The next day, Ordinaries from the palace took up flagstones across the square and revealed deep cylindrical holes. They opened a storeooom in the Imperial stables and produced cedar poles more than a foot thick, hard as rock, which they fitted into the holes so that the entire square seemed to sprout dead trees. There were new, green cedar trunks, too, stacked neatly by the gate, which the Guard had fetched in on their return the evening before, footsore and armour chafed. Men who had remained behind on guard duty or as escorts or workers in the Navy Yard were cursed as slackers.
The cedar trunks were stripped of branches by Nordikans and erected. In the Outer Court, the regiments paraded in armour, but without weapons, and officers of the Ordinaries opened the Imperial Armoury and handed out wooden swords, wooden axes, and wicker shields. From the full plate and chain of Francis Atcourt to the squat leather-coated Vardariotes’ youngest and slightest female archer, the whole of the Guard – again, with the exception of watch and escort detachments – formed up at the wooden posts. There were more than a hundred posts, and every one of them received ten soldiers and an officer.
Ser Milus was in his element. With a slim Imperial messenger as a translator, he strode to the central wooden post. ‘This is today’s enemy!’ he roared, and the translator repeated his words in shrill intensity. As she was barely clear of adolescence and only five feet tall, her version of his words lost something.
‘I don’t want to see this,’ Ser Milus shouted, and he took a few casual pokes at the pell with his wood and leather pole-axe. ‘Any man who can cut all the way through his pell will receive an extra ration of wine tonight. So I want to see this!’ The knight danced forward and flicked his pole-axe at the heavy cedar pole. The head struck perfectly – his second strike caused the heavy cedar trunk to move slightly. He stopped and raised his visor, which had fallen over his face as soon as he lowered his head. ‘Fight the pell as you would fight a man,’ he called. He backed away and danced up again, and his pole-axe licked out and the blow was so powerful that every man on parade could feel the impact. The knight leaped away, recovering his guard, and struck again – an overhand thrust to the centre of the wood. ‘Make every blow count!’ he roared. ‘Hit his head, hit his arms, hit his thighs. Let me see you do it!’ he called. ‘Begin!’
They began. Each in turn would face the pell, move into range, and hit it. Some men were awkward, and some very unimaginative – some swung the same way at the pell every time. Some men understood intuitively and began to fight the pell, filling in both sides of a real fight. A few men rained blows down on it, the flurry meant to earn an extra tot of wine.
The officers bore down – singling one out for praise, and ordering another to take another turn.
The Primus Pilus went from pole to pole, taking men out of one line and marching them to another, so that by the time the most heavily armoured men were panting with exertion, there were members of all four regiments in every line. Wooden scimitars vied with wooden pole-axes to rock the heavy wood. Archers fenced with bucklered alacrity and Scholae threw blows from behind long, tapered shields while Nordikans chopped, sometimes like woodcutters and sometimes with blows as subtle as the lighter blades. The stakes were battered and rocked.
At noon, when the sun was high in the sky and there were five thousand people gathered in the square to watch, the men dispersed to tavernas and inns around the square to eat.
Ser Gavin and Count Zac sat on their horses just inside the gate of the Outer Court, at the head of a powerful troop – selected from all four regiments. As the Guardsmen ate and drank, fifty sentries watched the square, and Ser Gelfred and his huntsmen were out on the rooftops, watching.
But nothing happened.
By the time the sun began to set, most of the soldiers could no longer raise their arms above their shoulders.
That was the second day.
On the third day, there were archery butts standing in the square, and hundreds of yards of white rope to keep the spectators back. On foot, with longbow and horn bow, the men and women of all four regiments stepped up in one hundred and twenty lines at one hundred and twenty butts. As the day before, the Primus Pilus mixed every line.
Cully stood forth. ‘I want to see good clean hits at each range,’ he said. He walked over to a Vardariote and bowed. ‘May I use your bow?’ he asked.
The man drew his bow from its hip scabbard. It was horn and sinew, quite short. He also drew an arrow from his quiver on the other hip.
Cully turned to face the butts. He nocked, drew, and loosed. His shaft landed in the straw, a finger off dead centre, with a hearty thunk.
‘Don’t get fancy. Don’t show off.’ Behind him, a surprisingly pretty Imperial messenger repeated his words in Vardar and in Morean. ‘Remember that short range has its own challenges.’ He grinned. ‘Every line contains a few archers and a lot of soldiers who’ve never loosed a bow. The line with the best score overall gets a gold florin a man. Second and third best scores get a double wine ration. So – better teach your duffers to shoot!’
He stepped out of the way. ‘Begin!’
On Thursday, they threw javelins.
On Friday, the infantrymen ran, and the horse soldiers rode across broken country. More than a dozen horses were injured and had to be put down. Men twisted ankles, and a great many of them cursed the Duke. At noon, the tired infantrymen ate in the chilly autumn sunshine under the cover of olive trees whose fruit was so near ripe that olives fell on men’s heads – they threw them at each other.
The cavalrymen arrived by a separate route, having used guides and picked up a troop of the local stradiotes – the first tentative sign of the local men showing even lukewarm support for the palace. More than a hundred men came; all of them had fought under Duke Andronicus’s banner within a month. Any who represented the local regiment came.
‘Half of them will be traitors,’ muttered Ser Gavin.
The Duke shrugged. ‘I want my new breastplate,’ he said. He looked under his hand at the local troops wheeling a long line of horsemen. ‘I don’t think we need to care if they are traitors, Gavin. Whatever they think in their hearts, they’re here.’
Under the olive trees, men of the five regiments shared apples and watered wine, almonds in honey and hard sausage.
When the trumpets sounded, they fell in with alacrity.
They marched away in column, and twice they deployed from road column to fighting columns. Then the columns themselves deployed into line – by filing, by inclining, and then, to the Duke’s satisfaction, by inclining from the centre to the flanks, so that each column opened like a flower in spring and suddenly his whole little army was formed up in a long line, infantry in the centre, cavalry on the flanks.
Ser Gavin watched it happen. He rode with his brother, these days, in what had come to be known as ‘the household’. Ser Milus carried the standard; the trumpeter acted as their page; Ser Gavin and Ser Michael shared some of the duties of battlefield organisation and elite messenger service, and Ser Alcaeus translated, while Ser Thomas seemed to issue all the orders – the Duke seldom spoke. Gavin worried about him, because he so often seemed to be absent. He would gaze vacantly at nothing. And he drank.
All day. Toby, his squire, provided him with a succession of flasks.
Gavin thought, If I drank like that, I wouldn’t be able to ride.
The company had, at best, five hundred men. Today, they were commanding fourteen hundred men in three languages, and they were learning new skills at every turn.
The Duke rode across the front – he’d halted on a small hill to watch the deployment – and he pulled up by Ser Thomas. ‘Wheel by companies from the right and form a column of march on the road. The Alban road.’