Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

“Ban’s,” I said, still too stupefied by the unexpectedness of what we had found to have thought beyond the fact of it to the implications it entailed. “They’re garrison troops, wearing Ban’s emblem, see? The blue boar’s head.” And then, as the import of what we were seeing began to sink home to me, my voice shrank to a mere whisper and I felt my bowels twist themselves into spasms of knotting cramps. “These must be the men Theuderic took with him when he left yesterday.”

Ursus nudged his horse forward until he was sitting knee to knee with me. I glanced at him, wondering if he felt as I did, but he was scanning the entire scene ahead of us, his eyes moving ceaselessly over the ranks of slaughtered men.

“Took them on the march,” he said. “Must have lain in wait for them, knowing they’d be coming.” He tilted his head back slightly, pointing with his chin. “Look at them. Poor whoresons didn’t even have time to draw their weapons. Not a strung bow or an unsheathed sword among them. Probably ambushed from over there.” He pointed to the hillside facing us on the other side of the narrow valley. “See, on the top of the hill there, those bushes? See how dense they are? You could hide horses in there, and that’s exactly what they did. Perfect spot to lie in wait for anyone coming along this path, because once they’re on the slope down, there’s nowhere else for them to run to … .” His voice faded away for a moment, then resumed. “Can you see Theuderic here?”

“Theuderic?” The question snapped me out of the trance I had been sinking into, making me look around in expectant horror. It was one thing to see my cousin’s men shot down and slaughtered, but quite another to think that Theuderic himself might lie among the dead.

“No, I didn’t think so,” Ursus continued, speaking quietly as though musing to himself. “There’s no dead horses here at all, which suggests that whoever set this trap let all the horsemen pass by first—they would have been ahead of the infantry in any case—and then sat tight and waited for the foot soldiers. And they, knowing that their own cavalry was just ahead of them, would have marched right into death, suspecting nothing. Probably hadn’t even sent scouts out ahead of them, although it would have made no difference. Poor catamites walked right into it. Look at those arrows. I haven’t seen that many spent arrows since I fought on the coast of Arabia, against the Berbers there. I’ve seen hedgehogs with fewer bristles than that. And yet there’s hundreds missing. Look, you can see where they’ve cut the retrievable ones out of the bodies.” He indicated the body lying closest to us, and I saw immediately what he meant. The man had taken an arrow in the thigh, which dropped him in his tracks, severing the leg’s main blood vessel and causing him to bleed to death very quickly. The entire area around him was black with his lifeblood and it had gouted far enough to stain several of the bodies lying ahead of him, as well. The wound that had been added afterward had not bled at all; its edges were clean and deep, and the hole left by the missing arrowhead was big. I turned my head away before the gagging in my throat could overwhelm me, but Ursus was still looking.

“Look over there! That fellow there was still alive before they came down. They slit his throat when they came back, either to silence him or to make sure he’d tell no one what he had seen.” He shook his head in disbelief and blew out his breath explosively through puffed cheeks, looking up again to where the bushes that had concealed the killers stretched across the top of the hillside on the far side of the little valley.

“This is cousin Gunthar’s work.” I said it quietly, and Ursus looked again at the surrounding scene and expelled another whoosh of breath.

“May God Himself be my witness, I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself, but those whoresons actually came back down here after the slaughter and collected their spent arrows to use them again.” He shook his head again, still looking about him as he continued in the same musing tone. “It takes a special kind of attitude to let a man do things like that—especially to people he has known. These were garrison mates … . That’s a close relationship, young Clothar, brothers in arms. But their brothers, like some of your own relatives, were less than loving. Your cousin picks his guardsmen carefully, it would appear, with more than half an eye to temperament … . I wonder if they are all mounted archers. They must be, to account for the numbers of arrows and the rate of fire … the short amount of time involved.” He waved a pointing finger, indicating the feathered missiles projecting from the bodies. “These are mounted bowmen’s arrows, much smaller than the ones you and I have in our quivers. When we come face-to-face with Gunthar’s men I think I would rather have my bow to pull than theirs.” He sucked air between his teeth, still looking thoughtful as his eyes moved ceaselessly over the killing ground. “Before we do anything else, though, we ought to take a closer look at what we have here. Come on.”

He swung down from his saddle, and I joined him very reluctantly, my gorge rising anew at the stench that had begun to rise now that the rain had stopped. My entire mouth seemed coated with the brassy, almost granular stink-taste of blood. I tried to ignore the feel of the blood-soaked ground beneath my feet, telling myself it was no more than mud, then stood reeling with nausea, clinging to my horse’s halter. Ursus, however, paid me no attention. He was already quartering the scene around us with his eyes.

“Go you and look down there, Clothar, among the bushes at the bottom of the slope. See if you can find anyone still alive. And see if you can find any different crests from the boar’s head, something that might give us proof of who’s responsible for this. I’ll search on this side of the slope. If you find anything at all, shout.”

A long time passed before I found anything to shout about, and when I did, I almost missed it.

I had lost track of time, walking among the dead for so long that I had grown inured to the horrors I was seeing, and my revulsion and nausea had passed. It was plain to see that Ursus was right. The killers had come down after the slaughter and retrieved as many of their arrows as they could cut out of the corpses, and the number of cut throats showed that many of their victims had still been alive when they came down. Now, all of them were dead, every man and boy, and there had been more than a few very young boys, evidently trainees, among the garrison troops. My guess was that no one had survived this massacre, that even those who had sought to surrender or flee had been shot down without mercy or compunction.

The rain started falling again at some point, and the renewed chill of it reminded me how far removed we were from any kind of warmth or shelter that day, and I had turned in disgust to rejoin Ursus when I glimpsed something from the corner of my eye that seemed out of place. I immediately looked for it again, but this time saw nothing, and I felt impatience flaring up in me. I forced it down, however, and disciplined myself to move slowly and look again, meticulously this time. And then I saw it: a flash of gray and green among the long, yellowed grass at the base of a thorn bush to my right, a long way from where the nearest dead man lay. Whatever it might be, it had not been left there by any of Theuderic’s dead foot soldiers.

Ursus came running at my shout, to where I was tugging my prize out of the rank, thorn-filled grass among which it lay. He was leading our two horses as he came and I noticed that in one hand he was carrying an arrow that he had obviously taken out of a dead man. I glanced at it but said nothing, contenting myself with merely raising one eyebrow. He saw my reaction and hefted the ugly thing, its barbs clogged and clotted with gore.