“Doesn’t sound like panic to me. More like good sense. You’re still alive. And you stood and fought those people we just killed today. Nothing cowardly there. And you couldn’t have done that if you’d been killed yesterday, could you?”
He stared at me, waiting for an answer.
“No,” I said, quietly. “I suppose not.”
“Don’t suppose anything. Accept it and stop fretting. What happened to us yesterday—to me and to you—happened because it was meant to happen. If you and I had been meant to die in that ambush we would have died. But we lived, so we were not meant to die. And if that’s the case, then what is the point of whining about not being dead?”
I nodded. “Where is Duke Lorco now?”
“I don’t know. I expected him to be somewhere up ahead of me, but I suspect you’re telling me now that’s not so. Am I right?”
“Yes. That’s why I came back in this direction. How could you not have seen him yesterday? You must have swum right by his camp at some point.”
“No, not yesterday. After the ambush I hid in a bank of reeds in a pond that once was an eddy in the river. And I mean hid … head down and flat on my belly most of the time, holding my breath in case someone might hear me breathing. There were hostiles everywhere. The whole countryside was swarming with them, and none of them looked like the people who attacked us earlier in the day. I think they were an entirely different bunch—an army, not just a rabble mob like the crew that hit us. I never got close enough to any of them to hear them speak, but as far as I could tell from what they were wearing, they were Burgundians, and they were well armed and well equipped. The first ones I met were on the other side of the river, and they almost caught me out in the open on the riverbank, but I saw them just in time and managed to make it to the tall reeds around the edge of the pond. And there I stayed for the rest of the day, because there were more of them all around me, on my side of the river. I don’t know how they got to be on both sides, because the river’s wide, and it’s in spate, but there they were.
“All I could do was sit tight and hope to get back into the water as soon as it grew dark enough, and then swim downstream from there. Whoever these people were, Burgundians or not, they had been passing by me all day, all headed south, as far as I could tell, and there were thousands of them. I mean, I couldn’t stand up and count them, not without getting myself killed, but I could hear them passing by and they’ just kept coming and coming.
“Thing was, though, I couldn’t tell where they were really going, or where they planned to stop for the night, and that worried me, for if they were going to be sleeping all along the banks of the river, then I wouldn’t be able to make as much as a splash, and if I hit a stretch with bad currents, I could give myself away just by trying to stay alive.
“Anyway, late in the afternoon they started to thin out, but as luck would have it, just before dark, as I was getting ready to make my escape, a whole new detachment of them came along and settled in for the night right along the riverbank next to where I was hiding. They set up a guard post so close to me I couldn’t even lie back in the reeds and sleep, in case I snored. I was stuck in there until the whoresons left this morning at dawn, and I’ve been drifting downstream ever since, with my head in the middle of a floating crown of long reeds that I made while I was stuck in the pond, waiting to get away.” He paused, then added, “Crown isn’t the right word. It was more of a wreath, with long reeds sticking straight up out of it so that no one could see my head in the middle of it. I’m starved. Have you got anything to eat?”
“No.” I half turned back to where the three dead men lay behind us. “But they might. We didn’t expect to be in need of food yesterday, until we were attacked, but those fellows came here a-purpose, so they probably brought food with them.”
“Bright lad,” Ursus said, turning smoothly and moving back to check the contents of the scrips that hung about the dead men’s waists. Sure enough, we found bread, dried meat, and a small pouch of dried nuts mixed with what tasted like chopped dried pears, as well as a full skin of watered wine. We sat down where we were, our backs against the big oak tree, and made short work of all of it, ignoring the dead men and eating and drinking until our empty stomachs were full again. By the time we finished there was not much left to save, other than a heel of bread and an end of the dried meat.
Ursus sighed, finally, and stretched where he sat, grimacing as he did so.
“I don’t know,” he growled. “We’ll live now, for a while, at least long enough to get ourselves killed if we run into any more of those Burgundians. But where’s Duke Lorco? That’s the question you and I have to answer. We’ll have to find him by the shortest route, for our own safety—” He broke off, frowning at the expression on my face. “What’s wrong with you?”
I shrugged, trying to make light of what I had been thinking and to dismiss the grim vision that had sprung into my mind. “Nothing, not really. I was just thinking about what you said about the hostiles … the Burgundians … . Thousands of them, you said. Is that true or were you exaggerating?”
Ursus made a face. “No, it was true.”
“Far more than Duke Lorco has with him.”
“Aye, but Lorco’s cavalry are worth ten men afoot, and he’s got three turmae.”
“True.” I nodded, but with no enthusiasm, for the calculation attached to that was not a difficult one. “That’s more than a hundred troopers … . But a single thousand men would match them at ten-to-one odds, and you said there were several thousands of Burgundians. That could make odds of twenty, thirty to one.”
“If it came to a fight, aye, it could. But who’s to say it would? Lorco’s smart enough to keep away from an army of that size.”
“What if he has no choice?”
“What do you mean? Of course he’ll have a choice. There’s always a choice.”
I dismissed that, seeing the fallacy behind his bluster. “No, not always. Look at what happened to me with these three. I came around the big tree and there they were, right in front of me, looking at me. I had no choice but to fight. Same thing might easily happen to Duke Lorco.”
Ursus pulled his mouth down into a scowl of doubt. “Nah, I don’t think so. Lorco would have scouts out. He’d never be stupid enough to ride without scouts.”
“Granted, but these Burgundians would have scouts out, too—that’s what these three were doing here, scouting. But they ran into us, and now they’ll never get the word back that we’re here. Couldn’t the same thing have happened to Duke Lorco’s scouts?”
Now the scowl on Ursus’s face had deepened to a glower. “By the Christ, boy, you have a knack for seeing the blackest side of things, haven’t you?” He glanced around us, looking at the forest growth that sheltered us. “Well, we can’t sit here forever, so let’s go and try to find our own before the enemy finds us. I warn you, though, they’ll be swarming like bees to the north of us, and if we can’t pass through them—which is almost certain to be the way of it—we’ll have to ride around them. God alone knows how long that might take. However it turns out, you make sure to stick close behind me, keep your head down, and do whatever I tell you to do right now, with no arguments and no questions. If you ever live to be as old as I am, then I’ll take orders from you. In the meantime, I’m the Magister, understand?”
I nodded, and we moved directly to mount up and head northward in search of our friends.