Castaways in Time

by Robert Adams

  Holding the lances back for the nonce, Foster led his dragoons against the left flank of the yelling mob. They poured in a single pistol volley, then retired, reformed with the lancers, and charged in a triangular, spear-point formation that cleaved through the motley throng like a hot knife through butter. Then they turned, regrouped and rode through again . . . and again, and yet again.

  For the extent of those long, busy minutes, Foster could never after recall much more than a terrible, jumbled kaleidoscope of faces twisted in bloodlust or agony; hairy, sinewy arms; and a vast assortment of weapons, their points and edges all seeking his flesh and blood.

  He rode with Bruiser's loose reins clenched between his teeth, his superposed two-barreled horse pistol (cut down by Pete Fletcher from one of the two Browning over-under shotguns which had been part of Webster's load) in his left hand, his long, flashing Tara-steel sword in his right. A superbly trained destrier, the big, spotted horse was perfectly tractable when the smells of powder and blood were in his wide-flared nostrils and acres of man-flesh awaited his square, yellow teeth and steel-shod hooves.

  Foster remembered confronting a tall, slender man, probably a chief, as he was mounted on a bay cobby and wore a rust-spotted chain-mail hauberk. The foeman's head and face were hidden from view by a flat-topped barrel-helm that probably dated from the thirteenth century. Both horses reared, and Foster fenced briefly with the Scot around and over Bruiser's muscle-bulging neck, until the stallion's savage ferocity and superior weight brought the small, pony-like horse crashing onto its back, the mailed rider beneath it.

  Another mounted man loomed over the press of infantry ahead. His mount was bigger but his armor was just as ancient and sketchy—jazeran and dog-faced basinet with a two-hand claidheamh, five feet in the blade. Instantly aware that he could never effectively parry a full-force blow from that twenty-pound sword, Foster used his last pistol charge to shoot the huge, stocky man out of his old saddle, then had to hack and slash his way through the press of berserk clansmen.

  A wolf spear was thrust at him; he grasped the crossbar and jerked the wielder close enough to drive his dripping sword-point into a bulging, red-rimmed eye, while Bruiser's lashing hooves caved in chests and cracked skulls. The sharp-edged Tara sword cut through pikeshafts and the arms that powered them, sliced through straining muscles and took hirsute heads from off hunched shoulders. The arm that impelled that sword was become a single, white-hot agony with the unceasing impacts, but when he sensed his battered command once more clear, he hastily grouped them after a fashion and once more hurled them and himself at the foe.

  But this time opposition was scant and sketchy. Those front-rank Scots still able to crawl or hobble were in full retreat from the serried formation of red-dripping Welsh pikes. A few of the clansmen behind pressed forward, but most—bereft by Foster's squadron of a large proportion of their chiefs—milled in aimless confusion, the berserkers striking out blindly at anyone who moved, and frequently being cut down by fellow clansmen simply as a matter of self-protection.

  Then, when Foster expected his force to be in the clear, the point was suddenly driving into the exposed flank of a formation of morioned and buff-coated Lowlander infantry. Had the ordered troops been prepared and expecting the cavalry, their langues de boeuf and poleaxes could have wrought gory havoc on Foster's squadron, but struck by surprise at flank and rear, they panicked and broke. Heedless of their lairds' commands and verbal abuse, they fled in any direction that took them from the path of those dripping broadswords and the soot-blackened men who bore them. Some fled to the rear areas to spread a measure of their mindless terror among the troops not yet committed, some careened into the rear of units already engaging the English line, but the bulk of the two thousand Lowlanders pelted to their right, straight into the flank of the Papal landesknechten, already hard-pressed at their van by Northumbrian infantry.

  Confused by the buff-coats and morions—which also happened to be the attire of the troops they faced—the European mercenaries faced about and had already cut down several hundred of the Lowlanders before their officers and the surviving lairds could bring the butchery to an end and form the flanks and rear to repel Foster's squadron.

  That squadron was, however, down to a little more than half its initial strength, and even had they been at full, reinforced strength, it would have required a royal order for Foster to put them at that glittering hedge of fifteen-foot pikes and the hard-eyed professional soldiers behind it. Rather, he halted his command long enough for pistols to be hastily recharged, then wheeled them into pursuit of the now fully broken Highlanders, with the Welsh pikewall moving forward in his wake.

  Ruthlessly, the horsemen cut down or pistoled the slower Scots and the few brave enough or stupid enough to turn and make a stand. The rest they chased all the way back to where the baggage wagons had been drawn up into a fortified square, and drew off only when musket fire had emptied several saddles.

  Finding the way back blocked by a hastily formed line of pikemen, Foster led his troopers far over to his left and onto a heath-grown hillock to survey the best means of extricating his remaining force, only to find that he could see little, due to a thickening fog that had commenced to settle over the battlefield. But what glimpses he could espy convinced him that something was wrong, terribly wrong.

  The English lines had been drawn up at the beginning of the battle with their backs to a small rill which bisected the plain; but in the raging battle below, the opposing lines appeared to be drawn up at right angles to that stream, the Scottish right and the English left engaged almost at the very site on which the English had camped the night previous.

  A bigger shock came when he noted that the pale, cloud-enshrouded glow of the sun was westering. What had happened to the day?

  The pikemen who had barred his return to his own lines were abruptly faced about and led trotting off into the fog, but he did not remount this much-reduced command. The troopers were as exhausted as the foam-streaked horses, many were wounded, and few had enough remaining powder to recharge their pistols. He could think of no way in which two hundred-odd tired and pain-racked men on as many plodding horses and with only use-dulled broadswords for armament could affect any favorable outcome in the hellishness beneath the swirling opacity of the fog.

  The remaining hours of light were spent in rest and repair of weapons and equipment, bandaging wounds and sharing out water and powder, rubbing down the trembling horses with handfuls of vegetation and slow walking of the animals to cool them gradually. With the fall of darkness, he remounted them and led them a long, circuitous swing among the hillocks, then over the plain to where he thought the baggage train and camp lay.

  When they appeared among the scattered tents before the stout wagon fort, muskets were leveled and swivel-guns brought to bear before his spotted horse was recognized. A Welsh officer of foot Foster vaguely remembered as Howard ap Somethingorother hobbled from among the wagons, leaning heavily on a broken pikestaff, his face drawn and wan under the dirty, bloody bandages swathing his head.

  "Captain Forster, as I live and breathe! 'Tis dead you were thought, sir, and all your men, as well, when ye rode into the very maw of the Scots. Ye impressed the King mightily, then, they say."

  Foster paced Bruiser forward slowly. "Who won the battle?"

  The Welshman cackled. "No one, last I heard, b'God."

  Foster was amazed; full battles—as opposed to raids, skirmishes and patrol-actions—were never fought at night, here and now, due to the lack of effective communications as much as custom.

  "I heard no shots?" he said skeptically.

  "No powder left, mostly," answered the wounded officer. "An' what little be likely wetted. But the center and right was both rock-steady when I lefted. And the left had been reinforced and was firming up."

  Foster thought he could catch a glimmering of how the lines had taken that ninety-degree turn. "The left broke, then?"

  The officer unconsciously nodd
ed, then gasped and grimaced with pain. Weakly, he answered, "Oh, aye, they were flanked. The dragoons tried to do what you and your'n did, but they run onto a bit of swamp and ere they could get free, the barbarians were all over them. Captain Webster and several of his officers were slain and—"

  "Webster? Bud Webster? Dead?" Foster felt numb.

  "Shot from off his horse, or so I heard, God rest him." The Welshman crossed himself solemnly. "He were a gallant sojer."

  Foster thought that the long-bodied, short-legged man was beginning to look faint. "Is there room for my animals and men inside the wagon fort?"

  The wounded officer nodded, unthinkingly once more, staggered and almost fell. Leaning most of his weight on his staff, he croaked, "More than enough, good sir, and well come ye be. The quartermaster captain and all his war-trained men were thrown into the battle with every other unattached man to bolster the left, and I was brought here to command when I took a quarrel through me thigh. But all it be to defend the baggage and stores be wounded sojers and wagoners what hadden' been shot oe'r, ere this. An' each time the battle line shifts a bit an' we end a-hint the Scots lines, them Satan's-spawn Highlanders make to o'emin us again. Twice now, it's happened, and a chancy thing each time."

  ——«»——«»——«»——

  Three more times during that long confused night the wagon fort was attacked by roaring, blood-mad, loot-hungry Highlanders. Each time the battle line turned a few degrees, the hordes of tartaned irregulars swept against the embattled wooden walls. Lieutenant Squire Howard ap Harry stumbled and fell into a blazing watch fire during the first attack and died in unspeakable agony an hour later, leaving Foster—as senior officer present—in reluctant command of the vulnerable, valuable, and seriously undermanned position.

  Since the King had wisely left most of the trains in Durham, there were but about a hundred and fifty wagons arranged—at Reichsherzog Wolfgang's orders—in a perfect square, fronted by chest-high ramparts of peat. Not a bad arrangement, Foster thought, had there but been enough men to adequately defend it. There were his own two hundred-odd troopers on whom he could depend. For the rest, perhaps two hundred wagoners were left, armed with a miscellany of pole-arms, hangers, and elderly matchlock muskets. Every third wagon was mounted with a breech-loading brass swivel-gun, averaging an inch and a half in the bore and each furnished with four to six brass breech-jacks, which arrangement should have made for easy defense of the wagon fort, as the swivels required little or no training and experience to employ and were nothing short of murderous in their effect on targets at three hundred yards or less—being simply huge shotguns.

  However, Foster was quickly aware of some glaring snafus, somewhere along the line. There was plenty of powder, of all grades, but all of the stuff was packed in casks, there was no paper to make cartridges, and but a limited number of flasks, roughly one flask for every three and a half muskets. Moreover, no one had been able to locate the grape and canister loads for the swivels, and for want of anything better they had been loaded with handfuls of musket balls, scrap metal, short lengths of light chain, and even dried-out knuckle-bones from last night's stewpots.

  In garrison or fort, powder stores were usually kept partially or totally below ground in a heavily timbered pit, but so high was the water table here that this could not be done without serious risk of spoilage, so the volatile stuff had been stacked in the center of the compound and covered against the mist and rain with waxed—and consequently highly inflammable—canvas sheeting. Foster shuddered every time he looked at the incipient disaster, but there was no other way to handle the situation.

  In the two hours between the first attack and the second, Foster sent a hundred of his cavalrymen out to strike the tents ranged about that had not already been burned or shot down, aware that they would dispatch any wounded Scots without orders from him. The wounded, those capable of the task, he set to casting pistol and musket balls and refilling powder flasks. Then, with the wagoners and his remaining troopers, he set about emptying every wagon and opening every sack, box, chest, cask, and bale.

  After an hour, they chanced across the loads for the swivels, the containers bearing markings clearly indicating that the contents were for 6-pdr. sakers.

  First, there was the distant but fast-closing wail of the chanters, backed by the incessant, nerve-fraying droning; then, boiling up out of the fog, seemingly impervious to the wet chill of the night, the numberless rabble of Highlanders bore down upon them from all sides, heralded by their deep-voiced shouts and curses and, as they neared, by the slap-slap of their bare feet on the wet peat.

  Foster had solemnly promised to personally shoot any man who fired prematurely, and such was his reputation with the Royal Army that no single weapon was discharged until his little Irish wheel-lock spat. By then, the bunches of clansmen were close, deadly close, some only fifty yards distant, and the double-charged swivels wrought pure horror in their tight ranks. While the guns were reloaded, the best musketeers loosed at the Scots still charging, being handed fresh, primed muskets by those poorer shots assigned to load for the shooters.

  The swivels roared double death again, canister this time as the Scots were closer, and then the horse pistols joined the muskets in covering the reloading. Once more did the swivels bark, before the mob of Highlanders faded back into the mists that had spawned them. Not one attacker had come closer than twenty yards.

  But they tried once more, only a half hour later, and with equally disastrous results. But that was enough for even the stubborn Scots. Foster and his little command were unmolested for the remainder of the night, while, dim with distance, the clash of steel, the shouts and screams, an occasional drum roll or bugle blare, and the ceaseless caterwauling of the bagpipes testified to the ongoing battle.

  Under the bright, morning sun, the wagon fort lay secure. But for hundreds of yards in every direction from it the earth was thickly scattered with corpses clad in stained and rent tartan. Closer in, the dead lay in windrows and, closer still, in mangled heaps of gray flesh. Exhausted pikemen stumbled about among them, blinking to keep red-rimmed eyes open, driving their leaf-shaped points down with a grunt in the mercy stroke wherever there was sign of remaining life.

  Reichsherzog Wolfgang—his fine armor dented, his boots and clothing slashed and stained—leaned against a wagon wheel, chewing salt bacon and taking in the scene. Foster stood beside him, feeling sick.

  "Gross Gott, Bass, such a battle never before have I to see. Fighters those Schottlanders be, by the Virgin's toenails, but no brains have they got, ja. Lost vas the day for them ven your squadron their right ving routed. Lost most certainly vas the day for them ven you disrupted at a crucial moment for their central attack the reinforcing. Und vhile your jungen behind them galumped, that fool of a king held back his reserves until far too late it vas to anything save mit them."

  "Und now, this" He waved one bare, bruised hand at the carnage. "Vasted are your talents, mein freund, vasted. Such a Soldner vould you make, ja. Consider it you must vonce these vars vun be."

  Finally, exhaustion and alcohol overcame Foster's pains enough for him to sleep until he was awakened by the straining sextet of troopers who bore Webster's massive weight into the tent. The big man's body was covered from head to foot with slimy, brown mud, and he was dripping foul-smelling water and fouler curses.

  "Goddamm it, Bud Webster, I thought you were finally out of my hair for good. Somebody told me you were dead. Now you come roaring in here and wake me out of the best, and only, sleep I've had in—"

  Webster almost screamed when the troopers placed him on the ground, and Foster abruptly ordered, "You, there, Allison, isn't it? Fetch my man, Nugai, in here. At the double, trooper!"

  Between grunts and groans, between wheezes of choked-backed cries as Nugai and the troopers stripped his armor and boots and clothing from off the fair-skinned body that looked to have become a single blue-black-and-red bruise, Webster told Foster, "Well, thishere galloper brun
g word from Ole Wolfie to swing round wide an' hit the lef and front o' them half-nekkid, screechin' devuls."

  "That was your left, but the Scots' right, Bud," corrected Foster gently.

  "It don' matter a good diddlysquat, do it? Enyhow, we swung wide, a'right, and come back hell-fer-leather and we'uz ackshuly close enough to of pistoled the damn bastids and nex thing I knowed ole Trixie my mare come to rear up and I could feel she's gonna fall and 'fore I could pull leather, she'uz down top o' the mosta me and the onlies' reason this ole boy's still a-kickin' is a-cause the groun' was so fuckin' soft."

  "Then a whole passel of them friggin' Scots come a-runnin' and a-roarin' at us and I think I yelled at the boys to pull back, enyhow, they did, them as still could, leastways. I jest played possum. Them thievin' cocksuckers! They took my pistols offen Trixie's saddle and my good sword and even my fuckin' helmet."

  "Well, ole buddy, I tell you! I laid in thet friggin' swamp all day and all fuckin' night, too. It'uz purely all I could do jest to keep my face outen the dang water and ever' time I seed or heared somma them damn Scots a pokin' round, I jest tuck me a deep breath and let my haid go under. Ever' time I tried a-pullin' out from under pore ole Trixie, it'uz all I could do to keep from howlin' like a dang coyote, the way my dang leg hurt me. And I—"

  "GAWDAMNIRECKON! Bass, you git yore tame slope-head offen me or I'll flat tear him in two. You heah?"

  Nugai had probed the bared, terribly discolored right leg of the big man with gentle, sensitive fingers; now he turned to Foster. "Herr Hauptmann, zee zhigh bone breaken iss undt zee grosser bone ahv zee leg. Set must zhey be undt tight-tied mit boards."

  Foster had to listen carefully to the thick, singsong accent to decipher its meaning, then he shook his head. "Allison, you'd better fetch back some more men, a dozen anyway. Captain Webster is going to take a lot of holding down."

  But Nugai caught his eye. "To pardon pliss, Herr Hauptmann Forster, better vay iss." Rummaging in his leather bag, the Tartar brought out a small brass cup and a leather flask. He poured the cup half full of a thick, viscous, dark-brown liquid, then added an equal measure of Foster's "liberated" whiskey, stirred it with a yellow finger, then proffered it to Webster.