Chapter 425: Before First Light
Lothair slowly raised his brass spyglass back to his eye, trying to focus through the clouds of black powder smoke.
"They are coming!" Marshal Gauzlin suddenly shrieked, pointing a finger toward the far side of the valley.
"Look, Lord Lothair! Riders!"
Lothair adjusted the focus ring on his spyglass. Bursting out from a narrow ravine behind the smoking craters were half a dozen heavily armored men on horseback.
They were wearing steel mail and carrying repeating rifles slung across their backs.
They were galloping furiously across the broken gravel, ignoring the pits, heading straight for the lone man.
"Don’t just stand there, you fucking idiots!" Lothair roared at the top of his lungs, kicking his horse and drawing his broadsword.
"Muskets to the front! Shoot them down! Do not let that man escape!"
The Frankish infantry scrambled entirely in a panic, trying to form a firing line at the edge of the tree line.
But their hands were shaking from the sheer terror of the explosive valley, and ramming the lead balls down their primitive fire-tubes was taking entirely too long.
Down in the smoking valley, the perspective shifted.
Richard let out a long breath that turned into white mist in the Norwegian air.
He brushed a few stray pieces of sharp gravel from his coat and looked up as the six riders pulled their warhorses to a halt right beside him.
"By the gods, Richard!" a large, bearded knight named Wulfstan laughed loudly, extending a hand downward.
"We thought you were going to get blown to pieces out here!"
Richard smiled, grabbing the knight’s hand and swinging himself up onto the back of the horse, sitting just behind the saddle.
"The Frankish artillery has a very predictable recoil and angle. I just had to sit where their iron balls couldn’t bounce."
Wulfstan let out another laugh, shaking his head. "You southern scholars are crazy! But your plan did everything, Richard... You crippled their heavy artillery without us losing a single man!"
"They still have thirty thousand infantrymen," Richard corrected.
"Let them march in the mud!" another knight, young Osric, cheered, holding his rifle high. "We just broke their teeth! Now let’s get back to the castle!"
However, the Frankish vanguard had finally managed to form a hasty firing line.
"Hold on tightly!" Wulfstan roared, kicking his spurs into his horse’s flanks.
The six horses surged forward, tearing across the rocky, uneven ground toward the safety of the rear hills.
Behind them, the deafening crack of a thousand Frankish muskets entirely shattered the air.
A swarm of hot lead bullets whistled angrily through the valley.
Most of them buried themselves into the dirt craters or flew wildly into the sky.
But when you fire a thousand primitive muskets at once, sheer luck becomes a highly deadly factor.
"Argghhh!" young Osric suddenly screamed.
Richard snapped his head around.
A stray lead ball had struck Osric squarely in the back of his neck, completely shattering his spine.
The young knight’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he violently tumbled off his galloping horse, slamming heavily into the hard, freezing gravel.
"Osric!" Wulfstan yelled, yanking hard on the reins to stop.
"Don’t stop!" Richard shouted, grabbing Wulfstan’s shoulder tightly.
"...he is already dead! If we stop now, they will reload and turn all of us into bloody rags! Keep riding!"
Wulfstan cursed bitterly. He kicked his horse again, abandoning their fallen brother in the dirt.
They rode hard into the safety of the rocky hills, quickly disappearing from the Frankish army’s line of sight.
...
Hours passed.
The afternoon sun quickly surrendered to the dark of the Norwegian night.
At the edge of the ruined valley, the Frankish army was miserable... they were forced to make a camp right there in the mud of the dense pine forest.
Lord Lothair sat inside his tent, staring at a table.
He had a cup of wine in his hand, but he hadn’t taken a single sip.
Outside the thin canvas, the noise of his army lacked its usual arrogant confidence.
Men were shivering, huddling closely around smoky campfires.
The engineers were exhausted, having spent the last four hours trying to dig the fifty heavy bronze cannons out of the sinking marsh.
They had only managed to free six of them...
"This is an absolute disaster." Marshal Gauzlin muttered, stepping into the tent.
"The men are freezing, my Lord. The morale is broken. They keep whispering about the man at the table. They think King Erik has summoned a demon to lead his armies."
"...."
"We cannot just sit here in the mud."
"If we don’t push forward tomorrow, we will freeze to death... Or worse, the Vikings will surround the forest and pick us off."
"We will march at first light," Lothair promised, "We leave the stuck cannons behind. We take the six we freed, and we march our infantry over the craters. We will take the port by force."
Though Lothair sounded confident, the twisting knot of dread in his stomach had only grown larger.
He knew exactly what an army looked like when it was beaten before the actual battle even began.
...
Meanwhile, miles away behind the safety of the palisades of the port city.
The city was bustling with lethal activity... torches burned brightly along the breakwaters, reflecting off the choppy water of the natural harbor.
Richard walked through the port. He pushed past groups of heavily armed Viking riflemen who were laughing and sharing hot bowls of fish stew.
He finally reached the edge of the deep, rushing river that cut through the eastern side of the port and snaked its way deep into the dense pine forests behind the city.
Waiting for him on the docks was Commander Sigurd, a scarred Norwegian veteran who had served King Erik for two decades.
Sigurd was directing hundreds of elite riflemen onto a fleet of long riverboats.
"Richard!" Sigurd called out.
The commander walked over and clapped a hand on Richard’s shoulder. "I heard about the valley. You stuck their bronze pigs in the mud!"
"We lost Osric, Commander," Richard said quietly, "Lothair won’t just sit in the woods and freeze. He will try to push over the valley tomorrow morning."
"Let him try," Sigurd grinned viciously, "...he won’t be fighting us in the valley."
Richard looked past Sigurd, watching the silent efficiency of the Norwegian soldiers loading the iron ammunition boxes onto the riverboats.
"Are the boats ready?" Richard asked.
"Fully loaded," Sigurd nodded firmly. "We are taking 3,000 of our best men to flank them by the river."
Thus, the second phase of Richard’s grand trap was set into motion.
The Frankish vanguard thought they were stuck fighting a defensive enemy behind wooden walls.
They had ignored the river that flowed just a few miles east of their camp.
"They don’t know what King Ragnar’s new shallow-hulls can do," Richard said.
"So," Sigurd asked, "When we surround their camp in the dark... do we offer them a chance to surrender, or do we just open fire?"
Richard turned his head, looking down at the line of trees where 30,000 exhausted Frankish soldiers were shivering.
Give them a chance to surrender?
"At least I must meet King Erik." Richard said calmly.