The Legacy of Gird (46 page)

Six hands of men—three from the original Stone Circle outlaws and three from Fireoak barton—followed Gird and the original forward scouts. They crossed the rushing little river upstream of the gap, at a narrows where the forest almost met across the water, going single-file as quietly as they could. Then they worked their way upslope, hoping to flank the ambush. Gird was not at all sure this would work; he would have expected his own maneuver. But if the guards were still expecting ignorant peasants, they might have no one on the hilltop to watch for it.

His idea almost worked. Gird spotted one of the guards at the moment the guard spotted him, and yelled. More yells, and the noise of movement. Gird held his group still. It was possible that the guard had not seen them all, and in a moment he would know where all the guards were.

"Come out here, you!" the guard said. "Who are you, skulking about in the woods?" He sounded as much nervous as angry.

Gird did his best to look frightened; he could hear the others clearly now, and then they came in sight. Seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . in yellow and green uniforms. They carried short swords; two had bows slung over their shoulders. That was a mistake; he hoped they would not realize it in time to cause him any trouble.

"Answer me, serf!" said the guard, bolder with his friends around him. "You know the rules: no one's allowed on the hills now."

Gird would like to have said something clever, but he couldn't think of anything. The man was three long strides away—farther than that for the men behind him—and Gird would have to be fast or the bowmen might get their bows into action. Someone behind him, trying to move closer, rustled the leaves; the guard's eyes widened. "Are there more . . . ?" His voice rose, as Gird charged straight ahead.

They had swords in hand, but swords could not reach him. Not if the others came in time. Gird thrust the point of his stick at a face that had blurred to a white blob; the man staggered back. Someone's sword hacked at his stick; he felt the jolt, swung the tip away, and jabbed forward again. The guards were yelling, surprise and fear mixed together. Gird paid no attention to them; he could see his own men on either side of him, jabbing again and again at the soldiers who flailed wildly with their swords, stumbling into trees. The two bowmen backed quickly, reaching for their bows.

"Bowmen first!" yelled Gird—the first thing he'd actually said, in words, and lunged at one of them. His stick caught the man hard in the chest; it didn't penetrate, but the man staggered and fell. He gave Gird a look of such utter surprise that it almost made Gird back a step—but instead he thrust again. This time the point caught the man in the neck, slid off to one side, and pinned his shoulder to the ground. Gird leaned on the pole. It was surprisingly hard to force the point in . . . but the man was clawing at his throat, his face purplish. Gird pulled the stick back and clouted him hard on the head. The soldier fell limp; when Gird checked, he was not breathing.

Around him, the fight was ending in a wild flurry of blows, counterblows, and bellows. The sharpened sticks worked, but clumsily: driving a sharp point of wood through clothing and flesh took strength and weight; once spitted, the enemy was even harder to free. Most of Gird's people had done what he did: use the point to fend off attack and throw the swordsmen off balance, then finish them with a blow to the head. It worked because they outnumbered their opponents, but Gird knew that would not always be true.

"Get their weapons," Gird reminded his people, as they finished off the last of the soldiers. "Knives as well: we can use everything. All their food, any tools." The dead soldiers had not worn armor. Gird shook his head over that; they must have assumed that the peasants had no weapons worth wearing armor for.

"Boots?" asked one of his still barefoot yeomen.

Gird nodded. "Clothes, if you want 'em. Felis, take two hands and go downslope; watch for their reinforcements. We made enough noise to rouse a drunk on the morning after. Cob, you take a hand back to hurry our people along." Gird helped drag the bodies into a pile out of the way. He did not bother to look for herbs of remembrance: these were his enemies; he had helped kill them, and it would be an insult to lay the herbs on them. Only one of his people had been hurt, a young yeoman who had a knife wound on the arm to remind him that fallen enemies were not necessarily dead.

Soon he could hear the rest of his people coming. They were hardly past, moving much slower than he would have liked, when he heard hoofbeats from the stream valley. No one had said anything about a mounted contingent nearby, but it made no real difference. Felis sent a runner back up: twenty horsemen, five bowmen and the rest with swords. Dust back down the trail, as if more were coming, though he couldn't say if those were horsemen or afoot.

"Good," said Gird, surprising those around him. He hoped it was good; it would be good if they won. "Fori, take eight hands—go
that
way—" Downstream that was, "—through the woods two hundred paces, then go downslope and wait for my call. You'll be coming in on their flank or rear. The rest of you, come with me."

The entrance to the gap trail offered the horsemen a gently rising slope from the narrow fields near the river, a slope gradually steepening as the trees closed in. Gird placed his troops across the point of this triangle, inside the trees, with the center set back a horselength. He watched the horsemen as they rode back and forth near the river, clearly looking for signs of a crossing. One of them went upstream, and came back at a gallop, yelling. The group milled about, then formed into a double column and headed for the gap trail.

Gird was surprised at that. Could they really be so stupid? Sunlight glinted off their breastplates and helmets—these would be harder to kill, but they were trusting too much to their horses and weapons. At the last moment, as the leaders came under the edge of the forest, some caution came to the leader, for he held up his hand and the troop reined in. The bowmen had their bows strung; they reached for arrows. Gird gave the signal anyway. On either side, his men ran out, carefully keeping their formation, poles firm in their hands.

The rearmost horses squealed and tried to back away: their riders spurred ahead. Two bucked, and one unseated its rider, who fell heavily. The first two riders had also fallen, shoved from their saddles by skillfully applied poles. One lay stunned; the other had rolled up quickly, and was doing his best to defend himself with his sword. Behind him, the other riders had tried to charge forward, but their horses shied from the sharp points of the sticks, swerving and rearing. The riders cursed, spurring hard; they could not reach Gird's men with their swords, and any who were separated were quickly surrounded, and pushed out of the saddle. Three of the bowmen, however, had managed to set arrow to string. Two of the arrows flew wide, but one—by luck or skill—went home in the throat of the man about to unseat the bowman. He managed to fit another arrow to his string, and this one narrowly missed Gird. Now his companions realized what he was doing; the remaining horsemen clumped together, protecting the bowmen in their midst, so that they had time to shoot again and again.

Gird smacked the man nearest him with the flat of his hand. "We've got to get them
now!
" he bellowed. His people surrounded the horsemen several men deep, but were showing no more eagerness to face the frightened horses' hooves than the horses were to face their poles. "Stand there and they'll get you all!" he said, flinging himself past those in front to snatch at one horse's bridle. Its rider aimed a vicious slash at him; Gird ducked, and thrust his belt-knife into the underside of the horse's jaw. The horse reared, screaming and flailing; Gird caught a hard blow from one hoof, but lunged again. His men yelled; he saw another dart forward, and another. The bowmen could not hit them now without shooting through their own companions. Horses and men screamed; it smelled like a butchering. Gird grabbed for another bridle, and nearly fell; he had slipped in a gush of horse blood. Too bad, his mind said as if from a distance, that we have to kill the beasts for their riders' sake. And where, his mind went on, are those others that made the dust cloud?

As if in answer to that question, an even louder uproar erupted somewhere behind him. Gird whirled, slipped to one knee in the carnage, and staggered back up. There—downstream a little—it sounded as if Fori's group had engaged the enemy support without waiting for Gird's call. Or had he called? He couldn't remember. He was out of breath, and his leg hurt. When he looked down, he could see a rent in his trousers. The horse's hoof, probably. He took a deep breath, and bellowed. Those who looked around, he waved toward the new noise. "Fori's men," he yelled. "Get in
line
, idiots, before—" his breath and voice failed together. Someone put a shoulder under his arm; he would have shoved help away, but for the moment he could not. He let himself be helped to the edge of the trampled ground.

Someone handed him a waterskin; he drank, wincing as someone else prodded the gash on his leg. Now he could breathe, and see: all the horsemen down, and half the horses, in a welter of blood. Some of his own dead this time, more wounded. Tending them were women he distinctly remembered from the refugee group . . . what were they doing down here? He had to get back to the fighting, he reminded himself. When he tried to get up (when had he slid to the ground against this tree?) his leg refused to take his weight.

"Your arm—" said someone behind him.

"It's my leg," he growled, but glanced at his arm anyway. A bloody gash had opened it from near his shoulder to his elbow; he stared at it, surprised. He didn't remember that. A broad-faced woman with tangled reddish hair sluiced the blood off with water from a bucket, laid a compress of leaves on the gash, and wrapped it tightly with a strip of cloth. She touched his head; he winced and pulled back.

"Quite a lump," she said cheerfully. "We might's well call you Gird Hardhead as Gird Strongarm."

"But Fori—" he said.

"Quiet. It's all right."

He wanted to say it was not all right, not until the fighting was done and they were safely away. But something with teeth had hold of his leg, and was trying to pull it off. He blinked, grunted, and resolved the monster into two people, one of them holding his leg still while the other cleaned out the ragged wound. It seemed to hurt a lot more than it had; he didn't know if that was good or bad.

"Gird?" That was Fori's voice; Gird fought his way through the haze of pain and exhaustion to focus on Fori's face. Pale, but unmarked; he looked more worried than anything else.

"I'm fine," said Gird. He would be fine; it was not all a lie.

Fori grinned. "It worked," he said. "Just as you wanted: we took their reserves in the flank before they knew we were there. And then the others from here—from the first fight—came and got them between us. We lost a few—"

"How many, each side?" Thinking about the fight might clear his head.

Fori's hands flicked, counting it up. "Eight hands of reserves, afoot—our match. Then four hands of horsemen, and two hands in the gap itself: fourteen hands, seventy altogether. All dead. Of ours, eight dead, and four hands wounded, some bad."

Cob's head appeared beside Fori's. "Gird—we're going to move you now."

"Move me! I can move myself!" He lunged up, but firm hands pushed him down.

"No. We aren't going to lose you because you walked all your blood out." Gird would have fought harder, but his body did not cooperate. He let himself relax onto the rough litter, and endured a miserable bouncy trip to whatever ridiculous site Cob or Felis had picked for a camp.

He woke to firelight, and listened to the voices around him before opening his eyes. He knew at once he was indoors, in some large, mostly bare room. It did not smell like he imagined a prison would smell, and the voices around him sounded tired, but satisfied, happy, quietly confident. Then, in a lower tone, someone said, "What about Gird—do you think—?"

"He'll be fine," said the voice of the red-headed woman who had tied up his arm. "If he hadn't tried to fight the whole battle himself—"

"Did you ever see anything like it!" That was no question; the speaker's voice carried raw emotion. "Throwing that horse down like a shepherd throws a lamb—"

Did I?
wondered Gird. He could remember nothing but the first horse rearing over him, and the hoof raking his leg. Now he came to think of it, that had been the other leg, not the one with the bad gash.

"—Like something out of a tale," the young voice was going on. Others chimed in, a confusion of details almost as chaotic as the battle itself. Gird felt himself flushing. They made it sound as if he'd waded single-handed into the entire Finaarean army.

"If
he
dies—" began someone else in a hushed voice.

Gird opened his eyes. "I am not going to die," he said firmly, glad that his voice carried his intent.

Several men laughed. "I told you," said Cob. "He's too stubborn to die." Under that confidence Gird could hear relief in his voice. He tried to hitch himself up and pain lanced through his head.

"Don't move," said the red-headed woman beside him.

"You could have said that before I did." Gird cleared his throat. With the headache, his other pains awoke again, and he wished he'd stayed asleep.

The woman grinned down at him. "Cranky patients get well faster," she said. "Soup?"

"Water." She and another supported his shoulders as he drank, then propped him up. The various pains settled down to a steady but bearable level, and he realized he was hungry after all. And curious: what exactly had happened, and where were they, and who had taken over when he fell on his face? Someone handed the woman a bowl of soup, and she lifted Gird's head so he could drink it.

He saw movement in the group around the fire. Then his most experienced fighters were around him. "You're wondering what happened," said Felis, almost smugly. Gird glared as best he could. Felis had become a good leader, but he could be unbearably smug.