“But Egon, hah! Mit reavers ahorse over most of the Northumbria, Sir Francis to let hiss daughter now ride south vill not allow, und of rightness he iss. But Egon romantic iss as the jungen so often are, und he insists that to remain by his chosen lady he vill. So, mit him I left my faithful Amadeo und most of my goot Tartars. Most potent and solemn oaths did they svear to protect him and hiss lady, so fear not for our Egon.”
Recalling the silent and immensely powerful Savoyard called Amadeo, who had been Wolfgang’s personal servant and bodyguard for many years, not to mention the several dozens of Mongol horsearchers who virtually worshiped their German commanders, Foster had not the slightest doubt that Egon von Hirschburg and Arabella Whyffler would be as safe as human flesh could wreak.
The snow melted, the streams rose over their banks, the rivers became boiling torrents of frigid water, laden with a flotsam of ice chunks and uprooted trees. Very gradually, a few bare degrees each succeeding week, the winds from off the far highlands shed their biting teeth and, here and there, tiny flowers began to show a bit of color.
As soon as the gaps were passable and the streams ford-able, King Alexander led his host across the ancient boundary and into England. Thirty thousand fighting men followed his banner. There were a vast host of Highlanders, lean as winter wolves, unshod and barelegged in the cold mud, dirty, disheveled, usually bearded and armed only with dirks, cowhide targets, and a miscellany of archaic polearms. The most of them owned no single piece of armor; indeed, few owned even a rough shirt. Flat, feathered bonnets and the long, pleated, filthy tartans which were clothing and cloak by day and blanket by night were their sole attire.
The Lowland troops were mostly better clothed and armed, but there were far fewer of them. Since Alexander had yet to settle his multitudinous differences with certain powerful and influential lairds, they had flatly refused to either march with his invasion army or to allow their folk to do so. For that reason, the personal troops of the Papal Legate—two thousand Genovese crossbowmen and four thousand mercenary landesknechten—were a welcome addition, in the Scottish king’s mind.
So, too, were the multitude of Crusader-noblemen of assorted nationalities—renegade Englishmen, Irish, French, Flemings, Burgundians, Scandinavians, Portuguese and Spaniards, Savoyards, Italians, Dalmatians, Croatians, Greeks and Bulgars, even a few Turkish and Egyptian knights—and the handful of tightly disciplined, ebon-skinned, Ghanaian mercenaries whom Papal agents had found for him to hire.
Withal, he was vastly deficient in cavalry—only a little over ten percentum of his army was mounted—and such artillery as he possessed was hardly worthy of the name. Nor could he safely get any of the heavy, clumsy, unwieldy bombards close enough to the well-designed defenses of Whyffier Hall to effectively reduce it. The two mass assaults launched against the place accomplished nothing save a couple of thousand dead and wounded Scots and a distinct plunge in the morale of the generally courageous but always volatile Highlanders.
Deciding Whyffler Hall too tough a nut to crack, Alexander left a contingent of his less dependable troops to invest the fort and marched on southeast with his reduced host The English army met them just south of Hexham.
Foster lay propped against his rolled sleeping bag, heedlessly dripping blood on the floor of his tattered pyramid tent, and wishing he had something more effective than a jug of captured whiskey to dull the waves of pain.
Nugai, the bodyguard-batman assigned to him by the Reichsherzog, had pulled off his master’s left boot, unbuckled and removed the cuishe-plate and the knee-cop, and carefully cut away the blood-stiff trouser leg. Lacking water, he had sloshed a measure of the raw whiskey onto the cloth adhering to the long slash in Foster’s leg—at which point only Foster’s pride kept him from shrieking like a banshee and blasting headfirst through the roof like a rocket—then gently worried the fabric from the flesh. Ignoring the gush of fresh blood brought by his ministrations, the impassive little man had scooped a handful of a stinking brownish paste from an earthenware bowl. With strong yellow fingers, he had stretched open the mouth of the wound and stuffed it full of the concoction, then smeared more of it over the gash before bandaging the injured leg.