Firethorn

by Sarah Micklem

  All this while Galan walked across the field.

  There were four cataphracts of Ardor who passed through the charge unscathed and found, on the other side, Galan strolling toward them. Likely they’d come looking for him. I imagine they felt joy, seeing how harmless he looked, this troublesome man.

  They converged, three coming from the left flank and one from the right, and each man put spurs to his warhorse, racing to be the one to ride Galan down. The three on the left galloped side by side and nearly neck and neck, and two of their armigers followed some lengths behind. The cat-aphract on the right looked to reach Galan first.

  Galan went right. As if he were eager to meet his own death, he ran toward the cataphract bearing down on him. The rider (“Sire Tropel, house of Lamna,” the rumormonger called out) lowered his lance to take Galan in the chest. At the last instant Galan darted across the horse’s path and past the lance head, and drove the lance downward with the shaft of his scorpion. The lance plowed into the ground, jolting the horse and shaking Sire Tropel half out of his saddle. Galan hooked him under the arm with the claw of his scorpion and pried him the rest of the way out. The lance fell one way and Sire Tropel another, and in that moment of falling, he left his element and became hapless and awkward. His foot caught in the stirrup and he was dragged along the ground, shouting and flailing. The horse cocked his head to see what was behind him and bolted.

  Then Chance peeked under her blindfold and gave Galan a wink, we all saw it. As the stallion swerved, going crabwise to escape his own rider, he crossed the path of the three cataphracts who were still coming for Galan at full tilt. The one on the swiftest horse was ahead by two strides with his lance lowered, and he couldn’t pull up in time. He struck Sire Tropel’s mount below the withers with such force the lance pierced the stiff leather barding and buried itself in meat and bone, and the two horses collided, and then the other two slammed into them. There was such a thunderclap when they came together, I felt my teeth jar in my head.

  A horse heaved himself up and stood with his reins trailing. That left three stallions on the ground in a moil. Sire Tropel’s courser had been killed and the other two were hurt. The riders were thrown, winded, maybe wounded, and trapped in their mounts’ caparisons as the horses rolled and churned. Galan ran toward them. The wagers were flying, the odds shifting: it looked to be a fairer fight.

  Sire Tropel lay under his dead horse. All I could see of him was his helmet and shoulders and an arm so askew it must have been wrenched from its socket. We could tell he was alive because he rolled his head from side to side. When Galan reached him he steadied Sire Tropel’s head under one foot and leaned down. Maybe they spoke.

  The crowd howled, demanding a kill, and I knew he should do it, for a dead man could bring him no harm. But he spared Sire Tropel, and as he did the rumormonger cried, “Sire Virote’s armiger, Sire Nidal, House of Accendo!” and Galan turned away from Sire Tropel to find a man charging him on a rawboned chestnut.

  The armiger slashed downward with his sword and Galan swept the blow aside and clouted the chestnut on the rump with the scorpion to send him on his way. Then Galan jumped up on the flank of Sire Tropel’s dead horse and everybody laughed to see him waiting so patiently for the armiger to wrench his courser around and come at him again.

  The rumormonger said to me, “No fear—the man’s a fool—he has Sire Galan on his left now, and the scorpion has the longer reach.” And Fly killer said, “True, and his horse has an iron mouth and won’t answer to the bit. But Sire Galan should have a care.”

  Before the armiger was close enough to swing his sword, Galan struck at his mount, raking the horse across the eyes with the scorpion’s claw. And there was Sire Tropel lying helpless in the horse’s path, and the chestnut stumbled over him and planted one hoof squarely on his helmet and fled, blinded, across the field. He carried away Sire Nidal, who never did land a blow, and raucous hoots followed him as he went. Galan jumped down to firmer ground and a sound came out of me that was almost a laugh, but hurt like crying. I took a breath.

  The rumormonger shouted to the crowd. “Sire Tropel’s a dead man, and Sire Nidal’s a deserter! Six men rode against Sire Galan, and two he’s accounted for. ’Ware of the rest!”

  The Crux had once chided his men for failing to see past the points of their swords, and hadn’t I done the same? For as I’d watched Galan toy with Sire Nidal, I’d failed to see that two of the men who’d charged him had disentangled themselves from their fallen mounts with the help of a third, an armiger, and now that armiger was scrambling toward Galan’s back holding a sowpricker, with the two cataphracts close on his heels.

  The rumormonger bellowed the men’s names, their houses. He might have started on their ancestry next, but one of the hotspurs was so eager to reach Galan first that he grabbed the armiger’s ankle and tripped him. So Chance granted Galan another boon, and he was ready for it. As the armiger fell forward, Galan turned and dropped to one knee—leaning sideways to avoid the sowpricker—and caught him on the scorpion’s sting the way a hunter would catch a charging boar. The rumormonger sang, “That makes three!” Galan flipped the man onto his back and there he lay with the scorpion quivering in him. Galan hauled on the haft, but it wouldn’t come free.

  Watchers on the hill shouted warnings and I couldn’t draw breath enough to make a sound. Men had broken from the melee in the middle of the field to ride to Galan. The Crux himself was coming at a gallop with some of his men strung out behind him, fending off pursuers. And yet there were men of Ardor before the Crux in this race. I found I was gripping Fleetfoot’s shoulder and I let him go, and my right hand found my left and clasped hard. I dug my nails into my skin, in need of some sensation, for I was unfeeling. My heart was too shrunken and hard, too paltry a thing to compass this day. But if my heart had not been deadened, how could I have borne it?

  I wondered if Galan saw them coming. No matter. He could only fight those within reach.

  The two cataphracts afoot closed with Galan and he dodged them long enough to draw his sword and unhook his buckler. One of the men hewed at Galan with mighty swings, while the other thrust at him from behind a long kite-shaped horseman’s shield. Galan sidestepped, he reeled, now hidden from me, now in sight. I thought I saw some blows get past his guard.

  I was too far away. Some stroke would take him from me and I wouldn’t know it, as if there were nothing between us. But why should I want to know the moment and manner of his death? If not now, then surely by noon. If not this battle, the next.

  A cataphract pitched onto his face with Galan’s sword between the breastplate and backplate of his cuirass. “Well done, well done!” the rumormonger bellowed. “Sire Lenador has fallen—it looks to be mortal—and he’s the fourth!” and there were cheers from the crowd on our hillside. But the other cataphract was shoving Galan with his wooden shield, jabbing at him over the top of it. Galan kicked the shield and turned it sideways and struck into the opening. The man staggered and recovered and bashed Galan with the shield’s edge. Now it was Galan’s turn to stumble. He backed up and the man came after him, and by then the foremost of the riders had reached Galan.

  He came at a gallop and caught Galan with the shoulder of his horse and flung him sideways through the air, over the backs of the three downed stallions. Galan’s sword wheeled overhead, catching the light. He hit one horse’s neck and the high cantle of another’s saddle and slid over the side of a rump. He sprawled, unmoving. The two injured horses whinnied and struggled to get up, to get away. Their legs folded under them. One rolled and let out a high scream and hid Galan from me.

  Then there were many horses in the way, with riders.

  He’d been thrown with such force—he’d landed so hard. I told myself he could be dead, but couldn’t believe it.

  I asked the rumormonger, “Do you see him?”

  He looked down at me and shook his head.

  I stood on a boulder on a hill, my bare feet gripping the stone, my
hand shielding my eyes from the searing light, and from this distance the tourney looked to me like a rough sea, iron and silver. Horses rose and plunged and the Sun beat on every wave. I sought Galan. I searched so intently I forgot to breathe, and all the world was caught, for a moment, in my pent breath.

  I looked away, and my eyes blurred and I saw a green afterimage of the Sun burning in the center of my vision. In the corners of my eyes, I saw shadows. Even now, as the Sun rose toward noon and the shadows dwindled, they grew blacker and more substantial. They mocked the warriors, mimicking their shapes, imitating their deeds, and they leapt like fire and flowed like water.

  I pulled the end of my headcloth free. There were two knots in the cloth: here where I’d hidden the dwale, and there the firethorn. I unwrapped the firethorn berries and they were hard and shriveled. I crammed them into my mouth.

  I chewed and swallowed and the taste was sour and tainted with mold. I thought of Ardor’s generosity, how this time it might kill me. Maybe I misused the gift. I didn’t care, because I’d begun to hope and hope made me rash.

  In the Kingswood once, I’d become my own shadow. I’d left my wooden body and flown. If it was a dream, I trusted it was a true dream.

  My mouth flooded with spit and I swallowed and swallowed again. I’d been cold all day and now I felt fever coming. I called it to me and it came fast and made me burn, sweat, and sway. My legs shook. Flykiller looked at me strangely and took hold of my arm. He looked odd too, with all that darkness tangled in the hairs of his beard, his face a patchwork of shadows under his brow, his nose, his lips, in the grooves beside his mouth. Around his head was a haze of a color I couldn’t name, one of the infi nite shades of black.

  I remembered in the Kingswood my shadow had been tethered somehow. I hadn’t strayed far or stayed long away. How far could the tether stretch before it broke? If it did, surely I’d go from shadow to shade.

  If there was any difference between one and the other.

  In another woods at dark-of-the-Moon I’d bound Galan to me. I hadn’t understood the rites and afterward had cause to doubt they’d done anything at all. Yet there were times I was sure of a bond between us, and when it pulled taut I knew I was caught fast by a line coiled around my heart.

  Today my heart was useless. I felt the pull right in the belly, a barb in the womb, sharp as fear.

  In my dream I’d gathered up my shadow until it was dense, and made some sort of shape I could inhabit. But it’s the way of dreams to give us knowledge we haven’t earned. Now I found, too late, that I no longer knew how it was done.

  Already I was going where I was tugged. Some small part of me stayed behind, a steward who kept the body standing upright, heard the shouts of the crowd, and beheld a dazzlement of light. The rest of me seeped into shadow. When water flows, a single drop can’t keep apart from the rest, it’s all one. So it is with shadows. I had no shape but what was borrowed, and that was changeable. And suddenly my senses were boundless, overwhelmed. Where did that flash of orange come from, that sound of a man groaning, the taste of ale, the touch of silk, the weight of mail and plate, the stench of blood? From everywhere and nowhere I could place.

  I was dispersing. I don’t know what would have become of me if not for the cord that tethered me to my body and to Galan. It hummed a tone so low it could only be felt, not heard, and something reverberated in a higher note, and that sound was me. I was not shadow after all, but I could move through it.

  I pooled underfoot in the pitted surface of the boulder and I ran downhill, and it was easy to go under the crowd, flowing from shadow to shadow. When I reached the edge of the tourney field, I was daunted by the light. It seemed to me that only shadows had depth and shape and hue, and what was in the light was flat and colorless, too brilliant. But I saw darkness ahead among the rocks and turf on the broken ground, and I hid from the Sun in the shadow of one blade of grass or another, and I made myself so small I was little more than a longing.

  I found my way toward that tumult of men, and darkness was beneath their feet and the bellies of their horses.

  I found Galan under a horse, or rather a horse’s crumpled leather barding. He dragged in a breath and coughed it out again. There was sweat in his eyes, sweat slick in the armpits. He lay on his buckler and one of the shield’s sword-catcher horns dug into his thigh. The iron scales of the brigandine chafed through the sodden padding of his underarmor. Something jabbed him in the shoulder—the sharp toe of a mailed boot. The foot twitched when Galan shifted away. An injured stallion wheezed, his flanks shuddering. The smell of horse, the smell of piss. The clangor of battle outside, the drone of a fly inside. Nearby, a mindless whining whimper. Unbearable heat. Dim light leaking through the eye slits of his helmet.

  I knew this because I cloaked myself in Galan’s shadow.

  It was a strange intimacy. When he moved I perforce moved under him like any shadow. But where it was dark under his helm, his armor, I was free to embrace him like a second skin. I nestled in the whorls of his ear and heard what he heard. I felt the working of his sinews, the hinging of his bones. I slid between his fingers and his grip.

  I knew what he felt; the body cannot lie. I knew by his dry throat and constricted wind, by the taste of his sweat, by the knotted muscles of his shoulders and the twitching of his lips that he was afraid.

  I knew when he reached for his smallsword how it came welcome into his hand. He crept from his little shelter under the stiff leather barding and the light smote him. He crawled over the two helpless horses and found the vulnerable spot at the throatlatch that the neck barding leaves bare, and slit their throats. The blood spattered and the horses tried to rise under him as they died.

  He rolled because of a sound he understood and I did not, and a sword struck where he’d just been, stabbing deep through the barding into the flank of a dead horse. Galan scrambled to his feet and found his attacker circling to try again, but empty-handed now. He was an armiger on a roan horse, and he meant to ride Galan down.

  Galan raised his buckler and smallsword. His arms were too stiff, his grip too tight. He made his sinews loosen, and by this I felt his will and how it strove with his fear, muscle by muscle. He couldn’t swallow. His tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth.

  The armiger was too bright for me. I saw only his shadow, how he and his mount were one creature dancing toward us over the rough ground, swelling and shrinking. Then Galan blinked, and I saw the man again. He wore a mail hood under a basin-shaped helmet. The links jingled as he came on.

  I felt Galan tense and I knew he’d move, yet still he took me by surprise. He sprang onto the backs of the dead horses and from there vaulted right over the roan, taking the rider with him. I clung to the hollows behind Galan’s knees and anklebones when he leapt, and I felt the play of his hamstrings and the swell of the muscles in his calves and thighs. I was also in that shadow left behind when his feet left the ground, and I fled into the shadow of the horseman and out the other side.

  He twisted in the air and took the armiger under the chin with the round rim of the buckler, driving the iron links of his hood into his throat and crushing his windpipe.

  They hit the ground and the armiger broke Galan’s fall, jerking under him. The horse shied at the men underfoot. Galan rose and caught the stallion’s reins and cut his throat. The horse tottered and collapsed and soon stopped moving, but the armiger went on writhing and choking in a dreadful silence.

  Galan turned away, we hastened away, and left the man to live or die by the mercy of the gods.

  Up on the hill, the rumormonger shouted that Sire Galan was building a fortress of dead horses, and for a moment I was standing on the hillside looking down, and then I heard Galan again, gasping in the confi nes of his helmet while he jumped from one horse’s rump to another’s withers, over treacherous ground. The hard leather of saddles and barding, knobbed and ridged, turned underfoot. Girths and reins and buckles caught at his feet. Nothing caught me. I skimmed over all
this, under his heel and toe. The horses had subsided awkwardly, heads twisted. One eye looked up through an iron mask. Their legs were so many broken branches. The bare flank of the roan was slippery with a foam of sweat and blood.

  Galan sheathed his smallsword, for he’d found his scorpion again. The man he’d speared with it was still alive. He’d driven it into his belly through the mail hauberk and it had stuck fast in his girdlebone. The man lay between two horses, curled up around the weapon, his hands gripping the shaft. I slid across his body when Galan stood between him and the Sun. The armiger was taking a long time to die. He whimpered with every exhalation. His helm had a plain visor with one long slit for the eyes and many holes pierced to let in air. I slipped into the shadow under the helm. His features were stretched and twisted in his agony.

  And I was in the shadow over Galan’s face, under the silver mask of his visor, and I felt his grimace and tasted the sour tang in his mouth. He stepped on the man’s chest and pulled hard until he freed the scorpion and a quantity of blood. It made an end to that terrible whimpering.

  Galan stood still for no more than ten or twenty heartbeats, out of reach of his enemies, and he pushed up his visor and looked around and caught his breath. I took refuge in the hollows under his cheekbones and brow, between his parted lips.

  And I looked too, from the shadow under his eyelid. He was not alone. His uncle was there. And Sires Guasca, Meollo, Erial, Lebrel, Pava, Alcoba, and most of their armigers. They were all around: his kin, his friends. They’d cast a circle around him.

  In an eyeblink I saw more men of both clans riding his way, or maybe I saw that from the hill. But almost all of me was in shadow now. I no longer heard the rumormonger, only the roar of the crowd and the din of battle: the clang of metal on metal, thuds, grunts, shouts, screams, neighs, hoofbeats, the creak of leather.