The stricken beast was within easy range, but when Foster made to shoot it, he discovered that although he could recall firing but the single recent shot, all five of his pistols were empty and thickly fouled and his hands were too tremulous to recharge one.
Very slowly, jerkily, his big stallion turned to his signal, his speckled hide streaked with foam, his proud, fearsome head hung low in utter exhaustion, his thick barrel working like a bellows as he gasped for air. Fifteen yards behind Foster, Sir AH drooped in the saddle of his captured mare, both man and mount looking as utterly spent as Foster felt. The Arabian nobleman’s unsheathed sword was as gore-clotted as was Foster’s own, his armor was blood-splashed from crown to spurs, and the plume had been raggedly shorn from off his helmet. Beyond him, at irregular intervals, were six or seven men that -the Markgraf of Velegrad could barely recognize as members of his bodyguard, and, beyond them, some battered gallowglasses and a sprinkling of Scots.
As the stumbling Bruiser neared, Sir AH grinned crookedly at Foster around his knocked-askew visor, his entire lower face crusted with blood from a nose canted and obviously broken. “My Lord hides his talents well. So mild is his daily manner that I had not realized just how formidable a paladin he truly is.” Slowly, the clearly injured man came erect in his saddle and brought up his hacked and crusty blade to render his commander an intricate, formal salute. “It is my great good fortune to fight behind the banner of Your Worship.”
Sir Ali’s solemn salute was the first, but far from the last, for every man or group that Foster passed as he allowed the leopard-stallion to pick his own slow way rendered him such evidences of honors as their conditions made possible—officers and other ranks, English, Welsh, Scots, and even the Irish. Foster had never before been accorded such, nor had he seen any other commander so treated with such awed respect by drooping, exhausted, wounded men.
Along a slow two miles of human and equine dead and wounded, wherein riderless mounts wandered here and there and the ground lay increasingly thickly littered with swords, pistols, carbines, broken lance shafts, axes, powder flasks, and other oddments of equipment, Foster made his way, trailed by Sir Ali and such others of his force as were capable of the journey. Then he came onto the true battlefield.
On that stricken field, the dead and dying lay so thickly that a man could have walked from end to end or side to side without once setting foot to the hoof-churned blood-mud beneath them. The phalanxes of circling carrion birds all but blotted out the sun, and flies rose up in a noisome black-and-metallic cloud around the intruders who disturbed their feast-ings.
It proved too much. Foster leaned from his saddle and retched until his emptied stomach could yield no more, but still his body heaved and shuddered with his sickness and horror. As he woodenly searched for a bit of rag to wipe his lips, the tears came, cascading, cutting lighter trails down his sweaty, soot-blackened cheeks, and his armored body shook to his wrenching sobs; nor did he care who saw or heard him, as he sat there on an all but foundered charger, with flies gorging on his bloodstained armor, trying to avoid gazing again upon that rye field whereon over two thousand men had fallen.
That night, in his headquarters in an unburned cottage on the outskirts of Lyme, Earl Howell, who had taken command of the uncommitted forces when Foster was swept into battle on the Scots’ unordered charge, rendered his accounting.
In preface, the grizzled old soldier said sternly, ‘The Lord Commander of Horse is not expected to lead cavalry charges any more than the King is; both are too valuable to the kingdom to risk in a melee, and if the Lord Commander does elect to take a personal part in a battle, the very least he should do is to notify his principal lieutenants in advance, not just go galloping off with his bodyguard on the spur of the moment.”