Altar of Blood: Empire IX (44 page)

‘Well it’s about time. Come on then, you unenlightened barbarian scum. I’m ready when you are.’

Amalric rode in silence, brooding on the three horses that had fallen to caltrops since their initial loss. Two of the riders had emerged from their falls with nothing worse than minor injuries, but the third had broken his arm on hitting the track’s wooden beams, and had been left propped against a tree with the promise that he would be picked up on their return southward. All three animals had been put out of their agony by Gernot, but each fresh casualty had consumed enough time for their quarry to have re-established a good half-mile or so of the lead that he was attempting to haul in by means of his calculated gamble with their pace. With each of the first two losses Gernot had urged him to surrender his place at the head of the column to a man whose loss would be less keenly felt, and each time he had dismissed the idea out of hand, so that at the third stop the noble had not raised the idea, but simply fixed his king with a lingering, piercing stare that spoke eloquently as to his concerns.

Staring intently down the track he almost missed the small fleck of white feathers as he rode past it, registering it out of the corner of his eye as it vanished beneath the hoofs of the leading riders. Just as he realised what it was that he had seen, a high-pitched scream of equine pain sounded from behind him.

‘This is the place your father named in his message to the king of the Angrivarii?’

Sigimund’s oldest son grunted, nodding dourly.

‘He told them we would be here by the middle of the day.’

Tiro looked about him, finding only an empty landscape above which clouds scudded slowly past.

‘Well if they’re here they’re doing a remarkable job of staying concealed.’ He turned to Varus and Dubnus with a raised eyebrow. ‘It seems my message to the Angrivarii has gone astray, but one of the main tenets of the men I work for is to get the job done, no matter what the circumstances throw in our way. Doubtless the man sent to deliver my request for safe passage to the locals is lying at the bottom of some ditch or other with a broken neck, with the message still tucked away about his person. So, we have a choice, gentlemen, to wait here until the Angrivarii do arrive, which of course might be a very long wait, or just to continue on our way without their assistance. Or their permission …’

Dubnus nodded slowly.

‘And if they find us on their land without having granted that permission?’

The older man pulled a wry face.

‘That depends on who does the finding. The tribe are still nominally our friends, but the discovery of Romans on their land unbidden might well result in our deaths before any sort of agreement could be reached.’

‘And the same can be said of the tribune and his party?’

‘Doubly so, for they have the Bructeri witch with them. My entire plan depended on our being able to recruit the Angrivarii to our cause, but without their co-operation there are several ways this can go bad.’

The Briton turned in his saddle to look at Varus.

‘It seems to me that our only real option is to press on, find our brothers and bring them back here. Any other course of action seems likely to result in their capture and likely death.’

Tiro leaned back in his saddle, playing a hard stare on the centurion.

‘You’re more of a pragmatist than I’d expected, Prince of the Brigantes. Very well, since you’ve done my arguing for me, we’ll risk the wrath of the Angrivarii and ride for the place I told Dolfus to meet us. I assume that you gentlemen will wait here for us?’

Husam watched the oncoming horsemen intently, the arrow nocked to his bowstring drawn and ready to shoot, gauging the balance between the urge to shoot with the Bructeri inside his longest range and the need to make every arrow count. A horse screamed, and the arrow seemed to spring away from the bow’s string of its own volition, so swift was his reaction, aimed at the point in the enemy’s column where chaos had erupted. With the first missile in the air he continued shooting for all he was worth, lofting shaft after shaft at the oncoming pack of horsemen, a target so densely packed that he knew that putting an arrow into their midst was likely to result in a hit. A horse had fallen just behind the horsemen’s front rank, presumably to a carefully placed caltrop, and the ensuing chaos behind the fallen beast and those its fall had balked in turn was preventing most of the riders from either escaping from beneath the rain of arrows or attacking down the road. A rider whose horse had avoided the chaos put his head down and charged his mount forward, and Husam lowered his bow a little and put an arrow into the man’s mount, cursing as the shaft struck deep into the beast’s chest rather than hitting the man in its saddle. Killed in mid-gallop the horse simply ploughed into the track’s shallow standing water, its rider managing to stay in the saddle long enough that when the beast’s dead momentum was almost spent he was able to step off his mount and take shelter behind its massive bulk, safe from the Hamian’s arrows.

The screams of wounded animals and their riders reached him, distant sounds of distress as his shafts hit targets that were so tightly grouped as to be unmissable. The Germans’ forward momentum was clearly lost, fallen horses preventing the men behind from pressing through to get at the source of the arrows that were falling on them with terrible, brutal efficiency and burying their evil iron heads indiscriminately in man and beast alike. He paused for a moment to look down at his first quiver, tallying the number of shafts remaining, realising that a voice was shouting above the chaos of the trapped horsemen and their mounts, urgent, imperative commands that could only presage one action from the trapped Germans.

A handful of men had managed to fight their way through the milling chaos of the horsemen bottled up behind the fallen beasts, two of them dropping into the shelter of the king’s dead horse twenty paces closer to the enemy archer than the main cluster of horsemen who were still suffering under his shafts, while the others fell flat in the marsh’s fetid water to their right in order to avoid drawing the bowman’s attention. The bigger of the two was a senior warrior within the royal household, a heavy bearded bear of a man whose greatest prize was a mail shirt he had taken from a Roman captive years before, and which he wore over a coat of thick hide so stiff as to itself resemble armour. He peeped over the horse’s ribcage at the ground before them, and Amalric followed his gaze, his spirits sinking as the distance across which the archer was shooting struck home. The big man looked at him with a determined set of his jaw, knuckles white on the shaft of his spear.

‘We must attack, my King!’ Amalric nodded grimly, readying himself to join them in storming the lone archer, only to find a hand on his sleeve. ‘Not you, Amalric. Your place is to lead our brothers and recover what has been stolen from us. Most of us who run at this man will die, but we give our lives for the good of the tribe. Praise our names, when the time comes for the songs to be sung of this day.’

Raising his voice the warrior bellowed at the men waiting in the swamp’s water.

‘Our king commands us to kill this archer! Are you ready to give your lives for the tribe?’

Their response was swift, if a little muted by the circumstances, a growled affirmation, and with a war cry that stood the hairs on the back of Amalric’s neck the big man rose from cover, pointing at the lone archer and striding forward with his spear raised, then grunting in pain as an arrow struck him in the chest, staggering back with the force of the impact. After a moment’s pause the man beside him leapt to his feet and vaulted the horse’s body, joining the charge of the half-dozen men who had rallied to join the desperate attack. He took half a dozen swift strides forward, bellowing a war cry made ragged by exertion and fear, then stopped dead, sinking to his knees with an arrow’s feathered shaft protruding from his chest.

Half a dozen men rose from the cover of their fallen mounts at an unintelligible bellowed command, clearly intent on overrunning Husam’s position, and with a savage grin that was half-exultation and half the agony of making any movement with his shattered leg strapped to the tree, the Hamian put an arrow into the first man to get to his feet, switching his attention to the next of them and dropping him as he stormed forward from the shelter of the fallen horse. The first man he had shot was back on his feet with no obvious wound, the arrow having apparently failed to beat whatever armour was protecting him, but the next shaft knocked him down again, apparently putting him out of the fight. A group of warriors climbed from the swamp beside the track and ran at him screaming their battle cries, and the Hamian switched targets, missing with his next shaft, as the warrior he’d targeted unwittingly weaved out of its path, but the next two shots both struck home, leaving only a pair of warriors baying for his blood as they came on in weaving, splashing runs, intended to throw his aim off. Behind them the first man was back on his feet, and Husam frowned at the realisation that two arrows had failed to stop the oncoming Bructeri, who was using the two men in front of him as unwitting cover. He lowered the bow, waiting for the runners to get close enough that their evasive changes of direction would cease to be of any protection against the lethal velocity of his arrows.

At fifty paces, as he raised the weapon to start shooting again, one of the runners went down clutching at his bloody foot in shock and agony, as he stumbled onto another one of the caltrops that had been scattered in the Bructeri’s path. The Hamian shot the man who turned to look back at his maimed comrade for an instant, his pause all the opportunity the waiting archer needed. Nocking another arrow he drew it back as far as he could before releasing it at the sole remaining warrior, still stubbornly advancing despite having been struck twice, nodding his head as the shaft stuck in his target.

His small smile of satisfaction faded as the big German, having momentarily doubled up over the arrow’s impact point, slowly straightened his body again, looked down, then pulled the shaft free of whatever had prevented it from piercing his body, tossing it aside. Raising his spear he stood still for a moment, coughing and spitting into the water, then grinned bloody-mouthed at the archer before he began to stagger forward again, still hunched against the pain in his body where three heavy iron arrowheads had struck with the power of spear thrusts, but clearly determined to use whatever magic was repelling the Syrian’s arrows to close with his tormentor and put him down.

Waiting, partly exercising the patience that he had learned while hunting game in the German forests, partly through sheer curiosity, he watched with another arrow strung and ready to loose, shaking his head in amazement as the Bructeri mastered the crippling pain and walked towards him, his face contorted with the agony of his damaged body as he broke into a shambling run. At twenty-five paces distance he drew his spear arm back and, with an incoherent, pain-wracked bellow of rage in the face of Husam’s raised bow, hurled his framea with a final roar, stopping with his hands on his knees to cough blood again as the spear whipped across the space between them in a short arc that seemed fated to strike the archer. Leaning his upper body to one side with a suppressed shriek of pain, Husam felt the wind of the weapon’s passage on his face, then straightened his body with slow, agonised care, every movement sending spikes of red hot agony down his broken leg. He raised the bow, trembling with the pain, waiting as the big tribesman stood, staring back at him with blank eyes, nodded at the German in respect of his tenacity, and then shot him in the throat. He watched dispassionately as the tribesman sank to his knees and then fell face down into the track’s water, nodding again.

‘I’ll be along to join you soon enough.’

Looking up he saw a lone figure racing forward out of the mass of horsemen bottled up behind the fallen beast, diving into the cover of a dying horse just in time to evade the arrow intended to kill him.

Staring past the fallen Germans he realised that the remaining warriors had gone to ground, and if any further attack on his position was in hand it was not yet evident. Drawing breath he bellowed a challenge at the men cowering behind the bodies of their dead and dying mounts.

‘Are there no more of you with the guts to come and kill a cripple!’

Amalric stared bleakly at the bodies that littered the ground in front of him, then ducked below the flank of his horse, hearing the hiss of another arrow over his head, as Gernot dived into the cover beside him. In the silence that followed he could hear the distant archer shouting something in a language he didn’t understand, his voice thick with anger.

‘We have to get round him! That may be a single man, but this is a field of death! We have to get around him, there’s no way we can go straight through him without losing too many men!’

The noble shook his head at his king’s frustrated outburst.

‘Impossible, my King. The marshes here are almost impassable unless you know the paths that give safe passage.’

Amalric nodded wearily.

‘How many men have we lost?’

‘At least five men lie dead and wounded behind us, and twice as many horses. Fortunately the rest had the good sense to pull back, out of the range of his bow. And here?’

Amalric waved a hand at the corpses strewn across the causeway.

‘As you see, he killed six men of my household without any of them ever getting within touching distance of him. If we are to attack again, we will have to go forward with every man we have, and look to overwhelm him with numbers.’

The noble’s mouth tightened in anger, and he turned to look back to where the prisoner squatted at the side of the track under the points of two spears.

‘We would lose more men than we could afford, given the number already dead or wounded at his hand. No. I have a better idea. One that will see him out of our way without a single further death. Or perhaps just the one.’

‘So where is it that we’re heading?’

Tiro made another nervous scan of the horizon to their north and east before answering Dubnus’s question, guiding his horse towards the cover of a copse several hundred paces distant.