Jack Whyte - The Eagles' Brood

It was a phenomenal amount, but I didn't respond. Thirty-four from eighty left forty-six—more than enough to make short work of us, now that our bows were almost useless, and less than forty paces separated us from where they had gone to ground.

"Look yonder." Curwin's voice was close to my shoulder. "We gave them a breathin' space, anyway."

I looked towards the farm wall that had sheltered the besieged party. There were men moving about rapidly, out in front of the defences, bent over, their eyes on the ground.

"Never mind them, Caius Merlyn, keep your eyes on these whoresons close to us!" Orvic's harsh voice jerked my eyes back to the ground below us, but still nothing appeared to be moving. Orvic continued to speak, his eyes sweeping the terrain then flicking a glance towards the farm. "Whoever's in charge over there's no fool. But then the Romans never were, were they? They're collecting spent arrows while the Saxons are involved with us. Now what I'm wondering is whether they'll come out to help us, or whether they'll leave us here to die and take their own chances again when we're done for." He nodded downwards to our left, pointing to where the stream bed we had followed from the ridge above fell steeply away to the north. "You watch that side, I'll take the other, and Curwin, you watch the front here. That ridge they're hiding behind can't be no more than twenty to thirty running steps from the stream bed down there, so be ready for them. First sign of movement, let fly, and don't miss! If they get into yon stream bed, under the bank where we can't see them, or around our flank on the other side, we're dead men."

He moved away to his right, sweeping the branches of the trees back with one arm as he cautiously skirted the very edge of our small cliff. Curwin hawked and spat loudly, and as he did, the giant Saxon I had been aiming at earlier sprang into view again, running hard towards the stream bed, crouched over, followed by a horde of others. I snapped off a quick shot at him and missed, but brought him to his knees with my second arrow, only to watch him being knocked aside by one of his followers who staggered, almost lost his balance then lurched forward and fell over the bank of the stream and out of sight. I saw another fall sprawling, shot by Curwin, and then another as I brought down one more. And then there were no more Saxons in sight.

"Orvic," I yelled. 'They got past us, into the stream bed. Six or seven of them."

Curwin was standing by my side. "They can't get up here without coming out of the cut. I'll hold 'em." Then he was gone, vanished into the trees at my back.

I could hear the twanging of Orvic's bowstring on my right as he fired rapidly, and shouts and yells drifting up from below on his side. Nothing moved below me.

"Orvic, do you need help? You want me there?"

"No, damnation, stay where you are. None of these whoresons are going anywhere." A pause, then, "Where's Curwin?"

"Gone to keep them pinned in the stream bed."

Something snapped in front of my face and I jerked my head back in sudden terror, hearing an arrow smack into the bole of the tree beside me. I looked down, but saw no sign of the archer. To my right, Orvic had stopped shooting.

"They've got bows," I yelled.

"I know." His voice startled me, coming from close behind me. I swung round and saw him leaning against a hawthorn tree, his face ashen, his homespun tunic crimson with the blood from where an arrow had pierced him cleanly, angling upward beneath his left collarbone. As I stared at him in shock, his knees folded and he fell forward onto his face, driving the shaft right through his shoulder.

Now I heard shouting from beneath again, and swung back to my watch, drawing my bowstring back as I turned. There were Saxons running again towards the stream, but now they were faltering, turning as they ran, and some were standing, staring backwards. I dropped one of the latter, driving an arrow into the base of his skull, hammering him down the slope. Before I could nock another, however, they were all running back downhill again, away from me, and I looked beyond them to see the Romans who had held the farm charging towards them in a tight, hard knot of clustered horsemen, swinging in hard across the Saxons' rear from my right and herding them northward, down the slope towards another distant band, a much larger band, of advancing cavalry. My own! I dropped my bow and ran to Orvic, pulling my knife. He was unconscious. I cut through the arrow, quickly and without gentleness, just below the flights, and pulled the rest of the shaft out through his wound in the direction it had travelled. He felt nothing, and I ripped part of my tunic and stuffed both sides of the wound, entry and exit, binding the packing in place with both our bowstrings. As I was finishing, Curwin arrived back, crowing with pleasure and relief, but as he saw what I was doing he stopped in his tracks.

"It's not as bad as it looks," I told him. "A clean wound, and shallow, angled upward. Looks like it glanced off his rib-cage and went beneath his collarbone. Nothing vital hit, as far as I can see. He'll mend and pull his bow again with the best of us."

I left the two of them together, , Orvic still unconscious, and began to make my way down to where the last movements of the drama below were being played out. From above, I could see that the Saxons were dying hard, expecting no quarter and giving none, each of them evidently prepared to go down fighting. In spite of myself, I felt a surge of admiration for their stubborn, pagan courage. The remnant of the fighting was sweeping away from me as I walked alone through the carnage of the battlefield among maimed and dead men. I stopped and turned around, looking up to the point from which I had so recently been shooting. The cliff below it looked unscalable from here, impregnable, towering above me like the wall of a fortress and backed by the grand sweep of the hillside leading up to the escarpment, the face of which was laced by the silvery cascade from the stream. The point itself looked far more distant and inaccessible from here than it had felt up there. I could see no sign of Curwin or Orvic. I became aware of my own shadow, stretching ahead of me westward, up the hill, and it shocked me to realize the sun had not yet reached its noonday zenith.

I heard my name shouted, and turned back to the valley to see Donuil cantering towards me awkwardly, holding the reins of his horse and my own in one hand and clutching my helmet beneath his other arm as though it could anchor him to his beast's back. Moments later, mounted and helmed and feeling much bigger and more in control of my destiny than I had afoot, I gave Donuil my bowstave and quiver and trotted ahead of him towards the gathering that marked the final outcome of the running fight. Apart from a brief word of thanks, I had said nothing to him and he left me to my thoughts. Moments later, I saw Lucanus and made my way to where he was bending over one of our young troopers. I told him about Orvic up on the point above, and he dispatched two stretcher-bearers to bring the big Celt down to safety, warning them against dropping their burden on the steep slope. That done, he returned his attention to the trooper at his feet, ignoring me completely.

"How many casualties, Lucanus?"

"Too many. Five dead, seven wounded including your friend up on the hill. This one's the worst."

"How bad is he?" The young trooper was unconscious.

"Axe wound to the thigh, as you can see, knife wound in the kidney, and probably a broken skull. He won't recover." He still had not looked up. Sighing, I left him to his work and looked around me.

The centre of activity, now that the fighting was over, was a densely packed group of horsemen, some of them my own, milling together on my right in the grip of the euphoria that always accompanies survival after a fight. At the centre of this eddy, I could clearly see a small group of four or five uniformed officers talking to some of my own officers, all of them set apart by the dignity and calmness of their bearing. I kneed my horse towards them as they moved towards me, making their way with authority through the press surrounding them, and as they came, some of my own troopers recognized me and raised a cry of welcome, bringing all of them surging to surround me in a great circle. In the middle of this circle, I came face to face with the strangers, and a silence fell around us.