Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap.
Four more men died in eight seconds, three instantly and one screaming and thrashing as a cedarwood shaft hammered through shield and arm and chest before it lodged in his spine. Then the rest were upon him, snarling shouting hairy faces vaguely seen as they labored up the hillside as if from a well of darkness, weapons reaching for his life. He tossed aside the bow and swept out his longsword in a hiss of steel on greased wood and leather. The other hand stripped the little buckler from its clip on the scabbard.
He was the second-ranked archer in the Clan Mackenzie, who were a people of the bow. But Rudi had never met his own equal with the sword since he got his full growth, not anywhere in his travels. Not yet. Everything slowed, sound burring deeper, vision fading except for faces, hands, weapons; he felt light and easy, his motions flowing like water over rocks in a mountain torrent.
I?m dead if I let them get around me and settle themselves, he knew. And I must keep their eyes on me and away from Edain. He has my back.
Existence was a dance through the purple dusk, lines precise as those scribed with compass and surveyor?s strings linking blade to target. It was riastrad, the battle-madness of the warrior Goddess whose scythe reaped men. He charged, shrieking, clearing the bush ahead of him with a long lunging stride; a yard of layer-forged steel in his fist and the eerie keening scream of the Mackenzies on his lips. A rust-pitted spearhead ground down from one blade of a pair of garden shears went over his right shoulder as he ducked beneath a thrust, and he struck with the buckler as it did.
The soup-plate shape of the metal shield cracked into a face covered in a black beard that crawled with lice, hard enough to make bone crumble and throw the wild-man backward to roll downslope in a tangle of limbs. With the weight of his armor added in there were better than two hundred pounds behind the blow, and the man wouldn?t be getting up again. The twinge from the old wound in his right shoulder was distant, unimportant except to remind him of how the infected arrow had weakened it a little.
In the same instant the blade in his left hand flicked out, the point driving through a throat and past it with scarcely a tug. Behind it a spray of droplets hung in the air for a second, black in the dying light.
There was a wisssst- thud behind him and an earsplitting scream, as an arrow struck and lodged in bone; more hissed past to strike, one close enough for the fletching to brush the skin of his neck in passing. The first -ranked archer in the Clan was in back of him, twice winner of the Silver Arrow at the Lughnasadh Games and a hunter of beasts and men. Then another cry of horrified pain, beneath a roaring growl; Garbh was at work protecting her master as he shot, darting in to slash at a hamstring and then close her great jaws on the man?s face as he fell, jerking him back and forth as she worried at what her long fangs held.
The twisted gorgon mask of Rudi?s face made a man stumble back in midattack. And die an instant later in a galvanic convulsion as the sword point flicked into and out of his eye faster than a frog?s tongue licking up a passing insect on the wing, punching through the thin bone and into the brain.
Another time, and the grating, crunching sensation that flowed up his hand and arm might come back to leave him sweating and clenched in some moment of peace. Now it was only a slight tug on his wrist as he wrenched the sword free and sliced down a spear shaft in a motion that left a long curl of wood flying free with the wielder?s fingers.
A thunder of hooves, and Epona was there, her eyes white and rolling, her great slab teeth bared as she bugled a challenge. One of the wild-men looked around just in time to see her milling forehooves come down on him like steel-shod warhammers, and threw up his arms in a gesture as futile as his scream. The remaining attackers crowded forward towards Rudi, half attacking him, half fleeing her. A thought flickered through some remote corner of his mind:
There are people who think horses can?t be dangerous because they eat grass.
A stab as precise as a surgeon?s scalpel in over the collarbone, and a man collapsed with the great mass of arteries above the heart severed. The withdrawal turned into a smashing backhand chop that sent a spearhead pinwheeling away into the evening with half a foot of shaft still attached. He slid forward in a smooth savage rush; the man made one futile jabbing motion with the stub before Rudi cracked the pommel of his sword into the temple and drove bone-splinters into his brain.
Get in close, he thought/knew.
He leapt over the hocking swing of a blade that had probably started life as some sort of hedging tool and was near enough to the weapon westerners called a billhook. It hissed beneath his boots, and one of the wild-men screamed as it struck his leg, as much in rage as pain. Rudi kicked as he landed, a solid heel-strike to the billman?s knee; something gave under the boot with a grisly snapping, crunching sound.
Ignore that one, he?s out of it.
He pushed off the impact, using it to swing himself around, the longsword slashing horizontally as he spun.
Get close, get close…
Too close for anyone to draw a spear back for a stab, and himself a whirling screaming striking blur that left death and ululating agony in its wake as the melee stumbled across the hillside?s uncertain footing. Edges and clubs grated and banged on his helmet, thumped into his brigandine, hard enough to leave bruises he?d feel later, if he lived-they were striking at the head and body from instinct, unused to dealing with real armor and not knowing how vulnerable they were to his ironclad violence.
If I had full war-harness on and a knight?s shield I could take the lot of them!
But he didn?t, and it could only be seconds until sharp metal hit something unprotected and vital, throat or limbs; he couldn?t block a dozen men, couldn?t kill them all. There wasn?t time An ax looped towards his neck. Rudi?s buckler deflected it with a crang, and his sword licked down on the man?s arm above the elbow. The edge cracked into bone and through it with an ugly thump that jarred up the weapon and into his arm and shoulder. The man spun away, staring at the bleeding stump and then sitting down to die. Startled as the blood spurted over her fetlocks, Epona stopped stamping a body into rags of flesh and bone-splinter and reared to pound her hooves into him instead.
Rudi recovered with desperate speed and a spray of leaves and twigs beneath his boots, but the next man was poised with his spear cocked back to thrust into Rudi?s face, the lunge already beginning. ..
… and he froze, with an expression of intense surprise on his features for an instant, as a wet red point appeared through his chest. Then he went flaccid and collapsed at the Mackenzie?s feet. Behind him a horseman swerved his mount and snatched another javelin out of the hide bucket slung over his back, throwing it with a whoop. The shadowed woods were alive for an instant with leaping fleeing men, throwing aside their weapons to run with heedless speed and crashing through the thickets as the horsemen they?d ambushed harried them on.
Rudi thrust the point of his sword into the earth as a support, leaning with his mouth open to suck in the air his lungs craved despite the raw stinks it bore. His other arm went around Epona?s neck as she nuzzled him, the sweet grassy-musky scent of her breath and sweat strong in his nostrils as he panted. The wave of rage that had filled his veins and nerves like liquid fire cooled, leaving his skin rippling with a sudden cold and his body full of a leaden weakness.
Suddenly half a dozen minor cuts stung like itching fire, above the duller ache of wrenched and battered muscle. For a moment he was not sure if the gathering darkness was natural, or the product of a body driven beyond its limits. Fighting was the hardest labor in the world. He was young and very strong and in hard condition, but his body still tried to shake like an overworked horse, and he had to swallow again and again with a paper-dry mouth to keep the heaves from starting. His trainers back home, Mackenzies and Bearkillers and Association knights alike, had warned him that he pushed himself too hard.