Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

Then he walked straight toward me, and as he passed he waved at me to go with him. I followed him to where my two horses had found some grass growing in a patch between the trees and were busily crunching and cropping at the succulent greenery. Ursus stopped and I almost walked into him.

“Which one do you want?” he asked.

“That one’s mine,” I said, pointing.

“Good, I’ll take the other one, then.”

He moved directly to the horse, and I spoke to his back. “You saved my life. Twice.”

He paused in the act of stroking the animal’s muzzle and turned to look at me, then nodded slightly. “Aye. You were outnumbered, but you were unlucky, too. If you hadn’t stepped on that stick and fallen you would have beaten both those men.”

“But I did fall.”

“Aye, and you were fortunate that I was there and watching. But don’t be too grateful. Next time, you might have to do the same for me, and though you won’t find me ungrateful, I might not thank you at the time.”

I said something then that I did not know I was going to say, and to this day I don’t know why I said it at that particular moment. It may have been relief at finding him to be more pleasant and approachable than people had said he was, or it might simply have been that the guilt that filled me had suddenly become unbearable.

“I ran away.”

Ursus looked at me, his face blank, then quirked one eyebrow. “From where, the school?”

“No, from the fight, yesterday. I panicked, lost my nerve, and ran for my life.”

“So did I. It all happened too quickly and there were too many of them, too suddenly. One moment we were ambling along as though we were the only people in the world, and then, the next, there were men leaping all around us on every side and arrows flying everywhere and dead people falling off their horses, their heads and bodies bristling with arrows. I was riding alone, closest to the riverbank, because my horse was grazing wherever he could find a mouthful of grass, and I saw the two men on my left, the cook and his helper, knocked off their horses, both of them in the same instant, one forward, the other backward, both stone dead. I’ve been in this game long enough to know a dead man when I see one, even if he’s still falling. I took one look around and saw wild men everywhere, three of the whoresons, at least, for every one of us when we were all alive. Then one fellow jumps up in front of me, coming at me with an ax. I put the spurs to my horse, ran the whoreson down and just kept going, right into the river, where I slid off and got my horse’s body between me and the bowmen on the bank who were already shooting at me. I got away, but they killed my horse. One of their arrows hit it in the neck and severed a big vein. Shame. Good thing I can swim, though.” He paused, then looked me in the eye. “But I thought I was the only one who got away. How did you manage it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I was talking to my friend Lorco when he was killed. An arrow hit him in the back of the head and came out through his face. There were strangers everywhere, screaming and shouting, attacking us on foot, and more than half of the people in our group were dead. I saw bodies lying everywhere. And that’s when I panicked and ran away. I didn’t stop running until I was deep in the forest.”

“Doesn’t sound like panic to me. More like good sense. You’re still alive. And you stood and fought those people we just killed today. Nothing cowardly there. And you couldn’t have done that if you’d been killed yesterday, could you?”

He stared at me, waiting for an answer.

“No,” I said, quietly. “I suppose not.”

“Don’t suppose anything. Accept it and stop fretting. What happened to us yesterday—to me and to you—happened because it was meant to happen. If you and I had been meant to die in that ambush we would have died. But we lived, so we were not meant to die. And if that’s the case, then what is the point of whining about not being dead?”

I nodded. “Where is Duke Lorco now?”

“I don’t know. I expected him to be somewhere up ahead of me, but I suspect you’re telling me now that’s not so. Am I right?”

“Yes. That’s why I came back in this direction. How could you not have seen him yesterday? You must have swum right by his camp at some point.”

“No, not yesterday. After the ambush I hid in a bank of reeds in a pond that once was an eddy in the river. And I mean hid … head down and flat on my belly most of the time, holding my breath in case someone might hear me breathing. There were hostiles everywhere . The whole countryside was swarming with them, and none of them looked like the people who attacked us earlier in the day. I think they were an entirely different bunch—an army, not just a rabble mob like the crew that hit us. I never got close enough to any of them to hear them speak, but as far as I could tell from what they were wearing, they were Burgundians, and they were well armed and well equipped. The first ones I met were on the other side of the river, and they almost caught me out in the open on the riverbank, but I saw them just in time and managed to make it to the tall reeds around the edge of the pond. And there I stayed for the rest of the day, because there were more of them all around me, on my side of the river. I don’t know how they got to be on both sides, because the river’s wide, and it’s in spate, but there they were.

“All I could do was sit tight and hope to get back into the water as soon as it grew dark enough, and then swim downstream from there. Whoever these people were, Burgundians or not, they had been passing by me all day, all headed south, as far as I could tell, and there were thousands of them. I mean, I couldn’t stand up and count them, not without getting myself killed, but I could hear them passing by and they’ just kept coming and coming.

“Thing was, though, I couldn’t tell where they were really going, or where they planned to stop for the night, and that worried me, for if they were going to be sleeping all along the banks of the river, then I wouldn’t be able to make as much as a splash, and if I hit a stretch with bad currents, I could give myself away just by trying to stay alive.

“Anyway, late in the afternoon they started to thin out, but as luck would have it, just before dark, as I was getting ready to make my escape, a whole new detachment of them came along and settled in for the night right along the riverbank next to where I was hiding. They set up a guard post so close to me I couldn’t even lie back in the reeds and sleep, in case I snored. I was stuck in there until the whoresons left this morning at dawn, and I’ve been drifting downstream ever since, with my head in the middle of a floating crown of long reeds that I made while I was stuck in the pond, waiting to get away.” He paused, then added, “Crown isn’t the right word. It was more of a wreath, with long reeds sticking straight up out of it so that no one could see my head in the middle of it. I’m starved. Have you got anything to eat?”

“No.” I half turned back to where the three dead men lay behind us. “But they might. We didn’t expect to be in need of food yesterday, until we were attacked, but those fellows came here a-purpose, so they probably brought food with them.”

“Bright lad,” Ursus said, turning smoothly and moving back to check the contents of the scrips that hung about the dead men’s waists. Sure enough, we found bread, dried meat, and a small pouch of dried nuts mixed with what tasted like chopped dried pears, as well as a full skin of watered wine. We sat down where we were, our backs against the big oak tree, and made short work of all of it, ignoring the dead men and eating and drinking until our empty stomachs were full again. By the time we finished there was not much left to save, other than a heel of bread and an end of the dried meat.