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?
Remembering the dogged, snarling attacks that the Yorkshire peasants had put in against him in the snow outside York, he thought they might. The men and women out there could see the country over which they were fighting, see its unreaped crops, its burned barns and cut-down orchards. To the children of the poor, food and land were sacred. They had too many hungry winters to remember.
As he watched the battle develop, Shef felt an odd sense of—not of freedom, but freedom from care. He was only a cog now. Cogs had to turn when they were wound. But they did not have to think about the rest of the machine. That would wind, or it would break, and the cog could do nothing about it. It had only to perform its part.
He dropped a hand on Godive's shoulder, standing beside him. She looked sideways at his ravaged face, allowed his hand to lie there.
King Charles, still moving forward toward the ridge of Caldbeck Hill—where from time to time through the rain he could see the taunting banner of his enemies displayed—held up his hand for the twentieth time for his main battle to halt. The leader of his light horse cantered up to him, rain now soaking through his wool and leather.
“Well, Rogier?”
The hobbelar shook his head disgustedly. “It's like fifty dogfights out there all at once. No one stands up to us. We chase them out and chase them out. Then when we reform and fall back they come back after us, or they come in behind.”
“What would happen if we just held together and rode forward? Up there.” The king jerked his thumb at the banner on the skyline a mile away.
“They'd shoot the hell out of us all the way.”
“But only as long as it takes us to ride a mile. All right, Rogier. Discourage these varlets and their bows as much as you can, but tell your men to ride forward in line with the main battle now. Once we have broken their center we can turn and deal with the flanks.”
Turning, the king raised his lance and swept it forward. His riders cheered hoarsely, once, and began to push their horses into a trot.
“They're coming now,” said Shef to Alfred, standing next to Godive. “But it's soft ground and they will save their speed for the last rush.” Barely fifty people stood by the three leaders on the ridge, mostly runners and message-bearers, but he had kept one pull-thrower team by him, with its clumsy, immobile machine. “Swan-stones,” he ordered.
Glad to move after hours of inactivity, the team—men and women together—sprang to their places. They too had only one role to play today. Early in their practicing, Shef's English machinists had discovered that chipping grooves in the stones their engines lobbed produced a strange warbling note as they flew through the air, like the noise of a swan. For their own amusement they had competed to see who could carve out the loudest. Now Shef meant to send a signal to his scattered troops that all could recognize.
His team loaded, braced, loosed. Launched one eerily whistling stone to one flank, heaved the machine round, launched to another. The dart-thrower and crossbow teams still lurking in ambush in front of the Frankish advance heard the signal, hitched up, retreated and swung round to join their leaders for the first time that day. As they appeared one by one, Shef pushed aside the farm-carts which he had set on the skyline, set the machines in the gaps, posted crossbows inside the carts. For every man, woman and machine, a horse or a horse-team stood no more than five yards away, horse-holders ready.
Shef walked up and down the line, repeating the order. “Three shots from each catapult, no more. Start at extreme range. One shot from each crossbow, on the word.”
As King Charles reached the foot of the ridge, his spirits rose in spite of the rain. His enemy had tried to harass and delay him, and now he was counting on the slope and the mud to take the force out of his charge. But the hobbelars had done their job in taking the casualties of skirmishing. And the English still did not appreciate the plan of the Frankish charge. Setting spurs to his horse, he drove up the hill at a canter rising to a gallop, overtaken in seconds by the counts of his bodyguard pulling ahead.
The catapults twanged, black lines streaking through the air, swirls in the massive body of metal plunging up the hill. Still they came on as the levers twirled behind the farm-carts. Again the musical notes, the streaks, the cries of pain from men and horses, the rear ranks hurdling over those who fell. Strange, Charles thought as the obstacle in front of him came into focus. A barricade, but no shields, no warriors. Did they think to stop him with wood alone?
“Shoot,” said Shef as the front ranks of the charge reached the white sticks he had planted that morning. Then, instantly, in a Brand-like roar, drowning the simultaneous thump of the crossbows, “Now run! Hitch up and run!”
In moments the slope behind the ridge was a flood of ponies, crossbows well in the lead, catapults taking seconds to hitch up, one team-leader cursing a sticking toggle. Then they too were away. Last of the throng, Godive suddenly turned back, jerked the Hammer and Cross from its frame, swung astride her gelding, and pounded off, banner dragging behind her like a lady's train.
Eyes glaring, lances poised, the Frankish cavalry swept up to the ridge-line, furious to strike at their harassers. A few drove their horses straight at the gaps in the enemy line, whirled round, stallions rearing to strike with their steel hooves at the foot soldiers who must be lurking there.
No one. Carts. Hoofprints. One single siege-engine, the pull-thrower Shef had abandoned. More and more squeezed through the gaps between carts, some finally dismounting and hauling the obstacles away. The king gaped up at the stout wooden frame from which Godive had hauled the Hammer and Cross. As he did so, tauntingly, the same banner rose again, on another ridge-line above a tangle of wood and gully, a long half-mile away. Some of the hotheads in his ranks, fury undispersed by action, yelled and began to spur again toward it. Sharp orders brought them back.
“I have brought a knife to cut beef,” the king muttered to his constable Godefroi. “But what is set before me is soup. Thin soup. We will go back to Hastings and think again.”
His eye fell on Alfgar. “I thought you said this rain of yours would stop.”
Alfgar said nothing, looked at the ground. Charles glanced again at the high frame from which the Hammer and Cross had been torn, still standing sturdily on its cart. He jerked a thumb at it. “Hang the English traitor,” he ordered.
“I warned you about the machines,” shrieked Alfgar as the hands seized him.
“What's he say?” asked one of the knights.
“I don't know. Some gabble in English.”
On a knoll well to one side of the track of the Franks, Thorvin, Geirulf and Farman conferred.
“What do you think?” asked Thorvin.
Geirulf, priest of Tyr, chronicler of
battles, shook his head. “It is something new. Completely new. I have never heard of such a thing before. I have to ask: who puts it in his mind? Who but the Father of Warriors? He is a son of Othin. And such men are dangerous.”
“I do not think so,” said Thorvin. “And I have talked to his mother.”
“We know what you told us,” said Farman. “What we do not know is what it means. Unless you have a better explanation, I must agree with Geirulf.”
“This is not the time to give it,” said Thorvin. “See, things are moving again. The Franks are retreating.”
Shef watched the heavy lancers turn back from the ridge, with foreboding. He had hoped they would come on again, take more losses, weary their horses and exhaust themselves. If they pulled back now, there was too much chance that they would reach their base and come out another day of their choosing and renew the attack. Instinctively he knew that an irregular army cannot do one thing: defend territory. He had not tried to do so today, and the Frankish king had not tried to make him, sure that both sides desired the traditional, decisive clash. But there must be a way to make him attack. An undefended population all over southern England stood at the king's mercy.
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.
Horn-blasts from both sides. Floundering through the mud, Charles tensed, expecting the counterattack, the desperate last charge. Instead his enemies turned suddenly, all together, and ran. Ran unashamedly, like hares or leverets. Leaving their machines to the conqueror.
Gasping with exertion, Charles realized there was no way to carry the things off. Nor to burn them. “Cut them up,” he ordered. An archer looked doubtfully at the heavy timbers. “Cut the ropes! Do something to them.”
“They lost a few,” said one of his counts. “And they ran like cowards. Left their weapons behind.”
“We lost many,” said the king. “And how many swords and mail-shirts have we left behind us today? Give me my horse. If we reach base with half the strength we started, we'll be lucky.”
Yes, he thought. But we're through. Through all the traps. And half, behind a safe stockade, may be enough another day.
As if to encourage him, the rain began to ease.
Guthmund the Greedy, sweeping down the Channel under oars alone, ignored the rain and welcomed the poor visibility it brought. If he was going to go ashore he would much prefer it to come as a surprise. Also, in rain or fog, there was a chance of snapping up information. In the prow of the leading ship, he pointed off to starboard, called an order to increase the stroke. In moments the longship was alongside the six-oar fishing-boat, its crew looking up in fear. Guthmund pulled the hammer-pendant from round his neck and showed it, noted the expressions fading from fear to wariness.
“We are here to fight the Franks,” he called, using the half-English pidgin of the Wayman camp. The expressions relaxed another degree as the men realized they could understand him, took in what he said.
“You're too late,” a fisherman called back. “They fight today.”
“You'd better come aboard,” replied Guthmund.
As he took in the sense of what the fishermen told him, his pulse began to beat stronger. If there was one principle of successful piracy, it was to land where the defenses were down. He checked again and again: the Frankish army had been seen marching out that morning. It had left camp-guards and ship-guards. The loot of the countryside, Canterbury included, was in the lightly guarded camp. The fishermen had no hope that the Franks would find anything but victory. Still, Guthmund told himse
lf, if his friend and jarl was defeated, it could do no harm to rob the conqueror. And a stroke in the rear might be a vital distraction. He turned to the fishermen again with another string of questions: The fleet drawn up in a bay? The stockaded camp on a hill? The nearest inlet to it? Steep sides but a path?
In the drenching rain the Wayman fleet, rowed now by chained Ragnarsson survivors, pulled one by one into the narrow mouth of the stream below Hastings and its camp.
“Do you mean to climb the walls with ladders?” asked one of the fishermen doubtfully. “They are ten feet high.”
“That's what those are for,” said Guthmund, waving cheerfully at the six onagers being slung over the side by derricks.
“Too heavy for the path,” said the fisherman, eyeing the way the boats heeled.
“I have plenty of carriers,” replied Guthmund, watching keenly as his men, weapons poised, unshackled the dangerous Ragnarsson galley-slaves a few at a time and made them fast again to the onagers' frames and carry-bars.
As the narrow inlet filled with men, Guthmund decided to make a short speech of encouragement.
“Loot,” he said, “lots of it. Stolen from the Christian Church, so we'll never have to give any back. Maybe we have to share it with the jarl, if he wins today. Maybe not. Let's go.”
“What about us?” said one of the chained men.
Guthmund looked at him attentively. Ogvind the Swede: a very hard man. Threats no good. And he needed these men to use their full strength up the steep hillside.
“This is how it is,” he said. “If we win, I'll let you go. If we lose, I'll leave you chained to the machines. Maybe the Christians will be merciful to you. Fair?”
The Hammer and The Cross thatc-1 Page 47