The Lance Thrower cc-8

by Jack Whyte

  I was screaming by that point, and almost among the men who had killed him. I saw them turning to face me, their faces registering surprise because until hearing my screams, they had not known I was coming at them. I aimed my horse directly at the two spear throwers, who were sitting side by side and had not yet had any opportunity to arm themselves in any other way. My horse hit the closest man’s mount with his shoulder and sent horse and rider flying, and I aimed a short, chopping stab of my spatha at the second man as I passed him, driving the point of my blade cleanly into the soft flesh under his chin. I felt the steel tip lodge against what could only have been his spine, killing him instantly as I swept by and turned in my saddle to allow the momentum of my passage to pull the tip of my sword free.

  Another of the remaining three riders tugged frantically at his reins, trying to pull his horse around to face me, but he had reined his horse in so that he could watch Samson as he fell and, in consequence, he had no momentum. He was heavily bearded, but I saw every line on his face above the growth clearly as I killed him, too, driving the point of my spatha through his right eye. I pulled the point free again immediately and swung back-handed at someone who was trying to reach me from behind my right shoulder, and as I did so I saw the unhorsed spearman moving toward me on the ground, carrying the bloodstained spear that he had recovered from Samson’s body. Something hit me heavily across the shoulders, once and then again, and I felt my horse collapsing beneath me. I glanced down and saw that the spearman had butchered it, and I threw myself from the saddle before I could be pinned beneath its body. I rolled and came up on my knees beside the body of my cousin, watching the last three of his killers preparing to kill me, too. The spearman on foot had his weapon pointing at me again and the other two were moving apart to come at me from two sides. Then came a sound of charging hoofbeats and a babble of voices shouting my name as a squad of my own troopers charged past me and my three adversaries were cut down.

  Shaken by the swiftness of events and my unexpected rescue, I tried to rise to my feet but found that I was incapable of raising either of my knees from the ground. I turned instead to the ruined body of my cousin Samson and bent forward to close his eyes, which, by some strange mischance, appeared to be staring directly into mine, although they were already glazed with that peculiar emptiness that differentiates a dead body from a living one. I remained there, kneeling over him for some time as I tried to find words to pray for his soul. But that was one of the few times in my entire life that I found myself unable to utter a single word of prayer.

  The battle had been a complete disaster for us. We had won again, according to the butcher’s accounting, but I knew we could never hope to recover from such losses and we were finished as a cohesive fighting force. The enemy had left thirteen dead men on the field and more than half again as many horses—we had no way of knowing how many of the survivors had been wounded or how serious those wounds were. We, however, had lost eight men dead and a full score more bore wounds of one kind or another, although, miraculously, none of those were serious enough to be life-threatening. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the injured horses. Few horses injured in battle could ever be healed, and although only five of our horses—two of them mine—had been killed outright during the fighting, we had to kill seven more wounded animals. We had not been at full strength at the start of the battle, fielding only half a hundred fighting men instead of our normal three score, but when the activities were all over and the dead all buried—with the sole exception of Samson, whose body we would take with us—we assembled to make our way homeward and we presented a sorry sight, even to ourselves. We numbered thirty-two whole men out of our original strength of sixty.

  Weary and discouraged, I gave the signal to proceed, and we headed home with our dead King at our center, laid out on a makeshift bier on the bed of the light two-horse supply wagon that always accompanied us on our extended raids. He lay on his back on a thick bed of fresh-cut reeds, his hands crossed upon his chest beneath the expanse of his war cloak, which, arranged in careful folds, served to conceal his body from profane eyes and the indignities of weather.

  My first thoughts at the start of that journey were all to do with my cousin Brach, who had now become King of Benwick with Samson’s death. He would be beside himself, I knew, over both the loss of his beloved brother and the unsought, unwished-for accession to the status of kingship. Brach, despite his visual splendor and apparent suitability to play the King’s role, was not a man who would ever enjoy the pomp and ceremonies that went with being a monarch. Spectacular as were his exploits in war, he was nonetheless too genuinely humble and too self-effacing ever to be comfortable in such a highly visible capacity as that of King of Benwick. But then, I thought, life seldom asks for our approval in advance of what it decrees for us. Brach’s fate was to be a king. He could not control that, any more than I could control what my destiny might be.

  I spent the remainder of the journey, then, deliberating about what I would say to Chulderic when we arrived at the castle, but he was waiting for us when we reached the red-wall caves, and I went into conference with him immediately, drawing him aside to where we could speak without being overheard.

  With Samson’s death, I told him, we had reached the limits of our cavalry’s usefulness as a striking force. We were dangerously, almost fatally, vulnerable in terms of renewable numbers—of both men and horses. We were still able, barely, to continue replacing the troopers who were killed or left unable to ride and fight on, but we had exhausted our supply of able veterans and were now reduced to using untrained riders—foot soldiers and young boys who dreamed of glory in riding out to war but barely knew one end of a horse from the other, with some of them believing that horses had tails purely to indicate that feeding the animal should be performed from the other end. The time had come, I told Chulderic, for us to cut our losses and consolidate the strengths remaining to us by keeping our surviving riders in the castle, acting as defensive garrison troops,, and their horses inside the caves where they would be held in reserve pending an emergency.

  Chulderic had sat staring at Samson’s covered bier on the wagon bed as he listened to me, and now he nodded his head and agreed with my assessment of the situation. We would take Samson in and bury him within the castle walls, he said, and then we would prepare for a siege. But while we were doing that, we would also work to reopen the postern gate, the old, walled-up doorway above the lakeside rocks at the rear of the castle. Thus, he opined, we would have two means of exit should the need for escape ever arise.

  Hearing him say those words demonstrated to me, more than anything else could have, just how bad our situation was. At the outset of the war, Chulderic would never have voiced such a possibility. Within the space of a short couple of months, however, his entire outlook on life had changed, and every facet of the changes involved reflected in some way upon the perfidy and evil of the man against whom he was fighting.

  Gunthar had never been a lovable person, even as a boy, and my own memories of him from my childhood days were of a sullen, melancholy young man with a foul temper and an unpleasant disposition. He was lavish with incessant insults, utterly uncaring whom he offended. His reputation had grown less and less wholesome and his behavior more and more violent as he aged, too, and most people came to prefer simply to stay out of his way.

  The most frightening thing about Gunthar, however, was his unpredictability. Of all his many attributes, that one alone was utterly predictable, and it frightened everyone, including his closest allies. And in the very recent past, we had heard persistent rumors that his behavior was growing ever more and more outrageous, erratic, and capricious, and that even his closest associates were increasingly apprehensive of being too long around him at any one time, fearful for their own lives. We had dismissed most of what we heard, however, principally because of the way it came to us. Rumors without some kind of solid ratification were seldom reliable.

  Three days after t
hat conversation with Chulderic, on the day following Samson’s interment in one of the castle’s interior courtyards, I was summoned to join Brach shortly after dawn. I had been up late, serving as captain of the night watch, and so had been asleep for little more than an hour when I was roughly shaken awake. Annoyed, but knowing that Brach would not disturb my sleep without good cause, I splashed water over my head, my face, and the back of my neck and toweled myself into wakefulness before going to join him.

  He was waiting for me on top of the main tower supporting the curtain wall across the front of the main gates, and as I strode toward him he stood watching me, one hand cupping his chin while the other supported his elbow. I tried to read his expression as I approached him, but his face betrayed nothing.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He jerked his thumb toward the edge of the tower. “Look over there.”

  I looked down toward the drawbridge, to where a party of three men sat gazing back up at me from horseback. One of the three carried a white banner.

  “They want to talk? Who are they?”

  Brach sauntered over to stand beside me. “Don’t you recognize the one in the middle?”

  I stared, trying to place the man’s face, but as far as I could tell I had never seen him before. I shook my head, and Brach’s mouth quirked wryly.

  “That’s Tulach, Cousin, Gunthar’s senior commander.”

  “Tulach the Butcher? Are you sure? What would he be doing here, looking to talk to us?” If Brach was correct, the man below was an inhuman creature, whose depravity and debauched behavior had become the stuff of legend within mere months of his arrival here in Benwick.

  My cousin sniffed. “I am absolutely sure of who he is, because I have seen him before and spoken to him on several occasions. As to why he is here, I would be prepared to wager that he has come, as Gunthar’s official representative, to offer us safe conduct out of here if we will simply consent to leave without further hostilities and surrender the castle and its kingdom to Gunthar.”

  “And will you accept his offer?”

  Brach merely glanced at me sidewise. “Would you?”

  “Hmm. Where’s Chulderic?”

  “I sent for him, but he’s not as young as you are. Moves more slowly. He should be here soon.”

  “So what do you intend to do?”

  “Talk to him, I suppose. Listen to what he has to say, then tell him what I wish him to say to my fratricidal brother. Here comes Chulderic now.”

  The upshot of the ensuing conversation was that I was delegated to ride out and talk to Tulach, thereby delivering a tacit message that Chulderic and Brach both considered it beneath their dignity and station to tattle with the enemy. I took two of my own troopers with me, and. as the men at the controls lowered the great drawbridge, we rode out toward the enemy party. Above us as we went I could hear the tramp of running feet as bowmen hurried to line the walkway along the top of the wall, and as their sergeants shouted orders I could visualize them setting themselves up, nocking their arrows, and standing prepared to draw and shoot upon command.

  Tulach watched me coming, his face stern and unreadable. I paid no attention at all to the two men he had with him, just as he betrayed no interest in the two men escorting me. He was a bigger man than I had expected, and his face was hard and cruel, with high, flat cheekbones and deep lines graven on each side of his mouth. I was expecting him to state his business without waste of time, and he did, but what he said was the very last thing I would have hoped or expected to hear.

  “I want safe conduct,” he said, “for me and my men. No more fighting. You allow us to ride out along the main road to Lugdunum without bothering us or pursuing us and we will leave your lands immediately and never come back.”

  “How many men do you have?” I asked the question for no other purpose than to gain time and cover my own stupefaction.

  “Nigh on five hundred, altogether.”

  “All horsemen?”

  “Aye. We have no truck with Gunthar’s infantry.”

  “And how far do you intend to go from here?”

  “That’s no concern of yours. We can fight our way out, if need be, but I thought we might both prefer—your friends and mine—to sacrifice no more men than we have already lost.”

  I nodded my head judiciously, as if I knew exactly what I was doing and talking about, but I was still as completely in the dark as I had been when he first told me what he wanted, and the predominant thought in my mind was that the man obviously thought we were far stronger and had more resources at our disposal than was the case. And if that were true, I thought, I would have to be careful not to disillusion him.

  “You have come up with the only viable reason I could imagine for gaining our agreement in this … the need to squander no more lives. But how can I be sure that, given my promise, on behalf of my people, that you will not be pursued or harassed, you won’t take that as a license to murder and plunder your way from here to Lugdunum? I can hardly take you at your given word, can I? Your reputation for trustworthy honesty and open dealings leaves much to be desired, from where we watch. Your name reeks of atrocity throughout Benwick. Tulach the Butcher, they call you, and you have earned all the hatred that goes with such a name.”

  His face betrayed no emotion. “Aye, that may be. But now everything has changed and I’ll butcher no more. Our days here are done.”

  “Really, say you so? And what does Gunthar the brother-killer say to that?”

  “No single word. Gunthar is dead. He died yesterday, late in the evening, in a fit of rage. His eyes filled up with blood and his face turned black and he staggered and fell dead, clutching his head. I was there at the time.”

  I was struck speechless, but fortunately Tulach felt the need to say more and kept on talking. “With him gone, our cause is gone and so is our livelihood, so we need to move on and find further employment. Knowing that, I decided to come here and speak with you people. Particularly with Chulderic and Brach, the sole remaining brother.”

  “Your information is surprisingly up-to-date. We buried Samson only last night.”

  Tulach shrugged. “I didn’t know that, but I knew he had been killed. Will Chulderic speak with me?”

  “No, he will not. Had he wished to speak with you he would have come out here instead of sending me. You have not endeared yourself to anyone here over the past few months.”

  The big man shrugged. “So be it. Are you authorized to grant acceptance of my suggestion, or do you have to discuss it with the others?”

  “They are here. I’ll consult with them on this and return soon.” I made to turn my mount around, but he forestalled me, reaching into the scrip that hung at his waist and tossing me a cloth bag that, from the way it felt when I caught it, evidently contained a small box of wood.

  “Best take them this, then, because they’ll no more take my word on this than you would.”

  My curiosity was instantly aroused and it was all I could do to resist the temptation to sit there and open the bag and its contents right in front of him. Instead, keeping my face rigidly blank, I nodded and tucked the bag into my own scrip. “Wait here,” I said, and swung my horse around, leaving him sitting there.

  Brach and Chulderic were waiting for me in the courtyard and they were as amazed as I had been to hear the tidings of Gunthar’s death, but their wonder and gratitude immediately gave way to suspicion and fear of entrapment. This was precisely the kind of duplicity we could expect Gunthar to use to disarm us, Chulderic swore, but while they were debating I withdrew Tulach’s bag and opened the box it contained. My stomach heaved immediately, but I quickly conquered my revulsion and held the open box out toward the others.

  “I believed him when he told me Gunthar is dead,” I told them. “But there’s the proof. Gunthar would never part willingly with his personal seal, especially when it was yet attached to his finger. Tulach must have cut the finger off, knowing we would never believe his unsupported word.”
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  Brach reached out and took the box, shaking his brother’s severed finger with its heavy, ornate seal out into his palm, where he pulled the ring free and dropped the finger into the dirt at his feet.

  “I’m convinced,” he said. “The war is over. Let them go home, so be it they go quickly. We have a land to resurrect here.”

  I returned to Tulach within the half hour, my features carefully schooled to give this man no inkling of the reaction his tidings had caused within the castle walls. Once again, he spoke out as soon as I came within hearing range.

  “Well? Are we to fight?”

  “You have a full day to withdraw,” I told him, “until this time tomorrow, at which point we will send cavalry to look for you, but not to pursue you. If they find you, then they will attack. That is our offer. Accept it or leave it, as you will, but do so now.”

  He pursed his lips quickly as I spoke, showing quick-flaring anger, but as soon as I had finished speaking, he said, “So be it. My men are ready. We will be far beyond Benwick’s borders by this time tomorrow.” He nodded to his two escorts, and as he made to swing away I stopped him.

  “One more question: where is Gunthar?”

  Tulach turned his head slowly and looked back at me, and for a moment I thought he was not going to answer me at all, but then he hawked and spat. “He’s in Chabliss,” he said, naming the smallest of the four forts clustered in the southeast quadrant of our territories. “He lies where he fell, in front of the fire, steeped in his own excrescences. I wish you joy of finding him.”