The priest laughed aloud.?You can?t win this one, you know… your Majesty. Though I?ll have it with you as often as you please.? ?It?s you Christians who think you can argue your way to truth,? Rudi said, with a grin.?Right now, to be sure, I?d rather eat. Let?s go sluice off!?
TheSwordoftheLady
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Next afternoon Rudi grinned again as he watched Edain collecting his bets after a round of shooting with the bow-and then handing the winnings out as gifts, each to a different man than the one who?d wagered it.
Sure, and there?s a wisdom of hand and eye, too, he thought.
There was plenty of room for play in the big enclosure that Eriksgarth made-the hall and house of the godhi, smaller dwellings for his carles and their families and the youngsters fostered here to learn, barns and sheds and workshops, all around a court paved with river-smoothed cobbles mostly hidden beneath hard-packed snow. The sky was bright, with traces of high cloud like a white mare?s tail. The air was no more than cold, without the frigid cutting blast that made your face ache; the fresh drifts sparkled like soft-curved masses of diamond dust in the light.
And Epona is looking better, he thought happily. Still a bit of that dry wheeze, but her eyes aren?t as dull. Some quiet and rest and she?ll be fine.
For shooting with the bow they used the bank of a distant potato barn as a target, a curious structure like a long rectangle three-quarters sunken in the ground and with earth berms heaped up against its walls. There were clear fields beyond that, for a quarter-mile of open fenced pastureland until a holy shaw?s trees stood bare-branched around the steep roof-on-roof height of a stave-hof, a temple. A bright glitter caught his eye there, paint on one of the riot of carvings.
The locals were good enough archers in their way, but not up to Mackenzie standards, and certainly not to be set against a champion of the Lughnasadh Games like Edain. The young men he?d defeated laughed and slapped him on the back; then three of them looked at each other, nodded, and each picked up one of the plate-sized wooden targets.
With a shout they threw them high, in a spread that opened like the spines of a fan. Edain?s movements seemed steady, almost leisurely, but the flat snap of the bow sounded three times so quickly that the sound was lost in the hard crack-crack-crack of the points striking home in wood. The last of the targets was still man-height above the ground when the arrow punched it away. ?Fetch, Garbh!? the younger Mackenzie said.
The big shaggy half mastiff had been sitting in aristocratic indifference, ignoring the stiff-legged wariness of the local beasts as they stalked closer. Now she trotted off, to return and lay the disks at her master?s feet. ?Did you miss?? one of the Bjornings said; no arrows stood in the wooden circles.?I thought I heard the strike!?
Edain tossed him one of the disks, skimming it through the air; they were like flat miniature shields a foot across, made from two layers of birch strips glued crossways and rimmed in iron. The Norrheim man held his up and whistled between his teeth, showing the neat round hole punched through near the center of it. ?This is not a little boy who?s come among us!? he said. ?Ah, it?s the cold steel that wins a battle,? one of the others grumbled.
Garbh returned with the arrows held gently between her long yellow teeth, lips curled daintily back. The fletching of each had been stripped off as they made passage through the wood, but they were otherwise intact. ?Not with one of those through your eye,? his friend said thoughtfully.?And through your shield first. I?d guess you could punch through a byrnie, too, eh?? ?A mail shirt? Yes, with anything like a straight hit, and a nice bodkin. But a solid steel breastplate or lames, now… no, not always through that. The surface may glance the point; you need a closer range and a little luck. Enough shafts in the air at once-an arrow storm, we call it-will do the job right enough.?
Edain finshed checking the arrows and slid them over his shoulder into the quiver. He spoke with a little slyness in it: ?You were speakin? of the cold steel? Well, my Chief there, himself, is a very fair shot, enough to keep me exercised, as it were, but a man of the sword first and foremost. Better at that than I am with a bow, if truth be told, and I?ve fought by his side more than once, in ambuscades, onsets, raids and pitched battles.?
He reached out and took an apple that one of the local men had halfway raised to his mouth, twitching it out of his fingers, tossing it up and catching it. Then he threw it with a sudden hard snap, the plump red fruit a blurred streak through the air. ?Chief!? he called as it left his hand.
Rudi had been waiting for something of the sort; the contests had all been friendly, but he didn?t think the men of Eriksgarth would have spent this much time with their weapons on the day of a feast if the strangers hadn?t arrived. Though they seemed to love games and tests of skill of all sorts, from chess to wrestling and swordplay, and this gathering was a chance for trials between many from isolated steadings.
The apple was aimed more than arm?s length to Rudi?s left, past what was now his sword hand. That hand flashed across his body and he turned in the packed snow of the yard, granules flying up in arcs from his boots with the speed of the movement. Steel glittered in the cold winter light as he extended in a long lunge, the point an extension of his arm in a play of motion and angle.
Tock.
The point went through the firm flesh of the apple with a surgeon?s delicacy, the edge parallel to the ground so that it stopped the motion without splitting the fruit. He held the lunge for an instant, with a background of amazed oaths, then flicked the longsword?s point upward and twitched his wrist to send the steel in a shimmering arc.
Tock.
This time the apple tumbled towards the ground in two neat halves. Rudi caught them with his other hand, moving like a frog?s tongue after a fly, then wiped the tip of his sword on his sleeve and slid it home. He tossed one half to a grinning Edain as the broad-shouldered bowman sauntered up. ?You almost wasted a good apple, there, boyo,? he said mildly. ?The which the Goddess of the Blossom-time would not like.?
His half was tart and sweet at the same time as he crunched it; a little harder and more grainy than the breeds they grew back home in the Mackenzie duns or the Yakima lands, but palatable. Edain ate his in three bites, his cheeks bulging for a moment, and his gray eyes taking in the awestruck expressions scattered across the open expanse. Some were frankly goggling; everyone here trained to the blade, which meant they had a fair idea of just what combination of speed and control the little demonstration had required.
Now that was more than a bit flashy, Rudi half chided himself. But then, Edain?s only a bit past twenty. And I?m no graybeard yet either! And we wouldn?t have done it before those who weren?t warriors themselves, sure. ?I think it?s the custom here to push a man a bit. To see what?s in him, as it were,? Edain said. ?The which Mackenzies would never do,? Rudi said, and they both laughed.
Edain went on:?They?re a bit doomful here, but for the rest it?s homelike enough; and they get something more lively with some beer in them.? ?That they do!? ?Has it struck you, Chief, that men are not at all unlike dogs.. . especially in the way they greet a stranger??