Firethorn

by Sarah Micklem

  The battle had come to Galan; Crux contested with Ardor as if he were the prize. I was glad, thinking his clansmen had come to save his life. So when the Crux shouted, “’Ware, Galan!” and lifted his sword to let a cataphract of Ardor ride past him, I didn’t understand why.

  Galan’s pulse never jumped and his breathing was steady. He, at least, was not surprised.

  The cataphract was on a huge stallion. I saw what Galan saw, how the painted leather barding flapped against legs of a dirty dun color, with white fetlocks. The courser lumbered toward us like a drafthorse. But I also saw the shadow around the man, how the darkness had the color of fear.

  Galan snapped down his visor and smiled under it. “My thanks, Uncle,” he said under his breath.

  Then I knew. They did him honor to leave the killing to him.

  As his enemy rode toward him, before Galan moved, I felt the hair rise on his neck and scalp. The skin tightened across his forehead. He trembled. There was a humming in his ear. I knew this feeling: it was the presence of a god. He said a word: “Hazard.” Not Chance or Peril or Fate, not any one aspect, but the whole. I didn’t taste fear now. Something else. Exaltation.

  He started to run over the backs of the fallen horses. Though he was surefooted, he stumbled when barding gave under his weight, slid when a saddle turned around a girth. He didn’t hesitate. Every slip became a leap, every mischance the next chance. This was Hazard’s gift to one who hazarded all: the ability to balance on the sharp edge of the blade that divides life and death.

  Hazard had him, he was possessed. Yet never was he more in his own possession, in command of all that he knew and all that he was. As if the god did not ride him—the god was of him.

  A grin was fixed on his face. How right the scorpion felt in his grip. How long it made his reach, our reach. I was the shadow of the weapon and the arm that held it. The ribbons danced as he swung and I streamed over the ground. I felt the haft shudder in Galan’s hands as the sickle-shaped claw bit into bone. The horse careened and fell, hamstrung. The man without the horse was nothing.

  There was recklessness in him, to take some harm if it would get him what he wanted. Or maybe he was reckoning all the while, with the ruthless judgment of a man who has set aside fear and hope, that if he tarried to ward a blow, he’d miss his chance to strike faster, to strike first. I couldn’t know for certain, his thoughts were then beyond my ken, and yet I knew every blow that he received, for I was between their weapons and his flesh: how the skin split and the bruises spread on his back, his thigh, his inner arm, his shin. I didn’t feel pain, because he felt none. He was heedless of his wounds.

  Galan shouted, “Send me another!” and Sire Alcoba sent him two, a cataphract and his armiger. The armiger rode his courser straight at the heap of dead horses and men as if he’d overleap it, but the horse balked and the man was half over the pommel already and his neck was bare, for he had no neckguard. As Galan struck, the muscles of his belly clenched and his breath pushed out in a hoarse bark: Ha!

  The cataphract hit Galan from behind and knocked him facedown over a fallen horse. There was blood in his mouth and he swallowed it. Before his eyes, tufts of mane braided with bright ribbon. I was under Galan and I wrapped myself around him as he rolled and jabbed at the underbelly of his assailant’s mount. The stallion reared, his hooves above our heads. The cat-aphract leaned over with his mace, looking for Galan in the darkness under the horse, and Galan brought him down.

  He moved faster than I could think, and yet I moved with him, for a shadow must keep pace. And I battened on his swiftness and force. I tasted his want and it was my own: to overthrow his enemies, to grind them down. It was not their deaths we craved so much as their devouring.

  Time lurched, now racing, now lagging; I began to lose moments.

  Galan broke a rider’s leg with the shaft of his scorpion and pulled him from his horse and stood upon his arm and punched holes in his helmet and skull with the venom, the scorpion’s spike. And we were screaming.

  I crawled into the open mouth of a dead man, across a glazed and sightless eye, and felt satisfaction. Yet we were not sated.

  A horse was disemboweled and ran away tripping on his own guts. Galan must have done that. I don’t remember. He had his fortress of dead horses. They had to clamber to us now. They couldn’t reach us on horseback. Two teeth were loose and wobbling in his jaw. His cheeks were stiff. His grin had become a snarl. There was a longsword that had belonged to some one else in his hand. The scorpion and buckler were long gone. We struck and the metal sang; struck again and found the true spot on the edge where the sword cut without jarring. Some fool left himself open for a thrust and we shoved hard, all those layers to reach the flesh, grunting as the blade went home, ripping it out sideways to finish him fast. Every man was the same man, faceless in his helm or with a face of fear or pain or anger. The same enemy over and over, and we were growing weary of it. One leg shook. Exaltation had soured to impatience, the taste of wrath.

  The blood spilling from the enemy had been warm, but it was cool against Galan’s skin. He burned so hot he scorched even me, his shadow, and in feeling this I knew myself apart from him again, for a moment. Time enough to feel fear.

  If any god rode him now, it was Rift, who sows fear and reaps destruction, who gathers the dead like so many sheaves. It was a thought too great for me to hold, for I was diminished, a scrap of self.

  There was a gorgeous shadow streaming around Galan, as if his shade had grown too large for his body to contain. His heat consumed me, and I was the smoke of his flame and our shades commingled.

  A cataphract climbed up the mound of fallen men and horses. He carried the insignia of the Ardor’s own house on his banner, the smith’s forge with a fire burning in its heart, so it was fitting that he wore the finest plate armor I’d ever seen, with overlapping bands at every joint so that he could move with ease. His visor was smooth and inlaid with a pattern of flames in gold and copper.

  The armor was useless as a prize; the man was tall and thin as a sapling and it could never be remade to fit. That was Galan’s thought and mine. By then there was no difference.

  All that was left of me was a flaw in his eyes, a throbbing in his bloodstream.

  I saw everything doubled, shadowed. There was a black nimbus around the enemy, and by its tinge I knew he was too calm. I hoped the heavy plate would make him clumsy, but his attack was audacious and fast. A flare of darkness warned me it was coming. I huffed and scrambled out of the way.A breath or two, while I eyed him. Where had he been hiding, that his armor was so clean, not yet besmirched with mud and gore? His freshness was a jape. He mocked me with it. I’d sully that perfect armor and trample him like the others.

  He came in high and I swept his blow aside with an armored hand while I thrust low. When my sword hit his thighguard, it jarred my arm. His blade darted back to slice through the padding of my left sleeve and into the flesh above the elbow. That stung me; it was the first pain I’d felt since the battle began.

  Then fear nattered at me, fear wavered on the point and edge of his blade. I blinked away the sweat and drew my mercy dagger. My left arm had been weakened by the cut, but I could still grip. Another blink, and I lunged.

  We might have been laboring alone on the field, for I heard no sound but our panting and groans, our blows. He was well schooled, his elegance only a little marred by the uneven footing of dead men and horses. He pierced my thigh; he tried to bleed me to death with little pricks, aiming where I had least protection. Blood ran down my leg and arm, making the linen under-armor bind like swaddling clothes. I waded through air thick as water.

  But I knew his moves, every one. By the way he combined one form with another, by his very precision, I knew his swordmaster, I knew his name. The Ardor’s son. They’d kept him safe that he might find me when I was weary. A ferocious glee was rising in me. He hadn’t killed today and that would be his downfall, for I was bent on his death and he—though he didn’t
know it—hesitated at mine.

  And his shadow reached for me first and I knew where he meant to go. I knew I could kill him. He was beginning to understand. His shadow flickered and changed hue.

  Now he was forgetting half of what he’d been taught, and all I had to do was follow my sword’s lead, slide from counter to counterattack along the length of the blade. And I struck and struck again, but my sword rang against his armor. They’d used the best steel and I could hardly dent it. There were so few chinks. I studied them all. My fury burned cold now, and measuring.

  A blow against his shins weakened his leg. I tried to get under his neck-guard and my sword nicked on his cuirass. Two more blows and the blade shivered. I dropped it and he lunged and I caught the blade of his sword in my gauntleted hand and pulled him close and drove my dagger into the small gap where his steel prickguard was laced to his mail leggings, and left it there. I wrested his sword from him and bashed him so hard with the pommel that I stove in his helmet and rocked him back on his heels. He raised his arms to fend off the blows, and I turned the sword and jabbed him in the armpit. He fell to his knees and I hammered him across the visor, cursing every time I struck. The visor flew off, and I drove the hilt into his nose and he toppled over.

  And that should have ended it, but the man trapped my legs between his and brought me down. I fell on him, and we wrestled for the sword in a close embrace. His nose was broken and his breath bubbled and blood ran down his cheeks. We rolled and I was wedged between two horses. He loomed over me. But I found my mercy dagger lodged in his groin and I pulled it free with my left hand. I saw fear widen his pupils before I drove the blade under his chin, to the hilt. A spray of blood got through the eye slits of my visor.

  I pushed him off me and saw his shadow seethe and roil away like smoke, and so his shade departed.

  What was left had been more boy than man, with a downy beard.

  I climbed to my feet and looked for the next enemy. The palms of my gauntlets were sticky with clotted blood. I picked up the man’s sword. There was pain from the old belly wound; maybe I’d torn it again. I was gasping, hot as a hearthstone and thirsty. I licked my lips and tasted blood and salt.

  To stand still was to know these things. To collect myself, to slip into shadow again, to hide underfoot. The Sun was high overhead. It gave too much light and we shrank from it.

  And we looked for the next man we must kill, and the next, but there was no one at hand. The locus of battle had shifted and left us stranded on our fortress of corpses. We began to search among them, among the dead.

  And I, on the hill, began to fall. Sometimes I’ve dreamed of falling only to start awake, heart racing. This was worse: I plummeted from a great height or a great distance and woke to find myself still falling. For a perilous moment I didn’t know who I was, where I was. The eyes were filled with sun splotches and shadows. And all those pains—at the groin, across the back, around the neck and down the throat, into the bellows—and the pricking in the limbs, the burning skin—surely those pains and those limbs were none of mine. The sap of strength was gone and there was nothing inside but weak and brittle pith that couldn’t bear me up. The legs were giving way.

  I was truly falling. It was no dream. I’d been pushed from my perch on the boulder. A strong hand grabbed my arm as I went down. Flykiller pulled me up and saved my life.

  The spectators had begun to move toward the tourney field, and we were in the midst of them. As those nearby pressed against us, so were they pressed. There was no contending against that force. A grain of sand might as well defy the tide.

  Later I found out a brawl had started on our hill. Who knows how it started and what does it matter? When the knives and cudgels came out, a good many drudges ran to see the scuffle or to join in, but more tried to flee, pushing others as they went. At the churning edge of the crowd, the brawl became a riot. We were trapped inside. I heard grunts and shouts, shrieks and curses. Someone shoved against the burns on my back. Flykiller stiff-armed the man away and got behind me to shield my back, but he too shoved. He had no choice. His thick arm was wedged between us, under my shoulder blades. I lost Mai’s shawl. There were hands on me I couldn’t fend off. Fleetfoot was ahead and there were people between us. I called his name but he never heard.

  I came close to slipping into shadow again, slipping away. I had but to give myself to the vertigo, for I’d never stopped falling; I was still neither here nor there, not entirely, as if I’d left motes of self scattered over the field in the shadows under stones and blades of grass. I was plagued by wayward perceptions. Fever burned. My feet stumbled along at a distance, as if they made their way without me. I saw the crowd one moment and the next a throng of shadows. I blinked to banish the swarming darkness, and saw the rumormonger had lost his mount but kept his banner; it moved away overhead, the pole swaying, as he was carried off in some eddy. Uly was at my side. He had the wild, startled stare of a walleyed horse. He drove his elbow into my ribs to give himself another handsbreadth of room. The skin was stretched tight over my own grimace and I knew I looked no different.

  Rift Dread had us all, we were the god made manifest in a swarm, we were a mob.

  We moved downhill toward the field like an avalanche. The embrace of the crowd was such I feared my ribs would crack; I feared if I let out one breath I might not have room for the next. As we moved some were carried along and others submerged, clutching at their neighbors for help, finding none, until they disappeared under our feet. And I trampled them too.

  The Blood of Rift and Prey, who guarded the field, met the crowd and tried to turn us back. Their horses sidled, presenting well-armored flanks, and the riders thrust with the wooden butt ends of their scorpions or used their swords like cudgels, sparing us the edge. Some drudges at the front of the mob were caught between the wall of horses and the surge of men coming downhill and died standing up, crushed to death. I couldn’t see what was happening down there, surrounded as I was by taller men, but the screams were terrible to hear. And when the horsemen checked us, we felt that force come uphill like a wave. The man in front of me lurched backward and Fly-killer bore me up.

  There was no room to fall now. A boy swooned, eyes rolling and head lolling, and the crowd carried him.

  I wondered if Galan still lived, and then the thought was gone.

  Down by the crowd’s forefront, a few drudges were so desperate they ducked under the horses’ bellies or around their hindquarters and dodged the weapons of the Blood and ran onto the tourney field, looking for safety. Men of Prey and Rift turned to ride them down, hunting those who profaned the consecrated ground, and now they showed no forbearance, they used their sharp blades. But fewer Blood were left to hold back the multitudes.

  We were going faster, stumbling over the rocky ground. I could breathe again. Flykiller grabbed my sleeve, which was nothing more than a rag hanging from my bodice; a pull, a tear, a few threads broken, and he was gone and my sleeve with him. I was running with the rest, a headlong stampede.

  As I ran I found myself praying—not to the gods, not even to Ardor—but to the Dame and Na, whose bones I still carried. As if they could intercede for me now.

  I came to an upended smudge pot with coals smoking around it, and after it a shambles that marked the southern boundary of the field, the dead and wounded under our feet.

  Now we were among the riders and the riders were among us. Most of the horsemen bore the banners of Rift and Prey, but I saw some of the Blood of Ardor, and even a few of Crux, turn from killing each other to strike us down, outraged by the vermin scuttling about the legs of their horses. Rift Warrior must have put a battle frenzy on those men of Crux, and blindness, for most in the mob wore a sprig of their green. The metal skins of the warriors shone against our dingy garments, our dull flesh. They rode into the throng wearing their frightful masks, and they scythed us and threshed us under hooves, and we ran to and fro, colliding, tripping over the fallen, dodging the boulders that littered the fi
eld, sliding and sticking in the bloody muck.

  I ran with the other drudges, as if I could hide in the swarm, as if any of us could hide. And maybe the others prayed for the same thing I did: let them take the one next to me, and the next, just so I am spared. There is a selfishness Dread teaches, to hold our own death dear and that of others cheap.

  We sounded like pigs at slaughtering time, squealing and screaming. There was that stink too, of bodies opened up. I couldn’t believe we held so much stink. The Blood were careless, and left many to die a slow death. No butcher would do that.

  I felt a spatter of rain from the cloudless sky and wiped my face and my hand came away red. I turned, and there was a whore behind me in a striped skirt. She took two steps before she fell. I might have known her, but her head was gone. Gods, the blood is so pent up inside us, it bursts forth like a fountain.

  I saw, but I couldn’t make a world out of what I was seeing: scintillas of light, specks of darkness, everything shimmering. I swayed, blinded. As if vision were a trick and I’d forgotten the mastery of it.

  Someone ran into me and knocked me down. I scrambled to my feet and I could see again and there was a horseman bearing down on me and people scattering from his path. I knew by his light armor that he was a priest of Rift. He went bareheaded, with a shaven pate. A grotesque face had been painted on the top of his skull and he bent his head to show me this face and I mistook it for his own. I thought he was my death. I stood still, caught in Dread’s paralysis, and he came so close the stirrup brushed my arm, and the wind of his passing brought the smell of horseflesh and sweat and leather; I heard the chuffing of the courser’s breath.

  The priest struck as he passed. His sword licked out and parted my head-cloth with a sure touch. The cloth fell and my hair came unbound; it was dark with sweat and clung in coils to my face and neck, my burned back. I saw by his face, his real face, not the one painted on his skull, that this was sport to him. He clucked to his mount and they leaned as one, man and horse, and circled me in the tightest possible compass. He culled me neatly from the flock. I stooped to pick up my headcloth—my mind was empty as a poor man’s purse—and the sword hissed over my head and lopped off a hank of hair. He made his courser rear over me, and at last I ran, ducking low, clutching the scraps he’d made of my headcloth.