Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (39 page)

I started to do precisely that, raising my arms in the air like wings and preparing to spin around, but I froze instead, shocked into immobility by the sight of Ursus's bow and quiver lying on the path less than twenty paces from where I stood.

They lay there, in the open, like dead things, the two most valuable weapons Ursus and I possessed, and even before the first flare of panic had subsided, I was thinking about the reasons for their being there. Clearly they had been left for me to find, a warning of some kind. For some reason unknown to me but evidently imperative, Ursus had decided that I could make better use of the weapons in this instance than he could. That all seemed self-evident at first glance, but I had no understanding at all of what it meant and even less understanding of what had happened to Ursus and the horses. And then I saw how the path, just beyond where the weapons lay, veered sharply to the left and disappeared, concealed beyond the bend by a towering clump of vibrant dark green growth that I recognized as an ancient and impenetrable thicket of bramble briars.

Ursus had gone around the bend in the path with both horses, but before doing so he had stopped and removed the weapons from about his shoulders, laying them there for me. He knew I would be close behind him, but he had no means of knowing how close, and if he were walking into danger beyond that bend in the path that knowledge might be crucial. I snatched up the quiver and slung it over my shoulder, then dropped to one knee and nocked an arrow to the bow string. My intent was to listen, but even as I knelt I heard the sound of metal blades in contact, not ringing as they would in a fight but slithering along each other almost lazily as Ursus raised his voice.

"Come then, you ill-matched set of whoresons. Let's see if four Burgundians—or whatever you call yourselves in the underworld that spawned you—let's see if you can best one Roman Gaul. See, two blades I have, each one of them fit to kill a pair of you before you can puke your fear out. Come to me, then, and taste your deaths."

I edged around the bush in front of me, the bow string taut to my ear as my eyes sought the source of Ursus's voice. He was facing me across a clearing, perhaps a score of paces from me, his back against a tree trunk that was wider than his shoulders. Safe there from attack from behind, he stood on the balls of his feet, leaning slightly forward and rubbing the two long blades of the weapons he held, one against the other. They were his own spatha and mine, the one I had left hanging from Lorco's saddle bow when I took Tiberias Cato's weapon in its place. His eyes were narrowed in concentration but he was smiling, too, the confident smile of a man who knows he is about to take much enjoyment from some imminent activity. He saw me as soon as I appeared around the bush, I know, but he gave no sign of it. His torso weaved slightly from side to side as his eyes moved constantly, watching all four of his attackers simultaneously.

Our two mounts stood close by him on his left side, slightly behind him and beyond the tree, their trailing reins anchoring the animals where Ursus had dropped them on the ground. I knew immediately that he had led the horses there, to place them safely out of his way, and had then darted back to the tree, putting it solidly at his back.

The four men ranged against him, all of whom had their backs to me, had made no move to attack him yet, and looking at their posture, observing the uneasy, anxious way they traded glances back and forth among themselves, I could tell they were bemused, to say the least, by his behaviour. He should not have been smiling, not against odds of four to one. I could almost hear their minds working, worrying at the logic here, so much so, in fact, that my mind began framing antic thoughts about what they must be thinking: this fellow had two fine horses, both richly saddled and equipped, which meant that he was not alone. But he
was
alone and carrying two swords, one for each hand, which indicated that his companion, if he had one, must now be somewhere else without a weapon, and that made no sense at all, for no sane man would leave his sword behind him in strange territory. And that raised the possibility that this man had had a friend and lost him to death, burying him and continuing to journey with his possessions. Which meant, in turn, that this fellow—

With a snarl of fury, one of the four gave up his puzzling and launched himself towards Ursus. I let him go, knowing that Ursus had his measure. No sooner had this fellow started moving, however, than his accomplices joined him, all three of them lunging forward to assist the first man. None of them had seen me yet, and so I sighted on the leading runner of the three, a huge, gaunt man with long black hair and stilt-like legs that carried him out in front of the other two. I sucked a deep breath and then released it steadily as I followed his rush, obeying every lesson I had ever learned on sighting and shooting with a bow, and as the first clash of striking blades reached my ears I released and watched my arrow hiss across the space between me and the running target to hit him brutally hard in the neck, just behind the point of his jaw, and hurl him bodily off his feet and head over heels to roll and sprawl in a huddled mass just beyond the kneeling body of his friend, who had already been dispatched without ceremony by Ursus.

The behaviour of the remaining two men, after seeing their companion so suddenly and unexpectedly destroyed, might have been laughable under any other circumstances. I saw them hesitate in mid-charge, then break off their attack, spinning away from each other and from the perceived direction of the new threat they had found in me. One of them spun completely around and came running straight for me, covering ground at an enormous rate, while the other ran back the way he had come, pursued by Ursus.

My attention, however, remained focused on the shapeless huddle of drab rags that marked the first man I had ever killed. There was no doubt in my mind that he was dead. I had seen my arrow hit, and it had reminded me exactly of what had happened to my friend Lorco when a similar arrow hit him in approximately the same place. But this death was one that I had inflicted, personally. I had taken this man's life. He was now dead, finished, ended. He would never move or smile or laugh or eat or weep again, because I had killed him.

The fellow running at me now—and I could see him with utter clarity—was wide eyed with terror, plainly expecting me to raise my bow again and shoot him down before he could reach me. But filled as I was with the thought of what I had done to his companion, the thought of rearming my bow had not even occurred to me, and as I watched him come hurtling towards me I saw the white knuckles of the hand that held his upraised sword and accepted, somewhere at the back of my mind, that I was going to die there. Even as he began to straighten up for the death blow and his eyes showed dawning awareness that he was destined not to die before he could reach me, he stubbed his foot hard against something in his path and fell, sprawling forward and crashing heavily against me, grunting in my ear with the pain and with the effort of trying to recover his balance.

He was a big man, far taller than I and easily more than twice my weight, and the impact of our collision sent me flying and smashed the breath from me. Even as I crashed to the ground, however, I knew that the ancient goddess Fortuna had been watching over me. So complete had been his loss of balance that he had had no hope of swinging his sword, even although all his being had been focused upon cleaving me in two, and now we were both on the ground, both in one piece. I refused to yield to the urge to hunch over and hug my middle, which appeared to have been replaced by a ball of solid pain. Instead I bit down hard on my own cheek, focusing upon that pain, and forced my legs to swing up and over my head, rolling violently backwards on tucked shoulders until I could push myself to my knees and see what my opponent was doing.

He, too, had landed badly and winded himself, but where I had fallen on hard ground, he had fallen or bounced sideways into the enormous clump of brambles that had flanked me. His entire face was ripped by the wicked thorns of the bramble briars, as was the palm of the hand he was holding up to his eyes. I could see him gasping for air, too, and hear the great whooping noises that were coming from his open mouth. I scrambled away from him, pushing at the ground in my panic before my common sense began to return to me. He was at as great a disadvantage as I was for the moment and could do me no harm. But that would change if he recovered more quickly than I did. And so I forced myself to sit still and breathe deeply and steadily, willing my body to behave itself and recover its functions before my enemy did.

With a scream of pain and anger that would have frightened me mere days before, the giant facing me dragged himself to his feet, snarling with rage and agony and hacking determinedly with his sword at the briars that surrounded him on all sides. I felt a stirring of awe at his strength and endurance, for I knew how viciously the thousands of long, hooked barbs on those green stems, some of them as thick as a boy's wrist, were ripping at his muscled flesh. Even so, he made headway, gradually clearing a way out of the dragon's nest that held him, and when it became plain to me that he would soon be free, I realized too late that I should have reclaimed my abandoned bow and shot him dead long since. I looked about me then and saw the quiver that had fallen from my shoulder when the big man knocked me down. I counted six arrows in one brief glance, but could see no signs of the bow I had been holding.

And then it really was too late. The big man won free of his prison and reared up to his full height, raising his sword high above his head again and roaring something at me in a language I had never heard before. It was evident that he had no intention of missing his next swing at me.

Strangely enough, I felt not the slightest stirring of fear, though I had every reason to be afraid. I could not see a single patch of skin anywhere on my assailant's body that was not covered in blood. I had never seen anyone so bloodied. He was huge and he was angry and he was covered in severed, trailing lengths of barbed briars and coming to smite me into oblivion for having dared to cross his path and I felt no animosity towards him.

As he lurched towards me, however, I moved easily away from him, circling smoothly to my right, unsurprised by the awareness that I was moving that way in order to take advantage of the fact that he was left handed, and as I moved, the spatha by my side, for so long the property of Tiberias Cato, seemed to spring into my hand by magic. I saw his eyes narrow at the sight of my unsheathed blade, and then he snarled again and raised his right hand to his forehead to wipe the blood from his eyes, and the contempt in his gesture was unmistakable. I hefted my weapon, feeling its balance, and moved again towards his sword arm, inhibiting him and forcing him to step back and away as he sought to raise his blade high for a clean swing at me. I heard Tiberias Cato's voice again in my mind, explaining to us, as he had at least a hundred times each year, that the wooden practice swords we used every day had been used by Roman legionaries for a thousand years, and that they had been designed in the earliest days of Rome to be twice the weight of a real sword, so that a man's muscles, accustomed to dealing with the heavy practice swords, would rejoice in the apparent weightlessness of the real thing.

I reversed direction, moving left and away from him now and freeing him to use the full extent of his long, left-handed swing. I watched carefully, gauging my moment, then leaped away, a long jump that took me well clear of his clumsy, sweeping blade so that it hissed by me a good arm's length from my right knee. I gave him sufficient time to rally and try for me again, and again I leaped nimbly beyond his reach.

By the time we had repeated the same moves a fourth time he was beginning to flag. His blade was heavy, as well as long, and the effort of swinging it and missing was, if anything, more damaging than anything else he might have done. His anger increasing visibly now with every heartbeat, he snarled something unintelligible at me, and I knew he was defying me to stand and fight, or more accurately to stand still and let him kill me. I grinned at him, drawing my lips back to show him all my teeth, and prepared to repeat the dance, even hesitating in preparation for leaping away, but this time he was determined that I would not skip away from him again, and as I began my spring to the left he threw himself after me, withholding his swing until he was sure of me.

Even as he launched himself, however, I had already shifted my balance, and jumped this time to his right, landing behind him as he charged past me and crouching to sweep the end of my blade hard across the unprotected back of his knees. The double-edged tip of the blade missed the hamstrings this time, but sliced deeply into the thick muscles of his left calf.

With a bellow of rage the monstrous man swung around with impossible speed, slashing at my face as he came towards me. I threw my upper body sharply backwards, almost falling over but avoiding the hissing slash of his blade and managing somehow to counter his attack with a blow of my own, blade against blade, my right-handed blow against his left, smashing his blade down and away from me so that his entire body followed the line of his swing and I ended up behind him again. I leaned forward, my weight on the balls of my feet, and closed with him quickly, stabbing hard, but my blade hit solid metal and its tip slid off the back of a cuirass I had not expected, worn beneath his tunic rather than over it.

Again he turned and came at me, but this time I detected a new respect in his approach. He paused, watching me, waiting for me to move, and when I did not, he changed his grip on his sword, holding it differently, more like a sword now than an axe, and began to circle me, moving now to my right, forcing me to move left against my natural inclination. The aversion I felt to moving so unnaturally reminded me of yet another lesson from my mentor Cato for dealing with a left-handed opponent.

I shifted my weight and took two quick steps towards my assailant, leading off with my right foot and then stepping forward and to the left. The sudden move took me right inside his guard and put me in front of him, within smelling length of his unwashed body, my sword arm raised in expectation of his next blow. It was an awkward, ill-formed hack, as I knew it would be, useless from the start because I was all at once too close to him too suddenly. I caught his blade on my own with no effort and turned it aside, and as it fell away past me I dropped my right shoulder, pivoted to the left and thrust my blade into the flesh below his navel, below his cuirass. It was a classic stroke, and I carried it out as I had been taught, twisting my wrist sharply to free the buried blade and jerking it straight back and away before the sundered flesh could clamp around it and before the dying man could drop his hands to grasp it.