THE EARL (A HAMMER FOR PRINCES) (19 page)

“Do you feel well?” Morgan said kindly.

They floundered down toward the strip of glassy water at the foot of the slope, and the marsh insects, aroused and ready, rose in a swarm to feast. Morgan sang of the king’s son, standing in the bow of the White Ship, which shone like the sun in its glory.

A fine black scum covered the water of the creek, and the horses would not drink it. The rocks along the streambed were covered with drinking bees. They struggled up the far slope through the brush.

“Were you stung?” Roger said.

“Very Biblically, on my most sinful parts.”

They climbed painfully up into the dry, sweet air of the hillside.

On into the afternoon, they rode across the low hills, while before them the dust cloud of Thierry’s passage hung in the air. The swellings on Fulk’s face went down quickly. Just after noon, with the sun filling the sky, they rode through a little village, and they stopped to water their horses. Fulk soaked a cloth in cold well water and held it to his face. The village was tiny, only a dozen huts of splint oak branches covered with turf, and it stank of pigs. A woman there told them that Thierry had passed by before noon. Morgan spoke to her, all friendship, in his musical English, but she jerked her eyes away and ignored him. Fulk said that she probably did not understand him.

That he did not believe. They were well inside the demesne of Sulwick now, and these people knew their enemies.

Sulwick, warned of the army approaching, would certainly send out men to scout and harass. In the heat, in the dust, with his bad arm aching and itching, Fulk began to see Thierry as the enemy he pursued, and the men of Sulwick as his allies, the walls against which he drove Thierry. The hard marching of the day had dried him out and made thinking difficult. He felt shrunken in against the bone of his will, all the flesh of reason and excuse eaten up by the sun. Roger said nothing all afternoon, knowing it.

The pasturage and fields they rode through were returning quickly to the forest. Shrubs and berry bushes sprouted in a mat of tough, furry-leaved weeds. The wells were broken and filled in and there were no villages at all. Fulk could not remember that great battles had been fought here, but this same thing had happened everywhere during the wars, the death of the land. The forest was always waiting to reclaim it, and once the struggle to hold back the forest slackened, its vanguard attacked—these weeds, these woody little shrubs and the thickets of dense brush.

The sun slide down the western sky; Fulk strained against it, startled to find himself fighting to hold the sun in the sky. If it set they would have to camp. In their broken country he could easily command the three separate parts of the army to camp separately, but that, he knew, would be a victory for Thierry—to have survived one day alone in command would make him immeasurably stronger. He stared at the plume of dust beyond the rowans that crowned the next hill.

He prayed for help, knew he could not expect God’s help for this, and prayed harder. God would understand. God had swallowed so much in the way of piety in the past twenty years that this must seem almost virtue. He shifted the sheepskin pad under his arm and only managed to jar it, and the aching pain always working in it sharpened to where he could no longer ignore it. He fell to brooding over the chance that the arm would heal crooked.

“My lord,” Roger said. “Look over there—beyond Thierry’s dust.”

Fulk blinked. Thierry was almost directly west of them now and he had to look into the sun. The ruddy sky confused him; he could see nothing.

“Dust,” Roger said.

“Oh. Yes.” He scrubbed his eyes and looked again. He still could not see it. “Where is it?”

“Past him,” Morgan said in his light voice. “I see it. It’s more dust than Thierry’s, isn’t it, Sir Roger?”

“Yes,” Roger said. “Shall we send to Thierry?”

Fulk nodded. “Tell him not to stop, to go straight on to Sulwick. Does he have the sense to steal a peasant to show him the way? Tell him that, too.”

Roger turned and bellowed for a knight riding behind them. Fulk’s mouth was dry. He strained to see the dust in the air ahead but the falling sun blotted it out. All along the horizon, the sky turned red and orange. Roger gave orders to the knight and sent him galloping west.

“Leave the wagons here,” Fulk said. “De Brise can bring them. Tell the drovers that we think the vanguard is being attacked and we’re going to help and they may as well wait for de Brise. Tell de Brise to come as fast as he can.” He stood in his stirrups, looking up and down the line. “We’ll bring the archers, if they can keep up. Roger dropped back to give orders; Fulk rode forward to the head of the band of archers. The sun was turning blood red and its long light turned the faces around him rosy. He talked to Godric, who stood listening and rubbing his hand up and down his cased bow.

“If we can’t keep up we’ll wait for de Brise,” Godric said. “We can move quicker on foot in this terrain than knights, my lord.”

Fulk nodded. All his will was dragging him down the road, after Thierry, and his excitement drowned the pain in his arm and made his voice more clipped than usual. The archers caught it; they started off before Fulk gave them an order, but he let them go.

The knights called to him, and he drew off to one side and waved them on past him. “We’ll be fighting soon—get ready. Go on.” He saw how they laughed at that, and his heart jumped. Oh, yes, fighting is what we’re made for. With Morgan beside him he waited until they passed. A horse galloping toward him from the rear of the column, a steady, rising pound of hoofs, made him look around, and he saw Roger. The other knights were already trotting off into the west. Fulk reined his horse around before Roger reached him and loped after them.

Overhead, the sky turned pink and orange and darkened to violet. Before the sun set Fulk and Roger had shouted and shoved the knights into a tight double column; they kept their horses to a short lope, one horse’s length between each, up and down the rocky slopes. Thierry’s dust trace had vanished into the darkness, and they had to follow his trail, cut deep and wide into the hillsides. The darkness closed down around them like a forest. The archers had fallen back, but the horses could not keep this pace for long, and they could catch up later.

“What do you think happened?” Roger shouted, riding up beside him. “Have they attacked yet?”

Fulk shook his head. He hadn’t seen the other dust cloud but he was sure they would have heard something.

Morgan said, “My lord, can you use a shield and a sword both?”

“No.”

They rode into the thickening darkness. The twilight was a resonant blue, strange and confusing. It was hard to see. His ears began to hurt from listening so hard, and he tried to stop, but a moment later caught himself struggling to hear. Bird calls, the sound of the wind. Somewhere a dog or a wolf howled. The road pitched down a steep slope into a well of black dark. In the cloudless sky stars were shining.

“Listen,” Roger said.

He could hear nothing. The noises of the galloping column drowned all other sound. Am I to miss all the—He sucked in his breath.

Out of the darkness ahead of them came the muffled sounds of fighting, the neighing and squealing of horses, the clank of swords, and the cries of the knights. They could see nothing but the sounds were so near, right in front of them, that the men around him drew their swords. An instant later the noise faded to a distant mutter. A trick of the wind, bringing it so close. Fulk thrust his feet deep into his stirrups and shortened his reins.

“On, on,” Roger shouted, in a voice like a young man’s.

The knights shrieked. Their horses lengthened stride, vaulting over obstacles before them only half-sensed in the dark, straight into the black glen ahead of them.

“Bruyère, Bruyère,” a voice cried, ahead of them, and the knights bellowed in answer. That was Thierry’s voice. Fulk reached down to unhook his shield from his saddle, realized he would never be able to put it on, and took his reins out of the tips of his right fingers. His horse carried him over rocks and through trees, careening down the hillside in the dark.

A shield on his arm, Morgan was riding beside him on his light mare, keeping pace with Fulk’s horse. The sounds of fighting crashed on his ears again—shrill cries and screams and the hacking of blades on metal. A horse with an empty saddle galloped up beside Roger, foam streaming from its mouth. Fulk whispered a prayer. His horse braced itself. With Morgan beside him shielding them both, he hurtled forward into the midst of the fighting.

In the dark, no one could see anything—they were fighting across a stream and up a slope, and the brush and stubby trees entangled them. They fought galloping, headed straight up the slope. No one could tell who was the friend and the enemy. A man loomed up before Fulk, headed straight for him. He saw the glint of the horse’s mad eyes and the man’s eyes behind the nosepiece of his helmet and ser himself, filled his lungs, and shouted, “Bruyère, Bruyère.” Abruptly the man before him veered off—one of his other knights. He could not see the bodies surging all around him—he heard them, he smelled them. He ran his horse into another from behind and knocked it down, and with Morgan close on his right side turned to go back.

“Keep going,” Roger shouted. “Keep going—follow me!”

Fulk aimed for his voice. His horse stumbled on something and wrenched itself up onto its feet again and stepped on something that screamed. Horsemen were racing away from them, toward Sulwick, in little packs; he saw them against the sky when they topped the hill. He needed a weapon, but he knew he could not hold a lance. A horn sounded to his left, and he felt his horse shudder at the sound and his own blood tingle at it.

“Bruyère, Bruyère, over here.”

He reined in, almost at the crest of the slope, and looked back. The moon was finally rising, and in its first light he could see masses of men riding back and forth over the slope, among the bushes. Roger, just behind Fulk, sounded his horn again, and the knights turned and rode up toward him. Across their saddles, they carried bodies, but only a few—in the confusion no one had killed very well. Fulk let out his breath; he did not see Thierry or any of Thierry’s men.

“Make a column again,” he said to Roger. “With the moon up we can see well enough.”

“Where is Thierry?” Roger said.

“Ahead of us, somewhere. They all fled when we attacked.” He turned to Morgan. “Carry my sword. “Let’s give this arm some exercise, in case the other comes out bent.”

The moon rose higher, nearly full, and they rose through its pale light toward Sulwick. After the confused fighting, the knights were excited and talkative. They kept the column tight and held their horses to an even trot. Fulk left his place in the middle of the line and rode forward, looking over the men he passed. They waved to him, smiling; they were all eager to fight again.

“My lord,” somebody shouted, up in front of him. “Send for the lord—look.”

Fulk stood in his stirrups to see. The column broke apart, up where the man had shouted, and some of them stopped, blocking the way for those behind. High shouts rose. He galloped forward, toward the milling knights, who were watching something on the ground. Their mail glinted in the moonlight, and when they wheeled aside to let him through, the moonlight glinted on the mail of the man lying there in the grass.

“Is he ours?” a knight shouted. “Where is my lord?”

“Here,” Fulk called. “Let me see.”

Another knight said, “Whoever he is, he’s dead.”

Fulk stopped his horse and dismounted. His legs were sore and cramped from so much riding. Kneeling beside the body, he turned it over. In the vague moonlight he saw fair hair, a young, white face, wild eyes staring up past him into the sky. Not stiff yet. He had just died. In the young man’s chest and side there was a great wound, the links of his chain mail driven into the flesh and blood below.

“He isn’t ours,” Fulk said. “Where’s his horse?”

Nobody had seen the horse.

“Leave him here. De Brise can bring him in the wagons, when he finds him.” If he finds him. He stood up, groaning at the ache in his leg muscles. “Come along, now, straighten out this line. Get back in line and move on. You’re holding us all up.”

They swung their horses away, and the column trotted past, each man craning his neck to see the dead boy in the grass. Fulk gathered his reins and hauled himself stiffly into his saddle.

Roger said, “Who was he?”

“Sulwick’s man.”

They moved back into the column. A little way on, Fulk turned to look back. He could not see the body, but he knew where it was. The column had left it behind, and from a copse of yew nearby a long shadow slunk down toward the dead knight.

The wolves will eat him before de Brise finds him. I should have brought him with us, or stopped to bury him. His uneasy guilt at that startled him: he realized he was tired.

There was no wind. The smells of horses and men smothered the ordinary scents of the open fields; Fulk began to feel stale and filthy, encased in dirt like armor. Morgan was dozing in his saddle. Roger and Fulk passed a wineskin back and forth in silence.

“Look, over there,” a man shouted, in the column in front of them.

“Another,” Fulk said. He pulled his horse out of the column and galloped forward again, toward where the knights were gathering around another lump in the grass.