He pushed with his right leg and got his feet under him. A spike of cold pain pulsed in his right hip.
The Morean strategos came out of the dust like the inevitable villain of a romance. He had a heavy short sword in his right fist and a scarred shield with a beautifully painted figure of the Virgin Mary on his left arm.
‘Yield,’ shouted the Red Knight in High Archaic.
The strategos stopped. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘Your army is beaten. Yield.’ The Red Knight flexed his hip carefully like a man testing a bad tooth. It wasn’t good.
No, there’s nothing I can do.
Thanks for that, old man.
A few feet away Ser Jehan hacked one of the icon bearers to the ground, swinging his long sword over and over into the man’s guard until he slipped and took the sword in his unarmoured face.
‘Heretic barbarian!’ the strategos shouted. ‘I am Michael Tzoukes. My ancestors fought the infidel and the irk when yours lived in straw huts and worshipped idols. I will not yield to you.’
The Red Knight sighed and stepped forward into the guard called ‘All gates are iron’. He crossed his wrists, held his dagger reversed in his right hand and grabbed it by the tip with his left. The roundel was a foot and a half long, triangular in cross section, and had steel rounds which neatly filled the top and bottom of his closed and armoured fist, making the hand a single, seamless steel surface to an enemy blade.
The dust of the melee was settling and sight lines were improving. The Moreans were utterly beaten – routed or, in the centre, smashed flat. More than a dozen of the Red Knight’s men-at-arms were closing in on the strategos.
They were still six feet apart. The Red Knight stepped back, tried and failed to open his visor and got a nasty pain in the back of his right leg for his trouble. He had to shout from within his helmet.
‘Stay back,’ he managed.
The strategos looked around him, growled, and leaped. His heavy sword fell like a lightning bolt-
– onto the Red Knight’s crossed hands and the steel bar that was his dagger. Cursing his hip, the Red Knight powered forward, slipped the dagger from his left hand for a moment, caught his opponent’s blade, and rolled on his hips – a sudden and unintended intake of breath and a stumble marked how much pain the hip could cause – before he uncrossed his hands, stripping the sword from the Morean and breaking the man’s elbow in a single fluid movement.
Ruthless to his own hip and to his opponent alike, the Red Knight stepped in again, holding the man by his broken arm, and rolled him – put a foot between his armoured legs and forced him to the ground through pain and the power of his leg lock – against his own steel-clad legs.
‘Yield,’ said the Red Knight, panting with pain and trying his level best to hide it.
‘I yield,’ spat the Morean.
Ser Alcaeus took charge of the Morean prisoners while the archers brutally and efficiently looted the Morean camp. The Captain said they had one hour and none of them intended to leave a single silver solidi behind. Trunks were dumped, clothes slit, tents thrown down.
Ser Alcaeus had the forethought to inform the Captain that the women in the camp were probably the wives of stradiotes and not trulls. The men-at-arms, under Sauce’s command, rounded them up and penned them where the Moreans’ spare horses had, until a few minutes before, been kept. If the women saw this as a merciful release from the threat of rape and violent death, they didn’t show any thanks. Rather they screamed, heckled, and cursed. Luckily, very few of the men-at-arms spoke any Archaic.
The company took all of the carts and animals.
The Captain was almost the only man who was injured. He tried to bite down on the pain, and he soaked up the strong sunlight and filtered through his newfound medical workings, trying to use it to heal the injury, but either he was doing something wrong or it was getting worse.
‘Trust you to find a good fight in the middle of a wasted day,’ said Bad Tom. ‘That was pitiful. I want to go back to fighting the Wild.’
‘Tom, we were outnumbered three to one. What do you want? We surprised them. I doubt we’ll be so lucky again.’ The Captain winced.
‘He put a lance in your horse, eh? Smart.’ Tom grinned. ‘Nasty fall. You weren’t ready for that.’
‘Clean against the laws of chivalry,’ Michael said. ‘Here, I just looted some really good white wine.’
‘I don’t think yon have quite the same laws,’ Tom said.
‘Did you have to break his arm?’ asked Michael.
‘He was trying to kill me,’ said the Captain.
Tom laughed.
When the hour was up, the company marched west around the walls accompanied by a hundred prisoners and twenty new carts, chased by nothing but the imprecations of a thousand unexpectedly destitute women.
The road was excellent, but it was still late afternoon when the company came in sight of the Duke of Thrake’s main army, drawn up in battle order facing the Gate of Ares. The Moreans weren’t taken completely unaware, and even as the Red Knight’s battle line, formed up a mile away on the move, came over the low ridge that faced the ancient field, the Morean army was wheeling back, giving ground to avoid being outflanked.
The Morean line was three times the length of the company’s line, and deeper. The Duke of Thrake had four good companies of infantry, with armour, long spears, and archers in the fifth and sixth rank, and they filled the centre of his line. He had heavy Alban-style men-at-arms on his left, and stradiotes flanked by Easterners on his right.
The Despot’s company of Easterners flowed further and further to the right, out on to the apparently limitless grass of the Field of Ares, galloping around the company’s flank. In response, the company formed a shallow box with the baggage in the centre.
‘I can feel their magister,’ the Captain said to no one in particular.
Ser Jehan trotted over. ‘We need to retire and secure one of our flanks,’ he said.
‘We should give them some ash shafts and then charge ’em,’ said Ser Thomas.
The Captain rose in his stirrups and his hip screamed in protest. His ugly, borrowed horse assumed that he was at liberty to rid himself of an unwelcome rider and did a four-footed bound, which the Captain reined in savagely.
Ser Jehan coughed. ‘Captain, the men are tired, we have already faced one action today, and the enemy is both more numerous and well armed and trained. I would like to respectifully suggest-’
Tom spat. ‘Fuck that. We can take them.’
Jehan narrowed his eyes. ‘Tom, you ain’t as smart as you think you are. This is foolery. Mayhap we can win. Put a lot of our boys in the dust – and what for?’
‘The Vardariotes will come into his flank and just like that, the campaign is won,’ the Captain said.
‘Or they don’t and we get gutted. Who cares? We’re paid the same either way. Christ on the cross – we’re mercenaries. What got into you two? Retire now and tomorrow we’ll drive him off with these whatever-you-call-them on our flanks.’
The Captain looked through him. ‘We’ll use the wagons to cover our flanks. Advance.’
‘You just want to say you’ve won two battles in a day, you arrogant pup. And men will die for your – your-’ Jehan was splutting with professioanl rage.
Tom laughed. ‘He’s a loon, right enough. Save your breath to cool your porridge, boyo. We’re going to fight.’
‘Look!’ shouted the Despot. He leaned out over the neck of his horse and pointed at the enemy. ‘He has both of our icons! Tzoukes has betrayed us!’
The Duke had not won every battle of his career, and he smelled a rat. He rose in his stirrups. ‘That’s crap. And saying such things aloud does you no credit.’ He looked under his hand at the glittering, steel-clad ranks of his new adversaries. The Vardariotes had thus far remained safely inside the gates of the city.