Firethorn (54 page)

Later I found out a brawl had started on our hill. Who knows how it started and what does it matter? When the knives and cudgels came out, a good many drudges ran to see the scuffle or to join in, but more tried to flee, pushing others as they went. At the churning edge of the crowd, the brawl became a riot. We were trapped inside. I heard grunts and shouts, shrieks and curses. Someone shoved against the burns on my back. Flykiller stiff-armed the man away and got behind me to shield my back, but he too shoved. He had no choice. His thick arm was wedged between us, under my shoulder blades. I lost Mai's shawl. There were hands on me I couldn't fend off. Fleetfoot was ahead and there were people between us. I called his name but he never heard.

I came close to slipping into shadow again, slipping away. I had but to give myself to the vertigo, for I'd never stopped falling; I was still neither here nor there, not entirely, as if I'd left motes of self scattered over the field in the shadows under stones and blades of grass. I was plagued by wayward perceptions. Fever burned. My feet stumbled along at a distance, as if they made their way without me. I saw the crowd one moment and the next a throng of shadows. I blinked to banish the swarming darkness, and saw the rumormonger had lost his mount but kept his banner; it moved away overhead, the pole swaying, as he was carried off in some eddy. Uly was at my side. He had the wild, startled stare of a walleyed horse. He drove his elbow into my ribs to give himself another handsbreadth of room. The skin was stretched tight over my own grimace and I knew I looked no different.

Rift Dread had us all, we were the god made manifest in a swarm, we were a mob.

We moved downhill toward the field like an avalanche. The embrace of the crowd was such I feared my ribs would crack; I feared if I let out one breath I might not have room for the next. As we moved some were carried along and others submerged, clutching at their neighbors for help, finding none, until they disappeared under our feet. And I trampled them too.

The Blood of Rift and Prey, who guarded the field, met the crowd and tried to turn us back. Their horses sidled, presenting well-armored flanks, and the riders thrust with the wooden butt ends of their scorpions or used their swords like cudgels, sparing us the edge. Some drudges at the front of the mob were caught between the wall of horses and the surge of men coming downhill and died standing up, crushed to death. I couldn't see what was happening down there, surrounded as I was by taller men, but the screams were terrible to hear. And when the horsemen checked us, we felt that force come uphill like a wave. The man in front of me lurched backward and Fly-killer bore me up.

There was no room to fall now. A boy swooned, eyes rolling and head lolling, and the crowd carried him.

I wondered if Galan still lived, and then the thought was gone.

Down by the crowd's forefront, a few drudges were so desperate they ducked under the horses' bellies or around their hindquarters and dodged the weapons of the Blood and ran onto the tourney field, looking for safety. Men of Prey and Rift turned to ride them down, hunting those who profaned the consecrated ground, and now they showed no forbearance, they used their sharp blades. But fewer Blood were left to hold back the multitudes.

We were going faster, stumbling over the rocky ground. I could breathe again. Flykiller grabbed my sleeve, which was nothing more than a rag hanging from my bodice; a pull, a tear, a few threads broken, and he was gone and my sleeve with him. I was running with the rest, a headlong stampede.

As I ran I found myself praying—not to the gods, not even to Ardor—but to the Dame and Na, whose bones I still carried. As if they could intercede for me now.

I came to an upended smudge pot with coals smoking around it, and after it a shambles that marked the southern boundary of the field, the dead and wounded under our feet.

Now we were among the riders and the riders were among us. Most of the horsemen bore the banners of Rift and Prey, but I saw some of the Blood of Ardor, and even a few of Crux, turn from killing each other to strike us down, outraged by the vermin scuttling about the legs of their horses. Rift Warrior must have put a battle frenzy on those men of Crux, and blindness, for most in the mob wore a sprig of their green. The metal skins of the warriors shone against our dingy garments, our dull flesh. They rode into the throng wearing their frightful masks, and they scythed us and threshed us under hooves, and we ran to and fro, colliding, tripping over the fallen, dodging the boulders that littered the field, sliding and sticking in the bloody muck.

I ran with the other drudges, as if I could hide in the swarm, as if any of us could hide. And maybe the others prayed for the same thing I did: let them take the one next to me, and the next, just so I am spared. There is a selfishness Dread teaches, to hold our own death dear and that of others cheap.

We sounded like pigs at slaughtering time, squealing and screaming. There was that stink too, of bodies opened up. I couldn't believe we held so much stink. The Blood were careless, and left many to die a slow death. No butcher would do that.

I felt a spatter of rain from the cloudless sky and wiped my face and my hand came away red. I turned, and there was a whore behind me in a striped skirt. She took two steps before she fell. I might have known her, but her head was gone. Gods, the blood is so pent up inside us, it bursts forth like a fountain.

I saw, but I couldn't make a world out of what I was seeing: scintillas of light, specks of darkness, everything shimmering. I swayed, blinded. As if vision were a trick and I'd forgotten the mastery of it.

Someone ran into me and knocked me down. I scrambled to my feet and I could see again and there was a horseman bearing down on me and people scattering from his path. I knew by his light armor that he was a priest of Rift. He went bareheaded, with a shaven pate. A grotesque face had been painted on the top of his skull and he bent his head to show me this face and I mistook it for his own. I thought he was my death. I stood still, caught in Dread's paralysis, and he came so close the stirrup brushed my arm, and the wind of his passing brought the smell of horseflesh and sweat and leather; I heard the chuffing of the courser's breath.

The priest struck as he passed. His sword licked out and parted my head-cloth with a sure touch. The cloth fell and my hair came unbound; it was dark with sweat and clung in coils to my face and neck, my burned back. I saw by his face, his real face, not the one painted on his skull, that this was sport to him. He clucked to his mount and they leaned as one, man and horse, and circled me in the tightest possible compass. He culled me neatly from the flock. I stooped to pick up my headcloth—my mind was empty as a poor man's purse—and the sword hissed over my head and lopped off a hank of hair. He made his courser rear over me, and at last I ran, ducking low, clutching the scraps he'd made of my headcloth.

He spared me. Maybe he disdained to kill any of us. His sword was not bloody.

I fled toward the edge of the tourney field and met the mob still rushing downhill. I was no longer part of it, having gathered up some of my scattered wits again. I tucked up my skirts as I ran, and I made my way against the current, dodging the runners and the riders, leaping over the slain, making my way west along the boundary of the field, toward safer ground, where the crowd thinned and the bodies lay less thickly strewn about.

It was nearly noon. The Heavens were empty of clouds but full of birds: gulls and ravens, kites and fish hawks and falcons, starlings and swallows. Up where the Sun climbed, the sky blazed white; elsewhere it was a lucid blue. I was alive for this moment and maybe the next, and I ran as if the Queen of the Dead followed at my right shoulder and Dread at the left. I meant to outrun them both, then go to ground like the prey I was. I wanted no more of crowds.

I headed for a ravine between the hills, for a stand of twisted scrub oak and a marshy place hidden behind it where the water came up from the ground and collected from the rains, where I'd gathered stanchmoss and cresses. I knew this ground and what could be found there, from many days spent wandering over these hills with Noggin at my heels when I was supposed to be watching tourneys.

A thud and a crack and I was facedown on the turf and I heard a horse galloping away that I had never heard coming. I'd been struck on my back, near a kidney, and the pain was so sharp I thought I'd been stabbed. I strove to breathe, and couldn't. Couldn't. Couldn't. Until the pain tore open and let in some air. And then I breathed until I could crawl. I crawled under a rock outcropping that cast a small shadow, blessedly cool and dark, and I felt safer out of the Sun's eye. I trembled with fever. Pain beat on me in waves.

At last the tide of pain went out. I felt my back and I wasn't bleeding, and I knew I'd live. And I felt, for the first time since I'd fallen so far and so suddenly back into my body, that I was in one place, every last and least remnant of self called home. For the body knew what the shade had forgotten: I was mortal and not ready to die.

Yet I wasn't wholly restored. Once I'd been all of a piece, now I was a fist around a handful of shards. Or less than that. If I opened my hand, I might find only a hum, a song.

It seemed a long time I was there. I raised my head. The tourney went on, and also the hunt. I heard them both and the sounds were different. And there was Sire Rodela's bay horse, in mask and barding painted green and ivory, nosing about for faded tufts of grass among the stones. The bay tore at the grass and chewed, his bit jangling. I saw the horse plain, without a halo of shadow. It hurt to look, the Sun was so fierce.

Beyond him two cataphracts of Prey rode the boundaries of the field with their armigers trailing behind. They rested the butts of their scorpions on their thighs. The blades winked in the sunlight. The horsemen watched the crowd that covered the heights to make sure that no one strayed—and the spectators on the western hill were wise enough to keep to their place, though there was movement among them, swirls that troubled the backwater. They were noisy with whoops and catcalls. Someone threw a stone and an armiger's mount shied. The silks and awnings and pennants of the Blood dotted the hill, bright as the first spring flowers in a wintry meadow.

No more than fifty paces to that haven in the ravine. Behind me there was havoc, ahead a seeming peace. Yet my way was barred. I feared to pass those men who guarded the field; they might be eager to join the sport of their fellows.

I backed away from them, around the rock outcropping. And on the other side I found Sire Rodela. He sat propped against the stone with his hands dangling laxly over his knees. His head was bowed and he looked nearly dead. The man lying beside him was dead beyond a doubt. His helmet was gone and he had cuts across his neck deep enough to lay bare his backbone. A cataphract, to judge by his fine armor; one of Ardor's, by his banner. So Rodela had won that armor he had boasted of last night.

I stopped in front of Sire Rodela and he looked up at me. His helmet was of leather with an iron noseguard and iron ribs. One of his cheekguards was missing and the other dangled by a strap. The whites of his eyes were startling against the blood on his face. He blinked and lifted his hand, a vague gesture. I stood with my back to the Sun and he was in my shadow.

“Water,” he said.

It must be he didn't know me.

I thought of Galan seeking Sire Rodela, and then of what Galan had said:
If Chance puts him in my way, can I refuse her gift?
There was no doubting my luck, but as to Chance—I couldn't be sure.

I remembered the taste of Galan's wrath, how I'v fed on it when I was a shadow. How it felt to be as absolute as a sword, forged for one purpose. Hard, sharp, swift, bright. I was alloyed of baser metals. I couldn't summon Galan's wrath. Neither could I summon my own, for I was still estranged from myself.

I must do without it.

All this I thought between two heartbeats. I said, “Give me your helmet and I'll fetch some water.”

When he fumbled for the strap that held his helmet under his chin, I went to him and unfastened the buckle. I pulled off his helmet and the padded cap came with it. It was soaked with blood. His scalp had split where he'd been struck above his right temple—perhaps a blow from a mace—something heavy rather than sharp. I could see the injury plainly because of his bald crown. The hair was matted flat below it. The blood was darker than I expected, blackish, and it welled up from the wound and ran from his nose too, and clotted in his mustache and beard. I pressed the spot with my fingers and found it pulpy to the touch under the skin. Maybe my woman's touch would sicken him, taint his blood, and I wouldn't have to poison him. Maybe he'd die of the wound without my help.

Sire Rodela raised his arm and pushed me away. “Get off,” he said. He swayed and put a hand on the ground to support himself. One knee flopped sideways. He was panting.

I dumped the sodden cap on the ground and looked at the helmet. Two of its iron ribs had been driven inward. He'd been struck more than once.

I looked up and saw that the two cataphracts and armigers who guarded the boundary were trotting away, still with their eyes on the crowd. I was afraid to run, but staying was no better. I sprinted toward the ravine between the hills with Sire Rodela's helmet in my hand and when I reached the stand of scrub oak, I ducked and pushed my way in. The oaks were not much higher than my head. Rusty leaves clung to the black twigs, clattering as I passed. Acorns rolled underfoot and briars caught my skirts.