“Ansiau’s in trouble,” remarked the leader of another conroy of horsemen, watching the growing turmoil. “An ambush. We’ll hook round behind it and catch them between him and us. Teach ’em a lesson; they won’t try it again.”
As he began to lead his men round in a wide sweep, there came a thud in the air and a sudden terrible shrieking behind him: a great dart from nowhere, striking a man in the thigh, driving through, pinning the screaming man to his dead horse. Not from the ambush. From somewhere else. The leader stood up in his stirrups, searching round the featureless landscape for something to show him where to charge. Trees, fields of standing wheat. Hedges everywhere. As he hesitated, a crossbow-bolt, shot from a steady rest by a man under a hedge a hundred and fifty yards off, caught him full in the face. The marksman, a poacher from Ditton-in-the-Fen, made no attempt to leap to his feet and run. In ten heartbeats he was twenty yards away, crawling like an eel in a half-filled ditch. The waxed and twisted gut of his crossbow, he had already discovered, had took little harm from the wet. As the horsemen hesitated, spurred in the end toward the place where they thought the shot might have come from, the sights of another twist-shooter trained round.
Slowly, without horns or trumpets, like a cogwheel tightening a rope, twenty separate skirmishes began to grow into battle.
From his vantage point on the ridge, Shef saw the Frankish main force still riding forward: but slowly, at no more than a walk, with many checks. They did not like to advance without their flanks secured. And on the flanks, for long moments, there was scarcely anything to be seen. Then horsemen would appear, spurring round a copse, or charging a burned-out village in extended line. What they were charging or spurring after was usually invisible. Then, as Shef strained his one eye in the blurring rain, he caught a flash of movement far out to one side: a pair of horses side by side at full gallop, one of the twist-shooters bouncing behind, its team drumming their ponies with their heels in a long trail behind. Oswi and “Dead Level” pulling out at one end of a hamlet as the Franks poured in the other, the flanking movement that was meant to cut him off delayed and confused by shots from other directions. The catapult disappeared behind a dip in the ground. In seconds it would be unlimbered again, once more menacing a wide arc anywhere within its half-mile range.
Shef’s strategy depended on three things. One was local knowledge: only those who lived, farmed and hunted over the landscape knew where there were passable tracks, safe lines of retreat. Every group he had sent out had attached to it a man or boy picked from those who had fled the area. Others were scattered in hiding places everywhere over twenty square miles, told not to fight but to guide and pass messages. The second thing was the shooting-power of the torsion-catapults with their great darts, and the new crossbows. Both were slow to load, but even the crossbows would pierce mail at up to two hundred paces. And they were best shot by men lying down in cover.
The most important part of Shef’s strategy was his realization that there are two ways to win a battle. Every battle he had ever seen—every battle fought in the Western world for centuries—had been won one way. By shock. By forming lines and clashing till one line broke. The line might be broken by axe and sword, as the Vikings preferred; by horse and lance, in the Frankish style; or by stone and dart, as Shef had introduced. Breaking the line meant winning the battle.
This might be a completely new way to win a battle. To have no line, to produce no shock, but to wear and shred the enemy away by missile attack. Only Shef’s unprofessional and unwarlike troops would do it: it went against too many ingrained habits of lifetime warriors. Ground was not important. It was there to be yielded. Face-to-face courage was not important. It was a mark of failure. But there could be none of the usual battlefield boosts to morale—the horns, war-songs, leaders shouting, most of all the sense of comrades alongside you. In a battle like this one it would be easy to desert, or simply to hide, to come out when all was over. Shef hoped his teams would keep on covering each other: they had gone out in bands of about fifty—a catapult, twenty crossbows, a few halberdiers together. But it was in the nature of the battle that they would split up. Once that happened, would they come back again?