"From High Captain von Orseln to the Princess Joan.
"Come with all speed, if you would be in time. We are hard beset. The enemy are all about us. Prince Conrad has ordered a charge!"
The face of the woman whitened as she read, but at the same moment the fingers of Joan of the Sword Hand tightened upon the hilt. She read the letter aloud. There was no comment. Boris cried an order, Jorian dropped to the rear, and the retinue of the Envoys Extraordinary swung out on the road towards the great battle.
Outnumbered and beaten back by the locust flock which spread to either side, far outflanking and sometimes completely enfolding his small army, Prince Conrad still maintained himself by good generalship and the high personal courage which stimulated his followers. The hardy Kernsbergers, both horse and foot, whom Maurice had brought up, proved the backbone of the defence. Besides which Werner von Orseln had striven by rebuke and chastening, as well as by appeals to their honour, to impart some steadiness into the Courtland ranks. But save the free knights from the landward parts, who were driven wild by the sight of the ever-spreading Muscovite desolation, there was little stamina among the burghers. They were, indeed, loud and turbulent upon occasion, but they understood but ill any concerted action. In this they differed conspicuously from their fellows of the Hansa League, or even from the clothweavers of the Netherland cities.
As Joan and the war-captains of Plassenburg came nearer they heard a low growling roar like the distant sound of the breakers on the outer shore at Isle Rugen. It rose and fell as the fitful wind bore it towards them, but it never entirely ceased.
They dashed through the fords of the Alla, the three hundred lances of the Plassenburg Guard clattering eagerly behind them. Joan led, on a black horse which Conrad had given her. The two war-captains with one mind set their steel caps more firmly on their heads, and as his steed breasted the river bank Jorian laughed aloud. Angrily Joan turned in her saddle to see what the little man was laughing at. But with quick instinct she perceived that he laughed only as the war-horse neighs when he scents the battle from afar. He was once more the born fighter of men. Jorian and his mate would never be generals, but they were the best tools any general could have.
They came nearer. A few wreaths of smoke, hanging over the yet distant field, told where Russ and Teuton met in battle array. A solemn slumberous reverberation heard at intervals split the dull general roar apart. It was the new cannon which had come from the Margraf George to help beat back the common foe. Again and again broke in upon their advance that appalling sound, which set the inward parts of men quivering. Presently they began to pass limping men hasting cityward, then fleeing and panic-stricken wretches who looked over their shoulders as if they saw steel flashing at their backs.
A camp-marshal or two was trying to stay these, beating them over the head and shoulders with the flat of their swords; but not a man of the Plassenburgers even looked towards them. Their eyes were on that distant tossing line dimly seen amid clouds of dust, and those strange wreaths of white smoke going upward from the cannons' mouths. The roar grew louder; there were gaps in the fighting line; a banner went down amid great shouting. They could see the glinting of sunshine upon armour.
"Kernsberg!" cried Joan, her sword high in the air as she set spurs in her black stallion and swept onward a good twenty yards before the rush of the horsemen of Plassenburg.
Now they began to see the arching arrow-hail, grey against the skyline like gnat swarms dancing in the dusk of summer trees. The quarrels buzzed. The great catapults, still used by the Muscovites, twanged like the breaking of viol cords.
The horses instinctively quickened their pace to take the wounded in their stride. There—there was the thickest of the fray, where the great cannon of the Margraf George thundered and were instantly wrapped in their own white pall.