He loosed – nocked, drew, and loosed, with a grunt, like a man lifting weights; and again, and finally, with his last arrow, he all but cried aloud his release was so poor.
He had time to say ‘Too fucking tired’ as he watched the fall of his shafts.
To reach two hundred yards with a war arrow required a big bow – Redmede’s was more than six feet long. And he had to pull it to the ear, and aim it almost fifty degrees from the ground, rendering the concept of ‘aiming’ impossible. The archer can’t even see the target under his arrow.
His first arrow landed at the edge of the stream, forty yards short of the target, but dead in line.
The second shaft flew true, and for a heart-stopping moment Redmede thought he’d hit the thing, but it sprang, not into the air as he hoped, but forward, and came towards the stream. The third arrow went long and to the right as the wight sprinted for the stream bank. And the fourth arrow pulled to the right, and fish-tailed, losing energy. The boglin chief changed direction to leap onto a great rock – raised its wing cases-
What does that mean? Christ – he’s casting!
– and blue-white fire played along them.
His badly released arrow plummeted from the heavens like a stooping raptor. The wight stepped directly into it, and the shaft went into his extended wing case – penetrated the chitonous armour and ripped the monster’s wing clean off.
Even two hundred yards away, Redmede saw the spurt of ichor as it took the wound. It stumbled and fell into the water.
A panicked Jack, Bill Alan, pinned it to the stream bed with his sword. He chopped and chopped at it, and the stream turned a green-brown around him as he cut. It landed a blow on him – he stumbled back, lost his footing, and fell. By then Redmede was running for the stream’s bank and fitting another heavy arrow to his string. He had three left.
Alan got a hand under him and got to his feet, his arming sword still clutched in his fist. The wight came at him, rising heavily out of the water, still spraying ichor. It hacked through the man’s guard, notching his sword and his over-cut opened Alan’s cheek. But the panic had passed, and Alan cut back and his luck held – he landed a hard blow on the wight’s arm. It stumbled and vanished beneath the water.
Every boglin on the bank was launching itself into the water and coming across.
It knows who I am, Redmede thought. They’re coming for me.
He ran along the bank, skipping from rock to rock like a small boy, paused and balanced on a pair of huge boulders.
The wight errupted from the water at Alan’s feet. His sword swept up-
Redmede loosed. It was less than sixty yards, and his arrow went into the soft, mammalian skin under the thing’s armpit, and the thing unmade. It literally fell apart. Alan’s desperate parry caught nothing; the wight was falling to pieces and the stream was already sweeping him away.
The bond that held the boglins to one another dissipated with the wight’s power – Redmede watched them fall apart as well. Instead of a mass of creatures expressing a single will, they became, in three heartbeats, hundreds of individual creatures more afraid of his Jacks then determined to conquer. In the time it took a man to say a prayer they were gone.
Redmede wished he could vanish as well. He couldn’t tell how bad his losses were, but they were bad enough. His men were alone in the vast Wild; exhausted, panicked, and beaten. And darkness was falling.
He sounded his great horn, gathering the survivors. Many had scattered at the first attack; Nat Tyler had held all the men and women left on the near bank and refused to let them cross, which Redmede thought a wise decision, and on the far bank Bess had crossed with Cat and Cal in the vanguard with the veterans – men and women with good swords and bows. They had held their own – indeed, they had killed quite a few boglins.
But in the centre they had lost forty men and two women. There wasn’t much of them left to bury.
Any man wounded had died, save six, and Tyler, Bess, and Redmede spent the night on them, using scraps of fabric from the dead as bandages while Tyler organised watches to resist another attack. Then he came back and squatted by a fire with Redmede.
‘That was bad,’ Tyler said. ‘We won’t last another fight like that.’
Redmede sat and stared at the fire. As long as there had been something to do, he hadn’t had to think. But now . . .
‘It’s all my fucking fault,’ Redmede said. He slumped down, head on his pulled-up knees. ‘We should ha’ gone south, to Jarsay.’
Tyler was silent and Redmede knew the other man agreed – they should have gone south.
‘Don’t you believe it, Bill Redmede!’ Bess emerged from the darkness, found the water bucket by feel, and began to wash her bloody hands. ‘Jarsay would ha’ been death for all o’ us. The nobles would be huntin’ us for sport. The Wild’s better. It’s just cold.’ She smiled, collected the hot water and went back to tending her wounded.
Tyler watched her with hungry eyes. ‘Even when she’s dead beat and hasn’t bathed in ten days, she’s a beauty,’ he said.
Redmede shrugged. Bess was a good companion and probably a better leader than he was. He didn’t see the rest of her. He didn’t allow himself to see the rest of her.
‘Think she’d go for an old fuck like me?’ Tyler asked.
Redmede couldn’t even think of such things. ‘I have to talk to the irk we picked up. We need a friend out here.’
Tyler grinned. ‘I’ll just go help Bess, then, won’t I?’
Redmede took some time boiling water in his own small copper pot. A rout like today’s had a thousand small impacts. One was that most men had abandoned any camp equipment they’d had – and pots were as precious as arrows in the Wild. Redmede had saved his – for all he knew, it was the last metal pot west of Lissen Carrak. He groaned, and waited for the water to boil. It was frustrating – they had no tapers, no rush lights, and no oil lamps, so that the darkness above the fire was absolute, and he couldn’t see down into his little copper pot to see if the water was boiling. Finally he detected it by feel, through a twig. He added some sassafras – last season’s – and the last of the honey. He was making a princely offering because it was all he had to give, and he needed the irk to like him.
Redmede took tea to the irk, who raised the horn cup in acknowledgement.
‘Can you talk?’ Redmede asked.
The creature sighed. ‘Yiss,’ it said.
‘What’s your name, then?’ he asked.
‘Tapio Haltija,’ it sang. ‘I am lord of these woods, little man.’
Redmede spat. ‘I have no time for lords,’ he said. But his heart rose a little.
The irk stiffened, but then looked away. ‘Half a thousand yearsss I haf lorded these woodssss. But I am not ssso ungentle asss to be ungrateful. Even to a ssservant of Thorn’sss.’ He nodded. ‘And your name? ’
Redmede shook his head. ‘I am no servant, least of all to that bastard. He left us high and dry.’ He looked away. He was too tired for this. ‘Bill Redmede,’ he said.
‘Ahhh, man, your ssspeech isss ever more pleassssing. Fair Friend, let me hosst you and your men. I mean you no harm – and few men hasss ever heard sssuch an offer of me before.’ He smiled, and his fangs glittered wetly in the dark.
Bill Redmede knew too little about irks. His brother liked them – that much he knew. His brother had feasted in their halls, and traded with the bolder ones in the woods. But this one was old, and very, very dangerous, or so his instinct told him. And he had just given the creature his name. That had been foolish.
‘My people are coming. I can feel them in the blood of the earth. I would esssteem it an essspecial favour if you would give me another cup of thisss tea. And my sword. I sssee you pressserved it.’