The Stonegate Sword

by Harry James Fox

“The javelin!” came Daniel’s voice. “Step on it and then hit him.”

  Suddenly, Don understood the purpose of the javelin and why it was designed to stick in the shield. Waiting for his chance he cocked his sword arm and leapt on the trailing shaft. His weight forced the red shield down and tipped the upper edge forward. At the same time, Don swung his newly-sharpened sword with all his strength in a backhand arc, aiming at his opponent’s neck. He felt rather than heard the blade chunk into something yielding. The foeman collapsed forward, and as Don stepped aside to let him fall, he saw an iron helm roll in the mud.

  Joyfully, he glanced back, just in time to see a red spear being withdrawn from the small of the prostrate enemy’s back. He winced and felt a distinct pain in his own spine. Suddenly, his joy turned to pity for the stranger who had come so far just to die in the rain and mud on a nameless hilltop. He shook his head and mechanically parried a thrust from a short-spear.

  At that point, just as before, the battle blurred together. As the rain continued to hammer them, the weight of his sodden clothes and fatigue dragged at him. He hewed at a line of rain-soaked shields, trying to work as a team with young Daniel behind him. He held his own, but did little damage. The ground where he stood had relatively good footing, but lower down, the clay slope had turned into a slippery nightmare. The waves of attackers faltered again and again as they met the stern wall of steel at the hilltop’s rim, only to slip back again.

  Again and again they struggled up, sometimes on hands and knees. Spear points and sword blades threw them back down. Don looked to his left and saw Gray John standing next to him, wielding a long-hafted battle axe. With no wasted motion, he hewed down three enemies in as many swings. They fell down the slope in a bloody pile. Just then, Don saw a hand clawing at the mud near his feet as an enemy tried to gain the last few feet. But Don’s sword was there, nearly severing the arm. Don heard his cry as he tumbled backward, but the wall of shields hid him from view.

  The enemy before their small part of the line pulled back for a moment, as though dismayed. Just then a javelin was laid across his arm. He transferred his sword to his left hand for a second, letting his shield hang from the strap across his forearm, and accepted the weapon. He cast the javelin at a knot of enemy part way down the slope. The cast took a skinny foeman cleanly through the ribs.

  A cheer broke from around him. “Good throw, Lore-man!”

  “Well thrown!” Faces looked at him, faces that smiled. He saw helms turn his way, all with the red axe bravely showing. Now the slope below them was littered with dead, and waves of the enemy still struggled up, but the attacks seemed weaker. An order sounded from behind him, “Every other spearman! Pull back! You! You! You too! No, you stay!” Don looked over his shoulder to see men scrambling to the rear. A group of the enemy whooped and tried to climb the hill, but Gray John’s axe and the keen swords around him drove them back with sore wounds and heavy losses. Again, they pulled back down the hill for a few rods.

  “What’s happening?” shouted Don to Simson.

  “They’re strengthening our rear. We only have one spearman for the two of us.” He turned to Daniel. “You work for Donald and me, understand!”

  Don glanced back to see the young spearman brush back his sodden hood and nod. His cheery grin was gone, and Don could see blood on the spear, not yet washed off by the downpour.

  The sheets of rain continued, almost without letup. Lightning flashed, and thunder crashed intermittently, but no bolts struck near them. Torrents sluiced down on friend as well as enemy. Then came hoarse shouts of battle and the clash of arms from over the hill to the north. Don noticed that none of the archers were firing, and he realized that they must be on the north side as well, or else fighting in the ranks. The flanks had pulled much closer in. He wondered if they were surrounded, cut off from the horses, trapped.

  The scattered line of black and red surged upward again with more than a hint of desperation. Slipping, falling, thrust forward from the rear, they pressed up like a breaker at high tide. Up they surged, to crest and smash against the weakened shield wall. The combat was sharp and bitter. Don felt like a machine and fought by instinct. His sword arm had a life of its own, and for a detached moment, he realized that the knot of fear in his belly had vanished. He knew that he was likely to die, but by God, they would remember this day and this hill of bloody mud. A foeman fell to his knees and thrust up at Don with a short spear. It glanced off the bottom of the shield and hit his thigh, which stung for a moment. Don’s blade slashed the man’s arm and he fell back. At the same time, the wave of the enemy fell back as a group, They retreated twenty feet down the hill, then a hundred. In the swale below, they milled around as if they were trying to reorganize. Don had nothing to throw at them.

  Gray John came by with a skin flask, giving every man a drink. Don took a taste in his turn. It was like fire, burning all the way to his bowels.

  “Ahh!” he choked. “What is it?”

  “Spirits. It will put heart in you. Take a deep drink.”

  Don complied. This time the fire burned deeper still, and he could feel new strength course through his limbs, but only for a moment. Strangely, the shield began to feel heavier, as heavy as a millstone, really too heavy to lift. If only he could lay down and take a nap. The rain felt strangely warm on his right leg, and his foot slipped around inside his boot.

  Suddenly, he found himself on one knee. Strange … Someone seemed to be shouting at him. Something about blood on his leg … Then the rocky slope jumped up and hit him in the face. The murmur of voices seemed to fade; then he welcomed the darkness like a sweet and tender lover.

  †

  The voices were back again. The seemed to come and go, but at least he could lay still. The shaking and jerking had stopped. Perhaps he should get up. Had he overslept?

  “He’s coming around,” a voice said. Had that been the voice of the dream? It had seemed so real.

  Firelight shone in his eyes as soon as they opened, so he looked away into the cold darkness. There was a patter, exactly like rain on canvas. He looked back again and saw a face, a face that looked concerned.

  “What happened?” mumbled Don, thickly. “Is it raining?”

  “Is it raining?” shot back a familiar voice. “Is it raining? Why do you care? You let some idiot open one of your veins, tell no one, bleed nearly to death, and now all you worry about is the rain!”

  “Don looked to the left, toward the voice, and saw Gray John. “I didn’t know it was so bad,” he returned, weakly.

  “Well, don’t worry about it now,” the bearded face said. “You are in a safe place until morning. Sleep!”

  But Don had not heard. His eyes were already closed.

  †

  It was only much later that Don was able to piece together what had happened that long night. He learned in passing how the surgeon had tied off his severed artery and sewn up the wound, right on the battlefield. Then Don and the rest of the wounded, and what was left of their supplies had been laboriously hauled through the trampled mud to the northwest part of the knoll, above the low cliff. Simpson had told him how the shield wall had contracted to a small circle around the Red Wolf banner; how the patrol had fought until darkness began to fall.

  Stories around the fire at the camp near Brian’s Gate told how Lord Cal had been everywhere at once, untiring, his gold-chased axe crimson with great gouts of blood, hewing a path through the enemy wherever he went. The foemen had attacked again and again, untiring and merciless. Though their dead lay like grain before the scythe, they were implacable and had seemed to receive reinforcements. Thus strengthened, they pressed the Stonegate line back, step by step, by their sheer force of numbers. The low cliff and the anchor it gave to one corner of the line had finally freed enough swords to beat back the main weight of the last attack against the center of the shield wall. />
  As the Raiders had fallen back in momentary confusion, out of the shadows had come what seemed to be a major mounted attack against their flank. With horns blowing and the cry of “Stonegate” they had forced the enemy to turn their attention elsewhere. Thirty horsemen, each leading a mount behind him, thundered up the saddle from the East and swept into the enemy rear. The extra horses had given the illusion of much greater strength, apparently. Because, when Cal had led a charge through the enemy ranks to link up with the horsemen, the enemy wavered, then broke and ran. The rear ranks, as one, had turned and ran down the steep slope to the south. The horsemen had circled around to let thirty more troopers mount. Then the entire force, sixty strong, had followed the fleeing mob, slaughtering stragglers until total darkness fell. They chanced upon six enemy supply wagons and left them blazing as they returned to the blood-drenched knoll.

  The battle was over and won, but at heavy cost. Don and the other seriously wounded were moved again that night to the shelter of the woods and put in tents out of the rain. A day later, carts sent from the watch tower arrived to pick up the dead and critically wounded, as well as retrieve the captured arms, armor and other booty.

  Don had been taken to a camp near the watchtower where a temporary field hospital had been set up, but he had been only semiconscious and remembered little about it. Gray John’s troop had taken the most serious losses, so he and his men were left to guard the hospital and patrol the immediate area around Brian’s Gate.

  Don’s bed was a canvas sack filled with pine needles, under a canvas fly in a grove of pines. His nurses were his patrol mates, under the surgeon’s watchful eye. The surgeon had prescribed rich, hot broths and fresh liver to replace Don’s lost blood. Don was able to bear it and he could stomach the liver, but it was a pale shadow compared with his memory of Lady Wilma’s cooking. He had time to think of Rachel and wondered how she was doing. The wound was deep, and festered, but little fever came with it. The surgeon seemed pleased with his progress.

  “I only have a few of the Gray Pilgrim’s tablets,” he explained. “I must save them for those whose fever is much worse. Your wound is quite clean.”

  Probably everyone had heard of the Gray Pilgrims. They wore gray cloaks with a red cross and sold medicine as they traveled. Their cures, whether they be tablets, lotions or tonics, were powerful and effective. They had a headquarters west of the mountains somewhere, but they were not subjects of the Prophet.

  The evening of the fourth day after the battle, Gray John stopped by to see how Don was faring and stayed to talk for a few minutes. They exchanged pleasantries, then talked of their planned return to Stonegate in a few days when the rest of the patrol returned. Then the topic of conversation drifted to the battle.

  “I still don’t fully understand the tactics of the battle,” began Don, hesitantly. “Would you—”

  “You mean, would I waste my time talking tactics with a clumsy lackwit?” asked the older man, gruffly. “Someone who hardly knows crossbow bolts from horse dung?”

  Don felt his cheeks burn. Maybe he had deserved that. He had sounded pompous, and the old man’s tongue was sharper because it had a measure of the truth. “Sorry,” returned Don, quietly. “I do not want to waste your time. But even a lackwit can be trained, sometimes, as can an ignorant man.”

  Gray John gave him a long, measured glance, his face softening somewhat. He sat silently, rocking back and forth on the log on which he sat, both hands clasped around a knee. Embers in the nearby fire cracked. Don returned the gaze. After a long minute, the old warrior dropped his foot to the ground and faced Don squarely.

  “On second thought, Lore-man,” began John, tugging at his grizzled beard. “I have until moonrise before I check the guards. If you have any sensible questions I’ll try to answer them.”

  “Thanks!” returned Don, speaking slowly. “Well—I have heard much talk about the battle and how much damage we did to the enemy. But it seems that we were hurt too. Who won?”

  “Who won?” repeated the older man, sarcastically. “That is even more foolish than I had expected. Do you really think there are winners and losers in this war? Who won? We lost twenty-nine men dead! There were thirty-four sorely wounded, of which at least three or four will most likely die. Four or five will never fight again. Hundreds of enemies met us in open battle and escaped. And you asked me who won! No one won.”

  This was not what Don had expected. “But … But … ,” Don sputtered, startled by Gray John’s reaction as much as what he said. “We killed more of them—they fled.”

  “Oh, all right,” sighed John. “In the overall view, the long run, I can’t tell you who won. We did win the battle, of course. We suffered sixty casualties, but lost no horses or equipment. In fact, we captured a large number of weapons, some of good quality. We think they lost about two hundred killed and more wounded in the battle, and we killed about twenty-two stragglers the next day.”

  “The problem is …” he continued, staring into the fire. “Over three hundred got away back across the plain. ‘North Park,’ the ancients called it, as you should know! And they seem to have plenty of men, so they can probably replace their losses better than we can. Does that confuse you enough?”

  “Well—I think I see what you mean,” returned Don, frowning. “But where did all those Raiders come from in the second wave and later? I thought they had only about two hundred all told, or perhaps only a few more.”

  “Well, now. Well, now,” murmured the other, tugging at his beard. “That is a good question. I asked the same one, several times. Cal asked the same question. Why did our scouts report two hundred men, and then after we killed or sore wounded nearly half, how could they attack with nearly four hundred?”

  He counted his fingers mockingly. “By the Devil’s manure fork! That doesn’t seem to add up. Maybe the Prophet never learned to tell his sums.” He looked at Don, questioningly. Don remained silent.

  “Lore-man, in years you are no youngster, and you do not seem to have an idle tongue. Can you keep what I say behind your teeth? Would you have to spill it to your old man with the moldy books?”

  “’I say what seems well and keep my own counsel,’ as the saying goes,” replied Don, levelly. “But I will keep it between us, if you wish.”

  “That is well,” said John, nodding. “I trust you for some reason, against all my experience with wanderers and lore-men both. Very well, then.”

  He poured another cup of herb tea and added a few limbs to the glowing coals. Turning to Don, and without interruption he began to talk. Don did not interrupt, but relaxed and watched the play of firelight across the weather-beaten face. The pale, puckered scar across the cheekbone drew his eye, but then the hands began to tell the tale. With his expressive gestures, armies wheeled and charged, withdrew and maneuvered.

  “Now to your question, for I haven’t forgotten,” said John, finally, after they had seen an armload of wood burn to coals. “You must first realize that Lord Cal is a brave and mighty warrior, but he is not a great general, and he may never be. He would not want his mistakes shouted from the city walls, in any event. Understand?”

  Don nodded. John continued. “Some things went well. He sent scouts out as he should have done. When the enemy was sighted in force, and we had made our plans, he sent word back to the signal tower, just as he should. He listened to counsel fairly well and kept the enemy under scouts’ eyes at all times, and scouted the route of our advance very well. He ordered the shield wall well and fought mightily. He killed many of the enemies, personally. That all sounds good, and so it was. But what did he not do?”

  Don thought. “I don’t know,” he answered, finally. “Should he not have had the scouts recount to check the foemen’s strength?”

  “Close,” said John, nodding. “But, actually, I am sure their count was correct. The mistake was in not sendin
g the scouts on beyond to make sure another force was not in the area. There could always be another force following behind the first, perhaps, or maybe coming from another direction. Scouts are the leader’s eyes, and he must use them wisely and well. These youngsters will do no more than they are told, and rightly so.”

  “Then the second group of enemies was following at a distance?” asked Don, raising up on one elbow.

  “Such I believe, and it may have even been so planned,” replied John, sketching on the log with a piece of charcoal. “At any rate, we were too late for a mounted attack on their column. The first pack of the foe was too near the woods, which would have blunted our attack. The second force of 350 or so was, I believe, about five miles behind the first, but with less armor and able to move faster The supply wagons must have been in the first group, and they planned to use the long spears that they carried as a defense against our horse.”

  “You see why we could not attack on horseback after they had succeeded in crossing the open park. The knoll we chose was an excellent defensive position, near their route of march. So Cal decided to form the shield-wall there and let the Raiders either attack us and face our steel, or retreat and feel the weight of our horse when they reached the open plains to their rear.”

  “That seems to make sense,” said Don. “But why could not the enemy have simply marched around us and gone on to attack the farmsteads around Stonegate. Would we not have been unable to stop them?”

  “Remember,” returned John, wagging his finger. “Remember that we had already warned the towers. Messages by pigeon would have soon been on the way to Stonegate. Had the enemy marched on, we would merely have harried their rear until they met with the forces sent out to meet them. We would have crushed them like a nut in a cracker. No! They could neither retreat nor go on. They had to fight and win. They were counting on the rear force to carry the day for them in case they met a full patrol, and it nearly did. Remember, they had between five and six hundred men of which fully one hundred were as well armed as we.”