The bowman was dead, flat on his face on the ground and motionless, with an arrow through his ring-mail tunic and buried almost to the feathers between his shoulder blades. And as I saw that, my opponent attacked. He had seen me look away, then look again, and on the second look he lunged, swinging a mighty overhand chop that would have cleft me in two had it landed. Of course it did not land, because I had Cato’s magnificent spatha with which to deflect it. I swept it aside easily and leaped backward, only to land awkwardly on a round section of stick that rolled beneath my foot and sent me crashing to my back on a bed of the previous year’s oak leaves.
My opponent was above me almost before I had landed. Spread-legged and dark-faced, he rose on his toes to gain the maximum impetus from his ungainly weapon. I tried to whip my sword across in front of me to stab him in the groin, but my blade had slipped beneath a branch or a root when I fell, and as soon as I felt the resistance in my arm I knew I would not be able to dislodge it quickly enough to save myself. Then, for the second time in the space of two mornings, I watched a life snuffed out abruptly by a hard-shot arrow. This one caught my opponent in the hollow of the neck, just above the metal rim of his cuirass, and drove him backward, off his feet and into instant death.
I rolled hard to my left, dragging my sword behind me and feeling the moment when it sprang free of whatever had been holding it. As soon as I did, I spun on my left elbow, kicking my legs around, and lunged to my feet quickly, if far from gracefully, facing the direction from which the second arrow had come. I told myself that whoever had shot my enemy must be my friend, although I did not dare to trust myself sufficiently to believe it. As soon as I was safely upright, I set my feet squarely and hunched into a fighting crouch, glaring around me to see who and where the marksman was, but he remained unseen. Slightly to the right of where I now stood, the man I had hamstrung lay dead, too, pinned to the ground by yet another arrow. Directly ahead of me now was the massive oak tree that had stood between me and my three erstwhile attackers, and I guessed that the fourth man, whoever he was, must be behind its huge bole. I glared at the tree, willing him to come out and face me.
Moments later, just as I was beginning to feel foolish, a voice spoke from behind my back.
“That tree is not going to attack you, boy.”
Appalled at how easily I had been duped, I spun as quickly as I could move, raising my sword as I did so and preparing to throw myself to the attack, although I was once again expecting to die, shot down before I could really move forward. But then I stopped in midstep, astonished. The man facing me was Ursus. He held his arms folded across his chest as he leaned back against the trunk of a tree, his legs crossed at the ankles and his entire weight on his left foot. His bow, still strung, hung from his right shoulder. I was stunned to see him and was incapable of finding a single word of greeting or of gratitude or anything else. I simply stood and gaped at him.
“You handled yourself well, for a youngster. Who taught you to fight like that?”
I had never heard this man speak before, and now I found the sound of him to be more pleasant than I would have expected, based purely upon the things I had heard the others in the hunting party say about him. His voice was deep and sonorous, warm and mellifluous and somehow suggestive of humor. I cleared my throat and tried to answer him coherently.
“Teachers … I had many … at the Bishop’s School, in Auxerre.”
“They taught you to fight? I thought they were churchmen, priests.”
“They are, but the bishop there is Germanus. He used to be an imperial legatus, commander-in-chief of all imperial forces in central and northern Gaul. He was Duke Lorco’s first legatus.”
“Shit … I knew that, but I never made the connection between Germanus the legate and Germanus the bishop.”
“You mean the Duke didn’t tell you?”
He straightened up from the tree and uncrossed his arms, leaning forward slightly to peer at me, a strange expression on his face. “Are you twitting me?” Before I could react to that, however, he nodded and the expression on his face changed. “I’m a mercenary, lad, a sword for hire. I don’t even have a rank that earns me any more than basic pay, whereas Phillipus Lorco is the governor of an entire imperial region. We don’t have much in common, Duke Lorco and I. You understand?”
Then he walked straight toward me, and as he passed he waved at me to go with him. I followed him to where my two horses had found some grass growing in a patch between the trees and were busily crunching and cropping at the succulent greenery. Ursus stopped and I almost walked into him.
“Which one do you want?” he asked.
“That one’s mine,” I said, pointing.
“Good, I’ll take the other one, then.”
He moved directly to the horse, and I spoke to his back. “You saved my life. Twice.”
He paused in the act of stroking the animal’s muzzle and turned to look at me, then nodded slightly. “Aye. You were outnumbered, but you were unlucky, too. If you hadn’t stepped on that stick and fallen you would have beaten both those men.”
“But I did fall.”
“Aye, and you were fortunate that I was there and watching. But don’t be too grateful. Next time, you might have to do the same for me, and though you won’t find me ungrateful, I might not thank you at the time.”
I said something then that I did not know I was going to say, and to this day I don’t know why I said it at that particular moment. It may have been relief at finding him to be more pleasant and approachable than people had said he was, or it might simply have been that the guilt that filled me had suddenly become unbearable.
“I ran away.”
Ursus looked at me, his face blank, then quirked one eyebrow. “From where, the school?”
“No, from the fight, yesterday. I panicked, lost my nerve, and ran for my life.”
“So did I. It all happened too quickly and there were too many of them, too suddenly. One moment we were ambling along as though we were the only people in the world, and then, the next, there were men leaping all around us on every side and arrows flying everywhere and dead people falling off their horses, their heads and bodies bristling with arrows. I was riding alone, closest to the riverbank, because my horse was grazing wherever he could find a mouthful of grass, and I saw the two men on my left, the cook and his helper, knocked off their horses, both of them in the same instant, one forward, the other backward, both stone dead. I’ve been in this game long enough to know a dead man when I see one, even if he’s still falling. I took one look around and saw wild men everywhere, three of the whoresons, at least, for every one of us when we were all alive. Then one fellow jumps up in front of me, coming at me with an ax. I put the spurs to my horse, ran the whoreson down and just kept going, right into the river, where I slid off and got my horse’s body between me and the bowmen on the bank who were already shooting at me. I got away, but they killed my horse. One of their arrows hit it in the neck and severed a big vein. Shame. Good thing I can swim, though.” He paused, then looked me in the eye. “But I thought I was the only one who got away. How did you manage it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I was talking to my friend Lorco when he was killed. An arrow hit him in the back of the head and came out through his face. There were strangers everywhere, screaming and shouting, attacking us on foot, and more than half of the people in our group were dead. I saw bodies lying everywhere. And that’s when I panicked and ran away. I didn’t stop running until I was deep in the forest.”