The Lance Thrower cc-8

by Jack Whyte

  “I will, young Clothar, but I would far rather have gone with my King. Be careful.”

  We rode into it. Rode unsuspecting into the chaos and destruction that marked the beginning of Gunthar’s War and were engulfed by its madness within the space of two heartbeats. One moment we were forging ahead determinedly through the still unceasing downpour, our horses plodding side by side along a broad and muddy woodland path, and the next we had rounded a bend in the path and found ourselves at the top of a steep defile leading down into a tiny vale that was choked with corpses. It was still not yet noon and the noise of the lashing rain was loud enough to drown any noise from the flies that were beginning to swarm here in uncountable numbers.

  At first glance, I could not tell what I was looking at, but beyond that first uncomprehending look there was nothing that could disguise the atrocity of what we had found. My first conscious impression was of a score of bodies. The number sprang into my mind as though it had been spoken aloud, and I recall it clearly. A score of bodies. No sooner had I acknowledged it, however, than I saw that it was woefully inadequate, for another score and more lay sprawled and half concealed by bushes. And at that moment, as though it had been preordained, the rain stopped falling, for the first time in days, to leave us sitting stunned in a silence that seemed enormous, gazing in stupefaction at the carnage before us.

  Ursus, as usual, was first to collect himself. “Well,” he said, his voice sounding louder than ever now that he had no need to shout over the noise of the rain, “at least we know now that they have not all joined forces. Whose men were these, do you know?”

  “Ban’s,” I said, still too stupefied by the unexpectedness of what we had found to have thought beyond the fact of it to the implications it entailed. “They’re garrison troops, wearing Ban’s emblem, see? The blue boar’s head.” And then, as the import of what we were seeing began to sink home to me, my voice shrank to a mere whisper and I felt my bowels twist themselves into spasms of knotting cramps. “These must be the men Theuderic took with him when he left yesterday.”

  Ursus nudged his horse forward until he was sitting knee to knee with me. I glanced at him, wondering if he felt as I did, but he was scanning the entire scene ahead of us, his eyes moving ceaselessly over the ranks of slaughtered men.

  “Took them on the march,” he said. “Must have lain in wait for them, knowing they’d be coming.” He tilted his head back slightly, pointing with his chin. “Look at them. Poor whoresons didn’t even have time to draw their weapons. Not a strung bow or an unsheathed sword among them. Probably ambushed from over there.” He pointed to the hillside facing us on the other side of the narrow valley. “See, on the top of the hill there, those bushes? See how dense they are? You could hide horses in there, and that’s exactly what they did. Perfect spot to lie in wait for anyone coming along this path, because once they’re on the slope down, there’s nowhere else for them to run to … .” His voice faded away for a moment, then resumed. “Can you see Theuderic here?”

  “Theuderic?” The question snapped me out of the trance I had been sinking into, making me look around in expectant horror. It was one thing to see my cousin’s men shot down and slaughtered, but quite another to think that Theuderic himself might lie among the dead.

  “No, I didn’t think so,” Ursus continued, speaking quietly as though musing to himself. “There’s no dead horses here at all, which suggests that whoever set this trap let all the horsemen pass by first—they would have been ahead of the infantry in any case—and then sat tight and waited for the foot soldiers. And they, knowing that their own cavalry was just ahead of them, would have marched right into death, suspecting nothing. Probably hadn’t even sent scouts out ahead of them, although it would have made no difference. Poor catamites walked right into it. Look at those arrows. I haven’t seen that many spent arrows since I fought on the coast of Arabia, against the Berbers there. I’ve seen hedgehogs with fewer bristles than that. And yet there’s hundreds missing. Look, you can see where they’ve cut the retrievable ones out of the bodies.” He indicated the body lying closest to us, and I saw immediately what he meant. The man had taken an arrow in the thigh, which dropped him in his tracks, severing the leg’s main blood vessel and causing him to bleed to death very quickly. The entire area around him was black with his lifeblood and it had gouted far enough to stain several of the bodies lying ahead of him, as well. The wound that had been added afterward had not bled at all; its edges were clean and deep, and the hole left by the missing arrowhead was big. I turned my head away before the gagging in my throat could overwhelm me, but Ursus was still looking.

  “Look over there! That fellow there was still alive before they came down. They slit his throat when they came back, either to silence him or to make sure he’d tell no one what he had seen.” He shook his head in disbelief and blew out his breath explosively through puffed cheeks, looking up again to where the bushes that had concealed the killers stretched across the top of the hillside on the far side of the little valley.

  “This is cousin Gunthar’s work.” I said it quietly, and Ursus looked again at the surrounding scene and expelled another whoosh of breath.

  “May God Himself be my witness, I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself, but those whoresons actually came back down here after the slaughter and collected their spent arrows to use them again.” He shook his head again, still looking about him as he continued in the same musing tone. “It takes a special kind of attitude to let a man do things like that—especially to people he has known. These were garrison mates … . That’s a close relationship, young Clothar, brothers in arms. But their brothers, like some of your own relatives, were less than loving. Your cousin picks his guardsmen carefully, it would appear, with more than half an eye to temperament … . I wonder if they are all mounted archers. They must be, to account for the numbers of arrows and the rate of fire … the short amount of time involved.” He waved a pointing finger, indicating the feathered missiles projecting from the bodies. “These are mounted bowmen’s arrows, much smaller than the ones you and I have in our quivers. When we come face-to-face with Gunthar’s men I think I would rather have my bow to pull than theirs.” He sucked air between his teeth, still looking thoughtful as his eyes moved ceaselessly over the killing ground. “Before we do anything else, though, we ought to take a closer look at what we have here. Come on.”

  He swung down from his saddle, and I joined him very reluctantly, my gorge rising anew at the stench that had begun to rise now that the rain had stopped. My entire mouth seemed coated with the brassy, almost granular stink-taste of blood. I tried to ignore the feel of the blood-soaked ground beneath my feet, telling myself it was no more than mud, then stood reeling with nausea, clinging to my horse’s halter. Ursus, however, paid me no attention. He was already quartering the scene around us with his eyes.

  “Go you and look down there, Clothar, among the bushes at the bottom of the slope. See if you can find anyone still alive. And see if you can find any different crests from the boar’s head, something that might give us proof of who’s responsible for this. I’ll search on this side of the slope. If you find anything at all, shout.”

  A long time passed before I found anything to shout about, and when I did, I almost missed it.

  I had lost track of time, walking among the dead for so long that I had grown inured to the horrors I was seeing, and my revulsion and nausea had passed. It was plain to see that Ursus was right. The killers had come down after the slaughter and retrieved as many of their arrows as they could cut out of the corpses, and the number of cut throats showed that many of their victims had still been alive when they came down. Now, all of them were dead, every man and boy, and there had been more than a few very young boys, evidently trainees, among the garrison troops. My guess was that no one had survived this massacre, that even those who had sought to surrender or flee had been shot down without mercy or compunction.

  The rain started
falling again at some point, and the renewed chill of it reminded me how far removed we were from any kind of warmth or shelter that day, and I had turned in disgust to rejoin Ursus when I glimpsed something from the corner of my eye that seemed out of place. I immediately looked for it again, but this time saw nothing, and I felt impatience flaring up in me. I forced it down, however, and disciplined myself to move slowly and look again, meticulously this time. And then I saw it: a flash of gray and green among the long, yellowed grass at the base of a thorn bush to my right, a long way from where the nearest dead man lay. Whatever it might be, it had not been left there by any of Theuderic’s dead foot soldiers.

  Ursus came running at my shout, to where I was tugging my prize out of the rank, thorn-filled grass among which it lay. He was leading our two horses as he came and I noticed that in one hand he was carrying an arrow that he had obviously taken out of a dead man. I glanced at it but said nothing, contenting myself with merely raising one eyebrow. He saw my reaction and hefted the ugly thing, its barbs clogged and clotted with gore.

  “It’s not a memento, and I don’t intend to shoot it at anyone. It’s evidence of murder and it will be identifiable because it’s identical to all the others. Whoever made all these arrows is a master fletcher, and if we find him, we’ll find the people for whom he makes his arrows. What have you found?”

  “It’s a saddle roll. Must have been snagged in the brambles there and pulled off without anyone noticing it. Couldn’t have been too well secured in the first place.”

  I crouched on the narrow path and untied the knots binding the bundle, then rolled it out with a flip of my arms.

  Ursus whistled, a long, drawn-out sound of approbation. The main binding of the roll was a standard brown woolen blanket, Roman army issue, heavy and densely woven from untreated wool so that it retained its natural water-repellent attributes. It had been thinly layered with beeswax on one side, too, to increase its resistance to rainwater, and then it had been folded and wrapped into a tight cylinder. Within its folds, however, it contained a change of clothing for its owner, including a plain gray, quilted tunic, the left shoulder of which was emblazoned with a sewn-on patch of brightly colored yellow cloth, edged in dark green and cut in the shape of a bull’s head.

  “Gunthar’s bull,” I said.

  Ursus nodded and held out his hand. “I had a thought it might be. Let me look at it.”

  I passed the tunic over to him and he peered closely at it, then wadded it up roughly and handed it back to me along with the arrow he had collected. “Good. It’s not exactly proof of who did the killing here, but it would convince ninety-nine out of every hundred men I know. Wrap it in the blanket with this and bring it with you.

  “Now let’s move on and see what lies ahead of us on the remainder of the trail, but brace yourself, lad. You might not like what we find.”

  I was too enervated by then to show surprise. “Why?” was all I asked him.

  “Because there’s worse to come, I fear. What would have happened when your cousin Theuderic realized his infantry were slow in catching up?”

  “He would have come back to find them.”

  “Right. And he’s not here, is he? My guess is that he made the attempt and rode into the same kind of trap, set elsewhere for him.”

  “Which means he’s dead. Is that what you are saying?”

  “He could be, aye.” Ursus nodded, sober-faced. “Probably is, to tell the truth, for otherwise he would have been here before now, to find out what happened to these people. I think you had better prepare yourself for finding him and his men dead between here and Vervenna.”

  We rode on, neither of us saying another word, both of us expecting to find another scene of murderous destruction beyond every turn in the road and over the crest of every hill until, about a mile beyond the scene of the massacre, we emerged from the edge of a screen of small trees and saw a wide, smooth, grassy slope stretching up and away from us to the crest of a ridge that stretched all the way across our front. As soon as I saw it I drew rein.

  Ursus, seeing my sudden reaction from the corner of his eye, turned toward me. “What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I know this place. I remember it”

  Ursus sat looking at me patiently, holding his mount tightly reined so that its neck arched tautly and it stamped its forefeet, trying to sidle away from the curbing bit. He said nothing, controlling his restless mount, content to wait for what I had to say, and after a while I continued.

  “We used to play here, as young boys. We would run up to the crest there and throw ourselves over the top, then roll downhill on the other side. It’s all grassy and soft over there, no trees and not even any stones. The hillside slopes down from the crest on that side for about two hundred paces, perhaps slightly more. It’s a gentle slope. At the bottom of it, though, it butts right into another hill and the terrain changes. That whole hillside on the other side is covered with trees … hardy old things, stunted and twisted and not very big. There’s a narrow stream cutting through the line where the two hills meet—it’s very fast, very powerful, fed by an enormous spring that bubbles up out of the solid rock, higher up the far hillside on the left, close to the top. The channel it has cut over the years is deep but not wide. It levels out only in one narrow spot, where the ford is. That’s the only way across the gully, and no more than two horsemen can cross it at a time, side by side. And then to the right of that, the slope falls away dangerously until it drops into a ravine that’s choked lower down with moss-covered old trees—ancient old thorn trees and stunted oaks. It’s a wonderful place for boys to play, but you wouldn’t want to ride a horse down there.” I stopped, reluctant to say any more but unwilling to kick my horse into motion again.

  “So why did you stop here?” Ursus asked. “If that’s all you had to tell me, you could have done it as we rode.”

  “It’s a natural place for an ambush.” I had been reluctant to voice my sudden conviction lest somehow, by naming it, I made it come true. “It’s a perfect trap. Beyond the ford the slope climbs steeply up to another high crest, but that slope’s grassy, too, and soft like this one, so in the heavy rain it’ll be a quagmire. There are trees on that hillside, too, on either side, pointing away from you, up toward the crest, and they act like a funnel, pushing people inward to the center. So you’re going uphill more and more steeply, and there’s less and less room on either side. And up ahead of you, there’s ample cover to screen an attacking force, while behind you, on the far side of the stream at the bottom, there’s that beautiful slope for anyone charging at you from the rear to smash whatever troops you have remaining there, waiting to cross two at a time. It’s a nasty, nasty place.”

  I looked Ursus in the eye. “So … if your theory holds true and we’re to find that Theuderic has been ambushed, this is where we’re most likely to find him—on the other side of that crest up there.”

  He nodded, mute, and then his eyes drifted away from mine and focused on something behind me, in the distance. Before I could begin to turn around to see what he was looking at, he had loosened his reins and nudged his horse forward and past me. I spun my mount around and moved to join him where he sat gazing at a dark scar in the grass less than fifty paces from where we sat.

  “It looks as though you might be right,” he said quietly. What he had found was the darkened path worn into the muddy ground by a large number of horses as they emerged from a trail through the woodlands at our back and spilled out onto the soaked grass of the slope ahead. They had been riding in columns of four when they came out of the trees, but then they peeled off, right and left, to fan out and form a single line abreast as they made their way uphill toward the crest of the ridge, and we had no difficulty following them or seeing the moves of individual horsemen. There was a broad and much-trampled quagmire of muddied grass forming a lateral line less than twenty paces from the crest, where the advance had halted and stayed for a time, presumably safe beneath the skyline of
the ridge while the leaders rode forward to look beyond and wait for their signal to attack.

  Ursus glanced at me again, a wry expression on his face. “Well,” he said quietly, “we can’t very well ride away without looking, can we?”

  “No, we can’t, but I wish we hadn’t come this way.”

  He nodded in agreement and dug in his spurs, sending his horse bounding forward, and I followed him, roweling my own horse hard, driving him forward and uphill until I was riding knee to knee with Ursus. As we approached the crest of the ridge the ground beneath us showed all the scars born of the passage of three score of heavy horses digging their hooves in hard to gain purchase in the mud of the slippery, rising ground. Then we were on the crest itself and the scene below us opened up and spread out at our feet.

  At first glance there appeared to be nothing unusual in view. The ground sloped gently down in front of us for more than two hundred paces, exactly as I had described to Ursus, and the deep gully that marked the bed of the fast-flowing stream at the bottom was a brown and black gash slanting downward from left to right, its line obscured from our view by treetops and the natural fall of the land. I looked beyond that, however, knowing that anything there was to see would be lying on the sloping hillside on the far side of the gully. Even so, there was nothing unusual to be seen from the distance at which we sat peering, and so, feeling slightly more hopeful, I kicked my horse again and put him to the downhill slope, hearing Ursus following close behind me.

  By the time we were halfway down the slope, we had begun to see what we had feared we might. There were bodies among the long grass down there, but we were still a hundred and more paces away and so the only forms we could recognize were the swollen bellies of horses that had begun to bloat and now rose above the top of the grass. We increased our pace, knowing what we would find, and closed the distance quickly, and as we did so the bodies littering the upper slope ahead of us came into prominence.