Warlord(117)

For a moment Nur looked at me in stony silence. Then she said quietly: ‘You have become cruel, Alan. You were never like that before. A demon is gnawing on your soul. I can see it. Your heart is now a shard of ice. And you are forsworn; a liar like all your sex; a wretched, lying, worthless man.’ And she turned her back on me and walked to the centre of the clearing, by the pit-fire. She turned again to face me, thrust a hand into the hairy pouch at her waist, and pulled out a handful of dried herbs. Sprinkling them on the fire with her left hand, and holding up the staff in her right, she said: ‘One year, one day, after you wed, you pay.’ The herbs had caught fire and a thick, pungent, blue-greenish smoke was rising from the pit and enveloping her frail, raggedy body. The smoke seemed to cling to her skeletal frame as she repeated: ‘One year, one day, after you wed, you pay.’ But this time I could hear the murmurs of the other women repeating the refrain. It began low, but with each repetition the chant became louder. ‘One year, one day, after you wed, you pay.’ The women were swaying slightly with the rhythm of the chant, and I noticed that they seemed to be, almost imperceptibly, coming closer to the centre of the clearing, moving towards me and my men with shuffling steps, quiet but purposeful.

I took a pace forward, Fidelity, still sticky with tree sap, naked in my hand, and I said loudly, clearly above the lapping waves of the baleful rhythmical chorus: ‘Nur, stop this now, I will not stand for this—’

Nur gave a high, clear scream, and pointed the heavy granite end of the staff directly at me. Her body was by now entirely wreathed in smoke. ‘He threatens me; he threatens a woman of the sanctuary! A man, a lying man, a forsworn man – he threatens me, he threatens all women!’

I glanced down at the bright blade of Fidelity in my fist. ‘No, Nur, I do not mean—’

A stone sailed out of the crowd of advancing women and smashed into my chest, cutting off my words abruptly.

I looked beyond the smoke-wrapped form of Nur, pointing her staff, like a lance at my head. A wall of raggedy women, scores of them – old, young, maidens, matrons, crones, goodwives, whores; all hideous in one way or another, all broken or deformed, and all chanting those hateful words: ‘One year, one day, after you wed, you pay’ – was now moving across the clearing towards me. Another stone flew past my head, and another cracked painfully into my shin. Nur gave a long yelping cry, and gestured at me again with her staff. Then Thomas was at my side: ‘We cannot fight them all, Sir Alan, we must retreat,’ he said, his voice steady and calm.

And we ran.

I scrambled up on to Shaitan just as the first woman reached me. She was elderly, one-eyed, toothless and mangy and armed with no more than a rusty eating knife, but I had no time for mercy. She ran at me, ahead of the pack of her sisters, and I killed her, God forgive me, turning Shaitan in a tight circle and decapitating her with one sweeping blow of Fidelity. The women were screaming now in rage and fear, and they were nearly all upon us. And I put back my spurs and we five big brave men charged away into the safety of the forest.

Safety – that is an odd word to have chosen. True, we were away from the clearing and the terrifying advancing wall of chanting, stone-throwing women, but we were very far from safe. Our horses could not move swiftly in the thick undergrowth, and while one of the men-at-arms and I dispatched two more crazed women, a burly matron waving a carving knife and a slight pretty girl with one arm, who chased us into the trees, after that there appeared to be no one immediately behind us as we forced our horses through the gaps in the thick green wilderness. I could hear scurrying, however, and the cracking of sticks on either side of our path, and sometimes the grey blur of a figure slipping from tree to tree in the gloom of the forest; half-glimpsed and wraith-like. This was their territory, and we were the interlopers. Worse, I did not know which way to go to find the Great North Road and safety. My heart was beating like a tambour; my skin clammy with fear and the cloying warmth of the forest. The going was as hard as before, and we all took turns to hack a slender path through the undergrowth and create a road between the silent trees with our swords. I cursed myself again and again for my foolish haste in seeking to confront Nur. Rage filled me: I would return, I vowed, with a conroi of hard men, thirty mailed lancers, and scour this village of madwomen from the face of the earth with fire and sword – if God allowed us to escape with our lives today.

The attack came without warning; two dozen women, running in screaming from our left flank, two of them leaping on to the back of one of our hapless men-at-arms and dragging him from the saddle. They had no proper weapons to speak of – only sticks, stones and clumsy clubs, and one young girl wielding a heavy iron skillet. But they killed our comrade with their numbers. They used their teeth, when they were in range, and battered him bloody with rocks and broken tree branches, anything that came to hand. I killed another woman with a slash that opened her belly, and Thomas fought like a hero, slaying our enemies with short controlled strokes of his sword, but I had no time to admire his growing skills. A young girl of barely fifteen summers leaped down on me from the branch of a tree overhead. For an instant, her glaring, snarling face was inches from my own, her teeth snapping wildly at my nose like a mad dog’s, and then I managed to shrug her off, hurling her down to the leafy ground to my left. Shaitan, who was usually a model of composure in any mêlée, lost himself so far as to buck dangerously, whinnying with terror, and almost causing me to lose my seat. As I tried to calm him, the young madwoman came at me again, and I crushed her skull with one overhand blow of my mace. The women were all around us now; screaming curses, clawing at our legs and battering at our backs with home-made clubs; we killed them as fast as we could – easily spitting skin-and-bone bodies on our swords, hacking clean through scrawny limbs – but still more of these demented creatures came bounding out of the trees, and those we killed too. We feared them and their reckless ferocity, but in truth they were no match for us and, in our fear, we killed without mercy. And we lost another good man in that frenzied, unequal battle, pulled from his horse by the howling pack, and Thomas took a flung stone hard to the face that rattled his teeth, but by the time we had cut ourselves free of them, a dozen of those poor demented women would never breathe again.