The Proof House (66 page)

Bardas Loredan, on a low hill behind the camp, couldn’t see much of the pike formation either, but he had a fine view of the cavalry battle and decided that his only chance of saving the day was to commit his halberdiers against the lancers at the charge and hope they got there in time. They did the best they could, but it was a fairly hopeless venture; by the time they’d skirted the pikemen, the enemy infantrymen had deployed across their line of advance and were manoeuvring to take them in flank. There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained by slowing down at this point, so the captain of halberdiers led his column at the double into the centre of the enemy line. The effect was spectacular: they cut the line in half, routing one wing completely. That helped; they were now at liberty to hook the enemy formation and press home the attack on three sides. Their mistake was not spotting the two troops of heavy cavalry that had failed to get into the pike formation and retired to the side of the battle with nothing to do.

There weren’t enough of them to cause catastrophic damage, but they carved up a lot of men. The halberdiers had a weak spot, where the pauldrons buckled over the shoulder; a cut across the exposed straps with a sharp blade left them with loose, flapping armour plates hampering their arm movements and the whole of the shoulder and the side of the neck open to attack. Not many killed, but a great many disabled, as the scimitars glanced off the angled sides of the halberdiers’ kettle-hats and sliced into neck tendons and collar-bones. Where the halberdiers were able to turn and present arms, they had the better of the deal - the impetus of the oncoming horseman made a far better job of driving the halberd spike through mail and flesh than the human arm could ever do - but on balance the advantage, expressed as the ratio of casualties inflicted, was with the plainsmen.

At this point the battle was out of anybody’s control; even with both sides co-operating in a spirit of friendship and goodwill, it would have been a hard job to have disentangled the component parts of the two armies to the point where a general retreat would have been possible. There were only two practical options: to fight it out until one side was wiped out, or to disengage and pull out in the nearest possible approximation to order.

For a while, it looked depressingly like the first option. The plains cavalry wedged into the pikemen were slowly being crushed in from the sides; stuck in the middle of a mêlée, the lancers no longer had any advantage from impetus or momentum and were mostly blunting their scimitars on the dented and mangled but uncompromised armour of their opponents; enough halberdiers were dead or on the ground to give their colleagues room to turn and start pushing spikes up into the plainsmen’s faces; if the battle continued along this course, sooner or later the Imperials were bound to prevail, and their survivors, probably no more than a few hundred at best, would be left with the field and the monumental task of disposing of the dead.

Instead, the Imperials panicked, which was probably the best thing they could have done in the circumstances. The catalyst was a furious all-out attack by a young section leader by the name of Samzai on what he mistakenly believed was Bardas Loredan’s honour guard (in the event it turned out to be the cavalry escort for a detachment of trumpeters and other musicians; but they were rather splendidly dressed and equipped, and they’d somehow ended up wedged in among the pikemen, so it was an understandable mistake). Samzai didn’t make it; he fell swinging his axe - when his body was hauled out of the mess, they found seventeen holes in his mailshirt - just one rank short of his objective, but the survivors of his section managed to chop and shear their way through the pikemen and kill enough of the escort to get within arm’s length of the musicians, at which point someone started shouting that Bardas Loredan was dead . . . A head (nobody ever found out whose) was hoisted up on a pike, and the plainsmen, even the ones being clubbed to death while unable to defend themselves, started to cheer as if something important had just been decided. At first the reaction was just a moment of hesitation, concern that something was going on but nobody knew what it was; then the pikemen started to edge backwards, dropping their pikes (where possible) and looking for a way to get out of the press and into open ground. As the main infantry formation wavered and came apart, there was suddenly enough room for the cavalry to move; and a brief over-the-shoulder glimpse at the retreating pikemen was enough to convince the Imperial cavalry that something was badly wrong, prompting them to pull out as well. As the panic gathered momentum, so did the pace of withdrawal; men who’d been walking slowly backwards turned round and started to run, no longer remotely interested in the enemy in any capacity except that of possible obstruction. The battle seemed to come to pieces like a frail wicker basket, scattering its contents everywhere.

Two troops of plains heavy cavalry set off in pursuit of the Imperial pikemen; they were intercepted by an equal number of Imperials, cut to pieces and scattered. After that, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for pressing home the advantage, and the plainsmen fell back on the fortress as quickly as they could. As for the Imperials, they calmed down a little when they were told that Bardas Loredan wasn’t really dead (by Bardas Loredan himself, riding up to find out what the hell had happened) but still kept going till they reached the camp. It’s always hard to know how to act when you’ve just been driven from the field, particularly if the field you’ve just been driven from is now deserted. Perhaps wisely, Bardas didn’t try to make anything of it; he went back to his tent and called for casualty lists and the general staff; he had a lot to do, organising stretcher details and burial details, making sure as many of the wounded as possible at least got within sight of a doctor before they died, posting pickets and seeing to it that the camp was properly secured against follow-up attacks.

It took a full day to retrieve the wounded. Bardas sent a herald to sort out the usual truce, and the officers in charge on both sides reached a sensible understanding whereby each side cleared up its end of the field and handed back the other side’s wounded in a reasonable state of repair. It was harder to reach agreement on disposing of the daunting number of dead bodies that needed to be dealt with before they became a health hazard to both parties. Temrai’s men had to be cremated, whereas the Imperials needed to be buried, so a reciprocal arrangement was out of the question; Bardas’ negotiators suggested taking it in turns - they’d go first, collect their dead and then withdraw while the plainsmen collected theirs - but Temrai’s people objected on the grounds that that would mean waiting for at least a day, which wouldn’t be advisable if the sun decided to come out; instead they proposed having retrieval details working side by side, but the Imperials weren’t having that - too much risk of an incident, they said, tempers flaring, fights breaking out; instead, why not divide the field as before and each side make two piles, ours and theirs? Time was getting on, and Temrai’s people reluctantly agreed, but the deal nearly foundered on where the line across the field was to be drawn - more people had died on both sides up at Bardas’ end of the field, and his negotiators felt they were ending up with the rough end of the bargain, so they suggested splitting the field lengthways instead of down the middle. The plainsmen refused, but agreed to bring up the dividing line by a hundred and fifty yards, so that they took responsibility for most of the bodies from the cavalry actions, while the Imperials cleared up after the fighting around the pike formation. When the deal had been done and the work details were lining up, one of Bardas’ men remarked to his opposite number on Temrai’s negotiating team that whereas during the battle they’d been fighting to get as much of the field as possible, now they were struggling to give as much of it as they could away. The plainsman thought this remark in poor taste and lodged a formal complaint, which was ignored.

After the field had been cleared, the bodies removed, as much in the way of armour, arrows, horses and weapons as possible scavenged for salvage, it was finally possible to work out the score and announce the winner. It turned out to be a remarkably close thing. Purely on head-count of men killed, Temrai had lost; on percentages of total forces engaged killed, he had a marginal advantage. Broken down between cavalry and infantry, assuming cavalry to be worth more, Bardas had a slight lead, but the basis of accounting was dubious there, since heavy infantry were more useful to him than cavalry, and he’d lost rather more of them than Temrai had; besides which, properly speaking, at least three quarters of Temrai’s army were theoretically cavalry, which made a nonsense of the whole calculation. Since the battle hadn’t been about territory, and neither side had gained or lost an inch, that wasn’t much use as a criterion of success. The last accepted category, objectives achieved, was equally unhelpful, since (when they came to think of it) nobody could clearly define what either side’s objectives had been, or whether they’d had any at all; if there were any, nobody had achieved them, which meant that both sides had lost, which was plainly ridiculous.

‘For pity’s sake,’ Venart shouted, ‘will you stop that godawful noise?’

The hammering stopped. ‘What did you say?’

Venart took a step forward. It was dark and gloomy inside the workshop, the only light coming from the shrouded furnace. ‘I said, will you stop—Can’t you keep the noise down? I’m trying to work.’

Posc Dousor, the Auzeils’ next-door neighbour, stepped out from behind the furnace door. He was wearing a leather apron and holding a big hammer. ‘So am I,’ he said.

‘What?’

Dousor nodded towards the furnace and the anvil that stood near it. ‘You don’t think I’m doing this for fun, do you?’ he said.

Venart took a step inside and peered round. ‘Excuse me asking,’ he said, ‘but just what are you doing? Last time I was in here, this was a cheese store.’

‘Well, now it’s an armour factory.’ Dousor wiped his forehead with the back of his gloved hand. ‘On account of I can’t get any cheese to sell, but I do have this stock of steel billets I got landed with twelve years ago for a bad debt, and suddenly everybody wants to buy armour. So,’ he added, ‘I’m going to make some. All right?’

‘I see,’ Venart replied. ‘I didn’t know you knew how to make armour.’

Dousor frowned. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But soon I will. After all, it can’t be difficult, can it? You get the metal red hot, you bash it with a hammer till it’s thin, then you bash it some more till it’s the shape you want. And anyway,’ he added, ‘I bought a book. If you’ve got a book, you can learn anything.’

‘Well—’ Venart wasn’t quite sure what to say. It was a very big hammer, and Dousor was rather short-tempered. ‘That’s very enterprising of you, Posc, but do you think you could possibly do it somewhere else? Only I was up all night doing Council minutes, and—’

‘Where?’

‘Sorry?’

Dousor waggled the hammer impatiently. ‘Where do you suggest?’ he said. ‘Out in the street, maybe? Or perhaps I should sling out all my furniture, lug this bloody anvil indoors and turn my front room into a smithy. Well?’

Venart’s head wasn’t getting any better. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I really don’t mind what you do so long as you keep the noise down a bit. I do have a lot of rather important—’

‘Keep the noise down a bit,’ Dousor repeated. ‘You mean, bash a bit more gently? Just sort of
pat
the bloody great iron bars into flat sheets? Don’t be a prawn, Ven. Besides, you ought to be grateful.’

‘Sorry?’

‘War effort,’ Dousor said. ‘Munitions. Doing my bit for freedom and our unique cultural heritage. Doesn’t look particularly brilliant, does it, the First Citizen obstructing the war effort because of some trifling personal inconvenience?’

Venart thought for a moment. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘What if I were to find you a nice workshop you could use - down on the Drutz, say, in one of the old bonded warehouses? You could bash away to your heart’s content down there and I don’t suppose anybody’d even notice.’

Dousor frowned. ‘What, and pay you buggers rent when I’ve got a perfectly good shop of my own? Do I look like I’m stupid?’

‘All right then, rent-free. Come on, Posc, it’s driving Triz up the wall.’

Dousor shook his head. ‘I can’t help that,’ he said. ‘It’s taken me days to lick this place into shape, put in all these fixtures and stuff. And now you want me to rip them all out again, hump all this heavy gear halfway across the Island—’

‘’I’ll send someone to help you,’ Venart sighed. ‘At my expense, naturally,’ he added.

‘But there’s still inconvenience,’ Dousor persisted. ‘Time lost travelling to and fro, haulage charges—’

‘How much?’

‘What was that?’

‘How much do you want me to pay you,’ Venart said slowly, ‘to move all your gear over to the Drutz and leave us in peace? That’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it?’

Dousor’s brow furrowed. ‘That’s actually a rather offensive thing to say, Ven,’ he replied. ‘We’ve been neighbours for years, since your father was alive. Actually, I always thought we were friends. But now you’re First Citizen, of course, you think you can come barging in here giving orders—’

‘Twenty-five? Fifty?’

Dousor laughed. ‘Do me a favour,’ he said. ‘There’s also lost production time to consider. This window of opportunity isn’t going to last for ever, you know. Pretty soon this soldiering craze is going to wear off, and if I don’t get up and running pretty damn quick, I’m going to look round and see I’ve missed the boat. And now you’re telling me to drop everything—’

‘A hundred and seventy-five.’

‘No way,’ Dousor said. ‘No way I’m even going to consider it for less than three-two-five.’

‘Three-two-five? You must be—’

By way of replying, Dousor picked up the hammer and started laying into the bloom of iron on the anvil; it had long since gone cold, but he didn’t seem to have noticed that. Before Venart had a chance to make himself heard again over the noise, his sister pushed past him, swept into the shop and grabbed Dousor by the wrist.