‘Charge!’ roared Forest, and Tunny was away. He burst from the trees and down the long slope, threading between old tree stumps, bounding from one to another. He heard men shouting behind him, men running, but he was too busy holding the standard high in both hands, the wind taking the cloth and dragging it out straight above his head, tugging hard at his hands, his arms, his shoulders.
He splashed out into the stream, floundered through the slow water to the middle, no more than thigh deep. He turned, waving the standard back and forth, its golden sun flashing. ‘On, you bastards!’ he roared at the crowd of running men behind him. ‘On, the First! Forward! Forward!’ Something whipped past in the air, just seen out of the corner of his eye.
‘I’m hit!’ shrieked Worth, staggering in the stream, helmet twisted across his stricken face, clutching at his breastplate.
‘By birdshit, idiot!’ Tunny took the standard in one hand and wedged the other under Worth’s armpit, dragged him along a few steps until he had his balance back then plunged on himself, lifting his knees up high, spraying water with every step.
He hauled himself up the mossy bank, free hand clutching at roots, wet boots wrestling at the loose earth, finally clambering onto the overhanging turf. He snatched a look back, all he could hear his own whooping breath echoing in his helmet. The whole regiment, or the few hundred who remained, at any rate, were flooding down the slope and across the stream after him, kicking up sparkling drops.
He shoved the snapping standard high into the air, gave a meaningless roar as he drew his sword and ran on, face locked into a snarling mask, thumping towards the wall, spear-tips showing above it. Two more great strides and he sprang up onto the drystone, screaming like a madman, swinging his sword wildly one way and the other to clatter against the spears and knock them toppling …
There was no one there.
Just old pole-arms leaning loose against the wall, and damp barley shifting in the wind, and the calm, wooded fells rising faint at the north side of the valley very much like they did at the south side.
No one to fight.
No doubt there had been fighting, and plenty of it too. Over to the right the crops were flattened, the ground before the wall trampled to a mass of mud, littered with the bodies of men and horses, the ugly rubbish of victory and defeat.
But the fighting was over now.
Tunny narrowed his eyes. A few hundred strides away, off to the north and east, figures were jogging across the fields, chinks of sunlight through the heavy clouds glinting on armour. The Northmen, presumably. And since no one appeared to be pursuing them, pulling back in their own time, and on their own terms.
‘Yah!’ shrieked Yolk as he ran up, a war cry that could hardly have made a duck nervous. ‘Yah!’ Leaning over the wall to poke away wildly with his sword. ‘Yah?’
‘No one here,’ said Tunny, letting his own blade slowly fall.
‘No one here?’ muttered Worth, trying to straighten his twisted helmet.
Tunny sat down on the wall, the standard between his knees. ‘Only him.’ Not far away a scarecrow had been planted, a spear nailed to each stick arm, a brightly polished helmet on its sack-head. ‘And I reckon the whole regiment can take him.’ It all looked a pathetic ruse now. But then ruses always do, once you’ve seen through them. Tunny ought to have known that. He’d played more than a few himself, though usually on his own officers rather than the enemy.
More soldiers were reaching the wall. Wet through, tired out, mixed up. One clambered over it, walked up to the scarecrow and levelled his sword.
‘Lay down your arms in the name of his Majesty!’ he roared. There was a smattering of laughter, quickly cut off as Colonel Vallimir clambered up onto the drystone with a face like fury, Sergeant Forest beside him.
A horseman was pounding over from the empty gap in the wall on their right. The gap where they’d been sure a furious battle was taking place. A battle they would gloriously turn the tide of. A battle that was already over. He reined in before them, he and his horse breathing hard, dashed with mud from a full gallop.
‘Is General Mitterick here?’ he managed to gasp.
‘Afraid not,’ said Tunny.
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘Afraid not,’ said Tunny.
‘What’s the matter, man?’ snapped Vallimir, getting tangled with his scabbard as he hopped down from the wall and nearly falling on his face.
The messenger snapped out a salute. ‘Sir. Lord Marshal Kroy orders all hostilities to cease at once.’ He smiled, teeth gleaming white in his muddy face. ‘We’ve made peace with the Northmen!’ He turned his horse smartly and rode off, past a pair of stained and tattered flags drooping forgotten from leaning poles and south, towards a line of Union foot advancing across the ruined fields.
‘Peace?’ mumbled Yolk, soaked and shivering.
‘Peace,’ grunted Worth, trying to rub the birdshit from his breastplate.
‘Fuck!’ snarled Vallimir, flinging down his sword.
Tunny raised his brows, and stuck his own blade point-first in the earth. He couldn’t say he felt anywhere near as strongly as Vallimir about it, but he had to admit to feeling a mite disappointed at the way things had turned out.
‘But that’s war, eh, my beauty?’ He started to roll up the standard of his Majesty’s First, smoothing out the kinks with his thumb the way a woman might put away her wedding shawl when the big day was over.
‘That was quite some standard-bearing, Corporal!’ Forest was a stride or two away, foot up on the wall, a grin across his scarred face. ‘Up front, leading the men, in the place of most danger and most glory. ‘‘Forward!’’ cried brave Corporal Tunny, hurling his courage in the teeth of the enemy! I mean, there was no enemy, as it turned out, but still, I always knew you’d come through. You always do. Can’t help yourself, can you? Corporal Tunny, hero of the First!’
‘Fuck yourself, Forest.’
Tunny started to work the standard carefully back into its cover. Looking across the flat land to the north and east, watching the last of the Northmen hurrying away through the sunlit fields.
Luck. Some men have it. Some don’t. Calder could not but conclude, as he bounded through the barley behind his men, exhausted and muddy but very much alive, that he had it. By the dead, he had it.
Mad luck, that Mitterick had done the apparently insane, chosen to charge without checking the ground or waiting for light and doomed his cavalry. Impossible luck, that Brodd Tenways, of all people, would have lent a helping hand, the worst of his many enemies saving his life at the last moment. Even the rain had fought on his side, swept over at just the time to ruin the order of the Union foot and turn their dream ground into a nightmare of mud.
Even then, the men in the woods could still have done for him, but they’d been put off by a bundle of dead men’s spears, a scarecrow and a few boys each slipped a coin to wear a helmet twice too big and stick their heads up once in a while. Deal with them, Dow had said, and somehow bold Prince Calder had found a way.
When he thought of all the luck he’d had that day he felt dizzy. Felt as if the world must’ve chosen him for something. Must have great plans for him. How else could he have lurched through all this with his life? Him, Calder, who deserved it so bloody little?
There was an old ditch running through the fields up ahead with a low hedgerow behind. A boundary his father hadn’t quite managed to tear up, and the perfect place to form a new line. Another little slice of luck. He found himself wishing that Scale had lived to see this. To hug him and thump his back and say how proud he was at last. He’d fought, and what was even more surprising, he’d won. Calder was laughing as he jumped the ditch, slid sideways through a gap in the bushes— And stopped.