Chapter 60: No Room to Run

The lead rider was still spitting mud when one of the picchieri drove a pike through the base of his throat. The iron punched in beneath his jaw, and blood spilled over the shaft as quickly as the mud took him.

So much for the warning he had been trying to give.

Farther down the streambed, the cavalry formation broke apart all at once. There, one horse reared with a pike buried in its chest, blood dripping down its forelegs before it crashed sideways into the horse beside it. Both animals went down together, legs kicking, screaming loud enough to drown a prayer.

Then a third horse tried to force its way out and only drove itself deeper into the mud, its hindquarters sinking past the hock. A picchiere waded in beside its rider and slashed the man’s thighs open to the bone, leaving blood swirling red through the brown water.

Besides them, one more horse that had lost its battle with the mud was shoved around by the animals behind it. It came down hard on a picchiere who was too busy wrenching his pike free of another man’s chest to see it coming.

Vito crossed the distance in three strides, grabbed the man’s collar, and hauled him backward off his feet.

The horse crashed down across the very patch of mud where he had been standing an instant before.

The animal rolled over, screaming, and threw its rider clear. He landed at Vito’s boots, stunned but not dead, and immediately started groping for the knife at his belt.

His fingers closed around the hilt.

Vito didn’t let him try. He drove [Artiglio del Leone] down through the gap between the man’s coif and shoulder, the blade punching through mail and deep into the flesh beneath.

Around them, the ambush had become ugly work everywhere. The pikes went into horses that could no longer dodge and riders who could no longer run, and every thrust came back wet, or didn’t come back at all. More of the enemy disappeared into the mud than anyone on the company’s side had time to count.

Arms stung, boots sank past the ankles, and every man spent the last of his strength buying a few more feet of ground that nobody would ever think to name by dawn.

Off to his right, Vito watched Momolo with a sword in one hand and a dead man’s shield hastily tied to the other arm. He was driving a retainer backward one step at a time and shouting at him in a voice so hoarse that all the polish had been beaten clean out of it.

Then another shadow broke free of the melee and came straight at Vito. Sword up, small shield up, moving with resolve.

Vito’s first slash went for his head.

The man didn’t even flinch. He caught the blow high on the shield’s rim, and the steel screamed across the boss while sparks spat from the impact. Then he struck before Vito had his balance back, a short, clean cut at the place where throat met shoulder.

Vito only stopped it by throwing himself half a step sideways into the mud.

The blade still found him, enough to cut a shallow line across his collarbone, and a hot bead of blood immediately welled beneath his torn collar.

It told Vito this was no frightened man, he knew his trade.

They went at each other again, then again. Their blades crashed together, slipped apart, and crashed together, the steel rang between them while their boots searched for footing in mud that gave neither man anything easily.

The retainer’s shield was always there, somehow, arriving a heartbeat before Vito’s sword reached the place it meant to strike.

Then Vito saw it.

The shield dipped slightly before every cut to the left. The arm dropped first, preparing the blow before the sword ever began its swing.

The next time the shield dropped, Vito moved

He let the cut come and took it across his mail instead of his flesh, the blade scraping hard across the rings with a shriek of metal, then drove [Artiglio del Leone] upward beneath the man’s guard. The shield was still too low to help him.

The blade found the gap beneath the ribs, where the hauberk’s lacing left things thinner than they ought to be. It punched upward into him.

Vito felt the blade catch, then drove it deeper.

The retainer let out one sharp, wet breath and sat down hard in the mud, as if somebody had politely asked him to take a seat.

That part of the fight was over.

Meanwhile, behind the wreck of the cavalry formation, the officer in the splendid surcoat attempted to pull what remained of the column back together. He hauled his horse back into the press and shouted what might have been a command if it had not sounded so much like a plea.

There was no way to listen to him. The riders tried to turn at once and tangled their horses in the narrow water, their horses screamed and slammed into each other, and after that, the retreat became what it was.

A rout.

Vito looked over what remained of the ford without thinking.

Near fifteen of the enemy’s fifty lay in the mud, dead, drowning inside their gear, or too badly broken to sit a horse again that day.

The last of them scrambled of the ford, leaving the streambed clogged with dead horses and retainers. The picchieri, thinned out and bleeding, remained steadfast.

For a little while, the soldiers worked without saying much. They brought the pikes and checked the man beside them before bothering with their own wounds.

One picchieri, Bortolo, was half pinned beneath some dead retainer.

Three men hauled the corpse off him, and two more tore a strip from cloak, wrapped it around his wounds, and pulled it tight to slow the bleeding. The cloth darkened almost at once.

"Still with us, amico?"

Bortolo’s answer was between a laugh and a cough.

"Tell my mother I died beautifully. Tell everyone else I fell in a puddle."

The picchiere muttered as they wrung blood from their sleeves.

"Better than dying for real."

"God knows I’ve watched enough of that today."

Yet, behind them, the fight at the chokepoint had never stopped.

It reached out dull and steady, and much closer than any of them would have preferred.

Vito looked toward it for a moment, then turned back to the fifteen men he had left.

"Cazzo, on your feet. We’re not done."

"Ser Barozzi, some of us are down here discovering religion."

"Bring it with you. The boys held that line since noon, and I mean to walk back into it, not crawl."

Bortolo, half carried between two men, managed what might have been a laugh.

Behind him, what remained of picchieri and one theatrical soldier pulled themselves together and started back toward the noise they had never once been allowed to forget.