of them moved quickly back to their men and began issuing orders.
Sir George left them to it, and returned his attention to the enemy.
The odds are little worse than I faced with the King at Dupplin, he thought. He'd pointed that out to his men in his own less bombastic, and more professional, prebattle speech, and it was close enough to true to satisfy them. Sir George had based his present deployment upon the one that had been used that day, and he truly expected it to give him victory, yet there were significant differences between Dupplin and this field, and he knew it. For one thing, although Edward III's army had counted no more than five hundred knights and fifteen hundred archers against almost ten thousand Scots at Dupplin, the odds against him had been only five-to-one, not eight-to-one. For another, the Scots at Dupplin had boasted no archers, whereas the Thoolaas had more dart-throwers than he had longbowmen. And, for yet another, Scots weren't nine feet tall and equipped with four arms each.
Still, it's not as if we haven't done it before, he told himself firmly as the oncoming warriors reached the far side of the stream and began splashing into it, bellowing their deep, strange war cries while the drums thundered and boomed behind them.
They should be discovering the first caltrops about . . . now, he thought.
As if his thought had been a cue, a huge shudder seemed to run through the front ranks of the charging Thoolaas. War cries turned abruptly into bellows of anguish as huge, broad, six-toed f