One of the horses, the one with the dead rider, a longspear nearly all the way through its body, opened its mouth impossibly wide. Its teeth were those of a predator. It bit the face off the spearman who’d run it through. The dead man, his face a bloody ruin, did not fall. The press of the melee held him up. A warrior in the third rank, who’d just seen her lover’s face bitten off, screamed and despite the press lifted her spear and pushed herself forward to run the weapon through the horse’s skull.
‘And step!’ Morfudd cried. And somehow they did. The two remaining horses reared. Spears forced them back. One of the riders fell off his steed, impaling himself on three spears, but they did not drop due to the press of bodies.
The other horseman in the front row stabbed out with his longspear as his shield caught blow after blow. His spearhead ran through the head of the woman next to Morfudd.
‘And step!’ Morfudd screamed, furious now as her friend’s hot blood splattered her face. And again they did, holding their dead up in the press of bodies as they went.
Fachtna had pulled his boots off. He climbed up onto the shoulders of the spearmen and -women and ran from shoulder to shoulder over the warband, his bare feet giving him more purchase. Then he leaped. Powerful leg muscles, infused with what Britha would have thought of as the magics of his people, carried him over the heads of the first rank of horsemen as the spears in their flesh forced the rearing horses over and into the mud of the marsh.
Fachtna threw both his casting spears in mid-air. The rider next to Gwydyon died, a spear in his chest. Gwydyon raised his shield just in time, the spear meant for his head hitting the shield, its point piercing the wood.
Fachtna tore his sword out of its scabbard. His spear had made Gwydyon raise his shield so that his face was covered. Fachtna swung as he came in. The ghostly singing blade cut straight through Gwydyon’s shield and then continued its path through his body and then through his screaming horse’s flanks.
Ysgawyn watched the warrior he had seen from afar the other night land in front of him as his warband leader’s torso slid diagonally off the rest of his body. The man spun and sliced upwards with his sword, held two-handed. Ysgawyn threw himself back off his horse as it was decapitated. The warrior kicked at the horse as it toppled and came straight for him. Ysgawyn lost interest in the fight and leaped from the causeway onto an island in the marsh.
None of the horsemen near Fachtna seemed interested in fighting him. He watched the Corpse People’s king flee across the marsh as he tried to recover his breath.
Behind him the Cigfran Teulu charged the second rank, butchering the horses and killing the last remaining rider. Soon they were killing the third-rank riders as they tried to turn their horses. Morfudd was next to him now.
The rest of the horsemen were turning their horses as best they could to make their escape. Those close to the front were in disarray. Horses reared; others jumped into the marsh and got bogged down or broke their legs. There was no battle now, just killing. It could have gone very differently. The Corpse People could have ridden straight through them, but the Cigfran Teulu had held.
There was a savage grin on Morfudd’s blood-spattered face. The warband’s blood was up. They were feeling the rush of combat.
They had lost three fighters. Fachtna had respectfully suggested to Morfudd that they recover all the weapons that had been blessed with the blood magics. He, along with some of the warband, took discarded Corpse People’s shields. Unfortunately they did not have time to strip the dead of their armour.
Fachtna was impatient to get going. Tangwen had scouted ahead a little. The hunter could see that one of the curraghs had come close to the shore and warriors, the tips of their spearheads glinting in the sunlight, were making their way across sandbanks to the island. The giants were moving too, but none were approaching them.
Morfudd and Fachtna joined Britha and Teardrop at the front as Britha moved ahead to keep an eye on Tangwen. Some of the moonstruck wretches had made it to this side of the channel and more were following, but they seemed happy to wade around in the mud, occasionally throwing it at the warband but not getting any closer.
‘We need to move more quickly,’ Teardrop told Morfudd, who nodded and turned to hurry her warriors.
Britha was coming to the conclusion that she hated beaches, or indeed any body of sand close to water. She wished for night. She wished for enough woad to cover herself and the warband, and she wished for a warband who would fight naked.
Instead what she saw was a line two deep of a hundred demon-ridden Lochlannach spearmen standing on a sandbank, a curragh in the water behind them and behind that two of the horribly misshapen giants towering over the ship. She remembered broken chariots and horseflesh and the mangled bodies of the warriors of the Cirig. What were they thinking? They could fight the spearmen, just, with the help of blood magic, but the giants?
‘Each one of us only has to kill two of them,’ Morfudd said. ‘With your help we will triumph.’ But she was looking uncomfortably at the giants. They knew them to be excellent swimmers despite their deformed limbs and the horrific growths that sprouted from their rough skins.
‘We will not fight with you,’ Teardrop told her. To Britha’s surprise this seemed to come as a relief to the warband leader.
‘You will fight the giants then?’ she asked. The Cigfran Teulu had acquitted themselves well, but the giants were something else. The dead looked like people and subsequently were found to be so, and fighting them had been comparable to what they had done in the past. The giants, however, were things that should not be, things from stories told by the bards out of their colleges to the west beyond the plains of the dead. Giants were thought to be long dead.
‘No.’
Fachtna frowned at Teardrop, who had been staring at the giants as if searching for a way to kill them. The warband had spilt onto the sand at the end of the causeway, and the two forces were eyeing each other. There had been no point in hiding.
Morfudd turned on Teardrop. She did not flinch away from his strange eyes. ‘Then I call you craven, demon!’ she spat.
‘We need you to carry the fight as close to the water as you can, and indeed into the water if possible,’ Teardrop told her.
‘And then what?’ Morfudd asked.
‘Die well.’
Morfudd stared at him. Then she started laughing.
‘Your sacrifice will not be so that we can escape.’
‘I will fight with you, at the start,’ Fachtna told her. Teardrop opened his mouth to object. ‘Don’t worry. I will meet you in the water.’
‘The water?’ Tangwen said. ‘Did you see the people tied to the poles?’
As the discussion went back and forth around her, Britha could not shake the feeling that the water was her home. Where she should be. She knew that beneath its surface she would hear a song calling her back.
‘What about stealing a boat?’ Tangwen asked.
‘We don’t have time to break the magics that control them,’ Fachtna told her.
‘We’ll be fine in the water,’ Britha said. ‘I’ll protect you.’
Teardrop was looking at her, almost smiling. Britha did not see what they had to smile about. From here the wind carried the smell of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people kept in close captivity, the cries, their pleas. From here they could better appreciate the sheer size of the wicker man as it towered above them.