Brian Ruckley - Tyrant

‘Glad you think so,’ Lorin said. ‘You get up ahead, make sure none of your goats’ve topped the hill before us.’

They watched him labour to overtake the little crowd of villagers. Brennan saw some of those men and women looking up at Manadar as he passed them. Some of the children too. What did they see? he wondered. The figure out of legend that he and his friend had imagined when they talked of the Free years ago? Manadar did not look much like a legend. Nor did Brennan feel like one. Not any more, if he ever had.

‘Up! Up!’ Lorin shouted.

Almost like a shepherd trying to hurry along a recalcitrant flock.

Brennan was close beside him and heard the dull thud before Lorin reacted. That reaction, when it came, was little more than a sharp breath and a momentary lurch in the saddle.

‘They’ve got someone down there who knows how to use a bow after all,’ Lorin grunted.

The arrow had hit him in the back of his upper arm. The muscle was transfixed. Brennan reached across to steady Lorin in his saddle, but the older man shook his head.

‘It’s nothing.’

Another arrow rattled off the hard ground behind them.

‘Be good if it didn’t happen again though,’ Lorin muttered. ‘I’m running out of fresh bits of my body for them to bloody. Let’s get out of sight or out of range. One or the other.’

‘I was a lucky man before I met you two,’ Lorin grumbled, tearing a rag from his sleeve and struggling to bind it one-handed about his wound. He was sitting with his back against a sloping rock. He had broken the arrow and pulled it out of his flesh himself.

‘You’re not blaming us, are you?’ Manadar said with an affected plaintive air. He pushed Lorin’s hand away and set to bandaging his wound.

Lorin winced as Manadar pulled the rag tight.

‘This look like luck to you?’ he growled through gritted teeth.

‘Not much,’ Manadar conceded. ‘But you look luckier than you would as a corpse. And the day’s not done yet. Never know what might happen.’

Lorin snorted.

‘I know what’s going to happen if we ever get out of here. I’m going to Sussadar, and then to Armadell. Then back to Sussadar. Those two cities and the road between them, between my fine ladies. That’s going to be my world.’

‘Sounds like a noble plan,’ Manadar smiled. He glanced at Brennan. ‘What about you? You need some of my tender tending?’

‘No,’ Brennan said.

He had packed some bandaging in under his jerkin, tight over the knife wound. It was not a deep cut as far as he could tell. Messy, but not dangerous. He was more interested in watching the slavers moving to and fro at the base of the hill. Close to a hundred of them in all, by his count. A few had herded a crowd of captives into the cluster of trees and were presumably guarding them there out of sight. That left at least eighty or ninety who were arraying themselves in groups on the lower slopes. Some had ridden away, rounding the hill and out of sight.

‘Seems to me they’re going to try us before night falls,’ he observed.

‘Most likely,’ Lorin agreed. ‘Don’t suppose they like fighting in the dark. That sort never do.’

‘We going to get out of the way?’ Manadar asked.

‘These people aren’t going anywhere fast or easy,’ Lorin said.

He meant the villagers they had freed. Twenty-five of them. They were sitting around the cairn, feasting on the last of the food and water Manadar had given them. All of their food, in fact. There was nothing of that left for the morrow. Enough water to quench the thirst of this number for perhaps one day.

‘And I know you don’t mean to leave them in our wake,’ Lorin continued pointedly. ‘They’re the reason we’re here. To fight for them. So that’s what we do.’

‘I know,’ Manadar nodded. ‘I’m just curious about how we’re going to do it. There being three of us and… oh, I don’t know, what do you reckon, Brennan?’

‘Ninety or thereabouts.’

‘There you are. Ninety of them.’

‘We don’t do it alone, that’s how,’ said Lorin. ‘We’ve got a lot of their coin sitting up here with us in those twenty-five bodies over there. As long as they think they’re only against the three of us, they’ll stay here and make the attempt. All we need to do is keep them here, trying to kill us, until Yulan and the rest get here.’

‘Oh,’ Manadar said. ‘Yulan’s coming, is he?’

‘He will be once you light a fire.’

‘With what?’

‘You’ve got flint and steel, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.

‘Well, then. Cut up one of the bedrolls. Fray it apart. It’ll take a flame if you get it ripped up fine enough. Then burn whatever you can. Your clothes, anything, I don’t care. If we don’t get smoke in the sky before darkness falls, we’re all dead. And we’ve won nothing, worse than nothing, if we just moved the place these people die up a bit of a hill.’

The villagers watched Manadar struggling to get a fire going for a while. Eventually, one of the women went to him and gently but insistently took the task over. Soon enough, she had a little blaze started, crackling and spitting through the wreckage of one of the bedrolls. Brennan had a feeling it was his bedroll in fact. He should have watched more closely when Manadar was making the selection.

Manadar must have told the villagers the purpose of the fire, for they began shedding any odd pieces of inessential clothing they had left to them. Headscarves and thin shawls. Ruined shoes. Strips torn from the hems of skirts. It all went into the flames. A black line of smoke, thin but strong, climbed into the dimming sky. Just in time, perhaps. A fast dusk was close upon them.

Marweh came to Lorin and Brennan.

‘We can fight,’ she said levelly.

‘You’ll have to,’ Lorin replied.

He worked his knife a little clumsily out from its sheath in his boot.

‘Here. Give that to someone. You’ve a couple of spears. The rest of you should gather rocks. Anything small enough to throw, big enough to hurt. Take the cairn apart.’

They did. Brennan watched for a time. However long it had stood there for, the cairn ended in a few minutes. The villagers roughly dismantled it, making many small piles of stones from that one larger. A dozen good archers would have been much better, but still Brennan found it an encouraging sight. A rain of stones, thrown from on high, might be enough to discourage an assault, depending on the temper of the attackers. It might even crack a few heads.

‘You spotted this tyrant of theirs yet?’ Lorin asked him quietly.

Brennan shook his head. He had been searching for any distinguishing sign that might mark out the leader of the slavers. The distance was just too great to be sure.

‘If you do, put an arrow in him, would you?’

‘Of course,’ Brennan said.

He had his bow ready by his side, and the quiver resting against a rock within easy reach. He could see men moving slowly and cautiously up the slope below them. They were rushing from boulder to boulder, just as he and Lorin had done when they first climbed this hill. They used every wrinkle in the land to conceal their approach. Soon, soon, they would be close enough for him not to worry that a shot was a wasted arrow. He had counted his shafts. Twenty-seven. Every one might have to count if things went badly.

‘You want me to stay here or cover a different approach?’ he asked Lorin.

The older man heaved himself onto his feet with a groan of pain.

‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘Think you’ve got most of them on this side, and that’s where the archer should be.’

‘The closest thing you’ve got to an archer,’ Brennan said.

‘As you say.’