The last remnants of Creel’s former escort company were emerging from the trees, scattered in ones and twos all along the edge. Dying in those ones and twos, many of them, as they were shot down with arrows or impaled on hungry spears. The bandits, or king’s loyalists or whatever they were, streamed out on to the high ground. They came without order or rank, a chaotic flock of carrion birds jostling and calling in their haste. More and more of them, until Drann realised that it was not sanctuary he had found but the place where he would die.
He scrambled to get to his feet once more, but one of Creel’s men pushed past him and knocked him on to his backside. He was the only one of the levies to have reached the lord’s side, and the warriors seemed entirely uninterested in his presence. Contemptuous of it, he thought.
“I’m not running,” he heard himself shouting as he stood up.
He had no idea why he would say such a thing, or think it wise. But then wisdom had never been his greatest attribute, to hear his mother talk.
“I can see that,” Creel muttered at his side, startling him. “You want some sort of reward, boy?”
“No,” Drann stammered. “No, sire.”
“Good. There’s none coming here today. Fight and perhaps you get to live. That’ll have to be enough for you.”
Drann tightened his hands about his spear. He realised with surprise that his heartbeat was slowing. His mouth was dry, but he did not feel sick any more. He looked out between Creel’s warriors and saw a great crowd of men rushing up the hillside, meaning to kill him and strip his corpse, and he was not afraid. It seemed too late for fear.
He glanced up. The sky was blue, flecked with delicate white strands of high cloud that drifted slowly westward. It looked peaceful up there.
Arrows came first, clattering and pattering down on rocks and into the grass all around. They were poorly aimed. Creel’s warriors hunched behind their shields in any case. Drann heard the dull thunk of arrow striking wood once or twice. He had no shield himself, so folded down into the shadow of one of those big men as best he could.
The knoll was too rugged and too boulder-strewn to allow for the sort of shield line Drann had seen Creel’s well-trained men practising since he joined the army. All they could do was to each find a piece of ground that gave them a sure footing and fight upon it. Their attackers were too impatient, or too short of arrows, to hold back. They surged on, and Drann and the rest rose to meet them.
It was not as he had imagined fighting to be. It was faster, and more confused. More desperate. A mass of flailing, lurching figures. Gasps and grunts and the rattle of spears, of swords. It was hard to tell who was friend and who foe, and his body acted before he had time to sort one from another. He lunged with his spear, felt it hit something – perhaps flesh – once or twice, the impacts shivering up the shaft and jarring his hands.
His feet slipped over slick rock; he stumbled. A wild-eyed man with a thick black beard loomed over him, an axe raised above his head. Drann’s spear was tangled in his legs. He started to close his eyes, but a dark blur of movement swept across in front of him and his assailant was down, knocked from his feet by two men reeling around, locked together in violent embrace. Drann hauled his spear free and thrust it at the axeman’s face. It was only a glancing blow, carving open the man’s cheek, but it was enough. The man rolled away, bloodied, and first crawled then staggered back down the slope.
They all did. Drann watched them go in disbelief, his chest heaving, that feeling of sickness back in his throat. It all seemed too easy, too fast, and so it was. The retreat did not last. As Creel himself dragged a wounded man back over the rocks, and propped him up against a boulder, Drann watched their enemies gathering, bickering, and then spreading themselves out, thinning and reaching to encompass half the knoll with their ragged line. He could have wept then, at the brief flowering and instant withering of hope. It would have been better never to have caught its scent. All the weakness, that he had thought gone, was back in his legs.
It began again, the surge up towards the few men atop the rocks, the reaching for their blood and lives. This time, to Drann’s puzzlement, it seemed that in amongst the footfalls and the cries of fury, there was the pounding of hoofs too. That could not be right, he thought. For a moment, it seemed it must be his heart, thudding inside him, but then as blade met shield once more and the struggle was renewed, a horse came bursting across the shoulder of the knoll, and atop it a great and terrible rider.
He was tall and his skin brown-tinted, this newcomer, with a scalp clean-shaven and smooth as polished stone, save for a single thick length of black hair folded and pinned into a knot atop his head. A heavy leather waistcoat, with plates of metal, encased his chest. A long sword was in his hand, and it moved as fast and free as swirling water. The horse cast men aside as it ploughed through the throng. The blade carved them away from its flanks.
So sudden and so fierce was the charge, like an eagle plunging through a flock of lambs, that horse and rider burst through and out on to open ground, and there they wheeled, the horse rearing up and gouging the air with its forelegs. Already, their arrival had spread enough alarm to scatter some of the bandits, who were tumbling and bounding back down towards the edge of the woods. And there amongst them Drann saw another horseman. Another southerner, to judge by the hue of his skin, whose horse danced and jinked around as he flicked arrow after arrow, absurdly fast, in amongst the fleeing men. The reins hung loose and limp across the animal’s shoulders, yet the archer barely swayed and it seemed that almost every arrow found its intended home.
Only then did Drann realise that there were those amongst their attackers who did not know, or did not care, what was happening behind them, and had not yet had their fill of slaughter. They pressed in against the last of Creel’s guardians, and clambered over the rocks that kept them from the lord. Creel himself fought like a wounded boar, crying out in incoherent rage as he slashed at those who tried to reach him. Drann pushed away a corpse that had fallen across his legs, pinning him against a boulder. It was far heavier than he ever would have imagined. He took a few steps closer to Creel, trying to keep his spear up, not knowing what else to do. He was near when Creel went down, thrown backwards by a man who rushed him with only a shield, punching the metal boss into the lord’s chest.
Drann acted without thought. He thrust his spear at a flash of exposed skin, and it drove into the man’s neck, knocking him sideways. In the urgent moment, it seemed a small, unremarkable thing. Then the blood came, as Drann was dragged forward, falling across Creel himself, and his spear tore free of flesh. He kept hold of it somehow, but could not easily rise as Creel struggled beneath him. He managed to twist on to his side, in time to see a lean, hard-featured man clad in tattered hides rushing towards him and the lord of Mondoon, vaulting over a hump of rock, a knife almost as long as Drann’s forearm ready for the fatal blow. Leaping at them, to put all the weight and force the world could offer into the blade.
And there was a flash, and a strange sound unlike anything Drann had heard before, and the man’s head was apart from his body, springing away as if on a string. Making a dull noise as it landed and rolled. The decapitated corpse crumpled and curled and fell at Drann’s feet, spitting blood out across his boots. He looked up, into the face of a woman, who stood between him and the sun so that he had to narrow his eyes to make out her features. They might have been cut from stone, so impassive were they. She stared at him with cold eyes, much as if she was regarding some entirely unremarkable hummock in the ground. Her fair hair was tied back. Her sword, clad in the dead man’s blood, came slowly down. Drann suddenly realised that she might, in those moments, have been deciding whether or not she should kill him. He probably did not look much like the defender of a landed lord.
Apparently satisfied, though nothing in her expression gave so much as a whisper of her thoughts, that blade descended to her side. She shook the notched shield on her other arm and resettled her hold upon it. She looke
d away.
Drann rolled off Creel of Mondoon, and found that the fighting was done. Dead and wounded littered the ground around the rocky knoll, and stretched back towards the silent, still trees below. Here and there, a few survivors were limping, or running, or staggering back towards the safety of those woods. The two southerners, swordsman and archer, had dismounted and came striding up to stand beside the woman, all three of them staring down at Creel, who was grunting and muttering but did not seem injured. They paid no heed to Drann, sitting there in a state of amazement at the way his heart kept beating, the air kept easing in and out of his chest, and he kept living.
The tallest of these three, the first to have come, leaned and extended a big hand to Creel.
“Can I help you to your feet, lord of Mondoon?” he asked, with just the faintest hint of mirth in his voice.
Creel glowered at him, but reached to clasp hands. Drann glimpsed a fleck of movement in the sky, over the southerner’s shoulder. A dark scratch against the blue, skimming down towards them.
“Arrow…” he started to say, hoarsely, but he need not have spoken.
The woman was already glancing up and casually lifting her shield arm. No other part of her moved. She simply caught the arrow upon the wooden circle. The loud, sharp crack of it smacking in made Drann blink. No one else gave the smallest sign of surprise or alarm.
The archer sniffed, and took an arrow from his own quiver.
“You want me to do something about that?” he asked, staring back along the path of the offending shaft, at some target Drann could not see from where he sat.
“Is he going to try again?” the swordsman asked, still bent over and holding Creel’s hand in his.
“Not likely,” the archer reported. “Running like a hare now.”
“Let him go, then,” the swordsman said, and hauled Creel, one-handed, to his feet.
“You’re a sight-boon,” Creel grunted as he wiped the flat of his sword across his breeches.
“I imagine so.”
“Where’re the rest of you?”
“Coming along. We three thought it best to hurry when we caught the sound of the hunt.”
“Well and good,” Creel muttered. “You can follow us back. Make your own camp. Outside, mind. Keep a little ground between us, yes?” He shot a sharp, meaningful glance at the southerner, who said nothing. “Come and find me in my tent tomorrow morning.”
“I will.”
The lord of Mondoon sheathed his sword, flexed his wrist and rolled his hand around.
“I’m not dying today, then,” he mused. “That’s something of a surprise.”
“Of course you’re not dying,” the bald-headed warrior smiled. “You’ve not paid us yet.”
And with those words Drann belatedly understood what, and who, these people were. And realised that he would, after all, have a story worth the telling if he ever got back to his village.
3
Desert Lions, More Likely
In the early morning Drann stood watch, perhaps two hundred paces from the Free’s camp. He should have been asleep, but he had traded the duty with one of the other levies. The man had looked at him as if he was an idiot of the most ridiculous kind when he proposed it, and wandered off to find his bedroll shaking his head and murmuring about the rank stupidity of youth. Drann did not mind. His bloody adventure in the company of Creel of Mondoon had rendered him too agitated, too distracted, to easily sleep on the lump-rucked ground, and he had not yet had his fill of the Free.
From his perch atop a rock he could see them well enough, camped there a little further, and a little lower, along a ridge overlooking Creel’s army. It felt almost unreal. He was watching the inheritors of a name out of old tales, a fragment of Old Emmin’s histories come to life. He had fought alongside them yesterday – if you could call his efforts fighting – and that was a thing he doubted anyone back in his home village would believe, when he reported it. The Free: last and greatest by far of the mercenary companies. Makers and breakers of lords and kings and legends.
As he sat there on his hard seat he had counted them over and again, marked every detail of their manner and appearance. The three who had proved saviours at Creel’s knoll yesterday were there, archer, swordsman and ice-faced woman. Drann knew who the swordsman was now. Yulan, Captain of the Free. With them in their makeshift camp were another six archers, not southerners these, but drawn from every part of the land to judge from their faces and hair. They were dressed alike, though, in hides and tanned leathers.
And then two more, who did not fit the mould of warrior quite as the rest did. A man and a woman of early middle age, who wore no armour and carried no shields. From the way they regarded one another, exchanged whispers, touched hands now and again as they went about the morning tasks of any camp, Drann deduced that they were lovers. He was handsome, she close to beauty; they were well matched. All these people, as best he could tell, had slept under blankets in a circle round a fire that now guttered and glowed. They had a dozen horses, more than were needed to carry them all, tethered just beyond that circle.
None of this was what set its hooks most deeply into Drann’s attention, and sent thrills of wonder, of trepidation, through him. No, the thing from which he could barely avert his eyes was a huge, heavy flat-bedded wagon that stood not far from the horses. It had massive iron-clad wheels. The beast that hauled it grazed a short distance further out, and it was no dray horse but a mighty bull of grey hue, with shoulders like rocks and wide up-curving horns tipped with iron sheaths. It had taken Drann a long time to realise that the wagon had its own driver too, for he – or she, he could not really tell – stayed some way apart from all the others. Had not stirred, in fact, in all the time Drann had been watching, from the side of the wagon. A small figure, hunched down, sitting against one of the wheels, features and form entirely obscured by a very strange hooded green cloak that looked for all the world as though it was made of leaves stitched together.
An odd sight, but not enough to distract Drann from what rested on the bed of the wagon. It was a single enormous block of some sort, at least as high and wide as Drann was tall. Beyond that shape and size, he could tell nothing more, for it was covered over with a heavy canvas sheet tied down all around the edges of the wagon. But Drann knew what must lie beneath, in darkness, in silence. He knew it by rumour, at least. The Clamour.
When folk spoke of the Free, more often than not they did it in soft tones of fear or awe or wonder. As if speaking of something more than mere people and their deeds. There were many reasons for that: the fact that this, alone amongst all the free companies, had been the one powerful enough to persist when the times turned against the rest of their kind; that they had, over lifetimes, humbled many enemies others would have feared to even face; that they fought and died by no one’s choice but their own, and were said to do both of those things – the fighting and the dying – better than any who had ever lived.
But most of all when old men, softened by drink, whispered about the Free in some dark alehouse, the hushing of their voices was because of the Clamour. There were Clevers amongst the ranks of the Free, some said to be amongst the most powerful who lived, but most would hold the true reason for the Free’s continuing survival, for the inability of School or King to face them down, to be the Clamour. A Permanence. A thing not of this world. The remnant – or result; Drann was extremely vague about how such things came about – of some fell magic gone awry. Run beyond the control of the Clever who shaped it.
There were few Permanences so awful, so wondrous, so potent, that they became the common currency of ale-talk or children’s tales. Now here Drann was, and there just a couple of hundred steps away was one of those few. Everyone, everywhere, knew of the Clamour. He’d heard that it once ate an Orphanidon alive, armour and all.
The thin beard Drann had been trying to grow – with unsatisfactory results – for the last week or more itched. He scratched at his chin with grubby fingers. He had
assumed he would by now have a thick, wiry beard, such as Creel himself and so many of the hardened fighting men in the camp sported. Matters had not progressed in accordance with his hopes. As it turned out, the adornments of manhood were not so easily come by.
He was poised thus in mid scratch when a wood pigeon burst up from its roost in one of the big trees some way below him, clapping its way indignantly off into the new day. Drann looked towards the sound and found himself staring into the eyes of Yulan.
The Captain of the Free was regarding him with one eyebrow wryly arched.
“You supposed to be on watch?” the southerner asked.
He was clad just as he had been yesterday, but on foot now and with sword safe in its scabbard. Still intimidating, though. Still reeking of composure and capability. He had a heavy sack in one hand, and an expectant expression as he awaited a reply from Drann, perched atop the rock.
And Drann, finding himself tongue-tangled, could only nod in confirmation. He had no idea how Yulan had come to within touching reach of him so entirely unnoticed.
“If all Creel’s watchers are of the same quality, that’d explain how he got himself into such trouble yesterday,” Yulan observed. It might have been accusation, or condemnation, but somehow it sounded a little gentler than that.
Drann was not sure whether Yulan recognised him or not. Did he know that Drann had been there too, had been the one at Creel’s side at the end? Perhaps not. Perhaps men such as these did not remember those of less lofty station.
“You know where Creel’s tent is?” Yulan asked.
“Yes,” Drann managed to say.
“Good. Show me.” He lifted the sack at his side and gave it a shake. “I’ve got some ears for him.”
The Free Page 2