The Horsemasters (50 page)

Neihle nodded gravely.

“You will command the Red Deer men who are fighting in the left wing,” Ronan said. He hesitated infinitesimally. “And I will command the Red Deer men in the right.”

Unwar made a sharp sound of surprise.

Neihle and Ronan were looking at each other. “The men of the Red Deer will be proud to follow you,” Neihle said at last, slowly and deliberately.

Nigak raised his nose from Ronan’s thigh and pricked his ears forward, as if in acknowledgment of a tribute.

“And the center?” Haras asked.

“The men of the Wolf, led by Bror, and the men of the Fox and the Bear, led by Matti.”

Unwar chewed reflectively on his dried deer meat, then nodded his approval. His heavy-lidded eyes looked around the faces of his fellow chiefs. “We are all of us fighting for our homes, for our wives and for our children,” he said. “Perhaps this is not the place I would have chosen to make our stand, but we are here. This night we will win or we will die; there is no middle way.”

Ronan looked at the Leopard chief in surprise. He had not expected such a sentiment from Unwar.

“Unwar speaks true,” Haras said and bowed his noble head.

A bird called in the silence, a high clear trilling sound in the dying day.

“Get some sleep,” Ronan advised them all. “We will move out in four hours’ time.”

Chapter Thirty-five

Moonlight bathed the world in a glimmer of silvery luminescence. In the nighttime silence, nearly two hundred men lifted their spears and their shields and fell in behind their leaders. Then, still in silence, they began slowly to descend the tree-strewn hill that sloped to the meadow whereupon the Horsemasters lay sleeping in their camp.

Fenris had built big fires to ward off any predators that might be seeking to drink from the river during the night, and Ronan was certain there were men posted to keep watch on both the fires and the surrounding meadow. But no outcry came from the camp. No sentry had seen the men creeping so carefully down the hillside.

When they were almost to level ground, the men of the tribes formed up behind their leaders in the battle positions they had been given. When the quick and silent disposition was finished, the left and the right wings were each four lines deeper than was the center, which was composed only of the men of the Wolf under Bror and the remnants of the Fox and the Bear tribes under Matti.

“I am giving you the toughest job,” Ronan had said to Bror back at camp when he apprised Bror of his plans. “I am asking you to hold the center, and I am not giving you enough men to do it.”

Bror thought of those words now, as he took his place in the front line and looked over his shoulder at the men to his rear. His eyes fell upon Heno, who was directly behind him. Heno grinned and lifted his spear slightly. Bror smiled back and turned around to face forward once more, his heart suddenly swollen with love for these men who formed the fellowship known as the Tribe of the Wolf.

Still nothing stirred in the camp by the river, eerily lit by the leaping fires. Silence enveloped the world. Bror did not know how Thorn and Mait were keeping the horses so quiet, but they were. Then, from the farthest end of the right wing, Ronan’s voice rang out, “Now!”

Bror started to move forward at a steady trot, and out of the sides of his eyes, he saw the men beside him move forward with him. Behind him the rest of the men would be scrambling down the last of the hillside and falling into their places in the line.

It was a quarter of a mile to the Horsemasters’ camp. They were halfway there when the thunder of horse hooves from farther down the valley told Bror that Thorn and Mait had made their move.

Shouts were coming now from the Horsemasters’ camp, and the firelight showed men scrambling out of sleeping skins and grabbing their spears. Still the tribes came on at a slow and steady pace. Ronan wanted them to stay together, not to separate and go searching among the camp for victims. “Give them a chance to come to us,” he had said to the gathered men earlier in the night. “Let them throw themselves upon our line. Do not be betrayed into breaking!”

Bror could see now that the Horsemasters were hastily forming up into a band to oppose them. From his place in the front line, he could hear a deep voice shouting what must be orders. Then the first bunch of the enemy was running forward, spears forward, straight at the advancing line of tribesmen.

“Steady!” Bror called to his men and kept his shield in place, his spear level. He saw the man who was coming toward him and braced himself for the encounter.

The first wave of the defending Horsemasters hit into the Federation line with a shock and went down. Bror kicked at the dead body under his foot. The man’s spear had bounced right off his shield. Bror grinned.

Suddenly, the night was split with the screams of a stallion. Next came a cacophony of wild whinnies and thundering hooves. No need to worry about them getting to their horses, Bror thought with glee. The horses are gone.

Another wave hit the Federation line, and then another, and the tribes held strong.

The same deep voice made itself heard, even over the noise of the horses, and the men of the Horsemasters began to form into a more organized grouping. Again they came on, and this time each man Bror killed was followed by another. They were gaining more and more in number, and the weight of the onslaught was forcing Bror back, He looked in desperation at both of the Federation wings and saw that they were holding. It was only the undermanned center that was being pushed back.

“Hold!” Bror shouted to the men around him. “Hold!” Two men down from him, he saw Dai manage a step forward. Then Okal was at Dai’s side. Bror surged forward himself, and the men of the Wolf came after him.

The Horsemasters were far greater in number, but their shorter spears and lack of shields gave them a vulnerability the men of the tribes did not possess. Nor had they been trained to keep an even front and act with a regular movement, as the Federation men had been. They were incredibly brave, rushing forward again and again in desperate groups, striving to force a lane into the Federation line and break it. But the tribes were feeling their superiority, and even though the relentless attacks told upon their inferior numbers, the sight of the slaughter they had already done gave them the courage to keep on.

The fight went on in the moonlit valley.

Bror wasn’t sure when it happened, but all of a sudden he realized that the center was under heavier pressure. It seemed as if the enemy at last had perceived the weakness in Ronan’s disposition and was attacking it.

Furiously, the Horsemasters hurled themselves again and again into the center. Bror’s arm and wrist and shoulder ached from the blows he was taking upon his shield. Next to him, he saw Cree go down. The man who had felled him bent swiftly and picked up Cree’s shield. Then he came after Bror.

Bror parried the spear blows with his shield, but he could not retaliate as effectively as he had previously, for now the enemy had a shield also. Bror glanced up briefly into his enemy’s implacable face and recognized Fenris.

“Dhu,” he muttered under his breath.

Fenris shouted something to his men and, with a mighty blow, forced Bror to step back. Bror felt the line behind him starting to give.

“Hold!” he cried furiously.

But at last the weakness of the center was being exploited. Fenris shoved past Bror, and then another man followed behind the kain. The Horsemasters had breeched the line.

“Run,” Bror heard Dai screaming at him. “Run for the hill, Bror. We can regroup there!”

Realizing there was no longer a line for him to hold together, Bror followed Dai’s instructions and ran.

As soon as he reached the shelter of the trees on the mountain, Bror turned. Most of the men had reached the hill before him and were waiting to see if the Horsemasters would follow. Bror hoped desperately that they would.

It soon became clear, however, that Fenris was not going to be lured into a pursuit. He had got a wedge of his men in between Ronan’s two wings and was clearly going to try to exploit the divided ranks of the enemy.

The outcome would depend upon how successful the tribes had been up until now, Bror thought despairingly, as he yelled for his men to form up again. Had they killed enough of Fenris’s men?

“Should we charge again?” Matti asked eagerly.

“Wait,” Bror said. “Wait and see first where Ronan will need us the most.”

The men of the center waited tensely, Bror watching to see if the Horsemasters were still strong enough to attempt a flanking movement around one of the wings.

Nothing happened. Fenris appeared to have concentrated all of his remaining forces in the center. They were fighting on two sides, but there were enough of them to hold their position. The battle raged on, neither side appearing to have enough power to strike the killing blow.

Then, as Bror watched, the far end of the tribes’ right wing detached itself and swung around in orderly formation toward the back of the center, Ronan was outflanking the Horsemasters!

With a broad grin splitting his dirty, bloody face, Bror roared to his men to follow and ran forward to join with his chief.

The shock of the new attack from behind was what finally broke the Horsemasters. Many of the men, seeing the tribesmen running from the mountains, did not realize that Ronan’s center had broken and thought it was a new force entering the fight. In fear and confusion, the Horsemasters turned and ran.

Many of the tribesmen were hot to follow, but Ronan’s voice, miraculously audible over all the tumult, ordered them to stay. Within a few minutes, quiet had fallen on the body-strewn plain. The battle was over. Bror thought with stunned incredulity: We won.

* * * *

As the sun slowly rose in the eastern sky, the cleanup after the battle continued. The Federation dead and wounded had already been collected, the totals being an incredible thirty-one wounded and eighteen dead. The bodies still strewn all over the plain belonged to the Horsemasters.

It was Dai who brought Ronan the word that they had found Fenris. “He’s alive,” Dai reported. “He took a blow on the head and has a wound in his shoulder. Apparently, when one of his men saw him go down, he flung his own body over the kain’s to protect him. He was successful. At any rate, Fenris is alive and the other man is dead.”

“How badly is he hurt?” Ronan asked.

“I think it was the knock on the head that felled him. The shoulder wound does not look that serious.” Dai rocked back on his heels and exhaled slowly, “Shall we put him with the others?”

Ronan had given orders that the injured Horsemasters were to be separated from the dead. This was unlike what he had done in the gorge, when the injured had been killed where they lay. His men clearly preferred the killing.

Slowly, Ronan nodded his head. “And see that his shoulder gets some attention, Dai. I would like to speak to him before we do anything else.”

Dai looked as if he were going to say something; then he just shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

By dawn all of the Federation men had been accounted for, except Thorn and Mait.

“They were on horseback to drive the stallions,” Ronan said when their absence was reported to him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they got caught in the middle of the herd’s stampede. They will make their way back here, never fear.”

“I hope you are right,” Rilik, Thorn’s father, said with a worried frown. “I hope he wasn’t thrown and trampled.”

“Not Thorn,” Ronan said with confidence. “That boy can ride anything.”

Rilik smiled, but the worry still lurked in his eyes.

The sun was a bright yellow ball in a bright blue sky when finally Ronan sought out Fenris. Siguna’s father. His enemy.

The wounded Horsemasters had been put together under the shelter of some small trees that grew at the edge of the meadow where it met with the mountain. The number of the wounded, Ronan had been told, was forty-eight. The dead numbered over two hundred. Ronan’s plan had been effective indeed.

As Ronan approached the prisoners, the kain was sitting up, his back against a tree and his head slumped forward. The shoulder of his buckskin shirt was stained with dried blood. He looked to be asleep. Ronan paused and considered for a moment the figure before him.

This was the man responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of Kindred men. This was the man who had enslaved untold numbers of Kindred women. It was a strange feeling to have him like this, wounded and vulnerable and very much at Ronan’s mercy. I should hate him, Ronan told himself, as he took a few more steps forward. This is a man I should hate.

“Fenris,” he said clearly. There was no response. He said the name again, and the disordered blond head moved. The kain lifted his head slowly, as if it hurt, and saw Ronan. He said something in a language Ronan did not know.

“Can you understand me at all?” Ronan asked in the tongue of the Kindred.

The other man nodded, then winced at the movement.

He ran his tongue around his lips as if they were too dry. “I understand…a little,” he said in a deep voice that had lost but little of its strength. The kain’s eyes were dark gray in color, Ronan saw, not pale like his daughter’s. “Who…you?” Fenris asked.

Ronan answered. “I am the leader…the kain…of these men.”

Fenris squinted at him as if trying to get him into focus. Ronan could see that there was a great bruise on the kain’s left temple. His head must be pounding like a shaman’s drum, Ronan thought. He had taken a blow like that once, and the headache had lasted for days.

“You want…what?” Fenris asked.

Ronan stared into the other man’s face. In spite of pain, in spite of injury, in spite of defeat, Fenris yet managed to look authoritative. And Ronan realized that he had no answer to the kain’s question. He did not know what he wanted from Fenris. He just knew he wanted something.

He said, because he did not know what else to say, “Your daughter is safe.”

Fenris frowned, not understanding.

“Siguna,” Ronan said. “Siguna is safe. She is with us.”