The Two of Swords: Part 15 Read Online Free PDF Page B

briefly losing his balance. That could have been disastrous if there’d been anyone behind him, and it was pure luck that there wasn’t. But he recovered well and was nicely poised on the balls of his feet when a trooper lunged at him with a lance. He shifted left, caught the lance just below the head with his left hand, reeled the trooper in like a fish and cut his throat with a little backhand flick. As the trooper went down, he saw the helmsman topple over backwards; he reversed the dead soldier’s lance and threw it at the man who’d killed the helmsman, missed but drew him forward into a simple feint-high-cut-low. As he killed him, he thought he saw a shadow cross the dying man’s face; without looking, he pulled out the sword, reversed it and stabbed blindly behind him, registered an impact against something too hard to pierce; turned as tightly as he could and brought his sword up just in time to block a half-hearted cut; angled his blade so the cut would slide off and converted the block into a downward thrust that slithered off the scales of the cuirass down into an improvidently advanced knee. The pain and shock of that bought him enough time for a step back and a rather belated assessment of the situation, which he concluded with a rising cut under the chin – again, overdoing it, he cut right through to the poor devil’s teeth. Another step back and count the men standing – three. Orderic, one marine and the other sailor. Victory, apparently. He caught his breath and forced his mind clear, so difficult to do after a scrimmage. He was covered in blood, but he was pretty sure none of it was his, so that was all right.
    An awful thought struck him and he looked round; but she was still there, frozen stiff, a look of pure horror on her face. “Get her,” he snapped, and Orderic snapped out of whatever dream he’d been in, bounded across and grabbed her by the wrist; she screamed, and Orderic bellowed, “Quiet!”, and she stopped. Genseric stooped over the fallen marine; all over with him, poor sod, his head was split open down to his eyebrows. The helmsman he knew about. “You,” he called to the marine, “get those horses.”
    “Major.” Orderic pointed with his sword at the dead bodies. Yes, but there wasn’t time, the corporal would be back with his cart – the corporal, who’d heard everything, names, the request for asylum; damn. His idea had been to leave the mess and let the sea clean it up; by the time the bodies were found, they’d be over the border. He’d forgotten about the corporal. But an extra enemy might well have turned the fight against them, he’d done well to shorten the odds; it’s never perfect, and you have to do the best you can. He shook his head. “Get her on a horse,” he said. “Better tie her to the girth or something, I can’t be bothered with any more fuss.”
    Fortuitously there was some rope, just about enough, one end of a broken line tied to a cleat hook on the side of the catboat. He guessed she was still in shock; it occurred to him for the first time that maybe she’d never seen anything like this before – if so, a slice of luck, she’d be numb with it and no bother to anyone. Now then, which way? Happily, even he knew the answer to that one. The sea is north, therefore left is west, just follow the coast to the border. As he hauled himself into the dead officer’s saddle his mind was buzzing with mental arithmetic; let
x
be the time it takes for the cart to get here, plus another
x
for it to go back, a third
x
for the soldiers to arrive—
    Orderic handed him the reins of her horse. He didn’t look round. This was going to be hard enough as it was.
    Maybe an hour later. The sun was going down. Orderic said, “We could lay up for the night in that stand of trees over there.”
    Genseric shook his head. “Let’s keep going,” he said. “It can’t be much further, surely.”
    “I don’t like riding at night without a lantern,” Orderic