The Last Banner

Chapter 6: The King’s Measure

The pikes didn't charge.

That was the first lie the songs told about war: that men ran at each other screaming until iron met bone. Real armies walked. They walked because sixteen feet of seasoned ash weighed twenty pounds, and a man who ran forty paces with that weight in his fists was blown before he ever smelled the ditch.

Step. Clatter. Squelch.

Four hundred boots hitting the wet marsh-grass together. The sound had a drag to it—the suck of the Black Bog trying to claim the heels of the men on the left flank.

"Don't look at the points," Leon said. His voice sounded dry, like oats rattling in an empty trough.

Willem Fen was still sitting on his backside in the bottom of the ditch, his split boot tucked under his good thigh to keep the raw heel out of the peat water. "I can't see the points anyway, Leon. I only see their knees."

"Look at their shins, then," Leon told him. He reached down, took Willem's billhook, and drove the hazel-haft two feet into the clay beside the boy's ear. "Hold the wood. Don't let go of the wood. If you get stepped on, don't scream. Men step on things that scream."

Bren Ostler was breathing through his nose with a wet whistle, like a wind-broken horse after a hill-climb. The big boar spear was shaking in his hands, the socket-pin Leon had hammered in two nights ago clicking against the iron sleeve—*tick, tick, tick*—every time his fingers spasmed.

"They've got iron caps," Bren muttered. "Every one of them. Who gives an iron cap to an ordinary foot-man?"

"The Duke of Oakhaven," Tam Cambres said.

The cornet was leaning his back hard against the earthen wall of the trench. The grease-sheen on his leather brigandine had gathered a crust of ditch-dust, and his fine brass buckles were smeared with yellow clay where he'd scraped against the revetment. He had his sword out—the one Leon had bound with greasy bootlace—and the point was digging a little ditch in the mud between his boots.

"My uncle traded wool with the Duke's bailiffs," Tam whispered. "They buy their armor out of the river ports by the barrel. Hundred pots to a crate. They don't fit them to the head; they just put a fistful of dry straw in the crown and hammer the rim until it sits over the ears."

"Then don't hit the head," Leon said.

A dry *thrum* snapped from the parapet above, like fifty harp strings breaking at once.

Leon didn't look up, but he heard the arrows pass. An ash-shaft loosed from a six-foot war-bow didn't whistle; it hissed, like water thrown on a forge-rake.

Two hundred paces out, the front rank of the Vessian square didn't flinch. The third rank did. A man on the left file caught an iron broadhead through the throat-latch of his quilted coat. He didn't drop his pike immediately. The weight of the long ash shaft levered him forward, the butt digging into the turf, so that for three paces he stumbled onward with the wood holding him upright before he pitched sideways into the nettles.

The man behind him stepped over his hips without breaking the stride. *Step. Clatter. Squelch.*

"Mark two hundred!" the archer-serjeant yelled from the rampart. "Loose!"

Another hiss. More men went down, but in a square of four hundred, five falling men were just five holes that closed before the grass stopped shaking.

"They're coming for the ditch-bridge," Leon said.

Bren wiped his nose with the back of his hand, leaving a smear of gray mucus across his upper lip. "The bridge is burned, you said."

"The stringers are still there," Leon said, pointing with his chin toward the causeway sixty paces to their right. "The oak baulks didn't burn through. You can see the black timber sticking out of the mud. If they put hurdles across the charcoal, they have a road straight to the iron gate."

"Let them have the gate," Bren whined. "The gate has three bolts and an oak bar as thick as my waist."

"And two thousand of us outside it," Leon said.

The first Vessian rank hit the eighty-pace mark.

Now Leon could see their faces. They weren't monsters from the northern crags; they were men who looked like the weavers from the lower valley—thin-jawed, hollow under the cheekbones, with eyes that stayed fixed on the dirt four feet ahead of their boots. Most of them had gray woolen rags tied under their chin-straps to keep the rough iron of their pot-helmets from chewing the skin off their jawbones.

A horn blew from the middle of their square—one high, hard scream.

The sixteen-foot pikes came down.

They didn't come down one by one; the whole front three ranks leveled their points in a single, greasy wave that blocked out the gray sky beyond them. The iron tips—four inches of triangular steel, clean and bright from the grease-rag—looked like an iron harrow dragged over an oat field.

"Brace!" Corporal Karr shrieked from thirty paces down the trench. The old man was standing on an upturned bread-cask, his notched billhook held crosswise before his chest. "Put your backs to the dirt! Don't let the points get under your armpits!"

A boy from the next village down—a weaver's lad named Sim whose mother sold dried plums at Michaelmas—dropped his sharpened stake, turned around, and tried to scramble up the revetment toward the high wall.

He got his knees onto the second hurdle before an archer on the palisade leaned over the timber, caught him by the hair, and drew a short skinning knife across the back of the boy's neck.

The boy dropped back into the mud with a wet, bubbling cough, his fingers clawing at the ditch-sludge until his forehead hit the willow roots.

"Nobody leaves the ditch!" the archer shouted down. He was an old man with teeth like broken yellow shingles, and he didn't look at the boy he’d just killed. He took another arrow from the dirt between his boots, notched it to the hemp cord, and drew to his ear. "General's word! The ditch holds or the ditch gets filled!"

Tam Cambres made a small, strangled sound in his throat. He looked at the boy dying in the hazel mud, then looked up at the palisade where the royal eagles were carved into the gate posts.

"They're not going to let us in," Tam whispered. His mouth stayed open, a thin string of spit hanging from his lower lip. "Even if we break them. They aren't opening the gate."

"We knew that at the river," Leon said.

He reached behind his shoulder, his fingers finding the greasy bootlace that bound his father’s sword to the cowhide harness. He didn't draw it. The blade was too long for the bottom of a six-foot trench; a man who swung four feet of iron in a crowd only cut his own file-mates. Instead, he reached down to the charred willow stake he had driven with his boot-heel, grabbed it two-handed near the base, and wrenched it back toward himself.

The wet wood groaned, the green fibers tearing in the peat, but it held at an angle of thirty degrees—the point aimed straight at the belly-height of a walking man.

"Bren," Leon said. "Your spear."

Bren didn't move. He was staring at the weaver's boy whose blood was already turning the ditch-water the color of weak elderberry wine.

"Bren!" Leon barked, his voice cracking like a dried ash stave over an anvil. "Give me the butt!"

Bren blinked, his heavy chest heaving, and shoved the thick end of the boar spear into Leon's side. Leon caught the wood, dropped his weight onto his left knee in the freezing sludge, and drove the butt of the spear into the ditch-floor, wedging it against the base of a split oak hurdle.

"Willem," Leon yelled over his shoulder. "Sit on the shaft!"

Willem didn't ask questions. He rolled off his good hip, threw his scrawny belly over the spear-wood, and locked his fingers into the hazel wickerwork of the wall.

The first Vessian pike hit the trench.

It didn't strike a man. It struck the top of the revetment two feet above Leon’s head, the broad steel point burying four inches deep into the clay with a dull, heavy *thwack*. The ash shaft bent like a drawn bow, vibrating with a high, singing hum that shook the dirt down into Leon’s eyes.

Then the second rank arrived.

A man in a brown quilted coat stepped right onto the lip of the ditch. He didn't jump down. A soldier who jumped into a six-foot hole with forty pounds of kit was a dead man the moment his boots hit the grease. He stood on the edge, holding his pike short with both hands like a crowbar, looking for something soft to poke.

His eyes found Tam Cambres.

Tam didn't scream. He simply raised his fine, silk-wrapped sword—the one with his grandfather's silver wire—and pointed it at the man’s shins with a hand that shook so hard the pommel rattled against his wrist-guard.

The Vessian thrust.

A short, ugly jab, straight from the hip. The iron tip caught the shoulder-piece of Tam's forty-crown brigandine, tore through the boiled leather with a sound like a wet boot splitting on a root, and drove the boy back against the turf wall.

Tam grunted—a dry, hollow *whuff*—and his sword dropped into the water.

Leon didn't think about his mother's buckle, and he didn't think about the red ribbon he’d left on Elena's wrist. A smith who thought about the plow while he had hot iron under the sledge took off his own thumb.

He rose from the muck on his good right leg, caught the Vessian's pike-shaft with his left hand just behind the iron socket, and hauled downward with the whole eight-stone weight of his torso.

The Vessian wasn't expecting the pull. A pike was made to push, not to be dragged. The man’s balance broke; his iron-capped boots skidded on the greasy grass of the lip, and he pitched headfirst into the ditch, landing hard across Willem’s back.

The air went out of the man with a wet rattle.

Before he could find his short-sword, Leon brought the butt of his father’s wrapped hilt—still inside the greasy harness—down onto the side of the man’s iron pot-helmet.

It didn't crack the iron. It didn't have to. The shock traveled through the metal and the dry straw lining straight into the bone behind the ear. The man’s eyes rolled back until only the yellow whites showed in the dusk, and his hands went limp in the mud, fingers twitching like dying crabs.

"Take his knife," Leon said to Willem, not looking down. "Take his knife and cut the chin-strap. We need the pot."

"Leon—" Willem wheezed from under the dead weight.

"Do it!"

Above them, the sky seemed to open.

A great, tearing roar came from the causeway—not men shouting, but the sound of eighty feet of seasoned timber collapsing into the bog under the weight of three hundred pikes at once.

The bridge hadn't held. The Vessians hadn't put hurdles over the charred baulks; they had simply marched their third square onto the burned oak stringers until the whole span broke like an old floor-beam, dropping two hundred men in full iron straight into twelve feet of black marsh-sludge.

The screaming that came out of the water was different from the screaming in the ditch. It was the sound of iron pots filling with peat-soup, of men clawing at each other's throats to get a boot onto a floating timber, of fifty pounds of armor pulling two generations of second sons straight down into the cold silt where the sheep drowned in winter.

For ten breaths, the fighting along the ditch-lip stopped.

The Vessian ranks behind the trench halted, their pike-points wavering against the brown sky as they looked toward the broken causeway. Even the archers on the high wall had lowered their bows, their hands stiff on the hemp strings, watching the black water boil with bubbles and thrashing hands.

In that silence, a single horseman walked his mount through the half-shut gate of Eastvale.

He wasn't an outrider, and he wasn't General Cassian.

He wore an old-pattern mail hauberk that had been dipped in black pitch to keep the marsh-rust off the rings, and over it a surcoat of unbleached linen with a single black chevron torn off at the shoulder. He had no shield, but across his knees he carried a long, iron-shod pole with a pair of blacksmith's tongs wired to the end.

The horse was Garrick’s old bay mare—the one that had been requisitioned from Harrowden four days before the levy marched.

The rider stopped on the causeway lip, looked down into the ditch where Leon stood with mud to his thighs and blood on his father’s scabbard, and spit into the gap between the burned timbers.

"Varis," the man said.

Leon looked up through the grit and the smoke. "Aye."

"The General says if you know how to rivet an iron hoop to an axle-tree by firelight, you've ten minutes to get through this gate before he drops the portcullis." The man looked down at the Vessian soldier twitching at Willem's feet. "And bring the boy's boots. The Duke's leather is better than the king's."