Tim Leach - A Winter War

He found it then, as he pushed aside the armour that guarded her arm – a hack at the shoulder, half clotted, still oozing blackish-red blood. But perhaps it would not kill her. He ripped cloth to rags, bound and packed the wound, and as soon as he had finished her horse batted him aside with its head and began to nuzzle at Laimei’s face once more. It was only then that Kai remembered the others.

They stood in a circle about him, as solemn as men before a funeral pyre. And from them he could hear the whispers, as they spoke her name like a prayer. Not the name their mother had given her, but her war name – the Cruel Spear.

On a cattle raid into River Dragon lands, a warband might turn back in a heartbeat if one of the men thought he saw a rider on the plains bearing her sigil. Whispered stories passed around campfires at night, of clans with the odds in their favour breaking and running before the charge of the Cruel Spear. And it was not just stories around those campfires, for every clan had a survivor to look on, and to pity. Men with cut spines who had to be tied onto their horses, women left blinded or handless from their time in the warband. For it was a trail of the maimed that she had left behind her on the battlefield, and so she was feared more than death. To see her so broken seemed a final omen of defeat.

‘Will she live?’ It was Gaevani who spoke, picking at his teeth with his thumb.

‘If anyone can live through that wound, she will,’ said Kai.

‘And what does that mean?’

‘Only the gods can tell.’

Gaevani hissed, and shook his head. ‘No. What does that mean for us?’

It was then that Kai understood. He rose carefully, and faced the other man down.

‘She will be our captain, if she lives. Not you, and not me.’

‘And where will she lead us?’

‘Not to Dacia, that is for certain. Not to sell our spears to our enemies.’

The crack and spit of the fire, the clinking of armour as men shifted in their place. Kai could not before have said that shame had a scent, but he could almost smell the stink of it upon them.

‘It is said that you speak too much, Kai,’ said Gaevani. ‘I did not know that you heard too much as well.’

‘I told you that you should have set a sentry.’ Kai half-turned to speak to the other men, his voice raised in command. ‘Help me with her. We need to—’

It was quick, so quick that Kai could not say how he knew. Some whisper of a god in his ear, perhaps, that made him drop his shoulder and twist away, to feel the crack of a blade glancing from his armour. But he knew, and the Roman sword was in his hand and cutting at the air as he slid back and went into a low stance. Gaevani stood before him, the chipped stone axe weaving before him. There was surprise on his face, for perhaps Gaevani had not known what he meant to do until the moment he struck, had not known that he could be a traitor until the axe sang in the air.

But there could be no turning back now. Kai could see the others broadening the circle, making no move to step between them. They stood with their hands clasped before them, for much had been broken that day, but not the warrior’s code. A challenge made and answered – this was a matter for Kai and Gaevani alone.

They had no shields, and so they carried their left arms high, looking to block with armour and bone. It would be no fight like the old stories, where men leapt and danced and gave half a hundred strokes of their weapons before the end. They still wore their horseman’s armour – weighted and balanced for a man in the saddle and not one who walked upon the ground. Exhausted from the battle, they took little careful steps on the icy ground, gave slow and testing jabs with the weapons. Like two men fighting underwater they seemed, or practising the moves of a dance. Barely moving, offering only little flickers of the blade, a slight shift in stance or position that was countered by just as subtle a movement on the other side. But it did not take Kai long to realise the danger that he was in.

Gaevani was taller, heavier, and his axe longer than the Roman sword that Kai carried. Half a hand of height and reach, and it would be enough. Quickness was the only answer, the hope that the thrust of the sword could be faster than an axe swing, but every time that he moved and breathed Kai could feel those daggers of pain pressing into his side once more.

A shift of weight, his feet pressing into the ice, the sword darting forward. But Gaevani saw him coming – a turn of the body and the axe was moving in the darkness, cracking off the arm that Kai threw up at the last moment.

So it went – thrust and counter, thrust and counter. Kai feinted and tried to cut at the axehead instead, but Gaevani was ready for him and almost took his head off with the return swing. If things had been but a little different, Kai could have pressed him, driven him to the edge of the circle where his reach would count for nothing. If he had a shield, if they fought in daylight, if he did not bear his broken ribs like a spear in his side. If.

The weight of the armour burning in Kai’s legs, his steps stumbling like a foal’s. Gaevani, too, was breathing hard, his face grey with exhaustion, but there was lightness in his feet as he paced across the snow. The lightness of a man who knows he is winning.

But he was a little too light – the snow had been worn away by their circling footprints, and his foot skated against ice. Kai was forward without thinking, crossing the distance in a single beat of the heart, the iron singing in the air. But he did not strike with a thrust, for already Gaevani was guarding against it and turning his body to the side. Kai moving closer, hearing the little sigh of fear from one of the men who watched as he came to the killer’s distance – close enough to cut rather than stab, swinging at the unprotected throat to spill the life upon the ice.

And as he swung, he felt a wrist close about his. Almost a gentle touch, like a lover taking one’s hand in the dance, as it guided his sword arm aside.

For Gaevani had seen that, too. What a warrior he was, Kai thought, as the axe fell towards him.

The haft of the axe was in Kai’s hand – jarring, bruising to the bone, but he had caught Gaevani’s swing in return, the two of them standing together like a carved statue cut from a single piece of stone. Close enough to smell the man’s breath, sweet with wine, to feel it on his face.

A twist of the hands, a surge of weight, feet scattering across the snow and ice, and the two of them were parted. Parted, yet still close enough, the axe turning through the air. But Kai saw a chance of his own and knew he would not get another.

They swung and cut at the same moment.

Then they were away, leaping back, gasping and hunched over, each watching the other for some mark of weakness, for some sign of a wound. For there was fresh blood upon the snow.

Kai’s sword ran dark, the blade seeming black in the darkness, and Gaevani’s hand was at his side, the blood pulsing through the fingers. But Kai saw something else, too. Blood upon the tip of the axe and dripping onto the snow. And it was then that he felt his own wound.

A cold line across his thigh, the hot blood pulsing down his leg, into his boot, spilling out and steaming on the snow.

He felt it then, a sensation he had known before. Practising the swordsman’s craft with his father on the fields to the east, when the old warrior had seemed to know each of his moves before Kai even thought of them. A duel over a woman, fought to the first blood against a man too fast for him. A tournament on horseback fought with blunted spears – against his sister, before the feud – her laughter surrounding him as she tumbled him from his mount. The weary sadness of the fighter who knows he cannot win.