The Gathering Storm (Page 381)

“To arms!” he cried, breaking the spell. “Sound the horn.”

He wore mail at all times, but with battle imminent he allowed his guardsmen to add extra protection, the mark of the heavy cavalry that were his strongest pieces on the chessboard. He stood while Sibold strapped on an iron breastplate over his mail shirt and greaves on his calves. Chustaffus waited, fully armed, with the black dragon banner held in his left hand. The rest of his personal guard clustered behind, mounts saddled and ready. All of them had iron helms and most had greaves and breastplates—his strongest troops. While Sibold armed him, Captain Fulk gave his report.

“Our choices have dried in this heat, my lord prince. We cannot flee without water, nor can we withstand an assault from both town and field with our defense not yet set and the emperor’s army so large.”

As they spoke, stakes were being hastily set in the remaining gaps of the inner defense, between the circling wagons, to prevent a sally out of the town from breaking through their line.

Sanglant looked at Hathui. “Wendilgard’s retreat has cost us. Shall we surrender and beg my father’s mercy? He is renowned for being merciful.”

She lifted her chin. “Truly, Your Highness, if it were King Henry, we might expect mercy. But the man we face will only wear Henry’s face and speak with his voice. I saw what manner of daimone they forced into his body. I heard his voice condemn Villam, but I know King Henry would never have done so. If we surrender, we will be baring our throats to those who will show as little mercy to us as they did to him!” Without leaving him, her gaze shifted focus, seeing onto a scene he could not share: the events which had led her to take refuge with the regnant’s rebellious son.

“So be it.”

Sibold stepped back, having finished, and Sanglant mounted Resuelto and took his lance from Everwin. Raising it, catching the attention of the men making ready to fight, he called out in the voice that would, soon enough, ring above the fray. “Upon every field, there is a victory to be found. Let us find ours.”

Malbert handed up his helm, burnished, trimmed with the figure of a dragon so like the one he had once worn as captain of Henry’s Dragons, back in the days when he had been his father’s obedient son. So he was, still; it was Henry who had changed, not him. Yet did it matter what story he told himself, now that the hour was upon them? Last night, with Wendilgard’s departure, he had felt angry, sullen, worried, irritable. All that sloughed off him now. The decision had been made. He had ridden a long way to reach this moment. Now. At once. The anticipation of battle lightened his heart and lifted his mood. The griffins beat past overhead, heading out over the town.

As he rode with his escort behind him to the southern apex of such siege works as they had had time to throw up, he held his lance so the pennant tied on the shaft could dance in the breeze made by Resuelto’s pace. He was already sweating freely. There wasn’t a breath of wind.

The infantry had dug in to the northeast of the river along a line leading from the bluff where the river left the forest all the way to the shoreline. Because they had wanted to keep a portion of the river within their lines—if this trickle of water over stones still warranted such a noble title—the river split his force. Even over the course of the single day they had camped here the water level had fallen. When he pressed Resuelto down the bank and into the channel, the water came scarcely higher than the gelding’s fetlocks. Companies of Wendish, marchlanders, Quman, and centaurs followed him to the field, muddying what remained of the waters.

The infantry manned the defensive works, such as they were, with some of the ditches only half dug. There were too few soldiers to withstand an attack at multiple points. Still, infantry weren’t the strength of his army. They crossed beyond the defensive works into the dusty open ground where he had room to maneuver, most of it level but crossed by a dry streambed that had once been a tributary of the river. He and a dozen men from his entourage rode up onto a rise from which they could survey the field while his army took their places.

He had thirty centuries of cavalry, more or less. The Quman clans formed up on the left flank and marchlanders on the right. His Wendish cavalry, a motley crew nominally under the command of Wichman but actually controlled by Captain Fulk, held the center—which should have belonged to Wendilgard’s Avarians. What remained as a reserve force spread out as a second rank, broken up in groups of fifty to a hundred riders made up of his marchlanders and renegade Ungrians under Captain Istvan, Waltharia’s picked heavy cavalry under the banner of Lord Druthmar, his own personal guard, and the Bwr. The griffins had flown out over the exposed flats to the water’s edge, where they began to make their ponderous turn to come back in.