The lumbering wagons had trundled through the night to be here, to set up the mobile forts, each with a goodly trench and earth rampart, and their cannons ready. There were six of them, each considerably larger than the original makeshift one that Vlad's men had contrived.
The mounted infantry were out on the gently rolling hills, along with the Székeler light cavalry, harassing and drawing out the Hungarian heavy cavalry. The Székelers inflicted steady pinpricks of damage and fury, never stopping to allow the greater numbers and mass of their opponents to catch up with them.
In separate little battles, the Croat light cavalry were taking a battering. There were fewer of them than Emeric needed, for one thing. For another, the Székelers had local guides and used the mounted infantry as bait.
By the time the scouts sighted the wagon-forts, Emeric and his commanders were almost desperate for an enemy that would stand and fight. The Hungarian troops had had little respite since the campaign began, suffering small attacks day and night and facing a hostile local people.
For once, Emeric left the tactics to his commanders. They sent some of the Croats forward to probe the forts. Those could be avoided if they appeared too well defended. The Croats came within fifty yards of one of the forts, at which point they came under desultory arquebus fire.
"They're well enough dug in, Your Majesty. I would say they have been using them as reprovisioning points, camps to defend themselves against Mongols. Still, they're just earth embankments, wagons and a few pikes. Something of an abatis, but they're short of trees.
"One of the encampments," the scout added, "the one in the center, flies the flag of the Duke of Valahia."
Emeric grunted his satisfaction. That was what he had planned for. A battle with Vlad of Valahia here would make more sense than an endless campaign in the mountains, with its castles and fortifications, and a mobile enemy using the terrain to nullify the advantages of numbers and heavy cavalry.
Emeric directed two thousand of his troops at each fortification, in a simultaneous attack. "They plainly expect to come to each other's aid. This way, they can't."
In the wagon-forts, the covers were being taken from the guns. Fixed pikes were being positioned and anchored. And the waiting had started.
Instead of scouts and infantry, Emeric's commanders had apparently decided on speed and weight. The charge, the heavy cavalry's standard method, raced forward, to the brave sound of battle cries.
Under normal circumstances, that charge would have crushed the enemy. Magyar heavy cavalry were feared, and for good reason. But here they encountered fire they'd never expected in an open battlefield. At barely one hundred yards, the bastard culverins of the wagon-forts cut loose, firing cloth bags full of shrapnel.
The slaughter was horrific, especially of the horses. The charge collapsed almost instantly. And as the Hungarian cavalry began retreating, Mongol cavalrymen came in pursuit. The retreat became a rout.
Emeric's fleeing cavalry disorganized the rest of his army, as often happened in such instances. If the Hungarian troops weren't rallied, this battle could turn into a disaster.
More than anything, the situation called for a commander with steady nerves and the ability to instill confidence in his officers. Or, to put it another way . . .
Anyone except Emeric.
The King of Hungary began screeching furious orders mingled with threats that were as pointless as they were blood-curdling. The result was simply to confuse his staff officers.
The Hungarian army began coming apart, here and there. Infantry units began breaking and heading to the rear, following the cavalry. Naturally, the Mongol cavalrymen targeted them immediately. Steady infantry, well-organized and armed with either pikes or guns, could withstand cavalry. But routed infantrymen were easy prey for cavalry—any cavalry, much less Mongols who'd been trained since boyhood in the great Mongol hunts.
Emeric turned to Mindaug. The count was perched on a mule perhaps ten yards away.
"Do something!" he shrieked.
Mindaug managed not to shake his head. Barely. As he had feared, his new employer was prone to hysteria. From a purely military standpoint, the situation was not yet desperate. True, the initial headlong and reckless Magyar cavalry charge had been bloodied and battered, and the Hungarian army's morale was fraying badly. But there was still time for Emeric to rally his forces, and those forces still outnumbered those of his enemy. Under such circumstances, to turn toward magic would just be further recklessness.
"Your Majesty, I would recommend—"
"Do something!" Emeric looked to his immediate bodyguards and pointed a finger at Mindaug. "If he doesn't do something—quickly!—then kill him!"
Mindaug was sorely tempted to produce a harmless but dazzling display of magicry. That would, after all, constitute "doing something"—and it was obvious from the confused expressions on the faces of Emeric's guards that they had no real idea exactly what the king wanted. Which was hardly surprising, of course, since the king himself had no clear idea.
Just something.
The problem, of course, was simple. Someone as familiar with the black arts as Emeric should have known perfectly well that battlefields were terrible places to wield magic. There was far too much iron present, more than you would encounter almost anywhere else.
Iron and magic did not mix well. Only the strongest magics would work at all, and the end result was always uncertain.
"Do something!" the king screeched again.
Mindaug shrugged. So be it. He began chanting the necessary phrases.
If this magic went badly, it was likely to go very badly indeed—and there was a simple countermeasure against it. Hopefully, the enemy would overlook that countermeasure, because of its very simplicity.
And if they didn't . . . Well, Mindaug had long since prepared his escape. Too bad for the King of Hungary, then. But he was a loathsome fellow anyway.
Kaltegg Shaman was not happy about the dispersal of the magical protections at his disposal. He had wanted, and very badly, to station the knights with their curiously spiked armor at each of the mobile forts to help disperse magic, but it seemed that was out of the question. The knights stayed together, in a group. And the shaman had not had enough time to direct the cobbling together of iron and steel junk into dispersal-rods for all the forts, either.
The tengeri were uneasy. The air-horses were unhappy. The shaman could only wait for whatever the foe might throw at them, and hope that he could think of something to deflect it.
When the attack finally came, it was not the raging storm of magic on the spirit plane he had expected. Instead it came subtly, so subtly that at first he did not recognize it as an attack. It came as a lowering of the spirits, of energy. A dimming of the senses. It crept over him slowly, so slowly that he did not even realize what was happening until a wounded man he was tending began to weep and say a word that Shaman recognized as meaning "mother." Yet that man was not about to die, was an old and experienced campaigner, and should not be acting like a boy in his first combat.
And that was when the shaman knew, with a start, that the enemy had a truly skilled magic-user. A subtle one! He was doing his work in such a way that the knights had not been alerted. This was no Elizabeth Bartholdy, to bombard with demonic energies. This was a thing of long patience, indirection; the mind of an ambusher at work.
Just as the shaman realized that, there came a sound that he did not recognize from the farthest fort on the line. An explosion that seemed far too loud and somehow wrong. And then, another.
From the Sky-Runners came the word, whispered magically into his ear.
The cannons are exploding.
Frantically, the shaman began his drumming. And the Sky-Runners began to cloud-dance in time with his rhythms. They could not disperse the cannon-killing magic with iron and steel—but perhaps they could with air and fire and music.
He sensed, rather than saw, the farthest fort fall, its cannons turned deadly to the occupants, their bodies riddled with bronze shrapnel.
He redoubled his efforts, sweating.
It is not enough, came the strained word from above. We need more help.
The shaman rarely prayed as such. The spirits with which he dealt could be bargained with, or coaxed, or rarely, coerced. The gods, on the whole, preferred mortals to help themselves, which was right and good, if harsh. But the steppes were harsh, and had grown strong warriors—and a child never becomes a man if he is protected every step of his journey through life. The shaman agreed with that in principle.
But at this moment, he prayed. A little help, Powers. Just a little, or the enemy will engulf us.
And that was when it started, beside him.
The singing.
Not the knights; that, he might have expected. And not a battle-hymn such as the one they had sung to confound the evil woman. This was the horseboy, David, his voice still on the high side of tenor, high enough to pierce the battle-noise and carry over it, even though you could hear the faint tremolo of fear in it. And it was a simple song, a simple melody by the knights' standards, and what sounded like simple words.
The men around him took it up. Quickly, the shaman altered his drum-pattern to follow the beat of the words. There was power in this song, as there had been in the knights' battle-hymn. There was magic, too. And, it seemed, a greater magic than he guessed because soon all the men in their fort were singing it, and in three different tongues! The song carried out to the next fort, which took it up, and the next, and the next, and then the knights themselves sang it in their deep, thundering voices. Even his own people, the Mongols, seemed to sense the meaning of words none of them understood much of, and chanted nonsense syllables to the same tune. The Sky-Runners altered their dance to match it, and pulled the power of the song up to the sky, and power descended from the sky to match it.
The song somehow formed a protective shelter over the forts and the men in them. No more cannon exploded.
The shaman gave himself up to his drumming.
Luckily, the Hungarian king was too enthusiastic about the initial success of Mindaug's spells to notice that the count was now murmuring very different words.
As Mindaug had feared, the enemy either knew or had discovered by accident the countermeasure. And this countermeasure was building rapidly. Whoever that tenor was in the enemy ranks, he had enormous power. Mindaug wanted to be nowhere in sight when the enemy's counter-magic swept the field. The soldiers would panic; the horses, panic even worse.
Emeric must have realized, finally, that something was amiss. He turned toward Mindaug, his mouth open. To question, perhaps; more likely, to shriek more threats.
But Mindaug was gone. Where he and his mule had stood, there was now nothing but a cloud of smoke. And, bizarrely, a small mirror suspended in mid-air. Emeric could see his own reflection in that mirror, gaping. He clamped his mouth shut.
And then, suddenly, it was over. The Hungarian army simply disintegrated. The Mongols harried the edges of the fleeing mob. Vlad rode forward with his Székelers to accept the surrender of those who were sensible enough not to try to escape—or simply too stunned. The backlash of the spell unleashed by the Hungarians seemed to have struck the Magyar soldiers like a club.
Vlad's peasant soldiers found King Emeric, as they engaged in the looting of the corpses of their former attackers. Emeric was pretending to be dead himself.
That was a foolish ploy, given the finery of his apparel. One of the soldiers recognized him and moments later he was surrounded. The soldiers kept their distance—the Hungarian king had a reputation of his own for black magic—but they called out to their commander.
Prince Vlad rode over to see what all the shouting was about.
"I give you my surrender," said Emeric sulkily. "As one lord to another. Keep these peasant carrion away from me."
One of the soldiers laid hands on Emeric. He reacted, foolishly, by using his pain touch. The soldier screamed and backed away. Now in a rage, Vlad got off his horse and strode over to the King of Hungary.
Emeric seized him as well; and, indeed, his touch was quite agonizing. But Vlad simply ignored the pain. He seized Emeric's hands in his own and, with one mighty shoulder-heaving wrench, broke both of the king's wrists.
Emeric screamed. Vlad flung the king to the ground, half-stunning him in the process. Then, seized Emeric by the scruff of the neck and shook him like a terrier shakes a rat.
"D'you want us to impale him?" asked one of the Székelers, grinning savagely. "Won't take but a moment to sharpen a stake."
Emeric nearly fainted with terror, suddenly realizing that he could be on the sharp end of his own favorite method of torture. "Please. I beg you!" he squealed.
"You threatened me with that, once," said Vlad harshly. "I spent long hours thinking of doing the same to you. But I have seen what cruelty unleashed can bring. Still, I will not suffer you to live."
He turned to his men. "Build a gibbet and find a rope. He hangs, right here and now."
It didn't take long. Many of Vlad's men were skilled carpenters.
Emeric screeched throughout. Once, frantically, he tried the pain touch again. But with both wrists broken, he couldn't get a decent grip on the Prince of Valahia. Vlad cuffed him half-senseless, then.
That was something of a mercy, perhaps, since the Hungarian king was too stunned to be very aware of his surroundings. Which were, of course, quite unsettling. The gibbet went up almost as if by magic.
Emeric regained his senses when he felt the noose fitted to his neck.
"You can't do this!" he screamed.
"Yes. I can." Vlad heaved on the rope. Given his great strength, Emeric went up like a bag of linen. He kicked for a time, and then died.
Vlad tied off the rope to a strut on the gibbet and then gazed upon the dangling body for a few moments.
"Rosa," he said, and turned away.
* * *
When the fires were burning for the night, and men were feasting and drinking, Kaltegg Shaman sought out David, in the midst of the knights.
He found the boy by the side of the one that had designated himself as David's mentor. "Boy," he said, without preamble. "You did a good thing. You helped with the battle magic, and maybe more than you know." He nodded at the older knight, who was looking at him curiously, but without any hostility. "Translate. Tell your master."
With a look of astonishment on his face, David did so. The knight nodded thoughtfully. So did the others that were near enough to hear. So. They recognized what had happened, too.
"So, tell me. That song. What was it? Some magic spell this man taught you?"
David's brow creased with puzzlement, as he translated again. The knight laughed.
"No," the knight replied in terrible Mongol. "Is child's sing. I make him teachings of Church."
David blushed a deep crimson, but raised his chin. "My knight is giving me religious instruction, and he taught me the first hymn all children are taught, and it was the first thing that came into my mind. I couldn't remember the battle hymns, but I could remember this."
Tortoise Orkhan came into the firelight, and caught the last of David's words.
"The song? The boy is right, it's one of the first hymns any of our children are taught. They say Saint Hypatia—she was a sort of holy person, like a shaman of shamans—wrote it herself. I think it must have been translated into every language we've ever come across, which is why every Christian knows it." His brows knitted for a moment. "It's about how everyone of good will, no matter what face of God they worship, is united in the eyes of God. I'm no poet, but I'll try a translation for one of the stanzas."
His eyes closed for a moment, then sang softly.
"From lands of endless ice and snow, to sand-filled desert winds that blow, all men of good beneath the sun, hold this pure truth that we are one."
"It goes on like that for three or four verses, each one ending in 'we are one,' " said David. "I like it. I don't care if it is for children."
"Things for children are inclined to be very pure," the shaman said gravely. "Simple is not bad. The simplest things are likely to be quite profound."
He could well imagine that a saint had put her hand to those words. Even in translation, they had power.
Not enough power, however. So. Kaltegg studied the boy David. This one would bear watching, he thought.