Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

“He had a dagger drawn when I attacked him, and he almost killed me before he recognized me, but we were both falling at the time and instead of sticking me in the chest, his blade glanced off my cross-belt and carved a deep trench underneath my left arm. I bled like a pig and we had to scramble to stop the bleeding, for he had hit a large vein, but while he was tending to me he told me all he had seen.

“Childebertus was dead. That was the main thing Fallo had to tell me. No doubt of it; he said. He had seen the King die with his own eyes. The guards had been overwhelmed in silence, for the most part, struck down by arrows from a distance, but some of the arrows—one of them aimed at Fallo—had missed their marks and the alarm was raised. By then the enemy was already charging into the encampment in force, thundering hard on the heels of the volley of arrows, a solid body of horsemen designed to ride down and obliterate anyone left standing. Fallo and three others that he knew of had fallen back to the encampment, managing to keep ahead of the enemy, and it was as he ran toward the center of the camp that Fallo saw Childebertus at the entrance of his tent, half-naked and clutching a sword and shield.

“Before he could even shout a warning, Fallo saw a horseman dressed entirely in black gallop out from between two tents and bear down on your father, the horse’s shoulder striking him and hurling him backward, to hit and rebound from the side of his own tent then fall over a guy rope and sprawl on his face, his sword jarred from his hand. Clearly stunned by the force of the fall, your father then started to struggle to his knees, but the figure in black was already leaping down from his horse, swinging a heavy one-handed ax over his head. Fallo was still ten paces distant when the rider buried his ax between the kneeling King’s shoulders. Your father died then and there, but his killer worked the ax head free and then tried to sever his head, moving around him to the side and starting to take careful aim with his upraised weapon. He didn’t even see Fallo coming, and by the time he noticed him he was too late to escape. It was his head, not your father’s, that fell from its trunk. And even as he killed the man, Fallo recognized him.”

Chulderic stopped abruptly, his jaw set, and reined in his horse, staring through narrowed eyes into some scene that was forever closed to me.

“It frightened him at first, he said, to recognize the whoreson because the fellow was supposed to be already dead, killed a year earlier. The man was Merofled, who had once been Clodas’s closest crony and husband of the supposedly widowed Sabina. Fallo had struck off his head with one wild sword blow, and although he knew not how, he sensed nonetheless that this man’s identity was important and should be witnessed. But even as he scrambled to pick up the severed head he was attacked by other newcomers and almost died there beside your father. He forgot about Merofled’s head then and concentrated instead on saving his own. First two, then five assailants surrounded him, but he managed to cut his way out of the circle and escape, aided by the fact that several of his attackers quit fighting him to join another group who had entered the central tent and captured your mother. Unable to help her—he told me she had been surrounded by more than a dozen men, and I believed him—Fallo stole one of their horses, but in fighting to mount it he had to leave behind his sword when it stuck fast in the body of the last man he killed.”

Chulderic kicked his horse into motion again. “So, there it was, the entire conundrum in a nutshell, although I could not see it even then. As Fallo spoke the words that bared it all, the connection between Merofled and his ‘widowed’ wife passed over my head, leaving no impression. I was stunned by everything he had told me … stunned, I will admit, into something approaching mindlessness. When I heard Fallo’s description of what he had seen, the horror of what he was telling me left me fighting to draw breath, as empty inside as though my guts had been scooped right out. The sudden knowledge of these brutal deaths—your father’s and your mother’s—hit me as a personal judgment and condemnation. It was a crippling, punishing confirmation of my own worst fears and it was simply too much to absorb at one time.

“It did not occur to me at all then, for example, that your mother might have survived the capture that Fallo had described to me. And it certainly hadn’t yet come to me that the attackers were Clodas’s men—how, before it actually occurred, could such a monstrosity even have been conceivable? Certainly, when Fallo spoke Merofled’s name, my mind tried to form some kind of explanation for his unexpected presence—I remember thinking that the reports of his death must have been in error; he must have been captured and not killed, and thereafter been held hostage to some monstrous threat.

“I had some addled notion in my head, I remember, that the attackers were some kind of Outlanders, some ragtag invading force of barbarian adventurers from the far north, beyond the Rhine. I had half-formed visions in my mind of towheaded, blond-bearded savages carrying enormous axes and heavy shields. But then I remembered that Fallo had only seen one ax, a single-handed ax, wielded by Merofled, who was no Outlander. Even then, I realized later, stunned and disoriented as I was, I was beginning, deep in my mind, to sense the presence of evil.

“The deep wound in my arm from Fallo’s dagger was not making my problems any less difficult. The bleeding finally stopped, however, thanks to the pressure of the wadded bandage Fallo had strapped around my arm using one of my several belts. He was in better condition than I was, so I rode and he led me back cautiously toward our former encampment. I was fretting at his caution, but it proved worthwhile, for there were large numbers of enemy troops among the woods. Fortunately, they were all leaving, and there was that air of flattened calm about them that affects all of us after the terror of heavy fighting. We stopped and concealed ourselves in a dense thicket within a quarter mile of the camp and remained there for almost half an hour, watching as the last of them drifted away into the woods, heading northward. I had been watching those of them who had approached us, but none had come close enough for me to examine closely, and yet there was something that I felt I should be seeing, something that was plainly there but was eluding me. It was annoying, like the buzzing of an insect in the night, clearly heard but unseen.

“When they were all safely gone, we ventured out and made our way into the camp, where we found your father’s headless body, but no sign at all of your mother the Queen. We searched high and low, hoping to find her safely hidden somewhere in the surrounding area, but in the end we found no trace of her and were left wondering what had become of her.

“Whoever these attackers were, they had taken your father’s head as a trophy, for his was the only corpse that had been mutilated that way. His and Merofled’s, if Fallo was to be believed. But there was no sign of Merofled on the killing field, other than a great outpouring of blood at the spot where Fallo said he had struck off the butcher’s head, and the man in whose body Fallo had left his sword had vanished, too. All of the bodies of the enemy fallen had been removed, in fact, the dead as well as the wounded, and only a few slaughtered defenders and two dead horses remained sprawled in the clearing that had housed the camp. Our dead, and the far-flung ring of perimeter guards, had fallen where they stood and fought. I sat light-headed and reeling in my saddle, blinking at the sights that surrounded me, aware that something was wrong but unable to identify what it was. It was Fallo who finally defined it.