Jack Whyte - The Eagles' Brood

In the heat of the battle, Uther's new weapon impressed me more than anything else. It felt feather light in my grasp and yet each time that swinging iron ball hit someone, it threw the man bodily aside like a child's doll of cloth and straw. At one point I felt a heavy blow on my chest and then a pain in my wrist and briefly saw a spent arrow fall down by the side of my horse. I ignored it and killed another man on the ground, caving his helmet and skull with my swinging ball before the realization hit me that I might be dying from one of Lot's envenomed arrows. I felt a wave of panic sweep upwards from my gut and I reined in my horse violently, oblivious of the fighting around me, my eyes fastened to the small, shallow cut on my left wrist. And then my proud horse went to its knees with a stricken grunt of pain and I found myself standing on the ground, my feet still in my stirrups as the horse heaved under me in its death agony. Even as I regained my senses I saw the broad blade of a spear directed at my chest and I threw myself to the side, vainly trying to kick my feet free of the stirrups. One of them came free, and luckily it was the one I needed free to save my life. The spearhead hissed along my side, beneath my arm, and then the man holding it crashed into me, throwing me backwards and driving the breath out of me. Through eyes suddenly awash with tears I saw him come to his knees above me, shortening his grip on the spear, and then he was gone, smashed backwards himself by a swiping sword across the face. A second later there was a horse directly above me, rearing to keep from trampling me, and I heard a voice yelling my name.

"Commander! Merlyn! Can you rise?"

It was Catius, one of my own officers. I nodded to him, scrambling to my feet, even then admiring the way he controlled his mount, circling it on its hind legs, keeping an army at bay. I grasped the handle of my ball and chain in both hands and began flailing it around my head, dropping three men and clearing a space around me, and as I did so, I remember thinking that the noise and confusion was far worse here on the ground than it ever appeared from the back of a horse. It also occurred to me that I was obviously not poisoned. Then I heard Catius again, screaming at me to climb up behind him. I glanced around and saw the carcass of my own horse not three paces away, with only two of the enemy between it and myself. I swung my new weapon aloft with a roar and charged at them, catching the first full in the breast with the lethal iron ball, seeing his companion slip and fall at the same time in the bloody grass. I continued the momentum of my swing, spinning on my feet like a wild man, to shatter the second man's skull at the full swing, my arms fully extended. The effort almost toppled me, but it brought me alongside my dead horse, facing Catius who was close by me, his right arm extended towards me. I jumped up onto the dead animal's flank and hooked elbows with Catius as he passed, swinging myself high over his horse's rump just in time to go flying onwards as the beast took a spear full in the neck and went down instantly. Catius and I landed still linked together by our elbows, although this time my feet were beneath me, so that I staggered and fell backwards again, seeing Catius disappear beneath a giant brute of a man who held a short-sword like a dagger. I had lost my grip on my flail, but I could still feel the weight of it on the thong around my wrist. I scrambled up to crouch on all fours like a bear, just in time to see the giant fall away, skewered by a spear. Catius did not move. And then I felt the killing rage break loose inside me, and heard my own voice roaring in my ears as I stood erect and regained a grip on my terrible iron flail.

From that time on I remember nothing, until I found myself facing another giant Celt, with the chain of my flail somehow wrapped around the shaft of his axe, and the knowledge clear in my head that I no longer possessed the strength to pull it free. I was too tired. I released my grip and pulled my wrist free of the retaining loop and saw the flash of triumph in his eyes as he swung his axe high, letting my flail fall unheeded to the ground. But I was only tired. I was not yet dead, or even beaten. Before his axe had reached the apex of its swing, I had unsheathed my short- sword and buried it to the hilt beneath the fool's breastbone. Then I stood there, too tired to move again, and watched death blossom in his eyes before he fell. I made no attempt to pull my sword free. Slowly, in a stupor, I bent down and slipped the thong of the flail around my wrist again and then I sat down, not because I wanted to, but because I was completely spent. The flood of the battle had moved away from me and I was alone and alive in a sea of dead and maimed men.

I do not know how long I sat there, but eventually my breath and some of my strength came back to me and I rose to my feet and gazed at the carnage that surrounded me. A black and silver draped corpse caught my eye and I moved towards it, thinking it was Catius, but it was one of my troopers. So were the next eight I looked at before I found poor, courageous Catius, who had died trying to save me. The sight of his staring, lifeless eyes finally sobered me completely and I leaned over him, trying in vain to close his lids, before straightening to look more objectively about the field. As far as I could gauge, Lot's dead outnumbered ours by ten to one, but I could see far too many of my own men huddled in death. I saw my own dead horse nearby and beside it the body of Catius's mount, and at the sight of them my eyes swam with tears. I found nothing strange in grieving for horses amid so many dead men. In truth, the human dead were too numerous to allow for any pity; the mind could not absorb them. But the horses were innocent. I removed my helmet and wept, head down, for the pain and the folly and the outrage caused by one man's treachery. And then I replaced my helmet, fastened it securely, reclaimed my short-sword from the corpse of the last man I had killed, and went to search for Lot of Cornwall, striding across that field of death, hearing only now, and still only faintly, the screams and moans of the wounded who lay everywhere. As I walked, my eyes were fastened on the still-struggling masses in the distance. I held the shaft of my flail in my right hand with the chain over my shoulder and the ball dangling at my back, and as I went I prayed that Lot was not yet dead, because I had a lust to teach him the brute power of my new weapon.

Camulod still burned, and the sight of it smoking there upon its hilltop hardened everything within me. I remembered Daffyd the Druid talking of Lot's fortress in the west, and how it was said to be impregnable, and I swore an oath to send it tumbling, logs and stones and men, into the sea.

I found myself becoming more aware of the life and the pain yet present in many of the men about me. Their screams and moans and pleas for help seemed to grow louder all the time, until my head was filled with the chaos of them, but I ignored them all, friend and foe alike. And then I saw a horse, alive and well it seemed, standing head down, about two hundred paces from where I was. I approached it with caution, having no wish to frighten it again, but it stood calmly and let me take it by the bridle. It was almost exhausted, its flanks and withers scummed with sweat and blood. I hoisted myself up on its back and began to walk it towards our camp, realizing from its stirrups and the length of them that its previous rider had been one of our men with legs far shorter than my own. Having been afoot for so long, I was surprised by how much I could see from the height of a horse's back. The entire battlefield now took on a familiar perspective and, relieved of the need to walk, I began to look around me more carefully.

About three hundred paces short of the armed camp Popilius had built, I came across another of my men, this one alive. He was Polidor, a centurion in my own troop, and his left arm was bound up in a tourniquet above the elbow. I brought my horse sidling up to another* dead animal and clumsily helped Polidor to climb up behind me. Not a word passed between us until he was mounted and clutching me with his good arm.