Chapter 61: One Scare Was Enough

Vito reached the top of the rise, and the chokepoint appeared below him.

It had ceased to resemble a battlefield and become more like a threshing floor, if those were made of red mud, broken gear, and dead men. The earth had been churned until wreckage lay everywhere, and the dead now lay in heaps instead of scattered about wherever the fighting had moved on.

The blood had dried enough to start looking like dark pools in the low ground, enough of it to bring flies. Two black shadows circled overhead, patiently waiting for supper.

The shield wall was still there. Battered shields leaned against battered men, their rims bent, their faces dirtied and blackened where iron had struck them, but still there all the same, holding against a mass of men three or four times its size.

Even from this distance he could hear Domenego. His voice had gone hoarse, but he still shoved men into every gap before the enemy could find it.

Up on the rise, the crossbows kept their sole work. The volleys were thinner than they had been at noon, but they had not stopped, which was about as close to a miracle for soldiers.

The enemy levy had begun to change, too. The militia was exhausted, and their resolve spent.

The platoon held position. It always held.

Theirs was beginning to discover that there were limits to this habit. Close to a fifth of the five hundred men who had marched out were lying in the mud.

Vito swept his eyes across the field, quickly.

The Genoese were gone, and no dust rose from the road, either. No banners were coming up to rescue.

Momolo asked beside him. His voice had been stripped of everything except the question.

"Anyone coming to help them?"

"Not that I can see. So that’s all they’ve got down there."

And all they had was starting to look eager to run. He could see it now, as plainly as a face across a table.

The whole mass seemed to lean backward before every push forward, as if a good part of it was already wondering how far the other way it might have to go.

Vito turned. Nine of his picchieri stood close enough to hear him, pikes planted in the ground, waiting for whatever foolishness came next.

"Cazzo. Chin up boys, we’re about to be very stupid."

He looked them over. "We’re going to walk up on their flank, and make nine tired soldiers look like a great deal more trouble than they are. That’s the whole plan, if anybody wants the long version, write to the Doge."

The reply only came in grim nods. The soldiers were too exhausted to argue with a bad idea, provided it had at least some chance of getting them through alive.

"Sì, Ser Barozzi."

One of them lifted his pike from where its point had been dragging in the dirt.

"Whatever gets us the victory."

They moved out at a crouch, keeping low along the edge of the field until the levy’s flank appeared before them, broad and completely unaware that anyone had thought to watch it.

Then the squad came up together from the scrub, nine pikes lifting into the sky.

The first man who saw them dropped his spear and screamed. It was one raw, ugly cry, and it went farther than any order given all day.

The militia around him turned before they had any idea why, then saw the nine figures and understood all at once. The panic ran through them like fire through dry grass, faster than nine tired picchieri climbing out of a hedgerow had any business to cause.

Toward the rear, some soldiers were shouted that they were surrounded, and the lie traveled forward because frightened men rarely stop to check whether a thing is true.

The levy broke.

Spears were thrown aside and shields vanished into the mud. These soldiers shoved and stumbled over one another, some falling hard enough that those behind them went straight over their backs.

For the first time since noon, the shield wall at the chokepoint stood facing nothing but empty, churned ground.

Along the platoon, one footmen broke formation without waiting for an order. He took five quick strides after the fleeing mass, sword already raised.

"Hold!"

Vito’s command cracked out.

"Hold your ground, all of you!"

The soldier stopped, caught between two instincts that had apparently never found a reason to quarrel before this day.

A picchiere’s voice came out hoarse and almost unbelieving. "They’re running, Ser Barozzi. We could take half of them before they reach the gate."

Vito had to swallow his own urge to chase. "With what horses, amico? We’ve no legs faster than theirs, and no men to spare if even a third of them gets its courage back."

He exhaled. "We’ve done enough today."

Far away, one lone rider fought his horse in tight, useless circles, trying to put himself in the path of men who had lost all interest in stopping for anybody.

Melissenos. Vito recognized the robes, the old imperial cut flapping loose as the archon hauled on the reins.

<anno data-annotation-id="a2ccf6c5-a915-0ba0-e04b-2c18f943e5f7" data-title=""Στη θέση σας! Στη θέση σας!"">"Στη θέση σας! Στη θέση σας!"¹</anno>

Not one militia listened.

The archon’s horse fought the bit the whole time, foam streaking its mouth as it reared against the reins, frightened by the same blood and noise that had already driven five hundred men past its rider.

Melissenos tried once more. He wheeled back into the stream of his own retreating army, but the retreat flowed around him, water around a stone dropped into a river.

At last he gave it up, turned his horse toward Chania’s gates, and drove his heels into its sides.

What remained of his army streamed out across the open ground. Soon the field had nothing but the dead, the dying, and men too exhausted to chase either.

The company came apart the instant the last enemy disappeared from sight.

Footmen dropped to their knees in the mud, some praying and some simply too tired to remain standing, and nobody had enough energy left to ask which was which.

Some few seized whoever happened to be nearest and embraced them, filthy and bloodied together, laughing in short, cracked bursts that felt much closer to weeping than either man would have admitted afterward.

Wineskins began to pass from hand to hand at a speed no man would ever have managed to arrange.

"We’re alive! By every saint who ever bothered listening, we’re alive!"

"Tell that to my knees, Marin. They’ve retired without asking me."

Domenego moved through the middle of it, then turned toward the fleeing army and bellowed after them with genuine pleasure.

"Run home to your mothers! Venezia sends her love!

Then he was already back to business. "Get the wounded onto anything that’ll carry them, and find me a count of the dead before the sun gets much lower. We celebrate after the work’s done, not instead of it."

Vito moved through the company, giving one man a word, another a hand on the shoulder, never lingering long.

Victory was theirs.

<annotations style="display: none;">"Take your places! Take your places!"</annotations>