“We’re done for!” Renydd yelled. “Get up behind me.”
When Rhodry swung up behind him, Renydd spurred the gray hard, but all it could manage was a clumsy trot, sweating and foaming as it stumbled across the open ground. The horns sang through the smoke like ravens shrieking. When Rhodry choked on a sudden taste of smoke, he twisted round and saw fire creeping through the grass round the tents and heading their way. Off to their right, a poplar blazed like a sudden torch.
“Oh, by the hells,” Renydd snarled. “I hope it reaches the bastard’s dun and burns it for him!”
As they trotted for the road, three of Comerr’s men joined them on weary horses. Cursing, slapping the horses with the flats of their blades, the men rode on while the smoke spread out behind them as if it were sending claws to catch them. Ahead they saw a mob of men milling in confusion around a lord with a gold-trimmed shield.
“Erddyr, thank the gods,” Renydd said. “My lord! My Lord Erddyr!”
“Get over here, lad,” Erddyr yelled. “We’ve got a horse for that man behind you.”
Rhodry mounted a chestnut with a bleeding scratch down its neck and joined the pack, about fifty men, some of them wounded. As they made their slow retreat back to the dun of another ally, Degedd, Lord Comerr joined them with close to a hundred. A few at a time, stragglers caught up and joined their disorganized remnant of an army. At the top of a hill, the lords called a halt to let the horses rest—it was that or lose them. When Rhodry looked back, he saw no sign of pursuit. In the distance, the smoke pall slowly faded.
Just at sunset, they reached Degedd’s dun and mobbed into the ward, bleeding horses, bleeding men, all of them stinking of sweat and smoke and aching with shame. Yelling orders, Lord Degedd worked his way through the mob while he cradled a broken left wrist in his right hand. Rhodry and Renydd pulled a wounded man down from his saddle before he fainted and split his head on the cobbles. They carried him into the great hall, where Degedd’s lady and her women were already frantically at work, tending the wounded. The hall swarmed with so many men and servants that it was hard to find a place to lay their burden down.
“Over by the hearth,” Renydd said.
Rhodry cursed and shoved their way through until at last they could lay him down flat on the floor in a line of other wounded men, then started back outside to fetch anyone else who needed to be carried. Once the wounded were all brought in, they had the horses to tend.
Degedd’s small dun was crammed from wall to wall with the remnants of his allies’ army, so crowded that Rhodry felt a surge of hope. Although they’d fled the battle, the war wasn’t over yet. By the time Rhodry and Renydd returned to the great hall, Rhodry’s head was swimming. They got a couple of chunks of bread and some cold meat from a servant, then sat on the floor and gobbled it silently.
Up by the hearth of honor, the womenfolk were still working. His wrist bound and splinted, Lord Degedd sat on the floor with the other noble lords—Erddyr, Oldadd, and Comerr—and talked urgently. Although the hall was filled with men, it was oddly silent in a wordless chill of defeat. When Renydd finished eating, he leaned back against the curve of the wall and fell asleep. Many of the men did the same, slumping against the wall, lying down on the floor, but the noble lords leaned close together and went on talking. Rhodry thought he was going to ache too badly from his fall to sleep straightaway, but he was too exhausted to stay on his feet. He’d been awake and riding for the entire cycle of a day.
When he sat down next to Renydd, the captain stirred, looked at him blearily, then leaned against his shoulder. Rhodry put his arm around him just for the simple human comfort of it. All at once his weariness caught up with him. His last conscious thought was that they were all shamed men tonight, not just him.
Rhodry woke suddenly to Lord Erddyr’s voice. With a grunt, Renydd sat up straight next to him. Erddyr was on his feet in the middle of the hall and yelling at the men to wake up and listen to him. Sighing, cursing, the drowsy warband roused itself and turned toward their lords.
“Now here, lads,” Erddyr said. “I’m going to ask you a hard thing, but it has to be done. We can’t stay here tonight and get pinned like rats in a trap. We’re leaving the wounded behind and riding back to my dun.”
A soft exhausted sigh breathed through the hall.
“I know how you feel,” Erddyr went on. “By the Lord of Hell’s warty balls, don’t you think I’d rather be in my blankets than on the back of a horse? But if we stay, those horseshit bastards have us where they want us. Degedd can’t provision a siege. We’ve got to have time to collect our men on fort guard, and then we can make another strike on the bastards. Do you all understand? If we stay here, we lose the war and every scrap of honor we ever had. So, are you riding with me or not?”
Cheering as loudly as they could manage, the men began to get up, collecting shields and gear from the floor.
“Save your breath,” Erddyr called out. “And let’s ride!”
A few hours before dawn, Yraen went out for his turn on watch. Yawning and cursing, just on general principles, he climbed up to the catwalk and took his place next to Gedryc, the nominal captain of the fort guard, who acknowledged him with a nod. Together they leaned onto the rampart and looked over the hills, dark and shadowed in the moonlight, to watch the road. In about an hour, just as the moon was setting, Yraen saw a somewhat darker shape moving on the dark countryside, and a certain fuzziness in the air over it—probably dust.
“Who’s that?” Gedryc snapped. “Don’t tell me it’s our lord! Oh, ye gods!”
In a few minutes more the moving shape resolved itself into a long line of men on horseback, and something about the slumped way they sat, and the slow way that the horses limped and staggered along, told the tale.
“A defeat,” Gedryc said. “Run and wake the dun, lad.”
As Yraen climbed down the ladder, he felt a sudden sick wondering if Rhodry was still alive. Somehow, before this moment, it hadn’t really occurred to him that a friend of his might die in this war. He raced to the barracks over the stables, woke up the rest of the fort guard, then ran into the great hall and the kitchen hut to rouse the servants. He came back out in time to hear the men on the walls calling to one another.
“It’s Erddyr, all right! Open those gates!”
The servants came pouring into the ward to help the night watch pull open the heavy iron-bound gates. Torchlight flared in the ward as the army filed in, the horses stumbling blindly toward shelter. Wrapped in a cloak over her night dress, Lady Melynda rushed out of the broch just as Lord Erddyr dismounted and threw his reins to a groom.
“Your husband’s come home defeated and dishonored,” Erddyr said. “But the war’s not over yet.”
“Well and good, my lord,” Melynda said calmly. “Where are the wounded?”
“Back in Degedd’s dun, but get the servants to feeding these men, will you?”
Yraen found Rhodry down at the gates. He’d dismounted to lead his horse inside and spare it his weight for the last few yards. When Yraen caught his arm, all the silver dagger could do was turn toward him with a blind, almost drunken smile.
“I’ll tend that horse,” Yraen said. “Go get something to eat.”
When he finished with the horse, Yraen went back into the great hall, filled with men—some still eating, most asleep. At the table of honor the noble lords ate silently while Lady Melynda watched them with frightened eyes. Yraen picked his way through and joined Rhodry, sitting on the floor in the curve of the wall with Renydd, who was slowly eating a piece of bread as if the effort were too much for him.
“Why did you lose?” Yraen said to Rhodry.
“What a comfort my friend is,” Rhodry said. “From his mouth no excuses or blustering to lift a man’s shame, only the nastiest of truths.” He paused to yawn. “We lost because there were more of them than us, that’s all.”
“Well and good, then. I’m cursed glad to see you alive, y
ou bastard.”
Rhodry grinned and leaned back against the wall.
“We comported ourselves brilliantly on the field,” Rhodry said. “Renydd and me slew seventy men each, but there were thousands ranged against us.”
“Horseshit,” Renydd said with his mouth full.
“It’s not horseshit.” Rhodry yawned violently. “There were rivers of blood on the field, and corpses piled up like mountains. Never will that grass grow green again, but it’ll come up scarlet, all for grief at that slaughter.”
Yraen leaned forward and grabbed his arm: he was beginning to realize what it meant when Rhodry babbled this way.
“And the clash and clang was like thunder,” Rhodry went on. “We swept in like ravens and none could stand before us. We trampled them like grass—”
“That’s enough!” Yraen gave his arm a hard shake. “Rhodry, hold your tongue! You’re half-mad with the defeat.”
Rhodry stared at him, his eyes half-filled with tears.
“My apologies,” Rhodry said. “You’re right enough.”
He curled up on the straw like a dog and fell asleep straightaway, without even another yawn.
All that day, the army slept wherever it could find room, scattered through the dun. Before he went to his bed, Erddyr sent men from the fort guard out with messages to the duns of the various allies, warning their fort guards to be ready to join their lords. Other men rode out to scout and keep a watch for Adry’s army on the road. The servants went through the stored supplies. The army had lost all its carts, blankets, provisions, and, worst of all, its extra weapons. Not all the scrounging in the world could produce more than twenty javelins for the entire army. Yraen, of course, still had a pair, those he’d brought with him when he’d left home, but he gave one to Rhodry and hoarded the other.
“Here’s your saddlebags, too,” Yraen said. “I had no trouble with them.”
“Good. Huh. I’d say our enemy can’t track the whistle by dweomer then, but if that’s true, how by the hells did he know I had the ugly thing in the first place?”
“Well, was there someone else who could have told him?”
Rhodry swore under his breath.
“There was, at that, and I’ll wager it was our lovely Alshandra, all right.”
Yraen would have asked him more about this mysterious being, but a couple of other men joined them with rumors to share.
In the afternoon, Yraen had a word alone with Lady Melynda, who bravely smiled her tight-lipped smile and talked of her husband’s eventual victory. It seemed that Comerr alone had thirty fresh men in his dun, to say nothing of the men they could muster from other allies.
“If they can assemble them all, my lord swears they’ll outnumber the enemy. He tells me that Adry and Tewdyr already had every man they could muster at the siege.” Her bright smile faded abruptly. “I wonder if that’s true, or if he’s trying to spare my feelings?”
“It’s probably true, my lady, because he’s already let the worst news slip. What matters is whether they can assemble them in time, and Rhodry says that’s a hard thing to do.”
“Just so.” Melynda was silent for a long time. “I’m going to try to prevail upon my lord to send to the gwerbret for his judgment on this matter.”
“Do you think he will?”
Melynda shook her head in a no and stared at the floor.
“Not with this defeat aching his heart. He’d feel too shamed.”
When he left the lady, Yraen climbed up to the walls and looked out at the silent hills. Somewhere out there was the enemy army, perhaps riding for them, perhaps off licking its own wounds. He wondered if Erddyr would stand a siege or sally out right away should Adry appear at his gates, but in the end, the lords decided to leave the dun as soon as possible and ride round the countryside to collect their allies, rather than risk getting trapped in a siege. Although a dun with an army inside was a prize worth having, it was unlikely that Tewdyr and Adry would try to take an empty one, simply because they’d be too vulnerable to attack themselves. There came a point in any war where it was best to settle the matter in open country rather than trusting in stone walls, or so Rhodry always said.
Late that afternoon, one of the scouts returned, rushing into the great hall and blurting out his urgent message: Adry and his allies were riding their way and had made camp not fifteen miles off.
“There’s close to two hundred of them, my lord,” the scout finished up. “Fully provisioned.”
“Only two hundred?” Erddyr said, grinning. “Well, then, we left a few scars on them before we called the retreat.”
“Maybe so,” Comerr said. “But we’d best get out of here before they pin us at your gates.”
The dun turned into an orderly madhouse. The warband ran to fetch their gear and horses. Servants frantically loaded the last pair of carts left in the dun and commandeered extra horses for pack animals to carry what supplies they’d been able to scrape together. Yraen collected his horse, donned his armor, and realized that everything he’d wanted was about to come to him. Soon he would test himself and all the weaponcraft he’d learned; soon he would discover for himself what battle and battle-glory had to teach a man. Now that the time was upon him, he felt preternaturally calm and oddly light, as if he floated through the crowded ward to Rhodry’s side. Only his heart refused to quiet itself; he could feel it knocking in his throat, or so it seemed, like some wild creature in a trap.
“We’ll be at the rear, no doubt,” Rhodry said. “Silver daggers always eat the whole cursed army’s dust.”
Yraen merely nodded. Rhodry gave him a look as sharp as a knife blade.
“Tell me somewhat, lad. Have you ever fought before?”
The time was past for bluster. Yraen shook his head in a no. Rhodry swore under his breath and seemed to be about to say more, but at the head of the line the horns sang out the order to mount and ride. As the men swung into their saddles and started moving, trying to sort themselves into warbands in the too-small space, Yraen ended up separated from Rhodry, and there was no time to find him again as the riders began filing out the gates. When they first reached the road, Yraen made a futile try at spotting him, then fell back with the squad assigned to guard the supplies.
Once the moon rose, bright and swollen just a night off her full, the lords led their men off the road and began circling to the north through the hills and ravines, good hiding from their enemies. Thanks to the carts and the pack train, they moved slowly, the carters cursing as the carts banged through the rocks and brush. Riding at the very rear, Yraen was the only one who realized that someone was following them.
As they started down the side of a hill, Yraen saw movement out of the corner of his eye, turned to look, and caught the unmistakable shape of a man on foot slinking through the tall grass behind them. He must have left his horse somewhere behind—a mistake that cost him his life. With a shout of warning, Yraen turned his horse out of line and drew his javelin in the same smooth motion. The enemy scout turned and raced downhill, but Yraen galloped after, plunging through the grass and praying that his horse wouldn’t stumble and go down. Twisting in a desperate zigzag, his prey ran for the trees at the bottom of the valley, but Yraen gained on him and rose in the stirrups to throw. The point gleamed in the moonlight as it sped to the mark and caught the scout full in the back. With an ugly shriek he went down headlong into the grass. Yraen trotted over and dismounted, but he was already dead. A couple of men from his warband rode up and circled round them.
“Good job, lad,” one of them shouted. “We’re cursed lucky you’ve got good eyes.”
Yraen shrugged in pretended modesty and pulled the javelin free with a welling up of the enemy’s blood. In the moonlight it seemed like dark water, some strange and dreamlike substance. Yraen wondered how it could be possible that he’d killed a man and yet felt nothing, not grief nor gloating.
“Just let him lie,” the rider went on. “We’ve got
to get back to the warband, but in the morning, I’ll make sure Lord Oldadd knows what you’ve done.”
But apparently the noble-born already realized what had happened. When Yraen returned to the warband, the lords halted the march and had a hasty horseback conference up at the head of the line. Yraen strained to hear as Erddyr leaned over in his saddle to make his points with the wave of a gauntlet. All at once Lord Comerr laughed and gave Erddyr a friendly cuff on the shoulder. Erddyr turned his horse and trotted over to bellow at the warband.
“With their scout dead, we’ve got a chance to wreak a little havoc, lads,” Erddyr called out. “I want fifty men to risk their cursed necks. I’ll be leading you in a raid on Adry’s camp, just to stick a thorn up the bastard’s ass.”
Yraen turned his horse out of line to volunteer. As a squad assembled round Erddyr, he kept watch for Rhodry and finally saw him on the other side of the group, or saw, rather, his silver dagger, catching the moonlight with an unmistakable glitter. Although he waved, he had no idea if Rhodry had seen him or not.
Leaning forward in his saddle, Erddyr explained the situation. Comerr and the pack train were going to head for his dun in hopes of meeting the reinforcements on the road, while Erddyr and the squad tried to slow their enemies. It was going to be a quick raid—Erddyr emphasized that repeatedly—one fast sweep down, then an equally fast retreat.
“The whole point, lads, is to panic their horses, not to make kills. Go for the herd and try to scatter it. If anyone gets in your way, kill him, but leave the real slaughter for later. All we want to do is keep them busy chasing their worm-gut stock instead of chasing us.”
Deverry #06 - The Westlands 02 - A Time of Omens Page 29
