Fool's Quest - Страница 106

106

“It was night. We were drunk. Celebrating.” He paused suddenly.

Did he think he would keep a secret from me? “Celebrating what?”

He took several breaths. “We had a prisoner. One that could do magic. Could make people not see us …” His voice trailed away as he tried to make sense of shredded and dangling recollections.

“I hate you,” I told him affably. “I enjoy hurting you. You might not want to give me an excuse to make you bleed more.” I cocked my head at him. “A rapist does not need to be handsome. A rapist does not need a nose. Or ears.”

He spoke quickly. “We had the soft man. The man who looks like a boy. Vindeliar. The one who can make you forget things. We’d separated him from the pale folk and convinced him to enjoy himself. To use his magic for things he might want to do. We wanted to make him like us and think we were his friends. And it worked. He was worth more to us than any of the others, more than anything they offered us. We were going to take them all back to Chalced, sell them in the market there but keep the magic-man.”

A bigger story here, but not one I cared about. “You were celebrating. Then what happened?”

“I wanted a woman. I should not have had to ask for one. They were plunder, I had a right to my share, and there were plenty of them. But we had not had them …” Again, his words dangled. With no Ellik to recall, he would not know why they were working for women, let alone why he had refrained from raping them. He scowled to himself. “I had to take the ugliest one. The one that most of us thought was probably not a woman at all. But that was the only one …” Again he paused in puzzlement. I let him try to gather his threads.

“She started screaming before I even touched her. She fought so hard when I tried to strip her. If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have … I did nothing to her that a woman is not meant to have done to her. Nothing that would have killed her! But she screamed and screamed … And someone brought Vindeliar to have a turn … I think. I don’t know. Something happened. Oh. A woman, older and fleshy, and we were going to have her. But then … And everyone went mad. We chased them and hunted them, and the blood … and then we turned on one another. Sword-brothers. We’d eaten together, fought side by side for the last four years. But that one that she brought with her, the one who could make the villagers not see us? He turned on us and made us forget our brotherhood. All I could remember were the slights, the times they had cheated me at dice or taken a woman I wanted or eaten more than their share of the best food. I wanted to kill every one of them. I did kill two. Two of my fellow warriors. Two I had taken my oaths with. One slashed my leg before I killed him. Chriddick. He did that. I’d known him for five years. But I fought him and killed him.”

The words were pouring out now, heedless of the pain it cost him. I did not interrupt. Where in that mad night had my little girl been? Where were Bee and Shine? Somewhere beyond the camp, fallen bloody in the snow? Captured and dragged off by the fleeing mercenaries?

“The ones who hired us, the pale ones, the white ones? They did not do this to us. They could never have fought us. They were weak, stupid with weapons, with little stamina for the march or the cold. Always, they begged us to go slower, to rest more, to find more food for them. And we did. Why? Why were warriors commanded by sniveling women and sapling men? Because of a dirty magic they put upon us. They made us less than warriors. They shamed us. And then they turned us upon each other.” He gave a noise between a sob and a cry. “They took our honor!”

Did he hope to win sympathy from me? He was pathetic, but not in a way that roused any pity in me. “I care nothing for your lost honor. You took a woman and a child. What became of them?”

He balked again. My knife moved, slicing his nose. Noses bleed a lot. He flung himself back from my knife and lifted his hands defensively. I slashed both of them and he shrieked.

“Bastard! You cowardly bastard! You’ve no sense of a warrior’s honor! You know I cannot do battle with you or you would not dare treat me so.”

I did not laugh. I set my knife to the base of his throat. I pushed and he lay back on the snow. Words came out of my mouth. “Did the women of my holding know your warrior’s honor when you were raping them? Did my little kitchenmaid think you honorable as she staggered away from your friend Pandow? When you cut the throats of my unarmed stablemen, was that honor?”

He tried to pull back from the tip of my knife but I let it follow him. With his lamed leg he could no more flee than my little kitchen girl had. He lifted his bloody hands. I dropped my knee on his injured leg. He gasped at the pain and found blurred words. “They were not warriors! They had no honor as warriors. All know women can possess no honor. They are weak! Their lives have no meaning save what men give to them. And the others, those men, they were servants, slaves. Not warriors. She was not even right as a woman! So ugly and not even right as a woman!”

He screamed as my blade bit deeper, opening a gash in his neck. Careful. Not yet.

“Strange,” I said quietly when he ran out of wind. I moved my knife up to his face. He lifted his hands. I shook my head. “My women gave this meaning to my life: I hurt those who hurt mine. Without regard for their imaginary honor. Warriors who rape and kill the helpless have no honor. They possess no honor when they hurt children. If it were not for my women, the women of my household, and my serving men, I would think it dishonorable for me to do this to you. Tell me. How long did it take you to rape one of the women of my household? As long as my knife has been playing with your face?”

He bucked away from me, cutting his own face as he did so. I stood over him and picked up Verity’s sword. He was squeezed dry of all information. Time to end it. He looked at me and knew it.

“That night, that night they all ran away. Kerf might know. He fancied the woman in the red dress, mooned about her like a baby that wants his mother. We mocked him. He watched her all the time. Sneaking around in the bushes to watch her pee.”

“Kerf.” One tiny bit of information. “The magic-boy and the woman who commanded him. What became of them?”

“I don’t know. It was all madness and fighting and blood. Maybe they were killed. Maybe they ran away.” He gave a sudden sob. “I’m going to die here in the Six Duchies! And I don’t even remember why I came here!”

Two things happened simultaneously. I heard a horse whinny and the picketed animals answered it. And the crow screamed, “’Ware your back!”

My quenched Wit had not warned me. The old training kicked in. Never leave an enemy behind you. I cut Hogen’s throat, and went low and to the side as I spun around.

I’d underestimated the old man. Working his hands loose of my sling cord must have limbered his arms, for the stolen sword rang loudly against mine. He was a sight, his wet gray hair wild around his face, his teeth bared in fury. The glancing blow of my stone had purpled his brow and shot one eye with blood. Blood had darkened a swath of his shirt. I had a knife to his sword. I could see Verity’s sword behind him, still sheathed in the snowbank where I’d stupidly left it. He grunted, our blades screamed a kiss, and then he disengaged, caught a breath, and swung again. I parried him, but not without effort, and stepped forward and pushed him back hard with my blade. I leapt back. He smiled and took a step forward. I was going to die. He had the reach.

I gave ground and he grinned as he advanced. Ellik was old but he was powered by battered pride and a thirst for vengeance. And, I decided as he made yet another reckless attack, the desire to die as a warrior. I had no wish to assist him in that. I gave ground again. Bloodied as he was, I was fairly certain that I could simply let him attack until he exhausted himself. Fairly certain. Not absolutely certain. I tried to back toward Verity’s sword and he cut me off. His smile grew broader. He wasted none of his laboring breath on words. He surprised me with a sudden leap forward. I had to both duck and retreat.

Hoofbeats, muffled by snow. I was not at all certain that I could hold out against the number of riders I could now hear coming. I dared not look to see if they were Chalcedean or the Ringhill Guard. Then someone shouted, “Get the horses!” In Chalcedean.

Ellik looked aside for an instant. “To me!” he shouted to his men. “To me!”

I forced myself to believe that they could not and would not respond to his shout. I had to do something he didn’t expect, something stupid in any other setting. I stepped in, beat my knife-blade hard on his sword, and very nearly disarmed him, but he managed to step forward and shove me off with a display of strength I had not expected. It so startled me that I felt a moment of giddiness. I sprang back from him, disengaging, and had to endure his mocking grin. He shouted then, “Men! To me! To me!”

As the Chalcedeans swept in on horseback, I doubted that any of them gave him so much as a moment’s thought. The riders appeared completely unaware of Ellik. One even passed so close behind him that he was nearly trampled. They must have seen me and yet none of them took time to challenge me, for they were fleeing for their lives. I heard a more distant shout of “This way, they went this way!” and decided that the Ringhill Guard unit was after them.

The Chalcedean mercenaries were intent only on winning fresh mounts for themselves. They rode straight for the picketed horses, flinging themselves from their spent mounts and each racing to try to seize a horse and be gone. The picketed horses were spooked by the frenzy and danced and pulled at their leads, near-trampling the men in their distress. There were not enough fresh horses for all of them.

106