The Long Sword(229)

            Ned Cooper moved with me, loosing shaft after shaft. He grunted when he loosed.

            Things hit me. A shaft, spent and pin-wheeling through the darkness, another stone off a sling I could hear spinning in the dark, a thrown spear. The last of the three was ill-thrown, and yet it slammed across my knees and wounded Cooper behind me. In daylight, spears aren’t so dangerous. In the dark …

            Christ, I was scared. Fear is fatigue. Fatigue is fear. Thirst, hunger, bone-ache …

            There was nothing to fight.

            But when Ned went down, I got an arm under his, and dragged him. The legate was past us, and I couldn’t even see his horse. Gawain was across the avenue, head up.

            A good warhorse is a gift from God. I had no other plan; I was the target for every archer in the ambush. I decided, as if from very far away, that if I could make it to Gawain, I’d ride away.

            I made it halfway across the avenue and Gawain met me halfway, bless him. I didn’t really think about the consequence – I got Ned up into the saddle.

            He wasn’t unconscious. He screamed as his right knee got knocked around, but the spear came free and fell to the road.

            ‘Jesus fucking Christ the Saviour of fucking mankind,’ he shouted into the night.

            ‘Ride for it,’ I said.

            I slapped Gawain.

            About then, I realised that I hadn’t taken a blow or an arrow in what seemed like a long time. I had no idea why, but I had been in enough desperate fights to know that something had changed, and Ned and I were no longer the centre of the enemy’s attention.

            My visor was still up. I let go of Gawain’s stirrup – I had had some notion of holding the stirrup and bouncing along like a man with ten-league boots, but I was too tired. And I had some notion of occupying the enemy while the legate escaped.

            Unless, of course, he was dead, which was one awful explanation of why the enemy fire had shifted away from me.

            But that made no sense, even to my fatigue-addled head. Men in a fight will go after one opponent until he’s down and only then go for another. That’s the law of the forest.

            Kill the thing you can see.

            What in the hell of Alexandria was going on?

            The night was still a literal inferno. Fire and darkness … smoke, that makes darkness even more deceptive. And can choke you. Only in full night can you stumble into smoke you never saw and cough your lungs out.

            A man was coughing, just to my left.

            I picked up the spear that had come out of Cooper’s thigh. It was a surprisingly good spear – you know when you pick one up, line a sword. It was light and responsive in my hands, the haft slim and well balanced, the head light. I used it to feel my way. The cloud of smoke was drifting, I assume, because for me it was like a choking fog covering the moon. I could see a little at first, and then nothing.

            I wanted cover. The smoke was killing me, but it was cover. I couldn’t breathe, and my eyes were watering. My armour weighed like lead.

            Yet, I was unwounded.

            I moved one step at a time.

            A man screamed – and his scream was answered by a feral chorus from behind me, too far away to be part of this small thread in the tapestry of violence.

            I made it to the foot of one of the minarets. I knew the stonework in a glance, and there was a ruddy glow from inside that lit the smoke.

            There was a man. He came at me, or merely crossed my path, and my spear went into his throat with the unerring accuracy born of practice.