The Sword of the Lady

by S. M. Stirling

  ″They′re good fighting men, and no mistake,″ Rudi said. ″Nor is there any giving up in them, at all. They′re worthy of a better cause. Three times that number of those Bekwa savages; maybe four.″

  Edain grunted thoughtfully. Rudi could read his thought: fierce men, fearless and deadly on their own ground, but lightly armed and not trained for a stand-up fight.

  ″And as many again from those ships, the Moorish pirates. They look well armed and most malignantly expert in their trade, the grievous sadness and pitiful misfortune of it, ochone.″

  ″Two hundred inside the wall, less any they′ve lost, from what our friends of this land say,″ Edain said. ″Counting every booger and arsewipe, as me da would put it.″

  ″And just thirty-six of us here,″ Rudi said. ″Call it two hundred, two hundred and thirty on either side.″

  He cased the binoculars and tapped his knuckles thoughtfully on his chin for an instant.

  ″This is going to require the most careful timing,″ he said. ″We′re enough to pull it off . . . but only just, do y′see.″

  ″With luck, and the Lugh′s own favor.″

  They slid down the tree, dropping from branch to branch and springing the last ten feet or so. His companions gathered around him.

  ″It can be done,″ Rudi said. ″To boil it down, we wait until they′re all engaged, then attack them from the rear. But it′s possible only if we have some advantage of surprise. Take them at just the right moment, and it will work. Otherwise, bloody failure. The problem there is that the Cutter magus has what I′d be calling a most unpleasant habit; he knows things he should not. Not with just his five senses.″

  Thorlind was gray-faced but determined. ″He will not.″

  ″Not this time,″ Heidhveig said. ″I can . . . feel him. Like putting down your hand and having it push into a rotten corpse seething with maggots. He′s very strong. But we can blind him. For a little while.″

  ″A little while is all we′ll need. We must also take out their sentries, as many as possible. Delay the alarm as long as we can.″

  ″When will you attack?″ Thorlind said.

  ″Not until they′ve made their breach in the wall. Not until they′ve launched their attack, and are fighting in the town itself, tangled up amongst the buildings with no way to run.″

  Thorlind′s face was grim, and Heidhveig′s like an age-worn stone.

  ″So long?″ she said. ″You must wait until they′ve entered our home?″

  ″Yes,″ he said with calm firmness. ″We aren′t enough to count on driving them off if we attack sooner. A blow struck when your enemy′s off-balance is the one that knocks him down so that you can put the boot into him. And even if we did put them to flight earlier . . . we would not reap and savage them as we must. Pushing an enemy back isn′t enough, nor even making them run; too much chance of their returning the favor, manyfold, some other day. I want to catch them between my hammer and the anvil of the town and crush them. And the price of that must be paid, for it is the price of victory.″

  ″Paid by my people,″ Thorlind said.

  Rudi met her eyes and nodded. ″For the most part, yes. The cost of defeat would be much higher.″

  Heidhveig gathered her bearskin robe around her shoulders. ″I′m glad I don′t have to make decisions like that,″ she said softly.

  ″And I′d be glad never to make them either,″ Rudi said. ″But if I′m to make them, make them I will, and properly.″

  He raised his head from the map. ″Ingolf, you′re in charge of the main body; Father Ignatius, you′re second in command.″

  Then his finger went over the parchment. ″As for their sentries . . . Mary and Ritva, you take the ones here. Edain, Asgerd, here. Fred and Virginia, here. Matti and I will see to the removal of the ones here in the center, and them causing such a blockage and obstruction, the spalpeens.″

  That was a legitimate use of his own talents; he was much more likely to succeed than anyone else they had.

  I′m a general with an army of about platoon size, right now. And one with a round half score of followers fit for the command.

  ″Ingolf, you come forward with the main body, and we′ll rejoin as you do. Then we cross the open ground and hit them before they can disengage. Keep ranks; no quarter until I command, or they all throw down their arms. Lady Heidhveig, Lady Thorlind, you′ll remain here. Is everyone clear? Then let′s go.″

  The enemy sentries should be here, Rudi thought, twenty minutes later, baffled. They had perches in the trees.

  Instead everything looked just as it had; the last fringe of pines, towering over hummocky ground covered in thick soft snow . . . and no sentries waiting concealed in their branches, as Edain and the others had reported.

  That snow exploded upward right at his feet. A man came after it, the long knife in his hand flashing upward. The point struck him in the pit of the stomach, and breath gusted out of him with a grunting uffff!

  Shock and fear happened, but distantly; as distantly as pain. Will forced air back into his lungs in a whooping gasp. He could see his own shock reflected in the other man′s dark face, exaggerated by the bar of white paint across his eyes, as the knife tip stopped on a plate of the brigandine beneath the Mackenzie′s parka. The knife kept prodding, reflexively, as if the man couldn′t believe it hadn′t sunk hilt-deep and ripped upward.

  ″Merd′!″ the Bekwa blurted.

  Rudi snarled, an utterly unconsidered guttural sound that sprang from the back of his throat. His long-fingered hands flashed out, weaponless, and clamped on the man′s chin and the back of his head, twisted and pushed in one sharp ninety-degree turn to the left. There was a brief fibrous resistance and a sharp sound like green willow sticks breaking. He released the body instantly, and it fell limp as a banker′s charity as Rudi whirled.

  His sword hissed out, but the knee-deep snow leached agility. Two men had come out of the same sort of deep hide as his attacker, snow allowed to drift over loosely woven spruce branches. Rudi′s mind calculated without prompting, and his arm swept forward in a smooth arc. The long hilt left his fingers with a feeling of inevitability like the sensation when you leap from a height into water. The yard-long blade turned twice in a blurring twinkle.

  Thunk.

  A heavy wet sound with a crackling beneath it, incongruous somehow in the cold air. The Bekwa who′d been about to stab at Mathilda′s back looked down, goggling at two feet of longsword sticking out from his chest just below the breastbone. Blood steamed on the steel, and as it leaked out of his mouth and nose. Rudi stalked forward as the third man attacked Mathilda; she had her kite-shaped shield up, and the smooth curved visor of her sallet down. The long parka concealed her coat of titanium-alloy mail, but not the vambraces or greaves or gauntlets, and the metal had a gray glint in the bleak morning sunlight.

  The Bekwa was bulky in his furs, but no taller than she, with a four-foot spear tipped with a spike of ground-down steel strip in his right hand and a knife in his left. Snow fountained out from under his feet, the moccasins throwing up trails like arcs of powdered diamond. The same snow was more than knee-deep on Mathilda; she waited in the perfect knightly form her instructors had taught, left foot forward and sword ready over her head. He could see d′Ath′s instruction in it.

  The savage came in with desperate speed. He leapt the last few feet, just as Rudi reached his dead comrade and wrenched his longsword free; the hilt and blade stood up like a mast from a ship. Then he was close enough to hear Mathilda grunt as the weight of the Bekwa struck her shield, the point of the spear grating across her helmet as she flicked her face and the vision-slit away. But she was already crouched and ready for the impact; the broad curved surface of the shield turned the swift thrust of the knife. The man reeled back, and her sword moved in an economical over-hand chop that ended with a crack of steel in bone, then a low stab under the ribs. He sat down, staring at the nearly severed forearm that jetted blood onto the snow, clutched it to his ches
t and sank backward to die.

  There was only the panting of their breath in the cold silence, and a murmur of something like melleur place from the wounded savage. The face beneath the crude paint was young, thin with bad feeding and rather sad as the ferocity leached out of it. His eyes wandered for a moment, blinking and glazing with a look Rudi recognized; blood loss starving the brain. The Dread Lord′s wing had passed over his face, and it would be only seconds now.

  ″Maman?″ he whispered.

  Then he smiled uncertainly for an instant, and the expression fell away as he went limp. Mathilda closed his eyes, drew the Cross on his forehead, then rose and leaned against Rudi′s shoulder.

  ″He said we were going to a better place,″ she said quietly as he squeezed her for a moment with his free arm.

  ″I don′t doubt he has,″ he said. Then: ″Earth must be fed.″

  Rudi touched a finger to the blood on his steel and then marked his forehead, murmuring the salute to the departed. After that he whistled a fluting trill like a bird′s—not any particular type, but with a generic avian sound. A few minutes later the same call came from the woods about. Edain appeared with Asgerd trailing him; she looked a little wobbly. Garb trotted at his heels, massive head low and licking her hairy chops, with a little congealed blood from a slight cut on her right shoulder.

  ″All right?″ Rudi said; he couldn′t see any wounds on the Bjorning girl, though there was a spatter of red drops drying on the mottled white of her coat.

  ″In the event, Chief,″ the young clansman said. ″They′d come down from their perches, though, and weren′t where we expected, and there was an extra one. I had to shoot a bit fast—the last one was only winged. Asgerd took care of him, though. Might have been right nasty, if she hadn′t.″

  ″My first.″ She swallowed and added. ″It . . . wasn′t like practice. More like pig-butchering time. And as if I was watching myself kill him.″

  Edain put a hand on her shoulder for a moment. ″He chose to come onto your land uninvited with a weapon in his hand,″ he said. ″When a man does that, he consents to his fate and makes you clean of his blood.″

  She took a pair of deep breaths and nodded. ″That′s true. And . . . that′s one towards my oath,″ she said, her voice growing stronger.

  Then she looked at Garbh. ″That dog is a man-killer.″

  Edain grinned. ″To be sure, when she needs to be, or when I tell her, she is a man-killer. So am I. And so are you, now.″

  Asgerd nodded, but there was a dubious expression on her face, as if she was trying to frame an objection but couldn′t quite think of the words.

  ″And we′ve both hunted wolves, eh?″ She nodded again. ″The Gods have made the world so that sometimes we must kill to live; not just us, but our brother wolf and tiger and bear too. In the end, the Hunter comes for us all. Earth must be fed.″

  Mary and Ritva were silent when they came ghosting up; the one-eyed Ranger was wiping the sickle blade on the end of her fighting chain, which was comment enough. Fred and Virginia appeared next; the girl from Wyoming had a fresh scalp at her belt, and the dark young man was limping very slightly. Rudi went forward with slow care, then down on one knee behind a screen of leafless brush at the edge of the woods—where forest met open country there was always a screen of it. Through his binoculars he could see past the besieger′s camp, which looked empty now except for a few threads of smoke that were probably cookfires, or heating water for healers to use.

  Beyond that the town wall was even more battered than it had been from his treetop lookout earlier; they were getting a boulder into the air every fifteen minutes or so, good practice with a hastily built weapon and untrained crew. Shattered timber and rock made a rough low slope through the gap the trebuchet had pounded. The two scorpions bucked again, and the loads they threw trailed smoke. They were using incendiaries now, the best possible way to knock back any defenders massing to hold the breach. Thick volleys of arrows hissed up from behind the mantlets, not individually aimed but falling in a steel-tipped rain where any defenders would be.

  Graber knows his business, to be sure. And I′d be betting that the pirate captains do so, too.

  Crackling and muffled footfalls came from behind him; you couldn′t move two-score warriors through the forest silently at a trot, even if they were all woodsmen individually.

  ″Ready,″ Ingolf said, slightly breathless; running in armor did that, no matter how fit you were.

  ″Their outposts didn′t give any alarm,″ Rudi said; which was a stroke of luck, even with experts in what the Dúnedain called sentry removal at work.

  He raised his voice: ″Form on me. Archers to the front, and then on the flanks when we charge. Edain, the usual for an assault. Now wait for the word . . . and when I give it, a steady trot keeping good order, no more. It′s useless a man is when he′s too winded to fight.″

  Even as he spoke figures spilled out from behind the mantlets, running forward towards the ruined wall of Kalksthorpe under the cover of the ar rowstorm and the globes of napalm. Those lifted as they swarmed screeching up the rough slope, arching higher to fall safely behind the first rank of the defenders. The crest seemed to sprout armed men as the survivors of the bombardment rose to meet them. Faint with distance he could hear the screams of the Bekwa, and a deeper chant:

  ″Cut! Cut! Cut!″

  The Moorish pirates had slung their bows; they formed up in two solid blocks behind the sloped siege shields, waiting and still. Tall poles or spear shafts held green flags over their heads, with a squiggle of some unfamiliar script in silver on them, visible as the sea wind streamed them out. The bleak light glinted on their spearheads, above the dun mass of their tall almond-shaped hide shields. Here and there ostrich-feather plumes danced on a helmet or jewels glittered, oddly cheerless in the light of northern winter.

  Odard hissed between his teeth. ″I suspect that they′re not all blood brothers out there,″ he said. ″It′s after you, my friends. No, no, I insist, after you!″

  ″You are a cynic, my lord Gervais,″ Father Ignatius said; he was on the other side of Mathilda from Rudi. ″I fear you are right this time, as well. Your Majesty?″

  ″Wait. Wait,″ Rudi said, even as another long guttural shout rang out, this time from the corsairs:

  ″Alllaahuuu Akbaaaar!″

  ″Wait . . . not quite yet . . .″

  The green flags waved and the rover crews ran forward towards the thump and clatter and screams of combat beyond the broken wall.

  ″God is Great,″ the priest murmured. ″So He is indeed. But men, alas . . . Father, forgive us for what we are about to do, and forgive us that we can see no better way. Lord who blessed the centurion, bless us also this day. But Thy will alone be done, for Thy judgments are just and righteous altogether.″

  ″Holy Mary, Lady pierced with sorrows, Queen of Heaven, intercede for us, now and at the hour of our deaths,″ Mathilda added soberly; she held up her sword for an instant by the blade, kissed the cross the hilt and guard made, then tossed it up and caught it ready. ″For us and for our foes.″

  ″Amen,″ the Christians said.

  Tension grew, with a taste like hot copper and salt at the back of his throat. For a moment Rudi thought the wings beating above were in his mind. Then he realized they were two real ravens, launching themselves from a tall spruce. They soared upward, circling above the town. He felt a chill worse than the sweat congealing on his flanks under the armor and padding. Then a great calm, and under it a lifting current of hot anger.

  ″Yes,″ he said. ″It′s time, Victory-Father.″ Louder: ″For Montival! Follow me!″

  ″Artos and Montival!″ his companions called.

  The wedge of them trotted out into the open ground, snow floating up around them like dust to the pounding of booted feet.

  ″No!″ Abdou al-Naari snarled, cuffing a man over the head with a gloved fist. ″I′ll castrate the first man who plunders before the battle ends!″


  The crewman staggered, dropped the golden necklace he′d been pulling off a body and picked up his shield again. An arrow struck quivering in it a moment later with a hard dry thunk and the man′s eyes rolled in shock.

  Abdou coughed; the whole town wasn′t burning, but there was enough smoke to lie thick. And it was a maze of lanes and log houses with steel shutters over their doors and lower windows; from the upper ones came arrows and spears, rocks and jars of burning lamp oil. Bodies of pagans and corsairs and their allies littered the trampled mud and dirty snow of the street, in a mess of blood and broken weapons and men who shrieked or whimpered or tried to crawl aside and bandage themselves.

  Spears and axes waited behind a rough barricade of carts and furniture a little farther down; he could see the tiered roofs and gilt and painted dragonheads of the pagan temple beyond. If they took that, only the boat sheds and docks remained.

  ″Shields!″ he called.

  The Bou el-Mogdad′s crew rallied, raising a wall of wood and leather ahead and overhead as well. Under that tent he looked around for his bosun, shouting the man′s name:

  ″Falilu!″

  The man looked up, and Abdou pointed to a well-placed house larger than the others with his sword.

  ″That one. Clear it and get us some covering fire while we storm the barricade.″

  The man nodded, grabbed a dozen hands who were all archers. They slung their bows, lifted a thick timber and began beating in a door; it gave off a thudding bang like a huge drum as they rammed their way through. Then it fell inward, and they drew their blades and charged in; screams came out then, but only a few clashes of steel on steel.

  ″The rest of you, with me. God is great!″

  They charged the barricade with their tall shields locked together against missiles. Those rattled and thunked and banged off the protection until the moment they had to climb the obstacle; here and there a man fell, silent or screaming or cursing, but the others closed ranks and kept up the rush. Steel probed for his life as the wild corsair charge struck. He knocked the spearhead aside, slicing up it at the wielder′s fingers; a snarling face loomed out of the corner of his eye and a huge two-handed ax swung towards his head. Another man′s shield put itself in the way; Abdou could hear it crack beneath the force of the blow.