Lacking either food or tents or even blankets, the Spaniards—most of them from dry, sunny, Mediterranean provinces—shivered through the long nights of damp cold, their searches for the blessings of sleep unaided by the piteous moans and cries of the wounded. And despite the attrition of death, there were proportionately more wounded at each succeeding night’s encampment, due to the ceaseless and pitiless incursions and ambuscades of the flitting bands of horsemen.
Seemingly from out of empty air, three-quarter-armored dragoons would charge in on flank or rear, huge horsepistols booming, each launching a deadly ball or a dozen small-shot on a yard of flame. Then, before muskets could be presented or pikes lowered, the attackers would have faded back into the nothingness that had spawned them, only to strike again, as suddenly and devastatingly, at another integument of the trudging column.
Most of the field guns were lost on the first’day’s march, and none remained by nightfall of the second day. The few hundred horsemen manfully set themselves to pursuit of the attackers. In the beginning, so few of them ever returned that the Count forbade such heroics . . . but by that time he was numbering his remaining cavalry in mere scores.
The snail’s pace of the starving army became slower each day, as the continued lack of sustenance and dearth of sleep took their inevitable toll of the men’s strength and vitality. Now, infantry menaced them along with the ruthless cavalry, and even the humble comfort of an evening campfire was denied them, as the tiniest hint of a flame was certain to bring the crashing of a musket or the booming of a pistol or the deadly humming of a quarrel from the merciless foemen who ringed them about.
Every night, somewhere or other, sentries fell silently under knife or garrote, and with a pounding of steel-shod hooves, lines of yelling English horsemen were upon and among the recumbent, fatigue-drugged Crusaders, broadswords and pistols, lances and axes taking a bloody toll.
For four nights the carnage continued, but they were left in an uneasy peace for all of the fifth night, though the sounds of horses and the rattling clinking of equipment told that the English enemy still lurked out there in the darkness.
Near noon of the sixth day, the tattered, battered, weary, and demoralized Crusaders emerged from the marshy forest through which they had been marching since dawn to find the English army drawn up in battle array across a riverside lea.
Count Wenceslaus kneed his drooping destrier forward and took stock of the situation. The English flanks were secured by the river on the one side and by a continuation of the swampy forest on the other. Sunrays sparked on the points of a deep pikehedge, while lazy spirals of smoke rose into the balmy ah- over the long lines of musketeers blowing upon their siowmatches. Batteries—some of them his own, be noted ruefully through this glass—reinforced the line at obviously well-calculated intervals. He could spy no cavalry, but he had no doubt that they would manifest themselves at a time and place inconvenient to him. There, he thought, stands a first-rate army and well-led.
Turning, he set eyes upon his tatterdemalions, slowly debouching from the swamp and forest to stand gaping in stunned disbelief at the serried ranks blocking their only road to Bournemouth. He shook his head sadly, closed and cased his precious long-glass, set his helmet back over his coif, reined about and set off at a plodding walk toward the steel coach, heedless of the tears coursing down his lined cheeks into his scraggly beard. Surrender was foreign to his nature … but so, too, was suicide.
CHAPTER 8
With the capitulation of the last and largest force of foreign Crusaders, the counties of the south and the east were a-ripple with the sound of turning coats. Those few men too honest or too stubborn to decide that Arthur was lawful king after all spurred lathered horses for the safety of the walls of London. Some made it. Some did not, and full many a tree and gate lintel and gibbet throughout the realm was decorated with the bird-pecked corpses of churchmen and Church’s men, swaying and rotting and stinking under the hot summer sun.