Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

Lorco had fallen behind me by half a length, his horse stomping and cavorting, protesting at the cloud of horseflies that swarmed around us, and as I turned in my saddle to speak to him one of the flies landed on my nose and began crawling down, toward my mouth. I brought up my hand to brush it away as Lorco said, “That’s the biggest flock of crows I ev—”

My life changed at that instant, blasted by a sight I should never have seen.

I saw what happened because I was looking directly at Lorco’s mouth as his lips formed the words. I heard the sounds that accompanied the event and noted them because they were so strange and jarring. And both sight and sounds were seared indelibly into my memory. And yet I failed utterly to comprehend what I had heard and seen … and even now, I find myself wondering which came first, the sight, or the sounds? Such was their speed when they occurred that they were indistinguishable,’ but in a hundred dreams throughout the year that followed, they broke apart, sounds and sight, and took place again and again, inexorably and appallingly, sometimes sight followed by sound, sometimes the other way around, but always with the power to snap me sharply awake, gasping and filled with terror.

As my fingers brushed at the end of my nose, dislodging the tickling fly, Lorco’s entire head appeared to change shape. It was a phenomenon too brief to register, but I saw, or it seemed I saw, his entire head, flex in less than the blink of an eye, the way a reflection will sometimes undulate in a calm, dark pool when an unseen fish passes beneath. It was as though all the bones of his skull had suddenly been replaced, for a mere flicker of time, by a liquid-filled bladder of some kind. It lurched and instantly reformed itself. And as this odd event occurred I heard alien noises: an abrupt, violent hiss and a ripping, rending, meaty sound that terminated in a solid, crunching thunk! as something propelled Lorco toward me with great force, jerking him forward from the waist as his face split asunder in a welter of blood and flying pieces of whiteness that I would later come to recognize as teeth and fragments of shattered bone.

I did nothing, frozen in the instant by disbelief and feeling something within me grasped and crushed in the grip of a massive fist of solid, icy coldness that I could not even begin to recognize. I saw my best friend’s suddenly ruined face come thrusting toward me, a spray of blood bursting from his ruptured mouth, filling the space between us with a red, wet mist, and then I saw his eyes, wide and terrified, shrieking at me in eloquent silence, begging me to tell him what had happened. Unable to move, I saw his horse begin to spin and carry him away from me, and as he began to topple sideways to the ground I finally saw the arrow that had killed him. It was a heavy, iron-headed war arrow, triple-bladed and wickedly barbed, and it had struck the back of his neck, severing his spine before passing through the cavity of his mouth to shatter his upper front teeth and emerge through the base of his nose.

Even as Lorco pitched forward, and knowing that he would crash headfirst to the ground, I still had not begun to comprehend what had happened. Then I heard shouting, and saw movement ahead of me, and looked up toward the rear of our train in time to see the man who had shot Lorco preparing to loose another arrow at me. I remained frozen, but fortunately my horse was already reacting uneasily to the panic it sensed in its companion. It reared sideways, tossing its head and whinnying, and I watched the arrow spring from the killer’s bow and leap across the intervening space between us to hiss by me so closely that I felt its passing. And now, as my panicky mount spun me around, I saw that our entire party was surrounded and outnumbered by a swarm of strangers, most of them armed with bows. Even as I looked I saw Harga go down with two arrows in him, one of them deep in his skull behind the right ear, having pierced his leather helmet.

Fool, I remember thinking, seeing the silvery iron helmet hanging from his saddle. He should know better than that. I should have, too, for my own helmet hung close by my knee, but I was a mere boy, not a soldier, and so I absolved myself.

Then clarity returned and terror threatened to overwhelm me as I saw that I had mere moments in which to save myself or die. I could see six of my companions, not counting Lorco, already sprawled in the dirt of the path, and I saw several of the enemy take note of me sitting there, high up and empty-handed on my fine horse. One of them was almost within reach of me by that time, an outstretched hand grasping for my reins. I snatched them myself, barely in time, and pulled them tight, swinging my horse around hard, striking the man with its shoulder and sending him sprawling.

Someone shouted urgently, a warning to someone else to catch me before I could escape, but I was already spurring my horse hard, roweling him viciously in my need to get away from there. Another form leaped up at me, attempting to seize my bridle, but my horse was already surging forward. I kicked out with a savagery born of desperation and the man fell away as the thick, iron-studded sole of my heavy riding boot connected with his ear. I dug with my spurs again and now I could feel the strength of the horse beneath me as he strove to leap away from the gouging torment of the pain in his sides.

Another man leaped at me and was struck and thrust aside by the plunging horse, and a fourth slipped and fell with a cry beneath its trampling hooves. I heard three sharp, whistling sounds that I recognized as close-shot arrows, but I was almost free of the throng by then, with only two men now between me and the bare fields beyond. The man farthest to my right had a bow, and as I saw him he brought the weapon up and sighted toward me. Acting purely on instinct, I let go my reins, seized a handful of mane in each fist and threw myself down along the horse’s left side until I was hidden from the bowman completely. It was a trick I had practiced with this horse many times, for more than a year, and the only means the bowman had of countering it was to ignore me and shoot the horse. Fortunately, he did not. He may have wondered what happened to me, but by the time he stopped gawping I was past both him and his companion and my horse was galloping flat out. I swung myself back up into the saddle and leaned forward as his arrow belatedly flew by me, missing widely. I sighted between the animal’s ears toward the dark line of trees that marked the outer edge of the forest wherein I knew I would be safe—safer by far, at any rate, than I could be in the open fields that flanked the river—and raked him with my spurs again.

No one tried to follow me, and an hour later I dismounted by a narrow, fast-flowing stream where I lay on my belly and thrust my face into the water, drinking greedily until I could drink no more. The water was cold enough to hurt, but I made no attempt to get up. Instead, I rolled my head from side to side, soaking my head completely and allowing, encouraging, the chill to keep me numb and thoughtless. When I could stand the cold no longer, I pushed myself up onto my knees and tried to stand but fell instead to all fours in the streambed and vomited up what I had drunk.

I do not remember crawling out of the water, but sometime later, it might have been an hour, perhaps even longer, I awoke on my side on the thick grass beneath one of the trees on the stream’s bank.

There was a thought, a memory, already in my mind when I regained consciousness that afternoon on the bank of the stream. It was the memory of my own hubris, less than two weeks earlier. When I had learned that Bishop Germanus had great things in mind for me once I had reached sixteen, I had thought of myself as being a man and a warrior dedicated to the greater glory of God. Now the recollection of it made me cringe with shame.