Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (60 page)

We came together head on, in a wild, charging melee that seemed to have developed of its own accord. I had had some thought of splitting my squadron into two groups and spearing into the middle of the enemy formation, but before I could even begin to issue orders I saw them charging right towards us at the full gallop. We had no option other than to fight or run, and so we fought. I led my men directly towards the oncoming enemy, and by the time the two lines met, both sides were advancing at the full gallop.

I was unhorsed on the first pass because my mount went down, smitten in the neck by a hand axe, and I flew right over its head. I should have been killed then and there, for I was winded for a long time, but in the heat of the fighting no one paid me any attention and I was able to collect myself and find a riderless horse. It was a stallion, and it had no wish to be ridden any further that day. Unfortunately, in a battle of wills between him and me, he was destined to lose. As I was trying to catch hold of his bridle, a rider came galloping by on his other side. He knew I was not one of his, but he was galloping hard and could not reach me from where he was, so he slashed at the horse, trying to disable it. His slash was ill timed, however, and poorly aimed because of his speed, so that instead of wounding or crippling the horse, the flat of his blade smacked against the beast's rump, and the animal, already terrified out of its wits, erupted into a run. I went with it, for there was nothing else I could think to do. I twisted my fingers into its mane and ran alongside it in great, bounding strides until I grew confident enough to take my weight on my arms and raise both feet, then drop them back to earth and thrust myself up and back into a vaulting swing that landed me astride the horse's back. Once there, and free of the press for a moment, since we had run far beyond the fighting, I brought him to a stop and gathered up the reins, and as I turned to ride back towards my command, I saw my cousin Samson.

He, too, had evidently managed to swing out of the scrabble of the fight, flanked as always by his two most faithful followers, Jan and Gurrit, a pair of loyal stalwarts who might have been twins, so similar did they appear to be at a casual glance, and who had appointed themselves as Samson's personal bodyguards. I first saw him because his trio of riders were the only people moving in that area and my eye went to them automatically, assessing the potential danger there and recognizing Samson and his escorts immediately.

They were angling back towards the crush of the main fight, riding close together in a tight arrowhead with Samson in the lead and Jan and Gurrit pressing hard on his flanks. It was clear to me in my first, sweeping glance along the line of their attack to their intended target that they were aiming to use the concerted weight of their horses to drive a wedge into the exposed right flank of the enemy formation, but it was equally clear that someone in the enemy ranks had already anticipated what they would do and was moving quickly to counter them, dispatching a group of five riders to interpose themselves between Samson and their own force and give their comrades time to close the weakness in their formation.

I was more than a hundred paces from where the two small groups would meet, but I put my spurs to my new horse and drove him hard towards the convergence point, knowing that I would be too late to take part in the clash of the meeting and feeling the dread of foreknowledge swelling in my chest and threatening to choke me. Three against five was not particularly great odds, but my store of optimism had been sadly depleted during the previous few weeks and I no longer held high expectations of anything other than defeat and disappointment.

Sure enough, while the two groups were yet separated by a gap of twenty paces or more, I saw one of the enemy swinging what appeared to be a slingshot of some kind over his head, and moments later one of Samson's companions, I could not tell which, threw up his arms violently and toppled backwards, the helmet sent flying from his head by the force of the enemy projectile. He had barely hit the ground when the two groups closed with a meaty collision of horseflesh and the clang of hard-swung weapons. Samson's other man, the one on my side of the action, went down, hard, his arms outflung as he fell or was knocked sprawling from his mount. I was fifty paces distant now, galloping flat out, and I saw the blood spraying from the open slash in the falling man's neck, spreading like a red fog as he went down.

Samson's horse was rearing, turning on its hind legs as he hacked at the men surrounding him, making no visible impression on any of them. I howled in protest as I saw one of them, and then a second one, dance their horses clear of the tussle, leaving the uneven fight to their three companions while they distanced themselves slightly and took careful aim with short, heavy, wide-bladed spears. They threw together, and both missiles hit squarely, penetrating my cousin's armour and piercing his back, their blades less than a handsbreadth apart. The two impacts, occurring almost simultaneously, knocked Samson forward at first, threatening to tip him over his horse's ears, but he stopped himself from falling somehow, and then the combined weight of the two dragging spear shafts pulled him backwards and unseated him. He fell in such a way that the butts of the spear shafts hit the ground first, the points driving forward through Samson's chest. For a space of several heartbeats he hung suspended on the upright spears before they fell over backwards.

I was screaming by that point, and almost among the men who had killed him. I saw them turning to face me, their faces registering surprise because until hearing my screams, they had not known I was
coming at them
.
I aimed
my horse directly at the two spear
throwers, who were sitting side by side and had not yet had any opportunity to arm themselves in any other way. My horse hit the closest man's mount with his shoulder and sent horse and rider flying, and I aimed a short, chopping stab of my spatha at the second man as I passed him, driving the point of my blade cleanly into the soft flesh under his chin. I felt the steel tip lodge against what could only have been his spine, killing him instantly as I swept by and turned in my saddle to allow the momentum of my passage to pull the tip of my sword free.

Another of the remaining three riders tugged frantically at his reins, trying to pull his horse around to face me, but he had reined his horse in so that he could watch Samson as he fell and, in consequence, he had no momentum. He was heavily bearded, but I saw every line on his face above the growth clearly as I killed him, too, driving the point of my spatha through his right eye. I pulled the point free again immediately and swung back-handed at someone who was trying to reach me from behind my right shoulder, and as I did so I saw the unhorsed spearman moving towards me on the ground, carrying the bloodstained spear that he had recovered from Samson's body. Something hit me heavily across the shoulders, once and then again, and I felt my horse collapsing beneath me. I glanced down and saw that the spearman had butchered it, and I threw myself from the saddle before I could be pinned beneath its body. I rolled and came up on my knees beside the body of my cousin, watching the last three of his killers preparing to kill me, too. The spearman on foot had his weapon pointing at me again and the other two were moving apart to come at me from two sides. Then came a sound of charging hoofbeats and a babble of voices shouting my name as a squad of my own troopers charged past me and my three adversaries were cut down.

Shaken by the swiftness of events and my unexpected rescue, I tried to rise to my feet but found that I was incapable of raising either of my knees from the ground. I turned instead to the ruined body of my cousin Samson and bent forward to close his eyes, which, by some strange mischance, appeared to be staring directly into mine, although they were already glazed with that peculiar emptiness that differentiates a dead body from a living one. I remained there, kneeling over him for some time as I tried to find words to pray for his soul. But that was one of the few times in my entire life that I found myself unable to utter a single word of prayer.

The battle had been a complete disaster for us. We had won again, according to the butcher's accounting, but I knew we could never hope to recover from such losses and we were finished as a cohesive fighting force. The enemy had left thirteen dead men on the field and more than half again as many horses—we had no way of knowing how many of the survivors had been wounded or how serious those wounds were. We, however, had lost eight men dead and a full score more bore wounds of one kind or another, although, miraculously, none of those were serious enough to be life-threatening. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the injured horses. Few horses injured in battle could ever be healed, and although only five of our horses—two of them mine—had been killed outright during the fighting, we had to kill seven more wounded animals. We had not been at full strength at the start of the battle, fielding only half a hundred fighting men instead of our normal three score, but when the activities were all over and the dead all buried—with the sole exception of Samson, whose body we would take with us—we assembled to make our way homeward and we presented a sorry sight, even to ourselves. We numbered thirty-two whole men out of our original strength of sixty.

Weary and discouraged, I gave the signal to proceed, and we headed home with our dead King at our center, laid out on a makeshift bier on the bed of the light two-horse supply wagon that always accompanied us on our expended raids. He lay on his back on a thick bed of fresh-cut reeds, his hands crossed upon his chest beneath the expanse of his war cloak, which, arranged in careful folds, served to conceal his body from profane eyes and the indignities of weather.

My first thoughts at the start of that journey were all to do with my cousin Brach, who had now become King of Benwick with Samson's death. He would be beside himself, I knew, over both the loss of his beloved brother and the unsought, unwished-for accession to the status of kingship. Brach, despite his visual splendor and apparent suitability to play the King's role, was not a man who would ever enjoy the pomp and ceremonies that went with being a monarch. Spectacular as were his exploits in war, he was nonetheless too genuinely humble and too self-effacing ever to be comfortable in such a highly visible capacity as that of King of Benwick. But then, I thought, life seldom asks us for our approval in advance of what it decrees for us. Brach's fate was to be a king. He could not control that, any more than I could control what my destiny might be.

I spent the remainder of the journey, then, deliberating about what I would say to Chulderic when we arrived at the castle, but he was waiting for us when we reached the red-walled caves, and I went into conference with him immediately, drawing him aside to where we could speak without being overheard.

With Samson's death, I told him, we had reached the limits of our cavalry's usefulness as a striking force. We were dangerously, almost fatally, vulnerable in terms of renewable numbers—of both men and horses. We were still able, barely, to continue replacing the troopers who were killed or left unable to ride and fight on, but we had exhausted our supply of able veterans and were now reduced to using untrained riders—foot soldiers and young boys who dreamed of glory in riding out to war but barely knew one end of a horse from the other, with some of them believing that horses had tails purely to indicate that feeding the animal should be performed from the other end. The time had come, I told Chulderic, for us to cut our losses and consolidate the strengths remaining to us by keeping our surviving riders in the castle, acting as defensive garrison troops, and their horses inside the caves where they would be held in reserve pending an emergency.

Chulderic had sat staring at Samson's covered bier on the wagon bed as he listened to me, and now he nodded his head and agreed with my assessment of the situation. We would take Samson in and bury him within the castle walls, he said, and then we would prepare for a siege. But while we were doing that, we would also work to reopen the postern gate, the old, walled-up doorway above the lakeside rocks at the rear of the castle. Thus, he opined, we would have two means of exit should the need for escape ever arise.

Hearing him say those words demonstrated to me, more than anything else could have, just how bad our situation was. At the outset of the war, Chulderic would never have voiced such a possibility. Within the space of a short couple of months, however, his entire outlook on life had changed, and every facet of the changes involved reflected in some way upon the perfidy and evil of the man against whom he was fighting.

Gunthar had never been a lovable person, even as a boy, and my own memories of him from my childhood days were of a sullen, melancholy young man with a foul temper and an unpleasant disposition. He was lavish with incessant insults, utterly uncaring whom he offended. His reputation had grown less and less wholesome and his behaviour more and more violent as he aged, too, and most people came to prefer simply to stay out of his way. The most frightening thing about Gunthar, however, was his unpredictability. Of all his many attributes, that one alone was utterly predictable, and it frightened everyone, including his closest allies. And in the very recent past, we had heard persistent rumours that his behaviour was growing ever more and more outrageous, erratic and capricious, and that even his closest associates were increasingly apprehensive of being too long around him at any one time, fearful for their own lives. We had dismissed most of what we heard, however, principally because of the way it came to us. Rumours without some kind of solid ratification were seldom reliable.

6

Three days after that conversation with Chulderic, on the day following Samson's interment in one of the castle's interior courtyards, I was summoned to join Brach shortly after dawn. I had been up late, serving as captain of the night watch, and so had been asleep for little more than an hour when I was roughly shaken awake. Annoyed, but knowing that Brach would not disturb my sleep without good cause, I splashed water over my head, my face and the back of my neck and toweled myself into wakefulness before going to join him.