Meanwhile, halfway up the Golan, Cale’s plan of battle was disintegrating even further. Even though the rain was already easing off, the strength of the brief downpour was such that not only had it deliquesced the Villainous Saltpetre but it had wet the ropes of the mortars and reduced the power with which they could eject the unusually heavy bolts. Hooke had quickly covered them up but in order to reach the right wing of the advancing Laconics the mortars were operating at the extreme edge of their range. Now the ropes were slightly wet that range was reduced by a quarter, a distance that rendered them useless.
A desperate Hooke had a flag to signal that he was unable to fire and it was duly noted by an alarmed Cale on his rickety tower. He could also see lots of other makeshift flags waving from the Golan. They had not arranged a sign about the Villainous Saltpetre because there had been no good reason to do so. Now the Laconics were approaching the casks, as were the excellently timed burning ends of the fuses.
Another signal from Cale and another ear-cracking blast from the horns beneath him. This time the entire Redeemer front line ducked down and faced away from the caskets, each one curled up into a protective ball. The Laconics kept advancing, breaking into a run just as they had at Eight Martyrs. The fuses burnt as calculated, the Laconics arrived as hoped for and nothing happened. Many stepped on the lightly earth-covered container but though they could feel the ground change beneath them they were in no position to stop. Then one of the boxes exploded, the last but one on the Laconic right. It had been designed to explode forwards but wood is unreliable stuff and the force of the blast shot out to front and back, killing almost as many Redeemers behind as it did their advancing enemies.
What this single explosion managed to do was bring the Laconic line to an astonished halt. None of them had ever seen such violence, the earth itself blown into the sky and the ear-blasting sound worse than thunder. The ranks shuddered and stopped and staggered back as if a single startled creature. Carnage delivered by the human hand is one thing, horrible in its close and personal gash and mangle of flesh and bone. Think, though, what it was like to witness for the first time the calamity of such a flash of power and smoke. For a moment after the roar of armies striving to come to grips, there was a great and sudden silence as if the hand swipe of some bilious god had lashed the ground between them. Used to delivering the hideous blow or cut, none of them had seen a man ruptured, pulverized and torn in less time than it took to blink.
Slack-jawed and stupefied at the failure of the casks, panic and fear ran riot in Cale. But he was not the only one – King Stuart-Clarke had been thrown from his horse as it reared from its terror at the explosion as had half a dozen of the messengers with him. Frightened horses were bolting everywhere and the attack, the worst of nightmares, had completely stalled and all the vital momentum along a line of a thousand yards was lost. All the commanders had been unseated like the king or were trying to control their mounts. Cale, horrified by the failure of the casks, had a few moments to collect his shattered wits.
He was short of archers but had held them back in any case to pick off the Laconics after they had been hit by all twenty casks, guessing that some were bound to fail. Now he was down the tower and onto his waiting horse and shouting at the four hundred archers in front of him to let loose their first volley and sending a messenger to the four hundred hiding on the rise to wait until the Laconics tried to come around his right. Then as the Laconics began to sort themselves to renew the attack he waved Gil to take the reserves as planned to reinforce his already much stronger left. The reserves, mostly the surviving Black Cordelias, began a slow run towards their left-hand flank and Cale stopped and realized that in the pause between altering his plans and the re-start of the fight he had no idea what to do. Wait and see, wait and see. But the horror of inaction, the panic induced by the sense that he should stay where he was or go back to the tower and wait, was simply too great to stop. He raced up and down the rear for perhaps twenty seconds – an age on an age – like some lost and desperate child before he came to grips with himself and stopped. Now, as he used to do during his terrible panics during the long and bitter nights as a child, he bit deep into his hand below the thumb and felt the rush of pain begin to calm him down. He stopped, breathing deeply, a few seconds, and then turned the horse back to the tower and in a few moments was in control of himself, watching the battle collect itself and the Laconics begin the attack again.
There was no running attack this time; the Laconics simply advanced and expected to close. This was what happened with their strongest forces facing Cale’s now massively reinforced left. But he did not have the men to offer such a depth of soldiers to resist the Laconics’ strongest wing and also have a line six or eight deep in the middle and the right. Hence the yew stakes and the hooks. This would slow the Laconics down and protect this so much weaker line. Then once the Laconics were through he had trained the Redeemers here to fall back slowly as they fought and refuse to make a stand. Then four hundred archers on the rise would hit the Laconics from the rear where they would either have to turn to defend their unarmoured backs and take the pressure off the attack or be picked off by ten volleys every minute by the best archers in all the four quarters.
There were no such measures to his left. The Laconic right wing was twenty deep of their strongest and most experienced but now the Redeemers opposing them were nearly fifty deep. As long as the helmets protected them from the crushing blows of the Laconic swords, and the dreadful push and shove of so many men did not lead to a collapsing crush, then he hoped to reverse the push of the Laconic right and drive them back and around to their left do what they had done to the Black Cordelias twenty days before.
Whether all this would have worked by itself was argued over for months and years. It was touch and go said Cale as he talked about his victory late into the night with Vague Henri.
‘You were utterly useless,’ he said to him, pleasantly, ‘stuck up there with that half-wit Hooke – but without the dead dogs in the stream I don’t think we’d have done it.’
The battle had been as hideous as you might expect between one side who were simply not afraid to die and another who regarded death as merely a door to the eternal life. Six hours after it had begun so violently it was finished. King Stuart-Clarke was dead along with eight thousand of his men, the survivors fighting a retreat over four weeks, legendary for its courage and resilience. Not that their survival made much difference to the Laconics when all was said and done. Thomas Cale changed their history for ever on that day and all because of three things he thought at the time were less important than his great mortars and the mass destruction of the boxes of saltpetre: the reinforced helmets of the dead Materazzi, intelligent tactics, and a bad dose of the squits induced by the decaying animals in the stream that fed the Laconic camp had sapped, by just a little, just enough, the terrible strength that was required to fight in heavy armour for a day. And, credit where credit was due, the insane courage and self-sacrificing skill of the Redeemers. Throughout the day he was back and forth with his ten Purgators who were aching to die for him. He was on top of the tower one minute, scrambling down and heading to a section along the front threatening to decay and shouting at those who could not see where they were needed to rush here or withdraw from there. Along to his right he rode repeatedly, Purgators terrified on his behalf and shielding him as if their eternal life itself depended on it as he tried to get the line first to hold the Laconics along the razor wall of the spikes of yew and when they were through to pull back in steady order so that they were kept penned in where the archers on the rise could hurt them most. Then it was back to the great scrum on the left where the battle would be won or lost, urging on the deadly push and shove, picking up men who fell, shouting for others where the lines of force had eased to move around the other side and add their weight. Now the fear had gone and he was so busy in the fight he had no time to worry that he was in his element, that for once he was neither angry or sad but exhilarated beyond all reckoning and only now and again a still small voice calling to him to show some sense. All day throughout the fight he was like some fly or wasp at a window buzzing back and forth as if he were trying to find a weakness in the glass. Lead from the front: always, sometimes, never. It was the last he always promised to himself but today it was impossible. Sometimes he had to lay into the Laconics as they cut a hole into the Redeemer line, sealing it up, lashing his enemy like the calmest madman in the asylum, cutting and blocking like the machine he had been brought up to be, his Purgators and the men he most hated in the world running into die next to him as if they had no other destiny but this. And then the Purgators would form a ring around him and he’d withdraw and back onto his horse and up his spindly tower like God in his heaven surveying the chaos of his own creation. Then the glass impossibly bowed to the wasp and bulged and broke. The right flank of the Laconics warped and twisted and then not so much broke as burst. In such a beast as this it was the collective power that went, collapsing like a long-exhausted animal, at once falling under its own weight as much as that of its enemy. It was a collective death and not a matter of bravery or even strength, and once it was down it was finished as a battle. But not as an individual slaughter – now the creature was breaking into its parts, disassembled into each man, alone and weak and easy to kill where he could not re-form himself into a smaller beast to run away.