“God’s blood, but you’re a couple of fire-eaters,” Andruw said, resigned. “What’s the plan then, Corfe?”
Their colonel was silent for a few seconds, watching the haphazard collection of campfires that was the enemy camp. It was on a slight hill—at least they had had the sense to choose the higher ground—but if he squinted, he could make out a deeper darkness in the night on the far side of the camp. A small forest. Probably they had camped near it for the convenience of the firewood. Something clicked into place in Corfe’s head. Finally he said: “Have you ever hunted boar in a wood, Andruw?”
• • •
T HE stars wheeled in their courses, the cold deepened. It took two hours to get the squadrons in position, the men staggering with tiredness, half of them afoot in accordance with Corfe’s plan. It was one of the most wearing and difficult exercises in the field, Corfe thought as he sat his horse waiting for his men to get into position. A night march, when body and brain are drunk with exhaustion. Men can sleep as they march, blinking awake as their knees start to buckle. They begin to see bright lights and hallucinations in the night. Shadows become living things, trees move and walk. He had experienced it all himself. He hoped he had not pushed his willing tribesmen too far.
He had four squadrons about him, two hundred men mounted and sitting still as graven statues while their horses breathed pale plumes of smoke into the frigid night air. Thank God for the surplus horses. Every one of them was on a relatively fresh mount. Only ten men remained back at their camp with the rest of the remounts and the baggage. As always, he was staking everything on one throw of the dice. He had not the numbers to do otherwise.
His cavalry were deployed in a two-deep line on a slope to the north of the enemy camp, between it and the outskirts of Staed itself. From where he was he could see the sea glittering under the clear night sky off to his left. Ahead, perhaps half a mile away, the campfires burned by the hundred, guttering low as dawn approached.
The rest of his men, on foot, should by now be on the southern side of the enemy campsite, getting into position under Marsch and Andruw. Their approach and deployment would be concealed by the wood there, and the northern edge of the treeline would be their start point. They were the beaters, their job to wreck havoc and flush the enemy in a confused mass from the camp into the open. Like flushing a boar out of a hazel brake on to the spears of the hunters. Corfe had no reserves. Everything depended on speed, darkness, surprise, and the sheer unbridled savagery of his men.
And there it began. A surf of shouting in the night, the shrieking war-cry of the Felimbri, a sound to chill the blood. Corfe’s mount twitched and fidgeted under him at the distant sounds while around him the other mounted men seemed to straighten in the saddle, their exhaustion forgotten.
Marsch and Andruw were in the enemy camp. Men would be stumbling from their tents half awake. They would be fumbling for weapons in the firelit dark, running from unknown attackers. They would have no time to don their armour or to form up. Their officers would not have a chance. If any rallied and got a hold of themselves, Marsch and Andruw were under orders to butcher them, to annihilate any sign of organized resistance. Otherwise, their task was to simply panic the enemy, make him run north. Into the waiting arms of Corfe’s Cathedraller cavalry.
A few scattered arquebus shots, flashes followed by bangs. The shouting grew louder. Men screaming and yelling in fear, pain, anger. Blooming flames startling bright in the fleeing darkness. Someone was setting the tents on fire. Shadows and shapes running past the flames, the campfires blinking on and off as men went by them. This was the hardest part, judging when the enemy was in the open, far enough out of the camp so that Corfe’s charge would not carry them back into it. He could see them now. There was a mass of men in streaming retreat, a mob rather than an army, hundreds of them fleeing north towards the town with the tribesmen slashing at their heels, not giving a moment in which they might reform and dress their ranks. In the confusion they would not even realize that they outnumbered their attackers.
Now. Corfe hoped his men would recognize the signals he and Andruw had tried to teach them. He turned to Cerne, the burly tribesman who was on his right hand.
“Sound me the advance.”
Cerne wet his lips and put a hunting horn to them. It was an unorthodox kind of cavalry bugle, but it did the trick and it was somehow fitting that these men should be summoned to battle with the clear, high call of the chase, the hunting call of their own mountains.
The first line of heavily armoured horsemen began to move forward. A walk at first, then a trot. Metal clanking in the night air, the muffled snorting of horses. A sound that was almost a deep form of hum: the thumping of a myriad of hooves on the hard earth.
Corfe moved ahead of his men, lance upraised. He had to keep them in line, keep the cohesion of the unit until the last moment, like clenching the fingers into a fist for the blow. This was new to them, this keeping of a formation while mounted, and though he had drummed it into them as far as he could on their journey south he still could not be sure if they would remember the drills in the heat of approaching battle. So he stayed ahead of the line, something for them to focus on.
A canter. The line was becoming ragged as some men drew ahead, the horses jostling each other. The enemy was a black crowd of faceless shapes two hundred yards ahead. They were still fighting Marsch and Andruw’s men to their rear and the fire of the burning camp silhouetted them. They would be blinded by the light of the flames and would not be able to see what was approaching them out of the night. But they would hear the hoof-thunder, and would pause, afraid and uncertain.
“Charge!” Corfe screamed, and levelled his lance. Cerne blew the ringing five-note hunting call of the Cimbric foothills. The horsemen spurred their mounts into a raging flatout gallop, and the lances came down like a wood and iron hedge.
Corfe felt his mount go up and down small dips, rising and falling with the shape of the earth. Someone stumbled—he glimpsed it out of the corner of his eye, and there was the scream as a horse went pinwheeling. A rabbit hole, perhaps. They were blind to whatever was below the hooves of their mounts, an unnerving experience for a horseman, especially when he is encumbered by armour and lance, his vision, such as it is, circumscribed by the weighty bulk of an iron helmet. But the men held together, shrieking their shrill, unearthly battlecry. A hundred armoured troops on a hundred heavy horses, lances out chest-high. They crashed into the enemy at full career, like some iron-shod apocalypse come raging out of the dark, and trod them into the ground, impaled them, crushed them, knocked them flying.
Corfe was able to see more clearly. The burning campsite made the night into a chaotic, yellow-lit circus of toiling shadow, the flash of steel, faces half seen and then ridden down, stabbed at with the tall lances or hacked down with swords.
There was no coherent resistance. The enemy could not form ranks, and the cavalry hunted them like animals, spearing them and knocking them off their feet. It was murder, pure and simple. Those who could were running through the gaps in Corfe’s first line, now a series of struggling knots of horsemen brought to a standstill by the press of bodies and beasts around them. They ran to what they thought was salvation—northwards towards Staed and the castle of their overlord.
And these staggering survivors who kept running were hit by Corfe’s second line which Ensign Ebro now brought screaming out of the night at full gallop. Another thunderous wave of giant shadows which resolved itself into raging eyes and hooves and wicked piercing iron, not horsemen at all but some terrible fusion of beast and man out of nightmare myth. They smashed their way through mobs of men, dropping broken lances and drawing swords to slash and stab whilst under them the trained destriers reared up to bring down shattering hooves and bit and kicked in tune with their riders.
Corfe was not surprised to hear some of his men laughing as they whirled and swung and stabbed relentlessly in that maelstrom of slaughter, their exhaustion forgotten, their blood rising in that strange, reckless exaltation which sometimes comes upon men in combat. They were born horse-soldiers, well-mounted and in the midst of battle. They were doing what nature had created them to do. Corfe realized in that moment that in these few he had the kernel of what could be a great army, a force to rival Fimbrian tercios. With ten thousand of these men he could wipe anyone who opposed him off the face of the earth.
T HE sun rose at last in a bloody welter of cloud out of the glittering sea. Shadow lingered in the folds of the hills and there was a ground mist which hid the battlefield like a shroud pulled over for decency’s sake. Morning, in all its chill grayness, and the aftermath of the night.
