A weak barricade across the street. Left weak on purpose. An invitation. One Brock hadn’t been able to refuse. Broad was no better. He slunk through, keeping low, lips curled back, the low growl sawing at his throat.
A soldier knelt, pointing a broken spear.
“Get back!” he shouted.
Broad took one step and smashed his head open with the hammer. He’d seen men keep fighting with wounds in the body you wouldn’t believe. Make the skull a very different shape, that’s the best way to be sure. Flatten it, shatter it, punch holes right through it.
A window cracked, flames licking up the outside of a building. Broad coughed on smoke, prickled with sweat. Eyebrows slick with it. Blurred shapes loomed up. Pillars. What had been a covered market, its roof ripped away, slates and scorched timbers and chunks of masonry scattered.
There were dead men everywhere. Broad could hardly move without stepping on ’em. Dead men and dead horses, tangled and torn apart. Even the stonework was scarred and pockmarked. Cannons’ work, he reckoned. Cannons filled with smiths’ oddments. A storm of hot metal no armour, no shield and for damn sure no courage could stop. The place stank of smoke and blood, of broken men and smashed-open horses and everything they hold.
Mad fighting here. He saw a man laying about him from horseback. Another dragged from his saddle, hacked on the ground. Two men wrestled over a knife. Black figures against the fires. Devils in hell.
Broad charged into the very midst of it, caught a man full in the side with his shoulder and dumped him sprawling, sword bouncing from his hand. He reeled into someone else, spear clattering against Broad’s back as he swung, too close for the hammer and Broad stabbed with his knife, overhand. It scraped on a breastplate, scratched down an armplate, found the joint between the two and punched deep into flesh. The man tried to twist away, fumbling at Broad’s shoulder, and Broad rammed the dagger through the slot in his helmet, left it stuck there to the hilt as he toppled back.
The first man was scrambling for his fallen sword and Broad caught his clutching hand with a swing of the hammer. Turned it to a shapeless red glove. The man took a breath to scream, bent over and Broad kicked him so hard under the jaw his helmet flew right off and went skittering across the gouged cobbles. Kicked him again, and again. Couldn’t stop kicking him.
There was a cracking sound above. A great mass of stone fell crumbling, burst apart in a gout of fire. One man was flattened, others threw themselves down, reeled burning, trying to slap the flaming embers free. Broad hit another with the hammer so hard, he turned him over in the air and sent his corpse bouncing from a wall upside down.
He caught a flicker of movement, lurched back as a blade hissed past his nose. Lurched back again as the sword came at him the other way, caught it clumsily on the steel haft of his hammer.
They blundered into each other, wrestling, hints of a bearded face, teeth locked in a snarl. He butted at Broad, made him bite his tongue and filled his mouth with blood, but Broad had the wrist of his sword arm, set his weight and drove the bearded bastard back against a wall, and again, mashed his hand against the broken stonework till his sword clattered down.
He freed his hammer, snarled as he swung it at the man’s face, but he slid free, the head catching the wall, twisting the haft from Broad’s buzzing grip. Flash of metal as the bearded man jerked out a knife and Broad caught his hand, tripped on a corpse. They crashed over, rolling through burning wreckage.
Broad came out on top, all four of their fists clamped tight around the grip of the knife, the fire-gleaming blade quivering as they strained at it. Broad twisted it, straining, straining, clenched his jaw and put all his weight on it. The man tried to knee him, snorted as he tried to roll him, but Broad was too strong. He took a hand from the knife to claw at Broad’s face, turned his head to snap desperately at Broad’s hand with his teeth but it was too late.
Broad growled as he forced the blade’s point up under the man’s ear. Forced it up, blood turning his fist sticky, and he wrenched one hand free to peel the man’s clutching fingers away from his face, then made a clumsy fist and beat at the pommel like a hammer on a nail, hammered the blade into this bastard’s head till the crosspiece met his jaw.
Broad staggered up, spitting, gasping for breath. Battle was done here for now, but it’d be back, like waves up a beach. Waves of blood that left bodies as flotsam. He could hear it coming. Screams and clashes. Mad honking, squealing, like pigs rutting.
He saw a tattered standard sticking up above a heap of dead. As he got close, he could make out the lion, the hammers of Angland. One of Brock’s men still held it, with one arm. Sitting propped against a dead horse. The handsome one. Antaup? He was breathing hard, a couple of little holes through his breastplate, blood leaking out to soak his trousers.
Last stand wasn’t a phrase you ever wanted to use about your own side, but that was the look of it. Wounded men. Twisted faces. Desperate shouting. Someone coughed, leaning on a broken spear, coughing blood, and drooling blood, coughing again. The Northman, Jin, had a flatbow bolt in his thigh. He had Brock under the armpits even so, swearing in Northern as he struggled to drag him out from under his dead mount.
“Here,” slobbered Broad. His mouth wouldn’t fit round the human word. All it wanted to do was snarl and bite like an animal. He hooked his arms under the horse’s side and with a growl managed to heave its dead weight up enough for Jin to haul the Young Lion free and sag back, spent.
“Master Broad,” croaked Brock. He looked baffled. Like all this had come as quite the shock.
“Your wife sent me.” Broad frowned into the murk. Everything beyond arm’s reach was blurred. Everything more than a few paces off was just wriggling smears. Crackle of flames to one side. Air full of smoke and settling dust and dying men’s groans. Brock’s leg was a mangled mess, armour crushed and slathered with his blood, his horse’s blood, the knee-plate twisted almost flat.
“Good of you… to come.” Brock lifted his left arm, baring pink teeth as he dragged the battered remnant of his shield from it. “But you can see…” A great nail had punched right through the vambrace, near the elbow, blood dripping from the end. “There’s nothing… to be done here.”
Broad could see that. He could see that very clearly. He looked up at Jin, and the Northman looked back, and no words were any use.
“Go back… to Savine.” Brock was panting between each phrase. “Make sure she gets away.” Like every word was a hero’s effort. “Make sure my child… gets away.”
Broad stood. There were shapes in the smoke. The king’s men, he guessed, moving in to finish it.
He took a fallen sword and pressed the hilt into Leo dan Brock’s hand. The Young Lion nodded to him, and Broad nodded back.
He could do no good here. But then he hadn’t come to do good. He turned away from the killing. Slipped down a ruined side street, and away.
“Shit,” growled Clover, lowering his eyeglass and frowning down towards the smouldering wreck that used to be a town.
“What is it?” asked Flick, over the endless racket of the fighting.
“Best I can tell, the Young Lion’s glorious charge came to grief. Let that be a lesson for you in the value of glorious charges.”
“What does that mean?”