The hand on his shoulder was Doran's, and Doran did not shake him, only rested it there until Osric's eyes opened.
"Serjeant. Wilkin's heard horses."
Osric was upright in a breath, the cold stone at his back forgotten. Beyond Doran the room was black and the fire was down to a red eye, and Wilkin stood in the doorway with his spear in both hands and his face doing a poor job of hiding what it was doing.
"Say it, lad."
"East. Along the low road under the ridge." Wilkin swallowed. "Riding hard. Six or eight, I couldn't count them. I heard them for about the length of a paternoster and then the ground took the sound."
"Not a cart?"
"No, Serjeant. Nothing pulling. And no jingle to it either, no harness noise, which is what made me"
"That's right." Osric was buckling his belt. "That's exactly right. Go and wake Voss and then get the horses out and don't let them make any more noise than they must."
The boy went, and went fast, and Osric heard him get it wrong twice on the way and put it right both times.
They were up and moving inside four minutes. Bedrolls came off the floor. Cloaks went over shoulders. Erryk was awake before anybody touched him, as he always was, and had his spear in his hand and his one eye on the eastern gap in the wall.
"You hear it?" Osric asked him.
"I heard it before he did. I'd have given it another turn before waking you." Erryk did not sound displeased. "He's got good ears."
"He's got a good habit. He came to Doran and Doran came to me."
Argilac had his jerkin on and his messer strapped and was standing near the door with the particular stillness of a young man who is trying not to look eager.
"Fire out," Osric said. "Water on it, not earth, and do it slow. Nobody rides until I say. Voss, how long to span that if you've cold hands?"
"Longer than I'd like."
"Then span it now and carry it spanned and mind where you point it."
They led the horses out into a dark so complete that the tower behind them was only a place where the stars stopped. The cloud had opened just enough for a thin moon, and the frost lay on the grass in a grey wash, and their breath and the horses' breath went up and hung.
Osric took them east off the road and along the folds of the ground, at a walk, for the better part of a mile.
"Doran, point. Erryk, rear. Voss, eyes up. Nobody talks."
"I've ears like a rabbit, Serjeant."
"Then hear something."
They came up the back of a low rise and Osric halted them below the crest and went the last of it on foot with Doran beside him, and the two of them lay along the frost and looked down.
The trail ran between the hills below, pale in the moonlight.
There were riders on it.
Twelve, or near it, driving their horses hard and low in the saddle, fur lined cloaks and stitched hides, bows across their backs. No torches. Nothing on any of them a man could put in a report beyond the shape they made.
And ahead of them, perhaps sixty yards ahead, one horse running for its life.
The rider on it had no formation and no discipline and nothing left. The reins were loose. The seat was wrong. The animal was doing all of it on its own and would not be doing it much longer.
"Khesari," Doran breathed.
Osric watched.
He watched for the space of perhaps four heartbeats, and in that time something arrived in him sideways, before he had put any words to it.
Twelve horse archers.
One quarry, in open ground, at sixty yards, in moonlight.
And not one arrow in the air.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
The lead rider was coming up on the quarry's flank now, and he had leaned out with one arm reaching, and the man behind him had taken his axe up and back over his own shoulder to clear the swing of it.
"They're not shooting," Osric said.
"No."
"Twelve bows and they've closed to arm's length instead of ending it clean." He kept his voice down. "They want that rider off the horse and breathing."
Argilac had come up the slope on his belly beside them and was staring down at the trail.
"They'll have him inside a minute."
"They will."
"Then we go."
"We hold." Osric did not look round. "Twelve against nine, at night, downhill into open ground, with three of ours who've never done it. We watch, we count, we mark the road they take, and we carry it home."
He heard his son's breathing change.
"That's a person down there."
"I know what it is."
"They'll take him"
"They'll take him alive, which is the only reason I've a report worth carrying." Osric turned his head at last. "Argilac. Hold."
The boy looked at him for perhaps a second and a half.
Then he was gone, sliding back down the reverse slope on his heels, and Osric heard him hit the ground running and get a foot in the stirrup.
"Damn it, boy."
Alden swore and went after him without being told, because Alden had been given the boy to watch four years ago and had never needed reminding.
"Fool sons." Osric was already up and moving. "With me. WITH ME."
It came apart very fast after that.
The slope was steeper than it had looked from the top and the frost had got into the turf, and nine horses went down it in the dark with none of them entirely under control. Rutger's mount slipped its hind legs out from under it halfway down and recovered, somehow, and Rutger stayed on it because he had been riding since before he could walk. Wilkin came down last and sideways.
Below them the Khesari heard nine horses coming off a hillside and came apart like birds off a carcass.
Some wheeled to meet it. Some kept after the quarry, which told Osric what he already knew.
One got a horn to his lips and Voss shot him off the saddle at thirty yards from a moving horse, which was luck and would be called skill for the next two years, and the horn went into the grass and stayed quiet.
And then they were into them and there was no shape to it at all.
Osric had been in perhaps a dozen mounted actions in thirty years and had never once seen one that looked like the stories. Horses would not stand. Men could not see. Half of what happened, happened behind somebody. A rider went past him at arm's length in the dark and neither of them got a blade round in time and both of them were gone before it mattered.
He got his messer into a man's forearm as the two horses crossed and felt it bite and lost him.
Somewhere on his left Alden was making a noise like a bull and there was the flat wet crack of an axe going into something that stopped it.
The first pass took them clean through and out the other side, which is what happens, and then everybody had to turn, and the turning was where it went bad.
Nine horses and eight or nine of theirs, all of them wheeling in the same forty yards of frozen ground in the dark. Two of the Khesari did not turn at all and kept going after the quarry and were out of it for the next minute. One of Osric's own went down, and it was Ansel's horse, and it went down because Wilkin's mount came across its front quarters at the gallop and put its legs into it.
Ansel came off hard and rolled and got up, which was more than the horse did.
"ANSEL'S DOWN," Doran shouted, from somewhere.
"He's up," Ansel shouted back, furiously, and drew his long knife and went to find somebody to be angry at.
Osric came round and found two of them coming at him abreast.
He put his horse at the gap between rather than trying to take either, which is the one move that works and only works once, and got through it with a sabre skidding off the back of his shoulder plate and the other man's horse shouldering his so hard that both animals staggered. He hauled round on the reins and got the messer up in time to take the second cut on the flat and the third on the guard, and the nagel rang against the sabre and turned it, and he had a moment then where he had one of them at his knee with no room for either of them to swing.
He hit the man in the face with the pommel three times and pushed him off.
The second one came back for him and Erryk killed him.
Erryk had come off his horse deliberately, which nobody else in the party would have done and which was the only sensible act of the entire engagement, because a man on the ground in a horse fight is the only creature there with any control over where he is standing. He put his boar spear up under the rider's arm as the horse went by, and the point took him and lifted him and dropped him, and Erryk left the spear in him and drew his falchion.
"OFF THE HORSES," he bellowed. "GET OFF THE BLOODY HORSES."
Some of them heard him. Voss did, and slid down, and shot a man off his saddle at eight yards, and then had no time at all to span it again and did not touch the crossbow for the rest of the night.
Argilac was down.
Not hurt, or not yet. He had come into the middle of them at the gallop, which nobody should ever do, and a Khesari had swung a long handled axe at his chest and he had ducked under it and gone off the horse doing it. Now he was on the ground in the churn of legs and hooves with a man on top of him, and the two of them were rolling in a way that had nothing to do with skill, and every horse in that space was trying to get away from them.
Osric could not get to him. There were two men between and a mad horse doing figures.
Argilac got a knee up and got the man's weight off his chest and then got his gauntlet into his face, once, twice, three times, until the head went back and stayed back. Then he was crawling for his messer with his hand out flat on the
grass, patting for it, because it was black dark and he had lost it somewhere in the roll.
He found it. He came up onto one knee with it and put it through the man's throat to be certain, and then he was on his feet again with his chest going and his eyes hunting for the next.
Ansel took a cut across the shoulder from a man he never saw. He gave one back that opened the horse instead of the rider, and the horse screamed and went over sideways and rolled on its own man, and that was the end of both of them.
Rutger killed two. Nobody saw either of them and Rutger never mentioned it.
Wilkin rode past a man he should have engaged, at speed, entirely by accident, because his horse would not answer the rein. He got it round twenty yards on and came back and did engage him, and did it badly, and Doran arrived and put his spear in over the boy's shoulder and finished it and said nothing about any of it.
For perhaps a minute after that it was simply a brawl in the dark with horses in it.