The most important part of Shef's strategy was his realization that there are two ways to win a battle. Every battle he had ever seen—every battle fought in the Western world for centuries—had been won one way. By shock. By forming lines and clashing till one line broke. The line might be broken by axe and sword, as the Vikings preferred; by horse and lance, in the Frankish style; or by stone and dart, as Shef had introduced. Breaking the line meant winning the battle.
This might be a completely new way to win a battle. To have no line, to produce no shock, but to wear and shred the enemy away by missile attack. Only Shef's unprofessional and unwarlike troops would do it: it went against too many ingrained habits of lifetime warriors. Ground was not important. It was there to be yielded. Face- to-face courage was not important. It was a mark of failure. But there could be none of the usual battlefield boosts to morale—the horns, war-songs, leaders shouting, most of all the sense of comrades alongside you. In a battle like this one it would be easy to desert, or simply to hide, to come out when all was over. Shef hoped his teams would keep on covering each other: they had gone out in bands of about fifty—a catapult, twenty crossbows, a few halberdiers together. But it was in the nature of the battle that they would split up. Once that happened, would they come back again?
Remembering the dogged, snarling attacks that the Yorkshire peasants had put in against him in the snow outside York, he thought they might. The men and women out there could see the country over which they were fighting, see its unreaped crops, its burned barns and cut-down orchards. To the children of the poor, food and land were sacred. They had too many hungry winters to remember.
As he watched the battle develop, Shef felt an odd sense of—not of freedom, but freedom from care. He was only a cog now. Cogs had to turn when they were wound. But they did not have to think about the rest of the machine. That would wind, or it would break, and the cog could do nothing about it. It had only to perform its part.
He dropped a hand on Godive's shoulder, standing beside him. She looked sideways at his ravaged face, allowed his hand to lie there.
King Charles, still moving forward toward the ridge of Caldbeck Hill—where from time to time through the rain he could see the taunting banner of his enemies displayed—held up his hand for the twentieth time for his main battle to halt. The leader of his light horse cantered up to him, rain now soaking through his wool and leather.
“Well, Rogier?”
The hobbelar shook his head disgustedly. “It's like fifty dogfights out there all at once. No one stands up to us. We chase them out and chase them out. Then when we reform and fall back they come back after us, or they come in behind.”
“What would happen if we just held together and rode forward? Up there.” The king jerked his thumb at the banner on the skyline a mile away.
“They'd shoot the hell out of us all the way.”
“But only as long as it takes us to ride a mile. All right, Rogier. Discourage these varlets and their bows as much as you can, but tell your men to ride forward in line with the main battle now. Once we have broken their center we can turn and deal with the flanks.”
Turning, the king raised his lance and swept it forward. His riders cheered hoarsely, once, and began to push their horses into a trot.
“They're coming now,” said Shef to Alfred, standing next to Godive. “But it's soft ground and they will save their speed for the last rush.” Barely fifty people stood by the three leaders on the ridge, mostly runners and message-bearers, but he had kept one pull-thrower team by him, with its clumsy, immobile machine. “Swan- stones,” he ordered.
Glad to move after hours of inactivity, the team—men and women together—sprang to their places. They too had only one role to play today. Early in their practicing, Shef's English machinists had discovered that chipping grooves in the stones their engines lobbed produced a strange warbling note as they flew through the air, like the noise of a swan. For their own amusement they had competed to see who could carve out the loudest. Now Shef meant to send a signal to his scattered troops that all could recognize.
His team loaded, braced, loosed. Launched one eerily whistling stone to one flank, heaved the machine round, launched to another. The dart-thrower and crossbow teams still lurking in ambush in front of the Frankish advance heard the signal, hitched up, retreated and swung round to join their leaders for the first time that day. As they appeared one by one, Shef pushed aside the farm-carts which he had set on the skyline, set the machines in the gaps, posted crossbows inside the carts. For every man, woman and machine, a horse or a horse-team stood no more than five yards away, horse-holders ready.
Shef walked up and down the line, repeating the order. “Three shots from each catapult, no more. Start at extreme range. One shot from each crossbow, on the word.”
As King Charles reached the foot of the ridge, his spirits rose in spite of the rain. His enemy had tried to harass and delay him, and now he was counting on the slope and the mud to take the force out of his charge. But the hobbelars had done their job in taking the casualties of skirmishing. And the English still did not appreciate the plan of the Frankish charge. Setting spurs to his horse, he drove up the hill at a canter rising to a gallop, overtaken in seconds by the counts of his bodyguard pulling ahead.
The catapults twanged, black lines streaking through the air, swirls in the massive body of metal plunging up the hill. Still they came on as the levers twirled behind the farm-carts. Again the musical notes, the streaks, the cries of pain from men and horses, the rear ranks hurdling over those who fell. Strange, Charles thought as the obstacle in front of him came into focus. A barricade, but no shields, no warriors. Did they think to stop him with wood alone?
“Shoot,” said Shef as the front ranks of the charge reached the white sticks he had planted that morning. Then, instantly, in a Brand-like roar, drowning the simultaneous thump of the crossbows, “Now run! Hitch up and run!”
In moments the slope behind the ridge was a flood of ponies, crossbows well in the lead, catapults taking seconds to hitch up, one team-leader cursing a sticking toggle. Then they too were away. Last of the throng, Godive suddenly turned back, jerked the Hammer and Cross from its frame, swung astride her gelding, and pounded off, banner dragging behind her like a lady's train.
Eyes glaring, lances poised, the Frankish cavalry swept up to the ridge-line, furious to strike at their harassers. A few drove their horses straight at the gaps in the enemy line, whirled round, stallions rearing to strike with their steel hooves at the foot soldiers who must be lurking there.
No one. Carts. Hoofprints. One single siege-engine, the pull-thrower Shef had abandoned. More and more squeezed through the gaps between carts, some finally dismounting and hauling the obstacles away. The king gaped up at the stout wooden frame from which Godive had hauled the Hammer and Cross. As he did so, tauntingly, the same banner rose again, on another ridge-line above a tangle of wood and gully, a long half-mile away. Some of the hotheads in his ranks, fury undispersed by action, yelled and began to spur again toward it. Sharp orders brought them back.
“I have brought a knife to cut beef,” the king muttered to his constable Godefroi. “But what is set before me is soup. Thin soup. We will go back to Hastings and think again.”
His eye fell on Alfgar. “I thought you said this rain of yours would stop.”
Alfgar said nothing, looked at the ground. Charles glanced again at the high frame from which the Hammer and Cross had been torn, still standing sturdily on its cart. He jerked a thumb at it. “Hang the English traitor,” he ordered.
“I warned you about the machines,” shrieked Alfgar as the hands seized him.
“What's he say?” asked one of the knights.
“I don't know. Some gabble in English.”
On a knoll well to one side of the track of the Franks, Thorvin, Geirulf and Farman conferred.
“What do you think?” asked Thorvin.
