“Dismas, Dismas, Saint Dismas protect! Odell, Odell, Odell! Haro! Haro!”

They hit the enemy force locked with the Odell and Chehalis men, and the sound turned shrill as they realized they were being flanked and the crossbow volleys struck home. He rammed his shield into a pikeman’s unguarded right side with an impact that knocked into all his joints and the small of his back, smashed him off his feet and into the press of stamping boots below and thrust over and down into a man’s neck above the breastplate. The points of spears and gisarmes slammed past him from behind, thudding home in faces and guts or screeching off armor with tooth-grating tortured squeals.

Odell’s oliphants were sounding retreat. Guelf kept his head moving as he fought; you had no peripheral vision with a visor down, but he could feel the Pendleton men crumbling. He could also see Constantine Stavarov, shieldless, his visor knocked away, with blood spattered across his flushed high-cheeked, snub-nosed face and the white showing all around his eyes as he swung a two-handed war hammer with a thick spike on the other side in a blur of smashing, stabbing motion.

He was either laughing or just giving a bestial roar of joy, mouth like a red-and-white cavern. It was impossible to hear him in the tumult, but it was utterly obvious he wasn’t going to obey any trumpet-call to retreat and probably hadn’t even heard it. Two of his squires grabbed him neatly in what was obviously a rehearsed maneuver, each throwing an arm about him to pin his arms to his sides, pushing their shields forward to guard all three as they backed up with their lord’s feet almost off the ground as he screamed and struggled wildly.

Stavarov’s menie turned and ran west, to the waiting railcars and retreat. Viscount Chenoweth’s men and Guelf’s plugged the hole at the intersection, holding the enemy at bay while Thierry’s siege engineers and artillerists worked behind them in a ratcheting clack and clatter of machinery.

Smoke billowed upward as the bridge was fired, black and oily and rank with a scent of burning petroleum seldom smelled these days. The Pendleton men crumbled away, but behind them were ranks of oval hemispherical shields like sections of tower wall, each marked alike with an eagle and thunderbolts. The grim faces behind the low domed helmets and faceguards looked completely unfazed by being cut off from reinforcements by the fire. They moved in a unison like the bristle of a porcupine’s quills around an eagle standard, and the points of long javelins cocked backward with a ripple on brawny thick-muscled arms.

“Ware spears! Up shields!” Guelf shouted, and he wasn’t the only one.

The kite shields came up and the crossbowmen ducked and grabbed for their small steel bucklers. From the other side, a steady unhurried bellow of:

“Pila . . . ready . . . front rank . . . throw. Second rank . . . throw. Third rank . . . throw.”