Chapter 52: Stone-Sitter

Osric got the last five yards.

The man in the dark coat had drawn by then, and had put himself square, and there was nothing in his stance that suggested he expected to lose.

Up close he was perhaps forty. He had a broad flat face and a black beard cut close and a scar through one eyebrow that had taken the hair off it. His coat was good and had been good for some years. He had a heavy silver ring on his right hand and another on a cord at his throat.

He looked at Osric for about a second.

"Stone-Sitter," he said.

Osric did not answer him.

What followed was not a duel and had nothing whatever in common with the hill outside Auenstadt. It was two exhausted men in the dark in the middle of somebody else's battle, and it lasted about twenty seconds.

The Khesari was quick and knew his business and cut Osric twice, once across the outside of the shield arm and once low, and the second one skidded off the mail skirt over the bad thigh and went into the wound that was already there, and the pain took his left side away entirely.

He went down on the knee.

And because he went down, the man came forward.

That was all. That was the mistake and it was the only one he made, and it was the same mistake the champion had made on the hill, which is the mistake a man makes when he has decided the fight is over.

Osric came up off the knee with his shoulder into the man's midriff and put him on his back in the mud.

They rolled once. Osric got a knee onto the coat and got his forearm across the man's throat and leaned, and the Khesari got a hand up and got two fingers into the cut across Osric's brow and pulled, and Osric made a sound and did not let go.

He got the messer up.

And then he stopped.

He knelt there in the churned earth with his forearm across a man's windpipe and the point of a messer resting under the man's jaw and his own blood running off his face onto the man's coat, and he did not do it.

You speak our tongue. You bargained in it. You knew where she'd be lying in a hollow and you knew which road he'd be on and somebody told you both, and if I open you here I'll never know which of them it was.

Osric reversed the messer and hit him with the pommel, hard, twice, and the second one did it.

Then he knelt on the man's chest with his lungs tearing and his hands shaking and could not, for perhaps ten seconds, do anything else at all.

That was when the horns went.

They came from the east, from the high ground where the road came over the shoulder of the land, and they came all at once: three horns, then five, then more than anybody was counting, blaring flat and ragged and enormous across that whole trough of ground.

Every man on that hillside stopped and looked.

They came over the crest into the last of the light with the sky behind them.

The knights first, because knights are always first: twelve of them abreast on good horses with their spears up and the pennons streaming off the shafts, black and dark red and a good deal of gold, and the light going along the lance heads all down the line.

Then the mounted men-at-arms behind them, forty or fifty of them in no particular order, and behind that the levy: two hundred men on foot from the near farms, running, actually running, down a hill in the dark with billhooks and boar spears and whatever else they had been able to lift off a wall in four hours.

And out in front of all of it, three lengths clear and pulling further, the wyvern.

Heinric von Aelrich came down that slope with his visor up and his uncle at his right shoulder, and Waldric von Aelrich was sixty-eight years old and was riding a horse down a hill in the dark at a gallop with a lance in his hand, and Osric would think about that for the rest of his life.

The Khesari did not fight it.

They were steppe men. They had been steppe men for a thousand years and their entire art was knowing exactly when a piece of ground had stopped being

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

worth anything, and they knew it about four seconds before anybody on the bank did.

The horn down at the fires went twice, short, and every man on that hillside turned round and ran for the picket line.

Most of them got there. That was the part Osric had not expected and should have. They went in good order even running, and they got onto their horses in a way that would have taken Valmarch's garrison four times as long, and they were away east into the dark with the Baron's knights still two hundred yards short of them.

Forty or fifty rode out of that trough.

The ones who did not were the ones Doran and Voss had spent the evening on, which is to say the men whose horses had gone into the eastern wood and had not been found again, and there were perhaps twenty of those, and about nine of them were still standing when the levy arrived.

They did not surrender. Two of them tried to and were killed by farmers before anybody could stop it, which Osric did not see and heard about afterward and did not put in any report.

Six were taken. Six, and the man in the dark coat, who was face down in the mud with Osric kneeling on him and did not see any of it.

Then it was over, and the noise stopped, and the noise stopping was the strangest part of the entire night.

Osric stayed where he was for a while.

He knelt on the chest of an unconscious man on a slope in the dark, and around him two hundred men from the near farms came down onto ground they had never seen before and began, with no orders at all, to do what people do: to look for the living, and to shout, and to be sick.

It took them until well past midnight to find everybody.

The land had been a shallow trough with a road in it and an old spoil bank on the north side, and it was not that any more. There were bodies from the treeline on the north to the scrub on the south, spread over about four hundred yards, and there were more of them than anybody had expected because the fighting had gone everywhere.

They counted a hundred and thirty-one dead on that ground before the light came, and stopped counting the Khesari after seventy because it stopped mattering.

The fires were built up and more were lit, and by midnight there were twenty of them burning across that trough, and men went between them with torches looking at faces.

Osric walked it.

He should not have. Gerfried would have had a great deal to say about the leg, and the surgeon in Auenstadt would have had more. He walked it anyway, from the eastern scrub to the western treeline and back, twice, because there was nobody else who knew all three groups of men on that field and because he was not able to sit down.

He found Alden sitting against a cart wheel with his forearm opened again and his axe across his knees, entirely conscious, having a conversation with a dead man about something that had happened at the Vale. He got him to Gerfried's people and did not mention it to anybody, then or later.

He found Baldewin standing in the middle of the road with his spear still in his hand and his helm gone, looking at nothing at all, and had to say his name three times.

He found Doran carrying water.

He found Voss laid in the trench behind the two dead horses with a broken arm and a re-broken ankle and a great deal of blood that turned out mostly not to be his, and Voss looked up at him and said something about the ale ration that Osric did not catch and laughed at anyway.

He found Eckhard at the low end of the bank with four of his eleven left, standing over the bodies of the other seven, and the young knight looked up at him with his face entirely white and nothing at all in it, and Osric put a hand on his shoulder as he went past and neither of them said one word.

He found Tertius sitting on the wall with a farmer binding his leg and the wrecked banner across his knees, folding it, carefully, the way it is supposed to be folded.

He found his sons together.

They were sitting on the ground at the cut end of the bank with their backs against the earth, side by side, and neither of them was talking. Theo still had the hammer in his hand and did not appear to know it. His arms were shaking in a continuous fine tremor from the shoulder down and would go on shaking until nearly dawn.

Argilac had a cut along his jaw and one across the top of his forearm and had been sick twice and was fine.

Osric stood in front of them for a moment.

"Both of you up?"

"Both of us up," said Argilac.

"Right."

He could not think of one further word to say to either of them and did not try.

He went and found Throderic.

The captain was where he had been, in the angle where the earth wall met the wreck of the cart, and he was no longer standing.

They had got him down at some point in the second wave, or he had gone down and somebody had caught him, and he was sitting now with his back to the shale and his legs out and two of the Baron's own people working on his side by torchlight.

Heinric von Aelrich was kneeling in the mud beside him with his gauntlets off.

Osric stopped about six feet away and did not go closer, because there are moments a man does not walk into, and stood there in the dark and waited.

Throderic was talking.

He was talking very quietly and with a good deal of difficulty and he was, from the look of it, giving a report. The Baron had his head bent to hear it and was nodding, once in a while, and at one point put a hand flat on the captain's chest and left it there.

After a while Throderic stopped.

Heinric stayed where he was for a moment. Then he got up out of the mud and came over, and his face in the torchlight was not a face Osric had seen on him before.

"He is alive," the Baron said. "Gerfried's man says he should not be and cannot say why he is."

"He held that bank a day and a half, my lord."

"He held it two days. I have been counting since the boy came in." Heinric looked back at the angle. "He gave me the number of every man he lost and

where each of them fell and what they were doing at the time. Sixteen names. He would not let them dress the side until he had finished."

Osric said nothing.

"There is a Khesari down the slope with his hands tied," Heinric said, after a while, "whom I am told speaks our tongue, and who was carried up here by four farmers on a hurdle because somebody had cracked his skull with a pommel rather than opening his throat with the edge."

"Aye, my lord."

"That was a considerable piece of restraint at the end of a night like this one."

"It wasn't restraint," said Osric. "I want to know who told him where to be."

Heinric looked at him in the torchlight and did not speak.

"So do I," he said.