Chapter 49: Four Hours Until Relief

There were fifteen or sixteen shapes on that bank, and about half of them were lying down, and he could not tell from a hundred and fifty yards which of the lying-down ones were resting.

There were four small fires below the bank on the road, and men round them, and the Khesari had made a proper camp of it: a picket line for the horses off in the eastern scrub, a place where the wounded had been laid out, another place where somebody was cooking.

They had been there a day and a half and had settled in.

He counted the camp twice and got somewhere between seventy and eighty, and knew from the way they were spread that some of them were out in the wood and not in the count at all.

The same. It's the same warband to the man.

They finished at the tower, went home east, sat somewhere for a fortnight, and then came back over that river to lie in a wood on the west road on a particular day.

Somebody told them which road and which day. Again.

Doran came up on his elbows beside him and lay there for a good while without saying anything.

Then he tapped Osric's wrist twice and pointed, very slightly, with two fingers, at a place near the largest of the fires.

There was a man there in a good dark coat standing with his hands behind his back, looking at the bank.

Not sitting. Not eating. Standing at the edge of the firelight with his back to the flames, looking up at the spoil bank as at a job running longer than he was told it would.

Osric had never seen his face. He had heard him for perhaps four minutes through a stone floor.

He knew him at once.

There you are.

He watched him for the better part of two minutes.

The man did not move much. Once he turned his head and said something to somebody out of sight, and two men got up from a fire and went off toward the eastern scrub at a walk, and came back some while later with an armful each of something Osric could not make out.

He's still running it. A day and a half in and he's stood there working out how to open a bank without spending men, and he's been doing that since yesterday morning, and he has not once rushed it.

Which is why there are still fifteen up on that hump.

Osric slid back off the lip and got down behind the trees and put his back against one and let the leg have a moment.

The others came in round him.

He gave it to them in about ninety seconds, low and flat, because there was not time for anything else and because a plan explained twice is a plan half believed.

Seventy or eighty in the camp. Fifteen on the bank. The bank was a hundred and fifty yards out and there was open scrub between it and the trees on this side, and the Khesari were on the road side of it with their fires and their horses, and the horses were the point of the whole business.

Because a Khesari off his horse is a good foot soldier and a Khesari on one is something else entirely, and there were twenty of them, and if that picket line came alive the twenty of them would be dead in the scrub in about six minutes.

So the picket line went first.

Doran and Voss into the eastern wood on foot, quiet, right round behind it. Voss on his stick with a light prod and about a third of a draw, which at fifteen yards into a picketed horse was enough, and Doran with his spear and his knife and a purse of Osric's flint and a bundle of grass.

Not to kill horses. To move them.

Everybody else went in mounted from the north-west, out of the trees, across the scrub, straight at the gap between the largest fire and the bank.

Not to break the camp. To get through it, once, and put six men onto that bank alive.

"And then?" said Baldewin.

"Then we hold it with them until the Baron comes."

Nobody said anything about how many hours that was.

Osric looked round the six faces in the last of the light and stopped on the one at his left.

Theo had the mail that did not fit and the helm that sat badly and the hammer across his saddlebow, and his face had gone somewhere it had not been at the gate.

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"Left hand," said Osric.

"Left hand."

Doran and Voss went at the failing of the light, and it took them the better part of half an hour, and it was the longest half hour of the whole day.

Osric sat his horse in the trees with the others and watched the camp below and did nothing at all, which is the hardest work a man ever does.

The fires got brighter as the light went. Men moved round them. Somewhere on the bank, once, a man's voice went up in a short flat shout and was answered by another, and the Khesari nearest that side looked up and went back to what they were doing.

Then, out on the eastern edge of the camp, a horse screamed.

It was not the alarm. It was a horse in pain and terror, and then another one, and then the sound of a picket line coming apart, which is a sound like nothing else on earth: forty animals all deciding at once.

Half the camp was up and running east inside four seconds.

Osric let it run for eight more, which was as long as he could bear it, and then he put his heels in and took them out of the trees.

The scrub was bad ground and they went across it faster than the ground allowed. Somebody's horse went down about thirty yards out and Osric did not look to see whose. The rest came on.

The Khesari nearest the north side saw them at about sixty yards.

There were perhaps twenty men on that flank and half of them had gone east after the horses, and the ten who were left had bows and got two loose volleys off in the time it took twenty riders to cover sixty yards, and both of them went high because a man shooting at a charge in bad light shoots at where the horse's chest is and forgets the ground falls away.

One shaft took Baldewin's mount through the neck.

The animal went about four more strides on momentum and then folded, and Baldewin came off it and hit the scrub rolling and was up on his feet inside two seconds with his spear still in his hand, which for a reeve of nine years was a remarkable piece of work and which nobody had time to remark on.

They hit the camp.

There was no line to break. It was a camp: fires and bedrolls and stacked gear and men standing up out of it in ones and twos with whatever was to hand, and the twenty of them went through it at a canter putting down whatever came into reach and not stopping for any of it.

Osric took a man across the collarbone as he came up off a fire and did not slow. Alden killed one and rode over another. Argilac put his horse's shoulder into a man who was trying to nock and knocked him into the fire, and the fire went up in a great scatter of sparks and burning brush that lit that entire flank and did as much as any of them.

Theo hit a man with the hammer.

It was his first and it was appalling. He had no idea at all how to do it from a horse, and he did it with all the strength of three years at a forge and a seventeen-year-old's terror behind it, and the squared face took the man in the side of the head under the ear and the man was dead before he had finished going down.

Theo made a sound.

Osric heard it and could not do anything about it and shouted his name once, and got no answer, and looked and found the boy still on his left and still coming.

They came out the far side of the camp with about forty yards of open ground to the foot of the spoil bank and the eastern half of that camp now turning round and coming back.

"UP," Osric roared. "UP THE BANK. LEAVE THE HORSES."

They came off the horses at the foot of it and went up.

It was a bad climb, loose shale over hard earth, and Osric got about six feet up it and his leg went entirely and he came down onto his knees, and Theo had him under the arm before he had properly landed and got him up the rest of it by main strength.

Hands came over the wall to take them.

Osric got a fistful of somebody's mail and was hauled over the top of a dead horse and landed on the far side in a shallow trench that men had scraped out with their hands and their helmets, and lay there for about a second and a half with the breath gone out of him.

Then he got up.

The bank was a charnel house.

That was the first impression and it did not improve on inspection. There were perhaps sixteen men behind that wall and eleven of them were on their feet, and every one of the eleven had been wounded somewhere, and the five who were not on their feet were laid along the back of the trench in a row with their cloaks over them and two of those cloaks were over the faces as well.

There was no water. That was the second impression, and it arrived through the smell.

There were arrows everywhere. Hundreds of them, standing out of the earth of the bank and the wreck of the cart and the two dead horses, so thick along the top of the wall that in places they made a kind of thicket, and men had been snapping them off at the ground for a day and a half and using the heads.

And in the middle of it, on his feet, was Throderic.

He should not have been. That was the first thought Osric had and he could not get past it for several seconds.

The captain was standing with his right shoulder jammed into the angle where the earth wall met the wreck of the cart, and he was standing because the wall was holding him up, and he had one boot braced against a stone that somebody had put there for the purpose. His left hand had a grip on the cart's broken axle and had been gripping it long enough that the fingers had swollen round it.

He had taken a sabre across the face at some point and had lost the sight of one eye, and that side of his face had gone black and shut. There was a broken shaft standing out of his left shoulder and his arm below it hung. His mail had been opened low on the right side and packed with cloth and the cloth was black, and he had been packing it himself, because the hand that had done it was black to the wrist.

He was grey as ash. He was swaying very slightly, in a small regular way, like a man on a boat.

And he was entirely conscious, and he had a messer in his good hand, point down and resting on the earth, and he was looking out over the wall.

Osric got to him in four steps.

"Sit down."

"No."

"Captain"

"If I sit down I do not get up," Throderic said, "and every man on this bank has been watching me stand since yesterday noon, and about half of them are only still on their feet because I am."

He turned his head, which cost him something, and looked at Osric out of one eye, and something went across his ruined face that was not relief.

"You're early," he said.

His voice was gone. It came out as a scrape.

"I'm a day and a half late."

"You're early. I gave you till dawn." He shifted his grip on the axle and the swaying got worse for a moment and then settled. "How many did you bring?"

"Twenty."

"Twenty."

"Twenty, and the Baron's four hours behind me with the column and he's bringing it himself."

Something moved in the captain's face at that.

"He's coming himself."

"He's coming himself."

"Right." Throderic shut his eye for a moment. "Right. Then we've four hours."

And Tertius came down the line of the trench at a crouch with the banner pole across his back.