As the two great armies spread towards each other like a stain the small animals of the Machair were squeezed into the space between. First and only to escape are the pheasants, stupid almost to the last, they flap and cackle into the air just as the Laconic line is about to trample them. The hares now run for the cover they will never find darting backwards and forwards between the Laconic rush and the dead still patience of the Redeemers. The fox that was hunting them also makes a run for it, first one way then the other, terrified, and then is swallowed up, engulfed like the animals outside the ark in Noah’s flood.
This sudden Laconic rush threw the centenars of the Redeemer archers on the left and right. Already the sudden burst of speed down the slight incline to the Redeemer line had caught them out. Seconds of delay made their confusion worse – the steady advance was all they had ever seen. By the time the centenars had heard the order for the release from a furious Van Owen, the chance for two flights of arrows had been lost. Then they recovered, shot, and the two boys watched as the dreadful sharps poured through the air towards the charging men in red. But speed like this had brought the Laconics through the arc so that only those in the rear were hit and many arrows fell uselessly behind.
Now so close the Redeemer archers were forced to shoot flat onto the advancing Laconics and straight into the protection of their shields. Another shock: the mercenaries had themselves hired men to do their fighting for them. Poor archers themselves and having disdained for too long the effeminacy of fighting at a distance, they had brought four hundred hired archers from Little Italy lagging just behind the Laconics on the right, who had taken the brunt of the arrows that had missed the bulk of advancing Laconics. A hundred and fifty were already dead, the others stalled – but now as the Redeemer archers were let loose to fire at will the Italians were ignored and now given time to set themselves up, they poured their fire at the Redeemer archers in their turn.
Havoc. Not expecting archers and little used to taking what they were used to handing out, the Redeemer bowmen were thrown into confusion by a lashing of arrows that landed almost one for one into their massed ranks. The centenars and sergeants shouting above the screams of the wounded and the dying. ‘HEAD DOWN! HEAD DOWN! HEAD DOWN! HEAD DOWN!’ ‘Take care!’ cries out another. ‘Look out! OVER THERE! OVER THERE!’ One Redeemer takes an arrow in the chest but it’s the living man next to him who flinches like a horse that’s felt an unexpected lash. Men duck and bend away at nothing – others just stand and take an arrow in the stomach or the face as if they had been taken completely by surprise. The archers who had so devastated the Materazzi cavalry less than a year before were reduced to lookers-on as the Laconics, barely touched by their arrows, slammed as if with a stepping punch into the ranks of the Black Cordelias. The noise of bigger on smaller shields was more of an ugly clattering bang than a majestic crash. But only the Redeemers in all the world could have taken such armoured strength at such a speed and held. Some gave way along the line, Redeemer and Laconic rolling on top of each other in a clumsy pile, bad for the mercenaries who expected them either to hold or fall as one and getting through instead were slaughtered on the ground by waiting Norbetines. Then the pushing and the shoving began, the shouts and rhythmic calls from either side like the bellowing in a tug-of-war at a carnival. The men at the back throwing their weight behind the men in front who did the same to the men in front of them, shoulders to their upper backs, grunting and heaving the battle into shape all the way to the first line. From so far away on the hill the dark red of the Laconic capes and the many colours of the Redeemer Sodalities seemed like oil and water spilt on a tabletop. But here and there along the dividing line a tiny burst of colour mixed, stayed, and then the intruders were slaughtered or gave way and were absorbed back into their lines.
Then came the second shock: knowing they were facing men who, like themselves, did nothing but fight and learn to fight the Laconics had stolen another trick from their many wars. Out came their new swords taken from the Strouds, nearly forty inches long and steeply curving at the end. It allowed them to cut down easily over the shields of Redeemers and do so with a dreadful force onto the helmet of the men in front of them. Helmets designed to take only a blow or cut were split apart by the force of something like a hammer and a spike. The terrible injuries inflicted with each crushing stroke trembled the lines of the Black Cordelias. Then the final twist of the bezel as the dreadful practised grace of the Laconics came into play. To the Laconic right, packed with the strongest men in any case, the middle line of Laconics at the rear – once they knew the line in the centre would not give – shifted their weight and made it stronger still. While the Redeemer centre and the Redeemer right moved slowly back as the Black Cordelias fell to the curved blades and were replaced by weaker or even less well-armoured men, there was a crushing collapse on their left as the curved swords, the strongest Laconics, and the swift and sudden reinforcement became too much. ‘IS THAT IT? WHAT? WAIT! STAND THERE! STAND THERE!’ The confusion and the collapse and the shouts – most on either side had no idea if they were about to win or die.
Amid the rumbling noise, the screams, the orders, the trumpets blaring instructions and the dead and dying, the Laconic right broke their opponents – those that could do so ran, those that could not were killed and only their bodies slippery with blood and excrement and soil made awkward the turning advance of the Laconics. The mercenaries overbalanced on the bodies underneath their feet, the flabby leadenness of the dead, the clutching hands of the dying and the still noisily wounded, some of them still fighting able to stab at the stumbling mercenaries being pushed from behind and suddenly disordered and vulnerable. Many more Laconics died in that decisive but messy turn than in all their previous ten years of fighting. But once it was done, the battle but not the killing was through. Van Owen watched on from his hill in hopeless horror, unable to do anything but send his thin reserves to die in delaying what could not be stopped. Now as the Redeemers in the centre and the right fought on, the Laconics attacked them from the side and simply but bloodily rolled them up like a carpet at a picnic’s end. Those that did not run died.
For the second battle in a row, Vague Henri and Cale ended up watching a massacre. The Purgators around them had been yelling their encouragement, and became so loud Vague Henri swore at them to keep it down. He was about to point out to them that they were cheering on men who would have applauded at their executions, who regarded them as the living dead, men without souls. It was Cale who realized what he was going to say because he was thinking the same but put a hand on Vague Henri’s arm to shut him up. This time, unlike the fiasco at Silbury Hill, Cale had the sense not to become involved and long before the terrible end he had withdrawn. But unlike the Redeemers that day, he had a stroke of luck.
Of Cale and Vague Henri and their squad of Purgators, some were in tears, others calling out the prayers for the dead and the dying.
‘Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell,’ called out Purgator Giltrap, once the Prayer Sponsor of Meynouth before he was convicted of three of the nine offences against reason. To which, mindful of Vague Henri’s rebuke, the others replied softly: ‘The last four things on which we dwell.’
Chins on their chests, the two boys leading at the front were able to hide their unbecoming smirks.
As they returned towards the Golan, Cale protected the column by moving in a roundabout way along the Machair Fingers, called so because, long, low and thin, their stubby ends were held to point to the way around the heights. The Laconics were no better cavalrymen than they were archers but they had reserves, not used that day, of fast mounted soldiers and before they left the bluff, Cale had seen them in the distance slowly making their way around the far side of Van Owen’s outlook. Cale moved back to the Golan slowly, wary in case he stumbled over the Laconic mounted troops. Along the fingers to either side and just below the crest of these hills he had scouts on donkeys, sure-footed on the uneven sides, keepi
ng an eye out for anything that might threaten them. One of them, just before the fingers’ stubby end signalled Cale to join him at the top. When he made his way up on foot along with Vague Henri, the scout pointed to a troop of Redeemers about twenty strong leaving and heading towards the Golan.
‘Is it Van Owen?’ said Vague Henri, as Cale looked through his spyglass.
‘Must be.’ He handed the glasses to Vague Henri. ‘Look over there.’
Vague Henri searched in the direction Cale was pointing. About thirty mounted Laconics were chasing down Van Owen’s guard, who were, so it looked from their easy pace, unaware they were about to be attacked.
‘Don’t fancy Van Owen’s chances,’ said Vague Henri. ‘What I saw of his guards were old men, preachers and a couple of orthodoxers.’
Cale took the glasses back and watched as the Laconic horsemen closed. Even so hammers were working in his brain. Even without glasses, Vague Henri could see clearly enough. In five minutes the Laconics had closed to about two hundred and fifty yards before Van Owen’s rear guards saw them. Vague Henri watched as they moved at once from a slow gallop to a full one and all but five or six guards around what must have been Van Owen fell back to put a line of horsemen between him and the advancing Laconics. But if the Laconics were no cavalrymen they were still the better horsemen and with the better horses. It was clear the Redeemers would soon be caught and showing some sense at least the guards made for a small hill, little more than a glorified pimple on the landscape. Dismounting, Van Owen’s guards took up a circular position around their general and waited. Cale handed Vague Henri the glasses. Now he could see the Laconics dismount no more than thirty yards from Van Owen and move in quick formation up the slight rise. And then the fight began.
Cale started to move back down the finger. Vague Henri grabbed his arm.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Me? I’m going to save Van Owen. You stay here.’
‘Why?’
‘All right. Come with me.’
‘I’m not going to help that shit-bag. Why are you?’
‘Watch and wonder, Sonny Jim.’
‘You’re a nutter.’
‘We’ll see.’ And with that he was off down the hill like some mountain goat.
Vague Henri waited on top of the finger along with the donkey scout and watched as Cale and his Purgators moved out into the plain and to the fight on what they came later to call Pillock Hill half a mile ahead.
As Cale and the Purgators quickly advanced, Vague Henri realized that Cale had not been as peculiarly impulsive as he’d at first seemed. As long as he was quick he’d catch the Laconics from the rear. Squeezed between the lines of Redeemers their inevitable victory would become almost certain defeat. Besides, he wouldn’t risk an attack directly. Vague Henri was always arguing that crossbowmen could more easily replace archers because bowmen took years to train. The crossbow delivered the same and sometimes better results in only a few months. So it went as Cale dismounted his Purgators seventy yards away from the top of Pillock Hill and stood behind his men, some way back in fact, and started instructing them to shoot the Laconics down with their crossbows. Later that day one of the Purgators told Vague Henri one of them questioned the order because of the danger to Van Owen’s guard. Cale had punched him so hard that, as the Purgator described it, ‘his nose burst like a Bicester plum’.
Whatever the danger to the eminent guard of honour on Pillock Hill, the effect on the Laconics was devastating. Within a minute half a dozen of the red-cloaked mercenaries had fallen. They had no choice but to break off and attack Cale and his Purgators. But with the guard of honour behind they seemed to be swapping one inevitable kind of defeat for another. They charged down the hill, a fearsome enough sight even from Vague Henri’s distance, and were into the Purgators with only a further three casualties. What followed was a terrible fight and hideously close run. It should not have been but Van Owen’s guard of honour, instead of following down Pillock Hill and giving the Laconics the impossible task of fighting front and rear, simply stood and watched their rescuers fall into a desperate struggle for their lives. Despite their smaller numbers, now two to one, the Laconics were armoured – though not as heavily as unmounted troops – unlike the Purgators, and were heading downhill on terrain ideal for their way of fighting. The Purgators no longer held an advantage as it became clear that instead of chasing after the Laconics, as good sense dictated, the guard of honour had decided just to wait and watch. Cale cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled: ‘Help us!’ But the guards just stared at their rescuers, impassive as cows. Cale stood about ten yards behind the Purgators cursing, fit to be roped, as he realized that they had not misunderstood what was needed from them but were deliberately holding back. ‘Why?’ thought Cale. ‘Helping us makes sense.’ But not if you are a general who believes in martyrdom and sacrifice and that it’s vital, above everything, that you survive for the greater good. Already Van Owen and his guard were on their way down the other side of the hill, leaving to head back to the Golan. If he had been Vague Henri or Kleist then Cale could have stayed out of trouble with his marksmanship, picking off the Laconics from a safer distance. But he was not. His only choice was to fight himself. He screamed high with fury at his own stupidity and then raced to the raggedy left hand of the battle and took the first Laconic soldier from behind with a thrust underneath the back of his helmet and through his neck. Coming from the left he always had the advantage – sideways on he leant to the right – being off balance normally being a bad idea, raised his left leg not more than two feet and kicked out at the next man’s vulnerable knee-joint. The man’s scream of agony as the joint snapped was cut short by a kick to the side of his head as he fell. Cale grabbed the two desperately pressed Purgators he had saved and began trying to roll the Laconics up from the side, pulling each Purgator he could rescue around him to form an outflanking wall. At the other end of the line things were going badly for the unarmoured Purgators, who in any case could not match the strength or skill of their better-disciplined opponents. But Cale, furious at Van Owen’s treachery, was a whirlwind of animosity and bile. Without intending to he inspired his men, his courage as they thought, even his love for them, showing in his monstrous and ugly skill. Something in the focus of his talent for killing seemed to oppress even the Laconics for whom violent death was, in all essentials, the point of being alive. His every action so lacking in grace or elegance, in everything except a brutal conviction in each stab or blow that you and you only would fail, that anything you brought to this fight was futile, seemed to cause even the Laconics to lose heart as they were enfolded from the left. They did not show it, merciless as they were to themselves as well as to others, but in the minutes before their deaths they had time to understand that they were sure to lose. Seven became three, three became one, and then it was over. Then the usual monstrosity: the wounded crying out, the numb, the delighted, the cruel finishing of the Laconics still alive. One of the Laconics was only lightly wounded in the leg and the two Purgators were both leery of any danger – a hidden dagger perhaps – and enjoying taunting him as he shuffled backwards away from their jabs. ‘Antagonist bag of shit!’ Not accurate but the worst thing they could think of. ‘Atheist malefactor!’ This was nearer the truth of the Laconics, if misapplied, but it was an odd fact that most Redeemers had no idea that the Antagonists were a splinter of their own religion and believed most of the things that they did. The edge of one of the swords caught the Laconic soldier on the hand cutting deep into the palm and his cry of pain caught Cale’s attention. He raged over towards the two Purgators and pushed them irritably out of the way. The eyes of Laconic soldier, already terrified, widened as he saw Cale standing over him – he crouched with his arms outspread waiting, the blow arriving in an instant, down through the collarbone and sheering into his heart. A horrible cough which lasted seconds and then unconsciousness and death. A kinder end t
han for many over the next few hours who were left to die in agony from their wounds or who were slowly finished off by the cruel or the clumsy. All that horror was still to come for thousands on the battlefield. It is always better sometimes, had said IdrisPukke to Vague Henri once when they were eating fish and chips on a sandy beach on the Gulf of Memphis, to reserve the right to look away.
It was then that Vague Henri arrived, the donkey scout still three hundred yards behind. He looked at the dead men around him.
‘I never saw anything like it,’ he said to the surviving Purgators, eight of them. Cale stared at him knowing exactly what he meant and that it was not a compliment.
‘Strip a pair of them of armour and weapons and quickly.’ Within a couple of minutes they were gone, taking their dead with them.
Despite Cale having come even closer to death than at Silbury, things turned out all right in the end. He learnt a lesson, although as he later said to Vague Henri, ‘I still don’t know what it was,’ and he lived. But the day hadn’t finished with him by any means.
Although the sedge and heathers of the battlefield of Eight Martyrs were robust enough, a fair stretch of them had been churned up and the mud underneath exposed and dragged over. Despite the freezing weather of only a week before, the warm winds from the sea that had melted the snow had grown even warmer. That afternoon it was unseasonably hot, and it brought new life where there was only hideous death. Midge eggs lay buried under the warmth of the sedge and several inches into the mud. Exposed by the battle, heated by the sun, they hatched in their millions and in only an hour they formed a whirling single column the size of the battlefield and rising to over a thousand yards above.
The nearly three thousand Redeemers who survived the carnage and escaped in a ragged mass towards the foot of the Golan looked back and saw something in the air that few of them had seen before – a cloud in the sky moving and shifting like no mist or fog but like something alive. Which, after all, was what it was – now like a weasel on its hinds, now like a camel, now to those who’d seen one very like a whale. But to most, exhausted, shamed, afraid and terrorized it looked like the Hanged Redeemer shaking his head in rage at the dreadful loss and blasphemy of the Laconic victory. And then finally the wind and the causeless flight of the insects changed and the grief-stricken visage of the saviour became for a moment the stern and watchful face of an implacable boy. Or so it later seemed certainly to many – even, after a few days, to a growing number who had not been there at all.