As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  Runners, most of them young boys, were scurrying up and down the lines, shouting to be heard over the clamor of stirring arms. He seized one of the boys close, asked him, “What’s the word, child?”

  The child squirmed out of his grip, but stayed long enough to pass his message on, no matter the scowl. “Assal help the bastard, messar, we’re headed west.” Men herded them on, the boy sidling just beyond Isaak’s grip. “Some’n strung up the marshall we’d had at one them waterholes out there, Thekla and his folk—” as though he was supposed to know a Thekla, “—and folks saying they saw Witty’s colors. Tessel’s set to string them up too!” The child practically beamed with self-importance the more he got into the message.

  Past the word “west,” the boy’s words scarcely touched him. The plot swept him away and tore off leagues ahead of their own beleaguered steps. So. West. There were names, a dozen or more, which came immediately to mind, were weighted and juggled and tossed aside as need be. A few strong possibilities there, for there were some sizeable places out west, where the forest was thinnest. Ivon was playing it smart. He would not attempt to lead them east, toward the river. That was bait Tessel never would have taken. Tessel wanted the west, though, wanted to scrabble out of this damnable forest that sucked the life out of him sure as any peat bog.

  The child was away again without dismissal, and he, not truly any the wiser. He ignored the sensation, spread his thoughts out further, to the men around him and the ranks they marched, the trails they took, even watched the boughs of the trees for any sudden rustle of the wind.

  Nothing to leave behind. Tessel didn’t believe in writing his orders down. A pity. It should have made things easier. Instead, he had to play the oblivious man, chasing information no one else could see.

  The land they passed was a deceptive sort. For twenty miles behind, it was older forest, but this was all silver-backed firs writ large, certainly none even so old as Isaak’s father had been. Even so, there were no charred or hacked stumps here, the remnants of which had always struck Isaak like the contents of a sacked city. The downside to such new growth was the flurry of activity—it was a jungle, and as they did not take the trails, that meant exuberant growth, giant nettles, and tumbling streams licking their way through the rocks of a dozen tiny valleys.

  The day was warm, at least, the sort of warmth which stirred comfort in men’s hearts, which eased the worries from them. For impatient men, as Tessel had proved to be, this was a dangerous combination—not for the world, but for the man. For all that, more than one hundred men trampled the forest beyond, outriders meant to screen their approach, to sniff out trouble before it came to them. A good theory, but in country like this, one could have had twice that number, and they would still be good only for the ground over which they trod—as soon as they had vacated it, anything might have slipped into the recess.

  It was dark among the trees, in spite of the sun, strips of amethyst breaking through the leaf line. No standards here. Tessel had ordered them brought down, ordered a silent march—no trumpets, no drums, no excess. Men-at-arms moved in regulated masses, but enough abreast of one another that they were no easy line for cannon.

  They would be headed for Hausach, in the end. Riders went back and forth all afternoon, with word of the trail, updates from the town. Their quarry had drunk deep after the butchery, loitered and lounged and headed east now, straight toward them. Tessel would give cautious chase, as he always did. Isaak had said as much, when he sent that bird in the night, after he had so much pleaded with the birdmaster for the family who needed word of him. It would be dead by now, that bird. He, as so many others had known, fully suspected Ivon had watchers in or around their camp. Archers would not hesitate to down a messenger.

  It was a tangle. He wanted it to tangle. Men cursed or laughed in turn, some anxious, more eager. They wanted this to be over, and Isaak could not blame them for that. They hated this place, which was just as well. The Ulneberg was not a place for foreigners. Those who lived in its shadow understood it, worked and toiled and made their way through it, understood that it was older than any of their great names or greater deeds, would remain long after they had gone to dust. The rest saw only a nuisance, a dank, dreary backwater too far removed from the light of their cities. A place was what one made of it. They made it their enemy, and it obliged.

  By dusk, at their fierce pace, they crossed a shallow ravine terribly near the town, its slopes guttered by a stream which fed the marshes around, and here, they would have drawn up a common line if here was not where the tread of many horses and the rattle of swords and spears and armor fell upon Ivon’s bait.

  A storm of arrows sailed among them, but most clattered off armor or the trees, and those half a hundred men broke and ran. Water splashed as they crossed and re-crossed the stream, and the air lit suddenly with the fire of Tessel’s long guns, until the man himself barked out a general halt, and the guns slunk back, as men pulled for bows or crossbows instead. A dozen men died clambering up the far bank—Ivon’s men. The rest kept running, not looking back.

  Someone began to whistle and their bands surged forward, the outriders peeling off into raiding wedges that loped suddenly back for the men in flight. Soon the air thrummed with the chorus of purposeful killers, long iron ranks filing forward to do their duty. A war horn blew at last, and the silence was sundered. Riders leapt the gap and bore down on the bait, as the footmen marched stolidly forward, enjoying the anticipation of action.

  At the same time, there were other trumpet calls, and some, no doubt, came from the outriders Tessel had used to shield his men. But not all. Deception came best in using one’s own securities against them.

  After so many defeats, and so many failures, Tessel struck at the first enemies he encountered. There was to be no quarter given. This was the danger of a careful man prodded past his own bearing, an otherwise virile man suddenly forced to prove his potency after too many failures.

  The run stretched. Their lines lengthened. The stream was a muddy basin, deepened and broken up with the clots of heavy hoof prints. Clumps of men were beginning to form as men rooted and pulled, and passions began to get the better of some. Despite Tessel’s best efforts, his force remained uneven, the ranks shallow in some places, unnecessarily deep in others. Isaak urged his own men on, shouting glories to the God and to Tessel, to men to get their fill. Passion, he had found, tended to be a stronger argument than order.

  His own men had just reached the ditch when the arrows swept the ravine like a cloud of locusts. A hellish racket peppered the air as shafts thudded off or into armor, and pattered against the shallow stream. Already confused, the struggling men found their struggle punctuated by screaming horses and astonished shouts. Some men started to press back as the others, pushed by the unsteady ground, continued to shove forward, toward the opposite bank.

  Another wave followed, and another as the terrified men turned, clambered through the madness into the training. They were well-rested, well-trained, for wont of everything else. A comradery of distant deaths, perhaps. Isaak was among them, bent his pike with the rest as they formed up, making room for the long gunners on the shore. Bodies were pouring out of the woods by then, men from both sides, stopping only to fire. The last sweep of arrows were almost horizontal, packed so much strength of arm behind their tips they took men clean off their feet. Isaak stood, waited, listened. He was a reed, he told himself. All the rest was the wind.

  There was a drunken speed to the advance, men running, men howling, men hungry for blood. Riders raised their lances, and bowmen struck from the trees, shedding at last the leaves and the dirt which had hidden the gleam of their instruments.

  The ravine played strange tricks with the sound here. Dead men lingered longer than they should, other things muffled in the drink. Still the guns, the terrible guns, fired all at once, then the next line, and the next, and the woods were drowned in blood.

  To his right, a man screamed out for his maker, an arro
w in his hip. Isaak staggered, made it seem as if both had been taken, and as others pressed past, as the smoke swirled and men crashed through thin lines of sumac, he toppled back with the screaming man into the ravine, into the muddy water, and let the sound die. There was nothing more to see—nothing his ears could not tell him.

  * *

  People who said the wood was still didn’t watch it close enough. Sounds changed, with the passing of the sun or the slant-eyed arch of the moons’ twin rays, but there was always life. Nature never ceased its moving. A watchful person swiftly learned how tiny men truly were.

  Roswitte rode north, as the crow flies, through old growth and new, evading the open towns and villages of the western reaches, slogging more oft than not through carpets of moss and marshy morasses only mosquitoes could love. Some of their people knew these corners of the Ulneberg though, had been sent by Count Witold specifically for that knowledge. They led her true, rode swift and sure along shortcuts even her trained eyes should not have seen—places which, for most, should have seemed little more than deer trails, aimless and pointless.

  The air was dense and heavy, and they rode hard for all that. Even with wind flush on her skin, she could feel the sweat clinging to the crest of her back. Her bow did not help any. It hung awkward upon her bony shoulders, jostled with every clamor of her gryphon’s bounding legs. She found herself holding her breath, time and again, and releasing it, often as not, when she noticed it and named herself a fool. Hoses she liked fine enough in theory. Fellow like her, though, far as she was concerned, had no need for such ungainly creatures as these gryphons under her.

  By mid-afternoon, they had caught up with their quarry. She was near the front, with Ivon, when there came a soft whistling from the brush. She whistled back; Ivon could not whistle. Only then did the scout emerge, an old woodsman from the western marshes. She knew him, shared a crude joke every now and again.

  “Are they headed for Hausach?” Ivon asked.

  This was what the bird had said, when she pulled the note from its leg. She had adjusted the worn, supple leather guard on her forearm, nocked the arrow at the first flutter of wings from the camp. Where it was going, she did not know. Not signed. Not addressed. Weeks, such birds had been but scant prey. Riders rode out in triplet. Tessel grew careful. This was a gift.

  Or the traitor. She had begun to suspect there was one—little things, here and there, led her to it. She had exhaled calmly, took aim just ahead, could see where the bird’s flight would carry it and—released.

  Ivon had suggested a trap where some men suggested providence. Had the Brickheart still been with them, that notion should have nixed all others. Caution was his byword. Yet it was Ensil who had been the deciding factor.

  “Head west. To this Hausach. Your people know it, at the least, can learn well in advance if it is the trap you make it.”

  “Battles are won often enough by the ground you choose,” Ivon had snipped.

  “Or don’t,” the dust knight acquiesced, just the least bit pithy. It struck her as odd to see so noble a bearing suddenly dragging his knuckles through sarcasm. She found she liked it. “Your whole purpose here is battle. It must happen sometime.”

  She looked around her then, at wounded men and hardy men, men long past the question. Faces had been rendered motionless, hardened—a sort of exaggerated calm soldiers exuded as they pursued the mundane. Had to. It was enough to meet their eyes to know. These men were ready for battle.

  Ivon and Ensil both were, whatever else might define them, men of their people. Ivon brooded, but in the end he decided. The only question then, as difficult as the other: who to send? Sacrifice was a necessity of this mission, or the rest would never be believed. Another had to die to bait the trap to snare the wolf.

  Back in the present, the old woodsman coughed, skittered back. “They do. Nigh hundered men cupping ‘em, all eyes and ears and fire. Not knights, no, but light-foot folk. Sturdy northern horse. Quick rides, but they churn the forest so.”

  “Hausach,” Ivon repeated with a ghost of a smile. “I owe your dust knight an apology.”

  The latter, twisted on her, also burned her. She flinched from it, pursed her lips and did her best to look stoic. Your. She did not like how that sounded on his tongue.

  Now, Ensil was out there. As bait. As anchor. They had needed a man they could trust, with men he could trust. Men who knew the difference between running with purpose and running from fear. She had volunteered—no good, he would not let her, the others would not listen. Then the dust knight, all fool nobility, offered himself as the lamb. She might have screamed at him, beat him, named him for the fool he was, but she did none of these things before her lord, let Ivon bob his silly warrior’s tail and clasp the man’s hand, men being men, riding off to die all full of shit and bravado.

  It should have been her.

  “Ride now,” Ivon said to her. “Be the wind that whistles the tempest’s coming.”

  So she ran, though the air around her was dense. So she ran, two score commandos at her back, men who still called her Little Bear, as another man once had teased, the lot of them knowing that by day’s end they were more like to shrink than grow, to pass through a fire that would harden or break them. So she ran.

  She gave herself to the darkness. The gryphons knew it, clung to it, no remnant of their precious blue sky dreams remaining. Men were there and they were gone in these shadows. Life flitted moment to moment; death had to be as swift.

  They saw a few of the Bastard’s outliers, but those who saw them did not live to tell it. These rode together, and each had horns to link them to the rest. It was not easy. She had never asked nor expected such of life. All she asked was the strength to draw her bow to full, that she might never live a day past tasting the salt of a bowstring against the corner of her mouth.

  The bow was an extension of herself, had been since she was old enough to climb a tree. “If you can master the tree one way, you can master it another,” her father had told her, and he had given her that first bow, set her on that path. Many bows had touched her hands in the days since, but it was Pescha’s bow which remained—a hardy, composite thing, all laminated wood and sinew limb. Its delicate curves were known to her, the bowstrings with which she completed its arcs made by her own hand. Twenty-six-inch draw, perfectly accurate. She knew what she could do with that bow, knew its limits as intimately as her own.

  When she loosed, she heard the crunch of ribs being broken by the arrow, of tearing armor. Men went down and they either stayed down, or the horses or the gryphons rode them down, or another arrow finished them off. One should never rush after a shot animal, but in this she had no choice. No one could survive this day, not once she had decided their cycle was at its end.

  Sometimes there were shrieks of fear and pain from man and steed alike. Fleeting. She took their horns, left others to raid their bags—these would overtake them, oft enough, at the next kill, and so on, as they made their way around Tessel’s rear and flank. He could not see them coming. His attention had to be focused. His force was three times the size of their own, even splintered, and surprise only meant so much.

  Yet as day neared its end, they knew they had done it. A trail of dead men behind them, freed steeds to buffet their own. They waited for the others, sent a few runners of their own ahead, taking the place of dead men, to keep up illusions. They became as shadows on the periphery, birds hovering, scenting the kill. Then they watched the rebels begin to seep through the trees, like pus squeezed from a festering wound, a dark, grubby, malevolent seeming infestation. They glinted here and there with bright steel.

  Not long after Ivon rejoined them, it happened. Shapes moved in the distance. People in town were just beginning to kindle their fires. Light was setting. She could see shapes opposite them, Ivon dividing their force. She might have questioned that, but she was focused on the distant scene, as arrows traded and men fled. As horses bounded after them, intent on the kill.

 
* *

  The hunter shirked the old identity as a second skin. For a time he lay perfectly still, as dead men and living tussled around him, and the stink of the ravine gradually corrupted itself into the largest, rawest sewer in the world. A heap rose around him, and because he dare not move, it was a long time before he wriggled, and longer still did it take to wriggle free of dead men for it, shifting weight to find purchase.

  Free, he lay motionless still for another moment, just breathing. Then gagging. Nothing came up, fortunately. He started shaking, which was beyond even his control, but he dragged at a sword and started to crawl, and climb. While most of the tumult held above the banks by then, a legion of the dying still made the ravine a hellish choir.

  His limbs were near to numb, and they itched with a fever as the blood rushed back to them. He moved quickly for all that, but careful, ignoring dead and dying alike. Gradually, his strength seeped back. By the time he reached one edge of the hollow, he could totter upright.

  There was no shame in his appearance. He was a creature of shadows, not the battlefield. All the same, he found certain reactions did not falter with the rest.

  “Hold to that rut! Hold!” He twisted, found two long guns jutted out at him as their owned balanced precariously over the embankment. “Soldier or officer?”

  When he did not answer, the other’s calm broke, though his shout was smothered by a distant clamor of cannon. His eyes flitted back, and the hunter moved. The flung dagger was poorly balanced, but it still caught the man under the strap of his cap, and broke what it did not sever. The other man quailed as he fumbled backward, and his weapon discharged harmlessly into the air. Aside from ringing Isaak’s ears, nothing came of it, and he needn’t even kill this second, for he was fleeing away as Isaak gained the higher ground.