‘What devilry do they intend to use, Dietrich? Why leave such a space between their horse and foot?’

  Von Kivel pointed to the gates of Reval in the distance.

  ‘They are clever, your eminence. In front of the town’s walls are intricate defences termed “the devil’s garden”. The track that we are upon and which leads to the gates takes a crinkled shape ahead, you see?’

  ‘Devil’s garden?’ hissed Baldwin, ‘no wonder Valdemar lost Reval using such terms that are inflammatory to the Lord.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said von Kivel, ‘but my point is that further on the road is lined on either side with holes that will snap a horse’s leg if it steps into them, or a man’s for that matter. So the Marshal of Estonia has anchored his right flank on the road.’

  ‘And the Sword Brothers?’ asked Baldwin impatiently, ‘why do they stand so far apart from the pagan filth of the Marshal of Estonia’s army?’

  ‘My guess would be that they will wait until our forces are fully committed before attacking, thus hoping that surprise will add momentum to their assault.’

  Baldwin shook his head. He turned to Bishop Hermann on a horse next to Manfred Nordheim, the commander’s horsemen acting as the legate’s bodyguard.

  ‘This day, bishop, you will see the power of the Sword Brothers and Marshal of Estonia broken forever.’

  ‘Even now,’ replied Hermann, ‘it not too late to call off this madness.’

  ‘Madness!’ the ears of Baldwin’s horse pricked up in alarm at the harsh tone. ‘We are on the Lord’s work, bishop. Dietrich, signal the attack.’

  Von Kivel urged his horse forward and raised his hand to a knot of officers in front of a stand of banners, then lowered it to send them scampering to their commands. To the left a mass of knights, non-nobles and ordinary townsmen who owned a horse presented a dazzlingly display of colour against the drab green background. The legate’s horsemen flew banners of green, red, yellow, silver and blue showing the coat of arms of the towns and cities they had come from – Viterbo, Perugio, Ancona, Rimini, Faenza, Imol, Bologna and Ferrara.

  To their right a larger mass of foot soldiers began to move forward as white-robed priests raised their hands to heaven and implored God to smile on those who marched in His name. Six and a half thousand spearmen were grouped in four ‘battles’ and in front of them marched a long line of balestieri and pavesari. These were the élite of the legate’s army – fifteen hundred crossbowmen, each man capable of shooting four bolts a minute, and the same number of pavesari. All professionals and all focused on shooting the stationary enemy to pieces to allow the ‘battles’ following to finish off the survivors. They had no reason to worry about the paltry number of Sword Brothers greatly outnumbered by the horsemen of the Papal States.

  Each crossbowman wore a padded linen coif and over that an open-faced iron helmet. A rawhide vest – a ciroteca – under a thickly quilted short-sleeved garment called a perpunto, protected his torso. Over this he had additional armour protection in the form of a sleeveless mail shirt. In addition to his crossbow he was also armed with a dagger and sword.

  Each pavesari was also splendidly attired in iron helmet, long-sleeved quilted ‘soft’ armour and coat-of-plates armour. The latter comprised iron plates inside a coat of leather covered in red linen. His spear, the lanzelonghe, was thirteen feet in length and designed to keep horsemen at bay while the crossbowmen behind him did their work. But his spear was unwieldy and his tall, reinforced shield cumbersome so the pavesari moved slowly, like a great mobile, bristling fortress.

  *****

  Conrad heard the trumpets and drums and through the vision slits of his helmet saw the line of spears and shields in front of his men move forward. Falcone had briefed him as to the tactics of the enemy and waited patiently for the opposition to come to him. He knew that the men directly opposite were professionals, men like Leatherface who could load and shoot four bolts a minute even in the chaos and horror of battle, and shoot them accurately. He knew that if that the enemy crossbowmen were allowed to get within range they would unleash three thousand bolts in half minute at his men, the same number in the following half minute. Against such a deluge even the Army of the Wolf would buckle. But he also knew that the Italians would wait until they were within range. A crossbow was most effective at a range of a hundred and fifty yards or less, though it was still capable of killing a man up to three hundred yards away. So he waited and the enemy crossbowmen waited and all the time the distance between the two armies slowly narrowed.

  *****

  Lukas also waited. Waited for the longships to get closer so his men could begin shooting at them. He had four hundred of the order’s crossbowmen, another four hundred of its spearmen, dozens of novices brimming with youthful eagerness and two hundred members of the town militia, many of whom were pissing themselves with fear and visibly trembling as the Oeselians entered Reval’s harbour. He had worked out the plan beforehand with the harbour master: his dockers and anyone else who could be persuaded had rowed the boats out into the harbour and lashed them together, bow to stern, to form a floating wooden wall between the enemy and the harbour. They were all riverboats around forty-five feet in length. A large longship would be able to brush it aside with ease, but not if it was tied to other boats and that was what Lukas was counting on.

  There were thirty of them, their oars dipping furiously in the water as they left the open sea to enter Reval’s bay. Thirty Oeselian longships filled with warriors and with sails furled coming to plunder Reval and slaughter its inhabitants. Clever bastard, this Stark, mused Lukas, attacking when Volquin and Conrad were fighting their own battle outside the town. It would have worked perfectly if the Oeselians had not been so conspicuous by their absence from the port’s more seedy establishments.

  The trebuchets began shooting, hurling rocks into the bay. There were four of them – ‘God’s stone thrower’, ‘Big Mother’, ‘War Wolf’ and ‘Pagan Killer’ – and it was appropriate that it was the last named that sank a longship, the rock it catapulted into the bay hitting the vessel amidships. The longship stopped, began listing and suddenly broke in two. Lukas’s men standing on the line of riverboats cheered as warriors in mail armour thrashed around in the grey water before sinking below the surface. But their joy was short-lived as the other boats crashed into the flimsy floating defence line.

  The larger Oeselian boats, the skeids, pushed the riverboats beneath the water as they smashed into them. But they then became stuck on the vessels beneath their hulls while the smaller boats, the karvs, were stopped dead in the water when they collided with the barrier of boats. Their crews jumped down on to the riverboats to get to grips with the Sword Brothers, novices and town militia, the latter being killed easily, the former combining crossbows, shields and spears to inflict a rising toll of casualties on Stark’s warriors. And all the time the trebuchets kept shooting.

  Each machine was crewed by seven men and mounted at the end of its own jetty. They had managed to hit just one longship when Stark’s fleet had been on the move but now the enemy boats were stationary they could shoot more accurately. As Christians and pagans battled on a thin cobb of boats a few hundred paces away the trebuchet crews obeyed Lukas’ order: keep on shooting, don’t worry about hitting friends as well as foes, if the pagans get through we are all dead anyway. The crews worked feverishly to load and shoot the three hundred pound lumps of rock at the targets and this time half of them hit home. They fell on longships and riverboats, splintering wood and holing vessels that began to sink even as men fought on their decks. Lukas’ strategy was working, but at a high cost.

  *****

  The front rank knelt on the ground, their shields locked together and resting on the earth, the second rank came forward to place their shields above those resting on the ground in front and the third rank held their shields over the men in front to form a roof of sorts. Conrad turned and gave the signal and then crouched down behind his own shield as the enemy crossbowmen, as he knew they would, shot their first volley at a range of a hundred and fifty yards. The bolts slammed into the wall of shields, some glancing off the rims to strike faces and torsos, a few going through tiny gaps to hit flesh and bone, the sound of screams and groans mixing with the din of the enemy’s musical instruments. And then the mangonels shot their projectiles.

  There were fifteen of them, ten that had been taken from platforms in the harbour and the others from inside Reval itself. A simple one-armed throwing machine, each mangonel used a bundle of twisted sinew known as a skein to create torsion. The skein was strung across the base frame with the wooden throwing arm inserted in the middle. At the end of the arm was a metal basket. The arm was lowered and secured by the machine’s crew and when released it shot forward to hit a padded buffer secured to a vertical frame, thus providing the force to propel the projectile forward.

  The mangonels shot casks of burning pitch that arched over the Army of the Wolf and slammed into the ground in front of or just behind the enemy pavesari and balestieri, showering the soldiers with burning liquid. Instantly much of the enemy line was broken as men on fire dropped their weapons and tried to extinguish the flames, others instinctively recoiled from the heat erupting near them and stepped back or sideways.

  And then Conrad’s men attacked.

  There was no slow advance with shields locked, rather a mad dash to cover the open space between them and the Italians as quickly as possible. A feral rush of maddened men intent on getting to grips with the enemy with their axes, hollering war cries as the enemy desperately tried, and failed, to reform their line and then abandoned it as they turned and fled back to the safety of the rest of the legate’s foot soldiers. Those too tardy were overrun by Estonians and Kurs.

  Conrad brushed aside the long spear levelled at him with his shield and ran at its owner, who dropped it and tried to draw his sword. But he hacked down his axe on the man’s right forearm as he was pulling the blade from its scabbard and shattered bone. He smashed his shield into the man’s face and knocked him aside to attack the crossbowman behind him. Conrad was not quick enough and the man pulled his trigger, the bolt aimed at his chest striking the shield that Conrad managed to hold out in front of his body in the nick of time. The projectile went through the leather and wood, the iron head emerging just above his left forearm.

  He cut down with his axe to knock the weapon out of the man’s hands, twisted the axe in his hand and whipped it back so its blade struck the crossbowman’s face, obliterating his nose and sending him sprawling to the ground. He stepped over him and ran at the great mass of spearmen in front of him, one of the enemy’s ‘battles’. Either side of him hundreds of Estonians did the same, the line of balestieri and pavesari having vanished.

  The four ‘battles’ outnumbered the Estonians and Kurs by more than two to one and had they held their nerve and formations they could probably have defeated Conrad’s attack. But each formation contained not seasoned soldiers but townsmen, farmers and the unemployed, men who had been promised regular pay and food for the summer. Had they thought about death at all it had probably been some fanciful notion of a heroic and painless end. But now the reality of close-quarter combat was all around them, their ears assailed by screams and their eyes beholding a vision of hell. A black-clothed Kur cleaving a man’s skull to the neck with a two-handed axe, a comrade’s entrails hanging out after a long knife of an Estonian had done its terrible work, and the dead, so many dead. Men formerly full of life now staring at the sky with glazed eyes and mutilated bodies. The only way to escape the bearded demons with blood-covered spears, axes and swords was to flee, to run as fast at their legs could carry them. And that is what they did.

  Conrad, his shield battered, his surcoat covered with blood, fought a spearmen wearing a gambeson who was clutching his weapon with both hands in an effort to keep him at bay, jabbing the point in his face as if trying to deter a wild animal. Conrad rammed what was left of his shield against the spear point, lodging the metal in the wood. He pushed his shield up and lunged forward to bring down the spike on the opposite side of the axe head on the man’s right foot. The spike pierced the leather shoe and went straight through the bone. The man gave a high-pitched scream and released his spear.

  Conrad threw away his shield, gripped his axe with his left hand and drew his sword, ramming the blade through the man’s chest and into his heart. Hans came to him, mace covered in gore and helmet dented. His friend nodded; Conrad nodded back and they went back to the slaughter.

  *****

  Moments after the Army of the Wolf had launched its attack the nearly three thousand horsemen in the legate’s army had wheeled right to strike Conrad’s right flank. It seemed so simple but there was no overall commander among the knights and no discipline. So a disorganised mass of men on horseback got in each other’s way and bickered among themselves while Leatherface brought his crossbowmen forward behind a screen of spearmen to form rear flank protection on the Army of the Wolf’s right wing.

  ‘Maximum range, boys,’ he called, his crossbowmen shooting at the slow-moving horsemen at a range of over three hundred yards.

  The bolts initially fell short but as the horsemen got closer they began to strike horses, many of which had no caparisons to protect them. And the withering volleys did not decrease in intensity as the riders closed the gap. Every fifteen seconds three hundred and ninety bolts were shot at them; over fifteen hundred missiles a minute. Horses began to go down, others reared up in alarm and the charge came to a shuddering halt. Just as the horsemen of the Sword Brothers, Sir Paul and Sir Richard smashed into their rear ranks.

  Grand Master Volquin led the assault of two ranks of disciplined horsemen riding knee to knee, brother knights and knights in the front rank, sergeants and squires in the second. The initial impact unhorsed over two hundred Italians, the same number being skewered by Volquin’s second rank before a giant mêlée began and Leatherface ordered his men to stop shooting. He rested his crossbow on his shoulder and grinned like a mischievous child.

  ‘Master Conrad, you have the luck of the devil himself.’

  *****

  ‘What is happening? Do something!’

  Baldwin, face contorted with rage, screamed at von Kivel to work a miracle. He had seen his foot soldiers advance against the pagans and had watched in horror as they were halted by Satan’s fire and then cut to pieces by the Marshal of Estonia’s wild heathens. But the Duke of Narva had assured him that the Italian horsemen he had deployed on the left wing would first check and then cut to pieces Master Conrad’s men. But the faltering Italian mounted charge was stopped in its tracks by Leatherface’s crossbowmen and suddenly the legate’s horsemen were fighting for their lives when Grand Master Volquin’s riders assailed them.

  ‘There is nothing to be done,’ said von Kivel grimly.

  Groups of men were running by him to escape the battlefield, throwing aside their spears and shields as they did so. Many more were gravitating towards the carroccio in an effort to seek sanctuary. Soon hundreds of men were gathered round the religious wagon, those assigned to guard it shoving them away from the altar upon which the holy relic rested.

  The frantic tapping sound coming from the mêlée of horsemen signalling the clashing of hundreds of weapons suddenly decreased as men began to surrender to the Sword Brothers, either that or use their horses to flee the battlefield. Baldwin’s anger gave way to despair as he realised the enormity of the disaster unfolding before his eyes. But then a miracle occurred because a general lull descended all around and Baldwin was once more infused with confidence. The Lord had smiled upon him and his army as the flood of deserters turned into a trickle and the enemy suddenly halted, as if an invisible barrier had been erected between them and the legate’s bedraggled soldiers. And as a surreal calm materialised he heard the prayers of the priests around the carroccio and his eyes filled with tears of joy.

  *****

  Conrad removed his helmet. It may have been a cool autumn day but he was sweating profusely. He wiped his blood-covered sword blade on his surcoat. Hans was bent over, panting, his helmet resting on the ground. Killing fleeing men was a tiring business.

  ‘I’d prefer to fight face-to-face rather than running to catch up with those I kill,’ he gasped. ‘My lungs are on fire.’

  Conrad slapped him on the arm. ‘At least they were running, not us.’

  The Army of the Wolf had done great slaughter but now drew breath as Hillar, Riki, Andres, Tonis and Anu reorganised their men around the legate’s army. The warlords, bleeding, tired but still alive and in one piece, reported to Conrad after they had done so. Like a stag at bay against a pack of hungry hounds the legate’s army was ripe for the taking. Moments before there had been a frenzy of killing and bloodlust but now tiredness took hold of bodies.

  ‘Where are the Kurs?’ asked Conrad.

  His friends looked at each other and shrugged.

  ‘Perhaps they are dead, Susi,’ said Hillar flatly.

  But Gintaras was not dead; he was enjoying himself. He and his men had surrounded around five hundred Italian foot soldiers and were literally cutting them to pieces. While his medium foot soldiers faced outwards to guard against a relief force he and his axe men were making short work of those they had cornered. Some tried to give themselves up but were chopped into pieces by broadaxes. A minority, gripped by battle frenzy, charged at their tormentors and died fighting bravely, but still died. When there was a great mound of enemy dead in front of him the Kur leader sent Ringaudas and four of his medium foot to find Master Conrad to inform him that the Kurs held his right flank.

  *****

  Stark threw back his head and screamed in frustration. He had come to Reval to burn and destroy but it was his fleet that had been destroyed. Ten longships, holed by the trebuchets, were either slowly sinking or had already sunk. Hundreds of his men had been killed or wounded and though he and they had slaughtered many of the enemy, Reval’s crossbowmen had reaped a fearful harvest. They were no longer shooting, most lying dead on the line of riverboats and more having slipped beneath the waters of the bay. Many novices had also fallen. Fighting between Lukas’ mercenary spearmen and Oeselian warriors was still going on but it was sporadic now. Stark thought of taking his own ship and those nearby still seaworthy to the docks just a short distance away. But the jetties and wharfs were filled with armed people. They were not soldiers but rather dockers, sailors, women, children, priests and even merchants. All determined to sell their lives dearly should the Oeselians breach Lukas’ line of boats. Fresh warriors would have made short work of them but Stark’s men, those that still lived, were utterly exhausted.