Deornoth sighed. He was desperately unhappy, but a part of him had known his prince might do this—indeed, would have been surprised if he had not. “As you wish, Highness.”
“No, Deornoth.” Josua tested the knot. “As I must.”
Simon cheered as Hotvig’s riders smashed into Fengbald’s line. Binabik’s clever stratagem appeared to be working: the Thrithings-men, although still riding more slowly than normal, were far swifter than their opponents, and the difference in maneuverability was startling. Fengbald’s leading troops were falling back, forced to regroup several hundred cubits back from the barricade.
“Hit them!” Simon shouted. “Brave Hotvig!” The trolls cheered, too, strange bellowing whoops. Their time was fast approaching. Simon was counting silently, although he had already lost track once or twice and had to guess. So far, the battle was unfolding just the way Josua and the others had said.
He looked at his strange companions, at their round faces and small bodies, and felt an overwhelming affection and loyalty sweep through him. They were his responsibility, in a way. They had come far to fight in someone else’s cause—even if it might ultimately prove to be everyone’s cause—and he wanted them all to reach their homes safely once more. They would be fighting bigger, stronger men, but trolls were accustomed to fighting in these wintry conditions. They, too, wore boot-irons, but of a far more elaborate type than those Binabik had taught the forge men to make. Binabik had told Simon that among his people these boot-spikes were precious now, since the trolls had lost the trade routes and the trading partners which had once made it possible to bring iron into Yiqanuc; in this present era, each pair of boot-spikes was handed down from parent to child, and they were carefully oiled and regularly repaired. To lose a pair was a terrible thing, for there was now almost no way to replace them.
Their saddled rams, of course, had no need for such trifles as iron shoes: their soft, leathery hooves would cling to the ice like the feet of wall-walking flies. A flat lake was little challenge when compared to the treacherous frozen trackways of high Mintahoq.
“I come,” someone said behind him. Simon turned to find Sisqi looking up at him expectantly. The troll woman’s face was flushed and pearled with sweat, and the fur jacket she wore beneath her leather jerkin was tattered and muddy, as if she had crawled through the undergrowth.
“Where were you?” he said. He could see no trace of a wound on her, and was grateful for that.
“With Binabik. Help Binabik fight.” She lifted her hands to mime some complicated activity, then shrugged and gave up.
“Is Binabik well?” Simon asked.
She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Not hurt.”
Simon took a deep breath, relieved. “Good.” Before he could say more, there was a flurry of movement down below. Another group of shapes suddenly scrambled forth from near the log barricade, hurrying to join the battle. A moment later Simon heard the faint, mournful cry of a horn. It blew a long note, then four short, then two long blasts that echoed thinly along the hillside. His heart leaped and he felt suddenly cold and yet tingling, as though he had fallen into icy water. He had forgotten his count, but it did not matter. That was the call—it was time!
Despite his nervous excitement, he was careful not to scrape Homefinder’s side with his irons as he scrambled into the saddle. Most of the Qanuc words Binabik had so carefully taught him were blasted from his head.
“Now!” he shouted. “Now, Sisqi! Josua wants us!” He drew his sword and waved it in the air, catching it for a moment in a low-hanging tree branch. What was the word for “attack”? Ni-something. He turned and caught Sisqi’s eye. She stared back, her small face solemn. She knew. The troll woman waved her arm and called out to her troops.
Everybody knows what happens now, he realized. They don’t need me to tell them anything.
Sisqi nodded, giving him permission.
“Nihut!” Simon shouted, then spurred down the muddy trail.
Homefinder’s hooves skidded as they struck the frozen lake, but Simon—who had ridden her unshod on the same surface a few days before—was relieved when she quickly caught her balance. The noise of conflict was loud before them, and now his trollish comrades were shouting too, bellowing strange war-cries in which he could discern the names of one or two of the mountains of Yiqanuc. The din of battle swiftly rose until it crowded all other thoughts from his mind. Then, before it seemed that he even had time to think, they were in the thick of it.
Hotvig’s initial attack had split Fengbald’s line and scattered it away from the safety of the sledge-scraped track. Deornoth’s soldiers—all but a few on foot—had then surged out from behind the barricade and flung themselves on those Erkynguard who had been cut off from their own rearguard by Hotvig’s action. The fighting near the barricade was particularly fierce, and Simon was startled to see Prince Josua in the thick of it, standing tall in red Vinyafod’s saddle, his gray cloak billowing, his shouted words drowned in the confusion. Meanwhile, though, Fengbald had brought up his Thrithings mercenaries, who, instead of helping to stiffen the line behind the retreating Erkynguardsmen, were swarming around the broken column in their haste to engage Hotvig’s horsemen.
Simon’s troop struck the mercenaries from the blind side; those closest to the oncoming Qanuc had only a moment to look around in amazement before being skewered by the short spears of the trolls. A few of the Thrithings-men seemed to regard the onrushing Qanuc with a shock that seemed closer to superstitious terror than mere surprise. The trolls howled their Qanuc war-cries as they charged, and whirled stones on oiled cords over their head, which made a dreadful buzzing sound like a swarm of maddened bees. The rams moved swiftly between the slower horses, so that several of the mercenaries’ mounts reared and threw their masters; the trolls also used their darting spears to poke at the horses’ undefended bellies. More than one Thrithings-man was killed beneath his own toppled steed.
The din of battle, which at first had seemed to Simon a great roaring, quickly changed as the conflict drew him in, and became instead a kind of silence, a terrible humming quiet in which snarling faces and the steaming, white-toothed and red-throated mouths of horses loomed up from the mist. Everything seemed to move with a horrible sluggishness, but Simon felt that he was moving even more slowly. He swung his sword around, but although it was mere steel, it seemed at that moment as heavy as black Thorn.
A hand-ax struck one of the troll-men beside Simon. The small body was flung from the saddled ram and seemed to tumble slowly as a falling leaf until it disappeared beneath Homefinder’s hooves. Through the droning emptiness, Simon thought he heard a faint, high-pitched shriek, like the cry of a distant bird.
Killed, he thought distractedly as Homefinder stumbled and again found her footing. He was killed. A moment later he had to fling his own blade up before him to ward off a swordstroke from one of the mounted mercenaries. It seemed to take forever for the two swords to meet; when they did, with a thin clink, he felt the shock down his arm and into his chest. Something brushed by him from the other side. When he looked down, he saw that his makeshift corselet had been torn and blood was rilling up in a wound along his arm; he could feel only a line of icy numbness from wrist to elbow. Gaping, he lifted his sword to strike back, but there was no one within reach. He pulled Homefinder around and squinted through the mist rising off the ice, then spurred her toward a knot of tangled shapes where he could see some of the trolls at bay.
After that the battle rose around him like a smothering hand and nothing made very much sense. In the midst of the nightmare, he was struck in the chest by someone’s shield and tumbled from his saddle. As he scrambled to find purchase, he quickly realized that even shod with Binabik’s magic spikes, he was still a man struggling for footing on a glassy sheet of ice. By luck, the reins had stayed tangled around his hand so that Homefinder did not bolt, but this same luck almost killed him.
One of the mounted Thrithings-men came out of the murk and press
ed Simon backward, trapping him against Homefinder’s flank. The gaunt swordsman had a face so covered with ritual scars that the skin that showed beneath his helm looked like tree bark. Simon was in a terrible position, his shield arm still snagged in the reins so that he could barely get half of his shield between himself and his attacker. The grinning mercenary wounded him twice, a shallow gouge along his sword arm parallel to his first blooding of the day and a stab in the fat part of his thigh below his mail shirt. He would almost certainly have killed Simon in a few more moments, but someone else came up suddenly out of the fog—another Thrithings-man, Simon noted with dazed surprise—and accidentally collided with Simon’s adversary, knocking the man’s horse toward Simon and pushing the mercenary part of the way out of his saddle. Simon’s half-desperate thrust, more in self-defense than anything else, slid up the man’s leg and into his groin; he fell to the ground, blood fountaining from his wound, then screamed and writhed until his convulsions shook his helmet from his head. The man’s thin, staring-eyed face, contorted with pain, brought back to Simon a Hayholt memory of a rat that had fallen into a rain barrel. It had been horrible to see it paddling desperately, teeth bared, eyes bulging. Simon had tried to save it, but in its terror the rodent had snapped at his hand, so he had run away, unable to bear watching it drown. Now an older Simon stared at the shrieking mercenary for a moment, then stepped on his chest to stop him rolling and pushed his sword blade into the man’s throat, holding it there until all movement had stopped.
He felt curiously light-headed. Several long moments passed during which he tore loose the corpse’s baggy sleeve and cinched it tightly around the wound in his own leg. It was only when he had finished and put his foot into Homefinder’s stirrup that he realized what he had just done. His stomach heaved, but he had not made the mistake of eating that morning. After a brief pause he was able to drag himself up into the saddle.
Simon had thought he would be a sort of second-in-command of the trolls, Josua’s hand among the prince’s Qanuc allies, but he quickly discovered that it was hard enough work just to stay alive.
Sisqi and her diminutive troops were scattered all over the misty battlefield. At one point he had managed to find the area where they were most concentrated, and for a while he and the trolls had stood together—he saw Sisqi then, still alive, her slim spear as swift as a wasp sting, her round face set in a mask so fierce she looked like a tiny snow-demon—but at last the ebb and flow of combat had broken them apart again. The trolls did not do their best fighting in an orderly line, and Simon quickly saw that they were more useful when they moved quickly and unobtrusively among Fengbald’s bigger horsemen. The rams seemed surefooted as cats, and although Simon could see many small shapes of Qanuc dead and wounded scattered here and there among the other bodies, they seemed to be giving as good as they were getting, and perhaps better.
Simon himself had survived several more combats, and had killed another Thrithings-man, this time in a more or less fair fight.
It was only as he and this other were hacking at each other that Simon abruptly realized that to these enemies he was no child. He was taller than this particular mercenary, and in his helmet and mail-shirt, he doubtless seemed a large and fearsome fighter. Abruptly heartened, he had renewed his attack, driving the Thrithings-man backward. Then, as the man stopped and his horse came breast to breast with Homefinder, Simon remembered his lessons from Sludig. He feinted a clumsy swing and the mercenary seized the bait, leaning too far forward with his return stroke. Simon let the man’s sword carry him well off-balance, then slammed his shield against the man’s leather helm and followed with a sword thrust that slid between the two halves of the man’s chest armor and into his unprotected side. The mercenary stayed in his saddle as Simon pulled Homefinder back, tugging loose his sword, but before Simon turned away his opponent had already fallen awkwardly to the bloody ice.
Panting, Simon had looked around him and wondered who was winning.
Whatever beliefs about the nobility of war that Simon still retained died during that long day on the frozen lake. In the midst of such terrible carnage, with fallen friends and enemies alike scattered about, maimed and bloodied, some even made faceless by terrible wounds; with the crying and pleading of dying men ringing in his ears, their dignity ripped away from them; with the air rank with the stenches of fear-sweat, blood, and excrement, it was impossible to see warfare as anything other than what Morgenes had once termed it: a kind of hell on earth that impatient mankind had arranged so it would not have to wait for the afterlife. To Simon, the grotesque unfairness of it was almost the worst of all. For every armored knight dragged down, half a dozen foot-soldiers were slaughtered. Even animals suffered torments that should not have been visited on murderers and traitors. Simon saw screaming horses, hamstrung by a chance blow, left to roll on the ice in agony. Although many of the horses belonged to Fengbald’s troops, no one had asked them if they wanted to go to war; they had been forced to it, just as had Simon and the rest of the folk of New Gadrinsett. Even the king’s Erkynguard might have wished to be elsewhere, rather than here on this killing ground where duty brought them and loyalty prisoned them. Only the mercenaries were here by choice. To Simon, the minds of men who would come to this of their own will were suddenly as incomprehensible as the thoughts of spiders or lizards—less so, even, for the small creatures of the earth almost always fled from danger. These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they could force their will on the weak and peace-loving. If God allowed such madness to be, Simon could not help thinking, then He was an old god who had lost His grip.
The sun was vanished high above, hiding behind clouds: it was impossible to tell how long the battle had raged when Josua’s horn blew again. This time it was a summons note that sliced through the misty air. Simon, who did not think he had ever been wearier in his life, turned to the few trolls nearby and shouted: “Sosa! Come!”
A few moments later he nearly ran down Sisqi, who stood over her slaughtered ram, her face still strangely emotionless. Simon leaned toward her and extended his hand. She grasped it in her cold dry fingers and pulled herself up to his stirrup. He helped her into the saddle.
“Where is Binabik?” she asked him, shouting above the din.
“I don’t know. Josua is calling us. We go to Josua now.”
The horn blew again. The men of New Gadrinsett were falling back rapidly, as though they could not have fought a moment longer—which might not have been far from the truth—but they were retreating so swiftly that they seemed almost to evaporate around Simon, like the deposited foam of a sea-wave vanishing into the beach. Their departure left a knot of half a dozen trolls and a couple of Deornoth’s foot-soldiers encircled by a ring of mounted Erkynguardsmen some fifty ells out on the ice. Without help, Simon knew, the defenders would be smothered. He looked around at the small company and grimaced. Too few to do any good, certainly. And those trolls had heard the retreat just as Simon and the others had—was it his duty to rescue everyone? He was tired and bleeding and frightened, and sanctuary was only a few moments away—he had survived, and that was almost a miracle!—but he knew he could not leave those brave folk behind.
“We go there?” he said to Sisqi, pointing to the clump of beleaguered defenders.
She looked and nodded wearily, then screamed something to the few surrounding Qanuc as Simon pulled Homefinder around and moved toward the Erkynguards at a slithering trot. The trolls fell in behind. There were no howls this time, no singing: the little company rode in the silence of utter exhaustion.
And then there was another nightmare of hacking and slashing. The top of Simon’s shield was smashed by a sword blow, splinters of painted wood flying through the air. Several of his own blows struck against solid objects, but the chaos prevented him knowing what he had hit. The encircled trolls and men, seeing that help had come, redoubled their effort and managed to cut their
way out, although at least one more of the Qanuc fell. His blood-spattered ram, when it had shaken its dead master’s boot loose from the stirrup, leaped away from the corpse and ran off across the lake as though pursued by demons, zigzagging wildly until it vanished into the darkening mist. The weary Erkynguards, who after the initial moments seemed no more willing to prolong the struggle than Simon and his company, fought fiercely but gave ground, trying to herd Simon and the rest back toward the strength of Fengbald’s forces. Simon finally saw an opening and shouted to Sisqi. With a last convulsion of soldiers and horses and trolls and rams, Simon’s company broke away from the Erkynguards and fled toward Sesuad’ra and the waiting barricades.
Josua’s horn was blowing again as Simon and the trolls—less than two score gathered together, he noted with dismay—reached the great wall of logs at the base of the hill-trail. Many of Sesuad’ra’s other defenders were around them, and even those who were unwounded looked as beaten down and gray as dying men. A few of Hotvig’s Thrithings-folk, however, were singing hoarsely, and Simon saw one of them had what looked like a pair of bloody heads dangling from his saddle-horn, bouncing to the horse’s strides.
An immense feeling of relief struck Simon as he saw Prince Josua himself standing before the barricade, waving Naidel in the air like a banner and shouting to the returning combatants. The prince was grim, but his words were meant to be heartening.
“Come on,” he cried. “We have given them a taste of their own blood! We have showed them some teeth! Back now, back—they will come no more this day!”
Again, even through the chill that had settled on his heart like a frost, Simon felt a deep and loving loyalty toward Josua—but he also knew that the prince had little left to offer except brave words. Sesuad’ra’s defenders had nearly held their own against better trained and better equipped forces, but they could hardly match Fengbald body for body—the duke had almost three times as many men—and now any element of surprise, such as Binabik’s boot-irons, had been played to its utmost. From here on, the war would be one of attrition, and Simon knew that he would be on the losing side.