‘Couldn’t we just let them go?’ asked Jehan.
The Captain shook his head. ‘If we let them go, we’ll have to fight them all winter. If we smash them now, we’re done.’ He looked under his hand, and then roared, ‘On! Canter! Dress the line!’ and threw himself forward.
Duke Andronicus sighed so hard that his cheeks blew up like a bladder and then deflated. ‘Why’s he so aggressive?’ he asked. ‘Aeskepiles!’
‘Watch, my lord,’ said the magister. He raised his arms, carefully balancing powers in his head.
Fog began to rise from the damp grass – first wisps, and then tendrils.
‘I still say that with one charge – envelop their flanks – we could roll them back to their barbarous homes,’ Demetrius said. ‘Pater – listen to Kronmir. We’ll lose support in the city-’
‘Christos Pantokrator!’ spat the Duke. ‘Demetrius! You are last out, since you are so full of fire.’
But even as the fog began to thicken, the mass of Easterners to the north started to move, and the hooves of their horses shook the earth. They were riding to cut the Duke off from his line of retreat. The first of his baggage wagons were only starting to move.
‘Marcos! Take the last Tagma and clear the Vardariotes out of our path,’ called the Duke. He turned to his son. ‘Do not – I repeat, do not – die here. What I do, I do for you and your own sons. Cover us, and then ride away.’
The fog rose like smoke.
And then the wind hit. It blew straight from their enemies into their faces, picking up dust and bits of grass. The first gust was like the breath of a tired man, but the second gust was as harsh as a mid-winter storm.
The fog broke like glass.
Across the field, the enemy was dismounting. Demetrius stroked his beard. ‘They’re out of range,’ he said aloud. ‘How can they-’
‘Look at their horse holders,’ said his father. ‘Once, the Empire put every man on a horse or mule – every infantryman, every archer.’
Just to his left, their own infantry were retreating in columns, well closed up, their shields lapped and their spears held high, the small wind-sock standards of the Thrakian border holdings suddenly rigid in the new wind.
‘Draw!’ roared Cully.
The better archers measured the distance by eye and sneered.
Kandy, the fattest man in the company, shook his head. ‘On my best day I couldn’t hit yon,’ he muttered. But he grunted and got his string to his ear.
‘Loose!’ Cully roared. A few men had already loosed – no man could keep a great war bow at full draw for longer than a moment or two.
Twenty paces behind the archery line, the Captain felt the surge of power. It was odd, vaguely upsetting even, to be both a participant and an observer in an arcane contest.
Even as the volley of arrows leaped into the air, the gust of wind off Harmodius’s working overpowered the enemy’s hermetical defence.
Borne on a massive pulse of air, three hundred arrows fell like a well-aimed hail on the nearest block of retreating infantry. The heavy quarter-pound shafts punched through the scale or leather of the mountaineers. In one gust of air, forty men fell-
The enemy volley of arrows did more damage than the Duke had thought possible. More men – his men, his own trained soldiers, veterans of a dozen campaigns – died. The screams of the wounded told every other man on the field that the enemy arrows were in range, and they were caught with their shields facing away from the enemy.
His men panicked.
Far off to the right, where Ser Bescanan had rallied part of the Latinikon, the mercenary Albans and Galles and Occitans broke and ran, leaning far out over the necks of their wretched heavy horses as they galloped away.
Demetrius didn’t mutter imprecations at his father. Instead, he turned to the magister. ‘Do something!’ he snapped.
Aeskepiles took a deep breath and flung up a hand.
A carpet of flame, so thin as to be transparent, flowed over the field from his hand to the enemy, crossing the four hundred or so paces in the time it took a man’s heart to beat three times.
The carpet of white flame ran at the archers like a rising tide – a tide moving at the speed of a galloping horse.
‘Stand fast! Nock!’ ordered Cully. Most of the archers obeyed, but some awkward sods were flinching away.
Cully watched the fire and hoped it was an illusion.
But just short of his position it parted as if cut by a knife and flowed away to the left and right, rolling along the front of the archers’ positions.
The fire was not wholly without effect, as it panicked the horses. One small page was only enough to hold six strong cobs under ideal conditions, and with a wall of fire bearing down on them, dozens of the stronger – or more wicked – horses put their heads down, pulled their reins right out of their handler’s hands, and ran free over the grass.
Nell lost the Captain’s wicked roan, was bitten, and punched the horse in savage frustration. The horse looked at her in surprise and she recaptured his reins. Cully’s nag tried to rip free, and reared, and she was carried into the air. Then the Captain’s roan pulled his head, and she was down, face first in the bloody dirt. She didn’t let go, and the roan dragged her right over the corpse of a Thrakian. She screamed when the man – not yet dead – screamed.
Then Long Paw, the nicest of the archers, was dragging her to her feet. She still had the horses. He smiled at her and turned back to the line.
‘Draw!’ Cully roared.
‘Loose!’ he shouted as the wind rose behind them.
The second volley rose ragged and lost more shafts as the wind struck. The archers were shaken by the fire. But more than a hundred shafts received the full lift of Harmodius’s working and they fell on the centre tagma of stradiotes; Morean gentlemen in chain hauberks, with lances and bows and small steel shields. At the range, few of them were killed through their mail, but their horses suffered cruelly and the small band seemed to explode away from the point of impact as men rode in all directions.
The Red Knight raised his hand and snapped a single coherent beam of emerald light at the source of the enemy’s magery.
Aeskepiles raised a shield like a mirror, the size of three mounted men.
Very clever, Harmodius admitted, and voided the casting as it came, reflected, right back at him.
The Athanatos tagma was shattered, and the panic of the mercenaries was augmented by the stradiotes. Andronicus watched the hermetical workings – back and forth like a child’s game.
‘My men are dying!’ he roared.
Aeskepiles reached deep and cast a working he created on the spot. He built extravagant displays for court – he could work with inanimate materials, given time. And cloth and wood had once been animate. It was a snap working – something from deep inside him created it and he let go.
Every bowstring in the front rank snapped. The bows gave an odd sound, almost like a scream. Men had their faces flayed – Cully almost lost an eye. Men flinched. A few archers fell.
‘Christ save us!’ said Cully, now firmly spooked and blood running down his face.
Harmodius seized control of the Captain’s body and cast, breathed, and cast again, draining his master’s reserves utterly. Reserves, he noted, which grew deeper every day.
Fire appeared to leap from the Captain’s hand. It wasn’t a beam of light, but rather a great round gout of raw fire that made a deep roaring sound as it burst into being.
Damn you! said the Captain. Let go! Damn it!
Us or him! Harmodius barked. He kept control of the Red Knight’s body and let fly his spell.
The travel time of the fearful ball of fire was slow, by hermetical standards. The casting was terrifying – the power of the ball of fire dizzying. Aeskepiles had little choice but to shield – he left himself almost nothing, and struck the fireball with a deflection, swatting it to the north.