Chapter Twelve
It was chaos.
By the time Doncaster’s men arrived, the southern section of the village of Doncaster was burning.
Cassius, leading a large contingent of men, charged first into the town, a street that happened to have metal merchants and smithies.
The raiders had hit this side of the village first, decimating businesses, but the owners had appeared with swords and clubs and had chased many of them off, so the mercenaries had circled around to the market street.
That’s where Cassius found most of the fighting. The tunics of Clabecq were recognizable in the flames and moonlight, as they were not trying to hide them any longer. He unsheathed his de Wolfe-standard sword and plunged into the fight.
And a nasty fight it was.
Cassius was enormous and made quite a target, but he was also something to run from.
Half of the mercenaries were moving away from him while the other half were moving towards him.
Rhori joined him and, together, along with several hundred Doncaster men, engaged in a terrible battle that saw men falling, men running, and a few dying.
And Cassius was right in the middle of it.
The mercenaries were few, and highly skilled, but they were also highly clever.
Knowing they couldn’t match Doncaster’s numbers, they scattered, which caused small groups of Doncaster men to go in chase.
They were separating the army in a tactical move, piece by piece, that Cassius saw early on.
He began ordering the Doncaster men to remain grouped and to not run after the individual mercenaries.
But those individual mercenaries were creating an issue.
They were the ones who were setting the fires and generally causing havoc, trying to force the army to splinter.
Darian had his hands full because he was over by the church dedicated to St. George, trying to keep a gang of mercenaries from raiding the church.
That put him in a stationary position, meaning he couldn’t move away and manage the battle.
Cassius, once again, took charge.
He broke up his troops into four big groups and assigned each group a section of the town.
The men formed lines and began to move through the streets, fighting with the mercenaries, but sweeping them towards the town gates to essentially sweep them out of the town.
It worked well enough for the metal worker avenue and for the avenue of the bakers, but the avenue of the merchants was a more difficult fight.
That’s where things got down and dirty.
There were three gates leading into Doncaster’s village and Cassius made sure those gates were covered with a heavy presence of Doncaster soldiers as the fighting on the avenue of merchants turned into hand-to-hand combat.
The mercenaries were resorting to dirty tricks to battle the Doncaster men, including climbing on roofs and either dropping heavy things on the Doncaster men, like pots or rocks, or by jumping on top of them.
Cassius saw more than one soldier go down by someone jumping off the roof on top of them.
He even saw one of Darian’s junior knights get toppled off his horse that way.
Bose was able to help the young knight, who was badly injured, but he took a blade to the arm for his efforts.
Still able to fight, Bose had dispatched his enemy in a spectacularly gruesome way before making sure the young knight was taken away from the fight.
And the battle raged on. The Doncaster men had the mercenaries overwhelmed, but they didn’t go down easily.
Cassius had also given the order for the men to take away whatever booty the mercenaries happened to be carrying, so it soon became a fight for the mercenaries to purely keep what they’d already taken.
That’s when the punches began to fly in earnest.
There was so much blood being splattered around that it was difficult to tell where it was coming from and who, exactly, was injured.
Bose had beaten down a man who was carrying hams as well as finery he’d taken from a merchant stall, pounding him unconscious until he could finally take the items away from him.
All of the ill-gotten gains were being hauled back to the church for protection so the merchants and villagers could reclaim their items when the fight was over.
“Cass,” Rhori called above the sounds of battle. “The south side of the village is burning heavily. We should put men to help fight the fire. The villagers are afraid to come out of their homes and if we don’t do something, the town will be gone by morning.”
Cassius could see the heavy smoke rising to the south and he knew Rhori wasn’t wrong. With the brittle material the cottages were built with, they could go up very easily in a blaze.
“Select a contingent of men to fight the fire,” he directed. “Some to protect the villagers and some to help fight. Where’s de Lohr?”
“Still at the church as far as I know,” Rhori said. “Do you want me to fetch him?”
Cassius shook his head. “Nay,” he said, lashing out a big boot and kicking a mercenary in the face when he came too close. “Leave him where he is most needed. In fact, I think…”
He was cut off when the sounds of bolts being launched filled the air.
Two arrows sailed past his head, striking both a mercenary and a Doncaster soldier.
But before Cassius could get out of the way and under cover, two big bolts sailed into him, one hitting him in the shoulder and the other somewhere down on his torso.
The force of the strikes were hard enough to nearly topple him from his horse, but he held fast. He didn’t want to end up on the ground where he would surely be set upon. As he struggled to stay upright, Rhori was beside him, shoving him up onto his saddle.
“Christ, Cass,” he muttered. “We need to get you back to the castle. Can you ride?”
In extreme pain, Cassius grunted. “Bloody bastards,” he muttered as another series of bolts sailed through the air, missing him and barely missing Rhori. “Get the hell out of here. Tell the men to retreat to the church. Go!”
“But –”
“Go!” Cassius boomed. “I will make it back to the castle on my own, but you are now in charge. Find out who’s shooting off those arrows and cut their bloody heads off!”
Rhori wanted to go with him; he truly did, but a direct order from Cassius wasn’t meant to be disobeyed.
With two ugly projectiles sticking out of him, Cassius took off down an avenue, heading towards the gate that led back to the castle, while Rhori bellowed at the men to retreat back to the church.
It was really all they could do as more bolts began to fly and Doncaster men began to go down.
Somewhere in the mayhem, Rhori sent two men after Cassius to ensure he made it back to the castle.
The last thing they needed was for Cassius to pass out and end up in a ditch somewhere.
Or worse.
Retreat to the church they did, with tales of Cassius de Wolfe being struck by arrows and still managing to fight his way out. Brave and strong, Cassius wasn’t going to let a group of barbaric mercenaries end him.
He was a de Wolfe, after all.
A minor skirmish with mercenaries turned into an all-night murder spree for the Doncaster men, Rhori and Bose. Now, they had a personal score to settle.
Marcil and his mercenaries did not survive the night.
*
There were already men trickling into the great hall.
Dacia was ready for them. She knew that, with any battle, there needed to be a place to tend the wounded and that logical place was the great hall.
In the skirmishes she could remember from the past, she seemed to recall the servants setting up an infirmary in the great hall with the help of Mother Mary.
Dacia had been quite young at the time and didn’t remember much of it, but she knew enough to know that men would be returning from battle soon, some of them injured, and she had to have a place to put them.
Already, men were trickling in, mostly with bloody head and upper body wounds, and she put those with more severe wounds closer to the hearth and tended them first. Edie was with her, as was Fulco and her maids, and between the eight of them, the men were well covered.
Argos the dog was also in the hall, mostly following Dacia around, and she was learning to ignore him.
It seemed that he simply wanted to follow her about so she let him, and the casualties were light, so he wasn’t in the way.
But Dacia was coming to believe that the fight hadn’t been too terrible because of the limited wounded.
In fact, it was so light that her grandfather went to bed.
He didn’t see any need to stay up and help, not even to manage his castle’s own defenses.
That left everyone else at Doncaster overseeing the safety of the fortress and with Dacia in charge of the wounded, everything was organized brilliantly.
Men were receiving the best of care. When one of Darian’s knights was brought in with a myriad of wounds, he was put in a more secluded area of the hall so he could have some privacy.
Dacia was tending to the knight when she caught sight of someone entering the hall through the servants’ alcove. She thought it was another servant until she glanced up again and caught sight of Amata.
Immediately, she returned her attention to the knight, who had several puncture wounds and what she suspected to be a broken jaw.
She’d brought her medicament bag with her, which included a sewing kit, and she finished sewing up the last puncture wound on the knight’s hip with very fine silk thread.
The knight was young, and trying hard to be brave, and she had one of the servants bring the man some beef broth.
With his jaw, he didn’t have to chew it, so she was just packing her things up when Amata approached.
“What happened?” she said, looking around the hall with shock. “Why are these men wounded?”