He passed his lance across to Yulan, who, being distinctly unused to the feel and balance of such an ungainly weapon in his hand, took a moment or two to get to grips with it.
“Rather you didn’t drop it,” Rudran murmured.
He reached behind him and freed a long-handled, metal-spiked cudgel from its bindings. Another weapon Yulan found unappealing, but one Rudran could – unusually for him – wax adoring about. The methods and accoutrements of mounted battle were, in fact, the only things that normally seemed to much enthuse Rudran.
The lancer took a couple of his men slowly up ahead. Yulan watched them circling the wrecked farmhouse and its outbuildings, leaning to peer through windows and doors. He understood what Rudran had said, perhaps better than the man did himself. Before he had become Captain, Yulan knew he had been fiercer, harder. More dedicated to the business of slaughter. That he had changed was as it should be, he still thought. A leader had to have more strings to his bow than that.
But what Rudran wanted was the old Yulan back, just for this one venture. And he was probably right. There was going to be blood fit for wading in soon. It was time to forget why or to what purpose, and bend his mind to only one end: ensuring that it came not from the Free but from their enemy.
Rudran was brandishing his long mace in the air, swinging it in wide circles to summon the rest of the Free on.
Yulan turned in his saddle and called back: “If you’re wanting sleep, now’s the time. Rudran’s found a fine accommodation for you.”
While the others saw to their horses, and laid out their blankets, Yulan stalked around the farmstead.
Flies and beetles still busied themselves about the meagre remains of the animals. A few cattle, a few goats, Yulan judged from the bones. Behind the house was a walled garden. Cabbages and kale withered and rotted where they grew, since those who might have harvested them were dead, or fled. The air of abandonment was heavy. Miserable, but precisely what Yulan had hoped for. None had been here, he guessed, since whatever had brought about the place’s destruction.
The inside of the farmhouse was a ruin of fallen, charred roof timbers and tumbled stone. Perhaps a grave for unseen bodies. So the Free took to the grass outside it, by the edge of the track that had brought them here.
Kerig and Wren were already asleep, together on a single large blanket. She with her arm draped across his shoulders. He snoring unquietly. Both of their faces were so utterly peaceful that Yulan could not help but smile. The knowledge of what he would soon require of them chased the smile from his lips.
Hamdan was helping Drann to untie the cords holding his bedroll. The knots had tightened, after their wetting and drying in recent days. Yulan walked over to them.
“You should get yourself a spare water skin, and food for a day or two,” he said to Drann. “We’ll not be travelling together for much longer.”
Crestfallen disappointment swept across Drann’s face.
“You’re not going to leave me behind?”
“Only for a time. You’ll not be alone. I need to —”
“What if they want to see the contract?” Drann said earnestly, tapping the scroll case at his belt.
“No,” Yulan said. “Callotec’ll not be asking to see any contracts. Not with three hundred men at his back, and the Bereaved in his train. This’ll be warring, not reading.”
“I can help. I can fight.”
“No,” Yulan insisted. “Your only task now is to come back with me to Creel after all this is done. I’ll have no place for those that can’t look after themselves in what’s coming.”
“I can! I know how to use a spear. Creel drilled us in —”
“In how to stand a charge, a hundred or more of you together, I’d wager. That’s how lords use levymen, untrained men. A mass of you, quilled like a porcupine. That’s not the kind of fight we’re riding to.”
“You might need every spear. There’s three hundred of them and only —”
“Enough!’ Yulan said it sharply, not out of anger, but out of the certainty that he could not spend time freely now. “Akrana. Test this boy.”
She was sitting cross-legged, rolling her shoulders to loosen them, but rose at his call, and walked purposefully towards Drann.
“I’ll do it if you want it doing,” protested Hamdan, but Yulan steered him away with a gentle hand upon his arm.
“You’ve other business to be about, my friend,” he said.
And that was true, but so was his desire to see Drann tested. That was what would teach him the wisdom of caution, and of humility, amidst such perilous times and company as these. Perhaps save his life, if it drained a little of that bravery. Hamdan, Yulan knew, would not give Drann such a test. He did not have it in him.
“It’s time for you to go,” Yulan told the archer as they walked together towards the horses, Hamdan glancing back, frowning, over his shoulder. “I need you to find Callotec for me. Find me my ground; my time and place.”
Hamdan sighed, but nodded.
“We’ll keep to this course for as long as the trail favours us,” Yulan continued. “Send one of your bow boys to find us and guide us in, once you’ve the measure of it.”
“You want me to leave one or two of them with you?”
“Two, yes. They’ll be looking after Kerig and Drann.”
He threw an arm round Hamdan’s shoulder.
“Don’t worry. I won’t let her hurt him.”
Behind them, the sounds of a sparring match were just beginning. Yulan was pleased that Hamdan resisted the urge to look back.
“You’re limping,” the archer observed.
“Huh. I thought I’d hidden that better.”
“Not from me. That foot going bad?”
“It’s not going good, that’s sure,” Yulan grunted.
In truth, it burned and throbbed. When he put weight upon it, cruel little darts of pain came trembling up through ankle and calf. He hadn’t taken off his boot in some time. When he did, he doubted he would find anything beautiful.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Won’t be a problem, soon enough.”
“Is that so?”
Yulan nodded.
“Don’t get seen, and don’t get killed,” he told the archer.
“Never do, do I?” Hamdan smiled.
“Not so far. I’ll be needing a lock of your hair before you go. All of you, and the horses.”
“Ah,” Hamdan said wryly. “Poor old Kerig. There’s going to be unsweet words spoken of you hereabouts soon, then. Not sure I’m sorry or glad to be missing that.”
Drann had twice gone to levymeets, where all the men of fighting age in a few villages were gathered together to prove they had spear or bow to bring, should their lord ever call upon them. At those raucous gatherings, they had been given some training in the craft of battle. Notionally, at least. In Drann’s little experience, they were as much about bartering and arguing and gossiping and, once the lord’s men had disappeared, drinking as anything else.
But then, when he joined himself to Creel’s army, there had been true training. Hard. Two drills a day for a week or more. Just as Yulan had said, though, that had been all about fifty or more men marching and kneeling and sprouting spears. Not about trying to stand alone against an ill-tempered Clever with a ferocious gift for swordplay. Drann knew he was going to lose, fail whatever test Yulan thought this added up to, and did try to say as much to Akrana. But she was not listening.
She was trying to kill him; or would have been, had she not restricted herself to the use of a wooden sparring stick, pulled from her saddlebag. She certainly seemed to be trying to hurt him, and to Drann’s untutored eye that looked, and indeed felt, much like trying to kill.
She came at him in a flurry of blows that appeared wild and uncontrolled, yet somehow set his spear dancing around uselessly, rapped out a cacophony of knocks on its shaft. And on his knuckles, which made him howl and drop the spear entirely.
Akrana slid her foot und
er the spear, midway along its length, and lifted it. Held it balanced there on the top of her foot, just off the ground, then flicked it up to him. He caught it, out of instinct rather than desire. He glanced at his knuckles as he did so. A couple of them were bleeding.
“There’s no point —’ he began, but she was already advancing on him again.
Drann shuffled backwards, and as he went resolved himself to at least show that he was no sheep to go meekly down. He was fairly certain that he could not so much as scratch Akrana unless she allowed it; little harm could come, therefore, of fighting as if he meant it. Might as well earn whatever bruises she meant to inflict upon him. Perhaps, if he got improbably lucky, he might even —
Akrana rushed him, hissing like a delirious snake. Alarm made him jump back, and he caught his heels on an anthill bulging out of the short grass. Fell hard. Akrana sprang up and over the hummock. He rolled wildly to avoid her boots as she thumped down precisely where he had been sprawled.
“You are slow,” she said.
More or less everyone Drann had ever seen was slow compared to Akrana. He had no interest in discussing it with her, and suspected it was in any case a mere distraction intended to result, one way or another, in further pain or humiliation. He scrambled to his feet, and gave an exploratory lunge with his spear. She knocked that aside easily enough.
Later than he would have wished, he remembered what Hamdan had done to the man who jabbed a spear at him outside Curmen. He decided to make no more attacks, feint or otherwise, himself. Let her come to him. He thought Creel’s trainers had said something of that sort when trying to make fighters from the motley mass of farm folk that had been drawn beneath his banner. Something about spears being good for holding your own ground, not for taking another man’s.
Drann set his feet, tightened his grip on the spear, held it hard in against his hip. Levelled its point at Akrana’s gut. She closed with him more cautiously this time, swaying that club from side to side. Drann watched it, tracked its every movement, and then suddenly thought that might not be a good idea and snapped his gaze up to Akrana’s face. There was nothing to read there. Not so much as the faint echo of emotion. Just concentration. Intent.
Beyond her, Drann could see Hamdan and his archers riding away. Yulan was standing, watching the sparring match with his arms folded. Drann tried not to let any of that intrude upon the more painful business immediately to hand.
He did not retreat. He let Akrana come closer and closer. It troubled him a little that she just kept coming. He was not sure what he could do about that, short of sinking the spear into her stomach. She spared him too much confusion over such matters by suddenly springing sideways, crouching as if to fling herself at him. When he swung the spear around to keep it between the two of them, she reached out an alarmingly fast and long arm and seized hold of it, and pushed it on along the arc of its movement, and then down.
She drove the spear point into the earth, took a couple of long strides straight towards him, leaped and kicked him, hard, in the centre of his chest. So hard that it felt like having a stone block dropped from height on to his ribcage. So hard that he could not breathe. So hard that he lost hold of the spear, went reeling and fell on his back.
Akrana stood over him, staring down not with the contempt he half expected, but rather with an odd kind of empty distance in her eyes.
“You are of no use to us,” she said.
Anger boiled in Drann, surging up to his lips. Ready to spill. He bit it back. Shaped it.
“Can I get up now?” he asked.
She reached down, he reached up and they clasped one another’s wrists. She dragged him to his feet. Drann wiped his hand across his face.
“I might not be of any use, but at least I had a better reason than just gathering coins for joining the war. I was fighting because our lord seized half my family’s land, that we’ve held for three generations, and Crex’s court said that was just. Because the royal share of the tithe doubled in two years and when my father hid some of our barley from the tally-takers, they split the skin on his back with cord whips. Because men from Hudrin fort got into a fight at my village’s beer shop, and came back two nights later and burned it, and killed the man who brewed the beer. He’d not even been part of the fight. And nobody flayed the skin from their backs, the men who killed him.”
“Not true,” said Akrana, entirely unmoved by what Drann had thought a rather fine speech. “What you were really fighting for was Creel of Mondoon’s place at the table where the spoils will be shared out. In any war, there are only ever a few who truly win. It sometimes seems otherwise, but it is just that: a seeming.”
She turned and walked away.
“And what are you fighting for, then?” Drann called after her, still angry.
“The joy of it,” she said without looking back, and without any trace of joy.
“She’s done you a service,” Yulan said while Drann was pouring a little water over his battered knuckles, trying to brush grime and blood from them. “Remember how easy that was for her. How fast.”
“Am I supposed to thank her?” Drann muttered.
“You might,” said Yulan sharply. “And you might want to remember that she started her life, a very long way from here, with less than you did and she’s lost more of it. All of it, on stakes planted by the Empire in her village. Whatever she might say, or think, she fights for more reasons – and darker ones – than just pleasure or coin. Everybody does. You would do well to think of that before getting into arguments about such things with those who actually know how to use a sword.”
Drann stared over at Akrana, who was checking her saddle, tugging at the straps. She did not look like someone come from poverty, with her tall, straight back and strong arms. Her sword and warhorse. Perhaps she did, though, behave like someone who had lost everything that mattered.
“Next time,” Yulan told him, “try to remember there’re two ends to a spear. It’s not just the sharp end can be useful in a fight. But remember this first: a contract-holder only has one responsibility that matters. To stay out of the way, and not get himself or anyone else killed.”
18
Oh, Joy
Within a couple of hours of Hamdan’s departure, Drann realised that the mood was changing. When the time came to ride on from the shell of a farmhouse, the Free were quiet, measured in movement and speech. They loaded their supplies on to the wagon, packed them away into saddlebags. They took a last little food and drink. Tested the saddles and the laces about their boots and the slide of sword from sheath. They did not smile, or goad. They barely looked at one another.
It unsettled Drann, but he fell in with it. He borrowed the mood.
They rode on more slowly. They were waiting, Drann understood. Waiting for Hamdan, or one of his men, to come to them and bring word that the battlefield awaited.
The land changed. The rises and hollows over which they rode were less pronounced. The grass was thinner, drier; the earth in which it grew finer and lighter. The sky was wider, stretching to far horizons that showed only the same endless undulations. Grass, rolling hills, a scattering of trees and shrubs. Nothing changed, in whichever direction Drann looked save one.
To the west, towards the Empire, there was higher ground. Dark at this distance, a grey line running between sky and earth. Cliffs, Drann thought. And atop them, so vanishingly faint and small that he could not be entirely certain he did not imagine them, a little stand of three pillars. Three towers. Standing upon the border between an empire and a kingdom that they long out-aged. He knew only scraps of history, but he thought they were Sorentine, those towers. They must be.
Not that it much mattered who had built them. He would get no closer to them than this, as far as he could tell. Everything would be settled without him, out of his sight. He should be glad of it, that he would have no part in whatever slaughter might take place. Neither the giving nor the receiving of it. But somehow the gladness refused to take hold.
<
br /> Of one thing he could be glad, though. He was starting to think he might have learned how to ride. His horse no longer seemed quite so inimical. It even did what he asked of it, with rein or heel, more often than not. His body no longer sobbed inside after a few hours in the saddle. It was not much to take from this grand adventure, but neither was it entirely nothing. There were only a handful of folk in his village who could ride a horse properly, so far as he knew.
The pounding of hoofs announced the return of one of the archers. The man came arrowing in from a long stand of scrubby trees, bursting out from amongst them at full gallop. Grass and dust flew in his wake.
He came to a skidding halt in front of Yulan, his horse blowing hard.
“They’re close,” Drann heard the archer say. “And we’ve got your ground for you.”
Yulan only nodded and stood in his stirrups to survey the land around them with careful attention. Drann did not know why he did that.
The Captain of the Free turned his horse about and rode slowly down the length of the little column, past Rudran and his proud lancers, past Hestin and the Clamour. To the end, where Drann rode with Kerig and Wren, two archers behind them.
“Kerig,” Yulan said, “I’ll be needing you now. You stay here with Creel’s lad, and a couple of the bow boys. And a fistful of hair.”
“I knew it,” Kerig moaned, rolling his eyes.
It was Wren’s reaction that startled Drann, though. She glared at Yulan, and slapped her thigh so violently it could only be because she would rather have struck her captain.
“Come on, Yulan,” Kerig said, almost pleading. “It’s not the season for me to be trying that. If I do it while the Vernal’s running so feeble, I’ll be a wreck for days. Weeks. If it doesn’t kill me.”
The Free Page 18