It was like a gate being splintered by a ram. The front two ranks of legionaries were hurled backwards: bowled off their feet by the momentum of the cavalry charge. Gray had vanished beneath a press of falling bodies and the knights plunged onwards, fragmenting the Greyhazel. The line of knights was rearing up, as a wave rolls onto a beach, as they climbed the barricade of bodies thrown down before them. But still the legionaries pressed forward, laying down their flesh just to slow the momentum of the charge. Roper saw Helmec go down, smashed off his feet by a careening horse, only to rise again and continue pushing forward, obviously casting around for Gray. The sheer mass of bodies hitting the ground was horrifying, with warrior after warrior being buried in a pile of his fellows.
The knights were slowing. They had to keep moving or they would be dragged down and hacked apart but this disordered legion was resisting beyond any expectation; resisting like mud, clinging onto the horses and sucking at the riders’ boots. Some of the knights were falling now; as the momentum from their charge began to fade so they turned, riding back the way they had come. They rode clear, leaving behind a flattened, writhing mass of the living and the dead. Legionaries still pressed forward after them, still infected by that bloody-minded will to resist, but the ranks were thinner now. Many had fallen, dead or injured by the Suthern cavalry, and those bodies impeded their peers who stumbled and slipped as they pursued.
It was a horrifying achievement: the most impressive example of what it meant to be a warrior that Roper had yet seen. With little hope, order or expectation, the Greyhazel had resisted and somehow managed to rebuff a fully armoured charge. But they would not beat a second. The knights were regrouping beyond the battle line and preparing another charge. Gray was down: he had been in the overwhelmed front rank and was now nowhere to be seen. Helmec had vanished again. The Greyhazel were scattered and stumbling and the knights were beginning to surge forward once more. A Suthern trumpet blew out, inviting the knights on to finish the Greyhazel.
“Skallagrim, advance!” shouted Roper. “We must stop this charge!” Skallagrim signalled for his legionaries to advance but it was all too late: they were too far away and the dazed Greyhazel would be obliterated. That Suthern trumpet called again and some of the pikemen were cheering as they sensed their side’s victory. The knights were thundering forward; fifty, forty, thirty yards away.
The heavens burst.
There was a crack so loud that Roper did not hear it apart from the ringing noise that reverberated in his ears afterwards. A flash like ten million stars burst into life before Roper’s eyes. Some fissure in the matter of which the world was made was blown open and a bolt of pure energy escaped. It scarred his vision, so that all he could see was the stain of that unbelievable burst of power. Besides it, the rain-drenched world was dim and diluted. A violent tingling surged through Roper’s torso and out to his fingers, as though a thousand-thousand strings running through his body had been plucked simultaneously.
Roper could not think. He could see, but what he could see was of no consequence. Something stirred in his vacant brain. But the cavalry, said his mind. The cavalry, the Greyhazel: what’s happening? He looked for the horses that had been bearing down on the Greyhazel but the formation had atomised. It took Roper stunned heartbeats that felt like minutes to work out what had happened.
A bolt of lightning.
The lightning that had been flashing upon the battlefield for hours had finally struck something and had blown out the heart of the Suthern cavalry charge. A few dozen had been blasted away from the point of impact and now lay smoking and stirring feebly on the ground. The horses that still stood had bolted in all directions, away from the lightning. Some of the knights were reeling drunkenly away from the scene, their momentum suddenly disturbed. Perhaps forty knights who had been in front of the lightning did not seem to realise what had happened to their comrades and had hit the Greyhazel, but they were drastically outnumbered. Behind them, the charge had faltered. Silence seemed to have fallen. Most of the surrounding infantry had simply stopped to look on in awe.
There was only one thing to do.
Roper spurred forward and tore his helmet backwards so that his face was exposed. “Well?” he roared with all the force of his lungs. “What are you waiting for? Do you want more proof that god is on our side? Charge! Charge!”
The trumpet sounded again and, with a roar, Skallagrim’s men streamed forward, heading for the gap through which the Greyhazel were already pouring. They rushed the disorientated Suthern knights and began to butcher them, dragging them from their saddles, cutting their reins and bringing down their horses. Roper knew that now was the time to gamble and was driving Zephyr forward into the press of legionaries who were pulling apart this gap in the Suthern battle line. “Gray!” he called. “Helmec! Where are you?” If they were still on the ground, they would surely be crushed by this swarm of legionaries that now assaulted the knights. “Gray! Helmec!” Roper swore to himself again and again. Then one last time: he could not worry about two of his soldiers at the expense of so many others. He spurred Zephyr forward, screaming like a madman so that the legionaries made room for him. Zephyr took no more than a few moments to clear the press and burst into the open ground on which the knights were reeling.
Bellamus had indeed deliberately created the gap in
