Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Part Five Read online

  It was a spectacular weapon – beautifully made.

  ‘I thought you’d want this,’ Kendal said. ‘I got his gold, too.’

  ‘I’ll split it with you, then,’ Swan said.

  ‘’Course you will,’ Kendal said. ‘I waded in and got it, didn’t I?’ He nodded. ‘I’m going with Hugh. This is no place for an archer.’

  The standard came and stood with him. And one by one, or in clumps, the rest of the men-at-arms came and stood by him – three here, two there. Swan had wanted to tell Kendal to stay. That would seem like weakness.

  And the English archers were by far the best men at the game. They dismounted all together, as if they’d practised, which no doubt they had. Their horse holders rode with them. Then they came forward, looked at the wheat field, and slipped off to the right into the open woods at the edge of the stream. Swan saw Kendal hesitate and then slip into the marshy woods too.

  Grazias and his stradioti closed the column and were the last across. Most of them had bows, and none of them wanted to dismount. Swan told Grazias to stand in reserve.

  By then, the chaos was beginning to resemble a line of soldiers.

  A few feet away, Di Vecchio rolled his eyes. ‘Those Turks don’t know how close they came to massacring a company of fools,’ he said.

  Swan fell to his knees, and prayed. The only prayer he could think of was the paternoster, and before he’d finished, he realised that most of his people were on their knees.

  And the Turks were coming. Their horses – perhaps as many as a thousand horses – made the earth shake.

  They came over the wheat fields like the tide rolling across mudflats. Except that they were faster. And as they came, Swan couldn’t believe their sheer numbers. Clearly he’d struck an outpost – and now some substantial part of the whole reserve must be attacking him.

  Or, of course, Hunyadi had misread the whole situation.

  Or, alternatively, László had taken the wrong road and they were in the wrong place fighting the wrong Turks.

  The Akinjis began to scream.

  Swan flinched as the noise hit him.

  They lofted arrows.

  Behind Swan and to his right, Willoughby could be heard shouting in English.

  ‘Nock!’ he said.

  ‘Loose,’ he called.

  The Turkish arrows mostly fell short. A dozen fell into the company lines on helmets and armoured shoulders.

  The Turks had probably never faced English war bows. The first twenty arrows only struck two or three men, at extreme range – two hundred paces and more. The horses went down – a quarter-pound arrow from a big war bow fell from the sky with enough force to seriously wound or kill a horse. Falling horses wreak havoc on a cavalry charge.

  The English loosed again.

  And again.

  It was heartening – in fact, some of the Italians began to cheer. A surprising number of Akinjis were bowled over, and the visual effect of the oncoming tide was changed – where men were knocked down, it was as if there were eddies in the oncoming wave.

  At seventy paces, the war bows seemed to knock a horse or two over every second.

  At thirty paces, the Turkish charge began to slow. The company was formed very close, and its front line was a wall of steel, two hundred yards long and only two men deep, their backs to the woods and swamp, their flanks protected by the coils of the stream and its banks.

  The only man without a lance was Swan – every other man in the front rank had a twelve-foot spear. Most braced it against their back feet and unsheathed their swords with their right hands. A few stood in other positions – hands high, spear at chest height.

  The men in the second rank – mostly squires and a few of the bigger pages – braced their knights, or even held on to the spear with two more hands. Some had spears of their own.

  Arrows were falling quite regularly. None was falling on the position occupied by the two score English archers. But they pinged off Swan’s helmet and shoulder armour from time to time, arcing high, and Clemente took a light wound when a cane arrow shattered on Swan’s right shoulder and the splinters struck the boy. Men were down.

  At twenty yards, the front of the Turkish charge was wrecked, and the horses were already baulking at the tight ranks of men and their long spears. The bravest of the Akinjis reined up and loosed – point blank – with their deadly horse bows, heavy recurve bows of horn and sinew that Swan well knew could injure a man through armour.

  He took several hits, but none penetrated.

  The wall of dust raised by the Turks rolled over him like a living thing.

  With a roar – a crackling roar like the sound of a mountain avalanche, which lasted for perhaps two heartbeats – the Bohemians fired their hand-gonnes into the front of the Turkish line.

  Swan waited, sword in hand. There was movement out in the dust, and flashes of metal.

  An arrow slammed into his breastplate, and skittered off, tearing links off his mail voiders and digging a trench in his left bicep.

  And then, as if his hearing was restored, he could suddenly hear a man screaming in agony – and another, a cacophony of screams. And a horse – terribly hurt.

  And the smell of slaughter, as if a butcher had gone mad.

  And the stink of Satan – the Bohemians fired again, almost unnoticed in the din. The sulphur reek added an unworldly, supernatural feel to the fight, and the smoke of their hellish weapons lay thick and unmoving to the front of the company, intermingled with the dust.

  Swan’s whole body was on edge – he was leaning forward, his mouth slightly open, his sword in his right hand, point up, and he was not in any particular guard. Even as he thought this he adjusted himself – and still there was no opponent.

  With a terrifying crash, the Bohemians fired a third time into their own smoke.

  ‘Capitano!’ Grazias was calling behind him.

  Swan stepped back. Men closed ranks on either side where he had been.

  Swan fumbled with his visor while Grazias shouted, ‘Ser Suane!’ with increasing urgency.

  Swan got his visor open. ‘Grazias!’ he roared, and the Greek appeared out of the dust and smoke.

  ‘Let us through!’ Grazias begged. ‘Let us charge them!’

  Swan wasted precious seconds understanding, and then more – because again, they had never practised – opening a small hole in his front.

  Grazias cantered through with his dozen stradioti – and another dozen mounted pages, some with crossbows. Swan knew the Greek man must have gathered them himself. He would, if he survived, have to admit that other men had done all the clever thinking this day.

  The stradioti screamed like Turks.

  The dust began to settle several hundred rapid heartbeats after they charged.

  The Turks were gone.

  By then, Swan had discovered that Di Vecchio was lying on his back with his visor open and an arrow through his face. He was dead – dead the moment he was hit.

  ‘He was giving orders,’ Fortebracchio said. ‘And then he was dead.’

  Ser Orietto, Di Vecchio’s other lieutenant, was kneeling by the dead man. He rose. ‘Let us avenge him, Capitano!’

  ‘Horses!’ Swan called. His voice was strong now.

  The loss of Di Vecchio was a major blow. But he was their only dead man. A squire and two pages were hit, but only one other man had taken a heavy wound – a Turkish arrow through his brigantine into his guts. He was as white as snow, and someone had given him the broken shaft of an enemy arrow on which to chew.

  But the Turkish arrows had had surprisingly little effect against the front of his armoured line. This matched his experience in ship actions.

  His mind was working. Clemente brought Ataelus, whose eyes were rolling at the smell of blood. Swan got a leg over the big horse with a heavy push from his page, and then Clemente had to give him the reins. He was not as recovered as he had thought. But Ataelus calmed, and Swan rode into the shade where the English had gathered. T
heir horse holders were just coming up.

  ‘Hold the causeway,’ Swan said to Willoughby. ‘Send your horses back across, and use the marsh. You are our escape route.’

  Willoughby nodded. ‘I’ve got yer back, m’lord.’

  Swan took an offered water bottle and drained it. And then, despite all the protests of his aching body and the effort he knew it would be, he swung down, walked three paces away in the moist ground for courtesy, opened his points and pissed away the water.

  He wasn’t the only man. Some drank the water, and some rid themselves of it, all along the front. Horse were watered in the stream.

  Swan got back up with Kendal’s help, feeling better. He walked Ataelus over to the company standards.

  ‘Two ranks,’ he said. ‘A good wide spread – two paces between stirrups.’

  Ser Orietto waved a mace, and Ser Columbino raised his lance.

  ‘Sound “Forward”,’ Swan called.

  Clemente sounded the call, and the company began to move at a walk across the brazen fields. Swan pointed his horse’s head at what he thought was the south and west. Slowly – very slowly – his company aligned themselves on him.

  And nothing happened.

  They rode almost a mile, and the sun began to move in the sky – past midday and into afternoon.

  There was no sign of either Hunyadi, father or son. No sign of the Turks, either. Swan’s flanks hung in air, and he’d left some of his best men at the causeway.

  Swan saw the buildings of a small village to his front at the same time that he saw horsemen on his flank and more to his front. The men to his front were Turks – or at least, he assumed they were. There were two big mobs of them, in the fields outside the village. They were still almost a mile away, a mere smudge and the sparkle of spear points in the sun-haze and dust.

  The men on his flank were closer, but not much closer. And they looked more like a migration than an army – clumps and other clumps, like open vegetation, but moving.

  Swan ordered his line to halt.

  Ser Columbino, Ser Orietto and Fortebracchio all converged on him. Swan waved to Ser Niccolo Zane as well.

  He rode out well in front of his line.

  ‘Dismount and stand by your horses,’ he ordered.

  Ser Zane nodded immediately, and suited the action to the word.

  The others all tried to show him all the various threats.

  Swan raised a hand for silence – and was rewarded.

  ‘Hunyadi wanted us to pin the reserve,’ he said. He pointed at the far village. ‘If that is Gaj – and it may be – then those are the reserves.’

  Ser Columbino also dismounted. He took a linen square out of his armour and wiped his face. ‘By the risen Christ, my lord – those men – they are too far. We will be swallowed up by these.’ He pointed at the hundreds – perhaps thousands – coming from the west.

  Swan nodded. He prayed briefly.

  He opened his eyes, and saw fast-moving dust approaching. It was two men, riding flat out.

  Swan guessed it was Dmitri and the other Dmitri. Something about their riding.

  At any rate, they were close. Swan inhaled air, saved, for a moment, from making a decision. In fact, the direction from which they were coming told him almost everything, and his mind was working well, now freed – mostly – from the paralysis of fear that had held it all morning.

  He pointed. ‘If these are Grazias’ men,’ he said, ‘then I’ll wager that town is Gaj, and the men we fought are the reserve.’

  Ser Orietto looked at Gaj for a long time. Then he dismounted. He also wiped his face, and a small glass bottle of wine was passed around.

  ‘I agree,’ Orietto said. ‘I think you have it.’

  Swan nodded. He re-mounted, and then stood in his stirrups. ‘We need to wheel to the right!’ he called.

  ‘Christ, this will be a dog’s breakfast,’ Fortebracchio said.

  Swan shrugged. ‘We have time. Let’s get it done.’

  The other Dmitri rode out of his own dust, reined in, his horse shiny with sweat.

  ‘We pursued them right to the edge of the village!’ he shouted. His eyes were alight with triumph. ‘I myself have killed … ah, a hand, two hands of men.’ He leaned down. ‘They are retreating. From ten of us!’

  ‘So those Akinjis are the men we just fought,’ Swan said.

  ‘Yes!’ the Greek said.

  Swan didn’t need to tell anyone how close he’d come to making the utterly wrong decision.

  ‘And they are beaten?’ he asked. ‘All of their thousands?’

  Dmitri wiped his face with his sleeve. ‘By Saint Basil and the risen Christ,’ he said. ‘They are beaten by our dust cloud, anyway.’

  Swan watched his men wheeling, still on foot. It made it easier, for those whose horse-handling was imperfect. It took time – a line almost five hundred paces long does not wheel through a quarter of a circle without some collapses and some loss of cohesion.

  Swan swore that if he survived the day, he would make them practise. He had seldom had a day when he had felt so incompetent.

  But he knew how to act competent. It was like running a confidence trick, or cheating at cards. He made himself smile.

  ‘Let’s get this done. Hunyadi must be driving the Turks towards us. We need to go at them – with as much noise and dust as we can.’ He sheathed his sword and took out his new pick. It seemed like the appropriate tool.

  When the company had faced in its new direction – with its left flank now pointing off towards the distant village and several thousand Turks – Swan ordered them to mount. He placed himself in the centre, and the company, obedient to orders, spread even wider, into a single rank that covered almost half a mile. By that time, the enemy – if they were the enemy – were less than a mile away – perhaps as little as half a mile, although distances in the flat, dust-ridden, sunburnt plain were difficult to measure.

  ‘Horses are tired,’ Ser Columbino said.

  Swan tried to ignore that, and everything else.

  ‘Sound the trumpet,’ he said. ‘Forward at the trot.’

  The line was too long – spread too wide – for good order to be preserved. It shredded away. Moving faster – at a trot – only exacerbated the collapse.

  But they made a lot of dust and trampled a lot of crops. The trumpet sounded again and again, Clemente blowing until his face was an unnatural shade of red-brown.

  ‘Sound “rally”.’ Swan said. ‘Sound it three times.’

  Clemente took a sip of water, and then blew.

  This time, they rallied fast. They’d been expecting it – the Turks were close enough for man and horse to be seen as separate, for armour to be discerned.

  And other horn calls could be heard, as well.

  ‘How tightly can we form?’ Swan asked Ser Columbino.

  ‘Ah!’ Ser Columbino said. ‘The fanfaronade is over?’ He bowed. ‘Truly, you are a great captain.’

  Swan had never felt praise more unmerited. ‘Or a great fool. How close can we form and still charge?’

  ‘Germans form with stirrup to stirrup,’ Columbino said. ‘We all know how to do this.’ He rode along the front, ordering the men to form ‘nel modo tedesco’.

  Formed close, with only the best armoured men in front, they were suddenly only a hundred paces wide. Swan aimed his shortened line at the sound of Hungarian trumpets – a very different sound from the shrill Turkish music he knew so well from listening to Spahis in Constantinople.

  ‘All my life, I have longed to charge the Turk!’ Columbino shouted.

  Swan put his visor down. He wished he had a lance, but he wasn’t willing to take one from anyone else.

  They went forward at a walk. The trumpet called them to the trot, and they stayed at that speed for two hundred paces.

  And the Turks began to loft arrows – and break off.

  In fact, the whole carpet of the Turkish host was shredding – riding steadily south, away from the wall of dust
that Swan’s long line had raised, and now evading his charge. Arrows droned past – he wasn’t hit.

  Nor at first did it seem as if they were going to catch anyone. Thousands of enemy horse flowed across their front – but then they began to bunch up.

  ‘Now!’ Columbino and Orietto yelled, at the same time, in Italian. Without orders, both men set their warhorses to a gallop.

  The whole line surged forward, formation vanishing, as every horse went forward at its own speed. Swan’s horse was fastest, and Ataelus outdistanced them all, so that Swan, without a lance, led the charge by two horse lengths.

  The thick knot of Turkish cavalry seemed to move like flies brushed away from dung – but as they were pushed away, they were clearly hemmed in by something on the other side. There was a flare of Christian trumpets.

  Swan reached a Turk in the dust, shooting over the haunches of his horse, which was rearing and pawing the air in transmitted horse panic. The arrow hit Swan in the gorget – flexed the metal and punched his Adam’s apple so that for a moment he thought he was dead.

  In that moment, Ataelus crushed the smaller horse. And carried on.

  It was not a repeat of the first melee, because no sooner did Ataelus strike home then the whole line of Swan’s Italians and Germans crashed into the flank of the moving cavalry. Panicked faces passed under his hand – and ‘Szent István! Győzelem!’ came clearly through the dusty air.

  But the fight, though sharp, lasted for only three blows of Swan’s pick. The first was a clean miss as his opponent swerved in the saddle like a centaur and escaped. The second went through a man’s helmet – the pick pulled him from his cantering horse, and the riderless horse bolted.

  The third – locked chest to chest in a close press with a Turk or some easterner in more armour – was blocked, a heavy stroke baulked by a strong man. But the Turk’s horse was smaller and couldn’t take Ataelus’s bites and kicks to her legs – the mare tried to lunge away, but Swan had the man by one of his ornate armguards, which Swan had a hand on. He used that as a handle and dumped the man from the saddle. Somewhere in the throw he lost his pick.

  But that was the end of the fighting. The Turks had fled. There was a breeze here, and the dust cleared like a curtain being opened, revealing Hunyadi’s cavalry, most of them still moving east at a fast walk, a long line of four thousand men in just two ranks.