The Swiss looked on, some amused, the more intelligent suspicious. The only way through the wagons was through the spaces underneath – but this was soon closed as four more planks of wood were lowered through slots in the floor. For a moment nothing happened. Then there was a shout from inside the circle and the outriders started firing their crossbows at the Swiss ranks. Vague Henri’s design might have been less powerful but from a hundred yards the bolts, blunt as they were, hit the massed ranks of armoured men with a ferocious clang. The Swiss had only brought ten archers and they were trained for shooting at massed ranks, not ten men on agile horses. In a five-minute exchange only two New Model Army riders were hit, painfully enough and drawing blood, but they themselves hit more than twenty of the Swiss. Their armour and the bluntness of the bolts prevented any deep wounds but it was clear that a real bolt would have killed or badly wounded nearly all of them. After five minutes there was a trumpet burst from the wagons and the outriders moved back to the circle. A wooden shield was removed to let them in and they were gone.
Then three other walls were taken out and about twenty men with mallets and stakes rushed out and began hammering them into the ground. This was more to the Swiss archers’ taste, but before they could start shooting, volley after volley of arrows emerged from the centre of the wagons, causing huge confusion and yet more considerable injury to the lightly armoured Swiss archers.
Under this fearsome protective cover, the peasants knocking in the posts finished the job and ran back to the safety of the wagons, leaving behind the wooden stakes connected by thin ropes with sharp metal barbs woven into them every six inches. The odd thing about this was that the stakes and barbed ropes only covered about an eighth of the circle, leaving the attackers free to go round this unpleasant obstacle. It was hard to see the point.
With the arrows still raining on them, the Swiss had no choice but to advance and take the wagons in hand-to-hand combat. The blunted arrows were nothing more than nuisance value to men in such high-quality armour and fighting close was their life’s work. Skirting the barbed ropes – several of the knights slashed at them as they went past but wire had been threaded through the rope to prevent such an easy cure – they approached the wagons, determined to break their way in and give the occupants a bloody good thrashing. Although the wagons were neither particularly big nor tall, once they were close there seemed no obvious or easy way in. As they approached they noticed small square holes in the sides of the wagons – six in each. Out of them, crossbow bolts shattered into them, devastating at such short range despite their bluntness. And fast too – one fired every three or four seconds. They were forced to come right up to the wagon sides to grasp the wheels and heave them over. But the wheels had been hammered into the ground with hoops of steel. Then the roofs of the wagons were heaved up and crashed over the side on a hinge with blunted spikes on the leading edge, designed not to pierce the armour of anyone they hit but to deal a crushing blow. Dozens of arms and heads were broken in this move. Then the reason for the low height of the wagons became clearer. In each there were six peasants, armed with the wooden flails they’d been used to using all their lives as much as the Swiss professional soldiers had used swords and poleaxes. Even without the addition of the nails that would have been used in a real fight, the head of the flail moved with such ferocious speed that it crushed hands and chests and heads alike, armoured or not. And still the bolts kept coming. They may not have been able to kill but they caused terrible pain and deep bruising. The Swiss were hardly able to land a blow in return. The killing range of a few feet they were used to, dictated by the length of a sword or poleaxe, had been extended by Cale by no more than a few feet – but it was everything. Men they could have dismembered in a few seconds in the open were made untouchable by strong wood and a few extra feet in height. And now they were vulnerable to an insulting collection of modified agricultural tools wielded with confidence and familiarity by mere peasants. After fifteen minutes of pain and damage they withdrew – angry and frustrated, poisonously impotent. Their retreat was conducted to a mocking but still painful volley of blunt arrows from a dozen of Cale’s Purgators until he signalled them to stop. He watched with great pleasure as the Swiss generals went to inspect the damage to their baffled elite. He was gracious enough not to go with them; even from forty yards away, the effect of the metal flails, clubs, hammers, blunt woodaxes and rocks was clear.
After ten minutes of inspection it was Fanshawe who walked back to Cale, apparently as easy-going and frivolous as usual; but the truth was that he was shaken by the implications of what he’d seen.
‘I was wrong,’ he said to Bose Ikard. ‘It could work. I’ve got questions though.’
‘And I have answers,’ said Cale. They adjourned to a meeting later that day. On the way off the field Bose Ikard caught up with Fanshawe and spoke quietly.
‘Can this really work?’
‘You saw for yourself.’
‘And we can win?’
‘Possibly. But what if you do? What then?’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘You’ve shown your hillbillies that they’re as good as their masters. Are they going to fight and die in their thousands – and they will die – and then just hand it all back? Would you?’
At their meeting that afternoon there were a great many surly questions, all of them dealt with easily enough by Cale. If he’d been them he would have made things much more awkward – he knew there were weaknesses even if they couldn’t see them. The questions from Fanshawe failed to materialize: he could see the flaws too, but also that they could be managed. Cale answered calmly and pleasantly until the very last comment – the suggestion that once it was a matter of life and death the peasants would break in the face of blood and mutilation.
‘Then bring your men back tomorrow and we’ll fight with sharp weapons, and no mercy,’ said Cale, still calm. ‘You won’t be back for a third time.’
Bose Ikard, however, though mulling over the long-term consequences pointed out by Fanshawe, saw that he had no choice but to support Cale: there was no point in long-term thinking if there wasn’t going to be a long-term. He sent away his new High Command and got down to the details of money and the requisition powers Cale demanded.
This did not come easily to the Chancellor: giving away money and power was physically painful to him. But he’d worry about getting them back, as well as the dangers of an armed and trained peasantry, when this was all over. By the end of the meeting, Thomas Cale was the most powerful little boy in the history of the Four Quarters. It felt to Cale, as the letter was signed, as if deep in his peculiar soul a small sweet spring of cool water had started to flow.
Outside, Fanshawe signalled him to one side.
‘You were very quiet,’ said Cale.
‘Professional courtesy,’ said Fanshawe. ‘Didn’t want to piss on your pageant.’
‘And you think you could have?’
‘How are you going to supply them?’
‘Oh no! You’ve seen the big weakness – there’s no fooling you.’
Fanshawe smiled.
‘Then you won’t have a problem answering, will you?’
Ten minutes later they were in an old workshop deep in the slums of Spanish Leeds and Michael Nevin, outdragger and inventor, was proudly showing off one of his new supply wagons. Now he had money to back his ingenuity, the result, while still distantly related to his outdragger cart, was a thing of elegance and style.