Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank

by Whyte, Jack

  "It's a natural place for an ambush." I had been reluctant to voice my sudden conviction lest somehow, by naming it, I made it come true. "It's a perfect trap. Beyond the ford the slope climbs steeply up to another high crest, but that slope's grassy, too, and soft like this one, so in the heavy rain it'll be a quagmire. There are trees on that hillside, too, on either side, pointing away from you, up towards the crest, and they act like a funnel, pushing people inwards to the center. So you're going uphill more and more steeply, and there's less and less room on either side. And up ahead of you, there's ample cover to screen an attacking force, while behind you, on the far side of the stream at the bottom, there's that beautiful slope for anyone charging at you from the rear to smash whatever troops you have remaining there, waiting to cross two at a time. It's a nasty, nasty place."

  I looked Ursus in the eye. "So . . . if your theory holds true and we're to find that Theuderic has been ambushed, this is where we're most likely to find him—on the other side of that crest up there."

  He nodded, mute, and then his eyes drifted away from mine and focused on something behind me, in the distance. Before I could begin to turn around to see what he was looking at, he had loosened his reins and nudged his horse forward and past me. I spun my mount around and moved to join him where he sat gazing at a dark scar in the grass less than fifty paces from where we sat.

  "It looks as though you might be right," he said quietly.

  What he had found was the darkened path worn into the muddy ground by a large number of horses as they emerged from a trail through the woodlands at our back and spilled out onto the soaked grass of the slope ahead. They had been riding in columns of four when they came out of the trees, but then they peeled off, right and left, to fan out and form a single line abreast as they made their way uphill towards the crest of the ridge, and we had no difficulty following them or seeing the moves of individual horsemen. There was a broad and much-trampled quagmire of muddied grass forming a lateral line less than twenty paces from the crest, where the advance had halted and stayed for a time, presumably safe beneath the skyline of the ridge while the leaders rode forward to look beyond and wait for their signal to attack.

  Ursus glanced at me again, a wry expression on his face. "Well," he said quietly, "we can't very well ride away without looking, can we?"

  "No, we can't, but I wish we hadn't come this way."

  He nodded in agreement and dug in his spurs, sending his horse bounding forward, and I followed him, roweling my own horse hard, driving him forward and uphill until I was riding knee to knee with Ursus. As we approached the crest of the ridge the ground beneath us showed all the scars born of the passage of three score of heavy horses digging their hooves in hard to gain purchase in the mud of the slippery, rising ground. Then we were on the crest itself and the scene below us opened up and spread out at our feet.

  At first glance there appeared to be nothing unusual in view. The ground sloped gently down in front of us for more than two hundred paces, exactly as I had described to Ursus, and the deep gully that marked the bed of the fast-flowing stream at the bottom was a brown and black gash slanting downwards from left to right, its line obscured from our view by treetops and the natural fall of the land. I looked beyond that, however, knowing that anything there was to see would be lying on the sloping hillside on the far side of the gully. Even so, there was nothing unusual to be seen from the distance at which we sat peering, and so, feeling slightly more hopeful, I kicked my horse again and put him to the downhill slope, hearing Ursus following close behind me.

  By the time we were halfway down the slope, we had begun to see what we had feared we might. There were bodies among the long grass down there, but we were still a hundred and more paces away and so the only forms we could recognize were the swollen bellies of horses that had begun to bloat and now rose above the top of the grass. We increased our pace, knowing what we would find, and closed the distance quickly, and as we did so the bodies littering the upper slope ahead of us came into prominence.

  It was almost exactly as I had described the probability to Ursus. Deep scars gouged by hooves scrabbling urgently in the rain- soaked ground showed where Theuderic's party had made their crossing and started up towards the top of the distant hill. They had bunched together more and more as they penetrated farther into the funnel formed by the encroaching trees until—and even from the bottom by the ford, looking up the hill, it was plain to see where— at the very steepest part of the climb just short of the summit, they had been confronted by an enemy force. It must have been a heavy concentration of bowmen who had lain concealed until then among the trees. Perhaps a half score of bodies, men and horses, showed how far the advance had gone before that first attack. They had been in the front rank of the advancing party and had taken the brunt of the first volley of arrows. When we arrived there later to look at them we saw how, like their infantry counterparts in the first trap, they lay where they had fallen, without a drawn weapon among them.

  It was evident, too, from the deeply scored muddy scars on the steep slope, that the advance had turned immediately to head back down to the bottom of the hill and safety. Save that there had been no safety, for where there had been a pleasantly sloping, empty meadow at their back, Theuderic's force now found themselves confronted by a waiting formation of cavalry that sat safely ensconced on a slight upslope beyond a deep gully with only one narrow ford.

  The slaughter that had ensued had been much like the earlier massacre of the foot soldiers, save that this time there were horses among the dead. From the arrows that were stuck in the ground on our side of the ford it was evident that Theuderic had made a stand at the bottom of the hill and deployed his own bowmen against the cavalry facing him, but he had very few of those and their arrows were soon used up. Outnumbered and outmaneuvered on two fronts, Theuderic had then led a charge against the narrow ford, on a two-horse front, in a desperate attempt to win through and establish a foothold on the far bank and thereby give some protection to the troopers following behind him.

  We found him quickly, in the mud, pressed against the stream's bank at the bottom of the ford, sitting almost upright with his lower body crushed beneath the weight of two dead horses. The steep- sided streambed on both sides of him was so full of dead men and horses that the water had piled up above the obstruction they formed and found a new path down the hillside. Two broken arrows projected from Theuderic's body, one that had pierced the layered leather of his cuirass and another that had found its way between the rear and front plates of his armour, under his right arm. A third arrow, however, had transfixed his neck just below the Adam's apple and would most certainly have killed him, no matter what harm he might or might not have taken from the other two.

  I climbed down from my horse to remove his helmet, for although I believed the dead man was Theuderic, having judged so from the size of him and the richness of his armour and clothing, I had not set eyes on him for six years and so could not trust myself to recognize him properly without seeing the face beneath the closed metal flaps of his helmet's mask. I recognized him quickly, for all that, even before I cut the leather strap beneath his chin and tugged the helmet from his head. Theuderic had always been the most comely of the four brothers, with large, bright, wide-set eyes of dark, sparkling blue and a clean-shaven face that emphasized the squareness of his dimpled chin and the regularity of his strong white teeth. Now those eyes, open in death, were dull and clouded, unutterably vacant, showing none of the laughing, amiable attributes of the cousin I remembered so clearly. He had not been a vain man, my cousin Theuderic, at least as far as I could remember, save in that one matter of keeping his face cleanly shaved at all times, and as I gazed on his dead face now it occurred to me that I could not recall ever having seen him with a trace of stubble marring the perfect smoothness of his face. Kneeling there above his cold, rain-soaked corpse, unable to move him in the slightest way because the mountain of flesh towering beside me was the rump of o
ne dead horse lying on the carcass of another that was lying on his legs, I felt a welling sadness in my chest and then, for the first time since finding Chulderic and the King, a stirring of cold, clear anger. This was fratricide, the curse of Cain; the shameless and inexcusable murder of one brother by another, over the matter of pride and worldly possessions.

  The anger grew brighter until I could feel it blazing deep inside me. Unable to kneel still any longer, I rose to my feet and made my way up out of the streambed to my horse, where I tied my cousin's helmet to one of the straps hanging from my saddle. It would constitute proof of his death, should anyone require it later. That thought angered me even more and I walked away, stiff-legged and fighting to put down the flaring rage that now threatened to consume me. I was not accustomed to such anger. In fact, I could not remember ever having felt even remotely as I did then, and that made me walk faster than ever, trying to run away from the sensations bubbling inside me until I slipped suddenly on the treacherously sloping ground and wound up teetering at the top of the precipitous drop into the tree-choked ravine down which the stream cascaded. I regained my balance easily enough, but found myself gazing down to where a horse and its rider had fallen and died while attempting to escape from the trap. The horse had impaled itself on a broken stump some twenty paces below me, and its rider lay close beside it, broken and twisted into an unnatural shape. Not far from where they lay, the earth and moss had been torn up by other hooves.

  I shouted for Ursus, and he came to me at once, rubbing his palms against each other briskly, trying to rub off the mud that had caked them. When he reached my side I pointed down.

  "Someone got out. Look down there, and over there to the right, beyond the dead horse. It's hard to tell from up here, but it looks as though there could have been three, perhaps four of them got away. You can see where at least one horse went almost straight down here, on this side, see? And another over there on the right. Look at those marks! It doesn't seem possible that anyone could have survived that descent, but there's only one dead horse and rider down there, so someone made the leap."

  Mere moments later we were at the bottom of the ravine, having made our way carefully down the precipitous slope by clinging to moss-encrusted trees and lunging with care from one to the next, making sure to lodge our feet behind tree trunks whenever we could, which was most of the time. Now, at the bottom, we made our way quickly towards the marks we had seen from above and were quickly able to establish that a respectable number of mounted men—six at least and perhaps twice as many—had managed to escape the trap. Whether or not they had been pursued was moot, and some of the tracks we found might conceivably have been made by others riding in pursuit of a few escapees, but we were heartened to know that the slaughter in this second entrapment had not been as complete as in the other.

  In the exhilaration of knowing some men had escaped, we decided to follow them and try to find them and join up with them if we could, and Ursus turned his back on me, his hands on his hips, to stare back up at the slope we had descended.

  "Well," he said, "we should have brought the horses down and picked an easier route. No one was chasing us, after all. Now we have to climb back up that whoreson."

  Mounted again, we took one last look around the killing ground and then made our way slowly down the swooping slope by a more circuitous route until we could enter the wooded ravine, but we left it again almost immediately to make our way downhill more easily in the open, following the path of the stream and watching for the signs that would indicate where the survivors had left the protection of the deep gully. We did not find any until the hillside had faded gently into a wooded valley where the stream joined a wider brook, but when we found the spot where the horses had finally clambered out of the riverbed to head across the valley bottom towards a denser growth of forest on the far side, the tracks were clean and easy to identify as belonging to fourteen riders, which was a far larger number than either of us had expected. I looked at Ursus immediately, but before I could make any comment he shrugged his shoulders.

  "Makes no sense to me, either, so don't even ask me. Some of them must have made their way down the same way we did. Either that or they cut around behind somehow and managed to keep out of the way of the bowmen coming down from above until they found another way to reach the bottom of the slope. It's not important how they did it. What's important is that they escaped and now they're out there, somewhere ahead of us."

  It took us until late in the afternoon to track them down, even though we knew they must be close by in one large, wooded area because we had found their tracks, then lost them again on stony ground, but could find no trace of them anywhere beyond that, once the ground softened again and the soil was deep enough to show tracks. We made a complete circuit of the tract of woodland, large as it was, and by the end of it, when we arrived back at the point where we had started, we knew beyond any doubt that our quarry must still be within the tract somewhere, because the only way they could have traveled on without us finding their trail would have been to sprout wings and fly out.

  As it transpired, we must have ridden by the entrance to their hiding place three or four times without even suspecting it was there, because it lay in the densest part of the forest, shrouded by ancient clumps of gnarled, moss-covered trees covering the base of a hill that was crowned with a solid mass of thick, seemingly impenetrable brush. Behind that screen of growth, however, and not easily found unless you knew it was there, lay the single narrow, twisting entrance to a small, steep-sided valley—a rift, little more than a wide vertical split in the hillside—that had no exit. The men hiding in there were being very unobtrusive, knowing that they were deep in hostile territory, hostages to treachery, and evidently expecting, for the best of reasons, that they might be the object of a massive hunt.

  We found them on what might have been our fifth pass by the entrance to their hiding place, but it is far more accurate to say that they showed themselves to us. They had seen us pass by once before, and not recognizing us but knowing that we had not seen them, they had allowed us to pass unmolested. The next time we returned, however, they took notice of us.

  There was a wide, grassy expanse—a natural meadow with isolated copses of beech and chestnut trees—fronting the mass of older, smaller trees that veiled their hiding place from us, and Ursus and I were searching it thoroughly when we returned that time, quartering it slowly with our eyes to the ground, looking for signs that someone—anyone—had passed that way recently. Ursus was on my left, a good hundred paces from me at the farthest reach of my sweep, which took me within a very short distance of the edge of the clearing. At the opposite end of one sweep, however, when I was farthest away from the forest's edge and closest to Ursus, I caught a flicker of movement from the corner of my eye and looked up to see a horseman emerge from the woods on my right and come towards me. He was heavily armoured, his face hidden by the closed flaps of a heavy, crested helmet, and he carried a spear and a brightly colored shield, blazoned in yellow and crossed by the black diagonal bar that marked him clearly as one of Theuderic's men.

  And then, being almost sixteen, I committed the error of a sixteen-year-old for the first and only time. I whooped in welcome and kicked my horse forward to meet him as I saw two more mounted spearmen come out of the trees at his back. I heard Ursus shout something from behind me, but I assumed it was a shout of welcome like my own and paid it no attention, bent on exchanging greetings with the newcomers.

  Only as I began to draw close to the man ahead of me did I begin to suspect that all was not as it should be, because instead of approaching me directly and slowing down, the fellow I was riding to meet angled his horse away, to my right side, and increased his speed, drawing back his spear arm as if to make a cast. I sat up straighter in the saddle, thinking some foolish thought about allowing him to recognize me and with no thought in my mind that, after what they had been through, these people might expect to encounter only enemies in such a place
.

  Again I heard Ursus shout, his voice closer this time, but by then my own foolishness had begun to dawn on me. I heard the thunder of the oncoming horseman's hooves and saw his arm thrust forward, launching the long spear directly at me, and I leaned hard and far to my left, almost throwing myself out of the saddle and trying to pull my horse bodily out of the line of the weapon's flight. The point of the spear took me in the side, beneath my upraised arm and fortunately on the metal of my cuirass, rather than in the join between the plates. It hit solidly before it glanced off and away, but the force of its impact threw me effortlessly over my horse's rump, so that I saw my own feet fly up in front of my eyes. I had an instantaneous vision of my horse's rear hooves flying up, too, and hitting me in the head as I fell, and I tried desperately to extend the movement of my fall, tucking my head in and kicking my legs back further over my head. I landed awkwardly, with my weight on one knee and elbow, but I felt no flaring pain and I rolled immediately, clutching for my dagger, the only weapon left to me.

  My assailant had ridden around behind me and was now driving in for the kill, a long spatha raised above his head as he leaned towards me, concentrating on the angle of the cut that would kill me. The drumming of his horse's hooves was loud and concussive, and I threw myself down, rolling head over heels and managing somehow to avoid the hissing arc of his swing. As he charged past the spot where I had been a moment earlier I was already rising to my feet, pulling the helmet hastily from my head and looking about me for my horse, wondering what chance I had of laying hold of the long spatha that hung in its sheath by my saddle.

  Again the visored horseman came at me, and this time, freed from the restricted vision caused by my heavy helmet, I shouted as I threw myself forward and angled my roll so that I passed directly beneath his horse's belly. It was a dangerous thing to do, since I might have been caught by one of the beast's great hooves, but it was less dangerous than risking a deadly thrust from its rider's sword, and my hope was that the beast might be startled enough by my move to rear, and even unseat its rider.