He needed victory today. It meant taking greater risks for greater gains. Fortunately, retreating armies are vulnerable in a way that advancing ones are not. So far, hardly half of Shef’s forces had been engaged. Time to commit the rest. Calling his errand-lads around him, Shef began to pass his orders.
Down on the sodden slopes rising from the sea to the down-lands, the Frankish hobbelars were learning sense. No longer did they ride in bunched groups presenting easy targets. Instead they too lurked in cover, moving only when they had to and then in short gallops. By a path through a dripping copse, one group tensed as they heard running feet. As the barefoot lad rushed by, intent only on his message, one rider spurred out, slashed savagely with his saber.
“He had no weapon,” said one of the Franks, looking down at the body draining blood in the rain-pocked puddles.
“His weapon was in his head,” grunted the sergeant in charge. “Get ready to move again.”
The boy’s brother, running fifty paces behind, hid quiet as a vole behind a red-berried rowan tree, watched them go. Slipped off to find avengers.
The Frankish archers, so far, had done nothing but endure random shot, their bowstrings long since so wet as to be valueless. Their commanders, now, were using them to hold strategic spots as the army fell back. They, too, were starting to use woodcraft.
“Look.” One pointed to a conroy of hobbelars falling back over a field, one of them suddenly clutching his side and tipping from his horse. The archers, behind a wrecked barn, saw a figure suddenly slip from a hedgerow, seize a pony, and ride off unseen by its victims. But straight toward their ambush. As it came round the edge of the barn at full gallop, two men drove their short swords into the pony’s chest, seized the marksman as the pony collapsed.
“What devil’s work is this?” asked one, snatching the crossbow. “See, a bow, arrows. What is this at the belt?”
“Never mind the belt, Guillaume,” shouted one of his mates. “Look, it’s a girl.” The men stared at the slight, short-kilted figure.
“Women shooting men from cover,” muttered Guillaume.
“All right. We’ve time to teach her a lesson. Give her some memories to take to Hell with her.”
As the soldiers crowded round the writhing, splayed-out figure, a dozen churls of the Kentish fierd crawled closer, wood-axes and billhooks ready. They could not stand up to mailed horsemen. Mere prowlers and robbers they could deal with.
Leaking men and horses, the great steel reptile oozed sullenly back toward its base.
King Charles, sunk in thought, did not notice the check in front of him till he was almost on his own archers. Then he paused, looked down. A sergeant caught his stirrup, pointed. “Sire, they are in front of us. Standing, for once.”
The village reeve Shef had found was positive that a day’s rain and the passage of thousands of horses would turn the brook between the Brede and Bulverhythe into a quagmire. Shef had decided to take the chance and believe him. His runners had got through—most of them. The pull-thrower teams with their heavy guards of halberdiers had closed in from the far flanks where they had waited immobile. Assembled their weapons, lined up five yards apart along a hundred and fifty yards of front. On a fine day, in the open, against cavalry, suicide.
Osmod the marshal, peering through the rain, judged the Frankish vanguard within range. As he called the order, twenty beams lashed the air together, slings whirled, stones shot into the sky.
Charles’s horse reared as the brains of a dismounted archer flicked its face. Another stallion, leg broken, screamed and pawed at the air. Almost before one volley had landed another was in the air. For a moment the Frankish army, surprised again and again, came close to panic.
Charles rode forward bellowing, ignoring the stones now aimed deliberately at him. Imperiously he drove the archers forward, launching feeble arrows. Behind them, following his example, his heavy lancers broke into a slow trot. Into the quagmire where a brook had been.
Charles himself was pulled clear of his bogged horse by two counts of his stable, stood in the end to watch. His men floundered through, some on horses still, some on foot, to reach the machines that flung an unending rain of stones. They were met by a line of men in strange helmets, swinging and stabbing with huge axes like woodmen’s tools. Robbed of the élan which was their birthright, the Frankish knights stood and fought them weapon to weapon. Slowly, the big men in mail forced their smaller, strangely armed adversaries back. Back. Almost to the line of the machines, which they must stand to defend.