Red Rowan: Book 3: Return of the Reluctant Hero

by Helen Gosney

A spear and an axe together? Nobody could imagine such a thing, but something like that could certainly inflict a lot of damage. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “There’s… there’s one on my arm…” Rowan said wearily, “I think the cursed thing just missed it…”

  Rhys and Griff looked at each other and shook their heads sadly. Poor laddie, they thought, he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going, but Thorn looked more closely at the badly swollen and inflamed arm he was working on: the arm that he’d be amputating through the shoulder joint if he thought there was a reasonable chance that Rowan might survive it. But no, the shock and the inevitable blood loss would undoubtedly kill him in his weakened state. It was dangerous enough simply doing what he was. Even so, the healer thought that removing the shard of metal and cleaning the wound properly could only be a good thing, and with a bit of luck it might make it a bit less painful too. He peered carefully at either side of the long gash and followed the image of a polearm further up towards the shoulder…

  “Oh, yes,” he said, surprised that Rowan was in fact more lucid just now than he’d realised. Then again, Rowan surprised the healer every day by simply keeping breathing and he seemed to have an uncanny knack for struggling back to some degree of consciousness just when it’d be better for him if he didn’t. “That must be it… horrible looking thing, isn’t it?” He saw the amazed stares that Rhys and Griff sent his way and smiled for a moment. “Daft buggers,” he said, “Look!” and he pointed at Rowan’s upper arm.

  The intricate tattoo of the Weapons Master covered the arm from mid forearm to shoulder, marred now by the long gaping wound. And yes… among the many weapons depicted there that they simply couldn’t name, there was a sort of polearm that looked like it might be some kind of cross between an axe and a spear.

  Griff shuddered as he thought about such a thing being used against Rowan, or anyone else for that matter.

  “Aye, they are horrible…” Rowan managed, “I never did like the bloody things…”

  **********

  “You must have nearly lost your arm…”

  “Aye. ‘Twas only by sheer luck that I didn’t.” Rowan looked at the other man’s shocked face and said gently, “I take no joy in having killed all of those men, lad. But at the end of the day, they were trying to invade Wirran, and it was my job, the Guard’s job, to stop them. I’m truly sorry about your brother, but in battle, men are killed. It doesn’t mean the survivors take any sort of pleasure in the deaths they caused.”

  **********

  Bess was very surprised to see Rowan and the mysterious Plaiten come into the kitchen of the Dappled Stallion together. Rowan was as calm and unruffled as always and he smiled as he handed her a very fine trout.

  “There you go, Bess love. A nice trout as promised. I hope you enjoy it,” he said, “I did meet up with Estel here, while I was at the river, and I think he has a… um… perhaps a better understanding of things now, but I think he might be leaving you fairly soon.”

  Estel shuffled his feet a bit and looked abashed.

  “Yes, I think so too. I came here for all the wrong reasons, Mistress Bess, and my brother wouldn’t have been proud of me, I don’t think. Truly, I’m just lucky that Red Rowan is more of a man than I thought…” the Plaiten knew that Rowan could have killed him as easily as breathing, but he hadn’t. He’d actually taken the time to try and help his would-be murderer. It was time for him, Estel, to go home to Plait with a new sense of acceptance.

  Rowan smiled at him.

  “Don’t let that get around, for the Gods’ sakes. As long as folk believe that I’m a cold-blooded killer who’d rather murder them than talk to them, I might get a bit of peace,” he said half-seriously.

  **********

  Rowan spent a very enjoyable evening with Fess and his family, after a fine meal of trout. He’d intended to tell his friend about Estel, but after the children had gone to bed the conversation had turned to other matters and, well, he’d decided not to spoil things. He knew that Fess would be keen to send some troopers after the Plaiten, but he thought that telling him about it could wait for the next morning.

  As it happened, the aftermath of Rowan’s meeting with Estel would turn out to be far more dramatic than anyone could possibly have expected.

  **********

  43. “So much blood”

  “Good lad, Mica. Brave laddie,” Rowan said, hating himself as he urged the stallion into the thick of the fighting.

  He saw Mica’s ears flicker in acknowledgement of his voice.

  Wake up, Rowan, wake up you silly bugger! he screamed in his mind, knowing it would be futile. Sometimes he could wake himself up in the middle of a nightmare like this, but generally not so early in the piece. He hadn’t had the bit about the cursed halberdier yet and he hadn’t seen the worst of Trill either. It would be rare to escape one or the other of those, he knew, and it’d probably be even harder after meeting that poor silly pest Estel today. It didn’t stop him trying though.

  He tried not to watch as Mica galloped towards a wall of screaming Plaitens. They’d be screaming a hell of a lot more than that in a moment, he knew. Just wait until Mica and I get among you, you poor bastards. Mica lowered his head a bit as he charged, lining up the steel spike of the shaffron, the plated steel that protected his head, just… so; the men tried to scatter away from him as Rowan knew they would, and… there. The face of a Plaiten sergeant, screaming as he fell back from Rowan’s blood-drenched sabre minus a hand to disappear under Mica’s trampling hooves… a spray of blood from another man… and another… Gods, that arm was getting tired again already, he’d have to swap hands soon… a screech as Mica snapped at a man’s face and gouged him with the spike, then kicked at another’s legs… the horrid crunch of bone that he could hear over the battlefield cacophony.

  Here we go again, Rowan lad, he thought. Brace yourself. Of course he couldn’t, any more than he’d been able to all the other times this horrible scenario had played itself out.

  The sudden heavy thump into his shoulder, shocking and unexpected. The force of it knocked him to the side and he knew he was going to fall and there was nothing he could do about it. He had a sudden, crazy view of men fighting below him, saw Fess’s shocked white face behind him, saw the exultant Plaitens closing in to block his friend, his troopers, from helping him. And then a heavy crash that he couldn’t really remember when awake, and a dreadful searing pain in his shoulder that he could remember all too well.

  Get up, lad, get up. Don’t wait for them to have another bloody go at you. But he couldn’t get up just yet, he was barely conscious beside a mountain of dead men. Surely he hadn’t killed all of them himself, had he? He heard Mica’s savage scream, managed to turn his head a bit and saw the stallion fighting fiercely to protect him, just as it’d been trained to do. Good lad, Mica. Brave lad. Rollo’s men couldn’t believe it and they couldn’t get past the horse either as it kicked and bit, trampled, gored and killed the men trying to kill Rowan.

  Get up, Rowan! Don’t worry about anything else now, just get up! Mica needs you! He can’t do it all by himself. Rowan watched himself stagger to his feet, sway unsteadily for a long moment, then try to pull the halberd from under his shoulder piece. The Wirran Guard and their horses weren’t heavily armoured, in the interests of manoeuvrability, but they were protected well enough and he was surprised the thing had penetrated just there instead of sliding off as it should have; it hadn’t even been wielded well to start with… just sheer bad luck, and it probably wouldn’t happen again in a hundred years… but the cursed thing HAD, and now it was damned hard to get it out unassisted.

  Bloody horrible thing, his sleeping self thought, I never did like halberds. The weapon tore down his upper arm under its own weight as he struggled with it, just as it always did and it snagged in his chainmail just… there. He saw Mica leap upwards, kicking out hard behind him to cave in the chest of the trooper there who’d tried to cripple him, but only succeeded in
inflicting a shallow cut on the rump that enraged the stallion even more. The grey landed as lightly as a feather to pirouette perfectly, rear and lash out with his steel shod hooves to finish the job. For a moment Rowan was taken aback at the sheer beauty of the fierce, deadly dance and he could see the awe and fear on the Plaitens’ faces. Hold on, Mica, brave horse, I’m coming to help you, he thought desperately as the halberd finally came free of his arm with a gush of blood. It skidded down his mailed forearm to rip off his gauntlet and perhaps a finger. Rowan swore horribly at the pain in his shoulder, arm and hand and, he now realised, his nose that he’d broken somewhere along the way. Shut up, laddie, he thought as he tossed and turned and sweated in his bed, still trying hard to wake up. At least that cursed halberd didn’t take your damned arm right off and you didn’t even know your poor bloody nose was broken until now. Get on with it now, tuck your arm through your cursed sash and then your sabre’s just… there… grab the bloody thing and go! Go and help Mica, go and help Fess…

  But Fess wasn’t here in Trill… he’d sent him back to Den Siddon, hadn’t he? And Mica was back in camp, somehow not badly hurt, but Rowan had thought it best to ride one of the unclaimed and uninjured troop horses to chase after Rollo. The Gods knew there were enough of them. Sometimes Fess was in the dreams of Trill, though he shouldn’t be… don’t go near that bloody well, Rowan, you fool! Don’t…! Dammit. He felt the familiar revulsion sweep through him. Why could he never avoid that cursed bit? Sometimes he could alter the course of the nightmares, sometimes he could even wake himself up and escape them entirely, but not tonight. He shuddered as the horror unfolded before him again. So much blood, so many dead… how could anyone bear it…?

  He thought he heard a cat meowing, but there’d been no noise at all in Trill and that in itself had been awful. Maybe it was little Scrap, trying to wake him up as the cat often did when he, Rowan, had a nightmare. How Scrap knew, Rowan had no idea. Perhaps by the way he tossed and turned, though he did that at the best of times now. Just try a little bit harder, Scrap laddie, and I will too, maybe we can…

  **********

  Rowan blinked and looked around himself carefully: there was no blood, no hacked and abused bodies of women and children and old folk, no cursed Plaitens screaming at him and trying to kill him… just the moonlight coming through the leaves of the tallowbark into his room, and a night warbler whistling quietly to itself.

  If he turned his head a little, he could see the stars through the window… like that. He felt himself relax a bit as he took a deep breath of the tallowbark’s tangy scent and tried to untangle himself from the bedclothes. You’ll bloody strangle yourself one night, he thought absently, but at least you managed to wake yourself up, with help from Scrap.

  He reached up to stroke the little black cat that he knew would be snuggled against his pillow… but… he frowned as he looked down at his own body in surprise. His arm hadn’t… it wouldn’t move at all and to his horror he now saw that he was drenched with blood and gore and swathed with filthy bandages. Suddenly frantic, he tried with all of his strength to move. No. No, he couldn’t move at all as the warbler suddenly let out a heart-stopping shriek that no warbler had ever imagined before. It sounded more like that poor lad from Den Tiryl who’d lost an arm, having his dressings changed. Surely that was him, screaming and howling in his agony. Rowan stared unbelieving at the neat rows of suffering troopers that he hadn’t seen before. How the hell could he have not seen them? The familiar stench of Messton assailed his battered nose.

  He struggled desperately for a few moments as the truth finally dawned on him. He wasn’t awake. He wasn’t awake at all… his sleeping self said words that would surely have curled little Scrap’s whiskers if they’d come out as anything other than the incomprehensible mumble that they in fact did. Rowan hated it when he dreamed so very clearly that he was awake when he actually wasn’t, like this. It was most confusing when he really did finally wake and it was often the precursor to the most horrible parts of the nightmares.

  He watched, unsurprised, as his dream self stumbled wearily out of the healers’ tent, then over and around mangled bodies and bits of bodies, almost slipped in a great pool of blood, and headed towards the well that was overflowing with yet more blood. Leave it, you bloody fool, he thought tiredly. I know what’s there and you don’t want to, believe me. And you can’t bloody change it. Just leave the cursed thing be. Go and find Rollo and his damned Plaitens, go and kill them so we can get this over with. He hoped he wouldn’t dream about the trek home to Den Siddon as well, as he’d thought for a moment he was. But no. It was definitely Trill now, as if he hadn’t had enough of that already tonight.

  Rowan fought down nausea as he straightened up from the horrid well.

  “Don’t look at the well, lads, you don’t need to see what Rollo’s done here…” he wished he hadn’t seen it too, knew it would haunt him forever. He looked around the ghastly Town Square that was filled with the abused and tortured bodies of its citizens. All dead, even the little children and babies and old folk… their suffering was unthinkable and that anyone could or would do such things… simply inconceivable. He felt a sudden spark of white-hot rage ignite in his shattered soul and his exhaustion dropped from him like a cloak. He would find those who’d done this and when he did… He turned his head at a faint sound that was completely wrong in this silent charnel house of a town. Somewhere, and somewhere not too far away at that, he thought he heard the sounds of drunken revelry. He gathered his devastated troopers around him, ordered them to silence, and set off to follow the faint noise.

  “I think we’ve found the bastards, lads,” he said grimly, “Let’s go and see…”

  And there it was… the bloody Black Swan, that bastard Rollo and his men were there inside and there were so damned many of them… Somehow, he and Cade and the men would have to try to…

  Sudden pain exploded in his head. He had a brief, terrifying sensation of falling, wondered frantically what the hell was happening now and thought he saw stonework or brickwork rushing up to meet him. He barely had time for a single appalling thought before his head connected with something very hard indeed. He knew no more as blessed darkness overwhelmed him.

  **********

  44. “Safely tucked up in bed”

  Sergeant Lenni Shersson was Duty Warden for the garrison this week, with only two months to go to the Trophy. He finished his cup of tea in the upper guardroom, got to his feet and wriggled and stretched to unkink himself. Thom Blunt, Duty Sergeant for the night Watch, watched him idly.

  “Off to make sure all the naughty boys are back in the barracks and safely tucked up in bed, are you, Lenni?” he chuckled. There were four teams of two men and the others had just left.

  “Aye, Thom. It’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it,” Lenni said with a straight face.

  Thom nodded sagely.

  “True, true. Where’s whatsisname, your offsider, got to?”

  “Goran? He wasn’t feeling too good, so I sent him to the healers earlier. He’s not come back yet. Maybe they sent him off to bed and forgot to tell us.”

  “He’s a useless bugger, that Goran. He should have bloody told us himself, or at least made sure we know what’s going on,” Thom frowned in annoyance, “Here, take young Ulrich with you. He’s a big strong lad, he’ll protect you. Off you go with Sergeant Lenni, Ulrich, give him a hand on his rounds. Maybe you’ll find a drunk somewhere.” Extremely unlikely, he knew, but even in a well disciplined garrison like Den Siddon, there’d always be somebody who’d try to bend the rules.

  “Aye, Sir.” Ulrich, now a second-year recruit on his first night Watch, leapt to his feet and saluted. He was doing well and enjoying his training very much, even finding the not-always-popular night Watch interesting. A couple of nights ago he’d been startled to hear a quiet voice hail the troopers and then the Champion and his little black cat had appeared on the battlements. Rowan had stayed for a while, shared a cup of tea wit
h the Watch, and then disappeared as silently as he’d come.

  **********

  “They all do that, Ulrich,” Thom had said quietly, “Sometimes I even do it myself.”

  “What do you mean, Sir?”

  “All the men who were at Messton and especially those from Trill, like Rowan and Lieutenant Cade, they all come up here when they can’t sleep. Known for it, we are…” Thom had sighed, “Sometimes it doesn’t happen for weeks, months even, and then… well, who knows what starts it off? I’ve even seen Captain Fess up here…”

  “A couple of the lads were talking to the Champion one time…” Ivan and Rogen, it had been, “And they said… they said he’d told them that Messton was bloody awful, and he’d carry its scars forever. I thought he meant…” Ulrich’s voice had trailed away uncertainly.

  Thom had shaken his head.

  “No, not just the scars you can see, Ulrich, though the Gods know they’re bad enough. No, he meant the sort of scars that wake you up in the middle of the night, not sure where you are, and thinking that you’re about to be killed by a horde of screaming bloody Plaitens…”

  Ulrich had stared at him in horror.

  “I’m sorry, Sir, I… I didn’t realise…” he gabbled.

  “Why should you, laddie? None of us did before Messton either.” Thom sighed softly. “Anyway, as I say, we’re known for doing that whether we’re still in the Guard or not… a cup of tea and a chat to get the head straight again, and then back to bed. ‘Tis better than tossing and turning and keeping everyone else awake for half the damned night…Oh, and Ulrich… if ever you happen to see somebody you think is sleepwalking, somebody who was at Messton I mean, for the Gods’ sakes don’t bloody touch them to wake them up. Nobody in the garrison walks in their sleep now, that I know of, but… well, a friend of mine used to do it, and he’d fight like a man possessed when he was woken. It’s much better to stand well back and shout at them or even bloody throw something at them.”