by S. U. Pacat
‘I’m alive,’ said Laurent. They were gazing at one another. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d come back.’
‘I came back,’ said Damen.
Anything else that he might have said was forestalled by the arrival of Jord.
‘You missed the excitement,’ said Jord. ‘But you’re in time for the clean up. It’s over.’
‘It’s not over,’ said Damen.
And he told them what he knew.
‘We don’t have to ride though the pass,’ said Jord. ‘We can detour and find another way south. These mercenaries may have been hired to lay ambush, but I doubt they’ll follow an army through the heart of its own lands.’
They sat in Laurent’s tent. With the damage of the insurgency still awaiting his attention outside, Jord had reacted to Damen’s warning of an ambush as to a blow; he had tried to hide it but he was surprised, demoralised. Laurent had shown no reaction whatsoever. Damen tried to stop looking at Laurent. He had a hundred questions. How had he escaped his pursuers? Had it been easy? Difficult? Had he suffered any injury? Was he all right?
He could ask none of them. Instead Damen forced his eyes down to the map spread out on the table. The fight took precedence. He passed a hand over his face, sweeping away any weariness, and oriented himself in the situation. He said, ‘No. I don’t think we should detour. I think we should face them. Now. Tonight.’
‘Tonight? We’ve barely recovered from the bloodshed this morning,’ said Jord.
‘I know that. They know that. If you want to have any chance of taking them by surprise, it has to be tonight.’
He had heard from Jord the short, brutal story of the uprising within the camp. The news was bad but it was better than he had feared. It was better than it had appeared when he had first ridden into the camp.
It had begun mid-morning, in Laurent’s absence. There had been a small handful of instigators. To Damen, it seemed obvious that the uprising was planned, that the instigators were paid, and that their plan had relied on the fact that the rest of the Regent’s men, rabble-rousers, thugs and mercenaries looking for an outlet, would take the first excuse to lash out at the Prince’s men, and join in.
They would have, two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago, the troop had been a rabble split into two factions. They had not developed the fledgling camaraderie that now held them together; they hadn’t been sent to their sleeping rolls night after night exhausted from trying to outdo one another at some mad, impossible exercise; finding to their surprise after they had stopped cursing their Prince’s name, how much they had enjoyed themselves.
If Govart had been in charge, it would have been pandemonium. It would have been faction against faction, the troop splintered, fractured and bearing grudges, and captained by a man who did not wish the company to survive.
Instead, the uprising had been swiftly thwarted. It had been bloody but brief. No more than two dozen men were dead. There was minor damage to tents and stores. It could have been far, far worse.
Damen thought of all the ways that this might have played out: Laurent dead, or returned to find his troop in tatters, his messenger cut down on the road.
Laurent was alive. The troop was intact. The messenger had survived. This day was a victory, except that the men didn’t feel it. They needed to feel it. They needed to fight something, and to win. He pushed the sleep-fog from his mind and tried to put that into words.
‘These men can fight. They just—need to know it. You don’t have to let the threat of attack chase you halfway across the mountains. You can stand and fight,’ he said. ‘It’s not an army, it’s a group of mercenaries small enough to camp in the hills without being noticed.’
‘They’re big hills,’ said Jord. And then: ‘If you’re right, they’re camped and watching us with scouts. The second we ride out, they’ll know it.’
‘That’s why our best chance is to do it now. We’re not expected, and we’ll have the cover of night.’
Jord was shaking his head. ‘Better to avoid the fight.’
Laurent, who had allowed this argument to develop, now with a slight gesture indicated that it should cease. Damen found that Laurent’s gaze was on him; a long, impenetrable look.
‘I prefer to think my way out of traps,’ said Laurent, ‘rather than use brute force to simply smash through.’
The words had the air of finality to them. Damen nodded and began to rise when Laurent’s cool voice stopped him.
‘That’s why I think we should fight,’ said Laurent. ‘It’s the last thing I would ever do, and the last thing that anyone, knowing me, would expect.’
‘Your Highness—’ began Jord.
‘No,’ said Laurent. ‘I have made my decision. Call in Lazar. And Huet, he knows the hills. We plan the fight.’
Jord obeyed, and for a brief moment Damen and Laurent were left alone together.
‘I didn’t think you’d say yes,’ said Damen.
Laurent said, ‘I have recently learned that sometimes it is better to simply smash a hole in the wall.’
There was no time, then, for anything but preparations.
They were to ride out at nightfall, as Laurent announced when he addressed the men. To strike with any chance of success they must work swiftly, as they had never worked. There was a great deal to prove. They had just had their nose bloodied, and now was the moment when they either crawled away snivelling or proved themselves man enough to return the blow and fight.
It was a succinct speech that was equal parts rallying and infuriating, but it certainly had the effect of provoking the men into action—of taking the sullen, nervy energy of the troop, forging it into something useable, and directing it outward.
Damen had been right. They wanted to fight. There was a determination among many of them now that was replacing weariness. Damen heard one of the men mutter that they would hit the ambushers before they knew what was coming. Another swore that he would strike a blow for his fallen comrade.
As he worked, Damen learned the full extent of the damage done by the uprising, some of it unexpected. Asking the whereabouts of Orlant, he was told, simply: ‘Orlant’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ said Damen. ‘He was killed by one of the insurgents?’
‘He was one of the insurgents,’ he was told, shortly. ‘He attacked the Prince as he was returning to camp. Aimeric was there. He was the one who took Orlant down. Got cut up doing it.’
He remembered Aimeric’s tense, white face, and thought it best, before riding out into a fight, to check on the boy. He grew concerned when he learned from one of the Prince’s men that Aimeric had left the camp. He followed the man’s finger-point.
Pushing his way through the trees, he saw Aimeric, who was standing with one hand on the twisted branch of a tree, as though for support. Damen almost hailed him. But then he saw that Jord was weaving through the scattered trees, following Aimeric. Damen stayed silent, not announcing his presence.
Jord put a hand on Aimeric’s back.
‘After the first few times, you stop throwing up,’ he heard Jord say.
‘I’m fine,’ said Aimeric. ‘I’m fine. I just, I’ve never killed anyone before. I’ll be fine.’
‘It’s not an easy thing,’ said Jord. ‘For anyone.’ And then: ‘He was a traitor. He would have killed the Prince. Or you. Or me.’
‘A traitor,’ Aimeric echoed hollowly. ‘Would you have killed him for that? He was your friend.’ And then he said it again in a different voice, ‘He was your friend.’
Jord murmured something that was too soft to hear, and Aimeric let himself be folded into Jord’s arms. They stayed that way for a long moment, under the swaying branches of the trees; and then Damen saw Aimeric’s hands slide into Jord’s hair, heard him say, ‘Kiss me. Please, I want—’ and he stepped away to give them privacy, as Jord tilted Aimeric’s chin up, as the branches of the trees moved back and forth, a gentle, shifting veil, covering them up.
Fighting at night was not ideal.
In the dark,
friend and foe were one. In the dark, the terrain took on new importance; the hills of Nesson were rocky and fissured, as Damen now knew intimately, having scoured them with his eyes for hours on the ride that day, picking out a path for his horse. And that was during daylight.
But, in some ways, it was a standard mission for a small troop. Raids from the Vaskian mountains were troublesome to many townships, not only in Vere, but also in Patras and northern Akielos. It was not uncommon for a commander to be sent with a party to clean raiders out of the foothills. Nikandros, the Kyros of Delpha, had spent half his time doing just that, and the other half petitioning the King for monies, on the grounds that the Vaskian raiders he was dealing with were in fact supplied and funded by Vere.
The manoeuvre itself was simple.
There were several sites where the mercenaries might be camped. Rather than playing the odds, they were simply going to draw them out. Damen and the group of fifty men he led were the bait. With them were the wagons that mimicked the appearance of a full troop making an attempt at tiptoeing their way stealthily south, under cover of night.
When the enemy attacked, they would appear to fall back, and instead lead the way to the remainder of the troop led by Laurent. The two groups would trap the attackers between them, cutting off any escape. Simple.
Some of the men had experience with this kind of fighting. They were also at least somewhat familiar with night missions. They had been hoisted out of their beds more than once during the time they’d spent at Nesson, and set to work in the dark. Those were their advantages, alongside the hoped for element of surprise that would leave their attackers scrambling and disorganised.
But there had been no time for scouts, and of the men in the troop, only Huet had even a hazy knowledge of this particular piece of ground. Lack of familiarity with the terrain had been a concern from the start. And as they rode, carts and wagons trundling behind, cheerfully making the right amount of muted noise to announce their presence to anyone scouting for them, the ground around them changed. Granite cliffs heaved up on either side, and the road was becoming a mountain road, with a gentle but steepening slope to the left and a sheer rock face to the right.
It was different enough from the terrain that Huet had imperfectly described to cause concern. Damen looked again at the cliffs and realised his concentration was slipping. It occurred to him that it was his second night in a row without sleep. He shook his head to clear it.
It was not the right terrain for an ambush, or at least, not the type of ambush for which they had prepared. There was no place in the terrain above them for any group of sufficient size to lie in wait with bows, nor could men ride down those cliffs to attack. And no one in their right mind would attack from below. Something was wrong.
He reined his horse in, hard, suddenly aware of the true danger of this location.
‘Stop!’ He sent up the call. ‘We need to get off the road. Leave the wagons and ride for that tree line. Now.’ He saw the flash of confusion in Lazar’s eyes and thought for a single heart-pounding second that his order might not be followed—despite the authority that Laurent had lent him for this mission—because he was a slave. But his words carried. Lazar was the first to move, then the others followed. First the tail of the column, reining around the wagons, then the middle section, and finally the head. Too slow, thought Damen, as they struggled past the abandoned wagons.
A moment later, they heard the sound.
It was not the hiss and spit of arrows or the metallic sound of swords. Instead, there was a faint rumbling, a sound familiar to Damen, who had grown up on the cliffs of Ios, the high white cliffs that every now and again during his childhood would crack, break off and tumble into the sea.
It was a rockfall.
‘Ride!’ went the call, and the individuals of the troop became a single lurching, streaming mass of horseflesh pounding towards the trees.
The first of the men reached the tree line moments before the sound became a roar, the crack and crash of stones, of huge granite boulders large enough to smash into other parts of the cliff and send them driving downwards. The thundering sound, echoing off the walls of the mountain, was frightening and panicked the horses almost more than the boulders at their heels. It was as though the whole surface of the cliff loosened, dissolved into a liquid surface: a rain of stone, a rolling wave of stone.
Wheeling, racing, plunging into the trees, not everyone saw the rockfall hit the road where they had been moments before, cutting them off from the wagons, but falling short of the tree line, as Damen had predicted.
As the dust cleared, the men, coughing, steadied their horses and found their stirrups. Looking about themselves, they found they were intact in number. And while they were cut off from the wagons, they were not cut off from their Prince and the other half of their band, as they would have been if not for this ride, the rockfall slicing the road.
Damen dug in his spurs and forced his horse back to the edge of the road, giving the order for the company to ride for their Prince.
It was a hard, breathless ride. They arrived at the distant ridge of black trees just in time to see a stream of black shapes detach from the ridge and attack the Prince’s convoy, in a manoeuvre that was supposed to split the Prince’s troop in half, but which was prevented from doing so by Damen and the fifty horse he brought with him, riding into their attack, wrecking their lines and disrupting their momentum.
And then they were in the thick of it, fighting.
In the dense forest of slash and thrust, Damen saw that their attackers were indeed mercenaries, and that after the initial attack they had little in the way of tactics holding them together. Whether this disorganisation was indeed due to the speed with which they had been forced to muster, he couldn’t know. But certainly they had been surprised by the arrival of Damen and his men.
Their own lines held, their discipline held. Damen took point and saw Jord and Lazar close by, on the front. He caught a glimpse of Aimeric, looking pinched and white, but fighting with the same determination he had shown during the drills when he had pushed himself almost to exhaustion to keep up with the other men.
Their attackers fell back, or simply fell. Pulling his sword from the man who had tried to knife him, Damen saw the mercenary at his right fall victim to a precise killing.
‘I thought you were supposed to be the bait,’ said Laurent.
‘There was a change of plan,’ said Damen.
There was another brief burst of close fighting. He felt the shift, the moment when the fight was won. ‘Form up. Make a line,’ Jord was saying. Of the attackers, most were dead. Some had surrendered.
It was over; perched on the side of a mountain, they had won.
A cheer went up, and even Damen, whose standards in these situations were exacting, found he was satisfied with the outcome, considering the quality of the troop and the fighting conditions. This was a job well done.
When the lines were formed and heads were counted it turned out they had only lost two men. Apart from that, a few slices, a few cuts. It would give Paschal something to do, the men said. Victory buoyed everyone. Not even the revelation that they must now dig out their supplies and see about making camp could dampen the happy spirits of the men. Those who had ridden with Damen were particularly proud; they hammered each other on the back and boasted to the others about their escape from the rockfall, which, when they returned to the site to see about unearthing the wagons, everyone agreed was impressive.
In fact, only one of the wagons was smashed beyond repair. It was not the one that held the food or the mouth-rasping wine, another cause for cheer. This time the men hammered Damen on the back. He had achieved new status among them as the quick thinker who had saved half the men and all of the wine. They made camp in record time, and when Damen looked out at the neat lines of the tents, he found himself smiling.
It was not all revelry and relaxation, as there was inventory to be made, repairs to be started, outriders to be ass
igned, and men to be set on guard. But the campfires were lit, the wine was passed around, and the mood was jovial.
Caught between duties, Damen saw Laurent speaking with Jord on the far side of the camp, and when Laurent’s business with Jord was done, he made his way over.
‘You’re not celebrating,’ said Damen.
He leaned his back against the tree beside Laurent, and let his limbs feel heavy. The sounds of merriment and success drifted over to them, the men drunk on the euphoria of victory, sleeplessness and bad wine. It would be dawn soon. Again.
‘I’m not used to my uncle miscalculating,’ said Laurent, after a pause.
‘It’s because he’s working at a distance,’ said Damen.
‘It’s because of you,’ said Laurent.
‘What?’
‘He doesn’t know how to predict you,’ said Laurent. ‘After what I did to you in Arles, he thought you’d be—another Govart. Another one of his men. Another one of those men today. Ready to mutiny at a moment’s notice. That was what was supposed to have happened tonight.’
Laurent’s gaze passed calmly, critically over the troop, before it came to rest on Damen.
‘Instead, you have saved my life, more than once. You have made fighters of these men, trained them, honed them. Tonight you handed me my first victory. My uncle never dreamed you’d be this kind of asset to me. If he had, he would never have allowed you to ride out of the palace.’
He could see in Laurent’s eyes, hear in his words, a question that he did not want to answer.
He said, ‘I should go and help with repairs.’
He pushed away from the tree. He felt an odd dizziness, a sense of displacement, and to his surprise he was prevented from moving off by Laurent’s hand clasping his arm. He looked down at it. He thought for a strange moment that it was the first time Laurent had ever touched him, though of course it wasn’t; the grip was more intimate than the flutter of Laurent’s lips against his fingertips, the sting of Laurent striking his face, or the press of Laurent’s body in a confined space.