Hawkwood spat the ball into the barrel of his musket and ducked as a fresh broadside, this time from the road, ripped into the trees around him. A cry came from his left as another of Tewanias’s warriors – Alak – fell back, venting blood as a ball tore through his throat. Withering fire was now coming from two sides.

Cursing, Hawkwood tapped the butt of the musket against the ground to seat the ball and was about to swing the weapon up when a hand touched his shoulder. He heard Tewanias’s voice in his ear. “Hatskwi! We must move, now!”

Hawkwood took stock. It was hard to see how many uniformed shapes were advancing as the smoke through which they were moving was almost as impenetrable as the fog that had gone before, but it was safe to assume that Quade would have calculated the number of ambushers from the shots fired and deployed his men accordingly; in other words, in a significant number.

Quade’s mistake had been in failing to prevent his front rank from firing too soon.

A musket could propel a ball more than two hundred and fifty yards, but its effective range was only eighty or ninety at best. Judging by the location of the smoke, the troopers were beyond that. If they’d had the patience to hold their fire for another thirty paces, their surprise would have been complete. As it was, in their haste to engage, instead of cutting off an escape route, they had, inadvertently, provided one, by virtue of the fact it would take them some time to reload, giving their quarry an extra few seconds.

As Tewanias signalled to his men to pull back, Hawkwood raised his musket again and looked for a final target, to keep the troopers’ heads down. Unable to get a clear shot at the soldiers in the wood, he turned back to the road, sighted on a corporal shaking powder into his pan, and fired. As the corporal fell away, his hand clutching his half-primed weapon, Cageaga clicked his tongue in satisfaction and then flinched as a ball smacked into a snow-laden bough inches from his feathered topknot. “Come, Mat-huwa! The smoke will hide us!”

From your lips to God’s ear, Hawkwood thought.

But either God wasn’t listening or He’d turned a deaf ear, because shouts went up the second they broke from cover, drowned instantly by the crash of musketry, much closer than before.