by Harold Lamb
It was vaguely familiar to Arn. Once he had hired out his weapon and himself in Normandy far in the west. There he had been among troublemakers who sang like that—the English. Aye, English archers. But he had never seen hide or hair of them as far east as this.
They did not pass by. Three of them left the column and climbed the steep bank to the tower. Arn motioned the girl to be silent, and drew back into deep shadow. Perhaps, he thought, the tall English had also come up to the height for a spy around the countryside.
But one of them appeared in the doorway. With his head on one side and his sword held across his knees, he surveyed them. The girl came over, fearfully, to press herself close to Arn.
"Bide still,” said the archer, "my lovebirds.”
Another called down to the road something about here was running water to bathe in, cow meat to put in the pot, and a wench to kiss betimes.
By the way they unloaded the pack beasts within the wall’s circuit, and watered the horses before filling their drinking horns from kegs of beer, Arn thought them to be experienced warfarers. When they turned out the horses to graze under guard and set fires under cooking pots, he decided they meant to camp the night on the tower height that overlooked the fields and woods to the east. Whereupon he began to move as if idly among the piled-up packs, hoping to make his way out of their observation and to flee down the brook. It was not easy to do because the girl, following him like his shadow, drew the stares and gibes of the lounging men.
By then Arn the Axman had understood enough of their strange talk to realize that they were a company of free archers who had fought a while for the Burgundian lord and had gone their own road thereafter—that road taking them apparently wherever loot offered.
He was drawing near to a break in the wall when a giant with braided red hair stood in his way. This red archer pointed, and asked mildly, "Yours, youngling?”
Arn thought he asked about the timid girl, and he shook his head.
"Not the wench!” roared the big man. "Tha ax. Tha ax wi’ twain heads. Beware, for I will make trial of it.”
It seemed that Arn’s double-edged weapon had stirred his curiosity, because he pulled a heavy single ax from his belt and swung it high over the Saxon. "Be ware and yare! ”
Arn stepped aside from the blow, and instinctively struck back with his own weapon. Once the axes were swinging and clashing, he felt at ease. The greater fear in his mind made him indifferent to the weapon the giant wielded with great strength of arm, but little skill. In a moment the Saxon had hooked the tip of the English blade in one of his and wrenched it from the other’s grip. The single ax fell ten paces away. A shout from all around him greeted this quick end to the test.
"A fair, neat trick!” roared the red giant. "If it had been a longbow, now, Axman, you would not have fared so well!”
"No,” growled Arn, "I have no skill at bringing down pigeons.”
The archers were silent at that. Long Michael, as they called the tall owner of the ax, glanced at the pigeons fluttering up from the tower top. The birds had been startled by a small brown hawk circling above them.
Squinting up at the sky’s glare, Long Michael rubbed his fist across his nose and said, "My masters, this likely lad with the meat chopper holds to the opinion that we may have skill to shoot down pigeons. . . . Eh, Jakekin, make a test of your skill for him.”
They were like children. Jakekin, a thin, weathered man, wiped his lips and put aside his drinking horn. Rising and squinting up, he strung his bow—an inch or so longer than his own height—with a single motion of knee and arm. He selected a shaft as long as his leg, brushing the gray-feathered end carefully with his fingers. Then he flung up his bow and loosed the arrow. Arn heard a sound like the swish of a wild bird’s wing.
The bird that tumbled from the sky was not a flapping pigeon, but the fleet brown hawk transfixed by the arrow. Arn stared unbelieving.
Long Michael shook his head. "I greatly fear,” he declared, "that Jakekin’s eye was not true to the shaft, nor his shaft to the mark, for he failed to bring down a pigeon.” The others smiled as if that were some kind of jest.
The Axman did not heed them. Along the eastern sky line he beheld what he had most dreaded to see. From three points smoke was rising so heavily that it must come from burning hamlets, so near that he could distinguish white spirals mingled with dark in the smoke. He glanced up at the sun, which showed an hour gone from the afternoon. One hour might lead from life to death.
"That arrow was sped by a master’s hand.” he muttered, estimating the smoke to be no more than a league away. "Now are we quits, Englishman. I will go my way.”
Long Michael shook his head. "Anon, youngling,” quoth he. "Gil du Brae hath a mind to query you as to the topsy-turvy state of this land.”
These last days, said Long Michael, the English company had come upon hamlets and halls emptied of their folk, and the people afoot on the roads with their finest gear piled into carts—all of which had enabled the English company to pick up many very choice gifts for themselves.
Gil du Brae stepped up to them. He was short and powerful, a scarred Norman with a knight’s broad belt, but with no family crest on his small oiled shield. An outcast knight, and a downright man. "I have heard that yonder”—and he nodded at the rising smoke—"lies the town of Brünn with a fair, rich abbey. Is that truth, Saxon?”
His small gray eyes slanted up at Arn, who shook his head. "The truth is, Sieur du Brae, that now you will find only wolf’s meat in Brünn.”
"My name is Gil.” The gray eyes gleamed angrily. "What you say, Saxon, is easy to say, hard to believe. Now, I understand little of the speech of this eastern land, yet it seems to me I have been told by its people that they are fleeing from three things; item: a plague from the east; item: the wrath of the Lord God; item: a horde of Tartars, so named. What of this, to your mind, is the truth?”
The answer burst from Arn, "The Tartar horde. Aye, it comes from the east, unknowable as the plague, and deadly as the wrath of God.”
Du Brae shrugged. "Abracadabra. Words. Who has seen one of these Tartars? Nay, the Germans are fleeing from rumors. I have seen that happen.”
Arn looked about him. Most of the archers were asleep around the broken wall; the girl was whimpering quietly again because a pair of them were making ready to butcher her cow.
"If you look, archers,” he said with an effort, "you can see them now.” From behind the groves, cattle appeared, trotting, with riders herding them.
"I see herders,” admitted Du Brae, "somewhat outlandish, and perhaps from Asia. As to that, I do not know.”
"They have short lances slung!” Arn cried urgently, "Aye, and curved swords! Mark the bow-and-arrow cases belted at each hip!”
The small bands of Tartars trotted on across the slope. They paid no apparent attention to the watchers on the knoll. Some of them swung long coiled ropes over the cattle they had rounded up. Probably, Arn thought, these riders who had never seen English archers took the watchers at the tower to be a handful of loitering men-at-arms with long yellow staves in their hands.
In his mind’s eye he saw again the field of the Christian dead in Bohemia. "You are afoot,” he cried to Du Brae, "and you cannot run from them now!”
"Hitherto,” the Norman said, "we have not shown our backs to any men.”
"These are not men, but devils!”
He did not see or hear the signal that set the strange riders in motion. Almost in the same instant they swung to charge the knoll. They lashed their shaggy horses up the slope, pulling light lances and swords forward over their shoulders, or catching up bows in their rein hands. Du Brae grunted.
Long Michael jumped up, shouting, "Now it seems these herders have a mind to us! Greet them cheerily, lads! Shoot all together!”
The Tartars, in compact bands, bent low to their horses; their rush carried them within two hundred paces, when arrows flicked suddenly into the sunlight from riders behind them. They mad
e no sound.
Arn sensed the lift of bows on either side of him, and heard the swish of invisible wings. When the long arrows struck them, the foremost riders and horses went down as if poleaxed. When, in five seconds, another flight swept the Tartars, they began to howl, and the living riders turned half hidden by their horses, to bend and catch up half a hundred dead and wounded. Then, burdened and still howling plaintively, they started to gallop away.
"Let be, men,” shouted Du Brae. "They bear off their wounded!”
The two-score archers standing around him lowered their bows. Meanwhile the rest of the company ran out of the tower and wall to see what was happening.
"What folk be these?” they demanded.
"While you snored,” explained Long Michael, grinning,"yon cavaliers came on briskly; then they ran like lambs before wolves.”
The new arrivals were of a mind to run after the apparently disordered riders. One archer had been killed and a half dozen wounded by the arrows of the Tartars. But Du Brae stopped them, frowning.
"It seems to me,” he mused, "that folk who are at such pains to carry off their slain will not run far from us.” There being no Tartars left on the slope to examine, the English fell to studying their arrows. These shafts were short and heavy, tipped with metal finer than the English iron. Steel, decided the archers. They jested about the arrows like boys picking up a ball at the end of a game.
The arrow fell close to the tower when the late-aftemoon shadows stretched across the fields. High in the air, it wailed like a banshee. It did no harm, for its head was a tube of thin metal pierced like a flute. Out of his head fell a coil of thin stuff whiter than vellum.
Examining the long shaft, red Michael declared it to be a flight arrow, and more, a whistling arrow. Unrolling the coil, he declared it to be a missive with writing, and he passed it to Du Brae, who said the writing was German. He called, "John of Lincoln!”
A florid archer, massive as a boar, heaved himself up with his beer horn. When he bent over the script, the short hair on the top of his head showed that he had been a tonsured monk. His head wagged drunkenly. "'By command,’” he read unsteadily, "’of the great K-Khan, yield yourselves ... ye who have stout hearts and long bows. If ye yield not, only God knoweth how hard your death will be.'” He raised hazy eyes. "Finis. That ends it.”
"My masters,” cried Arn, "if you render yourselves, they will cut the lives out of your bodies!”
Angrily, Du Brae silenced him. The company, said Du Brae, had been summoned, and the company must take counsel. He seemed to be the leader in taking thought, as Long Michael was in making war, and John of Lincoln in clerking. The whole company gathered around the cart in the yard, sober and silent.
When Du Brae called for a show of hands, no hands were lifted for surrender, and all hands showed for no surrender. Arn remained passive.
"The noes have it,” Du Brae announced. . . . "Now, Axman, you may say your say.”
They acted as if going through ritual. Still Arn saw a chance to escape with some of them. "You see well,” he pointed out, "the Tartars have not fled. They pretend to flee. Aye, they have great cunning in battle, so it goes hard with one who tries to catch a Tartar. I saw the bodies of the Templars who charged upon the Bohemian field. They had been stripped and their right ears cut off for a tally. Then a knight came by, bearing a message from good King Wenceslas. The message was that these horsemen from far Asia who obey the commands of the great Khan were the finest archers in the world.” The stolid red faces all turned toward him at that.
"More, he said that if they were not stopped in the German lands, there would be none to stand against them as far as the sea itself.”
Something like curiosity flickered in the listening faces.
"Big words!” snarled Du Brae. "Axman, what is your rede for us in this matter?”
Quickly, Arn seized the chance they gave him. "I have small wit, my masters, to give my rede in council. Yet my rede is that you do not try to stand against them. In an hour it will be dark. After that, scatter by tens or pairs, taking only weapons, and keeping to the forests toward the west. Some of us may well escape,” he pleaded. "Aye, the cunning Tartars may linger in their pursuit to examine your loo—— property stacked here.”
When he had said his say, Du Brae considered while Arn heard the girl milking the cow they had forgotten to slaughter. "My rede is,” said the Norman at last, "that we do not try to match cunning against cunning. Strong these pagan Tartars may be as wild boars in armor, yet some weakness they must have. A boar will rush against a spear, but he fears a flaming candle. In this affair,” he added thoughtfully, "the honorable course is also the wise course—to stand and face them until we find their weakness.”
"And by God’s own body,” roared Long Michael, "my rede is to have done with this clack! Let the gray goose feathers speak! Hang me a fire basket on the tower top, brave lads, to see by! Remember, into the field by day, into the walls at night!”
So the council ended. To Arn, Long Michael said, "Indeed, Saxon, you have little wit, to think that this company would disband or leave its hard-won property behind.”
Although his instinct told him the stolid English had doomed themselves, he felt it would be a shame to him to leave them. Besides, one man afoot would have little chance to go from the tower now. The girl, watching his face, offered him the wooden pail of foaming milk, and to please her, he drank some.
The woodcutters they sent out to the nearest grove after full starlight did not return. Michael’s cresset, flaming on the tower, burned wood swiftly, and they had thought to lay in more before the rising of the old moon. These lost men were their first sign that night.
When the cresset burned down to embers, and they could see scarce a stone’s throw from the broken wall, the second sign came as if to mock them. Along the edge of woodlands below and around them lights showed.
The lights danced to and fro like will-o’-the-wisps; they glared yellow and shimmered green, and one of them—a round red face with fangs for teeth—rose into the sky above them.
"Faith,” said Jakekin, "the moon hath drunk too much.”
"Allhallows,” muttered John the Monk, "Allhallows eve tonight.”
Arn tried to remember something he had heard—"the lanterns of Cathay.” They turned, and figures moved on them in a devils’ dance. When the archers would have shot at the elusive marks, Du Brae restrained them. "Here is only mockery. Wait to see if power comes.”
Yet the sense of power was in the waiting night. The old half moon silvered the eastern sky, and a distant drum sounded slowly. The lanterns went away as if to leave room for something else to come. The moon waned in the mist of the late-night cold, and many of the watchers slept, lulled by the monotony of the drum.
"They play us a fair lullaby,” muttered the Norman.
"So that we shall not wake,” growled Arn.
"A pox on the night,” yawned Long Michael, listening. "’Tis all but gone. Have you ever before now heard so many night birds calling?”
"Now that you remark it,” acknowledged Arn, "I have never heard so many before now, and it seems to me a matter that should be looked into.”
So the Axman let himself down to the earth and crawled through a break in the breast-high wall, to spy further into the night. He crawled, keeping his weapon carefully away from stones. And with his ear to the ground he heard presently a rustling that was not the wind. The beat of the distant drum almost drowned out this rustling of many feet. Lying still, he thought, They were stung by the English bows, so they are coming on afoot in the dark, when bows may not be used.
Peering from right to left without moving, he noticed that the lowest stars blotted out and shone again. Objects were passing him by. A sweat of fear chilled him, and he opened his mouth to call out.
As he did so, a howling of wolves resounded and feet rushed by. A musty animal smell came from the dwarflike Tartars. They were swarming over the wall before the first screams of pai
n and clash of metal sounded.
Then the clash became a steady rasping, and over it rang Long Michael’s shout, "Cheerily, my hearts! Shoulder to shoulder; sword and ax!”
Then came the battle shout of the archers, thrice repeated. They were standing against the Tartar rush.
Arn jumped up with beserk fury and leaped back among the hurrying gnomes. Flailing with both blades of his ax, he cleared a path to the wall, and hurdled the wall between the swords of the archers.
"You had harder work,” Jakekin’s voice yelled in his ear, "coming back, Axman!”
Shoulder to shoulder, but keeping elbowroom, the mailed men behind the wall fought in silence. In front of the wall the short-legged men kept up their howling, "Ghar, ghar, ghar!” their dark, steaming heads bent over the lacquered leather of their bodies as they climbed on bodies and lances against the wall.
When light broke through the mist in the east, they were gone with their wounded and dead. Behind the wall and in the tower some men still lived.
Long Michael lay at the back of the tower, where he had taken his post, with his red head beaten in. Gil du Brae sat propped against the cart in the yard, with air bubbling from his mangled chest and blood streaming from his gaping mouth, yet with his mind still his own. He made a sign for those to come to him who could come.
More than fifty of the company stood, and some others sat unaided except for the girl, who went among them with wet cloths and water in the horns. She did not weep, now that they no longer had hope.
When Gil du Brae saw the Axman leaning on his ax with his blood dripping down the haft, he spat his mouth clear and muttered, "Your night birds came and pecked us.” Then he signed for them to raise him up to behold what they were staring at.
Far down the slope through the thinning mist dark groups of horsemen moved about leisurely. They appeared fresh. These Tartars gleamed in chain armor; over them a standard pole was hung with white horsetails; white was the horse beneath their commander, a man of rank, it seemed, by his fur mantle and the glint of gold at his belt; behind him other officers waited. When Du Brae had estimated the number of them all at a thousand, he nodded to the Axman. "A fair mark the pagans make. What now is your rede?”