Chapter 50: The Old Captain Holds

He had been fighting for a day and a half and looked it. His surcoat was in ribbons. There was blood dried black down all of his right side and a rag round his forearm and another round his head, and he had lost his helm and had lost most of the skin off his knuckles, and he was sixty-eight years old.

In his right hand he carried the sword he had carried for fifty years, which was not a messer and not a falchion and not anything else anybody in that county used: a spatha, long and narrow and straight, worn thin down one edge by half a century of sharpening, with a plain iron pommel and a grip he had rewrapped four times.

He looked at Osric.

"Serjeant."

"Old man."

"You took your time." Tertius grinned, and it was ghastly, and about half his teeth were red. "I've been holding your line since yesterday and it's been very poorly attended."

"You've held it."

"I've held it." He said it without any boast in it whatever, which from Tertius was the most alarming development of the day. "We've lost eight. Two more will go tonight. I've eleven up and about ninety arrows and no water since noon yesterday."

"Ninety arrows."

"Theirs. We've been pulling them out of the bank." Tertius jerked his chin at the wall. "There's a lad down the end who's been snapping the flights off and setting them into the top of the wall points-up, and it has worked twice, and I'd have him made a serjeant for it if there were anybody left to ask."

Below them, out in the dark, the camp had stopped running about.

Osric went to the wall and looked over it through the thicket of broken shafts.

The Khesari were re-forming.

Not charging. Forming: the ones who had gone east after the horses coming back at a jog and being sent to places, the ones from the wrecked northern flank pulling back out of bowshot and being counted, the fires being built up so

that the ground in front of the bank was lit and the ground behind the fires was not.

It was done quickly and it was done well and it took them about ten minutes.

And down at the largest fire, at the very edge of the light, a man in a good dark coat stood with his hands behind his back and looked up at the bank, and did not move, and did not hurry.

Osric watched him and felt something go quiet and level in the middle of his chest.

Then the man raised one hand, and made a small gesture with it, and about forty Khesari started up the slope at a walk.

"Here they come," said Tertius.

Osric turned round to the trench.

Eleven men who had been fighting for a day and a half. Seventeen who had ridden twenty-two miles and come through a camp to reach them. A captain who could not sit down. A boy at his left hand with a forge hammer and a helm that did not fit.

Four hours.

"On the wall," he said. "All of you. Now."

They came up out of the trench and onto the line and there was no time to arrange any of it properly, so Osric arranged it badly and fast.

The bank ran about forty paces from the cut end to the low end, and the low end was the trouble and everybody could see that it was. He put Eckhard and six of his there, because the young knight had the best harness on that hill and because it was the place where good harness was worth the most. He put Alden and Baldewin and four more in the centre where the two dead horses filled the gap. Doran and Voss he had already lost to the eastern wood and would not see for some while.

He kept the cut end himself, and Argilac, and Theo, and Tertius, who could not have been moved off it with a team of oxen.

Throderic stayed where he was standing, in the angle, with his messer down at his side, and did not go up onto the line and did not need to, because every man on that bank could see him from where they stood, which was the entire purpose.

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Forty men came up that slope at a walk with their shields up.

That was the part Osric had not expected and should have.

Not a rush. A walk, in a loose double line, with the front rank carrying whatever they had found or brought that would stop an arrow: a proper shield or two, but mostly cart boards, a door taken off some farmstead's hinges, a hurdle, three of them behind a single stretch of wattle carried between them like men bringing in a hay panel.

He's been at this a day and a half and he's stopped losing men to a bank.

"Do not shoot," Osric said, down the line. "Do not shoot. Let them come."

Somebody protested and Tertius told him to shut his mouth.

They came to thirty yards and the first arrows went over the top of the wall from the camp behind them, dropped in high to make the defenders keep their heads down, and every man on that bank got down behind the wall and heard the shafts come into the earth around them.

At twenty yards the walking line stopped, and knelt, and the second rank stood up behind them and loosed at the wall over their heads at twenty yards, flat and fast.

One of Eckhard's men was killed instantly. One of the defenders who had held that bank since yesterday was hit in the throat and went down into the trench without a sound and was dead before anybody could get to him.

And then the forty came the last twenty yards at a run.

They hit the low end first, exactly where the ground made it easiest, and Eckhard's six met them there and it was, for about ninety seconds, the best fighting Osric had seen out of anybody all year.

The young knight fought as though the entire evening had been arranged for his benefit. He was fast and he was extremely well taught and he was in the one suit of plate on that hillside, and Khesari sabres came off it and did nothing, and he killed three men in the first minute and did it without any wasted motion at all.

He also did not once stop moving forward, and by the ninety-second mark he was a full body-length in front of his own line with two of his men trying to catch him up, and that was how his flank opened.

Two Khesari got over the wall behind him.

Alden took one and Baldewin, who had never in his life stood in a line and had been standing in one for four minutes, put his boar spear into the other from the side and did it correctly and looked extremely surprised about it afterward.

"BACK," Osric roared at Eckhard. "BACK ON THE LINE."

Eckhard heard it, and Osric watched him hear it, and watched him want to argue with it in the middle of a fight, and watched him come back four paces and set his feet on the line where they belonged.

Right. He'll do.

At the cut end it was uglier and slower.

The ground there was steeper and the Khesari had to come up at it in twos, and Tertius stood at the top of that climb with the spatha and killed the first two who reached it and then held the third for what felt like a minute and was probably six seconds, and the old man's arm did not falter once.

Osric fought on his right and did not have a great deal of room.

His leg had gone. He had known it going up the bank and had not troubled to think about it since, and it meant he could not step off the left foot and could not turn on it and could not do half the things that had kept him alive for thirty years. So he did not move. He set himself in the gap between the earth and the cart and let them come to him, and killed the ones who came, and let his son and his other son do the moving.

Argilac was extraordinary.

Osric would remember that afterward and would never manage to say it to the boy. He fought the way Osric had fought at twenty-two, which is to say too fast and too far forward, but he had Doran's footwork and Alden's shoulder and he had learned something in the tower that Osric had not taught him, which was to stop trying to win the exchange in front of him and start looking at the next one.

He killed two men on that wall in the first assault and pulled a third off Tertius by the belt.

And Theo stayed at his father's left hand.

He was terrible at it. He had no idea where to put his feet and he swung the hammer like a hammer, in great looping strokes that a trained man would have stepped inside twice over, and twice Osric had to put a hand on him and haul him back onto his heels.

But nobody who came at that gap got past him.

The hammer was a forge hammer, made to move iron, and what it did to a man in a leather coat and a fur cloak did not bear thinking about. Theo hit one Khesari on the shoulder and the man simply stopped being able to use that arm. He hit another across the top of the head and the helm went in.

He made a noise every time. Not a war cry. A kind of grunt, forced out of him with the weight of it, and Osric heard that sound over and over for the better part of five minutes and would hear it again in his sleep for years.

The assault broke at about the eighth minute.

It did not break because the Khesari were beaten. It broke because a voice down at the fires called something, twice, and the forty men on that bank disengaged and went back down the slope at a walk, carrying their wounded, still behind their doors and their hurdles.

Somebody on the wall started to shout after them and Tertius knocked his arm down.

"Don't," the old man said. "Save it."

Osric leaned on the wall and got his breath and looked down at the camp.

Four dead on the bank. Two of Eckhard's, one of Throderic's, one of the two young men off the wall whose name Osric had been trying to bring to mind on the ride out and now would never ask anybody, because there is no asking after that.

Perhaps nine Khesari on the slope in front of them.

And down at the largest fire, at the edge of the light, the man in the dark coat stood with his hands behind his back and looked up at the bank, and said something to somebody, and about thirty more men began to come out of the dark toward the slope.

"He's not spending them," said Tertius, quietly, beside him. "He's counting ours."

"Aye."

"Forty, then thirty, then forty again. He'll go on doing that till dawn."

"He'll go on doing that till we're the ones getting tired," said Osric. "Which is about two hours."

Down the line, Throderic had not moved from the angle.

He was still standing.