Robert Adams - The Death of a Legend

So close that Bili could almost touch him stood a panting horse with his equally weary rider. There was no recognizing who might be within the plain, scarred, dented plate, but Bili knew the mare and urged Mahvros nearer.

When they were knee to knee, he leaned close and shouted, “Geros! Sir Geros! Are you hurt, man?” His voice was a painful thunder to his own ears within the closed helm. “Where did you get my eagle banner?”

But the other rider sat unmoving, unresponsive. His steel-plated shoulders rose and fell jerkily to his heavy, spasmodic breathing. One gauntleted fist gripped the hilt of his broadsword, its blade red-smeared from point to quillions; the other held a hacked and splintery ashwood shaft, from which the tattered and faded Red Eagle of Morguhn rippled silkily in the freshening breeze.

Sir Geros had once borne this very banner to glory and lasting fame while serving as a Freefighter with the troop of Captain Pawl Raikuh, but since his well-earned elevation to the ranks of the nobility, a common trooper had been chosen standardbearer, while the new knight took his expected place among the heavily armed nobles.

Bili tried mindspeak. “Did you piss your breeks, as usual, Sir Geros?”

Shame and contrition boiled up from the knight’s soul and beamed out with the chagrined reply. “I always do, my lord. Always wet myself in battle.”

Bili chuckled good-naturedly, and his mirth was silently transmitted, as well. “Geros, every man jack in this squadron knows that you’ve got at least a full league of guts. When are you going to stop being ashamed of the piddling fact that your bladder’s not as brave as the rest of you? None of the rest of us give a damn about it, man. Why then should you?”

“But… but, my lord thoheeks, it’s not…” he paused “Not manly!”

Bili snorted his derision. “Horse turds, Sir Geros! You are acknowledged one of the ten best swordsmen in a dozen duchies and you fight like a scalded treecat. So why waste worry about a meaningless quirk of yours? I assure you, no one else is bothered by it.”

“Yet I am the joke of the squadron, my lord,” grated the young’knight. “There is never any sort of alarm or fight but that someone mentions my weakness, my shame, and asks of it or openly lays hand to my saddle or my breeks. Then they all laugh at me.”

Bili extended his bridle hand to firmly grip the knight’s shoulder, chiding gently, “Oh, Geros, Geros, the laughter is not at you, man, it’s at your evident embarrassment And it’s friendly, Geros, just well-meant joshing among peers. In truth, there are few men in all the host who are so deeply and widely respected as are you. Everyone knows you’re a very brave man, Geros.”

Geros just shook his helmeted head, tiredly, resignedly. “But I’m not really brave, my lord, and I know it, even if no one else does. I fight for the same base reason I strove to master the sword and other weapons: only to stay alive. And I’m frightened near to death in a fight, nearly all the time, my lord, and that’s not valor.”

“Not so!” snapped Bili firmly. “It’s the highest degree of true valor that you recognize and accept your quite legitimate fears of death or maiming and then do your duty and more despite them. And don’t forget what poor old Pawl Raikuh told you the day that we stormed the salients outside the city of Vawnpolis. Fear, consciously controlled fear, is what keeps a warrior alive in a press. Men who don’t know fear seldom outlive their first, serious battle.

“And I’ll add this, now, Geros: Self-doubt is a good thing in many ways, for it teaches a man humility; but you can’t allow yourself to be carried too far by such doubts, else they’ll unman you.

“But all that aside. Tell me, how’d you chance to be bearing my banner again? Can’t keep your hands off it, eh?”

Geros was too exhausted and drained to rise to the joke. “My lord, I was riding at Klifud’s side through most of that ghastly mess back there, and I thought me I had guarded him and the eagle well. Then, just at the fringes of the horde, a barbarian axeman crowded between us and lopped off poor Klifud’s forearm. I ran the stinking savage through and barely caught the eagle ere it fell. Then I was in the open, here; I don’t know what happened to Klifud, my lord.”

Bili nodded brusquely. “Well, man, you have it now. How’s your throat? Dry as mine, I doubt me not.”

Peeling behind his saddle, he grunted his satisfaction at finding his canteen still in place and whole. With numb, twitching fingers, he unlatched and raised his visor. Lifting the quart bottle to his crusty lips, he filled his mouth once, spit the fluid out, then took several long drafts of the tepid brandy-and-water mixture. The first swallow burned his gullet ferociously, like a red-hot spearblade on an open wound, but those which followed it were as welcome and soothing as warm honey. Taking the bottle down at last, he proffered it to Sir Geros.

“Here, man, wash out your mouth and oil that remarkable set of vocal cords. If we’re to really clobber those unwashed bastards, we must rally the squadron and hit them hard again.”

For the impetus of that first smashing charge had been lost, as Bili could plainly see, and the majority of the lowland horsemen were fighting alone or, at best, in small groups, rising and falling from sight, almost lost in a roiling sea of shaggy, multitoned fur.

Bili realized that where mere skill at arms and superlative armor could not promise victory or even bare survival against such odds, the superior bulk and weighty force of the troop horses and destriers were his outnumbered squadron’s single asset. To take full advantage of that sole asset, the horde must again be struck by an ordered, disciplined formation, charging and striking at the gallop. But before he could deliver another crushing charge, he must rally such of his scattered elements as he could.

On command, Sir Geros’ clear tenor voice pealed like a trumpet above the uproar, while Bili himself, gripping the brass-shod ferrule in both his big hands, raised the eagle high above his head and waggled the shaft.

For a long, breathless moment, it seemed that none could or would respond to the imperative summons. But first a pair of blood-splashed Freefighters hacked their way from out of the near edge of the press, then a half-dozen more appeared behind a destrier-mounted nobleman, and slowly, by dribbles and drops, the squadron’s ranks again filled out and formed up behind the Red Eagle of Morguhn. Not all who had made the first charge returned, of course; some were just too hard pressed to win free of the horde, and some would never return.

Bili took a position some two hundred yards off the left flank of the milling mob that was his target—the absolutely minimal distance cavalry needed to achieve the proper impetus in a charge. He had just gotten the understrength units into squadron front when the beat of hundreds of drumming hooves sounded from somewhere within the narrow, winding defile to his own left flank.

The veteran troopers were already preparing to wheel in order to face the self-announced menace when the riders swept down from out the mouth of that precipitous gap. In the lead rode Ehrbuhn Duhnkin, followed by the bowmasters of the Freefighter troops. But their bows were all unstrung and cased; their sabers were out and flashing in errant beams of sunlight.

While the archer-troopers took their accustomed places in the shrunken ranks, Ehrbuhn rode up to Thoheeks Bili, mind-speaking. “We had to miss first blood, Lord Bili, but I mean to be in at the kill. So too do some others, incidentally; they it was showed us the way down from up there atop the cliffs. So, in all courtesy, my lord, I think we should not begin this dance until the arrival of the ladies.”