Soldiers and citizens waited nervously as the mounted attackers charged along the wall in groups of fifty, launching arrows at the defenders from horseback. Each group let fly two flights of arrows before peeling off and another group of fifty took their place. The mounted archers continued to harry the defenders in this manner in an unstopping rotation for nearly an hour before they grouped en masse a few hundred yards to the southwest and waited for an hour before resuming their attacks once more.
The city defenders became more confident when they saw that the marauders were not constructing any siege equipment or attempting to gain the walls. Even if they did breach the gates or walls, cavalry lost the majority of their effectiveness inside the close confines of a city. Lyonsgate was the closest thing to a border town in the region, and its defenders were well trained and, coupled with its armed citizens, had the numbers to make the four-hundred or so raiders think twice about trying to sack them.
What they were doing here, the guard and city leaders could only wonder. What did they hope to accomplish with just cavalry? They had no answers but they were not going to take any chances. They could not hope to drive them away with the forces they had, so they sent riders east toward Argoth and west toward Southport where a large company, closer to a battalion, of King’s soldiers were patrolling the roads in search of these raiders.
Sending messengers east presented no problem. The raiders concentrated their attack entirely on the western walls. The city chose its best riders and fastest horses to make a break south, and west in hopes of skirting the marauders wide enough to sprint past and alert friendly forces.
Two more riders and their spare mounts exited the city’s eastern gate and rode around the northern wall along the base of the foothills. They waited for the last sortie to finish its latest harassing assault before making a break toward the west. A dozen riders broke from the group, attempted to intercept, and even launched a few arrows at the fleeing men’s backs, but they were too far away to be of any use. Atop the hills, unseen eyes watched the messengers gallop away in search of help.
One of the pursuing men approached Kayne and saluted smartly. “Sir, two messengers escaped to the west and several more fled unimpeded to the east.”
“Excellent. That should put a pep in the step of Jarvin’s soldiers. This archery practice is becoming exceedingly dull. I think we can expect some relief from our boredom by morning,” Kayne said with a smile.
The two riders pushed their horses for all they were worth for about three miles before slowing once they saw that no pursuit was forthcoming. At mile five, they switched mounts and kept up a smooth canter until their trailing mounts were breathing too heavily and flecks of foam dotted their broad chests.
The two riders flashed each other a smile as they slowed to a walk to give their lathered, overworked mounts a much-needed rest. Once the horses were rested, the riders kicked them into a canter until they came upon the lead riders of Captain Cooper’s over-sized company a few hours later.
One of Captain Cooper’s scouts led the two men back to the head of the approaching army. “Sir, these men say that they have just ridden from Lyonsgate and have news.”
“What do you men have for me?” the Captain asked.
“Milord, horsemen are attacking Lyonsgate, hundreds of them! We broke through their lines to get help.”
“What is your name?”
“Conner, sir. Can you aid us?”
“How many raiders did you say there were?”
“Hundreds, milord; five or six hundred at least. I never saw so many horses at one time. Not sure I ever saw that many in my life all put together.”
Captain Cooper let out a deep breath. Lyonsgate was five or six hours by horse. He had maybe three hours of daylight left at best. Civilians usually exaggerated numbers, but it was close to the four to five hundred horsemen stated in his reports. He had only three hundred horses himself, and he was not about to go charging into battle against superior forces. He would have to have his infantry and archers with him, and to do that they would have to march through the night.
He turned to the two officers next to him. “Tell your men we will not be making camp tonight so we can reach Lyonsgate by daybreak. We will rest for thirty minutes before moving out. Give the men double rations to include wine. I want high spirits but not drunks.”
The two lieutenants saluted smartly and rode down the line, passing the Captain’s orders onto the sergeants who relayed it to the men. Lines formed up at the supply wagons as men received their meals and wine in order to provide them with ample energy for the long night of marching. Despite dreading the continued march, the soldier’s discipline kept the grumblings of dissent at a minimum, and the extra wine helped to keep it that way.
After sunset, Kayne split his cavalry into two shifts so that they could continue to harass the wall’s defenders and still get some rest before the contingent of king’s soldiers arrived. The riders launched flaming brands over the walls throughout the night, more for psychological affect than any real hope of starting a major conflagration.
Just before sunrise, Kayne’s scouts reported that the soldiers were no more than two hours march from the city. He sent the scouts to the men in hiding to remind them of their orders and to prepare themselves.
Finally, all these weeks and months of pointless raiding would be at an end, and they could enjoy a real battle! Kayne smiled at the thought. He had lost perhaps a dozen men to the defenders’ arrows, and there would be many more before the day was out, but such was the life of a mercenary.
Captain Cooper rode at the head of the fatigued columns of marching soldiers. He thought that he may have gotten an hour of sleep while sitting in the saddle, but that was far more than the legs who lacked even that small luxury. They were good men though and disciplined. With his luck, the raiders would be gone before they got to Lyonsgate anyway; such has always been the case thus far. He jerked his attention back as one of his scouts returned at a gallop and reined in just before him.
“Sir, we have seen the marauders. Looks like about five hundred, sporadically launching arrows over the walls, but the defenders have kept them away and out of the city thus far.”
“Excellent, perhaps we can trap them between our forces and the walls and crush this rabble once and for all!” Captain Cooper exclaimed, immediately shaking off all traces of fatigue.
Thirty minutes later, he had his unit arrayed in battle formation. He split his cavalry along each of his flanks. Archers to the fore, backed up by pikemen and halberdiers. The rest of his footmen formed into tight groups of fifty and prepared to surround and protect the archers once they fell back behind the pikemen and halberdiers. Then they could engage the cavalry once the pikemen broke up their charge if they were foolish enough to stand and fight.
A little over an hour after full sunrise, he spotted the walls of Lyonsgate and the milling mass of horsemen just out of the defenders’ bow range. Twin columns of black smoke spiraled high into the brisk morning air where a few fires had apparently taken hold, but it did not look as though the city was in any danger of burning.
Captain Cooper was now close enough to make out the finer details of the enemy and watched as they hastily arrayed themselves for battle upon spotting his approaching army.
“Archers, ready!” he commanded in a pitched command voice.
The archers readied their longbows and prepared to release a deadly rain of clothyard shafts into the charging cavalry.
They are going to stand and fight! Cooper thought to himself as the marauders kicked their mounts into a gallop
“Find your range—loose!” the archer commander barked.
One hundred longbows twanged in near perfect, discordant harmony. The flight was aimed not at the charging horsemen but where the enemy would be given the speed of their charge. It is that kind of skill that took years to hone before an archer was even considered proficient, which is what made them so valuable to any army.
Kayne’s men, despite what most thought about the average mercenary, were well-trained fighters, and they were all fully aware of the standard tactics used in warfare. It was why Kayne drilled the use of nonstandard tactics into his men.
The charging riders burst apart like a school of fish the moment the archers loosed their lethal volley. What should have been a devastating blow was largely negated by the now spread out formation of cavalry. Several arrows still found their mark amongst the charging riders, but Kayne’s losses were greatly minimized by their quick reactions.
The riders converged a moment later into two groups, one to the north, and one to the south, perhaps two hundred yards apart. The standard tactic for cavalry was to charge into the ranks of footmen and use their mounted advantage to hack their enemy to pieces. Instead, they came within range to use their short horse bows. The two groups turned inward and galloped across the front of Captain Cooper’s lines not more than a hundred yards away, making the pike formation that protected the archers useless.
Kayne’s cavalry raked the massed ranks of soldiers with arrows as they crossed. The archers knelt and presented their backs, which sported large, thick shields strapped around their shoulders. The footmen knelt and raised their own shields while the pikemen and halberdiers could only kneel and weather the deadly volley.
Firing from galloping horseback and hitting anything other than the ground is as much luck as skill, and it lacked the concentrated volley of the longbowmen, but the sheer number of arrows and the soldiers own tightly packed ranks enabled Kayne’s men to inflict far greater damage than they had received.
Men cried out as the steel-tipped shafts penetrated armor and flesh. Arrows protruded from dozens of the massed soldiers’ bodies, killing many instantly and sending even more writhing on the ground in agony. Captain Cooper’s men endured two more such exchanges before he decided that he could not afford to continue sustaining such losses.
On the fourth cavalry charge, the Captain ordered his pikemen and halberdiers forward at a run the moment the archers loosed their volley. Cooper’s archers scored more hits now that they adjusted for the marauder’s tactics, but the footmen and cavalry needed to engage them if the battle was to be won by any decent margin.
The archers turned and knelt as the infantrymen charged forward, shouting their loud battle cries. The approaching horsemen released their final volley before shouldering their bows, drawing their swords, and slipping on their small shields.
As the thundering riders drew near, the pikemen set their long spears to receive the charge but, at the last moment, Kayne’s men pulled up short before throwing themselves and their mounts onto the steel-headed shafts. They darted in and took wild swings at the front ranks of pikemen before turning and galloping away again.
Captain Cooper used his cavalry to circle around the flanks of the enemy in an attempt to pin them between him and his infantry. So intent on their mission, few of them spotted the hundreds of men quietly swarming over the low foothills and breaking from the cover of trees until Kayne’s longbowmen began raining down destruction into his northernmost flanking cavalry.
By the time the king’s men realized that they themselves were being flanked by a huge host of infantry and archers, they barely had enough time to turn and set for the charge. Having been spotted, the charging horde of footmen dropped their attempt at stealth, shouted a challenge, and bashed their shields with their weapons, creating an awful din as they raced forward into battle.
The two groups clashed with the sound of an avalanche. Swords cleaved limbs from bodies while spears pierced vital organs and sent men’s lifeblood pouring out onto the battlefield. Ten minutes later, Kayne’s southern forces slammed into the rear of Captain Cooper’s ranks, taking them completely by surprise.
Atop the high Lyonsgate’s high walls, the men who had only a short time before been cheering loudly at the appearance of Captain Cooper’s army looked on in horror as a swarm of enemy enveloped their rescuers.
“By the gods,” the commander of the city’s defenses swore as he watched the horrific scene unfold. “If those men are defeated there is nothing we can do to keep them from laying siege to the city. Order the men to prepare to meet the enemy. On my order, throw open the gates, but keep a heavy repelling party ready to cover our retreat.”
Commander Aaronson took the wooden stairs down to the courtyard two at a time and mounted his waiting steed. He would ride at the head of his own paltry cavalry, just shy of a hundred horses, and a third of the men were militia, not regular army.
With another two hundred men afoot, Commander Aaronson ordered the gates open and the portcullis raised and held. He and his men set forth, pushed by the cheers of the men still manning the walls, though every man with a view could see that the Valerians were still outnumbered nearly two to one.
Commander Aaronson did not wait for his slower-moving infantry. He and his cobbled together cavalry lowered their lances and charged into the southern flank of the mounted enemy. Lances snapped and were dropped as they punched through steel armor and the flesh of men and horses. Commander Aaronson began shouting for the King’s men to retreat to the city as he waved his longsword over his head and hewed off the left hand of a halberdier that stabbed at him from the ground.
The decimated forces under Captain Cooper took up the call to retreat and, rallied by the sudden support, began a fighting withdrawal toward the gates of the city. Commander Aaronson’s infantry reached the melee and drove a wedge between Kayne’s northern cavalry and Cooper’s soldiers to give them an avenue of escape.
Lyonsgate’s cavalry and the remaining horsemen under Captain Cooper formed a thin wall between the Hell’s Legion mercenaries and their routed infantry. The mounted soldiers fought furiously and inflicted grievous damage to the ranks of marauders, but their numbers were far too few and their enemy too numerous to do anything except buy the men a few more seconds to reach the dubious safety of the gates.
As the invaders pressed the soldiers back toward the city, they came within range of the archers atop the wall. Arrows began falling dangerously close to the pummeled cavalry but managed to strike almost entirely within the enemy ranks, giving the few remaining cavalrymen a chance to turn and run for the gate themselves.
Ragged volleys of arrows from Kayne’s archers chased after the fleeing men but most fell short. Kayne ordered his men to stay clear of the town’s arrow fire and retreated to a safe distance as the gates slammed behind the last of the soldiers to enter the city.
Inside the walls of Lyonsgate, the mood was a mixed affair. Only thirty-two of the ninety-four horses under Commander Aaronson returned to the city, and he was not amongst their numbers. Many families would also be mourning the one-hundred and six footmen who followed him to the grave. While the survivors of Captain Cooper’s army found joy at their rescue, only two hundred and fifty-four out of the nearly one thousand made it to the relative safety of the city, and their commander had also given his life to give his men a chance to escape.
Lyonsgate welcomed the surviving king’s men but now faced the daunting prospect of repelling a siege. Fear of such a prospect turned to confusion as the defenders watched the invaders march off toward the south and disappear into the distant rolling hills. Five days passed before the city began to think that the marauders were not returning and began to relax, but the confusion remained. Why did they attack if they had no plans to besiege the city? No one in the city was likely to get an answer anytime soon, probably never.
Kayne led his victorious forces south until they met up with the support personnel and the rear detachment. It was not the total victory he had wanted. He had hoped to crush them utterly but had not counted on the men from the city to face almost certain death to attempt to rescue their rescuers, much less fight with such fury and tenacity. Kayne accepted the fact that he had broken the back of a large portion of King Jarvin’s military might and counted it as a decent victory despite the more than two hundred men he lost.
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Kayne’s forces marched westward and then northward where Duke Ulric planned to load his men onto waiting ships for the voyage north. Only the infantry would be sailing by ship. The beach where his men would embark would not allow the big war galleys to land near enough to get the horses on board even if there was enough ships and space available, which there was not.
Several days of marching brought them to the deserted stretch of coast where the mercenaries could see the tall-masted ships already waiting for them. Longboats were launched almost immediately upon Kayne’s arrival to begin ferrying his men to the awaiting vessels.
The plan was for his men to be taken by ship where they would be unloaded maybe two days march from North Haven onto one of the few stretches of coastline that was not too rugged to do so. Kayne would lead his cavalry northward, avoiding towns and people as much as possible, but it was not vital that his presence remain a secret at this point. His support elements would follow by caravan at their best speed. They would take at least a week longer to reach North Haven, but he would not need them before then. With luck, he will have secured the city by the time they arrived.
Duke Ulric would supplement his forces with over a thousand men of his own who would then slip away once they took the city to rejoin the Duke’s main force so that they could “liberate” North Haven. It is unfortunate that the frigid Duchess would be dead by then, but he would be just in time to rescue her daughter who would join their two cities by marriage. If not, she would suffer the same fate as her mother, and Ulric would simply annex the city.
As much as Kayne despised over-complicated plans and politics, he had to respect the way the Duke had it all worked out. As the hero who saved Brightridge, Groveswood, and soon North Haven, as well as routing the marauders once and for all, his bid for the crown was almost guaranteed to be successful.
CHAPTER 19
Hati stood upon the crenellated roof of the tower alternating her gaze between the grey clouds above just being lit by the rising sun and the hard ground more than sixty feet below. It was early and the sun was peaking above the distant horizon, just barely visible to her keen eyes through the thick but wispy cloud cover.
The Sorcerer's Path Box Set: Book 1-4 Page 132