the Bridge Castle and the Lower Town, while, I assume, sending men to look at what we built yesterday. Or perhaps to burn it.’ He sounded quite happy about the prospect.
Michael took a deep breath. A valet put a cup of warm wine into his hand and he drank it off.
The captain leaned well out over the wall. ‘Loose!’ he called.
The trebuchet in the western tower creaked, and the whole tower moved by the width of a finger.
‘Hail shot. Watch this.’
Michael had sometimes entertained his brothers and sisters by throwing handfuls of stones into water. This was like that, only multiplied many hundreds of times, with larger stones, and instead of striking water most of them hit the ground. The rest fell on chitinous hides and flesh and blood, having fallen several hundred feet.
‘Again!’ the captain called.
Down in the Bridge Castle, both of their heavy onagers loosed together, throwing baskets of stones the size of a man’s heart out into the trenches built the day before.
Screams rose out of the churned ground.
‘You seem very pleased with yourself,’ the Abbess said. She was fully dressed and looked exactly the same as she did in the height of a calm day. She had come around the corner by the west tower, attended by stretcher- bearers and a pair of nursing sisters.
‘The enemy has just fallen into our little trap with both feet.’ He turned to Bent. ‘We’ll get one more round off. Then raise both red flags. At that signal everyone – everyone in the garrison except you and the engine crews – attacks down the road. On me.’
The captain then managed to combine a bow to the Abbess with a duck under the lintel of the West Tower door. The valets had Grendel saddled, and the captain took his place at the head of Sauce’s column. Michael, still fuzzy headed and with his ribs burning in his chest, tried to keep up with him.
Jacques was standing by Michael’s horse. ‘You looked like you needed your sleep,’ the man said, with a smile. ‘Don’t get fancy, youngster. Those ribs will kill you.’ He leaned close. ‘So will kissing girls, if it costs you sleep.’
Then Michael was up, Jacques’ hand shoving his rump to get him into the saddle, and he was out of the low stable gateway and into the courtyard. Toby was holding the captain’s helmet while eating a half-loaf of bread, and the captain was pinning something – a white linen handkerchief – on his cote armour. It was very white against the scarlet velvet.
Michael grinned. ‘What is that?’ he began.
‘
The sortie quieted.
‘Once we’re through that gate kill everything that comes under your sword,’ the captain said. ‘The trench edge will be marked in fire so remember your route. If you lose me, follow the route. When you hear Carlus sound the recall, you turn and come back. Understand me?’
And with that as a speech, they rode from the gate as the trebuchet sprayed another rain of death out over their heads.
The hour was on the knife edge between day and night, and the trebuchet’s great baskets of stones had obliterated life over a swathe of ground that was roughly the shape of a great egg – creatures had been turned to a bloody or ichorous pulp, and the ground itself was littered with the stones – softer ground had deep pock-marks. Bushes and grass were pulverized. In the half-dark it was a vision of hell, and the sudden burst of balefire in the new-dug trenches added to the terrible aspect.
Especially when viewed through the slit of a closed visor.
There was no fight in the men or the monsters that struggled to win free of the beaten ground, or routed away from the hail of missiles still pelting them from the Bridge Castle. They were streaming for the woods, over a mile distant.
The captain led his sortie well to the south, right along the river, along the smooth ground, and then formed them up in a single rank and brought up his trumpeter and his great black banner with the lacs d’amour and the golden collars – his personal badge – and drew his sword.
‘All the way to the edge of the wood, and then
‘Kill everything that comes under your sword,’ he said again. Michael didn’t think they’d lost a single man getting here. The war machines had utterly shattered the enemy attack. He took a deep breath, and the routed enemy flowed past them, running on exhausted feet – or talons or claws or paws – for the woods.
‘Charge!’ he roared, and the banner pointed at the enemy and the trumpets sounded.
Michael had never been in a charge before.
It was exhilarating, and nothing on the ground seemed to be able to touch them. They swept over the irks and the broken men and a single larger creature, something nightmarish that gleamed a sickening green hue in the first light of the sun, but Bad Tom put his lance tip precisely in the thing’s ear-bole as it turned its talons on Grendel, and his lance tip – a spear point as long as a man’s forearm and as wide as a big man’s palm – ripped its brain pan from its lower jaw.
‘Lachlan for Aa!’ the big man roared.
The monster died, and the line of knights swept over the pitiful resistance and then into the running men – and things.
By the time the sun was above the horizon, they had reached the wood’s edge, and the creatures and men of the Wild were a bloody mangle on the grass behind them – or rather, any they’d chanced on were a bloody mangle, while hundreds more ran around them to the north or south, or lay flat and prayed as the horses thundered over them.
And then the captain led them back to the gate by much the same road, crashing though a line of desperate irks trying vainly to defend themselves with spears which splintered on steel armour. Right through, and on to the edge of the fortress hill, where twenty valets waited with fresh horses.
Michael was mystified. His elation was ebbing quickly to be replaced by fatigue and the thumping pain of his ribs, jarred by the gallop and barely held together by his cote armour.
All of the men-at-arms and many of the archers were changing horses. The men on the walls were cheering them.
The captain rode up to him and opened his visor. ‘You’re moving badly,’ the captain said bluntly. ‘In fact, you look like shit. Fall out.’
‘What? Where-’ Michael spluttered.
Jacques took his reins. Michael noted that the valet was in armour – good armour – as Jacques got him out of his saddle and Michael wanted to cry – but at the same time, he couldn’t imagine fighting again.
Then Jacques swung up on a heavy horse of his own – an ugly roan with a roman nose. ‘I’ll keep him alive, lad,’ Jacques said.
So Michael stood there and watched as they changed horses and formed up, and then to his surprise they turned away from the beaten enemy and rode south, along the edge of the rising sun, moving at a canter. They rode straight for the Bridge Castle’s gate, and it opened as if by magic letting them pass through, canter over the bridge, and vanish onto the southern road.
Even as he watched, Gelfred, the master of the hunt, left Bridge Castle with three men and a cart. The men each took a brace of dogs – beautiful dogs – and moved briskly off to the west with a dozen archers covering them.
Just as the first starlings and ravens began to appear, gyrfalcons began to soar into the heavens over Bridge Castle, one after another. Up on the walls, a great eagle leaped into the air with a scream that must have chilled every lesser bird for three leagues.
Gelfred had struck, and the Abbess with him.
Braces of hounds emerged from the cover of Bridge Castle, running flat out for the leverets and the coneys and any other animal that lurked at the edge of the woods, and the gyrfalcon, Parcival the eagle and the lesser birds – well-trained birds brought from Theva to sell at the fair – struck the starlings, the ravens, and the oversized doves, ripping through their flocks like a knight through a crowd of peasants, and feathers, wings, blood and whole dead birds fell like an avian rain.
It took Michael half an hour to climb back to the fortress gate. The valets ignored him, and he stumbled many
