The traumatized Redeemers pulled out from their position during the night but within an hour of dawn the Swiss were back as they tried to retreat. They were badly hampered in their efforts to withdraw by the numerous wounded from the attack on the bastion, which had delivered much more in the way of broken arms and smashed knees than the fatalities of the unexpected Swiss attack just before dark. The dead could just be left behind. The Swiss kept up a continuous long distance sniping from the dozen heavy-duty crossbows Vague Henri had assigned to each wagon fort. Every few minutes there were skirmishes from the more expert Swiss cavalry, who would race in and pick off stragglers then run away before the able-bodied Redeemer guards could respond. By the time they left off and returned to the bastion, Redeemer numbers were half what they had been when they first set eyes on the fort three days earlier. The New Model Army had lost ten dead and eleven wounded.
Blair, though not Partiger, survived to give a report and to urge a swift response. But it was an odd story and entirely isolated so no one in the lower levels of authority Blair could reach took him seriously. But over the next few weeks the general headquarters of the Redeemer Fourth Army were forced to change their opinion. The bastions started turning up in increasing numbers and causing terrible casualties. Now aware of the danger, they sent out heavily armed counter forces equipped with ladders, siege hooks and siege torches but by the time they arrived the bastions were long gone. Once he was made aware of the problem, Princeps, furious at the delay, doubled the number of his patrols in order to identify bastion sites quickly and bring larger forces to bear on them. But it was here that Artemisia’s scouts came into play: operating mostly on their own, they were able to provide constant information about Redeemer movements. In effect, each wagon fort operated at the centre of a web of information up to fifty miles in all directions. Any small Redeemer force they could ignore, anything somewhat larger they could resist and anything larger than that they could move with half an hour’s notice and have vanished by the time a major force had arrived. There was no catching them either – Michael Nevin’s wagons could move much faster than any Redeemer army. The Redeemers were caught in a trap: small, light units could catch up with the bastions but were not strong enough to break in; heavy units that might have succeeded were too slow.
There was a month of this fighting before the Redeemers managed to delay a bastion long enough to catch them with a thousand heavy infantry armed with siege weapons. It took four days to break into the camp and annihilate the occupants. This was a blow to the New Model Army, puffed up by a month of easy victories and despite the warnings of the Purgators and Laconics who trained them that a defeat was inevitable. There was much corresponding joy in victory from Princeps when he heard the news – but it didn’t last once he heard the details: the lives of two hundred Swiss peasants had come at the price of nearly four hundred Redeemers, and another hundred with the crushing wounds that took so long to heal and used up so much in the way of resources. As worrying was the report of one of Princeps’ personal centenars, who he’d ordered to take part in the siege to give him a proper sense of the battle and the soldiers who fought it.
‘It was murderous getting in, Redeemer, as hard as any fighting I’ve ever done. They’d arranged it so that we were easy to hit but to strike back was almost impossible. But once we got inside, that was the shock – they had a few soldiers, maybe fifty, who knew what they were doing and were hard work but the ones who’d been killing us for three days – once we were inside and it was hand to hand – it was like cutting down big children.’
From then on the problem facing Princeps was how to break the shell to get at the soft insides. The problem for Cale was that the creation of the war wagons had been far too successful for its own good. Their successes had been so easy and so comprehensive that the New Model Army was dead drunk on its triumphs. The defeats, when they started to come, winded them badly – there were, after all, no survivors. From euphoric arrogance to demoralized failure was such a short step and so great a fall that an emergency (one might almost have said a panic) meeting was held halfway between the Mississippi plains and Spanish Leeds. Cale was sicker than usual, it had been a bad few weeks, but he was forced into a war wagon filled with mattresses and, along with IdrisPukke and Vipond, tried to sleep his way to Potsdam where the meeting had been arranged with Fanshawe, Vague Henri and the Committee of Ten Antagonist Churches. On the way into Potsdam, he’d decided to get out and ride. For all its padding the converted war wagon was uncomfortable when he couldn’t sleep, and today all his old wounds – finger, head and shoulder – were throbbing and grinding out their claims on his attention (Me, too! they screamed, What about us!) To add to his misery his right ear was aching. He put on a coat and pulled up the hood against the cold and to keep the wind away from his sore ear. This was not something he would normally do because only the Redeemer Lords of Discipline wore hoods and they were not a memory he wanted to revisit. Cale was now, of course, more experienced in the strangeness of the world than many practised hands three times his age, but he was astonished at the electric effect even a word of his presence had on the soldiers camped on his way into the city. The mysterious force that moves rumour with astonishing speed through even the largest and most dispersed military force brought the New Model Army out in droves wherever he went. At first sight he was greeted with adoring silence that quickly burst into ecstatic cheers, as if he were the Hanged Redeemer entering into Salem. Cale was amazed that so many could draw such power from so sickly a hand-hurting, ear-aching, shoulder-groaning weakling such as him. Uncertain how to respond, he thought perhaps he should speak to them; but when he tried the retching, an hour earlier than it was due, silenced him, and it was all he could do to keep it under some sort of control. So he sat, dog-sick, on his horse and looked about at the men, in their hundreds and then thousands, inspired by his mere presence. To them his pale and cadaverous silence was far more powerful than anything he could say, even though he had learnt a dozen inspirational speeches from the writer whose plays he’d found in the Sanctuary library that seemed to cover the entire range of ways in which to manipulate a crowd: Friends, comrades, countrymen, lend me your ears; or: Once more into the breach, dear chums; and the ever dependable: We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
But not even a tongue touched with the lighted coals of God himself could have done better than his enforced silence. They did not want anything so fallible as a human being who could talk to them man to man – they wanted to be led by an exterminating angel, not by some bloke. He may have felt like death but he now looked the part. And that was what mattered: he was something fatal from another world, something and not someone, who had made them powerful and all-conquering in the past and now was here to do the same again. They needed him to be inhuman, the essence of death and plague, to be wasted, pale and skeletal because he was those things and was on their side. The cry went up – one or two voices at first then tens, then hundreds and then a roar.
‘ANGEL! ANGEL! ANGEL! ANGEL! ANGEL!’
Vipond and IdrisPukke, following just behind, no beginners in the seen-it-all-before and surprised-by-nothing stakes, were left amazed and even shaken by what they were seeing and hearing and, above all, what they were feeling: even they were carried along, like it or not, by the power of the crowd. But the preachers and padres and moderators of the Committee of Ten Churches heard it too and recognized it for the devil worship that it was.