it was jammed. After he’d fumbled with it for a moment or so, the envoy leaned over him, took it from him and drew out the paper without any difficulty. ‘Have you got something to write with?’ he asked.
‘Hm? Oh, yes.’ Venart felt in his pockets, then the pouch on his belt. ‘At least – yes, here it is.’ He found the little writing-set Athli Zeuxis had given him, years ago; pen, inkstone, small knife, all in a dear little cedarwood box. He moistened the stone with a little wine, rubbed up some ink and signed the paper.
When Temrai felt a little better, he gave orders for a large-scale sortie.
‘You’ve changed your tune,’ they said to him.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
The general staff, who’d almost given up hope of being allowed to do anything, weren’t too bothered to find out his motivation. They couldn’t have cared less if he’d told them he’d changed his mind because he’d been told to do it by special voices that only he could hear; they’d been cleared for action, that was enough.
With both Temrai and Sildocai out of action, overall command passed to Peltecai, whose official designation was cavalry marshal; a good man but a worrier, who worried that he worried. Because he was concerned that his tendency to apprehension might result in dithering leading to disaster, he delegated command to a number of other officers, while reserving the right to override any of their orders if he saw fit. He then held a council of war.
This proved inconclusive; the general staff, it seemed to him, were in a reckless mood as a result of the frustrations of the bombardment, so he resolved to be firm and not allow them to rush him into anything. On the other hand, he had nothing concrete of his own in mind, since he’d wisely delegated planning on the tactical level to his lieutenants. Time, meanwhile, was getting on; unless something was decided soon they’d be too late for a daytime operation and be obliged to mount a night attack; Peltecai saw only too clearly the risks of being hustled into such a risky initiative without proper planning or preparation, and therefore made up his mind to attack at once, with all his available forces.
He then addressed the question of what forces were available, and by the time he’d worked out the true implications of the question it was getting on for mid-morning, and the last thing he wanted was to be bounced into fighting a crucial battle in the midday heat, so he nominated one unit in three for garrison duty and told the rest to fall in for the attack.
At this point, a message arrived from Temrai asking what all the delays were in aid of. Flustered, Peltecai sent back a reply saying that they were just on the point of setting off, and rode to the head of the column. Whatever faults he may have had as a commander, lack of individual courage wasn’t one of them. He was determined to lead from the front, by example.
This turned out to be unfortunate, because, as the grand cavalry charge came into range of the enemy’s weak and uncommitted archers, one of the handful of men shot from the saddle and trampled into an unrecognisable mess by the troop behind was Peltecai. By this point, of course, nobody else had a clue what the plan was or how the chain of command was supposed to work. As the plains cavalry crashed headlong into the wall of the enemy’s pikes, therefore, they were operating on the default principle of kill as many of them as you can, then go home.
Which worked fine, at least to begin with. Temrai had decided at the start of the war that the only way to deal with the formations of massed armoured pikemen they were likely to encounter was a point-blank volley from the horse-archers to break the line, followed by an utterly committed follow-up with scimitars and battle-axes to widen the gaps and cause a panic. Once they’d achieved that, the enemy’s close formation and sheer bulk would be their undoing, if anything could defeat them.
At the hundred-yard mark, therefore, the horse-archers pulled ahead of the heavy cavalry and split their column into two lines, peeling off to ride down the face of the pike formations. The volley went home at thirty-five yards, each archer loosing as he rode past the designated point in the line. The hedge of spearheads crumpled in two places, as the dead and dying pikemen swayed and fell against their comrades in the rows behind, tangling and snagging the men around them. As soon as the archers were clear, the heavy cavalry drove into the wounds in the line, their column splitting down the middle as they rode. Penetration was the key; if they could drive deep enough into the mass of pikemen, they’d be fighting unopposed – at ground level, there simply wasn’t room to lower a pike or draw a sword, and the horsemen would cut the lines like a shear cutting sheet steel, using the tension of the material to make the cut possible. Meanwhile the horse-archers would stand off and shoot from as close as they could get into the rest of the line, trying to prompt them to charge and further disrupt their formation; and if they managed to do that, there were the heavy reserves and, if absolutely necessary, the infantry.
They made a very promising start; the front troops punched two deep holes in the line, like bodkinheads puncturing a breastplate. Once they were in, however, they found they had a problem; there wasn’t much the enemy could do to them, but their light, sharp scimitars weren’t up to the job of shearing Imperial proof. They hammered and bashed until their fine edges were blunt and the muscles of their wrists and forearms were crippled with the shock of resisted force running back up the bone, but it was like bashing with a hammer on an anvil, which is specifically designed to be bashed. Stalemate.
In a battle, however, stalemate never endures; something always happens, usually through nobody’s conscious choice. While the heavy cavalry were pounding ineffectually on the anvil, the enemy cavalry (who’d been held back as a reserve; a mistake, as Bardas Loredan later admitted) sprinted up to engage them and ran into the horse-archers, who were pulling out in order to avoid them but mistimed their manoeuvre. In desperation, the archers loosed as much of a volley as they could put together on the fly; in accordance with standing orders, they shot at the horses rather than the men, and were far more successful than either party had anticipated. The front rank of Imperial troopers went down in a welter of noise and dust, and the next rank couldn’t stop in time; they rode over and through the fallen horses, crashing like a runaway cart hitting a wall. Startled but greatly encouraged, the horse-archers put up their bows, drew their scimitars and charged, only to find they had the same problem as their colleagues in the heavy cavalry when it came to cutting steel. They’d anticipated rolling up the Imperials with the momentum of their charge; instead, they stalled and came to a standstill as they found out the hard way that their chain-mail and cuir-bouilli was enough to stop them getting cut by the four-pound Imperial swords but didn’t do much to prevent smashed bones or concussion. At this point the back three troops of Imperials (who’d lagged behind and only just caught up) swept round their flank, cut off their escape and started hacking them down like an overgrown hedge.