Harmodius gathered power. Harmodius and the Red Knight had a shared problem – they seemed to have tangled whatever matrix of habit and aethereal training allowed them to access ops, so that instead of being two mages with two sets of power, they were two mages at the mercy of one another’s expenditures.
The Captain watched most of his ops crackle off across the scythe-cut grass and crash into the centre block of enemy infantrymen. Men burst into flame. One man stumbled clear, screaming, a horrible parody of a person.
Another flight of arrows hissed into the enemy charge.
They kept coming.
Duke Andronicus could see his line flanking the enemy’s, but he could also see the wagon wall the mercenaries had formed. He turned to Ser Stefanos, his personal champion. ‘To my son. Tell him to ride further around the enemy flank.’
Ser Stefanos saluted and galloped away.
Far off towards the city, Ser Bescanon’s men were starting to trot.
Andronicus began to look for the spot to place his killing blow. ‘Close up, Hetaeroi!’ he called.
The Captain dismounted next to Ser Milus with the standard and Ser Jehan, in the centre of the line. Ser Jehan still had his visor open, although the enemy was only fifty paces away.
‘We’re over-extended, and you were right,’ the Captain said to his senior officer.
Ser Jehan looked at him – a glance of pure disgust that ever so briefly reminded him of his father’s contempt.
He was stung by it.
‘Three more!’ Cully roared.
The last three flights did more damage than all the shafts loosed until then. The Captain had never, in fact, seen his company’s archers loose into men at point-blank range before.
At that range, the arrows went through shields, and men’s bodies. Through light helmets. Through horn scales. Through Wyverns’ hide.
A hundred Morean veterans died with each flight – men who had served for ten or fifteen years. The Duke of Thrake’s best men fell.
The two centre blocks of infantry shuffled, hesitated and were shredded.
On their flanks, the spearmen put their heads down and ran the last few paces into the teeth of the arrow storm.
Duke Andronicus couldn’t believe the evidence of his eyes as his handpicked veterans hesitated and then broke. His position on the right wing limited his line of sight and so he couldn’t see the intensity of the arrow storm, only the result – his centre breaking.
They were the men he’d commanded since he was the most junior centurione in the army, and he left his bodyguard and rode to them, rode among them. ‘On me! On me, companions!’ he roared – and they came. They turned and raised their heads – his men were crying in shame.
Duke Andronicus looked down the path of their charge and saw how few of them were left. ‘Christ Pantokrator,’ he said.
Ser Christos, wearing Gallish plate and mail and well mounted, had six arrows in his horse and two more in his breastplate. Even as Andronicus watched, the horse collapsed, feet rolling high, and the Count of the Infantry took too long to rise.
The barbarians immediately attacked from their centre, where their archery had proven so triumphant.
‘Charge,’ shouted the Captain. He had his sword in his fist and he started forward. Jehan shouted something, but the Captain saw their salvation and all around them archers threw down their bows and plucked out their swords and the dismounted men-at-arms went forward – the Captain ran towards the left. The men in front of him were not the immediate threat.
They caught the enemy infantrymen by surpise in their shielded flank and then all was chaos.
The Red Knight ran full tilt into the flank of the enemy block, hip forgotten. He knocked a man flat at impact, kicked him savagely with an armoured foot, stepped on the man’s shield and broke his arm then lunged with the point of his sword, which went between the scales of the next man’s flank, behind his shield, while he tried to turn and was hampered by the length of his own spear. He took a blow to his head, a spear blow that rocked him, and fell.
He started to rise – a spearshaft rang against his helmet and then he got his left hand on it and pulled, cut down without science, and his blade rang off the man’s helemet and he stepped in and crushed the man’s face with his pommel. To his right, Ser Jehan had cleared a space the length of his pole-hammer. Long Paw was cutting hands from spearshafts, and Ser Milus was using the company banner to shield himself from cuts while he crushed men with a mace. Cully tackled a spearman and Wilful Murder ran the prone man through with his side sword. Kanny fell with a spearpoint through the meat of his right leg, Big Paul died with a spearpoint in his throat, and John le Bailli stepped on his corpse and buried the point of his pole-axe in his killer . . . And as they pressed forward, the enemy infantry flinched back.
Bent’s archers and Ser George Brewe’s men-at-arms charged into the front of the spearmen and they broke.
‘Halt! Halt!’ roared Ser Jehan, while the Red Knight slumped, panting, to his left knee – his hip wouldn’t support him any further. They were far beyond the line of the wagons and just a hundred paces away they could see the enemy commander’s standard as he rallied the remnants of his broken centre.
The Red Knight looked around but Ser Jehan was herding the victors back to their own lines, leaving their dead and wounded intermingled with the enemy.
He got his feet under him, found an abandoned spear, and used it to limp back to their lines. As he turned, he saw the enemy’s knights begin their own charge, into his open right flank.
And his headache began with a pulse that nearly blinded him, as Harmodius cast again.
Andronicus watched his attack fail and, like a farmer who has seen bad weather before, put his head down and kept rallying his men. To his own right he could see his son swinging wide of the enemy wagons. To his left, he watched his own mercenaries begin their charge.
But his son was going too far. Perhaps worried by the flights of arrows, his son’s Easterners had gone off almost half a league in the high grass, and were only now turning their deep hook into the enemy flank.
‘Steady, my friends!’ Andronicus bellowed. ‘Steady! We’re not done yet!’
He looked around for the magister, but the man had stayed with his stradiotes, hundreds of paces away. Andronicus wished the man would do something.
In the aethereal, gouts of power spat back and forth over the battlefield like fireflies on a summer evening – and were extinguished. Aeskepiles had allowed one strike through into the Duke’s precious infantry, but he couldn’t be everywhere, and it was far more difficult to project a deflection than it was to deploy one closer to hand.
His adversary was nimble and subtle, and after attempting too many heavy blows Aeskepiles had to acknowledge that he was facing a peer. He prepared a layered attack, murmuring a reassuring invocation while using one of the rings on his left hand to power what he hoped would be a decisive strike.
In that moment between initiation and action, the enemy’s second magus revealed himself again and laid some kind of complex working – Aeskepiles couldn’t read it, but the potency of the caster caused him to alter his tactics yet again.
Self-protection was always Aeskepiles’s first priority. He raised a layered shield and allowed his own complex attack to dissipate, unpowered.
Bad Tom was the point of the wedge, with almost sixty knights and men-at-arms hastily arrayed behind him – two in the second rank, three in the third, and so on. He watched the enemy knights lower their lances and come forward at a trot, then a canter, and he grinned.
‘That’s more like it,’ he said. He put spurs to his horse.
The wedge emerged from behind the tangle of wagons Mag was trying bring to order out of equine and bovine chaos and turned east towards the charging knights. The ground shook beneath their charge.