'em.”
“Just the same,” said Geirulf, Tyr's priest. “We learned this morning the Franks will not stand still to be shot down. So what are we to do?”
“Listen,” said Shef, drawing a deep breath, “and I will tell you.”
Chapter Eleven
Like a great steel reptile, the Frankish army moved out of its base at Hastings, a little after dawn. First, the light cavalry in their hundreds, armed only with steel caps, leather jackets and sabers: their duty, to search out the enemy, hold the flanks, exploit breakthrough. Then, file after file of archers, mounted like every man in the army, but expecting to dismount for battle, when they would close to within fifty yards of an enemy line and pour in the arrows from their breast-bows: their duty, to fix the enemy, make them raise shields to cover faces, crouch down to cover unarmored legs.
In the center, the heavy cavalry, the weapon which had brought the Franks victory after victory on the plains of central Europe. Each man with mail-shirt and thigh-guards, back and bowels protected by the high-reaching saddle, each man with helmet and longsword, and above all, shield, lance and stirrups. The kite-shaped shield to cover the body, the lance with which to strike overhand or underhand, the stirrups to brace the feet for the stroke. Few men, and no Englishmen, could at once wield a lance in one hand, strap the other arm into an unmoving shield, and control a war-stallion with thigh-pressure and the fingertips of one hand alone. Those men who could, they believed, could ride down any infantry in the world, once they came out from their ships or their walls.
At the head of his main battle, nine hundred riders strong, King Charles the Bald turned in his saddle and looked back at the banners flying immediately behind him, at his guarded base beyond, at the ships clustered off the beach. His scouts had brought him good news. The last army south of the Humber, marching to meet him, careless and unprepared, but ready to give battle. That was what he wanted: one decisive shock, the leaders dead on the field, then surrender and the transfer of all the reins of government to his own hand. It should have come sooner, after the defeat of the gallant but foolish Alfred. Then the summer would not have been so far on.
At least the time was ripe. Maybe overripe. But today, or at worst, tomorrow, the decision would be made. Charles realized that his view was blurred by rain drifting in from the Channel. He turned, rode on, waved the English renegade up to ride by him with the translator.
“You live in this God-forsaken country,” he said. “How long is this rain going to last?”
Alfgar glanced at the drooping banners, noted the slow wind from the southwest, thought to himself that it looked as if it was settled in for a week-long soak. Not what the king wants to hear, he realized.
“I think it will soon pass over,” he said. The king grunted, urged on his horse. Slowly, as the army picked its way over the unharvested fields, the damp earth churned into mud—the advance-guards leaving a broad black swathe across the turf.
Five miles northwest, on a ridge a little south of Caldbeck Hill, Shef watched the Franks moving toward him. His banner flew from an ox-cart, the Hammer and Cross athwart each other. He knew the scouts would already have picked it up, told King Charles where he was. He had moved forward at dusk the day before, after the marauding Frankish light horsemen had pulled back to their base. His men—and women—had taken up their positions at night. Almost none of them were with him. This was a battle he could control no more. The real question, he knew, was whether his army could act according to plan—and keep on acting after they had lost touch with him and with each other.
One thing Shef was sure of: there were more people in his army than he knew about. All day the day before, he had overtaken little groups of men heading toward the battleground, churls with spears, woodsmen with their axes, even grimy charcoal-burners out of the Weald, called out by Alfred's summons of the
But the rain, thought Shef. Would it help or hinder? He would know soon enough.
The first shot came from the shelter of a half-burned hamlet. Fifty Frankish light horsemen, well forward and to the flank of the army's main advance, crossed the sights of “Dead Level.” Oswi squeezed the trigger, felt the thump of release, saw the great dart flash half a mile. Driving clear into the solid target of horsemen. Instantly the team—seven men and four women—were rewinding, dropping the next bolt into its slot. Thirty slow heartbeats before it could shoot again.
The leader of the hobbelars saw his man on the ground, shaft driven below his ribs, and bit his lip with surprise. Siege-engines, in the open. Yet the answer was clear. Spread out, scatter the targets, ride round behind them. The shot must have come from the right, the open flank. He spurred his horse, shouting, sent his men pouring across the fields.
Thick hedgerows, designed to keep the cattle in and the wild pigs out, channeled his rush into a sunken lane. As the hobbelars swept by, faces looked out from the thorns. At ten-foot range, the crossbow bolts thumped into leather-jerkined backs. As soon as the boots left the stocks, the shooters turned and ran, not even waiting to see if they had hit. In instants they too were astride ponies, spurring hard for cover.
“Ansiau's in trouble,” remarked the leader of another conroy of horsemen, watching the growing turmoil. “An ambush. We'll hook round behind it and catch them between him and us. Teach 'em a lesson; they won't try it again.”
As he began to lead his men round in a wide sweep, there came a thud in the air and a sudden terrible shrieking behind him: a great dart from nowhere, striking a man in the thigh, driving through, pinning the screaming man to his dead horse. Not from the ambush. From somewhere else. The leader stood up in his stirrups, searching round the featureless landscape for something to show him where to charge. Trees, fields of standing wheat. Hedges everywhere. As he hesitated, a crossbow-bolt, shot from a steady rest by a man under a hedge a hundred and fifty yards off, caught him full in the face. The marksman, a poacher from Ditton-in-the-Fen, made no attempt to leap to his feet and run. In ten heartbeats he was twenty yards away, crawling like an eel in a half-filled ditch. The waxed and twisted gut of his crossbow, he had already discovered, had took little harm from the wet. As the horsemen hesitated, spurred in the end toward the place where they thought the shot might have come from, the sights of another twist-shooter trained round.
Slowly, without horns or trumpets, like a cogwheel tightening a rope, twenty separate skirmishes began to grow into battle.
From his vantage point on the ridge, Shef saw the Frankish main force still riding forward: but slowly, at no more than a walk, with many checks. They did not like to advance without their flanks secured. And on the flanks, for long moments, there was scarcely anything to be seen. Then horsemen would appear, spurring round a copse, or charging a burned-out village in extended line. What they were charging or spurring after was usually invisible. Then, as Shef strained his one eye in the blurring rain, he caught a flash of movement far out to one side: a pair of horses side by side at full gallop, one of the twist-shooters bouncing behind, its team drumming their ponies with their heels in a long trail behind. Oswi and “Dead Level” pulling out at one end of a hamlet as the Franks poured in the other, the flanking movement that was meant to cut him off delayed and confused by shots from other directions. The catapult disappeared behind a dip in the ground. In seconds it would be unlimbered again, once more menacing a wide arc anywhere within its half-mile range.
Shef's strategy depended on three things. One was local knowledge: only those who lived, farmed and hunted over the landscape knew where there were passable tracks, safe lines of retreat. Every group he had sent out had attached to it a man or boy picked from those who had fled the area. Others were scattered in hiding places everywhere over twenty square miles, told not to fight but to guide and pass messages. The second thing was the shooting-power of the torsion-catapults with their great darts, and the new crossbows. Both were slow to load, but even the crossbows would pierce mail at up to two hundred paces. And they were best shot by men lying down in cover.
