The Fatal Child (51 page)

‘Re-form, lads.’

With a weary clatter the Pemini men turned and clambered free of the strewn bodies. Here and there men stooped to snatch a weapon or a dead man’s helmet. They gained the ridge-top and ordered themselves along it. Padry wondered how many fewer they were than they had been an hour before.

‘The castle!’ another voice exclaimed. ‘Look!’

The mists had lifted. There, away to the right, was the castle: hulking, brown-walled, its black slits brooding on the scene like narrow eyes. It had changed shape. The north-east tower lay in a pile of rubble at the foot of the walls. There were people on the battlements. Padry could see their heads like black dots, tiny with the distance. And above them was the flag – the flag that the new wind teased out for the eye to see – blue and gold with the Sun of Tuscolo. The banner of Gueronius. He saw it at last, high on the ruined walls.

Trant had fallen.

‘Will Your Majesty take wine?’ asked an attendant.

‘I shall have fruits,’ said Atti. ‘And clean water.’

They had set a chair for her at the edge of a grove of olives, under an awning of pale canvas. Servants and ladies surrounded her, together with a small bodyguard of armed knights. Nearby the bright yellow banner of Baldwin stirred in the breeze.

On the far side of the broad valley the armies were
gathered. One lined the far ridge, facing them. The other clumped and straggled in long masses of men and horses at the bottom. Scattered like fallen leaves between them were the dead. A distant sea of voices, clinking armour, drums and horns rose to the ear.

‘We have him, Your Majesty!’ one of the young knights was saying. ‘His back is to the lake. And Your Majesty’s own knights’ – he pointed to his right – ‘have gained the far end of the ridge. His retreat is cut!’

‘He has the high ground still,’ said another, older man. ‘It will be hard.’

‘I see,’ said Atti.

That’s your husband over there
, thought Melissa, who stood at her elbow.
Surrounded by his enemies. And you could stop them, Atti. You could send to Gueronius even now. You could stop them killing him
.

A servant came forward with the juice of a squeezed orange. Atti sipped it. Melissa brought her the jug of water. She went down on one knee and poured the water into a bowl. And she looked up into Atti’s face.

You could stop them
, she thought.
If you ever loved him, you could try
.

Did you? I do
.

Atti looked at her. Just for a second she looked into Melissa’s eyes.

Then her gaze fell to the water. ‘It is not clean,’ she said.

It had been the cleanest Melissa could find, and she had searched for hours. Maybe, she thought savagely, maybe Atti should have seen what the
soldiers were drinking! But she bobbed silently and withdrew.

‘How long will this take?’ sighed Atti.

The crowd of Pemini men ordered itself on the ridge-top, pikes to the front and flanks and everyone else jostling in behind them. There was little space to swing. Padry felt exhausted and thirsty. His skin seemed to be covered in a layer of sticky sweat. He longed to go and empty his bladder somewhere on the reverse slope of the hill. But he knew that if he did, others would, too, and the ranks must stay ordered. The enemy attack might be only moments away. He wished he were not where he was. He wished that he were anywhere else in the world. Just let him live out this day, he thought, and he would never take up a weapon again. He would never serve a king or even a lord again. He would go away somewhere quiet, with a few books and enough to eat and drink, and live out his life where no one could trouble him. Perhaps he would even finish that wretched second volume of the Path.

The man next to him was testing his shoulder as though it hurt.

‘Are you wounded?’ Padry asked.

The man shook his head. In the cage of his helmet his face was pale.

‘Sprained, I think,’ was the reply.

‘You had better take yourself off then,’ said Padry.

The man glanced around. To the rear of the battle the slope ran gently down to the lakeshore. Winking
in the new sun, the waters stretched left and right as far as the eye could see.

‘Nowhere to go, is there?’

Hawskill overheard them. ‘That’s the truth,’ he said. He lifted his voice. ‘Now, lads. Take a moment to look behind you. That’s the lake there – see it? You can’t swim it and you can’t hide in it. Don’t think of trying …’

Padry was still staring at his neighbour, who must have felt his look. He glanced once at Padry and dropped his eyes. Then he muttered something, and sidled a little away in the crowd.

‘We all want out of here,’ Hawskill was saying. ‘But the only way out is to
stay where we are
. Stand fast, pack tight, look after one another …’

Padry’s eyes had not left the injured man. Because he knew from the voice that it was not a man. It was a woman. A woman, all dressed up in iron, so that neither friend nor foe would know the difference.

Someone’s wife, or sweetheart, following in the ranks? Maybe even someone’s daughter? Such things did happen.

And if there was one, he thought, how many others would there be, concealed among the men around him?

He looked around, but they were only armoured figures. The faces were shrouded in iron. The shapes of their helms, the crude, cruel axes and maces that they held in their hands were the only things that distinguished them now. And the woman, whoever she was, had slipped in among them. When he
looked for her again he could no longer pick her out in the crowd.

‘…And some time today something’s going to happen, something we didn’t expect, and I dare say it’ll all be looking bad. But we
stay where we are
. If we don’t, they’ll be burying us all along that lakeshore. This turf…’ Hawskill stamped his foot on the thin grass. ‘This turf
here
is the road home.’

Padry’s bladder was aching. What would Croscan say about that? What could Thomas Padry, with his three clever little signs, say? The dragon does not loose his hold for pain. Hah. Wrap it round your bladder, Thomas, and hang on. Just as the men – and women – of Pemini must hang onto this ground. The army was a dragon, too. A great, thin worm, stretched along the top of the ridge. The Dragon does not loose his hold. But…

But down in the valley there was another dragon, and it had begun to move.

To the right, to the left and down there before him, one after another, the enemy battles had lurched from their places and begun to creep forward up the trampled and corpse-littered slope.

‘Now for it, boys,’ said Hawskill. ‘Steady.’ And he bellowed across to the second Pemini company, massed to the left, ‘Master Knowlright, I’ll thank you to keep your eyes on Watermane for me. They have the hard end of this.’

Padry watched the enemy pikemen, creeping up the slope under the banners of the Sun. He thought of all the things he had seen in his life – sack and
execution, monsters and a weeping goddess. None of them had ever been more terrible, more chilling, than these lines upon lines of men with iron, walking steadily towards him. And now he knew what was coming.

Thunk-thunk
, went the first crossbows.
Thunk-thunk!

Padry, with his eyes on his enemies, deliberately pissed himself.

He pissed himself because there was no help for it. There was no honour. There was no dignity. There was no courage and there never had been. Either he did it when he chose, or he would do it as soon as he lost control. And he would fight with it warm and wet down his legs, and if later he felt warm and wet he would not know if it were his blood or just the urine that he was shedding now.

It went on and on. The smell of it reached his nose. Someone near to him swore. Maybe that had been her – the woman with the shoulder. But he must forget her now. Forget everything, but be ready.

‘Heads down, boys.’

Head down. The rattle of the bolts, falling among them. Were there more this time? Did crossbowmen ever run out of shafts? Dear Angels, what if the enemy just stood off and loosed at close range? Surely they would have to charge! And then?

‘Pemini!’ called someone.

‘Hah, Pemini!’ cried others.

The man in front of Padry began to sway, lifting first one foot and then the other as he bellowed,
‘Hah, Pemini, hah!
’ Others were doing it, too. They were all
doing it: they were all one mass of armoured men, swaying and chanting as their enemies climbed towards them. Eyes on his knees, Padry joined in. He shouted with them. Over the chant he could hear other voices shouting other things, drawing closer. A bolt glanced off his helmet and another punched him in the shoulder but did not break the mail.

‘
Hah-Pemini-hah! Hah-Pemini-hah!
’

His voice was hoarse and his limbs trembled. Still he shouted, rocking foot to foot with the men around him. He was not shouting for the King. (What were kings, after all?) He was shouting for his town – the town where he had been born, and which he had left while still a boy. He was shouting for the fighters beside him, born later but under the same roofs, the same stinking little streets, who had walked together to this little patch of ground by the lakeshore.

‘Steady, boys!’ cried Hawskill as the tumult rose.

‘Ha-aargh
.’

‘Look! Your Majesty, look!’ cried the excitable knight. ‘His wing is going!’

On the far side of the valley the seething crowds had changed shape. They were bunching in from the right. Over there men were running, more and more of them, peeling away from the battle. The gap between right and centre was closing as the struggle on the flank was pushed inwards. The note of shouting rose, growing sharper, as if all the thousands of voices over there knew that a crisis was coming. And still more and more men were
running, and now there were horsemen among them and the flash of swords.

‘Who was that?’

‘That went? Watermane, I think.’

‘Now for the centre. Either they’ll give at a rush, or …’

‘Or they won’t.’

No one spoke. Opposite them, the gap closed. The centre was one heaving mass of armed men, crowding together. Where the battle on the right had been there were now only littered figures, lying thickly, and the lazy swoop of black birds coming in to see what they could find.

‘Go, damn you, go,’ said one of the men softly.

They watched. Everyone – the Queen, the ladies, the knights and attendants, the servants and musicians – was fixed on the far hill, waiting for something more to happen.

Someone licked their lips. ‘Stubborn, aren’t they?’

‘We just have to wear them down …’

‘Look! Those knights!’

‘Develin!’

A group of mounted knights riding along the very crest of the ridge. A chequered banner, square at their head …

‘Damn it! Stand, stand, stand!’

‘They won’t see them!’

They waited.

‘Damn!
Are they all farmers, Seguin’s men?’

The patterns on the ridge were changing again.
Slowly the fighting clumps seemed to peel themselves apart. Men were running the other way now, away from the struggle for the centre. A great crowd of them were running.

‘Damn it!’ exclaimed one knight. ‘Damn it, damn it, damn it! Just because Develin had a couple of score men to put in the saddle! What do they think they’re
doing
over there?’

Atti sighed and beckoned to Melissa, who bent to let her whisper in her ear.

‘Well,’ said another knight. ‘That was that chance gone. Now what?’

‘There goes Seguin, look,’ said a third. ‘He’ll have them back together.’

The excitable knight was still stamping and cursing.

‘He damned well better! Or I’ll name every living man in his lands a coward tonight!’

‘Sirs,’ said Melissa, coming up to them. ‘The Queen has a headache. She prays that those of you who can, be silent. And that those of you who cannot shall move a little further from her.’

My axe is dented, thought Padry.

Axe? he thought as he swayed with exhaustion. How is it an axe? It was a mace when this started. When did I pick up an axe?

He could not remember. He had been fighting, that was all. He had been pinned in a mass of men so tightly that he could not lift his arm. He had felt his feet lifted from the ground in the press. He had felt his own teeth snap together inside his helmet as he
had tried to bite a man who had cannoned into him. That was what he remembered.

I am soaked.

I am soaked in someone’s blood. Is some of it mine? In my sweat and piss. I could drink the lake if I could drag myself down there.

‘Who has command?’ cried a rough voice from the sky.

Padry looked up. A knight towered over him, high on a huge horse. Both beast and rider wore the chequered red and white of Develin, and the man’s face was hidden in a great closed helm. The iron mask looked down on the Pemini men and showed them no pity.

‘Who has command here?’ demanded the Develin knight.

Some distant part of Padry’s brain, where the memories that made him a man had locked themselves for safekeeping, recognized the voice. It was Caw, the lady’s marshal.

‘Damn all the Angels!’ swore the marshal. ‘Is no one in command of you?’

The Pemini men looked at one another. They were so many fewer than they had been. And many were cradling wounds, or had sunk to the ground. Where was Hawskill? Nowhere to be seen.

‘Damn it! Who—?’

Hesitantly, reluctantly, Padry lifted his hand.

‘Get your men together! And pick up every pike you can, because they’ll come at you with horse. And don’t you
dare
give ground. You hear me? You damned well stay and
die here!’

The marshal had not recognized him. Very probably Padry would not have recognized himself. He felt his lips move.

‘What of the King?’

His voice was a croak. His throat was parched. He needed water.

‘The King is unhurt,’ said Caw curtly, and rode on.

Unhurt. Padry knew that was a lie. It had been a lie even before the day began.

‘Get together, boys,’ he heard himself say. And: ‘The King is unhurt’