by Whyte, Jack
He was a big man, far taller than I and easily more than twice my weight, and the impact of our collision sent me flying and smashed the breath from me. Even as I crashed to the ground, however, I knew that the ancient goddess Fortuna had been watching over me. So complete had been his loss of balance that he had had no hope of swinging his sword, even although all his being had been focused upon cleaving me in two, and now we were both on the ground, both in one piece. I refused to yield to the urge to hunch over and hug my middle, which appeared to have been replaced by a ball of solid pain. Instead I bit down hard on my own cheek, focusing upon that pain, and forced my legs to swing up and over my head, rolling violently backwards on tucked shoulders until I could push myself to my knees and see what my opponent was doing.
He, too, had landed badly and winded himself, but where I had fallen on hard ground, he had fallen or bounced sideways into the enormous clump of brambles that had flanked me. His entire face was ripped by the wicked thorns of the bramble briars, as was the palm of the hand he was holding up to his eyes. I could see him gasping for air, too, and hear the great whooping noises that were coming from his open mouth. I scrambled away from him, pushing at the ground in my panic before my common sense began to return to me. He was at as great a disadvantage as I was for the moment and could do me no harm. But that would change if he recovered more quickly than I did. And so I forced myself to sit still and breathe deeply and steadily, willing my body to behave itself and recover its functions before my enemy did.
With a scream of pain and anger that would have frightened me mere days before, the giant facing me dragged himself to his feet, snarling with rage and agony and hacking determinedly with his sword at the briars that surrounded him on all sides. I felt a stirring of awe at his strength and endurance, for I knew how viciously the thousands of long, hooked barbs on those green stems, some of them as thick as a boy's wrist, were ripping at his muscled flesh. Even so, he made headway, gradually clearing a way out of the dragon's nest that held him, and when it became plain to me that he would soon be free, I realized too late that I should have reclaimed my abandoned bow and shot him dead long since. I looked about me then and saw the quiver that had fallen from my shoulder when the big man knocked me down. I counted six arrows in one brief glance, but could see no signs of the bow I had been holding.
And then it really was too late. The big man won free of his prison and reared up to his full height, raising his sword high above his head again and roaring something at me in a language I had never heard before. It was evident that he had no intention of missing his next swing at me.
Strangely enough, I felt not the slightest stirring of fear, though I had every reason to be afraid. I could not see a single patch of skin anywhere on my assailant's body that was not covered in blood. I had never seen anyone so bloodied. He was huge and he was angry and he was covered in severed, trailing lengths of barbed briars and coming to smite me into oblivion for having dared to cross his path and I felt no animosity towards him.
As he lurched towards me, however, I moved easily away from him, circling smoothly to my right, unsurprised by the awareness that I was moving that way in order to take advantage of the fact that he was left handed, and as I moved, the spatha by my side, for so long the property of Tiberias Cato, seemed to spring into my hand by magic. I saw his eyes narrow at the sight of my unsheathed blade, and then he snarled again and raised his right hand to his forehead to wipe the blood from his eyes, and the contempt in his gesture was unmistakable. I hefted my weapon, feeling its balance, and moved again towards his sword arm, inhibiting him and forcing him to step back and away as he sought to raise his blade high for a clean swing at me. I heard Tiberias Cato's voice again in my mind, explaining to us, as he had at least a hundred times each year, that the wooden practice swords we used every day had been used by Roman legionaries for a thousand years, and that they had been designed in the earliest days of Rome to be twice the weight of a real sword, so that a man's muscles, accustomed to dealing with the heavy practice swords, would rejoice in the apparent weightlessness of the real thing.
I reversed direction, moving left and away from him now and freeing him to use the full extent of his long, left-handed swing. I watched carefully, gauging my moment, then leaped away, a long jump that took me well clear of his clumsy, sweeping blade so that it hissed by me a good arm's length from my right knee. I gave him sufficient time to rally and try for me again, and again I leaped nimbly beyond his reach.
By the time we had repeated the same moves a fourth time he was beginning to flag. His blade was heavy, as well as long, and the effort of swinging it and missing was, if anything, more damaging than anything else he might have done. His anger increasing visibly now with every heartbeat, he snarled something unintelligible at me, and I knew he was defying me to stand and fight, or more accurately to stand still and let him kill me. I grinned at him, drawing my lips back to show him all my teeth, and prepared to repeat the dance, even hesitating in preparation for leaping away, but this time he was determined that I would not skip away from him again, and as I began my spring to the left he threw himself after me, withholding his swing until he was sure of me.
Even as he launched himself, however, I had already shifted my balance, and jumped this time to his right, landing behind him as he charged past me and crouching to sweep the end of my blade hard across the unprotected back of his knees. The double-edged tip of the blade missed the hamstrings this time, but sliced deeply into the thick muscles of his left calf.
With a bellow of rage the monstrous man swung around with impossible speed, slashing at my face as he came towards me. I threw my upper body sharply backwards, almost falling over but avoiding the hissing slash of his blade and managing somehow to counter his attack with a blow of my own, blade against blade, my right-handed blow against his left, smashing his blade down and away from me so that his entire body followed the line of his swing and I ended up behind him again. I leaned forward, my weight on the balls of my feet, and closed with him quickly, stabbing hard, but my blade hit solid metal and its tip slid off the back of a cuirass I had not expected, worn beneath his tunic rather than over it.
Again he turned and came at me, but this time I detected a new respect in his approach. He paused, watching me, waiting for me to move, and when I did not, he changed his grip on his sword, holding it differently, more like a sword now than an axe, and began to circle me, moving now to my right, forcing me to move left against my natural inclination. The aversion I felt to moving so unnaturally reminded me of yet another lesson from my mentor Cato for dealing with a left-handed opponent.
I shifted my weight and took two quick steps towards my assailant, leading off with my right foot and then stepping forward and to the left. The sudden move took me right inside his guard and put me in front of him, within smelling length of his unwashed body, my sword arm raised in expectation of his next blow. It was an awkward, ill-formed hack, as I knew it would be, useless from the start because I was all at once too close to him too suddenly. I caught his blade on my own with no effort and turned it aside, and as it fell away past me I dropped my right shoulder, pivoted to the left and thrust my blade into the flesh below his navel, below his cuirass. It was a classic stroke, and I carried it out as I had been taught, twisting my wrist sharply to free the buried blade and jerking it straight back and away before the sundered flesh could clamp around it and before the dying man could drop his hands to grasp it.
He fell to his knees at my feet and gazed up into my eyes, his face twisted into a mask of consternation and terror as he realized what I had done to him. There was nothing worse than a belly wound, I knew. I had never seen one before, let alone dealt one, but I had heard all about what they meant: a slow, lingering, agonizing death.
"Finish him. You can't leave the poor whoreson like that."
I looked away from my assailant's face to where Ursus stood close by, watching us, an arrow in his bow again, and I knew that eve
n if I could do no more, Ursus would put the fellow out of his misery. But that, again, would be an avoidance that I would find difficult to live with. I looked back at my former opponent, who had fallen forward and now hung head down in front of me and moaning quietly, then I stepped to one side, gripped my spatha firmly in both hands and swung hard at his exposed neck, killing him instantly. Then I turned aside and vomited.
I have no idea how long it took me to recover from the sickness that swept over me, but when it was over and I picked myself up off the ground I found that Ursus had confiscated our assailants' provisions and kindled a fire to cook some bannock to go with the cooked meat he had found in one of their packs. The smells were delicious, and I approached the fire slowly, feeling somewhat shamefaced about my latest pusillanimous behaviour. Ursus, however, said nothing at all and contented himself with serving me some heated meat on a slab of thin, salty, freshly baked bannock. I accepted it gratefully and devoured it without saying a word. Ursus ate his more slowly, and when he was done he licked the blade of his knife carefully and pointed it at me.
"You did well, lad. First kill's never easy to handle. But it'll never be as difficult or as worrisome again, I promise."
"He wasn't the first." I raised my head and looked Ursus directly in the eye. 'The one I shot with your bow was the first."
Ursus twisted his face into the semblance of a half grin. "Nah," he said. "That one didn't count. That was no more than helping a friend in need. If you hadn't taken that one down he would have been on top of me before I could handle his friend, and that might easily have been the end of me. Truth is, lad, your first real kill's always the one whose blood gets on your hands and your clothes— the up-close, frantic one who's trying just as hard to kill you as you are to kill him. He's the one you'll dream about for a while. But you'll get over it, in time. We all do."
He skewered the last piece of meat that lay simmering on the flat iron griddle he had laid on the coals of the fire—he must have found that, too, I realized, in his searching—and dropped it onto the last remaining piece of bannock in his hand, then closed his fist, squeezing the whole thing into a solid cylinder of bread and meat. He held it out to me. "Here, finish this, and then we'll salvage those arrows and drag the bodies out of sight. Can't bury them, but we can't just leave them lying there, either."
A long time later, after it grew dark, he spoke to me again across the dying fire. "Where exactly are you headed? Where are your people from?"
It was the first thing either of us had said for hours and it roused me from my semi-stupor of meditation. I realized that I couldn't answer his question properly, simple though it was. I knew where I was going, but I had no notion of how to get there from where we were.
"Genava," I told him. "It's a lake, far to the southeast, I think, close to the Alps—part of the Frankish kingdom called Benwick. King Ban rules there. He is a Ripuarian Frank and my stepfather, wed to my mother's sister—"
Ursus interrupted me with a scoffing laugh. "A Frank's a Frank, lad, be he from north or south. Leave it at that."
"No, that's not true. The two are very different, no matter that they sound alike. King Ban is a Ripuarian Frank, but I'm not. I'm a Salian Frank, from the north, near the Rhine River. My father's people lived and ruled along the Rhine. Ban rules along the Rhodanus, which is called the Rhone nowadays. Rhine, Rhone, almost the same, one in the north, one in the south. Are they the same river because of that? I think not."
Ursus raised both eyebrows and pursed his lips, then nodded deeply, maintaining his wide-eyed look. "Prettily put," he said. "A point well made, so I will say no more."
I shrugged. "The fact remains, I know where I'm headed, but I don't know how to set about going there from here. I don't know where we are now."
Ursus laughed, a sharp, deep bark. "Is that all? Well, lad, that's easily taken care of since I know exactly where we are, and I also know the route from here to Benwick and Lake Genava."
I blinked at him, astonished. "You do?"
"Of course I do, and you'd better learn to do the same, and the quicker the better." He paused, gazing at me. "Knowing where you are is a matter of simple self-preservation. Look at me, a professional soldier, a mercenary. If I don't know where I am at any time I could be killed, simply for wandering among the wrong people. And so I pay attention to where I go, always. I'm so used to doing it that I never think about it any more, but I always remember where I've been and I know where I am headed next—even if it's only as far as I can see in a strange country."
"So where are we now?"
"Seven days' south of the gorge on the Liger River, headed southeast, this being the seventh day, and I'd say we've been covering less than a score of miles a day because we've been being cautious, moving slow, keeping our heads down, covering our tracks and taking care to stay out of people's way. Seven more days at the same speed should bring us to Lugdunum. The locals call it Leeyon, but whichever way you say it, it's the military administration's headquarters for south-central Gaul." He paused, waiting for my admiration, and when I admitted it he grinned. "What's important about that, though, from your viewpoint, is that if we swing back to the northeast from there and follow the High Road, we can be bathing in Lake Genava in five more days, providing the water's warm enough."
This was momentous news, and I was pleasantly surprised at how close we were to my family home, for had he told me it would take us three times as long I would have accepted that without demur. I felt my face split into a wide grin.
"Well, whether the lake is cold or not, King Ban's bath houses are fine, I promise you. They were built for a Roman governor long ago and they lack nothing that his wealth could provide. Will you come with me, then, to Benwick?"
"Of course, how could I not? I have to see you safely home. We should find word of Duke Lorco in Lugdunum, but even if we are ahead of him and he hasn't arrived yet, we'll leave word there that I've escorted you home and I'll follow him later to Carcasso. Does that sound like good sense? Course it does, so let's get some sleep and be on the road again early tomorrow morning."
4
The twelve days Ursus had estimated for our journey were more than sufficient. We found ourselves approaching Lugdunum at the end of the fifth of the seven days he had allowed us for that portion, and this was mainly because, within three days of setting out on that last lap, we had found ourselves in a heavily traveled area serviced by one of Rome's great spear-straight roads and hence were able to discard all our former caution and proceed openly at more than twice our previous pace.
Lugdunum was a surprise to me. I knew I must have passed through it years earlier on my way north to Auxerre, but I had absolutely no memory of the place, and I found it to be very different, in almost every way that I could think of, from its counterpart city of Treves in the north. Each had a military fortress, and the imperial legions quartered there were the same in both places.
Apart from that similarity, however, everything else was different from one town to the other, beginning most notably with the food but extending to the local people, the farmers and artisans who lived in the surrounding areas. The climate was warmer here, for one thing, since we were now in southern Gaul, but the very appearance of the local folk was completely dissimilar to that of the people who lived in the Treves region. These people here were darker skinned than their northern brethren, and they seemed plumper, somehow, sleeker, more content and more self-satisfied. "Better fed" was the way Ursus expressed it, and in the utterance he made it sound like some kind of cause for shame.
The wine they drank was better, loo, I learned, and even though I could not have told from tasting it I could see for myself that the white wine of this region was closer to yellow in appearance, so I was prepared to believe that it might be thicker and more fruity with the kinds of sugar that northern wines lacked notably. It was the local red wine that made this region famous, however, according to what Ursus told me, and I saw no reason to doubt him, although I had no d
esire to taste any of it. I had tasted my first cup of watered wine at twelve years old. Now, almost four years later, the blend of the two liquids I infrequently drank was barely stronger than that first anemic mixture of one part wine to three parts water. I still found the taste of it unpleasant and preferred the honest tastelessness of chilled, clear water.
We found no trace of Lorco's turmae in Lugdunum. No one had heard of him or from him since he and his party passed through on the way north a month earlier. And so Ursus delivered a formal report to the military authorities, describing all that had happened, to the best of our limited knowledge, and left another written missive with the commander of the garrison for delivery to Duke Lorco when he arrived. That done, Ursus and I ale in the garrison refectory that night and slept soundly for eight hours in one of the barracks rooms before striking out again at dawn along the broad, straight highway that followed the Rhone River to the lake called Genava in the ancient territories of Cisalpine Gaul.
We rode with the river on our right, and at first we had no shortage of companions along the route, teamsters with laden wagons and self-sufficient pedestrians and an occasional string of laden mules led by handlers as taciturn as the creatures they led. But as we traveled farther and farther beyond the protection of the military headquarters, our traveling companions reached their various destinations in hamlets and small towns and villa farms and left us to travel on without them, until eventually we were alone again on the open road.
