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Robert hadn’t intended to join a cavalry charge. He had come to the north side of Emerson Square with the news that the troops from Walfisk were now in full retreat down Crown Street toward the Bocburg. The army’s whole eastern flank had collapsed, and the western one probably wasn’t doing so well, either.
Sir Alfred had calmly taken Robert’s report, then looked around at the dozens of pikemen, engineers, and archers massed behind the lethal crossbow machine. Some of the men looked back and nodded respectfully, ready for orders. Quite a few averted their eyes, though, glancing at side alleys and no doubt pondering how far they could get if they started running now.
“We’ll need to get this machine back to Addle Street,” said Alfred, waving over Sir Walter Davies. “Form a position around the south side of the Bocburg.” To one of the engineers working the crossbow, he said, “Keep shooting as we move you back. Don’t worry if it affects your accuracy. Accuracy can go to the Void if those people just keep their heads down.”
Then, looking around at Robert and the handful of knights he still had left, he smiled and said, “Let’s give them a chance, shall we? Mount up, and the moment anyone comes across the square, we’ll charge.”
Not even a minute later, Gramiren troops in the livery of Haydonshire and Keneshire poured into the little square from the west along Peabody Street and from the south. Sir Alfred spurred his horse and shot forward, lance couched under his arm like he was on the tourney ground. The other knights gave a cheer and followed. And Robert, who was lightly armored in only a mail shirt and steel pauldrons, drew his sword and joined them.
They hacked and slashed and the big destriers rode down the enemy soldiers and crushed them into a pulp. The Keneshire and Haydonshire men faltered, then broke and fell back out of the square. Some of the knights wanted to keep going, but Alfred, standing in his stirrups, bellowed for them to regroup and fall back. They had done their part and given the retreating Sigor troops a little more time.
As he returned through the square, Robert glanced to his left and saw movement in one of the side alleys. He slowed and looked more closely, expecting to see cowering soldiers. Instead, he saw a woman with her children, holding them tightly to her and shaking with fear. Her clothes and face were gray with dust, and her eyes were wide and red.
“Get out of here!” Robert shouted at her. “Head for the river! Head for the bridges, if you can.”
Then he had to ride on and rejoin Sir Alfred and the rest of the knights.
There was a pause as Alfred and his officers had to sort out all the retreating men into something like a defensive position, spanning all the streets that led north to the Bocburg. Oxen and horses were brought in to wheel the three big crossbows into position. They were set up at intersections, so they could cover the retreat.
Robert dismounted, but there was nothing for him to do. He took a drink of water from the skin on his saddlebags and thought about that woman and her children. They were probably doomed. But then, maybe everyone here was doomed.
He had convinced Alicia to take the children north over the river before dawn that morning. He had been confident she could get them past the converging enemy troops to the little hidden cabin in the woods. He wanted to believe they would be safer there than at the Bocburg with the queen. All morning, he had wavered between thinking he had done the right thing, and thinking he had sent them to their deaths. But maybe at this point there was no right choice anymore. Maybe this was the point where all the choices were bad, and you had to decide how you wanted to meet your end.
Horns sounded, and for a confused minute, Robert had no idea what was going on. Even when he mounted his horse again, he couldn’t see what had happened. Troops were racing back and forth. Alfred was rallying some pikemen. Sir Walter Davies jogged up with a company of archers and crossbowmen, but some of them had no more arrows.
Then off to the west, Robert saw a sudden rush of men in Gramiren black and Severnshire blue surge into Addle Street from the south. They turned, and some bugler sounded the charge. The nearest crossbow, at the corner of Addle Street and Wyld Street, barely had time to swing around and start shooting before it was surrounded. The engineers operating it were hacked to bits where they stood. Some of the Gramiren men jumped up and tried to spin it around, so they could use it on the Sigors. But either they did not understand how to work it, or it had jammed.
Alfred tried to retake the machine with another little cavalry charge, but there were too many of the enemy pikemen now. When Alfred’s knights retreated, the two remaining crossbows launched a withering hail of bolts against the enemy, which drove them back from the captured machine.
The Sigor troops had no time to retrieve it, however. And there was no telling if it could even be repaired now. Alfred gave the order to abandon it, and to move the two surviving machines back to the intersection at Addle and Routhier Streets. At that point, they could still mow down the advancing enemy, but they were only a few yards from the main gate of the Bocburg.
“Once we get them inside,” Alfred reasoned, “I bet Professor Sobol will figure out some way to mount them up on the gate towers, or something like that.”
That was the first time anyone had said out loud that they were going to fall back into the castle. At least in Robert’s hearing. But it made perfect sense. Except, of course, that all their food was in the granaries along the river—outside the castle walls. Robert looked around at the soldiers. There were a lot fewer than there had been that morning. Too few to defend the city anymore. Too many to feed inside the Bocburg, though.
Duke Robert set up his knights around the main gate, as Earl Lawrence and other officers started moving companies of men, bit by bit, inside the castle. It was a tricky business. Someone had to remain outside to defend the retreat. But the men who were left outside looked nervously over their shoulders, wondering when it would be their turn to put the massive stone walls between themselves and the enemy. It could all so easily turn into a panicked rout.
Alfred did his best to keep up everyone’s spirits, though, riding up and down the line and chatting with soldiers he knew. And he knew quite a few of them. He traded little jokes and congratulated men on little feats of bravery that they probably thought no one had noticed. He acted like a general who was about to win a battle, not lose a city.
As he came back around to Addle Street, with Robert riding close behind him, Sir Walter Davies approached on foot, looking a bit perplexed. Alfred asked him what the matter was.
“We took a few prisoners in that last exchange there, around the crossbow, sir,” said Walter. “And one of them told me the oddest thing. Apparently, they think the crossbows are some kind of dark magy. I couldn’t convince him otherwise.”
“We’re in luck,” said Alfred, loud enough for the men to hear. “Apparently there are no engineers or men of science on the other side. We couldn’t have picked a stupider bunch to fight if we tried.”
The soldiers laughed, though by this point Robert could see the timbers of big Gramiren catapults rising in Emerson Square. Even if the Gramirens were idiots, which they weren’t, they had Annenstrukers on their side. And everyone knew Annenstruk had some of the best military engineers in the world. Alfred wasn’t trying to give the men the truth, though. He was trying to give them hope.
Trumpets sounded somewhere deep in the city, and they were answered by horns somewhere off to the west—somewhere much closer. Alfred and Earl Lawrence had only enough time to give a few last orders and move a few last troops before the enemy surged up Addle Street again. This time they had the arms of the Duke of Severn on their shields and tabards. At their head rode an astonishing figure—a huge man with shaggy blond hair and a wild blond beard, dressed in furs and carrying a long axe.
It had been a few years since Robert had seen the man, but Sir Halvor Ingridsson, natural son of Duke Lukas of Severn, could never have been mistaken for anyone else. He laughed as he advanced, shouting insults at Sir Alfred and Earl Lawrence and any other man he could see. As he led his men in a charge, he burst into song, some kind of wild marching chant of his mother’s people, far to the south in Krigadam. And he sang and he laughed as he smashed through the Gramiren lines, hacking men apart with huge, hammering blows. He sliced one archer clean in half at the waist, then cut through a knight’s steel helmet, slicing all the way down into the man’s chest.
The nearest crossbow turned, trying to shoot Halvor, but he was too quick. Several luckless Gramiren knights were skewered as they rode along in his wake. The glass and stone of the building facades across the street were pulverized by the bolts that missed, sending out a shower of shimmering dust. Halvor turned in the saddle and blew a kiss at the engineers working the crossbow.
Alfred spurred his horse at the huge man, heedless of the danger. But even Alfred, with all his skill and courage, was outmatched by Halvor. The big Krigadamite knight moved with astonishing speed for someone so massive, batting aside Alfred’s strokes with brutal efficiency. Robert and Sir Walter and a dozen other knights all moved as one to help Alfred, but Halvor broke off the engagement, riding back up the street and laughing like a boy who had pulled some kind of prank and gotten away with it.
At the abandoned crossbow, he paused and reined in. In a deep, ringing voice, he shouted, “Your puny little king, Edwin, does not frighten me. Nor does your puny little god, Earstien!”
Suddenly, there was a figure beside him in a dark cloak, standing on the platform of the crossbow. It faced Halvor and seemed to be saying something to him. A small white hand appeared from the folds of the robe and shook in Halvor’s direction, like a schoolmistress telling off a student.
Halvor laughed harder than ever and cried, “What business is it of yours who I worship, sorceress?” He gestured toward the Sigor lines with his axe. “Do what you came here to do. Or go away. It is all the same to me.”
The men on the nearest crossbow still in Sigor hands were struggling to reload, grumbling at each other about spring tension and gear timing and how they had a perfect shot at Halvor if they could get the damned thing working again.
Alfred spun around and shouted at the engineers, “Get off there! Now!”
Then Robert understood who the woman in the cloak was, and he, too, shouted for the engineers to jump clear while they still could.
An eerie wail echoed off the buildings of Addle Street, and a strange orange light flickered over the walls and towers of the Bocburg. Then a pair of fireballs, each larger than a man, dropped out of the sky and blasted the two crossbows and all the engineers into bits. Flaming shards of wood and red-hot metal went scything through the nearby soldiers, slicing away heads and limbs and spraying bloody entrails over the survivors.
Back at the abandoned crossbow—the only one now left—Halvor Ingridsson grabbed Lady Jorunn Unset around the waist and threw the hillichmagnar over his saddle. Then he shouted for his men to retreat. Even as bits of burning wood and rope from the destroyed crossbows were still raining down, the Gramiren column and its brutal commander vanished from Addle Street into the alleys to the south again.
For a minute, Robert’s ears were ringing from the explosion, and he could barely hear the screams of the injured and dying. Earl Lawrence and Duke Robert waded into the worst of it, shouting for physicians and for volunteers to carry the wounded inside the castle. Meanwhile, Alfred started organizing a double line of soldiers around the gate—both archers and pikemen. Nobody, not even Robert, wanted to look at the burning remnants of the two crossbows, with the shattered bits of bone and seared flesh splattered around them.
Somewhere to the south, a catapult began shooting. The first shot—a ranging shot—fell short and destroyed the attics of some shops on the other side of Addle Street. The second one went long, and must have landed somewhere in the castle courtyard. Possibly among the wounded who had just been taken inside to safety.
The third shot was perfect and smashed down on the Bocburg wall from above. It hit on the western side of the main gate, between Valamir Tower and the Queen’s Tower. The projectile shattered and rained down rocks and dust on the Sigor soldiers on Addle Street. The wall still looked perfectly intact, but the engineers on the Gramiren catapults knew they had found their mark, and in moments, a steady barrage began, with heavy shot exploding against the wall over and over, every ten or fifteen seconds.
Alfred moved the soldiers to a safer position, then came back and approached Earl Lawrence and the duke, who were sheltering in the gateway with Robert and several other knights.
“What do we do now?” asked the duke, addressing the question to Alfred, not the captain general.
“We hold out as long as we can today,” answered Alfred.
Robert, like the rest of the officers, understood what that meant. They had lost. The Bocburg was going to fall. It was only a matter of time now.