The soldiers in the Frank column sang melodies punctuated with laughter with each step they marched north out of the Roncevaux pass into Francia. Brothers, cousins, and friends, they moved with a flowing martial order honed through hundreds of miles on the march and countless days in battle.
Charles and his retinue traveled among them. With the terminal end of the pass in sight, a weight fell upon the monarch’s shoulders heavier than his shield and coat of mail—a burden that dragged on his bones and threatened to cave in his chest. Riding close behind, Naimon watched the king withdraw further and further into himself. He planted his heels in his horse’s ribs to catch up.
“Something bothers you,” he ventured.
Charles focused his eyes on his counselor as if emerging from a dream.
“I’m sorry, old friend,” he said, his voice dry and cracked. “I slept poorly. Most likely badly digested beef.”
Naimon offered Charles his water skin. The king took it and drank deeply before handing it back.
“Go on,” Naimon urged. “Please, sire, go on.”
“You know me too well, don’t you? Am I but an open book?”
“Nothing so simple, my king,” Naimon replied with a warm smile. “Not just a common book. Rather a richly illuminated manuscript colored by a master of ink.”
Charles laughed, but the sound was anything but cheerful. “Simpler to read events on the page than to make sense of them as they happen. But such is the lot of man, is it not? A divine creature chained to the flesh and subject to the buffetings of mortality.”
“True. And poets, philosophers, and clergy will debate interpretations of things until the final trump. And then the earth will be consumed anyway. But until then we must survive as best we can. I’m your friend and offer you an ear and my heart.”
Charles nodded.
“Well then, that is what we must trust in,” he said. “You see—I had a dream, and in that vision Ganelon charged me, ripping a lance from my hand and shattering it to splinters. Before I could ask him what he intended, I opened my eyes once more and knelt before the altar in Aachen. And as I prayed, a boar and a leopard leapt from the shadows to attack me. But a great hound burst through the cathedral doors. It fought bravely until the other two beasts bore it down in a pool of blood. Yet with its sacrifice, the noble creature saved me.”
Naimon tugged at his beard, salt and pepper eyebrows knit together. “Well, I’m no soothsayer. But could the vision represent peace by shattering the lance of war? And the hound could represent all the brave men who died to secure that peace?”
The haunted shadow refused to lift from Charles’s eyes. “What you say is possible,” he said as he turned to look back at the mountains. “But the chill in my bones refuses to be warmed by it.”
AOI
The hillside was alive with activity as Oliver directed the cavalry to their positions on the wings of the battle line. The marchmen sat upright in their saddles, lances tall and straight, banners defiant in the scattered breeze. Otun strode toward Roland. At his back, a band of Dane archers were braced by a number of their brothers from the Frank infantry. The champion paused from surveying the foothills and pointed to a stone ridge to the left.
“Hide your men there among those rocks,” he said. “That should give you a clear enfilade as they navigate the approach. Plenty of time to teach them their lessons this fine morning.”
Otun bared his feral grin. “Lessons?”
“Yes,” Roland replied. “Teach Saragossa to fear.”
“I give you my word,” Otun growled. “Fear shall sing them to hell. When all this is done, we’ll see if it’s Odin’s maids or your God’s angels who come for the dead!”
Across the hillside, Frank knights, sergeants, and infantry stood in formation, shields and banners bearing the symbols of noble houses—the stag and wolf foremost among them.
The Saragossan host crawled closer.
Marsilion’s army advanced under rich silk banners of exotic houses rippling over warriors bearing weapons and armor of shimmering silver and gold. In the center of the host rose the scimitar-and-moon banner of the emir himself. Marsilion and Blancandrin rode together beneath that fluttering cloth, both clad in armor crafted in distant forges of the East.
The emir scanned the hillside, still partially obscured by shadows clinging to the base of the mountains.
Blancandrin leaned over in his saddle. “They’re so few. Charles trusted the peace would hold.”
“And you who brought this idea to our court!” Marsilion replied with a laugh. “Never fear, it will hold when Charles is deprived of his lance, his sword arm, and his very heart! Then we’ll be in Francia before the spring blooms again, the whole land opened up to us!”
Blancandrin straightened in his saddle.
“Allah preserve us in our greed,” he whispered beneath his breath. His own son traveled with the Franks and would be butchered for his father’s part in the day’s doings. He gauged the distance to the thin Frank line and marked an imaginary spot on the ground a few dozen yards nearer.
At last, when the Saracen line finally reached the mark, he raised his sword to signal the charge.
Saragossa’s horns broke the morning air, and the cavalry lurched forward toward the lower slopes. Blancandrin gritted his teeth against the jarring of his horse’s hooves upon the uneven ground. Around him, beasts heaved breath through flared nostrils as they labored to traverse the long yards to get at the Franks dug into the upper ridge. Too soon, he cursed himself. They could have waited another ten yards.
Then the sky blackened from shadows that reached out from an upper ridge and arrows shrieked down in a sluicing sheet of maim and ruin. Horses and men tumbled to the ground in deafening screams. The charge faltered.
“Keep moving!” Blancandrin harangued his men. “You must get through it to stop them!”
Survivors cantered over bristling bodies and under another shadow of pain and death that darkened the sky. Blancandrin’s own horse reared. Behind him, Marsilion pulled up his mount, wavering among his own guard. With no time to brace the emir’s resolve, the general turned his attention to the ridge.
Across the open ground ahead, a single horseman rode from the front ranks of the enemy. He sat astride his distinctive beast arrayed in scaled armor like a veritable juggernaut. Roland raised Durendal high overhead, the steel catching the sunlight brilliantly, and swept it forward in a gleaming arc.
From the ends of the Frank line, their massive cavalry erupted like a rolling iron wave to bear down mercilessly on the lightly clad Saracens.
Oliver led his horse soldiers over the crest in a thunderous tide, their long lances lowered to strike. With a deafening crash, the Franks collided into the floundering Saragossans and carried through them, trampling men and mounts like blades of field grass. The momentum of the surge drove the Frank cavalry deep toward Marsilion’s pennants. Oliver shattered his lance against a Saragossan trooper and hauled Halteclare from its scabbard, and blade cleaved flesh from bone as the knight urged his steed deeper into the enemy’s tens of thousands.
When the Frank attack finally stalled against the sheer numbers stacked against the ridge, Roland left his position in the center and plunged after his companion. With a primal cry, he cut a trooper from the saddle and parried another’s thrust on the recovery. Veillantif struck a swift kick that crushed the knee of another’s horse, driving the beast to the ground, its rider tumbling into the melee to be lost amid the crush. Saragossans dropped beneath Durendal’s bite as the champion plowed toward Oliver, and the surging battle churned blood and dust into a sludge that clung to clothes and skin.
An impact jarred Roland hard when a rider drove a lance into his shield. But the saddle held, and Durendal sang in a wicked return arc, catching the trooper between hauberk collar and helmet, removing his head in a splash of blood.
The enemy parted before Roland’s relentless assault. Once at Oliver’s side, both men fought with devastating skill. They drove toward Marsilion’s hard-pressed center where the banners now limply signaled lost momentum, carving a swath of broken bodies that caused enemy troopers to turn tail and collide with the ranks behind them. With the Saragossan resolve crumbling, Marsilion’s personal guard rushed forward to fill the gaps with their shields high against the assault. Marchmen, close behind their champion, crashed into the guards and rolled them back.
Roland maneuvered Veillantif through the guards’ desperate counterattack. Their sabers bit into his shield and skittered off his mail, but the undeterred hunter had his quarry in his sights. The emir shouted to rally his men, and Blancandrin advanced to fill the breach but to little avail. Roland charged through, turning the enemy general aside. Oliver rode but a few lengths behind and followed up with a spirited assault, forcing Blancandrin to defend his own life.
Veillantif launched through the gap even as Marsilion shrieked again for aid. The emir dragged his horse’s reins around to flee but not fast enough. In Roland’s hands, Durendal hissed through the air, cleaving the front of the emir’s helm, clawing through his face, and cutting into his armored shoulder. Marsilion pitched back, streaming blood and flailing his arms to ward off further attack. At that instant, the momentum of the assault separated the champion from his prey.
Horns blared, and another wave of Franks rolled from the ridge upon the Saragossans, driving back rank upon jumbled rank and sowing disarray.
Blancandrin beat and stabbed through scattered and isolated Franks to reach Marsilion’s mount. He grabbed the skittish horse’s bridle then spurred for the rear echelons, the emir’s guard straggling after their master’s reeling form. With the turning away of Marsilion’s proud banners, the rest of the army ebbed back down the ridge, and the marchmen cut them down as they ran.
Through the fleeing Saragossans, Roland spied Oliver weaving unsteadily in his saddle not far away. Roland spurred across the wreckage and snatched Oliver’s reins. Bareheaded, face flooded with blood, Oliver lashed out with his sword and struck a solid blow to Roland’s shoulder. The blade parted scales and bit into his flesh.
“Saint Michael!” Roland cried, jerking Oliver’s horse around. “It’s me! Oliver, it’s Roland!”
“Who’s that?” Oliver mopped the blood from his eyes.
Roland pressed Veillantif closer, clenching his fingers around Oliver’s sword arm. “It’s me, brother. I swear it!”
Oliver lowered his weapon. Around them now only Frank cavalry remained on the slopes amid the crying, wretched wounded and dying.
The Franks restrained themselves from chasing after the immense Saragossan army into the plains where their sheer numbers would surely swallow them up. Sergeants spilled over the ridge to pick among the fallen for wounded and dead comrades while Roland led Oliver’s horse toward the ridge. Beneath the champion’s battered helmet, tears tracked down his cheeks.
Across the carnage two horsemen made their way from the staging ground toward the bustle of a camp that too soon had prepared for victory over the Franks. Marsilion swooned in the saddle, and when Blancandrin braced him upright, the emir swam into lucidity, his remaining eye seizing upon his general.
“We have them! Do not fail me!” He clutched at Blancandrin’s mail shirt to remain erect.
Guards rushed to assist their emir.
“We’ll not fail, lord,” Blancandrin replied firmly. “They’ll be dead before nightfall. I swear it.” He released the emir’s horse to attendants and physicians who swarmed Marislion, hurrying him off to the large silk tent at the center of the camp.
He stared after their heedless devotion. “Allah have mercy on us all.”
Blancandrin struggled to regain order on the plains while in the hills above the Franks adjusted their ranks, filling gaps in infantry and cavalry with a stoic professionalism. Otun and his Dane bowmen restocked quivers and hunkered down once more in the rocks just above the main body of marchmen but kept their axes and swords close at hand. The Saragossan charge had accomplished one thing—their ranks had been thinned, and for each one who fell there would be no reinforcements. The stolid men of the north were prepared to step into the ranks of the marchmen as their brothers in arms, and neither they nor the men of the march would give any quarter to an enemy who had betrayed them with trinkets and promises of peace delivered by one of their own. The betrayal was complete, and there would be no mercy on either side.
In the distance, the Saragossans advanced again.
Roland took a deep pull from a water skin, its stale liquid rolling over his tongue and down his parched throat. He wiped his face with the back of his gloved hand. Sweat and dust stung his eyes. Through the haze rising from the plain, he could see a mounted horseman clothed in shadows that defied the sun picking among the torn and broken dead. The rider became more discernible as he drew near.
William’s shade once again rode the field of the dead.
“Father,” Roland began, his voice a cracked whisper, a barely audible supplication, “I’ve so much to atone for.”
Deep in the recesses of his mind, Roland could hear his father’s voice bridge the distance. “My son, when you are the emperor’s champion, you not only wield a sword in his name, you are indeed the sword of God. You do not just fulfill the requirements of honor. You breathe living steel, fearing no man and no weapon—not even the bottomless gates of hell. Only then do you find what you truly seek, my son—redemption.”
Roland’s heart beat in his throat when the Saragossan horns squealed. Veillantif stirred impatiently beneath him. He reached down and patted the steed on the neck. No further words came to his mind, for the Franks beat their weapons on their shields, and their voices raised in defiant martial harmony, “Roland! Roland! Roland!” Those words echoed across the hills as the Saragossans once again spurred their long-limbed steeds into the teeth of the Breton wolf.
An expansive shadow lofted high above the enemy, followed by Otun’s oaths to pagan gods. Then a fury of fletched wood and steel howled from the sky to spill Saracen blood in relentless streams. Horses and men crumpled to the ground. Flight after flight of arrows rained upon them, exacting their frightful levy each time.
Yet the Saragossans continued on through the squall until they collided with the center of the Frank line.
“Hold!” Roland shouted. The Frank wall of iron and flesh braced against the tsunami of horses and lances. The front ranks strained, but those behind pressed forward to steady their comrades. Shield to shield, the line bent but did not break.
“Stand firm!”
With the closing of quarters, the Northmen tossed aside their bows and raced down from their vantage to shore up the center, tall figures with axes eager to part flesh and sinew in mighty strokes. Otun claimed a place at the fore as the Breton line sagged under the intense Saragossan momentum. Roland ordered the cavalry charge from the wings, rolling the Saragossan flanks into their own and intensifying the flow of men toward the harried Frank center.
From within those crushing masses, Blancandrin spied the giant red-haired Dane shouldering to the front of the marchmen line, roaring defiance at men and gods alike, hewing open a Saragossan horse and tumbling the luckless rider against the Frank spears. The general lowered his lance and, burying his spurs into his horse’s flanks, vaulted across thrashing bodies. One of his own officers stumbled into his path, and he heedlessly beat the man aside as he thundered onward. The Dane turned, realizing the danger too late, and Blancandrin drove the cruel barbed lance into his chest with a shattering crunch of steel and bone. The impact threw him to the ground in an eruption of blood. Blancandrin released his grasp on the lance and tugged his saber from its scabbard at his side. The fallen Dane gasped raggedly, struggling to force his shattered body back into the battle line, but crimson spittle frothed his lips, and his eyes became unfocused. His last breath hissed from his torn lungs.
Roland’s lance crashed with a bone-jarring violence against Blancandrin’s shield, staggering both horse and rider in a flurry of splinters. Blancandrin slashed with his saber, but the cut went wide as his horse shuddered and righted itself. Roland cast his own shattered stub of a lance aside, drew Durendal, and spurred back around, raining blow after blow upon the general’s shield until it cracked and split.
“Damned oath breaker!” The champion’s words were stinging in their rebuke.
Saragossans rallied and drove against the marchmen to reach their general’s side. But Roland’s assault continued unabated, raining down blows that broke open seams in Blancandrin’s mail. While the two fought, Oliver charged into the Saragossans and laid about him with Halteclare, and with a titanic will, the unbowed Franks began to push back the Saragossans, step by bloody step.
Blancandrin fended off another round of crushing blows, then shrugged aside his ruined shield and launched his own attack against the champion. Durendal deflected Blancandrin’s curved steel in midair, and Roland pivoted the blade back around into a ringing blow across Blancandrin’s helm. The general reeled as his horse staggered before Veillantif’s own spirited assault. Vision blurred, he swung his blade once more to intercept a high cut, but Roland disrupted the parry with his cross guard and followed up with a mailed fist across Blancandrin’s face. The clangor of battle faded, overwhelmed by his rasping breath. His heart throbbed in his throat.
Durendal struck him across the shoulder, biting raggedly into the links of his scale byrnie. Before he could turn in the saddle, the sword bit again, deeper, its ravenous hunger now tearing at his flesh. A wordless battle cry escaped his lips when Blancandrin swung his saber again, but rather than staving off the buffeting attacks, he only met jarring resistance from Roland’s shield.
Durendal sliced under the exposed edge of his mail sleeve, cutting through muscle and bone. The general’s senses exploded as his forearm dropped to the ground with the saber still tightly gripped in the fist. Only his years of warring made his left hand draw a long dagger to block Roland’s pressing assault. The young Frank danced his mount around him, always just out of reach. Now Durendal bit at his hip, then at his chest, and finally across his back, stealing his breath. Blancandrin struggled to respond when Roland rammed Veillantif against him. The jarring collision caused him to slip off of his skittering horse.
He hit the ground hard beneath the dusty stomp of iron-shod hooves. His own horse reared to escape Veillantif’s kick and came down to crush his ribs. Roland shouted wordlessly overhead then drove beyond, deeper into the Saragossans.
Blancandrin’s last earthly vision was of Roland’s sword rising again and again in a terrible reaping of the Saragossan ranks.
A squad of Saragossan horsemen charged like hounds upon the wolf to meet the challenge of the Frank champion. They drove him further from the marchmen ranks and deeper into the swirling horde. Blades and maces shattered his shield and tore at his mail coat, yet Roland continued his assault, and all about him dead horsemen tumbled from their saddles to be crushed beneath the press. Veillantif lashed out as well, shattering knees and churning more bodies into the ground. Yet still the Saragossans pressed the champion and his beleaguered mount until a trooper’s barbed lance shot through Veillantif’s eye.
The horse fell, pitching Roland to the ground. He scrambled to his feet before he could be trampled, to face an enemy rider thundering at him with saber gleaming in a downward arc. Roland danced aside and drove Durendal up into his torso. He grabbed at the saddle beneath the sagging rider and held tight, using the horse as a shield. The crazed mount bucked and kicked, chasing back those who attempted to close and finish the champion.
A wedge of marchmen, their long spears bristling, drove back the enemy horsemen. Roland jerked Durendal free of the corpse, released his hold on the horse, then dodged to the line where the veteran Franks closed their shields around him. As one, the marchmen drove ahead once more, pushing the Saragossans back upon themselves and down the slopes choked with the dead and the dying.
The leaderless Saragossans broke once more.
The rampant wolf still fluttered defiant over the killing fields, though fewer were the troopers now rallying around the tattered standard. Crows swirled overhead in a thick cloud, providing shade to the remaining Franks and Danes while they bound up wounds and traded out gear with the dead. For they knew beyond doubt that each wave of the Saragossan army, like storm surf, would eventually grind them as so much chaff. For them the outcome was not in question.
Roland searched the wreckage on the slope below their ranks, stepping over shattered limbs and broken weapons until he found Veillantif laying amid a pile of armored bodies, most of them Saragossan. He knelt down, sweeping away clouds of flies, and patted the horse’s lifeless neck, covered with dirt and blood.
“It’s been a long ride,” he murmured as he undid Charles’s silver horn from the saddle. “Rest now. Rest now, my friend.”
He stood with the Oliphant, and his eyes swept the slope, which wept crimson. In the distance, Saragossa’s still-massive army swirled, threatening to reform into another raging tide. Scattered troops coalesced into units that then merged into the main body. Roland turned away and trudged back up the grade.
Roland hefted the Oliphant in his hand—this very horn had hung at the king’s own saddle in battle as well as in peace. It had passed through generations of Charles’s house and had ridden to the ends of the Frank kingdom and beyond, on campaign even to Rome where the pope himself had crowned Charles emperor on a long-ago Christmas Day. Roland’s fingers tightened about the smooth surface. His chest muscles constricted his heart, for he couldn’t imagine his father standing in his place and considering his next action. Then again, the steel in his soul had been forged on different fires than that which had flowed through William. To be the sword of God, he must be willing to be the trump of the king.
He raised the horn, sucking in air that smelled of death. A shadow fell across him, and Oliver struck the horn away from his lips.
“Not now!” he said, anger bubbling up in his voice. “Not now! Why should you, after all this? What of your oath to protect Charles’s withdrawal? Was that for nothing? Have our deaths meant so little that you call him back now?”
“This has not been for nothing. But, Oliver, please—”
“Look at you—look at us covered in blood! Saragossan blood! We’ve engaged the enemy and driven them back! We bought Charles the time he needed to exit the pass. It has been purchased with the final breaths of good men. Our men! Sounding the horn now will only bring us all shame. Sound the horn, and Charles will return—he has sworn to—and more men will die, and your oath, and the deaths of all these men will be meaningless!”
The horn slipped from Roland’s grasp to dangle on the worn leather cord slung over his shoulder. He clasped Oliver’s shoulders with both hands and stared at his friend’s face, covered in blood, sweat, and dirt.
“My brother,” he started. “Oh, God …”
Oliver’s eyes never wavered, crusted as they were with his and his enemies’ blood. He embraced Roland without losing the sternness that clung to his eyes. “Oh, Roland, your prowess in battle—we’ve never seen its like before, and it will never be seen again! Through our lives, we’ve kept faith, you and I. We were companions, brothers. But everything we were ends today, cold and final on this field. No one will live to sing the tales of our deeds. Valor on this battlefield will be forgotten with the dawn. But if you sound the horn now, we will be remembered, as the ones who lost their courage in the final test!”
Turpin approached, chewing at the corner of his filthy mustache, thoughtfully listening to the exchange. His surcoat was stained and torn, his mail battered. Yet his fierce face was colored with emotion. “Sounding the horn won’t save us, Oliver, you are right,” he growled. “We’re all dead men regardless. But still, do it. Do it, Roland! Not to call back the army but because Charles must know we have breathed our last. And if he chooses to return—if he chooses—he will be forewarned. Then he can bear our bodies home with honor—and keep our bones from being picked over by the crows!”
The remaining marchmen, Demetrius in their midst, closed ranks before the gates of Roncevaux. Roland scanned their grim faces. Most he knew well, though here and there he found ones he had only seen in passing on this long slog through Spain. His gaze fell again on Oliver, whose fierce eyes never wavered.
He picked up the horn.
To you, Uncle, I leave my last report. Muscles straining with this simple effort, he raised the Oliphant to his lips and unleashed a long, hauntingly clear note, crisp and defiant. It echoed off the hills, seeming to gain strength with every reverberation, rushing northward to the ears of the king.
On the plain below, the Saracens regained their courage, found their places in line, and charged the slopes once more.
AOI