Brennan understood what was happening in an instant. His body reacted to the opening without need of any prompting. A reverse sweep of his sword to knock the other man’s blade to the side as it was changing hands. A roll of his wrist and a fast cut back and up to the underside of the chin.
It was not a killing blow, but it staggered and dazed the slaver and had him reaching up to staunch the immediate rich flow of blood. Brennan rushed in and landed a hard two-handed slash on his ribcage. He heard the click of breaking ribs. That felled the slaver. Brennan killed him on the ground.
Breathing hard now, he turned about to take the measure of his surroundings. He could see Manadar plunging back and forth among the trees, whooping with furious excitement as he cut and hacked at scattering slavers. Closer, he saw a huddle of men and women and children. They sat on the ground, arms around one another. Their clothes were ragged and filthy. Some were ripped, revealing the fresh welts left by whips. Their faces were drawn and grimed. Villagers. Slaves.
Brennan hesitated. There was still fighting to be done but these people were his purpose here, in the end.
‘Get up-’ he began to shout.
Then something hit him, hard. He went down, the air rushing out of his chest. Someone was on top of him. He knew he was injured. It was not so much pain as a point of pressure, an awareness of a presence in his body that did not belong. A knife, he thought surprisingly calmly, in my flank. No time to worry about that.
He twisted with all his strength and smashed the pommel of his sword against his attacker’s head. They rolled, the two of them. And of the two, it was Brennan whose furious refusal to die was the stronger. He pounded again and again, beating at the same point in the man’s head. No skill, no artifice, just anger and violence. The slaver slumped aside. Not dead, but quivering, his eyelids fluttering and his lips trembling.
Brennan got stiffly to his feet, clamping a hand over the wound in his side. It was not serious. It did hurt though, now that he could allow himself to feel the pain.
‘Get up,’ he repeated to the villagers, leaning on his sword.
They did, one by one. Some looked hesitant and fearful. Others less so. A couple of the men and one of the women rushed to the slaver and began kicking and beating him. The woman grabbed up a fallen branch and belaboured him with it. The man made no response to these assaults. He had already lost his grip on life, Brennan suspected.
‘Leave him,’ he snapped.
Somewhat to his surprise, they did.
‘That way,’ he told them, gesturing with his sword back towards where he could see his own horse, patiently waiting at the edge of the trees.
The first few paces he took were difficult. He limped a little. It was tightening up where the knife had gone in. He forced himself to straighten, walking tall and even.
Lorin appeared before him. His horse reared and snorted. There were more slaves-former slaves, now-appearing from among the trees.
‘Have we done it?’ Brennan asked, not quite ready to believe it.
‘No,’ Lorin said emphatically. ‘We’ve got a few folks set free for now, but now might be a short, short time.’
He nodded past Brennan’s shoulder. Brennan looked back, out beyond the limits of the thicket. A knot of horses and men was coming around the haunch of the hill, from the hidden far side. A lot of them. Called by the horn, Brennan assumed. A handful of slavers had escaped the struggle among the trees unhurt and were sprinting across the open ground towards those newcomers. They would tell them they only faced three men, should they wish to reclaim their precious captives.
‘We need to get back on high ground,’ Lorin said.
His voice sounded slightly strained. There was a lot of blood over his boot, flowing from the wound where the spear had cut him. There looked to be some in his scalp too. Another blow collected along the way.
It was Lorin who asked ‘You hurt?’ though.
Brennan shrugged. He glanced at his left hand, still pressed hard against his side.
‘Not bad enough to slow me down.’
‘Good.’
Lorin swung his horse away and moved off.
‘Manadar!’ he shouted. ‘Manadar! Get back up the hill, you lazy whelp.’
‘Up the hill,’ Brennan shouted at the villagers around him.
He ran-hobbled, really-for his horse. Before he reached it, he found Marweh. She was sitting on the ground, cradling a man’s head in her lap. A boy stood at her shoulder. He looked to be about six, just as she had said.
‘This is them?’ Brennan asked, standing over her.
‘Yes,’ she said without looking up. She had eyes only for her husband’s pale face.
He did look sick. Fevered. And there were ugly marks where the tips of the thorns he had been whipped with had curled around the side of his neck and face. His eyes were closed.
‘Can he walk?’ Brennan asked.
Marweh’s husband opened his eyes.
‘I can walk,’ he said.
And they did walk. All the two dozen or so people Brennan and the others had freed found the strength-despite all they had already suffered-to stagger their way up the hillside. A few had picked up spears whose owners were slain or fled. They leaned on them like walking staffs. The sun was starting to get low in the sky now, and it threw their long, lean shadows across the rocks. Like weights, dragging them back.
Lorin and Brennan and Manadar rode at the rear. Their horses were running short on strength, struggling almost as much as the villagers to make the climb. Brennan could feel his own vigour flagging now that the urgency of combat had retreated, like a wave pulling back from a beach. Taking some of the beach with it.
Only Manadar of the three of them had come through the skirmish unscathed. He still had the fire of battle burning in him.
‘They’re goats, these slave-takers,’ he crowed. ‘Running around, bleating. They’re no test.’
‘Glad you think so,’ Lorin said. ‘You get up ahead, make sure none of your goats’ve topped the hill before us.’
They watched him labour to overtake the little crowd of villagers. Brennan saw some of those men and women looking up at Manadar as he passed them. Some of the children too. What did they see? he wondered. The figure out of legend that he and his friend had imagined when they talked of the Free years ago? Manadar did not look much like a legend. Nor did Brennan feel like one. Not any more, if he ever had.
‘Up! Up!’ Lorin shouted.
Almost like a shepherd trying to hurry along a recalcitrant flock.
Brennan was close beside him and heard the dull thud before Lorin reacted. That reaction, when it came, was little more than a sharp breath and a momentary lurch in the saddle.
‘They’ve got someone down there who knows how to use a bow after all,’ Lorin grunted.
The arrow had hit him in the back of his upper arm. The muscle was transfixed. Brennan reached across to steady Lorin in his saddle, but the older man shook his head.
‘It’s nothing.’
Another arrow rattled off the hard ground behind them.
‘Be good if it didn’t happen again though,’ Lorin muttered. ‘I’m running out of fresh bits of my body for them to bloody. Let’s get out of sight or out of range. One or the other.’
XI
‘I was a lucky man before I met you two,’ Lorin grumbled, tearing a rag from his sleeve and struggling to bind it one-handed about his wound. He was sitting with his back against a sloping rock. He had broken the arrow and pulled it out of his flesh himself.
‘You’re not blaming us, are you?’ Manadar said with an affected plaintive air. He pushed Lorin’s hand away and set to bandaging his wound.
Lorin winced as Manadar pulled the rag tight.
‘This look like luck to you?’ he growled through gritted teeth.
‘Not much,’ Manadar conceded. ‘But you look luckier than you would as a corpse. And the day’s not done yet. Never know what might happen.’