Tyrant

by Brian Ruckley

  ‘Can he walk?’ Brennan asked.

  Marweh’s husband opened his eyes.

  ‘I can walk,’ he said.

  And they did walk. All the two dozen or so people Brennan and the others had freed found the strength–despite all they had already suffered–to stagger their way up the hillside. A few had picked up spears whose owners were slain or fled. They leaned on them like walking staffs. The sun was starting to get low in the sky now, and it threw their long, lean shadows across the rocks. Like weights, dragging them back.

  Lorin and Brennan and Manadar rode at the rear. Their horses were running short on strength, struggling almost as much as the villagers to make the climb. Brennan could feel his own vigour flagging now that the urgency of combat had retreated, like a wave pulling back from a beach. Taking some of the beach with it.

  Only Manadar of the three of them had come through the skirmish unscathed. He still had the fire of battle burning in him.

  ‘They’re goats, these slave-takers,’ he crowed. ‘Running around, bleating. They’re no test.’

  ‘Glad you think so,’ Lorin said. ‘You get up ahead, make sure none of your goats’ve topped the hill before us.’

  They watched him labour to overtake the little crowd of villagers. Brennan saw some of those men and women looking up at Manadar as he passed them. Some of the children too. What did they see? he wondered. The figure out of legend that he and his friend had imagined when they talked of the Free years ago? Manadar did not look much like a legend. Nor did Brennan feel like one. Not any more, if he ever had.

  ‘Up! Up!’ Lorin shouted.

  Almost like a shepherd trying to hurry along a recalcitrant flock.

  Brennan was close beside him and heard the dull thud before Lorin reacted. That reaction, when it came, was little more than a sharp breath and a momentary lurch in the saddle.

  ‘They’ve got someone down there who knows how to use a bow after all,’ Lorin grunted.

  The arrow had hit him in the back of his upper arm. The muscle was transfixed. Brennan reached across to steady Lorin in his saddle, but the older man shook his head.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  Another arrow rattled off the hard ground behind them.

  ‘Be good if it didn’t happen again though,’ Lorin muttered. ‘I’m running out of fresh bits of my body for them to bloody. Let’s get out of sight or out of range. One or the other.’

  XI

  ‘I was a lucky man before I met you two,’ Lorin grumbled, tearing a rag from his sleeve and struggling to bind it one-handed about his wound. He was sitting with his back against a sloping rock. He had broken the arrow and pulled it out of his flesh himself.

  ‘You’re not blaming us, are you?’ Manadar said with an affected plaintive air. He pushed Lorin’s hand away and set to bandaging his wound.

  Lorin winced as Manadar pulled the rag tight.

  ‘This look like luck to you?’ he growled through gritted teeth.

  ‘Not much,’ Manadar conceded. ‘But you look luckier than you would as a corpse. And the day’s not done yet. Never know what might happen.’

  Lorin snorted.

  ‘I know what’s going to happen if we ever get out of here. I’m going to Sussadar, and then to Armadell. Then back to Sussadar. Those two cities and the road between them, between my fine ladies. That’s going to be my world.’

  ‘Sounds like a noble plan,’ Manadar smiled. He glanced at Brennan. ‘What about you? You need some of my tender tending?’

  ‘No,’ Brennan said.

  He had packed some bandaging in under his jerkin, tight over the knife wound. It was not a deep cut as far as he could tell. Messy, but not dangerous. He was more interested in watching the slavers moving to and fro at the base of the hill. Close to a hundred of them in all, by his count. A few had herded a crowd of captives into the cluster of trees and were presumably guarding them there out of sight. That left at least eighty or ninety who were arraying themselves in groups on the lower slopes. Some had ridden away, rounding the hill and out of sight.

  ‘Seems to me they’re going to try us before night falls,’ he observed.

  ‘Most likely,’ Lorin agreed. ‘Don’t suppose they like fighting in the dark. That sort never do.’

  ‘We going to get out of the way?’ Manadar asked.

  ‘These people aren’t going anywhere fast or easy,’ Lorin said.

  He meant the villagers they had freed. Twenty-five of them. They were sitting around the cairn, feasting on the last of the food and water Manadar had given them. All of their food, in fact. There was nothing of that left for the morrow. Enough water to quench the thirst of this number for perhaps one day.

  ‘And I know you don’t mean to leave them in our wake,’ Lorin continued pointedly. ‘They’re the reason we’re here. To fight for them. So that’s what we do.’

  ‘I know,’ Manadar nodded. ‘I’m just curious about how we’re going to do it. There being three of us and… oh, I don’t know, what do you reckon, Brennan?’

  ‘Ninety or thereabouts.’

  ‘There you are. Ninety of them.’

  ‘We don’t do it alone, that’s how,’ said Lorin. ‘We’ve got a lot of their coin sitting up here with us in those twenty-five bodies over there. As long as they think they’re only against the three of us, they’ll stay here and make the attempt. All we need to do is keep them here, trying to kill us, until Yulan and the rest get here.’

  ‘Oh,’ Manadar said. ‘Yulan’s coming, is he?’

  ‘He will be once you light a fire.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘You’ve got flint and steel, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘Well, then. Cut up one of the bedrolls. Fray it apart. It’ll take a flame if you get it ripped up fine enough. Then burn whatever you can. Your clothes, anything, I don’t care. If we don’t get smoke in the sky before darkness falls, we’re all dead. And we’ve won nothing, worse than nothing, if we just moved the place these people die up a bit of a hill.’

  The villagers watched Manadar struggling to get a fire going for a while. Eventually, one of the women went to him and gently but insistently took the task over. Soon enough, she had a little blaze started, crackling and spitting through the wreckage of one of the bedrolls. Brennan had a feeling it was his bedroll in fact. He should have watched more closely when Manadar was making the selection.

  Manadar must have told the villagers the purpose of the fire, for they began shedding any odd pieces of inessential clothing they had left to them. Headscarves and thin shawls. Ruined shoes. Strips torn from the hems of skirts. It all went into the flames. A black line of smoke, thin but strong, climbed into the dimming sky. Just in time, perhaps. A fast dusk was close upon them.

  Marweh came to Lorin and Brennan.

  ‘We can fight,’ she said levelly.

  ‘You’ll have to,’ Lorin replied.

  He worked his knife a little clumsily out from its sheath in his boot.

  ‘Here. Give that to someone. You’ve a couple of spears. The rest of you should gather rocks. Anything small enough to throw, big enough to hurt. Take the cairn apart.’

  They did. Brennan watched for a time. However long it had stood there for, the cairn ended in a few minutes. The villagers roughly dismantled it, making many small piles of stones from that one larger. A dozen good archers would have been much better, but still Brennan found it an encouraging sight. A rain of stones, thrown from on high, might be enough to discourage an assault, depending on the temper of the attackers. It might even crack a few heads.

  ‘You spotted this tyrant of theirs yet?’ Lorin asked him quietly.

  Brennan shook his head. He had been searching for any distinguishing sign that might mark out the leader of the slavers. The distance was just too great to be sure.

  ‘If you do, put an arrow in him, would you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Brennan said.

  He had his bow ready by his side, and the quiver r
esting against a rock within easy reach. He could see men moving slowly and cautiously up the slope below them. They were rushing from boulder to boulder, just as he and Lorin had done when they first climbed this hill. They used every wrinkle in the land to conceal their approach. Soon, soon, they would be close enough for him not to worry that a shot was a wasted arrow. He had counted his shafts. Twenty-seven. Every one might have to count if things went badly.

  ‘You want me to stay here or cover a different approach?’ he asked Lorin.

  The older man heaved himself onto his feet with a groan of pain.

  ‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘Think you’ve got most of them on this side, and that’s where the archer should be.’

  ‘The closest thing you’ve got to an archer,’ Brennan said.

  ‘As you say.’

  Brennan waited. He watched slavers coming closer and closer, inch by careful inch. Many of them.

  He was not at all certain he was sufficient for the task fortune had allotted to him. Not strong enough, not brave enough, not skilled enough. But that task was advancing upon him anyway. His doubt would not stay it.

  He reached for an arrow. He could smell the fire and the smoke behind him. It was a dense and acrid stench. Things that were not really meant for burning were going up in flames. That was good. It made for good smoke.

  XII

  Just before he loosed his first arrow, Brennan finally spotted what he thought might be the tyrant. Sitting on a big horse, alone, way down beside the trees. A stocky, motionless figure. Staring up towards the hilltop.

  It was hard to tell but it looked as though he was wearing a helmet–the only one Brennan had noticed among any of the slavers. The horse he was astride had sheets of padding over its neck and flanks. A crude kind of armour. Something in the man’s posture, even at this distance, spoke to Brennan of arrogance. He was just out of an arrow’s reach. I’ll kill you later, Brennan thought.

  He drew back the bowstring and sighted down the length of the arrow. He imagined a line, extending out from the sharp point of the arrow to the nearest of the advancing slavers. The man was bent almost double, working his way across a steep bit of slope, making for the lee of a big, split boulder.

  Brennan waited. One step, another. Close enough. He let the arrow fly. It darted downhill, skimming low over the ground. Because the man was so hunched over, it hit him in the top of his shoulder. It seemed to find the notch between the bones, because it looked to go deep, punching into his upper chest. The man howled and fell.

  Brennan paid him no more heed after that. He reached at once for the next arrow. Men were scattering on the slope below him, suddenly desirous of better cover now that they knew what was coming. Brennan tracked one of them–just for a few heartbeats–then let his aim drift a little ahead of the scampering figure and loosed the arrow. It darted down and smacked into his thigh.

  ‘Close enough to an archer,’ Brennan murmured to himself.

  He could hear rocks rattling down on the other flanks of the hill. He ventured a quick glance over his shoulder. The villagers had scattered from where the cairn had once been. Many of them, even the children, were flinging stones down at attackers Brennan could not see. He could not see Lorin either, but Manadar was there, crouched low, sword at the ready. He saw Brennan looking and smiled. Then he peered down the far side of the hill, picked some unfortunate target and ran. Brennan lost sight of him.

  He put an arrow in another man who, braver or more foolish than the rest, attempted a quick sprint straight up a stretch of bare ground. The arrow punched into his groin and stood there, trembling, as the man yelped and turned about. He half ran, half hopped downslope. Brennan shot him again, in the back.

  After that, no one seemed inclined to test his aim. He began to feel that he and his bow could hold this small piece of ground for a long, long time. Even against dozens. There was too little shelter for anyone to get close without him having at least a chance to put a quill or two in them. But neither he, nor his bow, could be in more than one place. And sooner or later, he would run out of arrows.

  Even as he noticed one or two slavers beginning to fall back, slinking away to reconsider their approach, he heard harsh, rending cries break out behind him. He spun about.

  There were slavers on the summit. Driving villagers before them, snarling and cursing. Spittle flew from their lips as if they were raging dogs. Somehow, they must have got past either Lorin or Manadar, and the shower of rocks. They just did not have enough defenders to hold this hill secure, Brennan realised. The smoke from the fire was swirling about, wreathing everything in black coils.

  He dropped his bow, drew his sword and ran to meet the invaders. Some of the villagers tried too. One of them lunged with a spear, but it was knocked aside and the backhanded sword stroke that followed cut halfway through his neck. Even as the man fell, limp as a child’s doll, a woman sprang onto the back of the slaver who had killed him. She clawed at his eyes and face, hooked a finger into the corner of his mouth and pulled his lips back.

  Brennan saw what was going to happen and cried out in pure anger at his inability to get there fast enough. A second slaver strode up and hammered the woman across her spine with a big, heavy cudgel. She screamed, loosened her grip and began to fall. The man hit her again. Then Brennan was on him and had sunk his sword into his soft belly and was lifting him up and carrying him backwards. The slaver stared at Brennan for a moment, startled. Then his eyes rolled up into his head and he fainted. Brennan wrenched his blade free, pulling the stink of gore and gut loose with it.

  He could feel himself faltering. The knife wound in his flank felt fresh. Wet. It was bleeding anew, he could tell.

  He turned in time to meet the first slaver. Their swords clanged against one another. As they pushed back and forth, Brennan could see other fell men among the villagers. They were seizing men and women by hair or arm, sweeping up children. He was filled with an almost blinding rage that all should have come apart so quickly. It gave him the strength to set his opponent staggering. He dipped his shoulder and drove it into the man’s midriff, just below the centre of his ribcage. That splayed him out on the ground. Brennan stamped on the man’s outstretched sword arm, dropped onto one knee and plunged his sword straight down into the man’s chest.

  As he got to his feet, someone barged into him and he was sent staggering. The churning smoke burned at his eyes and he was left blinking and gasping. A spear jabbed out of the smoke and went into the meat of his leg, halfway between knee and thigh. Screaming, more from anger than pain, he broke its shaft with his sword and slashed through the smoke before him. Whoever had pierced him was gone though.

  He clamped his fingers to his thigh. There was not too much blood yet. He grasped the stump of broken spear and pulled it from his leg. He hissed at the agony of that, far worse than anything he had felt before. But it was brief, flaring in his flesh then dulling away.

  Limping, he tried to get clear of the smoke so that he could see what was happening. He found a pair of slavers, retreating from the hilltop. One dragged a man, bleeding from his mouth, after him. The other had a child, a boy, under his arm like a sack of grain. The boy was struggling, but weakly. It was Marweh’s son, Brennan thought, though his stinging eyes made it hard to be sure.

  He went after them, battling his failing leg as much as the smoke and sloping ground. Another reached them first. Manadar rose from concealment. He had lost his sword somewhere, somehow, but had a slaver’s spear. He tripped the man carrying the child with its butt. The two of them fell heavily, the boy rolling away from his captor, crying in fear.

  Manadar spun the spear in his hands as he rushed in. He planted its point in the slaver’s neck and swung his whole weight on it, vaulting over the pinned, screaming man. He launched his feet at the second slaver. The spear snapped, midway down its length, but Manadar was already striking his target. He hit the slaver in the chest with both his heels, knocked him sideways. Of the two of them, Manadar landed be
tter. He sprang up and leaped forward in a single lithe movement.

  Somehow, in the midst of that leap, Manadar conjured two of his throwing knives into his hands. He hit the slaver with them. Rammed them both into his upper chest on either side of his breastbone.

  Brennan reached the adult villager with the split lip first. The man was bewildered, confused.

  ‘Get back up to the top,’ Brennan hissed.

  He rushed to the boy, who was still on the ground. Still wailing. Brennan knelt beside him. It was not Marweh’s son. A year or two older.

  ‘It’s not him,’ Brennan said.

  ‘Not who?’

  Manadar was coming towards him, smiling. A knife, bloody now, still in each hand.

  ‘I thought it was Marweh’s son,’ Brennan said.

  ‘Does it matter? He’s someone’s son.’

  Brennan was going to say, ‘Of course. Of course it doesn’t matter,’ but the words never left his mouth.

  A slaver came flying down the hillside. Fleeing. He came so suddenly and without warning that Brennan did not even have the time to turn what he was going to say into what he needed to say: ‘Look out.’

  Manadar saw something in Brennan’s eyes. He began to turn. The slaver swept past, behind him, like a dark fleeting thought. As he went, he swung a studded mace in a wild arc. For no good reason since his fight was done. He was free of it, taking wing.

  The mace crunched into the side of Manadar’s face. His head rocked on his shoulders. His legs crumpled. Brennan surged to his feet, trying to catch Manadar as he fell. The slaver was already gone, bounding away down the steep slope. Manadar slipped through Brennan’s hands and slumped down.

  His face was a half-ruin. All buckled bone and ruptured flesh. He was dead. Dead in the instant the blow landed.

  Brennan bowed his head. There was a passing sickness in him. In his chest and throat. The boy was whimpering behind him, and that drew him back. He carried the child up to the summit. The hole in his side, and the one in his leg, pounded and burned. He barely noticed.