“A little late for that offer,” Verlein said. “Imagine my eagerness to yield to you here, in front of all my folk. You’ve had ample time to message ahead for a meeting.”
Delay could avail him nothing, and it gave her wedgebreakers time to organize. What was he playing at? His second wave was three days away, a day even by horseback. Apparently his folk agreed; closer, she could see the frowns, the tight shoulders, here and there a [312] shifted stance. Impatience, concern ... disgust? Was this not the first thing he had done or ordered that went against the grain?
“Look at me, Verlein,” he said.
Not “Shieldmaster”? He seemed very strange, very tight, as if he were fighting something within himself—forcing words past lips braced against them. But his dark eyes were foreign, unknowable.
“I’ll look where I please, Headman.”
The next words came without a struggle, drenched in his familiar arrogance. “Then look up that paltry slope you think you own, past your folk, to the blond head there. Patrolling your shores, is he?”
She looked. He wasn’t trying to hide. He might have just ridden out, as if on command, to sit his horse and watch the battle. Or join it, with the seafolk mounted awkwardly around him. There was nothing awkward about the longstaffs balanced across their saddlebows.
Was this betrayal? It was too late to matter. Six seafolk who could barely sit a horse would make little difference in this engagement. Evrael had deployed his ships, according to her scouts. He didn’t have to be on them. If he’d called them off, her coast was unguarded; running back wouldn’t change that today, and she might as well rout the Khinish while she was here.
“Your delay makes no sense,” she said. “Yield, Streln, and in return I’ll let your folk go home alive. Or make me a sensible offer, let me reject it, and let’s get on with this.”
Streln glanced to the other side and raised a brow in mild surprise before his eyes narrowed. She did not follow his gaze. She’d had enough games. But perhaps so had he, now. His head snapped back to her and with an eerie intensity he said, “Remember Eldrisil. Rout my folk or be routed, it’s the same in the end. Remember Eldrisil, understand him, and he will not have died in vain.” His throat closed up as he was speaking; the last words came out a rasp. His bronze skin blanched, his pupils contracted. He looked like a man fighting shock.
Battling some inner agony, and spouting babble. “I’ve had enough of this, Streln,” she said, half drowned out by a grumble of thunder. “This parley is over.” She didn’t care if he could hear her. The sight of her spine would convey the gist. Would she make it back to the shield without an arrow in the spine? She would not back away from him like a deferential subordinate.
If he managed some strangled plea or insolent riposte, she could not hear it under the anger in the sky.
Rain, she thought, as she walked, and waited for the iron point to enter her back.
Rain, she thought, as she reached the shieldwall.
[313] Rain, she thought, taking her place, checking the six wedgebreakers in sight, catching one nod from each of the closest.
“Ready archers,” she said, and the command was relayed, and yew and elm bent as bowstrings drew back.
A thrill went through her body and seemed communicated into the earth, which quivered beneath her. Don’t thwart me, Eiden, she bade him in silence, as Sylfonwy and Morlyrien conspired against the Khinish over her head. Let me end this, and see you safe.
Streln took the point of the wedge opposite her. He raised his arm. There was no blue cloth now.
“Archers—” Verlein began.
His arm swept forward.
“—let fly!” Verlein finished as, with the hum of a nonned bowstrings, the Khinish archers loosed their shafts. The song of their flight threaded over the deep many-stringed twang from her own bowfolk, and then all was drowned out by the swell of three nonned Khinish voices bellowing the charge.
Their strange horns called thin and redundant behind the pounding of their feet, and arrows cut several blasts short.
“Brace!” Verlein called, and heard the deep drums carry the word, and knew that too was redundant, for the shieldwall had gone taut as a bowstring, hard as a mortared stone wall, tight as the interlocking rings in their tunics.
The charge came on.
Each wedge moved as one, unnatural, uncanny.
Her wedgebreakers were nearly there, loosed with the arrows. A second flight of shielder arrows rained into the moving wedges, but whatever they hit they did not halt. Weight, momentum, and grinding commitment drove Streln’s wedge straight at her. The other two had turned just before the charge, seeking to surprise sections of the shieldwall that had not braced for the worst. The wedgebreakers, small quick groups, had shifted trajectory to compensate. The third flight of arrows picked off some Khinish in the rear ranks.
The wedgebreakers smashed into the wedges from the sides.
She could see only the effect on the one driving toward her. Cheveil’s group and Gilris’s severed the rear wings right off the wedge. They went down in a tangle of shields and spears with a diagonal cut through the straight ranks. The severed wings held formation in smaller wedges—and broke away, charging the shieldwall to either side of her. Insane, they were too few, but they moved as one, impossibly, and there was no calculating the effect of surprise on braced shielders who might have stiffened too much to adjust to being harried rather than charged.
[314] She could not watch or call to them. The main body of the wedge had also held formation, and Covered the last threfts in three eyeblinks, aimed straight at her.
They crashed against the shield.
Verlein was lifted off her feet.
A shield cracked, or a bone.
Streln’s breath rasped her neck as it came out of him in a whooshing grunt.
She was borne back, flat against the shields behind her. She could not move her arm to reach a weapon. Feet scrabbled for purchase in the grass behind her dangling feet. The feet behind those were cleated, and held, as her body and the body behind her absorbed the crushing weight.
She could not remember what it was to breathe.
The rear Khinish ranks drove forward around the wedge point, smashing into the shields around her in a spreading ripple.
Hold, she tried to tell them, hold, hold, hold, but there was no air in her.
She could not see. Shorter Streln had driven her shield up into her face. She tasted iron and blood.
A spear quested over her shoulder, seeking Khinish heads before the smashup broke apart. Grunts and cries came from behind her, but not beside. They’d crushed the breath out of themselves. She would never come back to earth. She would hang suspended between breath and death forever.
To the left and right, at the edges of the impact point, blades rang, a spear haft snapped, a woman cried out dying, a man cried out wounded. From far away, outside the muffling crush, came the scrapes and thunks and clangs of bladeplay, oaths and grunts and screams. A curved blade whipped downward, blind, from over her head, and found Girayal’s, and looked for more as blood gushed out to drench her neck and shoulder, then dropped into the crush after a stab from the shielder spearpoint.
The shieldwall around her bent like some massive ancient willow limb, and held. The second and third ranks surged up from behind her in a mighty groaning effort and pressed the Khinish back. Abruptly they gave way. Verlein fell free and forward. She kicked out, on some untrainable instinct, so that her own shield braced her at the base when she came down and she could push herself upright instead of toppling headfirst. Girayal lay crumpled and cleaved to her left; Eowi had fallen onto his shield. Her eyes on the Khinish, she hauled at his belt but couldn’t lift him along with his shield. He was stunned and limp. The Khinish wedge was dented into a square, [315] retreating fluidly. In the next blink, it broke apart. Some backed off and brought short bows into play. She would not fall back. She couldn’t haul at Eowi anymore, she had to rise to the next attack. “Roll!
” she shouted. He did not seem to hear.
The shield line came up beside her spaced for close quarters. The second rank hurled their javelins on her order. Khinish screamed, and fell. Arrows flew. Shielders fell to the sides and behind. More Khinish danced in, wielding spears and blades. Eowi rolled just in time to take a spear on his shield rim instead of in his back.
Her shield wall had held, and tightened, for as far as she could make out in her peripheral vision in the moment before Streln’s curved blade slashed toward her neck.
She jerked her shield around, and the curved blade bit wood a hair shy of her shoulder. She twisted, trying to pry it from his hand, but the blade only carved a furrow in her shield rim and slid free. She shoved her shield out in a vicious bid to smash his face, but he had danced back—they were all dancing, moving in and out again, tempting the line to warp. Her archers were done, and waited behind her spearfolk with blades ready. Holding, not jumping in. Letting the first rank do its job. Good, she thought, good, and she wanted to tell them that, but Streln had moved on and some other Khinishman was hacking at her now, and she met him in the bind, seeking always to exploit some weakness in the curve of those blades—but a quick deft spear thrust from beside her took him in the chest, and in the moment’s respite she could only glance around her shieldwall to take stock.
we have them surrounded we withstood the charge we outnumber them four to three we have only to tighten on them tighten until they’re backed up milling together let’s see them dance and harry us then
“Forward a pace!” she cried, and the drums called out the order, and the shieldwall tightened, so much that some first-rankers were squeezed out. Her first mistake knifed through her gut as she saw them elbow their way forward instead of falling back to join the second rank. To fall back is to fail, she had told them, drilled them, but she had not thought it through as far as this, bloody wretched spirits strike her—forced out of the shieldwall, they were flinging themselves into the fray, engaging the Khinish inside the circle, quickly overwhelmed.
“Fall back to make way!” she called to her drummer, but there was a hesitation, that was not a command he knew, he had to send it slowly like a name and she didn’t know whether the other drummers would make sense of it to pass it on or her people would understand it.
[316] Bloody balls, bloody balls, Eiden’s bloody balls—
Then she caught a clear view across the battleground, to the other side of the circle.
There was no other side of the circle.
The far Khinish wedge had driven through. The far side of the field was an incoherent melee.
There was nothing for it, nothing at all, nothing else she could do. She would have to call the charge.
A curved blade found a join and cleaved her shield down to the iron band above her arm.
She twisted down on reflex to avoid the cut. The shield tilted. The blade whipped out of its wielder’ s hand and twanged crazily, stuck in the shield. She brought her longblade up as she shifted for a view of the attacker, and cleaved him in return. A spearman beside him stabbed her in the shoulder. She fell back before the barb could bury itself, then drove forward with her cloven, blade-twanging shield and knocked the spearman to the ground. It drew the shieldwall with her, and she felt an irrational surge of rage, the bloody obedient idiots she had trained, couldn’t let her push an attack and return to position but had to stay blindly with her.
There is no bleeding circle anymore!
She flung the unwieldy shield from her at the feet of an onrushing Khinishwoman, tripping her into a tumble that ended under the blade of the shielder to the left. She didn’t know who was around her anymore, seconds or thirds, Girayal was dead and Eowi was lost in the fray and names and faces were lost with them, there were only shielders and Khinish, and as shields were hewn or dropped there were only straight blades and curved blades, silks and padded jerkins.
There was no circle anymore.
Her blade arm was not working well. Something wrong with her shoulder. Blood and punctured mail, at a glance. She drew a longknife left-handed, but for another moment there was no one to fight, there was a pile of dead Khinish in front of her and the battle seemed to have spread along the line. She blinked sticky dampness out of one eye with some dim memory of being smashed in the face.
Call the charge. There’s nothing left to do. Form up and call the charge and take their main force down. The ones in the back will have to fend as they can.
Movement caught her eye from the downland side. Another gap in the circle, blast it, it was all going to pieces. Folk on horseback. A line of horses. Not Khinish, not seafolk, not Evrael, he’d been on the other side. Horses had no place in a battle. No one would fight from horseback, they’d just hamstring the beasts or cut them out from [317] under them, a Khinish blade could behead a horse in one swing, there’d be no point to that, killing good stock, dead horses to no purpose, dead horses piling the battleground.
In the deepening gloom that might be her vision failing from blood loss or might be related to the claps of thunder muted in ears deafened by screams and bladeclash, she saw a head of white-blond hair.
Someone behind her was lifting her arm, pressing a wadded cloth to her shoulder, tying a binding around it. Some irritating second-ranker trying to stop the blood. Two Khinishwomen came at her and fell on blade and spear from either side of her. The neck. They should all have protected their necks better. Some had taken it in the head or limbs, but it always seemed to be the neck that did it, they bled out right away—
Kazhe.
Call the charge.
Kazhe, who was lost, irredeemable, maddened by drink, ungovernable—
Call the charge.
Kazhe, her blademaster, who had taught her and led her and forged the beginnings of a rebel horde for her and then abandoned her to follow the Lightbreaker to his death, come in this darkest hour to fight by her side as she was meant to—
Call the charge.
Kazhe, dismounting, handing her horse off to someone, but just standing there while others gathered around her from nowhere, at least a nonned armed fighters but not formed up into any kind of—
Kazhe, watching her shield wall crumble—
Kazhe! she tried to shout, through the darkness and the wasp stings of raindrops, past the ringing iron and the cries and the agony in her head and in her shoulder.
The blond head turned, and even from this distance Verlein could feel the ice-blue eyes burn through her gratitude and wonder like the inexorable deadly bite of frost.
“Verlein!” someone screamed from nearby, a small muffled cry in her fading ears. Almost offhandedly, she ducked the wobbling spear meant for her head. It was a longspear, no good for hurling. That was good. They were getting desperate, misusing their weapons.
She came up to see Streln staring at her from across a field of their dead and dying.
She sheathed her knife and moved her longblade to her offhand.
She drew breath, deep life’s breath, rank with blood and effluents and the sweat of terror and exhaustion and the heat that grew worse with the coming of the hot unnatural rain.
She called the charge.
The Menalad Plain
A Khinishman saw them. In his dark, battered face, his eyes went wide. His lips moved in the shape of an obscenity. In the nick of time he remembered the woman he was fighting. He beat her back. Another Khinish fighter bore in beside him—man or woman, you couldn’t tell one from the other now half the time. They had the shielder outnumbered two to one. But the Khinishman broke off and started toward them.
“Stay down,” Pelufer told Elora, pressing her deeper into the tufts of grazebane where they were hiding, at the base of a tree. As if Elora would move anyway. Her ankle was swollen and purpling, and her foot dangled grotesquely. Not sprained. Broken.
The Khinishman was coming closer. He was maybe six threfts away. Lightning branched across the sky. What if it hit the tree? But they couldn’t leave the tree, t
he tree was all that had kept them alive, shielding them from the first pounding assault. Nobody would charge right into a tree. If they moved two feet from it they would be trampled. Even if Elora could run and dodge. Arrows fell everywhere, wildly now. The tree was spined with them. But Pelufer had to sit up, remain visible, or the Khinishman would lose her in the confusing dark melee.
Would the other fighters let him pass, if he ran bearing the body of a young unarmored girl, with another little girl in tow? Would [319] arrows be more likely to hit them if they moved, or if they stayed still at the burled base of the arrow-spined tree?
The Khinishman fought his way over, smiting longblades and whirling to kick the bladefolk away, ducking one spear, cracking another in half with his curved blade.
He loomed over them, terrifying in his stiff, blood-soaked, iron-sewn clothes, a gigantic muscled armored killer. His mouth worked, but Pelufer couldn’t hear what he was saying over the crashing thunder and the crashing battle. When he touched her, she would be drenched in names, maybe too many to swallow, but maybe he wouldn’t be able to hear those either, maybe that wouldn’t stop him rescuing them.
She made way for him to pick up Elora, saw that he saw the bent ankle and drained face and understood, saw that he was swearing at them but that he was glancing around for the best route to make a run for it once he’d picked up Elora.
An arrowhead sprang out of the front of his neck.
He crumpled, his mouth still working. His eyes were shocked and then sad, so sad, as though he’d been a good man who tried hard to do right, a good man who’d done his best but left so much undone.
Pelufer wailed in blind frustration, and tugged at his body until it lay on its side, a buffer to trip anyone who would run them over without seeing them.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 40