by S. U. Pacat
It almost worked. The other men stopped laughing. They started shouting back. Attention shifted. Bows lowered.
Not all the bows: Damen had no doubt that, given a day or two, Laurent could have these men at each other’s throats. But they didn’t have a day or two.
Damen felt the moment when the tension threatened to burst into violence, felt that it did not have quite enough energy to push it over.
They didn’t have time for missed opportunities. Damen’s questing gaze found Laurent’s. If this was to be their only chance, they were going to have to make the attempt now, despite the unworkable odds, but Laurent, judging the odds and returning a different conclusion, minutely shook his head.
Damen felt frustration twist in his stomach, but by that time it was already too late. The clan leader had stopped, and swung all his attention back to Laurent, who stood alone and vulnerable, his pale hair marking him out despite the lack of light here in the dark space near the horses, away from the main gathering of the camp and its central fire.
It was not going to be a single blow this time. Damen knew that, from the way that the clan leader approached. Laurent was about to get the beating of his life.
A sharp order, and Laurent was restrained by two men, one at each shoulder, their arms interlocking around his arms, which remained tied behind his back. Laurent did not try to tear his shoulders from the grip of the men, or wrench himself from their hands. He just waited for what was coming, his body taut in a hard grip.
The clan leader stepped in close, too close to hit Laurent—close enough that he was breathing all over Laurent when he slid his hand slowly down over Laurent’s body.
Damen moved before he realised it, heard the sounds of impact and resistance, felt the burn in his veins. His faculties were obliterated by anger. He was not thinking about tactics. That man had laid hands on Laurent, and Damen was going to kill him.
When he came back to himself, more than one man was holding him down. His hands were still tied behind his back, but around him, there was chaos and physical disruption, and two of the men were dead. One had been driven onto the point of another’s blade. One had hit the ground and then had Damen’s foot applied to his throat.
No one was paying any attention to Laurent now.
But it hadn’t been enough—his hands were tied, and there were too many men. He could feel the iron grip of his captors on him now, and, against the strain of his arms and shoulders, the resistance of the rope that bound his wrists.
In the moment that followed—muscles bunched and chest heaving—he understood what he had done. The Regent wanted Laurent dead. These men were different. They probably wanted Laurent alive until they no longer wanted him. This far south it was, as Laurent himself had insouciantly speculated, at least partly the blond hair.
None of that applied to Damen.
There was a harsh to-and-fro of words in Vaskian, and Damen did not need to understand the dialect to understand the orders: Kill him.
He was a fool. He had let this happen. He was going to die out here, in the middle of nowhere, and Kastor’s claim would be made true. He thought of Akielos; of the view from the palace out over the high white cliffs. He had really believed, throughout this whole, drawn-out mess on the border, that he was going to make it home.
He struggled. It did very little. His hands, after all, were tied, and the men were bringing all their force to bear on the task of holding him back. He heard the sound of a sword being unsheathed to his left. The edge of the blade touched the back of his neck, then lifted—
And Laurent’s voice cut across the scene, in Vaskian.
From one heartbeat to the next, Damen waited for the sword to descend—it didn’t. There was no bite of metal; Damen’s head stayed where it was, attached to his neck.
In the ringing silence, Damen waited. It did not seem possible, at this point, that there existed any words that could better this situation—let alone a handful of words that could get the sword removed from his neck, get the leader to rescind his order, and gain Laurent a hint of approval from the clan. But that was, impossibly, what was happening.
If Damen wondered dazedly what it was Laurent had said, he did not have to wonder long. The clan leader was so pleased by Laurent’s words that he was inspired to draw close to Damen, and translate.
The words emerged in guttural, thickly accented Veretian:
‘He says, “Fast death doesn’t hurt,”’ just before a fist was applied to Damen’s stomach.
Damen’s left side took the worst of it: blunt, unimaginative pain. Struggling earned him a crack on the head with a club, which turned the camp wavy. He held hard to consciousness, which paid off. When brutalising their prisoner began distracting the other men from their duties about camp, the clan leader ordered the business end of things to be taken elsewhere.
Four men dragged Damen up, then prodded him at sword point until the light from the campfire winked out of sight and the sound of the drums dropped away.
They did not take any extraordinary precautions to secure him. They thought the ropes binding his hands were enough. They had not considered his size, or the fact that, by now, he was seriously annoyed, having long ago reached the threshold of what he would tolerate. That indeed, what he would tolerate in a camp of fifty men, with another captive’s welfare to consider, was very different to what he would tolerate alone, with four.
Since Laurent had decided not to follow through on his own reckless gambit, it was going to be Damen’s pleasure to escape the hard way.
Getting free of the ropes was only a matter of slamming the man to his left into the incline, and dragging the ropes down his trapped sword. Hands on the sword hilt, he drove it backwards into the man’s stomach, which caused him to curl over, choking.
Then he had freedom and a weapon. He used it, lifting his arm, to knock the sword of his attacker out of the way, then punched it forward to run the man through. He felt it slice through leather and fleece, then muscle; he felt the weight of the man on his blade. It was an inefficient way to kill someone, because it wasted precious seconds to withdraw the blade. But he had the time. The other two men were holding back now.
He pulled the blade out.
If he had had any doubts that these were the men who had attacked Tarasis, they were banished when the two men changed formation into one that was used to take advantage of Akielon sword tactics. Damen’s eyes narrowed.
He let the man clutching his stomach stand up, so that his opponents would feel confident with the odds of three on one, and attack rather than run for the camp. Then he killed them, with hard, brutal strokes, and took the best sword and knife to replace his own.
He took his time searching for weapons, cataloguing his surroundings, and taking stock of his own physical condition—his left side was now a weakness, but functional. That Laurent was still trapped in the camp while he did so did not worry him unduly. Laurent was the one who had insisted on this mode of escaping. Laurent was no passive virgin trembling at the thought of his own deflowering.
He frankly expected that Laurent, by this time, would have used his brain to pick off a few clansmen of his own.
As it turned out, he had.
Damen arrived just in time to witness chaos.
It must have been like this for the villagers in Tarasis, when the raiders hit it: a rain of death from out of the darkness, and then the sound of hooves.
The men had no warning, but that was the way in clan warfare. One of the men near the campfire looked down to find an arrow in his chest. Another man toppled to his knees—another arrow. And then without pause after the arrows came the riders. Damen felt the satisfying irony as this camp of men—these men who had raided and killed across the border—were overrun by riders from another clan.
As Damen watched, the newcomers divided seamlessly, five riders to go through the camp, and ten each on either side. At first they were dark, unidentifiable moving shapes. Then there was a sudden flare of light—two of
the riders had snatched up half-burnt branches from the fire, and dropped them on tents, whose skins burst into flame. Lit-up, the scene showed that the newcomers were women—the traditional warriors of the clans—riding ponies that could leap like chamois and dart about in formations like fish in clear stream water.
But the men were familiar with these tactics, being of the clans themselves. Instead of dissolving into panic and disorder, they only scrambled briefly before several of them peeled off, and made hard for the rocks and the surrounding dark, slashing and searching, to cut down the archers. Others made for the horses, and with a leap were astride.
It was different to every kind of fighting that Damen knew; the vicious blade cuts were different, the horsemanship, the uneven ground, the twisting tactics in the dark. This was clan warfare at night. Under the same conditions, Laurent’s men would have been overrun in an instant. So too would an Akielon troop. The clans knew more about mountain fighting than anyone alive.
He wasn’t here to watch them. He had his own purpose.
With his pale head, Laurent was easy to pick out. Laurent had found his way to the fringes of the camp, and, while other people were doing his fighting for him, he was calmly looking about himself for a way to untie his hands.
Damen emerged from cover, took a firm hold of him and spun him around. Then he pulled out the knife and cut his hands free.
Laurent said, ‘What took you so long?’
‘You planned this?’ said Damen. He didn’t know why it came out as a question. Of course Laurent had planned this. The second part did not come out like a question. ‘You arranged a counterattack with the women, then came out here as bait to draw out the men.’ Grimly, ‘If you knew we were going to be rescued—’
‘I thought evading that Akielon troop drove us too far out of our way, and that we’d missed our rendezvous with the women. He did hit me too,’ said Laurent.
‘Once,’ said Damen. And swept up his sword in the way of the man coming towards them. The man, expecting a kill, was startled to find his slashing blow met. Then he was dead. Laurent withdrew the point of the knife from the man’s ribcage and did not argue further, because by now, the fighting was on them.
Laurent, beside him, was percipient. Acquiring the fallen man’s short clan sword, Laurent inserted himself at Damen’s left, which, Damen noted without surprise, let Damen do all the heavy fighting. Until the moment when a clansman attacked from the left, and Damen, bracing himself to call hard on the muscles of his bruised side, found that Laurent was there, meeting the man’s blade, dispatching him with efficient grace, and shoring up Damen’s weak side. Damen, disconcerted, let him.
From that moment on, they fought side by side. The place Laurent had chosen to position them was not a random spot on the edge of the fighting—it was the northern path out of the camp, the same route along which Damen had been taken. If Laurent had been any other man, Damen might have suspected him of coming this way to find him. Because Laurent was Laurent, the reason was different.
For this was the only way out of the camp that was not defended by women. Trying to flee, men came in ones and twos, charging towards them. Better for everyone if no men escaped to tell their tale to the Regent, and so they fought together, killing with efficient purpose. It worked, until a man came galloping towards them on a horse.
It was difficult to kill a galloping horse with a sword. It was more difficult to kill the man riding the horse, high up out of range. Damen, seeing Laurent in the horse’s path, appraising the situation like a mathematical problem, took a handful of the fabric at the back of Laurent’s jacket and pulled him hard out of the way. The rider was killed by a woman, also on horseback, riding hard after him. The man flopped forward in the saddle while his horse slowed, then stopped.
Around them, the tents had burned down almost to nothing, but there was enough light to see that victory was emerging. Of the men in the camp, half were dead. The other half had surrendered. Surrendered wasn’t the word. They had been subdued, one by one, and were being bound as prisoners.
Moonlight and the last smouldering remnants of the fire: a new woman had arrived on horseback, flanked by two attendants, and was being led through the camp towards them.
‘One of us needs to view the dead and the prisoners, to make sure no one escaped,’ said Damen, watching her approach.
Laurent said, ‘I’ll do it. Later.’
He felt Laurent’s hand wrap around his bicep in a firm grip, and exert a pull.
‘Down,’ said Laurent.
Damen went to his knees, and Laurent lay punctuating fingers on Damen’s shoulder to keep him there.
The clanswoman swung down from her stocky horse. She showed her status with a great cloak of fur that wrapped around her shoulders. She was older than the other women, by at least thirty years. Black-eyed and stony-faced, Damen recognised her. It was Halvik.
The last time he had seen her, she had been enthroned on a dais of furs, giving orders. Her flinty voice was exactly as he remembered, although this time when she spoke, it was in heavily accented Veretian:
‘We will re-light the fires. We camp here tonight. The men will be guarded. A good fight, many captives.’
Laurent said, ‘The clan leader is dead?’
‘He is dead.’ To Laurent she said, ‘You fight well. It’s a shame you do not have the size to breed great warriors. But you are not malformed. Your woman may not be displeased.’ Then, in the spirit of benevolence, ‘Your face is well balanced.’ She slapped him encouragingly on the back, ‘You have very long eyelashes. Like a cow. Come. We will sit together, drink, and eat meats. Your slave is virile. Later he will service at the coupling fire.’
Damen felt the tenderness in his left side with each breath, and in his arms, when he did not repress it, was the fine tremor that occurs in muscles that have been restrained in bindings for too long, or pushed for an extended period beyond their usual limitations.
Laurent answered in a hard, unyielding voice, ‘The slave lies in no bed but mine.’
‘You couple with men, in the Veretian style?’ said Halvik. ‘Then he will be taken and prepared for you; he will be given good cuts of meat, and hakesh, so that when he mounts you, his endurance will bring you great pleasure. You see? This is Vaskian hospitality.’
Damen braced himself, gathering his remaining strength, for what was to follow, but almost to his surprise, he did not have his mouth prised open and hakesh poured immediately down his throat. He wasn’t forced into anything. He was treated as a guest, or at least, as the possession of a guest, to be buffed and polished and taken to where the guest would want him.
That was to the other side of the camp, to be washed of the dirt that was the inevitable result of a day’s ride during which one has been thrown to the ground several times by one’s captors, then killed several of them.
The women flung buckets of water at him, then scrubbed him with brushes, then dried him, briskly. Then they dressed him in a Vaskian man’s loincloth, a single leather string tied around the hips, then between the legs, with a hanging panel in front that could be lifted to one side for convenience at the appropriate time, as one of the women helpfully demonstrated. He weathered the demonstration.
By this time, the camp was cleared, and the newly pitched tents looked like softly glowing globes, the light from lamps inside turning the tent skins to warm gold. The prisoners were placed under guard, the campfire was re-lit, the dais erected. Damen was presented with food, generously and courteously, also to his surprise.
He was under no illusion that he was going to be taken to the campfire to roll around with Laurent. If anything, he was going to be taken to the campfire to watch Laurent do some inventive sidestepping.
But he wasn’t taken to the campfire. He was taken to a low tent. The hakesh was poured into a jug, and placed with a carved cup inside the tent for him to drink at his leisure. The woman lifted the flap of the tent with the same economic motion she had used on the loincloth.
>
Laurent was not inside the tent. Laurent would, Damen was made to understand, join him later.
Laurent had already done the sidestepping.
It was a very small tent; long, and low, the inside intimate, thick with furs, layers of chamois, and on the top fox fur, treated and softer than the underbelly of a rabbit. And it was hospitably equipped, for men’s pleasure. The foot of the tent held the jug of hakesh, a second jug of water, a hanging lamp, cloths, and three small stoppered bottles containing oils that were not for the lamp.
Entering, Damen could sit, but with barely a foot to spare above his head. If he stood up, he would take the tent with him. Having nothing else to do, he lay down on the furs, in his minimal garment.
The furs were warm and the tent was a cosy nook to lie with a partner, but alone it was hard not to think about where he was, and what might have happened today, if things had fallen out differently. He let all the aches of his body settle, stretching out.
His foot hit the tent hide with his knee still bent. He shifted onto a diagonal. Not that way either. On his side, he bumped the tent pole at his back. Looking around for somewhere to put his left leg, he let out a breath of amusement. Weary as he was, he could see the humour in this situation. Considering the size of the tent, it was lucky that Laurent was not going to be joining him until morning. He curled, found a position for all of his limbs, and let them grow heavy against the soft furs and cushions.
And that was when the flap lifted on a golden head.
Framed in the entry, Laurent had also been washed and dried and dressed. His skin was fresh, and he was wrapped in a Vaskian cloak of fur, like the one Halvik had worn. In the lamplight, it looked like a rich garment that a prince might swathe himself in, on a throne.
Damen pushed himself up on an elbow, and propped his head on his hand, his fingers in his hair. He saw that Laurent was looking at him. Not watching him, as he did sometimes, but looking at him, as a man might look at a carving that has caught his attention.
