‘You and Cal go and find me a campsite,’ he said.
Redmede saw Bess carrying Tyler. He patted her shoulder, squeezed Tyler’s hand, and headed back along the column. However far he went, the men at the end told him that they were keeping up and there were more further back.
He’d just found the same boy as the day before, sitting under a tree, when he heard shouting from the front – now far away.
The boy didn’t wait to be argued with, or struck. He got to his feet and started hobbling forward, cursing. He was crying again.
‘Are there more behind you?’ Redmede asked, but the boy just kept going.
Redmede stood on the trail in complete indecision for a long moment – and then unslung his bow and slowly drew it from the heavy linen bags. He’d messed it up properly – he needed to sharpen up the march order and keep his people together. He needed folk he could trust at the front and back. He wasn’t going to lose anyone else. He started to walk back, sure that his headcount was six men short, and equally sure that something was watching him. With practised ease he began to string his bow, the bottom nock firm against his sodden right foot. He pulled and found how weak he was when it was a struggle just to get the string in place. But his string was dry enough, and his bow was dry. He put a shaft on the great bow, and breathed a little easier as he jogged back east into the gloom.
He rounded a sharp curve in the old trail and saw boglins. There were thirty or forty, all together in a mass, and two of his people, back to back, hitting the little things with their walking staffs while a third man fought with a sword – somewhat wildly, but with effect.
Redmede had feathered three boggles before he really realised what he was seeing, and then the boggles were gone, and the thin man with the long sword stumbled – obviously wounded.
They were deep into twilight – the best time of day for boggle eyes and the worst for men. Redmede ran forward.
He saw what had happened to his other men. They were the reason the boggles had been all clumped up, and they were red ruins.
The two with staffs slumped to the ground.
‘No, you fools!’ Redmede shouted. ‘Run!’
Then he turned to the swordsman.
It took a long moment of twilit confusion to realise that the figure with the sword was an irk. He was a man’s height, wore forest colours of deerskin and wool, and his sword was almost as tall as he was and looked as if it were made of a lightning bolt. His elfin face had enormous eyes and equally prominent teeth.
The irk abruptly sat on the trail. There was blood – ichor – coming from its legs.
The bush moved. The boggles were right there.
Sometimes, in a moment of extreme danger, everything becomes crystal clear.
Redmede saw it all. ‘Stop!’ he bellowed at his two men. They hadn’t run yet – he got the irk’s cloak over its fanged head even as it thrashed in pain at the wounds to its feet. He laid the cloak on the ground, heard the boggles closer still, put the two staffs onto the cloak and threw the ends in over the staffs. Then he lifted the irk, who swiped a talon at his face for his pains. He’d expected that, and he dropped the foul creature into the stretcher he’d made. The creature’s weight pinned the cloak against the walking staffs, and the stretcher held together as the two Jacks lifted it on the edge of panic.
The boggles were coming for them.
‘Now run,’ Redmede said.
The two Jacks needed no further urging.
Redmede didn’t think very highly of his own leadership skills, but he knew himself to be an expert archer. Maybe the best, save his brother. He laid a shaft on his bow and had another in his fingers. He stole a moment to put five more into his belt, heads pointing up.
He was just going to try and make a break for it when the rush came, and the seven ready arrows flowed away in a steady stream – he didn’t even feel the great bow bending, he released without a thought, and he scarcely noted the shaft that pinned two of the foul things to a tree, nor the one that pinned a boggle, screaming shrilly, to the ground.
His fingers fetched another arrow from his bag, but the rush was broken. Creatures of the Wild are no keener to die than men – and even as he nocked his eighth arrow, the smoothly muscled predators were gone into the cedar scrub and small spruce trees north of the trail.
He watched the bush for the count of three long breaths, and then he stooped and caught up the irk’s glowing sword. It stung his hand, but he had expected it to, and held on.
And he ran.
There are times when heroism is invisible; when the effort required to do what you know to be right is more than your frame can bear. Redmede had fought, had used his great bow, had walked for miles and miles, and had done so with little sleep and less food. He knew his men needed him. He knew the ford crossing would be hard – he feared that the boglins would get in among his raw Jacks and make meat of them.
He knew that there were boggles moving behind him on the trail.
And yet, after one burst of speed, he found himself walking – striding along with his long-legged stride, but not sprinting or even jogging.
He all but ordered himself out loud, to run. And yet he walked.
‘Damn you, Bill Redmede,’ he said aloud. He leaned forward, daring his own body to fail him, and his legs caught him, and he broke into a heavy, flat-footed jog. His turnshoes slapped the trail heavily, and his run lumbered more than he liked, but he was moving.
After what he estimated to be two long bowshots, he found six of his Jacks, carrying the irk.
‘Move!’ he shouted, as soon as he saw them.
They, too, burst into lumbering runs.
He stayed behind them. When they flagged, which they did almost immediately, he bellowed, ‘Don’t slow down! They’re right on top of us!’
They ran. One of the younger ones looked back, and his eyes rolled in total panic.
Redmede couldn’t bring himself to care.
They pounded along the trail and his breathing began to come in gasps, and he cursed his weakness and every bad decision he’d ever made. But the men in front of him kept running and he was damned if he was going to slow down when they were keeping the pace despite carrying the wounded irk.
They climbed a shallow ridge among the heavy trees, and Bill heard fighting ahead.
‘Halt!’ he snapped. ‘Into cover – lie still.’
He ran past them, tossed the irk’s sword at the weary men, and drew his own.
He crested the low ridge, and looked down into the ford. It was a scene from the priests’ visions of hell.
The boglins had caught his Jacks in mid-crossing. Half his force was on the far bank, and they were holding, but only just. The men caught in the river, however, were being systematically killed and eaten – boglins lined the banks and were hauling corpses in and consuming them on the spot, and some – many – were still alive, screaming in horror as the little creatures ate them. The men in the ford were dying because they were exposed in the open, stumbling across slick round rocks where to lose their footing was death – and as they crossed, the boglins loosed a barrage of arrows on them. Flight after flight fell on the hapless Jacks, and even the weak bows the little creatures had were sufficient to wound or kill at fifty yards.
Redmede took deep breaths.
Boglins didn’t usually cooperate well in groups larger than twenty or thirty. Yet there were a thousand here, at least, chewing away at his Jacks.
He unslung his bow while he looked. He expected to find a man in their midst. But irks sometimes made use of boglins. He wondered if he could even make out an irk at this range. He wondered for a moment if the irk he’d saved was, in fact, the lord of these monsters . . .
But the flash of white from across the stream told him that it was neither man nor irk that he faced, but one of the Priests, the rare royal caste of the boglins, with their red, black and white chitonous armour, their elongated bodies and heads that made them look, to Redmede, like vicious hornets. He watched the c
reature as it used two human-made swords to chop a man down. A wight.
Two hundred and twenty yards away. Some wind; the air was moist, and his bow was cold. The string was dry enough. He sheathed his sword and ran his hand almost absently up his bowstring, pulled a light arrow out of his quiver, and put three more into his belt.
Then he took a lump of maple sugar from his belt-purse and ate it. Two more of his men died – their screams went on and on while he ate but he needed the surge of energy. He couldn’t afford to fail. The temptation to do something was so powerful that he could scarcely think – his body was full of the spirit of combat, and he wanted to fight.
He had a long pull of water, and corked his canteen, put the light arrow on his bowstring, and without further thought, he pulled – back leg slightly bent, his shoulders all the way into the pull – the arrowhead came up, past the target, and when his sense of the shot told him to release his fingers flew off the string almost as smoothly as the arrow leaped away in the opposite direction.
He didn’t watch the fall of his first shaft, but loosed all four he’d had ready, one after another.
His third shaft struck the Priest squarely, but the range was so long and the arrow so light that his arrow didn’t penetrate deeply enough. The fourth arrow struck one of its sword arms and went through it.
It fell back out of the tide of melee and began to search for him.
They don’t have to talk. They communicate by magic. Or scent. Or something.
He pulled four more arrows out of his quiver. He felt strong, he had the range now, and he took out his heavy war arrows; what King’s men called ‘quarter pounders’. He planted three of them in the ground, and drew his bow all the way to his ear so that his back muscles strained.
He loosed – nocked, drew, and loosed, with a grunt, like a man lifting weights; and again, and finally, with his last arrow, he all but cried aloud his release was so poor.
He had time to say ‘Too fucking tired’ as he watched the fall of his shafts.
To reach two hundred yards with a war arrow required a big bow – Redmede’s was more than six feet long. And he had to pull it to the ear, and aim it almost fifty degrees from the ground, rendering the concept of ‘aiming’ impossible. The archer can’t even see the target under his arrow.
His first arrow landed at the edge of the stream, forty yards short of the target, but dead in line.
The second shaft flew true, and for a heart-stopping moment Redmede thought he’d hit the thing, but it sprang, not into the air as he hoped, but forward, and came towards the stream. The third arrow went long and to the right as the wight sprinted for the stream bank. And the fourth arrow pulled to the right, and fish-tailed, losing energy. The boglin chief changed direction to leap onto a great rock – raised its wing cases—
What does that mean? Christ – he’s casting!
—and blue-white fire played along them.
His badly released arrow plummeted from the heavens like a stooping raptor. The wight stepped directly into it, and the shaft went into his extended wing case – penetrated the chitonous armour and ripped the monster’s wing clean off.
Even two hundred yards away, Redmede saw the spurt of ichor as it took the wound. It stumbled and fell into the water.
A panicked Jack, Bill Alan, pinned it to the stream bed with his sword. He chopped and chopped at it, and the stream turned a green-brown around him as he cut. It landed a blow on him – he stumbled back, lost his footing, and fell. By then Redmede was running for the stream’s bank and fitting another heavy arrow to his string. He had three left.
Alan got a hand under him and got to his feet, his arming sword still clutched in his fist. The wight came at him, rising heavily out of the water, still spraying ichor. It hacked through the man’s guard, notching his sword and his over-cut opened Alan’s cheek. But the panic had passed, and Alan cut back and his luck held – he landed a hard blow on the wight’s arm. It stumbled and vanished beneath the water.
Every boglin on the bank was launching itself into the water and coming across.
It knows who I am, Redmede thought. They’re coming for me.
He ran along the bank, skipping from rock to rock like a small boy, paused and balanced on a pair of huge boulders.
The wight errupted from the water at Alan’s feet. His sword swept up—
Redmede loosed. It was less than sixty yards, and his arrow went into the soft, mammalian skin under the thing’s armpit, and the thing unmade. It literally fell apart. Alan’s desperate parry caught nothing; the wight was falling to pieces and the stream was already sweeping him away.
The bond that held the boglins to one another dissipated with the wight’s power – Redmede watched them fall apart as well. Instead of a mass of creatures expressing a single will, they became, in three heartbeats, hundreds of individual creatures more afraid of his Jacks then determined to conquer. In the time it took a man to say a prayer they were gone.
Redmede wished he could vanish as well. He couldn’t tell how bad his losses were, but they were bad enough. His men were alone in the vast Wild; exhausted, panicked, and beaten. And darkness was falling.
He sounded his great horn, gathering the survivors. Many had scattered at the first attack; Nat Tyler had held all the men and women left on the near bank and refused to let them cross, which Redmede thought a wise decision, and on the far bank Bess had crossed with Cat and Cal in the vanguard with the veterans – men and women with good swords and bows. They had held their own – indeed, they had killed quite a few boglins.
But in the centre they had lost forty men and two women. There wasn’t much of them left to bury.
Any man wounded had died, save six, and Tyler, Bess, and Redmede spent the night on them, using scraps of fabric from the dead as bandages while Tyler organised watches to resist another attack. Then he came back and squatted by a fire with Redmede.
‘That was bad,’ Tyler said. ‘We won’t last another fight like that.’
Redmede sat and stared at the fire. As long as there had been something to do, he hadn’t had to think. But now . . .
‘It’s all my fucking fault,’ Redmede said. He slumped down, head on his pulled-up knees. ‘We should ha’ gone south, to Jarsay.’
Tyler was silent and Redmede knew the other man agreed – they should have gone south.
‘Don’t you believe it, Bill Redmede!’ Bess emerged from the darkness, found the water bucket by feel, and began to wash her bloody hands. ‘Jarsay would ha’ been death for all o’ us. The nobles would be huntin’ us for sport. The Wild’s better. It’s just cold.’ She smiled, collected the hot water and went back to tending her wounded.
Tyler watched her with hungry eyes. ‘Even when she’s dead beat and hasn’t bathed in ten days, she’s a beauty,’ he said.
Redmede shrugged. Bess was a good companion and probably a better leader than he was. He didn’t see the rest of her. He didn’t allow himself to see the rest of her.
‘Think she’d go for an old fuck like me?’ Tyler asked.
Redmede couldn’t even think of such things. ‘I have to talk to the irk we picked up. We need a friend out here.’
Tyler grinned. ‘I’ll just go help Bess, then, won’t I?’
Redmede took some time boiling water in his own small copper pot. A rout like today’s had a thousand small impacts. One was that most men had abandoned any camp equipment they’d had – and pots were as precious as arrows in the Wild. Redmede had saved his – for all he knew, it was the last metal pot west of Lissen Carrak. He groaned, and waited for the water to boil. It was frustrating – they had no tapers, no rush lights, and no oil lamps, so that the darkness above the fire was absolute, and he couldn’t see down into his little copper pot to see if the water was boiling. Finally he detected it by feel, through a twig. He added some sassafras – last season’s – and the last of the honey. He was making a princely offering because it was all he had to give, and he needed the irk to like him.
/>
Redmede took tea to the irk, who raised the horn cup in acknowledgement.
‘Can you talk?’ Redmede asked.
The creature sighed. ‘Yiss,’ it said.
‘What’s your name, then?’ he asked.
‘Tapio Haltija,’ it sang. ‘I am lord of these woods, little man.’
Redmede spat. ‘I have no time for lords,’ he said. But his heart rose a little.
The irk stiffened, but then looked away. ‘Half a thousand yearsss I haf lorded these woodssss. But I am not ssso ungentle asss to be ungrateful. Even to a ssservant of Thorn’sss.’ He nodded. ‘And your name? ’
Redmede shook his head. ‘I am no servant, least of all to that bastard. He left us high and dry.’ He looked away. He was too tired for this. ‘Bill Redmede,’ he said.
‘Ahhh, man, your ssspeech isss ever more pleassssing. Fair Friend, let me hosst you and your men. I mean you no harm – and few men hasss ever heard sssuch an offer of me before.’ He smiled, and his fangs glittered wetly in the dark.
Bill Redmede knew too little about irks. His brother liked them – that much he knew. His brother had feasted in their halls, and traded with the bolder ones in the woods. But this one was old, and very, very dangerous, or so his instinct told him. And he had just given the creature his name. That had been foolish.
‘My people are coming. I can feel them in the blood of the earth. I would esssteem it an essspecial favour if you would give me another cup of thisss tea. And my sword. I sssee you pressserved it.’
Redmede wished he could trust the creature, but he didn’t. ‘I bandaged your ankles,’ he said. ‘You can’t walk. I’ll return your sword soon enough.’
The irk smiled, which was horrific. ‘When you dine in my hall, man, you will ssssee that I need no treachery to dessstroy the likesss of you. If I wanted you, I would meet you ssssword to sssword. I am Tapio Haltija. I do not lie.’
Redmede found talking to the thing was tiring. He had trouble controlling his mind, his thoughts went tumbling off like the creature’s sibilant esses. He went and sat on his blankets after another check on the wounded, and Bess came and sat down beside him.