by T. C. Rypel
And with that he pounded away at the head of his command, through the gatehouse and on toward the barbican, leaving Mord to muse over his comment.
* * * *
Salavar pulled to a halt before the darkened alley, a field of blood, littered with corpses. In places the fallen were piled so high as to allow them to repose nearly upright on their feet. Carcasses were skewered on calthrops and spiked redoubts. His two surviving men drew up alongside.
The Slayer snapped his double-edged axe, bloodlets flinging off. Both he and his destrier were splashed to the ears with gore, red flecks dotting his face and beard. He removed his fur-brimmed helm and breathed a great weary sigh. The killing had been good. Many of these citizen soldiers had fought well; some even died nobly. And the more who did, the greater the honor heaped upon the Slayer.
His one regret was that he had been tracking the oriental bandit all night, yet never crossing him, always finding the quarry just beyond his reach, arriving a shade too late. Either the samurai hid himself well or he was already dead beneath some tangle of bodies.
“This is it, eh? This is what’s got you all so scared?”
One of the mercenaries agreed readily. “I think there’s only one left now, but what a hellion!”
Salavar snorted. “I can see that. Well, go in and get him. I haven’t time to waste on—”
The sizzle of a shaft. Salavar instinctively threw up his shield. The man on his right was torn backward by the impact, out from under his morion helmet to lie writhing in the street. The armor-piercer arrowhead protruded six inches out his back.
“Son of Satan!” the other man cried. “What strength!”
“Try daughter,” Salavar corrected. He started to laugh. “That’s a she-demon—a woman you fear, all you brave bastards. Get in there and bring her out to me—” He saw the fear in the man’s eyes. “Duck behind your nag’s crest. You’ve got a pistol, you friggin’ coward.”
The brigand brought his piece up alongside his helmet and uncertainly clucked his mount forward toward the deadly blackness. Salavar gurgled a laugh and calmly loaded his arquebus and wheel-lock, watching from behind his propped shield.
The nervous subordinate halted his steed at the head of the sinuous alley, licking dry lips as he crouched low.
Hildegarde’s battle cry froze him as she skipped forward, her scalpel-sharp halberd glinting in the full moon’s rays for an instant before tearing through the brigand’s throat. His pistol fired wildly. With a great flex, the warrioress lifted her foe from the mount’s back by his skewered neck and tossed him among the broken bodies. With a snarl at Salavar, she disappeared into the shadows again.
“Sonofabitch,” Salavar swore. “All right, gentle lady, you’ve earned a tilt at Salavar.” He rode forward, arquebus propped on the shield’s top edge.
He could hear her soft footfalls as the darkness engulfed him. A helmet bounced off the wall to his right. He spotted it instantly for the diversion it was and aimed his great firearm to the left. Hildegarde surged at him as the arquebus discharged its tumultuous blast.
The bushi screamed and spun away, her left shoulder in ruin. Salavar’s destrier fell under him, her razor steel having sliced open its neck. The Slayer hit the ground and rolled, losing his shield and helm in the fall but coming up with his lethal axe at port arms.
Hildegarde breathed hissingly somewhere in the shadows. The arrogant mercenary saw his helm on the ground but dared not reach for it.
With a banshee wail, Hildegarde charged him, the halberd leveled for disembowelment. He parried it downward, binding it on the stones, lunging forward with animal grace in the next motion. She leapt back, barely evading a smash to the face, and brought up the halberd’s head with a swipe.
“Arrrghhh!” Salavar grabbed his inner thigh. His hand came away darkly wet and coppery to his nostrils. His leather leg-harness came loose where she had cut the strap. He tore it off and flung it at her.
“Bloody bitch—you’ll pay for that. You know where I’m going to plant this axe?”
Hildegarde cursed him in her own language, her voice labored. He took note of the bits of meat and blood flecks at her shattered left pauldron. She was fighting him with little more than one arm. Galvanized, he whirled the battle-axe at her in a figure-eight, clashing with her halberd, pushing her back.
A wild blow, aimed at her head, struck a wall with an explosion of masonry, and her quick reply cut his ribs. He roared with shock and pain and thundered forward. Hildegarde gave ground, her strength beginning to fail with the blood loss, the strain creasing her face.
She tried a desperate lunge that Salavar slipped, her point digging into soft stone, catching. The Slayer’s powerful blow split her pole-arm’s haft with a sharp snap. He came on for the finish as she stumbled backward.
Hildegarde pressed her savaged shoulder a second, then picked up a downed militiaman’s broadsword. This she held in both hands in an iai-jutsu reverse guard. Salavar looked at her contemptuously and pulled his wheel-lock from his belt.
Gritting her teeth, Hildegarde danced from side to side, howling a battle cry and charging. The pistol’s report echoed through the alley. The Viking warrior-woman jerked back with the impact and fell. She groaned in pain and then lay still.
Salavar breathed a sigh of relief and tested his wounds. Then he came up to her prone form.
Her arcing blade hamstrung him. The Slayer pitched backward, roaring in electrified shock. Hildegarde tried to rise but couldn’t get off her knees. Couldn’t reach him, in her terrible pain, with an overhead blow.
The wounded bandit clawed at his boot for a throwing dagger. He cocked his trembling arm from where he sat, and hurled it. The small dagger tore into the fighting woman’s abdomen, just below the protective line of her leather breastplate. Bleeding profusely and in the throes of agony, Hildegarde shrilled a cry that lasted the duration of her remaining moments of life. Salavar saw her eyes and dragged himself back like an injured crab.
She scrabbled forward on her knees at the desperately crawling man, catching his ribs with a headlong lunge of her sword. Ripping upward through cuirass straps and flesh and erupting blood, to lay open the whiteness of bone.
With her last breath Hildegarde tore the dagger from her own belly and, finding an opening between his warding hands, plunged the slim blade into Salavar’s eye, and through the hard resistance behind its ruin.
* * * *
The relays passed the alarm along the windows above the alley: Laszlo’s defenders had given way; a Llorm troop had crashed through to ride, by ones and twos, through the gauntlet of the remaining old folk who fired down on their heads.
“The wagons are here—out in the lane!” came the cry from the head of the alley defended by Janos Agardy’s determined band of aged and handicapped. Escape for the evacuees was imminent. Janos saw brutalized eyes of his comrades gleam with desperate pleading in his direction. Relief was so near, and there was little left to defend—
“All right. All right, then—” Janos shouted “—the people left in the dwellings first—look out, there!”
The first two Llorm crashed through, slashing down upon the defenders’ heads. Janos fell back against an alley wall, nearly trampled. He saw one Llorm fall. The second dashed the brains of his old friend, the fisherman, with whom Janos had sat at the river in days past, when none save that kind soul would have the company of a clubfooted child.
He grimaced and choked back his sob. “Get moving, you people in the houses,” Janos cried. “Your work is done. Now flee....”
He heard Giselle’s frantic voice from the window down the alley as another Llorm lurched through aboard a spastically jerking, injured horse.
“Janos—my father—he won’t leave—!”
He took a swipe at the horseman, missing, saw Giselle yanked from the window by her long, radiant hair. The shutter slammed and bounced open.
Janos called two men to accompany him, screams and bellows wrenching out behind them. Toge
ther they battered the rear door of Giselle’s dwelling until it gave with a snap of timbers. Janos lumbered up the stairwell, guisarme before him.
“Open that door, sir.”
“Get away from here, you god-damn cripple! I’ll kill you!” The muted voice behind the door was choked with angry fear.
“Sir, this sector has been evacuated. The last of the people are boarding the wagons now. You must transport Giselle to safety.”
The door swung open, and Giselle’s father stood with heaving chest in its frame, a broadsword brandished in threat. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“Sir, you must get Giselle to safety and then join with the other militiamen to escort—”
“I’m not going to die fighting for that lunatic Jappo!” He warned them back with twitches of his swordpoint. His eyes rolled wildly.
“As a Christian, sir, I cannot ask you to fight,” Janos replied evenly. “Nor will anyone else. But you must save your daughter from the army’s reprisal. The city is being evacuated. The wagons are here now. They will not wait. And it will not be pleasant for those left behind. Surely you must understand that. Soon, even we shall be abandoning our post on this street. Think on it, sir—but swiftly.”
Giselle’s father did, stricken to hear the sounds of violent death from the streets below. And a moment later the frantic man threw his cloak about his shoulders and tossed Giselle her mantua. “Come on, girl,” he said bitterly, starting down the stairs, slapping aside the harpin wielded by his neighbor on the landing.
“She’ll join you momentarily,” Janos assured, leaning forward on his guisarme and smiling at her.
“God-damned infidel’s got everybody crazy,” her father grumbled as he departed. “Even the cripples!”
“Giselle—” Janos began, trembling but holding her bright gaze. “Giselle, I’ve only a moment to convey to you a lifetime of yearning. Since we were children, I’ve been in love with you, worshiped you, from the respectful distance one would tender an angel. I’ve written songs to your lips, to your eyes...the halo you wear when the sun smiles at your passing. But now there is no more time for song. I must speak plainly, while I still can....”
“I’ve heard your lovely songs,” she said, “but I never suspected I could have inspired them. I fear you exalt me too much. Your songs sing of divine perfection. Look here—” She passed a slim hand across the small scar high on her left cheek. “Do you remember the day I fell, how I cried?”
“I cried for you. But then my tears became tears of joy—if you will forgive me. You see...it was somehow a perverse comfort to me, to see that you could bleed like other mortals. That you were real, here, on earth. That scar, Giselle...that scar is God’s gracious, holy flaw! Lest you be thought a goddess, untouchable, to any man....”
Her brow creased, and she looked at him with a mixture of wonder and warmth.
“Janos—” came the cry from downstairs “—the cavalry says they must move now! They’re under attack, and the giant is thrashing about, very near now—!”
He snapped out of his reverie and tugged Giselle by the arm, guiding her to the balustrade. Her eyes were on him as they descended.
“Grant me this, Giselle—” he said desperately. “Not that I may have your hand. I dare not ask for that. But only tell me that I may be counted among your legion of suitors. I’ve seen them, and paled before them. But I’m a fighting man now! Ready to charge over the heads of your retinue from my humble rearmost position!”
She halted him, leaned across and kissed him. Her eyes were moist and sincere. “You’re more than among that fancied company. You are foremost—there is no other.”
“Hurry, Janos!” a comrade yelled from the alley.
Janos Agardy threw up a fist in triumph and ushered her out, personally escorting her to safety aboard the last embattled wagon. He waved to Nikolai Nagy as the latter rode by, saw a last celestial vision of the angelic face of Giselle, and then returned to his charges. Janos lashed about with a vengeance, then, cutting off enemy pursuit of the wagons, a song soaring from his chest as he fought valiantly, though his heart was far from the battle.
Giselle peered back at him as she was spirited off, part of her wishing to leap from the wagon to remain at his side. Heartsick, her stomach in knots, she deplored the years wasted on empty flirtation and romantic flummery. Feeling, for the first time, a profound mutual concern and a sense of completeness, now sundered by events too large to control. Giselle scarcely heard the conflict rage around her.
She would not see Janos again. She would marry, in Austria, a man of modest means and properties, bearing him three children and living out her life comfortably, deeply loved and needed, and, in her reflective moments, resignedly grateful and content. He was a compassionate, understanding man, her Hans. He indulged her the cenotaph on their land, raised to a forgotten poet, and inscribed with the curious epitaph: God’s gracious, holy flaw. Hyacinths flourished about the memorial site, and fresh-cut lilies were laid there weekly.
* * * *
Klaus splashed onward through the Street of Faith, his quarry still in sight but pulling away. He cared not that he had left his axe and helm behind; his only armament—the slender misericord at his waist—was more a decoration than a weapon in the fierce warfare at hand.
The red-eyed buckle-maker swung right onto Provender Lane, taking scanty note of the ugly black cavity of the armory, still billowing pungent smoke and hissing flame, an untended bonfire.
Klaus thought only of Paolo, struggling with the reality of the ghastly death of the man he’d tried so hard to befriend out of admiration and respect. He saw the brigand’s laughing face: he’d laughed when his companion had shot that crossbow bolt through Paolo’s neck. Laughed and pointed like a leering ape at Klaus’ dying friend.
The man who’d fired the shot had paid the price for his sin. God had given Klaus the strength to kill him. But the other had laughed and cursed and galloped off. And now Klaus would catch him and drag him down as he had the other, and make him understand the terrible pain of loss that twisted Klaus’ insides such that he couldn’t think straight. It wasn’t nice to laugh when a man’s friend was killed.
The bandit pulled up in front of the Provender, swung from the saddle and strode inside. Either he had forgotten about Klaus or it was a trap.
Ja, that’s what Gonji would have said. A man too sure of himself was laying a trap. Klaus would have to be careful. But, then, what did it matter? Paolo had been careful, hadn’t he?
Klaus dismounted, fifty paces from the Provender. The area was deserted now, or seemed so. Only the dead here now. So many. An uncovered graveyard.
The pistol report from the Provender froze him in his tracks a second. Then Klaus pushed himself on, heart racing, wishing his armor would stop clanking as it did. He peeked through a smashed window, only shards of the expensive swirled glass remaining. He remembered at what cost it was said those windows had been imported from Frankfurt—
Nothing moved inside. There was an awful stench of death and strong drink that clogged his nostrils. He eased inside through the wedged-open door.
A sudden movement at the far end of the bar—
“Jaaaa! What the hell you doing here, bimbo?” Gutschmidt roared from behind the barrels of two pistols. “You’re still alive? Gutch can fix that real quick—boo-hoo-hoo!” the innkeeper blared the exaggerated laugh he reserved for surly, overbearing moments. There was none to share the aggressive mirth. It died, hollowly, on his lips. There was neither humor nor triumph to be felt in Vedun this night.
“That soldier killed Paolo, Gutch,” Klaus said disconsolately. He stepped carefully over the death and debris in the inn, to the brigand’s warm corpse. He stared down at the large, blood-soaked rift that split the dead man’s face. An unreal horror....
“Well, what did you want me to do—save him for ya?” Gutch began to clean and reload a pistol. A rank of long pistol barrels lay primed on the bar, several more on the shelf below. “Pa
olo’s dead, eh? No surprise in that.”
“He was a good man. A good leader,” Klaus eulogized in his nasally voice.
“Sure—ja-ja—now why don’t you get lost? You’re bad for Gutch’s reputation.” He splashed water in his face, toweled off, and ran a long comb through his sweat-soaked hair. His doublet hung over a chair, his silk shirt torn and blood-stained.
“I—I don’t know where to go, Gutch...I feel alone—”
“You want Gutch to tell you where to go?”
Pistols exploded outside amidst war whoops, and still intact panes of glass shattered inward. Klaus hit the floor next to his late foe, and Gutch ducked behind the counter.
“Here we come—and there better be some service.”
A spate of laughter. “We’ll serve ourselves. Come on, Darusz—”
A big-chested brigand burst inside, pistol still smoking. Two more bandits followed, angry war helms dripping rain and blood. They all spotted Klaus peeking up at them.
“Hey, there—!”
Gutch’s sprang up from behind the counter—pistols boomed, clouds of smoke fuming, as Klaus pushed himself up, stumbling and lurching toward the surprised looters.
Two bandits were already going down. Gutch seized another wheel-lock. “Get outta my line of fire—!”
Klaus met the last mercenary just inside the door—but empty-handed, and the soldier was drawing his rapier. Klaus flinched and twisted from the slender sword’s slash, which dented his back plate but didn’t penetrate. Yelping, Klaus recovered and lunged forward like a steel cannonball, to pinion the man’s arms. They wrestled on their feet, slamming against the wall and pushing and tugging each other over one of the fallen bodies. Gutch bellowed and swore, moving along the bar anxiously with fisted pistol.
Then Klaus locked a leg behind his opponent, remembering the technique taught by Gonji, and plunged him backward. He landed atop the man, breath huffing out of both of them. Klaus staved the sword arm from his vulnerable skull as he fought out his misericord.
The needlelike blade pierced cuirass and flesh, raising and falling again and again, until the mercenary shuddered and died. Klaus wheezed as he pushed himself to his feet unsteadily. He dropped the misericord and backed away, sobbing.