Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

"Spears!" Dedalus was yelling from behind me. "Get down there! Use your spears!"

The pathway between me and the slaughter, comfortably wide a moment earlier, was now all too narrow and completely impassable, choked with men and rearing, fear-crazed horses. Forcing my own panic down, I looked around me, searching for some way to ride back to where the chaos was spreading, but it was hopeless, and I was forced to watch the utter disintegration of my force under the attack of a brute beast. The noise of the conflict escalated madly, the shouts of men mingling with the screams of the animals. No sense of order remained anywhere in our cavalcade, every man trying uselessly to control his demented horse. Impatiently, curbing Germanicus grimly and using his bulk as a battering ram, I forced my way back through the press until I could see some of what was happening. Five men surrounded the enraged boar, I could see now, two on horseback, three on foot, and as I saw them one of the men afoot, Rufio, leapt in and stabbed the beast deeply, thrusting the spear with his whole body, the shaft clutched in both hands and tucked beneath his arm. The creature reared and spun, showing another, broken spear in its right flank, and in its awesome rage flicked Rufio into the air and out of my sight. And then suddenly, with a final, deafening squeal of pain and rage, it broke off its attack and fled into the trees. Long after it had gone, the horses continued to plunge and scream in terror and the men waited tensely, glaring about them, anticipating its return.

It took us a full hour and more to regroup. The panicked horses had scattered widely, in spite of the impossible terrain, and we had the devil's own trouble catching some of them. By the final accounting, we were five horses poorer, three of them disembowelled by the beast, one with a broken leg, and one with a haunch so lacerated by a slashing tusk that it had no hope of surviving the remainder of the journey through such hostile land. Rufio, for whose life I had feared, was merely stunned and hideously bruised. He had landed in a tree, like a javelin shot from a catapult, and fallen heavily to the ground. The others were merciless in their treatment of him, calling him "the Bird Man," a name he was to carry for the rest of his life, although it was eventually shortened, as all such names are. Rufio, from that day forth, became The Bird.

When order was finally restored, I authorized an hour's rest. It was unlikely the boar would return now, and it seemed pointless to me to push on any farther without giving everyone a chance to recover. A good rest, followed by an early camp and a solid night's sleep, it seemed to me, would do all of us good.

Sometime later, Dedalus's voice close by my ear snapped me out of a doze. I roused myself and looked at him questioningly. He looked at Rufio, who lay sleeping beside me, and then he raised his eyes towards the sky. "I was saying it's very obvious, to me at least, that there are no Outlanders around here. That commotion would have been audible for miles in every direction. No one's come to see who caused it, so I think it's safe to say that no one will." He stopped, waiting for my response.

"So? What are you telling me?"

He shrugged his shoulders and ducked his head, managing to appear sheepish and conciliatory at the same time. "Nothing, but that boar was badly wounded and bleeding heavily, arterial blood or I'm a blind man; two spears lodged in him when he broke away, both deep and well-placed, one of them intact so it would hamper him in running far through that." He nodded towards the surrounding undergrowth. "So, he's probably lying close by here, at the end of a plain blood trail. If I'm right, and I'm prepared to wager against anything you might wish to part with, we could have, for the price of a short walk, fresh-killed pig tonight. We have a clear sky, fresh water close by, an injured companion, and we're all tired. It has been an eventful day. We've been shipwrecked, half drowned, abandoned, lost in an alien forest and savaged by a ravening beast that cost us five prime horses. And yet there's more grazing here, of a kind, for the remaining stock than any other place we've seen since setting out this morning, and we have a master with us"—he bowed his head and clenched his fist over his heart in mock modesty—"of the art of dressing and roasting fresh-killed pig with garlic, onions and truffles."

"Truffles?"

He nodded sagely. "The greatest of all fungi. Our swinish visitor was rooting for them when we came along. I found where he was digging, and I found his prize."

"So you think we should stay here tonight and eat like pigs."

He sighed. "Caius Merlyn, I swear you have the gift of reading minds."

I nodded, pretending surliness. "Very well, you have an hour to find the beast. If you don't find it within that time, come back here and we'll eat horse meat. If you do find it, your truffles had better be superb."

XII

It took us until noon on the second day after our encounter with the boar to make contact again with Donuil and his father's galleys, but the weather held fine, with only scattered clouds and one heavy shower, and our progress was uninterrupted. We saw no sign of Feargus's Wild Ones, nor, although we saw ample evidence of the giant deer that had created the route we followed, did we see a single animal.

Our long night's rest and solid food had performed miracles for our well- being, and Rufio, our "flying man," had almost fully recovered from his misadventure, with only an aching in his ribs as a reminder. Ded's truffles had been epicurean, and the wild pig had provided a meal that each of us would remember with fond nostalgia in the years that lay ahead. While waiting for his men to finish scalding the bristles from the haunch that he had butchered, Dedalus had vanished back along the path, returning some time later with a helmet full of tiny, wrinkled, almost dry red apples. What he did to them I do not know, but when he served them with the succulent wild pig in the form of a thick, heavy sauce, they set every man's taste buds reeling with delight. We slept well that night, bloated with wondrous food and cushioned on thick, soft beds of springy moss.

An early start in the dim glow of dawn, begun tentatively with an eye to new and unlooked-for dangers, gave way gradually to a leisurely, carefree trot along our meandering route, following the path of least resistance with only occasional halts to negotiate natural hazards where trees or rocks, and once an entire cliff face, had fallen recently enough to block the way. Only the fallen cliff face caused us grief, forcing us to leave the smooth game trail completely and climb down a slippery, steeply sloping bank to bypass the tumbled obstruction at a crawl, carefully testing each tentative step along the base of the bank before committing to it, then clawing our way back upward to the pathway with much impatient, ill-tempered cursing. The experience reminded us forcibly of the impassability of this primeval forest and the debt we owed to our guiding spirits, the giant, unseen deer. It took us an hour to negotiate the downward slope, far enough away from the debris of the fallen cliff to be safe from loose, rolling boulders, and then as long again to make our way across the short space at the bottom of the sprawling pile that loomed above us. It took us more than twice as long again, however, to regain the pathway from the bottom on the other side, worming our way up sideways with the horses, whose hooves scrabbled and slithered and fell back on the soft, greasy loam.

And then, slightly before midday on the third day of our journey, we emerged without warning at the top of a high cliff and saw the two galleys of Feargus and Logan below us, drawn up onto a stone-grey, sheltered beach. Behind them, an arm of the sea swept inland and out of sight, masked by the high cliffs on which we sat. The cliff that had towered on our left throughout our journey pinched out here, on this high plateau. I waved to the tiny figures on the beach below, and shouted, but received no response. Finally, I nocked an arrow and launched it gently, watching it fall to earth beside one of the fires that burned brightly on the strand. That captured their attention, and they ran outward, staring up at us and waving, gesturing wildly towards our left. Sure enough, there was a downward route where they indicated, but it was terrifying in its steepness. Dedalus, beside me as usual, spoke the words that were in my mind.