The Red Knight

‘You seem very pleased with yourself,’ the Abbess said. She was fully dressed and looked exactly the same as she did in the height of a calm day. She had come around the corner by the west tower, attended by stretcher-bearers and a pair of nursing sisters.

‘The enemy has just fallen into our little trap with both feet.’ He turned to Bent. ‘We’ll get one more round off. Then raise both red flags. At that signal everyone – everyone in the garrison except you and the engine crews – attacks down the road. On me.’

The captain then managed to combine a bow to the Abbess with a duck under the lintel of the West Tower door. The valets had Grendel saddled, and the captain took his place at the head of Sauce’s column. Michael, still fuzzy headed and with his ribs burning in his chest, tried to keep up with him.

Jacques was standing by Michael’s horse. ‘You looked like you needed your sleep,’ the man said, with a smile. ‘Don’t get fancy, youngster. Those ribs will kill you.’ He leaned close. ‘So will kissing girls, if it costs you sleep.’

Then Michael was up, Jacques’ hand shoving his rump to get him into the saddle, and he was out of the low stable gateway and into the courtyard. Toby was holding the captain’s helmet while eating a half-loaf of bread, and the captain was pinning something – a white linen handkerchief – on his cote armour. It was very white against the scarlet velvet.

Michael grinned. ‘What is that?’ he began.

‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ said the captain. He winked, took his helmet from Toby, gave the boy a smile, and wheeled Grendel with his knees. ‘Listen up!’ he called.

The sortie quieted.

‘Once we’re through that gate kill everything that comes under your sword,’ the captain said. ‘The trench edge will be marked in fire so remember your route. If you lose me, follow the route. When you hear Carlus sound the recall, you turn and come back. Understand me?’

And with that as a speech, they rode from the gate as the trebuchet sprayed another rain of death out over their heads.

The hour was on the knife edge between day and night, and the trebuchet’s great baskets of stones had obliterated life over a swathe of ground that was roughly the shape of a great egg – creatures had been turned to a bloody or ichorous pulp, and the ground itself was littered with the stones – softer ground had deep pock-marks. Bushes and grass were pulverized. In the half-dark it was a vision of hell, and the sudden burst of balefire in the new-dug trenches added to the terrible aspect.

Especially when viewed through the slit of a closed visor.

There was no fight in the men or the monsters that struggled to win free of the beaten ground, or routed away from the hail of missiles still pelting them from the Bridge Castle. They were streaming for the woods, over a mile distant.

The captain led his sortie well to the south, right along the river, along the smooth ground, and then formed them up in a single rank and brought up his trumpeter and his great black banner with the lacs d’amour and the golden collars – his personal badge – and drew his sword.

‘All the way to the edge of the wood, and then form up on me.’ He had his visor up, and he looked around – Bad Tom was at his back, Sauce to one side, and Ser Jehannes was close.

‘Kill everything that comes under your sword,’ he said again. Michael didn’t think they’d lost a single man getting here. The war machines had utterly shattered the enemy attack. He took a deep breath, and the routed enemy flowed past them, running on exhausted feet – or talons or claws or paws – for the woods.

‘Charge!’ he roared, and the banner pointed at the enemy and the trumpets sounded.

Michael had never been in a charge before.

It was exhilarating, and nothing on the ground seemed to be able to touch them. They swept over the irks and the broken men and a single larger creature, something nightmarish that gleamed a sickening green hue in the first light of the sun, but Bad Tom put his lance tip precisely in the thing’s ear-bole as it turned its talons on Grendel, and his lance tip – a spear point as long as a man’s forearm and as wide as a big man’s palm – ripped its brain pan from its lower jaw.

‘Lachlan for Aa!’ the big man roared.

The monster died, and the line of knights swept over the pitiful resistance and then into the running men – and things.

By the time the sun was above the horizon, they had reached the wood’s edge, and the creatures and men of the Wild were a bloody mangle on the grass behind them – or rather, any they’d chanced on were a bloody mangle, while hundreds more ran around them to the north or south, or lay flat and prayed as the horses thundered over them.

And then the captain led them back to the gate by much the same road, crashing though a line of desperate irks trying vainly to defend themselves with spears which splintered on steel armour. Right through, and on to the edge of the fortress hill, where twenty valets waited with fresh horses.