The hoof beats intensified. Jarre wanted to lick his lips, but he couldn’t. His tongue had gone stiff. His tongue stopped behaving normally, it had stiffened strangely and was as dry as a bone. The hoof beats intensified.

‘Close ranks!’ roared Bronibor, drawing his sword. ‘Feel your comrade’s shoulder! Remember, none of you is fighting alone! And the only remedy for the fear you are feeling is the pike in your fist! Prepare to fight! Pikes aimed at the horses’ chests! What are we going to do, Vizimian brigands? I’m asking!’

‘Stand firm!’ roared the pikemen with one voice. ‘Stand like a wall! Close ranks!’

Jarre also roared. If everyone was he might as well too. Sand, grit and turf sprayed from beneath the hooves of the advancing wedge of cavalry. The charging horsemen yelled like demons, brandishing their weapons. Jarre leaned onto his pike, buried his head in his shoulders and shut his eyes.

Jarre shooed away a wasp circling above his inkwell with a violent movement of his stump, without interrupting his writing.

Marshal Coehoorn came to nothing. His flanking troop was stopped by the heroic Vizimian infantry under Voivode Bronibor, paying in blood for his heroism. And at the moment the Vizimians resisted, Nilfgaard fell into confusion on the left wing–some of them began to take flight, others to pull together and defend themselves in groups, surrounded on all sides. Soon after the same thing happened on the right wing, where the doggedness of the dwarves and condottieri finally overcame Nilfgaard’s assault. A single great cry of triumph went up along the entire front, and a new spirit entered the royal knights. And the spirit fell in the Nilfgaardians, their hands weakened, and our men began to shell them like peas so loudly it echoed.

And Field Marshal Menno Coehoorn understood that the battle was lost, saw the brigades perishing and falling into confusion around him.

And then his officers and knights ran to him, giving him a fresh horse, calling for him to flee and save his own life. But a fearless heart beat in the breast of the Nilfgaardian field marshal. ‘That will not do,’ he called, pushing away the reins held out towards him. ‘It will not do for me to flee like a coward from the field on which so many good men under my command have fallen for the emperor.’ And the doughty Menno Coehoorn added…

‘Besides, now there’s nowhere to fuck off to,’ Menno Coehoorn added calmly and soberly, looking around the battlefield. ‘They’re surrounding us on all sides.’

‘Give me your cloak and helmet, sir.’ Captain Sievers wiped blood and sweat from his face. ‘Take mine, sir! Dismount your steed, and take mine… Don’t protest! You must live, sir! You’re indispensable to the empire, irreplaceable… We Daerlanians will strike the Nordlings, we’ll draw them to us, you meanwhile try to break through down there, below the fishpond…’