by David Drake
Starkad was holding the sobbing girl with his left hand. She was British, perhaps sixteen years old now that Mael had a chance to look at her closely. "Now, let's see," the Dane murmured, pushing past the Herulian he had disabled. An oil lamp was alight within. It shone on a room that seemed to have been painted scarlet. A middle-aged woman and a boy of about eight lay on the floor. They had been hacked at repeatedly. One of the child's hands had been flung separately onto the cold hearth. A balding, corpulent man in a night shift had fallen on the stairs and skidded face-downward almost to the bottom. Blood was oozing onto his body from above, down the treads from the upper floor.
Mael had followed Starkad through the doorway. There was a loud clatter and shouting behind them. Six Companions with drawn swords and the white armbands of the Watch burst in. The British girl looked up wildly. "Not these!" she cried, throwing her hands over the Dane who still supported her. "The others!"
"Check the upstairs," the squad leader snapped to one of his men. "And what were you doing here, buddy?" he asked Starkad.
Mael spoke before his friend could. "Got lost looking for the bivouac," he said. "We heard screams, and when those two—" the Herulians' hands were being bound expertly in front of them—"chased the girl out, we grabbed them."
The Watch leader grunted. "At least you didn't do all this," he agreed. "Not without getting more blood on you than you seem to have."
From above, his subordinate called in British, "Two more kids up here, sarge. The shutters're open on one of the back windows. Dunno if those fucking Germans were just drunk or if they planned to get in a little early looting."
"Christ," said the noncom. "You two," he added to Mael and Starkad, "get the fuck back to where you belong. We'll get these slime off to where they belong."
The Watch filed out. Each of the prisoners was walking, secured by a baton thrust between his back and elbows and held on either end by a guard. Starkad followed them out and closed the door softly behind him. When he saw that the Watch had forgotten about him and Mael, he opened the latch again silently and tugged the Irishman inside with him. The bodies lay as they had. The girl, bent over a table weeping, looked up.
"What in hell are you doing?" Mael whispered hoarsely.
"Comforting the bereft," Starkad whispered back. Rising, the girl threw herself into the Dane's arms. She was sobbing uncontrollably.
Mael knuckled his lips in disbelief. Finally he started up the stairs, walking very carefully. "At least there'll be a softer bed here than back in the square," he muttered to himself.
* * *
The war horns aroused Mael and Starkad as surely as they did the troops billeted under canvas in the market. The two friends stumbled back to their unit, earning a black look but no comment from Maglos. Starkad had filched a skin of Spanish wine from the house in which they had slept. It was enough to square Vaces. "Her kin, her mother's folk'll be appointed guardians," the Dane said. "They'll strip the place. I figured we had as much need for the booze as they did. And she didn't mind. Her name was Luad."
The two Herulians had been crucified to either side of the North Gate, through which the combined squadrons rode on the final stage of their advance.
* * *
The way to Lincoln was deserted, stripped of all peaceful traffic by the threat of war. The Companions rode easily, four abreast. Even the lowering clouds were a boon for fending off the hammer of the sun. One brief shower set the cursing regulars to checking the fastenings of their bow cases, but few of the recruits were archers. Though their troop was near the end of the column as usual, the recruits reached Lincoln well before sundown. Geraint's force was in its normal barracks within the city, but they had palisaded a camp outside the walls for the two reinforcing squadrons.
Maglos and the rest of the captains attended a staff meeting at dusk. When the Briton returned, he summoned his motley troop together. The recruits stood around a cresset flaring in front of the four tents allotted to them. "Listen good," Maglos said in British. "You that can't understand, wait till I'm done and ask somebody who could." Realizing that what he had said made no sense, the captain scowled at himself and added, "Well, you know what I mean.
"Tomorrow's the real thing. Geraint left scouts across the Dubglas, that's the river just east. They rode back yesterday. Aelle's there and he's got a lot of men, maybe ten thousand. That's all of his own crew and anybody else who wanted to get in on the loot they're planning on. He's camped just across the river. We're going to meet him there in the morning."
The veteran Companion rubbed the knuckles of his hands together. "You guys aren't trained. You can't ride and you can't shoot, most of you. That doesn't mean you can't fight. It better not mean you can't fight. We'll be right in the center of the whole fucking line. The Leader'll be with us, us, and it'll be our job to protect him against any Saxons who get through. They'll be keying on him, don't kid yourself."
"If we're so goddamn worthless" demanded one of the Franks, "then why put us in the center?"
Maglos nodded as if unaware of the hostility of the question. "Everybody else'll have to ride or shoot," he said. "All you have to do is wait for the Saxons to run up to you. Then you spear them. Nobody who can't do that ought to 'a come looking for a berth with the Leader."
The grizzled Briton looked around the faces of his troop. "One more thing," he said. "You'll stand where you're put and wait. If anybody runs away, they'll be hunted down after the battle by whoever wins. You saw those two bastards at the gate this morning. That's not half what the Saxons like to do to Companions they capture. You're fighting men, that shouldn't be any problem.
"But none of you is going to leave your position and charge early, either. There's no glory in getting an arrow in your back, and that's just what you'll have before you've taken three steps. You don't know, you can't know, what the Leader's going to do. But he's got to know exactly what every man in his army does. That's how we've beat the Saxons before; that's how we'll beat 'em tomorrow. Anybody who doesn't think they can live with that had best consider falling on his sword. It's apt to be quicker than disobeying orders."
Maglos was breathing heavily with emotion. His eyes caught Starkad's. The Dane was as calm as a block of granite, impassive and untouched by anything that had been said. "Believe me or don't!" Maglos snarled. "But you'll learn tomorrow! Now get to bed!"
"When we get into line," Mael said very softly to Starkad as they trudged to their tent, "let's just wait for the Saxons to come to us."
"Because that loudmouthed Briton tells us to?" the Dane snorted.
"Umm, " Mael temporized, "because Arthur plans his battles so he can win them. And I've got a taste for wanting to be on the winning side. More loot."
"You kill everybody on the other side, then you win," Starkad muttered, but Mael was no longer afraid of his friend deciding to break ranks. When the Dane went berserk he was beyond reason or argument, but Starkad could control the onset of the rage—and Mael was now sure he would do so.
Chapter Fourteen
The Northern Squadron marched out of Lincoln in the middle of the night. Mael heard the gates squeal, then the soft thudding of hooves. Geraint's men knew the terrain well enough to be able to take up their positions in the dark. They were reinforcing the troop left as pickets at the Dubglas ford when the rest of the squadron pulled back to await Arthur.
The two remaining squadrons rode at dawn. For the first time, Arthur's men left the network of wide, stone-dressed Roman thoroughfares. Their captains led them along narrow tracks in single file through woods and between tall hedges. The forks would have been bewildering had not Geraint left guides at each doubtful turn to direct the unfamiliar troops. When the rear guard came by, the guides would join it.
Near Lincoln, the dead Saxons had all been dragged into mass graves by conscripted civilians, but from a mile beyond the walls there were constant reminders of the rout. The bodies were bloated and so blackened by decay that their skins were indistinguishable from
their leather garments. Perhaps the crows and the flies who lay across the corpses like sheets had risen when the first horsemen approached. By the time Mael and Starkad passed near the end of the column, they could ride within a foot of a cadaver rolled barely to the margin of the lane. The carrion eaters would still ignore them. The horses' hooves stirred up the scent of death along with the dust.
"None of them fought," Starkad noted idly as he and Mael rode side by side on a stretch wide enough to do so. "All the wounds are from behind."
"They were afraid," Mael said, realizing that the Dane's comment was accurate. Sometimes the stub of an arrow shaft protruded, broken when the archer tried to retrieve it; sometimes a diamond-shaped wound gaped between the shoulder blades where a lance had driven in with the stunning impact of a horse and armored man behind it. Less frequently, the victims had died when swords bit through skulls or collarbones in a huge, black fan of blood.
Starkad snorted in disgust. "You can't run away from a horseman," he said. "If you stand, you can maybe take a few of them with you to Hel."
The words were not braggadocio, Mael thought to himself. The big Dane really could not imagine panic, fear so great that a man would rather die than face it . . . though the fear itself was generally of death. Mael could not be like Starkad, but the Irishman knew from a hundred bloody fights that there was no fear so great that he could not function despite it. And invariably in the past, his opponents had proven to have had the greater reason for fear.
Forest opened onto plowed land, a narrow canal of sunlit ground between wooded dikes. In the cleared area, men and beasts were milling in disorder. Unarmed handlers from the support sections were leading clumps of riderless horses out of the way of the troops debouching from the woods to the west. Beyond the handlers, dismounted Companions were filing into the eastern woods, carrying all their equipment including the spears they seemed to be bearing instead of lances this day. The men in sight all appeared to be from British tribes, armed with long self bows instead of the more handy composite bows Arthur imported for the mercenaries of other nationalities. The western Britons had grown up with their highly effective weapon. Though the shorter bow of horn and sinew bonded to wood was more useful for a horseman, Arthur had not attempted to retrain his own countrymen.
Maglos rested his hands on his double pommels, counting his men as they appeared. "All right," he shouted. "Recruit Troop, dismount! Give your horses to the handlers, four to a man. Then follow me. And bring all your goddamned gear, especially your water skins, or by god you'll parch like raisins before this day is out."
Stumbling, his legs not working quite like legs after long days of gripping a horse, Mael followed Maglos up a recent slash in second-growth forest. Just behind him strode Starkad, bubblingly happy to be afoot again. The Dane's axe arced out in fun and nipped a two-inch branch from a pine tree. One of the cadre yelped a startled protest as the blade looped back at him. The Dane laughed and wiped sap from the steel.
A Companion stood at the head of the trail where the slope flattened and occasional glints of armor and sunlight could be seen through the trees. "Which unit?" the guide snapped at Maglos, then noticed the varied gear of the men beyond. "Oh, Christ, the recruits," the Companion muttered. "Straight on ahead and spread to the right, three feet between men. And keep 'em the fuck back from the edge of the trees. Every three feet, forming on the command staff."
Ten yards further were knots of men and horses—Arthur and a cornicine, Lancelot, and a blocky man holding the red dragon standard. A fifth man walked from behind a tree at the sound of the recruits trampling through the brush. Mael recognized Cei in a helmet whose long iron nose-strap seemed to split his face. The four subordinates were on foot, though their horses stood drop-reined just behind them. The king himself was still mounted.
Mael took his position to Cei's immediate right where Maglos motioned him. He met the seneschal's eyes, then turned and knelt by a tree. Pretending the command group was not present, the Irishman slid forward to where he could look out over the east slope of the hill. Maglos was spreading the rest of the troop along the crest, man by man.
The valley below had the cross section of a shallow U, half a mile from ridge to ridge. The floor was broad and flat, marked with the darker green of reeds where the Dubglas meandered down the middle. The slope was slight but noticeable, grassy except for an occasional outcropping of limestone. At the base of the hill were a pair of incongruous pennons set on staves some two hundred yards apart. They were apparently centered on the command staff. Mael's eyes narrowed as he saw the flags. To either side the Dubglas glittered in a narrow band, but in front of Mael the water purled and whitened over shallows. Twenty of Geraint's horsemen, the only Companions in plain view, patrolled slowly up and down the meadow to the west of the ford.
Across the stream were the Saxons. The rumor that they were ten thousand strong might have been an underestimate. They were in such disorder that it was hard to say. The far side of the valley was covered with a litter of tents, cookfires, and wagons. Men sat or sprawled among draft animals and the sheep and swine driven along with the levy for food. The Saxons had built no palisade. The only guards apparent were the parties of housecarls formed in front of the largest tents around the war standards.
The Saxons were disorganized, but their numbers were stunning.
Many of the Saxons were awake and straggling down toward the stream in small groups, some to draw water but many to shout insults at the mounted vedettes on the other side. The Dubglas was no more than a hundred feet wide at the ford, though the current there was swift enough over the slick stones to make crossing an awkward business. Standing at the edge of the water, a few Saxon archers shot at the Companions. Their shafts wobbled harmlessly short. Arthur's men appeared to be paying no attention.
There was a bit of discussion among the vedettes. One of the horsemen, a Hun with a naked torso and hair streaming down his back like a horse's tail, uncased his bow and nocked an arrow. Lancelot caught the motion out of the corner of his eye. The Gaul broke off his conversation with the king. The Saxon archers began stumbling back away from the stream in sudden panic. The mud clutched at their feet. Several dropped their weapons to scrabble on all fours.
The Hun ignored them, arching his back and his bow together. He drew and loosed the arrow in a single motion. The nearby Saxons froze, but the arrow curved high beyond them. It plunged down into the group of armored housecarls in front of the largest tent, three hundred yards away. The high-pitched hiss of the dropping shaft was enough warning that the Saxons looked up from their banter in the instant before the arrow struck. Then the guards exploded apart. They left one of their number screaming on the ground with the arrow through the flesh of his right leg. The standard he had held, a boar's skull on a ten-foot pole, wobbled and dipped to the earth before any of the other housecarls could catch it. The Hun's laughter pealed into the sudden silence of the Saxon camp.
Lancelot was swearing in Celtic, his knuckles white on the hilt of his sword. "They were told not to shoot without orders, not to do anything without orders!" he snarled. "I'll have him flayed alive when he—"
"Be silent," said Arthur, without particular emphasis. The king was squinting for a better look at the archer. There was a slight smile on his face. "That was Edzil, was it not?" he asked, as much of Lancelot as of anyone. "One makes allowances for Huns, you know, Roman."
The tall Master of Soldiers said nothing, though his face grew pale. After a moment, Lancelot released his sword so that it could slip the six inches back to home in its scabbard.
Starkad nudged Mael and gestured to the left. An armored horseman from the flank was picking his way along the tree line toward Arthur's position. The rider was alone, but the gilt and silver of his arms suggested his rank. Lancelot noticed him, too, and said, "Here's Geraint. He'd better have everything in order or . . ."
Geraint nudged his horse into the command group. "Or what, Lancelot?" he asked. He was older than
most of the Companions and rode with the stiffness of a man laced together with scar tissue. "Everything's fine. We set them between the two lances, from there up the slope to maybe forty yards from here. All of them you sent forward. They're waiting for the Saxons to come."
"Well, that's what they're doing now," said Cei expressionlessly. Every eye in Arthur's force riveted itself on the ford and the Saxons beginning to splash across it.
Not all of Aelle's army was advancing, nor were those who were crossing the Dubglas in as good an order as even the footing would allow. Bands of men, two or three or up to a score, plunged into the water, wearing long swords and full armor. The froth rose to their knees. They shouted, keeping their heavy shields raised to cover their faces and torsos against the expected sleet of arrows.
None of the patrolling Companions fired. Their officer gave a quick command. The squad rode north along the stream, then turned sharply away from the water and up the hill. The Saxon rabble on the other bank shrieked triumphantly and sent a useless volley of missiles after Arthur's men. Most of the arrows did not even reach the west side of the Dubglas. The last of the riders to disappear into the woods cloaking the British left flank was the Hun, Edzil. He turned toward the Saxons. They cried out in fear, but instead of firing again the Hun laughed and pumped his finger at the footmen unmistakably.