Elisha Barber: Book One Of The Dark Apostle (29 page)

Everywhere he looked, men lay dying, this one taken through the eye—a lucky shot at such distance. Another pierced through the chest, another already gone, five shafts at least bristling from his body. Still more lay wounded, clutching an arm or leg, struggling to stem the flow of their own blood. “Good Lord, Madoc, I can’t leave them.”

Madoc tightened his grip, giving Elisha a fierce look. “They’re well back, and most’ll make their way from the field, those as are likely to live in any case. Wait’ll we get beyond. When the fight’s well passed, you’ll come back.” He grinned. “Aye, I believe that you’ll come back.”

Something cracked, and Elisha flinched, looking up to the tower. When the sound came again, he realized it was thunder. As the rain began, a cheer rose from the men. Elisha couldn’t figure why this should make them happy. Presumably, mud could only bog down their progress.

Then the next flight of arrows fell, many of them tipped with balls of flame. A few struck and ignited the branches, but the flames died as the rain fell harder.

Brigit’s oath echoed in the back of his head, “Fire and flood,” her merry voice cheering him, if only in memory.

A shape of flame fled past them, accompanied by a keening wail.

“Get down!” he bawled to the burning man, who struggled with the arrow which stuck from his side. By the time the soldier fell, it was too late. Rain sizzled on his charred flesh, and Elisha felt a wave of nausea.

He staggered, colliding with Madoc who caught him up in a strong arm. “Soon,” Madoc muttered, “Soon, I’ll let you fall.”

Dizzy, Elisha barely felt the rain that soaked him, weighing down his already heavy hair. Terror and agony surrounded him, thick in the air as a swarm of bees. Again and again he felt the cold touch of death, familiar now and still awful as it played along his flesh with the rain. Madoc’s arm alone kept him upright and in the shadow of the siege tower.

Elisha numbly went over his recent training. There must be something he could do, some affinity here that would save these men’s lives, some mystery or
knowledge. Days of changing seeds into eggs, eggs back into seeds again now haunted him as time he’d lost in idle play.

Arrows fell like rain, he thought, and rain like arrows, sharp and stinging on his burned chest. He hugged his arms closer, Collum’s kitchen knife held close to his side.

Feeling the icy bite of death, Elisha raised his head. Rain splashed on his upturned face. Rain flowed like tears down his cheeks, like a river down his back.

Elisha willed his presence into the rain. He shook off Madoc’s arm and dragged his pouch around to the front, laying his left hand over it, feeling for the strip of cloth given him by someone who cared.

Arrows to raindrops, wind to water—one degree only, wasn’t it? Was it? He bent his will to it, picturing Brigit, almost thinking he could hear the voices of the others around him. Concentrate, hold the image, transform the image, touch the talisman, feel its power to support you. Touch the thing you must change.

Arrows swished through the rain. Elisha felt them falling, a thousand tiny pricks along his skin.

Contact.

Far away, soldiers cried out in astonishment. Some cheered, some cried out for the Lord or for His angels.

From the heavens, thunder answered them.

Thunder and rain.

E
lation flushed Elisha’s skin.
He stared in wonder as no arrows fell. Men stumbled, searching the sky, the downpour suddenly heavier. Shouts echoed down the line. Off to the left, a spear and pike quickly became a cross, raised up to the sky.

“Sweet Jesus and Mary,” Madoc said. “Where’d they go?”

Stifling a giggle, Elisha did not trust himself to answer. The casting left him giddy and weak, as if he’d spread himself too thin and had trouble to get himself together again.

“The king’ll think he’s blessed now for sure.”

The banner bearer piped up, “It’s we who’re blessed. May God stay with us.”

“Aye, you’ve said it.”

“Maybe the rain took them down,” someone suggested in a hushed tone.

“Or witchcraft.”

A hiss rose at this suggestion. “Heaven forbid!”

“No, lads,” Madoc assured them, “the devil has no wish to save such as us.”

A boom sounded up ahead, and the ground lurched. “Bombards,” Madoc shouted.

Elisha nodded as a second blast rocked them.

“Falling well short though. What’ve they done with the big ’un?” Madoc was muttering, keeping his head down. Noting a pit they passed, he nodded to himself. “Almost in range. Cross yourself, Barber, we’re at it soon.”

Another boom, then the air around them cracked open, a man-made
wind blowing their clothes as the concussive passage knocked down a few men on the right.

Yanking Elisha half off his feet, Madoc dragged him in that direction. “Down and quick!” he shouted, throwing Elisha into the mud and following himself as the men around them scrambled to do likewise.

Moments later, a second blast shattered the air around them, shaking the earth. The unseen stone smashed through the siege tower, sending up a fountain of debris as it slammed to earth behind. The tower groaned and tilted, shuddering. Men hesitated, then flung themselves away as the bulk that had once protected them came crashing down.

Slivers of wood and a shower of branches rained over them.

The screams of the dying, momentarily silenced by Elisha’s own miracle, broke in along with the timber, shattering his reveries. Elisha moaned, touched by so many. He covered his ears, but it wasn’t the air alone that brought them.

On the contrary, as he had touched the rain to turn the arrows, now the rain struck back, carrying the horror of the maimed and dying. This was not the directed communication of one magus to another—he could not sense their thoughts or hear their voices, but the contact he forged conveyed their emotions with an awful clarity. Sensitive, Sage had called him, but he did not know what that meant until now.

Darkness whirled around him. From all sides came the eager cold of death, not so strong as that in his gruesome, now buried talisman, but rather as an army of a hundred deaths. As each death faded, two more swelled to take its place. The rain brought them down upon him, piercing as arrows of ice. Worse yet, the mud which embraced him carried their cries through the very earth, in through the wetness of his clothes, in through the brand upon his chest. A gale of tortured souls surrounded him, such moaning and weeping that he was lost within it. The fingers of Death caressed his skin, leaving a wake of frost.

His teeth chattered so hard he feared they must break. Desperately, he fought the freezing mud, only to find the warmth of a hand pressing him down. Words penetrated his pounding skull.

“Down! Stay down,” Madoc urged. “Be dead. The line’s well ahead now.” Shifting the branches that covered him, Madoc brought his lips close to Elisha’s
ear. “Keep still a while, let us get on—you’ll hear the horsemen pass you, then do what you will.”

Shaking his head urgently, Elisha only made himself more dizzy, and his face fell again, the mud smearing his cheek where once an angel had touched him. Now the panic threatened to overwhelm him. He had to get up, somehow, to escape the ooze, even if he could not flee the rain.

Madoc had thrown them into the pit of a previous blast where water gathered that much more quickly. Elisha rolled over, shivering, his hands shaking so much he could barely turn them to his will. With elbows and flailing knees, he flung off the branches and scrambled uphill.

More debris rained down on him, more screams added to the din. He couldn’t see, his chilled hands couldn’t tell if he climbed on mud or stone or the ruins of the siege tower. Then they struck something warm.

Elisha let out a cry and collapsed again onto his belly, gathering the heat to him, the small warm body of the banner bearer.

Mastering his fear, Elisha held on to the warm, unconscious boy, feeling the life in him. His palms thawed with the sense of the boy’s faith, and his one-time eagerness for glory, for the admiration he had toward Madoc, and the fleeting heat of memories Elisha could not quite touch as they raced by.

Grudgingly, Death gave ground, retreating one terrible step at a time, withdrawing the freeze, then the pain, then the horrible sounds of men who could no longer speak.

Some time later, the earth trembled as the cavalry rode by, accompanied by shouts and the clanking of steel, sending a brief shower of mud down upon them, and a few more wails from the wounded, wails that shivered into Elisha’s heart.

At last, Elisha lay quiet. Rain washed away most of the mud clinging to him, but it was just rain, and the mud was only earth after all.

He took a deep breath, and let it out. His second breath went deeper yet, drawing in a sense of his own aches, and the burn on his chest soothed by the mud plastered against it. His third breath ruffled the curly locks of the boy who lay beside him. After a moment, Elisha reached out his hand to touch the boy’s throat. The pulse beat slow but steady. He inched himself up just a little. His arms still trembled. Elisha ran his hand gently over the boy’s arms
and legs, finding no arrow strike or obvious wound. Carefully, he turned the face toward his own.

A reddened patch stood out in sharp relief on the lad’s temple, remnant of a heavy blow. Still, the skull beneath held no fracture. Even as Elisha smoothed back the hair to check the extent of the blow, the boy’s eyes flew open, and he flinched from the touch.

Immediately, the banner bearer started to rise, then slumped back, both hands at his head. “By the cross,” he muttered, blinking at Elisha.

“You’re all right,” Elisha told him, “but you’d better rest a bit to get your senses back.”

“I’ve got to find Madoc,” the boy said, trying to shake his head and giving up with a groan. With one hand, he groped across the mud until he found the pole and the banner lying beneath him. “Got to take them on.”

“Wait, wait,” Elisha murmured. “Like this, you’ll only blunder up and be killed.”

A pretty blare of horns sounded some way off, and the boy rolled himself over, his head swaying as he tried again to rise. “That’s the charge!”

Still shaky himself, Elisha caught his arm.

“Let me go, I’ll not go home to Mum and tell her I’ve spent the battle lying in a pit.”

“Lad,” Elisha said, “You saved my life; let that content you until your head clears at least.”

Turning wide dark eyes on him—the pupils two different sizes—the boy breathed, “Me? I don’t remember that.”

Elisha smiled faintly. “Take my word for it, if not for you, I’d be a dead man.”

Sinking back to the earth, the boy grinned. “That means every life you save here on out is due to me.”

Laughing, Elisha tested his left arm, finding it adequate, if still throbbing. “Yes, my boy, it’s true.”

“Well, I’d better rest up for my next feat.” He drew one arm up over his face as his eyes slid shut, the concussion overcoming him once more.

“I’ll come check on you,” Elisha murmured, then he raised his head.

At the bottom of the pit below, three men lay in the mud. Two had their
eyes wide in that unblinking astonishment of death, but the third moaned, hand scraping feebly at the earth.

Shimmying back down the slope, Elisha retrieved Collum’s kitchen knife—it might yet come in handy—and tucked it at the back of his belt. He shifted his emergency pouch to the side and crept over to the wounded man. Heaving aside one of the corpses, he quickly saw the twist of the wounded man’s arm at his back and the blood seeping through his hair.

“I’m the barber,” he whispered to the man’s ear, and the eyes fluttered open, a trace of a smile touched the soldier’s lips. “Good. You’ve got a break in your arm, it doesn’t look bad, but it’ll hurt when I set it, hear me?”

As he spoke, his strong fingers searched out the break, judging where to hold, where to press just so. Relief welled up in him; watching the shaking of his hands, he had thought of his boast to the physician. His hands were the only thing he had faith in, and they had looked to fail him not so long ago. Now, the power returned, if a little slower than he would like.

Carefully, he placed his hands and eased the shifted bone back into place. He tore the sleeve from one of the corpses, the worn fabric washed by the rain until it was nearly as clean as any bandage back at the hospital. With the break bound, he probed the back of the man’s head, finding a small scalp wound, bloody, but not serious.

Withdrawing, he inched over to lie face to face with the soldier. “You’re fine, but lie still. There’s a cut at the back which should give up bleeding soon.”

“Thanks,” the soldier said.

Nodding his acknowledgement, Elisha crept on past, climbing the opposite bank on his stomach to get a view of the battlefield. Elisha pushed his hair back from his face, spending a minute to bundle it all together again. Ahead, and nearer than he’d ever seen it, stood the duke’s castle.

As he watched, he heard the bombards blast, but on the far side. One of the tree-topped hills beyond the castle trembled, then slipped from view in a cloud of dust, quickly dissipated by the rain. The ground shook as from an earthquake and finally lay still again. Elisha brushed raindrops from his face, staring at the place where the vanished hill once was. On the tall castle towers, storm winds shook bold pennants like taunting tongues.