Chapter 59: The Streambed’s Secret

Vito came down into the streambed, his boots slipping over stones slick with salt. Before he had caught his breath, Momolo’s voice reached him, pitched low and still large enough to fill the whole dry channel.

"So Achilles sat in his tent, arms folded, sulking like a bride whose husband had run off with the dowry, while better men bled for a glory he was too proud to share. Momolo tells you this because I know the disease, I can see it plain as day on every face here."

Fifteen picchieri crouched along the bank with their pikes planted beside them, and not one seemed pleased to have been compared to Achilles.

The nearest man spat onto the crust of salt.

"Achilles got tired of that eventually. When do we get our turn?"

"Soon."

Vito dropped in among them.

"Sooner than you’ll probably enjoy."

Momolo turned and brightened at once. "Ser Barozzi! Momolo was explaining the tragedy of enforced patience to men in desperate need of the lesson."

"Keep them silent however you have to, amico. Tell them the whole epic of Troy twice if that’s what it takes."

"Twice might cause a mutiny, Ser Barozzi. Even Momolo has limits."

"Then expand those limits quickly."

The grin came easily. He clapped his hands once, sharp enough to end the matter.

"Up. All of you. Now."

The men got to their feet, stiff and grumbling after a day spent pretending they were part of the scenery. Vito looked past them, where the streambed bent and fell lower than the noise coming from the chokepoint could reach.

"So we’re going around, then?"

One picchiere raised his pike toward the chokepoint. Its noise came even here, dull and steady, like surf beating against a ship.

"Take their arses from behind while they’re busy dying in front?"

"No."

Vito started to walk, keeping his eyes on the ground instead of the man who had asked.

"Down past the bend, all of you, and keep low the whole way."

That was enough

Fifteen men brought their pikes and packs and followed him over the dry crust of the streambed toward ground where the salt turned into darker earth. Water had been here more recently than any map worth trusting would have admitted.

He had noticed it from the beach, bent over a chart that no mapmaker of this century ought to have possessed. This very stretch had caught inside him and refused to let go.

A chokepoint only worked if there was no way around it.

This was the way around it.

The picchieri went down into the mud, pikes planted and bodies flat against the bank, when Momolo suddenly went stiff beside him and raised one hand.

"Ser Barozzi."

His voice had fallen completely out of its usual tone, which made it more troubling than a shout.

"There."

Far beyond the chokepoint, past the last of the enemy infantry, movement began to take form through the dust.

Cavalry.

The loose mounted body brought itself together, house colors bright and disagreeable in their variety across the riders’ surcoats. Fifty of them, more or less, swinging wide of the chokepoint and pointing straight toward the streambed.

"As expected."

He watched them a little longer than he needed to.

Whoever was responsible for the cavalry knew this terrain. He had probably ridden every mile of it, and had no reason to imagine that some foreigner cadet who had barely learned the coast’s name knew it just as well, thanks to a chart made out sheer bullshit.

Vito found that thought far more satisfying than it had any business to be.

"Down," he said. "All the way down. Let them come to us."

Fifteen men and one theatrical soldier flattened themselves into the mud and went silent, leaving the streambed with nothing but nature. The wait lasted enough for mud to seep through Vito’s mail and find every joint.

From where he lay, the chokepoint was no more than a smear of dust beyond the higher ground. The noise traveled well across open field, and what reached him told him enough.

The fighting had not slackened, and if anything, it had grown heavier. More shields crashed against shields in a rhythm that refused to quit, and inside that racket Domenego’s voice still came through, hard, forcing some gap shut before it could become a breach.

The volleys from the rise kept coming as well, steady as a heartbeat. The crossbowmen sergeant was conducting his own little war with more patience than any had thought to credit him for.

Nothing was breaking, not yet.

But underneath the noise Vito thought he could hear the militia beginning to crack.

Their march forward no longer washed like the roar of an army that believed it was winning.

It caught. It faltered. Then it tried again.

This crowd could fight bravely for a while, provided it believed victory was near. In Vito’s experience, belief was usually the first casualty once soldiers started to die left and right.

He put the thought away and kept watching the field.

The dust was nearer by then.

The cavalry formation had covered most of the distance while his attention was elsewhere. It came on at a trot, riders loosely bunched behind an officer wearing a surcoat much too splendid for the work he was riding toward.

Beside Vito, flat in the mud, Momolo lowered his voice until it was barely more than breath. "Fifty horses, Ser Barozzi, and fifteen of us. Momolo has faced worse odds before, and it didn’t end well for Momolo."

"Then let’s improve the story."

"A modest ambition. Momolo admires it."

The cavalry kept coming and tack creaked. More dust rose behind fifty sets of hooves while the banners and house colors flashed bright and careless in the sunlight.

None of the riders had the slightest notion what awaited them.

The first reached the wet stretch, and their pace broke immediately.

Hooves that had found a clean rhythm on packed earth began sucking and sliding through water and soft ground. The horses threw up their heads and fought the reins, unwilling to put their weight onto mud that moved beneath them.

Within a dozen strides, the riders careless spacing had come apart. The whole formation lost its form, rather like a frayed rope discovering that it was not, in fact, one rope anymore.

Vito came out of the mud with the others.

Fifteen pikes rose together where, a moment before, there had been nothing but wet ground and old reeds. The iron blades flashed between the riders before they had time to understand what they were seeing.

The lead rider hauled back on the reins and shouted, but the shout broke apart before the words were finished.

His horse struggled for its footing and had nowhere to go but forward, straight onto the pike at its chest. The point punched deep just above the foreleg, and blood burst dark across the wet ground.

The animal’s scream ripped through every other cry on the field as it collapsed, throwing its rider clear into the mud.

A second horse tried to wheel away and only made matters worse. Its hooves churned uselessly in the mud while its rider released the reins and reached for his sword, shouting a warning back toward the cavalry.

It was a warning, but it arrived much too late for the riders behind him.

The pikes drove forward into the ruined front rank, wood and iron jolting hard against flesh and armor as the trapped riders crashed into one another.

The horses screamed and reared, riders stumbled in the sucking mud, and the vanguard folded into the bodies already fallen beneath them. The cavalry that had come to flank the chokepoint and discovered that its own momentum had been spent in mud.

Behind them, the company still held the chokepoint, still bleeding for every foot of it.

Meanwhile, Vito had a fight of his own now, fifteen against fifty.