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 welclass="underline" 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.
Chapter Twenty-two
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.