by Whyte, Jack
The bowman was dead, flat on his face on the ground and motionless, with an arrow through his ring-mail tunic and buried almost to the feathers between his shoulder blades. And as I saw that, my opponent attacked. He had seen me look away, then look again, and on the second look he lunged, swinging a mighty overhand chop that would have cleft me in two had it landed. Of course it did not land, because I had Cato's magnificent spatha with which to deflect it. I swept it aside easily and leaped backwards, only to land awkwardly on a round section of stick that rolled beneath my foot and sent me crashing to my back on a bed of the previous year's oak leaves.
My opponent was above me almost before I had landed. Spread- legged and dark-faced, he rose on his toes to gain the maximum impetus from his ungainly weapon. I tried to whip my sword across in front of me to stab him in the groin, but my blade had slipped beneath a branch or a root when I fell, and as soon as I felt the resistance in my arm I knew I would not be able to dislodge it quickly enough to save myself. Then, for the second time in the space of two mornings, I watched a life snuffed out abruptly by a hard-shot arrow. This one caught my opponent in the hollow of the neck, just above the metal rim of his cuirass, and drove him backwards, off his feet and into instant death.
I rolled hard to my left, dragging my sword behind me and feeling the moment when it sprang free of whatever had been holding it. As soon as I did, I spun on my left elbow, kicking my legs around, and lunged to my feet quickly if far from gracefully, facing the direction from which the second arrow had come. I told myself that whoever had shot my enemy must be my friend, although I did not dare to trust myself sufficiently to believe it. As soon as I was safely upright, I set my feet squarely and hunched into a fighting crouch, glaring around me to see who and where the marksman was, but he remained unseen. Slightly to the right of where I now stood, the man I had hamstrung lay dead, too, pinned to the ground by yet another arrow. Directly ahead of me now was the massive oak tree that had stood between me and my three erstwhile attackers, and I guessed that the fourth man, whoever he was, must be behind its huge bole. I glared at the tree, willing him to come out and face me.
Moments later, just as I was beginning to feel foolish, a voice spoke from behind my back.
"That tree is not going to attack you, boy."
Appalled at how easily I had been duped, I spun as quickly as I could move, raising my sword as I did so and preparing to throw myself to the attack, although I was once again expecting to die, shot down before I could really move forward. But then I stopped in mid-step, astonished. The man facing me was Ursus. He held his arms folded across his chest as he leaned back against the trunk of a tree, his legs crossed at the ankles and his entire weight on his left foot. His bow, still strung, hung from his right shoulder. I was stunned to see him and was incapable of finding a single word of greetings or of gratitude or anything else. I simply stood and gaped at him.
"You handled yourself well, for a youngster. Who taught you to fight like that?"
I had never heard this man speak before, and now I found the sound of him to be more pleasant than I would have expected, based purely upon the things I had heard the others in the hunting party say about him. His voice was deep and sonorous, warm and mellifluous and somehow suggestive of humor. I cleared my throat and tried to answer him coherently.
'Teachers . . . I had many . . . at the Bishop's School, in Auxerre."
"They taught you to fight?. I thought they were churchmen, priests."
"They are, but the bishop there is Germanus. He used to be an imperial legatus, commander-in-chief of all imperial forces in central and northern Gaul. He was Duke Lorco's first legatus."
"Shit . . . I knew that, but I never made the connection between Germanus the legate and Germanus the bishop."
"You mean the Duke didn't tell you?"
He straightened up from the tree and uncrossed his arms, leaning forward slightly to peer at me, a strange expression on his face. "Are you twitting me?" Before I could react to that, however, he nodded and the expression on his face changed. "I'm a mercenary, lad, a sword for hire. I don't even have a rank that earns me any more than basic pay, whereas Phillipus Lorco is the governor of an entire imperial region. We don't have much in common, Duke Lorco and I. You understand?"
Then he walked straight towards me, and as he passed he waved at me to go with him. I followed him to where my two horses had found some grass growing in a patch between the trees and were busily crunching and cropping at the succulent greenery. Ursus stopped and I almost walked into him.
"Which one do you want?" he asked.
"That one's mine," I said, pointing.
"Good, I'll take the other one, then."
He moved directly to the horse, and I spoke to his back. "You saved my life. Twice."
He paused in the act of stroking the animal's muzzle and turned to look at me. "Aye. You were outnumbered, but you were unlucky, too. If you hadn't stepped on that stick and fallen you would have beaten both those men."
"But I did fall."
"Aye, and you were fortunate that I was there and watching. But don't be too grateful. Next time, you might have to do the same for me, and though you won't find me ungrateful, I might not thank you at the time."
I said something then that I did not know I was going to say, and to this day I don't know why I said it at that particular moment. It may have been relief at finding him to be more pleasant and approachable than people had said he was, or it might simply have been that the guilt that filled me had suddenly become unbearable.
"I ran away."
Ursus looked at me, his face blank, then quirked one eyebrow. "From where, the school?"
"No, from the fight, yesterday. I panicked, lost my nerve and ran for my life."
"So did I. It all happened too quickly and there were too many of them, too suddenly. One moment we were ambling along as though we were the only people in the world, and then, the next, there were men leaping all around us on every side and arrows flying everywhere and dead people falling off their horses, their heads and bodies bristling with arrows. I was riding alone, closest to the riverbank, because my horse was grazing wherever he could find a mouthful of grass, and I saw the two men on my left, the cook and his helper, knocked off their horses, both of them in the same instant, one forward, the other backwards, both stone dead. I've been in this game long enough to know a dead man when I see one, even if he's still falling. I took one look around and saw wild men everywhere, three of the whoresons, at least, for every one of us when we were all alive. Then one fellow jumps up in front of me, coming at me with an axe. I put the spurs to my horse, ran the whoreson down and just kept going, right into the river, where I slid off and got my horse's body between me and the bowmen on the bank who were already shooting at me. I got away, but they killed my horse. One of their arrows hit it in the neck and severed a big vein. Shame. Good thing I can swim, though." He paused, then looked me in the eye. "But I thought I was the only one who got away. How did you manage it?"
I shook my head. "I don't know. I was talking to my friend Lorco when he was killed. An arrow hit him in the back of the head and came out through his face. There were strangers everywhere, screaming and shouting, attacking us on foot, and more than half of the people in our group were dead. I saw bodies lying everywhere. And that's when I panicked and ran away. I didn't stop running until I was deep in the forest."
"Doesn't sound like panic to me. More like good sense. You're still alive. And you stood and fought those people we just killed today. Nothing cowardly there. And you couldn't have done that if you'd been killed yesterday, could you?"
He stared at me, waiting for an answer.
"No," I said, quietly. "I suppose not."
"Don't suppose anything. Accept it and stop fretting. What happened to us yesterday—to me and to you—happened because it was meant to happen. If you and I had been meant to die in that ambush we would have died. But we lived, so we were not meant to die. And if th
at's the case, then what is the point of whining about not being dead?"
I nodded. "Where is Duke Lorco now?"
"I don't know. I expected him to be somewhere up ahead of me, but I suspect you're telling me now that's not so. Am I right?"
"Yes. That's why I came back in this direction. How could you not have seen him yesterday? You must have swum right by his camp at some point."
"No, not yesterday. After the ambush I hid in a bank of reeds in a pond that once was an eddy in the river. And I mean hid . . . head down and flat on my belly most of the time, holding my breath in case someone might hear me breathing. There were hostiles everywhere. The whole countryside was swarming with them, and none of them looked like the people who attacked us earlier in the day. I think they were an entirely different bunch—an army, not just a rabble mob like the crew that hit us. I never got close enough to any of them to hear them speak, but as far as I could tell from what they were wearing, they were Burgundians, and they were well armed and well equipped. The first ones I met were on the other side of the river, and they almost caught me out in the open on the riverbank, but I saw them just in time and managed to make it to the tall reeds around the edge of the pond. And there I stayed for the rest of the day, because there were more of them all around me, on my side of the river. I don't know how they got to be on both sides, because the river's wide, and it's in spate, but there they were.
"All I could do was sit tight and hope to get back into the water as soon as it grew dark enough, and then swim downstream from there. Whoever these people were, Burgundians or not, they had been passing by me all day, all headed south, as far as I could tell, and there were thousands of them. I mean, I couldn't stand up and count them, not without getting myself killed, but I could hear them passing by and they just kept coming and coming.
"Thing was, though, I couldn't tell where they were really going, or where they planned to stop for the night, and that worried me, for if they were going to be sleeping all along the banks of the river, then I wouldn't be able to make as much as a splash, and if I hit a stretch with bad currents, I could give myself away just by trying to stay alive.
"Anyway, late in the afternoon they started to thin out, but as luck would have it, just before dark, as I was getting ready to make my escape, a whole new detachment of them came along and settled in for the night right along the riverbank next to where I was hiding. They set up a guard post so close to me I couldn't even lie back in the reeds and sleep, in case I snored. I was stuck in there until the whoresons left this morning at dawn, and I've been drifting downstream ever since, with my head in the middle of a floating crown of long reeds that I made while I was stuck in the pond, waiting to get away." He paused, then added, "Crown isn't the right word. It was more of a wreath, with long reeds sticking straight up out of it so that no one could see my head in the middle of it. I'm starved. Have you got anything to eat?"
"No." I half turned back to where the three dead men lay behind us. "But they might. We didn't expect to be in need of food yesterday, until we were attacked, but those fellows came here a-purpose, so they probably brought food with them."
"Bright lad," Ursus said, turning smoothly and moving back to check the contents of the scrips that hung about the dead men's waists. Sure enough, we found bread, dried meat and a small pouch of dried nuts mixed with what tasted like chopped dried pears, as well as a full skin of watered wine. We sat down where we were, our backs against the big oak tree, and made short work of all of it, ignoring the dead men and eating and drinking until our empty stomachs were full again. By the time we finished there was not much left to save, other than a heel of bread and an end of the dried meat.
Ursus sighed, finally, and stretched where he sat, grimacing as he did so.
"I don't know," he growled. "We'll live now, for a while, at least long enough to get ourselves killed if we run into any more of those Burgundians. But where's Duke Lorco? That's the question you and I have to answer. We'll have to find him by the shortest route, for our own safety—" He broke off, frowning at the expression on my face. "What's wrong with you?"
I shrugged, trying to make light of what I had been thinking and to dismiss the grim vision that had sprung into my mind. "Nothing, not really. I was just thinking about what you said about the hostiles . . . the Burgundians . . . Thousands of them, you said. Is that true or were you exaggerating?"
Ursus made a face. "No, it was true."
"Far more than Duke Lorco has with him."
"Aye, but Lorco's cavalry are worth ten men afoot, and he's got three turmae."
"True." I nodded, but with no enthusiasm, for the calculation attached to that was not a difficult one. 'That's more than a hundred troopers . . . But a single thousand men would match them at ten- to-one odds, and you said there were several thousands of Burgundians. That could make odds of twenty, thirty to one."
"If it came to a fight, aye, it could. But who's to say it would? Lorco's smart enough to keep away from an army of that size."
"What if he has no choice?"
"What do you mean? Of course he'll have a choice. There's always a choice."
I dismissed that, seeing the fallacy behind his bluster. "No, not always. Look at what happened to me with these three. I came around the big tree and there they were, right in front of me, looking at me. I had no choice but to fight. Same thing might easily happen to Duke Lorco."
Ursus pulled his mouth down into a scowl of doubt. "Nah, I don't think so. Lorco would have scouts out. He'd never be stupid enough to ride without scouts."
"Granted, but these Burgundians would have scouts out, too—that's what these three were doing here, scouting. But they ran into us, and now they'll never get the word back that we're here. Couldn't the same thing have happened to Duke Lorco's scouts?"
Now the scowl on Ursus's face had deepened to a glower. "By the Christ, boy, you have a knack for seeing the blackest side of things, haven't you?" He glanced around us, looking at the forest growth that sheltered us. "Well, we can't sit here forever, so let's go and try to find our own before the enemy finds us. I warn you, though, they'll be swarming like bees to the north of us, and if we can't pass through them—which is almost certain to be the way of it—we'll have to ride around them. God alone knows how long that might take. However it turns out, you make sure to stick close behind me, keep your head down, and do whatever I tell you to do right now, with no arguments and no questions. If you ever live to be as old as I am, then I'll take orders from you. In the meantime, I'm the Magister, understand?"
I nodded, and we prepared to mount up and head northward in search of our friends.
3
We never did discover what befell Duke Lorco and his three turmae. They simply vanished from the ken of men. Ursus and I searched for them for three entire days, and not once in that time did we find as much as a trace of them, although we might have had cause for thanks in that, since the entire countryside was overrun by the force that Ursus had described, and his estimation of their numbers as being in the thousands turned out to be very conservative. We were surprised, too, to see that they had large numbers of horsemen among them, because Ursus had seen no riders among the troops that moved steadily past him on that first afternoon when he had hidden among the pond reeds, and we were forced to assume that they had ridden separately to join the foot soldiers.
We watched these riders closely, after our initial surprise wore off, and although their mounts were healthy and well equipped, it soon became obvious that the riders themselves had had no intensive training in coordination. They were warriors, but not cavalry troopers. That realization, reinforced by our observations of the casual, informal way the riders moved about the countryside, encouraged us to step out of hiding and venture among them as though we had every right to be there doing what we were doing. We moved openly but took care nonetheless to avoid coming too close to any particular group, and we managed to avoid detection, although there were times during those days whe
n we passed within spitting distance of some of the invaders.
Notwithstanding all our caution, however, we were twice involved in skirmishes with small groups whom we met in places where we had no reason for being present, other than trying to slip past the carefully guarded strong points that had been built on high elevations overlooking those places where enemies like us might be expected to try to pass by undetected. We were fortunate enough on both occasions to see these people before they saw us. There were three foot soldiers in the first group and two horsemen in the second, and I take no shame in saying that it was Ursus who dispatched four of them, including both horsemen, each of them driven off his horse's back by a single deadly hard shot. I captured the fifth and last of the men by running him down, smashing my horse directly into him and bowling him over, then leaping on him and disarming him before he could regain his breath, after which I held him at the point of my sword until Ursus could tie his arms securely behind his back.
It was in questioning this captive—Ursus, it turned out, could speak a version of his language—that we discovered the enemy were in fact Burgundians from the southwest. A federation of their tribes, our prisoner told us, six in all and numbering close to ten thousand warriors, had left the lands they had settled almost a hundred years earlier and struck east in search of more living space. So far, he said, they had been on the march and victorious on all fronts for half a month. They had encountered no serious opposition and had annexed everything between their home territories and the spot where we had captured him, and it was plain to see from his attitude that even although he, personally, had erred and fallen into our hands, he did not expect to be our prisoner for long. He told us that we would be discovered and killed within the very near future.
