I couldn't tear my eyes away, waiting for the bloodbath I knew was coming.
Boiling oil splashed in torrents down the wall. Catapults launched pots of burning pitch into a mass of people so dense they couldn't miss. Suddenly two earth-shaking booms rang in my ears and vibrated up through my feet at the same time, and I winced. They'd lit off their great bombards. I could only stand and watch the man-sized stone balls spin through the air in a slow arc.
They smashed into the rioters like the hammer of God. Torn bodies flew away in every direction. Shards and slivers of rock chipped out from under them and shot off like a fresh rain of shrapnel, cutting down more people where they stood.
Every man fit to hold a crossbow was out on the walls now, raining quarrels into the mob and through the open windows. There wasn't room enough to miss.
I stood transfixed by the mad gore of it. Even the archers were humbled. Bows and arrows slipped from slack fingers. They inched back as sparks rained into the building from a pitch-pot, then fumbled for their weapons as if waking up from a terrible nightmare.
I snapped out of it before they did. My sword whispered from its oiled sheath as I crept up behind them, and with two soft cuts I opened their necks. They expired on the floor while I pulled Adar out of the wardrobe at a run.
We appeared in the street in the middle of a rout. Dark-skinned people fled in every direction, mad with fear, many of them drenched in blood ‒ maybe their own, maybe not.
I yelled at the top of my voice, “Yazizi! Now!”
I had to fight to stay standing against the rush of bodies. Hundreds were still trapped in the square, trampling both the living and the dead. Blood seemed to soak every inch of ground. The sound of hooves approached and I waved frantically above the crowd.
Thinking on my feet, I picked Adar up and threw him to Yazizi as she charged past. Then I raised one foot, felt it hit a stirrup, grabbed the reins around the rouncey's warm neck and let it sweep me off my feet. With monumental effort I dragged myself upwards into the saddle and clung on to the galloping animal for dear life. I gripped it with every available limb and still struggled to stay upright.
Yazizi carved us a path through sheer weight of horse. The Northerners were well past trying to kill us, too terrified to do anything but run, but now I had to worry about the frenzied Halers atop the wall. I tore a piece of white shirt off Adar and waved it like a flag of truce, calling, “We surrender! Don't shoot!”
A few quarrels whirled past my head, but already I could hear the sergeants thundering orders to hold fire. The horses balked in terror at the overwhelming smell of blood, but Yazizi kept them plodding ahead and finally made it to the relative safety of the sally port. The Halers closed the doors behind us and locked us in. More men came to guard the portcullis by virtue of shoving their pikes through the gaps. I kept the others back, dismounted and stopped as close to the pike wall as I dared.
“Who in blazes are you?” snarled a man with a foot leftenant's crest on his helmet. “What do you think you're doing bringing this foreign filth in?”
“My name is Karl Byren, former Sergeant of the King's Own Angian Guard,” I announced, puffed out my chest, and pulled back my cloak to show my gleaming breastplate. The man flinched as if struck. Maybe he wasn't as dumb as he looked. “This foreign filth saved my life, Leftenant, so I'll thank you to show her some respect. Now, I'm here to see Lady Silbane at once, returning her property and my services under contract.”
A nasty smile froze on the leftenant's lips. “Begging your pardon, Sergeant. Can't be too careful these days.” He scratched at his beard in momentary indecision, then seemed to cut through the knot. “Oi up! Open the inner!”
The portcullis in front of me winched open, and the familiar sights, sounds and smells of a military camp greeted my senses. I stepped forward with Adar and Yazizi, into a circle of pikes which quickly closed behind us.
The leftenant didn't lose his smile. Not a good sign. He said, “We'll hold you until such time as we can process all the night's captives. Then it's Lord Farrow's part whether or not you live or die, eh?”
“That's not‒”
“Chuck 'em in the camp, lads.”
His men closed in and marched us at spear-point into the fenced-off maze of a prison camp, waiting dark and cold in the shadow of the inner wall.
“Zayara is scared,” Yazizi whispered as we huddled together against the fence. I pressed myself up to eavesdrop on any soldier talk on the other side, without much luck. We were the only people around apart from a few morosely silent guards and a handful of Northerners who kept together on the other end of the compound. They probably had our bloody murder on their minds, and they might well get it done before the night was over.
I kept my eyes open and my mind alert. From the size of the compound, Lord Farrow expected quite a few more visitors tonight. He'd planned for this siege, probably set the damn fires himself. I could feel it in my bones.
Still, things could've been worse. If any of us had been sick, they would've marched us right back out of the sally port at pike-point. We'd have been killed by either the rioters or the crossbows on the wall, or maybe burned up with the rest of the town.
I looked up when Yazizi spoke again, then tried to hush her as my mind continued to wrestle with the problem. So many prisoners, so much blood, for what?
“She fears we will be separated again,” the girl continued relentlessly. “That I must walk while another rides her.”
“Better than being dead.”
She fell quiet for a moment. “Have you given any thought to my offer?”
I didn't respond. She lowered her eyes again, though I couldn't tell what emotions played underneath her placid surface.
Finally, “I can beg, if it pleases you.”
“No!” I snapped, jerking to my feet, and put some distance between us. To get me out of her reach before my body got any more ideas. Hot, humiliated anger burned in my stomach, not at her but at my own weakness and wounded pride.
A deep, measured breath calmed me down enough to grumble, “I will do what I can, girl, and I do not expect payment.”
I managed to shake myself free of my more base feelings, but I'd had just about all I could take right now. Turning my back on Yazizi, I stalked off to look for Adar, who'd found a dark corner to hide in and now refused to move. He hadn't shifted an inch. I sat down on a bench across from his cubbyhole and watched him rock slowly back and forth. Blood trickled down from his lip where his teeth bit in, and his eyes were wide and unfocussed as he fought not to blink. He'd had his eyes open when we rode across the carnage in the square. The face of death had gotten inside him, and I wondered if anyone would ever be able to get it out again.
I could only give him a friendly voice to listen to. The boy might be a wastrel but I'd prefer him to live all the same.
“Won't be long now,” I said. “Soon they'll come and take us to a nice inn where we can get cleaned up and eat something with meat in it. Proper beer, too. Tell you what, I'll buy you a pint, full strong with no water in it. How would you like that?”
Adar's watery eyes twitched, the only response before he resumed his thousand-yard stare. I tried not to let it deflate me. “I understand. We all go a bit mad, soldiers do. You have to. You can't see things like that and stay sane. I expect you'll come back when you're ready.”
We spent the next few minutes in silence. I only stirred when I heard someone shouting from beyond the fence, calling my name. I jumped up and ran to it.
“Halloo! Sarn't Byren!” echoed a man's voice from a narrow gap in the woodwork. A soldier in armour waved through it, and as I caught sight of the face underneath the helmet, a genuine laugh bubbled up from the core of my being. I took his mailed hand and gripped it like a lifeline.
“Barrat, as I live and breathe,” I giggled. “You mad old bastard! What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be in the field with the King?”
I didn't let go of his hand, didn't want to lose t
he contact, and took in every detail of his familiar. A great blonde beard tumbled down his chin, now shot through with grey, which he'd grown to hide the deep pink scars on his leathery cheeks. One piercing blue eye stared out with keen intelligence, the other was milky-white and blind from a deep cut across the socket, another old scar. Three or four browning teeth still clung resolutely to his gums. He was almost unchanged but for the uniform, no longer the purple-black livery of the King's Own, but green and gold in the style of Lord Farrow's men.
“Ah well, the buggers kicked me out, Sarn't,” Barrat mumbled and shrugged. “Too old, eh? They up an' retired me after my last wound, but I didn't takes that lyin' down, and now 'ere I am. Got me own sarn't stripes after all!” He grinned, but then looked around us and visibly sobered up, as if noticing the fence for the first time. “I 'eard you was here, Sarn't, but what're you doin' in a pen? Can't be right, can it?”
I told him what happened in the briefest possible terms. Barrat listened. He listened with all of himself, his face a mask of concentration.
“Now we're waiting to be let out at some bloody leftenant's pleasure, me and the children.” I'd been so caught up in the story, letting it make me angry, that I only now became aware of the way Barrat's pale complexion had gone several shades whiter than usual. “What's wrong?”
He leaned in close and hissed, “We got to get out o' there, Sarn't. We gots Northerners comin' in by the hundred, all bound for here. You won't last t'night.”
Even as he said it, the gates of the camp creaked open to admit another group of beaten-looking people, pushed in at the end of gleaming swords and pikes. Some were wounded, crudely-bandaged or still bleeding openly. Others had surrendered without a fight. There wasn't a Southerner among them. The glances they shot towards Yazizi and me made my blood run cold.
“Seems I'm going to need your help, old friend. Is there anything you can do?”
Barrat glanced left and right to make sure we were alone, then pulled a long dirk from under his tunic and slipped it through the gap in the fence. “I'm due back at me post in a minute, but I can see to it one o' t'pigeons gets loose with a note on him...”
I nodded. Barrat couldn't read or write but he could copy letters down to paper, something he'd done for me before, in a different life. I tore a strip of wood from the fence and quickly scratched a message into it. My one hope was that someone would recognise Lady Silbane's name.
Pressing the message into Barrat's hands, I said, “This is for a woman, a noble born lady with the power to get me out. She's in the inner city somewhere. See that she gets it or you'll be cleaning my guts off these cobbles.” I took the coinpurse from my belt and gave him that as well. “Use birds, runners, horsemen, anything. Everything.”
“All I can, Sarn't,” he said gravely.
“Godspeed, Barrrat, and thank you.”
He shook my hand one more time, and I found myself wishing we'd met in happier circumstances. Here in Farrowhale, with my life in constant jeopardy and soldiers in hauntingly familiar livery all around me, my old life in the Army seemed too close for comfort.
I let out a deep breath of relief as Barrat jogged away, limping. We might just survive the night, Fortune willing. Then I thought of Yazizi and Adar. They'd need protection. The dirk felt light in my hand, not as familiar as a sword or a spear, but a good deal better than nothing.
Then the first of the prisoners fell on me in murderous silence.
I knew I was going to die. Finally, after all these years of looking over my shoulder, I could see the reaper waiting for me.
No soldier can live through a battle without gaining an acute sense of his own mortality. My death was fated, something that would happen as sure as the tides in the ocean. However, before now, it had never seemed quite the time or the place.
As I tumbled across the ground wrestling a man half my age and twice as strong, rocks and clubs bouncing off my backplate when I desperately wormed my way on top of him, I realised there was no day like today and no time like a few seconds from now, when they decided to come in all at once.
I made a wild slash around me with the dirk, clearing some space, and then laid it across the throat of the man I was straddling. “I'll kill him!” I roared, in basic Northern. “I'll open his neck right here! Back away!”
They hesitated, but not for long. A stone bounced off the side of my head and I cut the man's throat by instinct. Stumbling upright, I slashed left and right to clear my way while more and more stones pelted me from all directions. The crowd was roaring with fury. They left a space around the body out of either respect or fear, but came at me from every other side, and all I had was the dirk. I backed into a wall and found Yazizi next to me, strangling an unlucky Northerner three times her size. The stones paused again.
“Have you seen the boy?” I panted.
“They'll have gutted him already,” she pointed out with cold calm. She tightened the chains around her captive's throat, and he grunted, his face turning purple. “We won't be long after him.”
My entire life played itself out before my eyes, all my triumphs and my regrets. I bit down hard on my tongue. Then I told her, “I'm sorry.”
“I'm not,” she said, never wavering.
A sudden glint of bronze appeared from behind the press of bodies. I instantly knew what it was, though I couldn't believe it. They didn't take his sword.
A spray of blood went up, and screams went up around the periphery of the crowd. The Northerners surged back in one massive motion, but the next second another handful of them went down, and another. The bronze sword flashed again and again. It only seemed to get brighter.
Improvised weapons dropped to the ground. The whole crowd turned and ran like a routed army, and behind them I could hear laughter, high and clear. No one fought anymore. They crowded around the gate and pounded on it, screaming to be let out.
I stared at Adar as he came forward, dragging the sword along the ground behind him. Its colour had dulled back to normal; I was no longer sure if the unearthly shine had been real or just a trick of the light. The boy panted, his breath steaming in the air, but he seemed unhurt. Not a scratch on him.
He looked at me with hollow eyes, empty as an open grave, and twitched all over.
“What have you done?” I whispered.
Adar glanced at the blood on his sword, then back at me. His voice was soft and strained. “Stand. Without hesitation.”
The crowd parted when a horse came galloping through the gates. It reared and neighed as the rider pulled its reins hard, scanning left and right. The armoured figure spotted the dead all around us and turned its mighty horse our way. At first I thought it might have been the woman. Then it came into the light.
It was a man clad from head to toe in maille, with only his eyes poking out of the thick coif. I might not have recognised him were it not for his shield, the beautiful red raven on brilliant white. I never thought I'd be so glad to see Sir Erroll's emblem.
He swung out of the saddle and ran to me, tearing a few hairs off his head along with coif and cap. “By God, Byren,” he gasped, “are you injured?”
I touched my left temple. My fingers came away sticky with blood, but only a little. I shook my head. “Did the lady send you?”
“No, I came as soon as I heard you were inside. I worried you might be in danger.” He looked down at the ten Northerners laid flat in pools of their own blood. The dirt around them slowly drank their moisture. “Saints wept...”
“You're too late, but thank you.” I glanced to my side where Yazizi was rubbing some life back into her wrists. Adar had sat down next to the wall with the sword laid across his knees. The blood on it wouldn't seem to dry, oozing down his trouser legs.
“How did you survive?” Sir Erroll whispered.
I looked at the knight as if in a dream. I told him honestly, “I don't know.”
He seemed to pull himself together. His eyes flashed with aristocratic hauteur. “Well, this won't do at all!
You are coming with me to a hot meal and a bath, and woe betide anyone who tries to stop us.”
I nodded.
It did feel like a dream. The air had a greasy quality to it, like something had happened that wasn't quite what the world had expected, and it was working to adjust.
Moving in a daze, I took Adar's hand, then Yazizi's, and followed the knight blindly from the camp. The Northerners shied away from us in cold fear. The guards outside proved a momentary problem as one of them barred the way with his pike. Sir Erroll gave him the look all nobles kept in reserve, the one which reduced a commoner to a cockroach with two choices: get out of the way or get stepped on. The guard couldn't pull his weapon back fast enough.
They closed the gate behind us, and waited for the queue of new prisoners being stripped of weapons and other 'contraband' in the shadow of the wall. A man in Lord Farrow's livery ran up to return my confiscated things. At least they were organised. I belted my sword back on and made a mental note to see if my spear had survived, back at the Fire and Wine. I'd also have to find Barrat again to return the dirk and thank him.
Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow.
We met the woman on the way to our lodgings. I couldn't help but feel flattered by the relief on her face. She demanded the full story from me as she walked alongside us, leading a borrowed courser with one hand and Yazizi's palfrey in the other. Even Sir Erroll deigned to walk in solidarity while Faro took care of the other horses.
Just over the walls, the burning orange glow of the outer city turned night into a sparking, smoky day.
“You shouldn't have taken such risks to get back to us, Byren,” the woman insisted. “I appreciate your courage and determination, but without Adar and yourself this whole journey would be for nothing.”
I was too exhausted to argue. “I took what I believed to be the least risky course of action, Milady.”
“Mm... I suppose I ought to trust your judgement. You are still alive, after all.”
She smiled slyly and dipped a curtsey, which made my cheeks burn. I also caught the icy look Sir Erroll gave me out the corner of his eye, though he hurried to conceal it. He'd never believe I stood a chance with the woman, but he was jealous of any affection.
Written in Blood Page 8
