Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 2 - Metamorphosis

One of our troopers lay on the ground, his back arched in pain, his mouth forming a gaping black hole as he screamed. His horse lay nearby, struggling to rise to its feet, the shaft of an arrow protruding from its neck. I kicked my horse forward and leaned from the saddle, my hand outstretched to pull the man erect, but he kept screaming, his staring eyes looking through and beyond me. I could see from the ungodly way his back was twisted that he was beyond my help.

Now I became aware of running footsteps closing rapidly. I reached behind me and unhooked my sword, drawing it quickly and hooking the scabbard to the ring at my belt. The weapon felt strange in my grip, feather light and almost insubstantial, and I knew that this was because I had never yet swung the sword in earnest against a living enemy. I heard coarse breathing and a muttered curse. I turned to my left to see an enormous man throwing himself towards me, his short sword drawn back for a killing chop. With no time to do anything else, I swung my own sword overhand, chopping it downward towards him and bracing my foot in the stirrup for leverage. The hasty blow missed my assailant's head but came down on his right arm, drawn back for the kill, and severed it so cleanly that I barely felt the impact, even though I had cleft cleanly through bone. He screamed and fell away, clutching at the sudden stump even before it had time to begin spewing his life blood, and I pulled Germanicus up into a rearing turn, spurring him to the run as his front hooves found the earth again. Only one other was close enough to me to offer danger, and Germanicus hammered him flat to the ground.

As we began to pick up speed, surging steadily forward and slightly downhill, other shapes came hurtling towards me, none close enough to make contact. Then a spinning knife clanged frighteningly against the front of my helmet, snapping my head backwards and filling my mind with the deafening clangour of the unexpected blow. I reeled and fought momentarily for balance, struggling against my own reflexive recoil. Then I was among my own and in control again, overtaking the rearmost of my troopers, and I dimly saw the moving shapes of Huw's bowmen as they stepped forward from concealment among the trees on our left to form massed ranks on the short grass between the road and the forest's edge. Realizing that I had passed beyond the last of them, I immediately reined in again and turned to watch.

The charging mercenaries from the hilltop were skidding to a halt, the nearest of them no more than ten or twenty paces from the formidable obstacle that had sprung up in front of them. Huw's people were drawn up in three ranks, each containing perhaps thirty men. Almost before my mind could grasp what I was seeing, the first rank launched their arrows and stepped aside, each man to the right. Now the second rank stepped forward, bows already drawn, and loosed their arrows. They, too, stepped aside to make way for the fellows at their back and to fill the spaces left by the men of the first rank, who had already fallen back one pace and were now fitting arrows to their bows and drawing them, preparing to step forward into the front rank again. Almost more quickly than I can describe, four lethal flights of arrows sought and found targets among the stupefied attackers facing them, and the fifth flight was in the air before the first of the confounded mercenaries rallied enough to try to run for safety.

They had no place to run, and so they were cut down in moments. The ground was filled with squirming, writhing men kicking in agony, and the air was dense with screams and choking gurgles of pain. Every living man in the main body Of the enemy was down, and the fight was over, except in the distance to my right and left. There, the charade of indecisiveness long since abandoned, the three eight man squads commanded by Scorvo and Metellus were delivering an object lesson in military precision to the hapless survivors who had chosen to pursue them.

My own trumpeter was sitting on my left, awaiting my signal, but I waved him down. My own group would not be needed. Moments later, I saw Paul Scorvo wave his men back towards me, and almost before they had swung into motion, Rufus Metellus and his sixteen men were cantering in my direction, too. Now I turned to Benedict and bade him send two men to find and comfort the trooper who had gone down behind me. They found him quickly, his throat cut from ear to ear.

Huw Strongarm's men assembled in front of me, their faces strangely blank, showing no pleasure in the slaughter. I was preparing to lead our party back to the bridge when I heard a commotion behind me and turned to see three more of Strongarm's men approaching at the run. The fight there was over, too, with losses of only four of Strongarm's bowmen. None of the interlopers from the ravine had survived. Thereafter, I led our party back into the convergence of the two valleys and settled in to wait for the remainder of our troops.

The cavalry came first, four hundred and sixty troopers, by the route we had followed. Within half an hour of their arrival, the blare of a trumpet to the west announced the arrival of our infantry from the coast, and soon they, too, came into view, marching along the valley bottom in columns often, led by Huw Strongarm's scouts. When all had assembled—five hundred cavalry, a thousand foot soldiers and more than two hundred Pendragon bowmen—I climbed to a prominent rock on the hillside and addressed diem all briefly, outlining what we must do next Then I led them north and east at the forced march pace towards the place where we had been summoned to meet with Uderic Pendragon.

The "king" was not in residence when we reached Moridunum. Word of our surprise must have passed ahead of us. The Roman fort lay still and vacant although the debris littering the ground and the smoke from numerous smouldering fires made it quite obvious that large numbers of men had waited here but a short time previously. Without dismounting, I dispatched Benedict and our five hundred Scouts in pursuit of whoever they might find, and then I ordered the remainder of our people to set up camp here for the night I set out on a short inspection of the old fort itself. It reminded me considerably of our former home in Mediobogdum, save that it was situated in a valley rather than on the heights. Fundamentally, it was exactly the same fort, built to the classical design of a cohortal unit and meant to house as many as six hundred men in comfort. Even the bathhouse, built beyond the walls, was comparable, although it had not been quite as lavishly appointed, and the furnaces were cold and long since dead, their flues blocked by soot and the detritus of decades. Unlike Mediobogdum, however, which had sat high and inaccessible among its mountains, remaining almost inviolate for more than two hundred years, all of the buildings here in Moridunum had been used and abused by careless strangers and were far advanced in ruin, roofless and crumbling after a mere four decades of abandonment.

I finished my tour, accompanied by Rufio, and returned to the fort's ruinous main gate, where Donuil called out to me, inviting me to come and look at something he had discovered. I could see young Bedwyr kneeling on the ground by his feet, his body partly concealed by the stone gatepost. As I stood up in the stirrups to step down from the saddle, I heard an angry, lethal, hissing noise, lightning fast, and saw a flash of movement at the edge of my sight. Then, before I could react, I was hammered by a stunning concussion between my shoulder blades and flung over my horse's head to crash to the ground, unconscious.

I came to my senses in one of the ruined buildings in the fort, beneath the remnants of a sagging roof that extended for about three paces from the gable end before giving way to open sky. As my eyes opened and my vision swam for a few moments, I saw Donuil and Rufio, Derek of Ravenglass, Benedict, Philip, Paul Scorvo, Rufus Metellus and several others, including Huw Strongarm. They were all looking at someone to my left and their faces wavered in my sight during those first few, blinking moments, dissolving and reshaping themselves as my eyes struggled to adjust to the brightness that filled the room. As I lay there, my head ringing, the memory came back to me—the crashing blow against my back, the clang against my helmet and the swooping vision of my horse's ears looming in my face and then passing beneath me. No one had seen my eyes open, and now I heard the sounds of their voices, unintelligible for a time, then sharpening into a babble of discrete words.