They had been stronger in numbers than we were, but they had not been as well armed, and the impressions I had had of heavily armed and armored men had been born more from frightened panic than from observation. Many of them had been bowmen, true, but I could recall now, looking back less fearfully, that more than half of them had not. The essence of their victory had lain in the success of the trap they laid; in their numbers and the speed and surprise of their onslaught. More than anything else, however, their victory had been our fault, attributable to the slovenly, incompetent leadership of the Sergeant-at-Arms, Harga.
Chilled by that assessment, I sucked in a deep breath and set about my self-imposed task of cataloguing the dead. We had been thirteen, including myself, Lorco, and Borg the wagon driver, but I found fifteen corpses scattered about the field, and four of those were strangers to me. That meant that there was a body missing, and someone else from our group had survived the attack, unless—and the idea came to me quickly, surprising me with my own pessimism—the missing man had tried to escape by the river and had been killed in the water. I pulled my horse’s head around and turned to look toward the river, and as I did so I thought I saw a flicker of movement off to my right, among the osier willows that lined the riverbank.
I froze, afraid to turn my head again and look more closely, but then, accepting that I had a choice of fleeing yet again or staying where I was, perhaps to die this time, I acknowledged to myself with great bitterness that I would never be able to live with the shame of running away again, and so I gritted my teeth, unsheathed my spatha, and turned to face directly toward the place where I had seen the movement, seeing the spot slide into clear focus in the gap between the side flaps of my helmet.
I stared and waited, silently defying whoever was there to step forth, but no one appeared and nothing moved, and eventually I began to feel foolish, sitting there on my horse like a living statue and facing an uninhabited stretch of treed riverbank. I nudged my heels into my horse’s flanks and it began to walk forward slowly, its ears pricked in the direction we were taking. And then, in a burst of movement that brought my heart into my mouth, Lorco’s horse lurched out from among the distant willows and came trotting toward us, whinnying a welcome. The sight of it almost unmanned me yet again, for I had assumed that the raiders had taken it with all the others, but seeing it trotting toward me, with Lorco’s silver helmet dangling from its saddle hook, I realized that it must have run away right at the start of the attack, when Lorco fell from its back, and not stopped until it entered the river willows, presumably to find water. It had obviously managed to remain unseen by the enemy, who must still have been fighting at the time.
The magnificent animal, one of Tiberias Cato’s finest blacks and bred from the same sire and dam as my own mount, came directly to us and made no move to avoid me as I sheathed my sword and leaned forward to take hold of its reins. As I straightened up again with the reins safely in my hand I saw something that I had never expected to see again. The magnificent long-bladed spatha that Lorco had won in the school arena weeks earlier, Tiberias Cato’s own spatha, hung in its belted, hand-tooled sheath from the hook on the other side of the saddlebow from Lorco’s helmet. Slowly, reverently, I reached across and collected it, then removed my own sword and replaced it with Lorco’s, hanging mine from the hook on my saddlebow. Then, once again, I unsheathed the sword, and the difference between it and my own was immediately apparent. It settled into my grasp, filling my fist completely and satisfyingly, and in the pleasure of simply holding it and feeling the heft of it, it took several moments for me to remember that I was a coward and undeserving of such a weapon. Grimly then, I sheathed it and returned to the task of recording the dead.
The corpses were not all completely naked, but all had been stripped of everything of value—weaponry and armor. I had to check each of them, including those not ours, before I could identify the missing man, but eventually it became clear that the man called Ursus, the Bear, was not among the dead. He was a loner, a taciturn, self-sufficient man who asked nothing of anyone and expected to be treated the same way. I had never heard him speak, but even in the short time I had spent in his company, I had learned that he had a reputation as a fearsome fighter. Now he was missing, and I found myself wondering if he, too, had run away as I had.
I had not once descended from my horse since my return to the killing ground, and thus I ended up sitting high in the saddle and gazing down at the carnage on the ground, wondering what I should do next. I had no desire to ride away and simply leave the bodies lying there to rot, but I could see no alternative. There were fifteen dead men lying here—fourteen men and one boy, my best friend—and I had no means of burying them, having nothing to dig with other than a narrow-bladed sword. Nor was there any way to burn them in a pyre. The scrub willows that lined the riverbank were green and wet and no more than an inch thick at any point, and the closest trees of any adequate size were half a mile away and it was growing dark already.
Aching with the knowledge of what I must do, I dismounted beside Lorco, who lay where he had fallen, close by the wagon. He was flat on his back and mercifully his eyes were closed above the ruin of the lower part of his face. I stooped and picked up one of the loose garments that lay by my feet, and draped it very gently over his head, concealing his wounds. That done, I dug into my saddlebag to pull out the small codex that Germanus had given me before I left the school. It contained a transcription of several prayers attributed to the blessed Saint Anthony, and others attributed to Saint Martin, a native of Gaul. I opened it to the beginning of the first prayer, then knelt beside the body of my friend and read the entire selection of the prayers of Saint Martin aloud, dedicating them in the reading to the surrounding dead while focusing on my beloved friend.
By the time I finished reading it was almost too dark to see, and I stood up to leave, knowing I could do no more for Lorco or for any of them, but as I turned to remount my horse, I again saw the garments scattered about my feet and realized that I would be a fool to leave all of them there when I would surely have need of them later. I sorted through the things that I could find, surprised at how much had been left undisturbed in at least one of my chests. I filled my own saddlebags and Lorco’s with clean, dry clothing, then improvised a pair of bags from two spare tunics and stuffed those full as well before tying them together and slinging them over Lorco’s saddle. Only then, in what was close to full darkness, did I ride away from the killing ground, unwilling to spend a single moment longer than I had to in that place.
I rode though the dark along the riverbank for more than an hour, following the narrow path that traced the black line of willow shrubs along the waterside, and then the moon rose, full and large in a cloudless sky, and I was able to see clearly enough eventually to identify a large stand of trees that would shelter me for the remainder of the night.
I made a dry, dark camp at the base of one huge tree and God blessed me with a sound and dreamless sleep.
I awoke with the sun shining directly into my eyes through the screen of leaves that hung over me, and the first thought that came into my mind was a vision of Lorco dead on the ground as I prayed over him. I knew that before I did anything else, I had to find Duke Lorco and tell him about his son, about what had happened to him and about how I had come to survive the attack. It was not an encouraging incentive to leap up and be on my way, but nothing could have induced me to leap up that morning under any circumstances, since I had slept wearing full armor and my awakening body was now busily making me aware of the outrages to which it had been subjected overnight. I struggled to a sitting position and scrubbed at my eyes with the heels of my hands.