The Battle of Hackham Heath by John Flanagan
“We’re not,” he said.
Then, as Stott went to ask a further question, Morgarath heard an ugly hiss-thud and a crossbow bolt from above slammed into Stott’s chest, sending him reeling back out of the saddle, dead before he hit the ground.
Morgarath wheeled his horse and galloped away out of range. Typically, he didn’t look back at his fallen officer.
• • •
High on the battlements, on one of the many turrets situated along the walls, Queen Deborah, the Queen Mother, handed the crossbow back to the sergeant standing beside her. He looked at her in admiration. She was gray-haired, and her face was lined and wrinkled. But she had just pulled off a remarkable shot at pretty much maximum range. He began to understand why her son had left her in command of the castle.
“Good shot, ma’am!” he said, but she shook her head angrily, watching the black-clad figure galloping away to safety.
“Didn’t allow enough for the wind,” she said. She glared after the retreating former lord of Gorlan. “Don’t come back, Morgarath,” she muttered. “I won’t miss again.”
25
THE ARMY REACHED THE ASHDOWN CUT THREE HOURS after sunrise.
The Cut was a valley that sloped uphill. Its sides were steep and rocky, and so heavily overgrown with trees as to be virtually impassable. The Cut narrowed as it followed the slope upward. At the top, it was less than fifty meters wide; at the base, one hundred.
Beyond the top was a downhill slope that led north, with a broad highway twisting through the trees—an easily defensible escape route for the army.
Duncan, Arald and Northolt selected a spot almost two-thirds of the way up the valley, where the slope grew steeper and then leveled out before beginning to gradually climb again. The men were set various tasks to create a defensive position. Some were put to cutting and stripping young saplings to form a barricade of sharpened spikes facing out and down. Others began digging a deep ditch across the valley in front of the spikes. An enemy attacking would have to negotiate the steep slope of the hill, then the deep ditch with its soft crumbling sides, before forcing his way through the thick hedge of stakes facing outward.
And of course, there would also be heavily armed soldiers with long spears behind the earthworks, ready to discourage any would-be attacker.
During the night, all but one of the Rangers had rejoined the company. Berwick had been assigned to a fief in the southwest and had the greatest distance to travel. Crowley expected him to arrive sometime late in the morning. He gathered the Rangers, and their six apprentices, in a small group behind the fortifications.
“We’ll split into two groups,” he told them, indicating the earthworks being built. “Each group will take up a position at the end of the line. I’ll command the left wing, and Halt the right.”
“Wouldn’t we be more effective in one group?” Robert asked. “There are only twenty of us, after all.”
It was a reasonable question and Crowley had considered this option. But he shook his head. “I want to catch them in an enfilade from either side,” he said. “If my group shoots first and they turn their shields toward us, they’ll expose themselves to Halt’s group—and vice versa. Besides, our rate of shooting will make a smaller group seem like a big one.”
Robert nodded assent, as did a few of the others. He hadn’t been querying Crowley’s arrangement to be contentious and he could see the good reasoning behind the plan.
Crowley scanned the line of faces, each one shadowed and grim beneath their hooded cloaks. He found the one he was looking for—Denison.
Since his first brush with Halt, Denison had fallen quickly into line and lost his initial propensity to query and dispute orders from the two young Rangers. He had spoken at length with Samdash, Jurgen and Leander, who were all well-known to him from earlier days. He had been impressed by their wholehearted endorsement of the sandy-haired commander and his grim, bearded friend.
Now Crowley singled him out because he was one of the most experienced and longest-serving Rangers in their group.
“Denison, you’ll be in my ten,” he said. “But first I have another task for you.” He jerked his thumb back in the direction they had traveled. “I need you to ride back down our trail for fifteen kilometers or so. Find a good vantage point and keep watch for Morgarath’s army. The minute you see them, ride flat out back to us and let us know they’re coming. That way we’ll have plenty of time to get ready for them.”
Denison nodded, then made a suggestion. “Can I take Cedric along with me?” he asked. “Two sets of eyes will be better than one, and it’ll mean one of us can rest while the other watches. After all, Morgarath could be a few days behind us.”
Crowley agreed instantly. “Good idea,” he said. He glanced at Cedric. “That all right with you?”
The balding Ranger grinned. He was a cheerful enough fellow, Crowley thought.
“That’s fine by me,” Cedric said, then added, “Whose group will I be shooting with?”
“Halt’s,” Crowley said immediately. If anything happened to the two rearward scouts, he didn’t want one of the shooting parties weakened by two archers.
Cedric turned his grin toward Halt. “I’ll look forward to that,” he said. He had seen Halt demonstrate his shooting skills on the practice range and he was keen to see how the Hibernian accounted himself in a real battle. He expected to be impressed.
“What about the apprentices?” Chase asked now. He was mentoring one of the six apprentices and wanted to know where his protégé would be stationed.
“We’ll put them in the middle of the line, behind the barricade. Farrel, can you supervise their shooting?”
The limping Ranger nodded. The apprentices would be using lighter-powered bows and would need an experienced eye to gauge the most effective range for them to begin shooting.
“You won’t mind if I take a shot or two myself?” he asked, with a grim smile.
Crowley smiled back. “I’m counting on it,” he said. Then he slapped his hands together briskly. “Right, gentlemen, we’ve got a lot to do. Let’s get to it.”
The assembly broke up, with Denison and Cedric heading for the horse lines, where their horses were grazing. The rest of the army’s horses were tethered to rope lines. The Ranger horses were left to wander free. No Ranger horse would ever stray from its master. As they saddled the two shaggy, muscular ponies, a thought occurred to Denison.
“What’s your code word?” he asked.
They were going into a dangerous situation, and neither of them knew what emergency might befall them. It might become necessary for either of them to ride the other’s horse, and without the code word neither horse would allow it.
“Here I come,” Cedric replied in a lowered tone. His horse pricked its ears at the phrase and he slapped it affectionately on the neck. “Yours?”
“Upsy-daisy-do,” replied Denison, his look challenging Cedric to comment on the phrase. Cedric couldn’t prevent that grin of his from spreading across his face. Denison was a good Ranger, but he could tend to be a little pompous. Perhaps the horse trainer, Young Bob, had selected the phrase intentionally, to take some of the starch out of him. Wisely, Cedric didn’t joke about it. He merely nodded several times.
“I’ll remember that,” he said eventually, forcing his face into a deadpan expression.
Denison sighed. “Be hard not to,” he replied in a long-suffering tone.
As the two Rangers cantered out of the camp and headed down the army’s back trail, Halt and Crowley were sitting on the grass outside Crowley’s low field tent, adjusting arrows. Each of the Rangers had drawn forty shafts from the armorer’s wagon. They loaded their quivers with a dozen, and kept the other twenty-eight in canvas arrow bags. The arrows had been produced in their thousands in Castle Araluen over the preceding week. They were all made to a standard length, but each Ranger’s dra
Halt had a standard draw length, so he didn’t need to adjust his arrows. Crowley, however, drew his arrows two centimeters less than standard. He and Halt worked in companionable silence now, removing the warheads, cutting two centimeters from the shaft, then resetting the warheads on the shortened shafts. A small pot of glue simmered on the fire between them and they daubed each bare shaft with glue before refitting the warhead.
A shadow fell across them and the two Rangers looked up. Halt recognized the newcomer. He was Wearne, the senior archer from the small company attached to the army—the man who had watched the Rangers practice their shooting.
“What do you want from my men?” Wearne asked, without any preamble. He addressed the question to Halt, as he’d seen him as the commander on their previous meeting. Halt made a gesture to Crowley, deferring to him.
“We’re going to be in two groups, one on either wing,” Crowley said. The archer nodded. It was a sensible arrangement. “I’d like you and your men—how many do you have, by the way?”
“Twenty-eight,” Wearne replied gruffly. “Not many of us, but we’re all good shots.” There was no boastfulness about the statement. It would be pointless to exaggerate his men’s skill at such a time.
“So Halt tells me,” Crowley replied.
The archer turned his gaze to Halt again, who shrugged. “I watched you practice after our men left the range,” he said. “You all shoot well.”
Wearne acknowledged the compliment. He hadn’t seen the Ranger watching them. Then he realized that often you didn’t see a Ranger, if the Ranger didn’t want to be seen.
“I’d like your men in the center,” Crowley continued. “About twenty meters behind the army, on the higher ground. Once we start shooting at the front ranks of Morgarath’s army, I want you to direct a plunging barrage on their rear.”
Wearne considered the idea. Plunging arrows were shot high into the air to come down—plunging, as the term indicated—from a steep angle. It was a skill that Araluen’s archers practiced constantly.
“Sounds good,” he said. “That way we’ll hit them from three directions at once—left, right and above. That should get ’em confused.”
“I rather hope it gets them dead,” Crowley said succinctly.
A humorless smile touched Wearne’s rugged features. “That’d be even better,” he agreed.
“Just wait for the signal before you start shooting,” Halt said. “I’m going to be conducting a little experiment when they start to move up the hill.”
Crowley turned an inquisitive eye on his friend. “You are? And what might that be?”
Halt chewed his lip thoughtfully. “I’m going to feint a cavalry attack on their front line.”
Crowley frowned. “We don’t have enough cavalry for a frontal charge.”
Halt made an appeasing gesture with one hand. “That’s why it’ll be a feint. I’ll take thirty troopers and make it look as if we’re going to charge. I want to see if the Wargals still react to horses the same way they did when I saw them on the plateau. We won’t actually make contact. I’ll bring them back before we hit their front line. But while I’m doing that, I don’t want the rest of you shooting my backside full of arrows.”
Crowley and Wearne exchanged a glance. Both of them smiled.
“We’ll do our best to miss you,” Crowley assured his friend.
Halt raised an eyebrow. “The way you shoot, that should be easy for you,” he said.
26
DENISON AND CEDRIC CANTERED THEIR HORSES TO A POINT twenty kilometers in the rear. As the light began to fade, they selected a tall hill to the right of the trail as their vantage point and urged their horses up to the summit.
From here, they had an excellent view of the surrounding countryside. To the south, the direction from which they expected Morgarath’s army to appear, there was a high ridge four kilometers away. Beyond it, they could see the open countryside and the high road.
“There’s a lot of dead ground beyond that ridge,” Cedric commented. “Maybe we should set up on the ridge itself.”
Dead ground was ground that wasn’t visible to them, by dint of the fact that it was hidden by the ridge. Denison considered the suggestion, but shook his head.
“We’re not sure where they are,” he said. “For all we know, they could be just behind that ridge, and I don’t want to bump into them. We’ll still have plenty of advance warning when they top the ridge itself.”
“Fair point,” Cedric agreed. They loosened the girths on their horses’ saddles. They didn’t want to waste time re-saddling them if the Wargals suddenly appeared.
They settled down in the long, soft grass. Their horses moved to and fro, cropping the fresh shoots. Cedric glanced at the sky and saw that it was clear, with only a few clouds chasing each other across the heavens.
“No need for a tent,” he said.
Denison grunted agreement. “I suppose there’ll be no fire, either?”
The other Ranger shook his head. “It’d be visible for kilometers if someone’s watching,” he said. “And you never know when someone’s watching.”
They had a cold meal of dried meat and fruit wrapped in bread. They washed it down with cold water from their canteens. Luckily for them, they hadn’t developed the taste for, and dependence on, coffee that Halt and Crowley shared.
As the sun began to disappear over the western horizon, the evening grew chilly and they drew their warm cloaks closer around themselves, sitting with their knees drawn up, scanning the countryside behind them in silence as the last of the sun’s rays faded in the western sky.
Then they became aware of a new light source. It loomed over the ridge they were watching, an orange light that reflected in the sky. The light of hundreds of campfires.
“That’s them,” Denison said, gesturing toward the sky above the ridge.
Cedric stood up, shading his eyes, and peered toward the south. “Just over the ridge, do you think?”
But Denison shook his head. “I’d say they’re a kilometer or so back. From memory, there’s a large open space there where they could pitch their tents.”
“Well, at least we know they’ve stopped for the night,” Cedric said.
“True. No sense in our both staying awake. Why don’t you grab a few hours’ sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s your turn to watch.”
“Sounds good to me,” Cedric replied. He settled his knapsack as a pillow, leaned his quiver of arrows against a bush a meter or so from it, then lay down and rolled himself in his cloak. There was a nip in the night air, and he enjoyed the feeling of warmth and comfort that the cloak brought. He kept his bow strung and wrapped in the cloak with him to protect the string from the damp night air. Within a few minutes, he had fallen sound asleep, a skill that all Rangers possessed.
• • •
They changed watch halfway through the night. When Denison opened his eyes next morning, he heard the familiar sounds of the horses pawing the earth and cropping the grass. Their harness jingled softly.
He sat up. There was a familiar smell in the air. Cedric, who was standing a few meters away, heard him move and turned to him.
“Wood smoke,” Denison said, tossing aside the cloak and standing up. Cedric nodded and pointed to multiple columns of smoke rising into the air beyond the ridge. There was little wind close to the ground and the smoke rose to some height before dissipating in the higher air.
“They’ve got their cook fires going,” Cedric said. “Obviously, they’re not in any great hurry.”
“They know where we’re going,” Denison said. It was impossible for an army, even a small one such as Duncan’s, to move through the countryside and not leave a clear trail. “If they’ve got trackers, they probably have
Cedric said nothing. Then, after a few minutes, he glanced to where his horse was standing.
“Maybe we should get back and report to Crowley,” he said. “We know how far behind us they are.”
“Good idea,” Denison told him. “You go ahead with that. I’ll stay here a while longer. There’s something I want to see.”
Cedric cocked his head to one side in a question. “What’s that?”
“I want to get an idea of how fast they’re moving,” Denison replied. He gestured to a grove of trees on the flat ground below the ridge. “Would you say those trees—the ones with the really dark green one in the center—are about a kilometer from the ridgeline?”
Cedric squinted, glancing from the grove of trees to the top of the ridge and back again several times. “Close enough to,” he replied.
“Then I’ll see how long their army takes to pass that point. That’ll give us some idea of when they might arrive at the Cut.”
Cedric pursed his lips. It was a good idea, he thought. “Of course, they’ll move faster this morning when they’re rested and fresh. By this afternoon, they’ll be slowing up.” Denison was studying him with a long-suffering expression on his face, and he realized he had been stating the obvious. “Sorry,” he said.
Denison waved a hand, dismissing the apology.
Cedric turned and strode to where his horse was waiting expectantly. He leaned down and tightened the girth straps, then swung up into the saddle in one easy movement. He trotted the horse to where Denison was standing at the summit of the hill, his eyes fixed on that distant ridge.
“I’ll be off then,” he said.
Denison smiled up at him. “Travel safely.”
Cedric nodded toward the ridge. “You too,” he said. “And don’t leave it too long before you start back after me. Remember, we’ll need every shooter we’ve got.”
Denison patted Cedric’s horse’s neck several times. “Don’t worry. I’ll be on Sparrow,” he said, nodding toward his own horse, who was watching events with her ears pricked in interest. Ranger horses always wanted to know what was going on around them. “She can outrun any band of shambling shaggy bears any day of the week.”