A Hibernian soldier charged. Gricenchos’s sword was a massive thing of shining steel. It knocked the Hibernian’s blade from his hand and separated his head from his body in one lazy swipe, cutting through armour and chain mail like it was nothing. Two more Hibernian soldiers went at Gricenchos, and two more were dispatched with similar ease.
A circle of sorts had formed in the midst of the battle, an arena where the Fomorian king took on all comers. Fleece wondered what it felt like for the other demons to know that their leader was with them at times like these. It was probably inspiring. Not like for him and the other Hibernians with their fat slug of a leader back at camp. The only threat he’d pose to an enemy would be if he rolled over them on his way to the chicken.
A heavy wave rippled through the ranks, knocking Fleece to his knees, and then General Tua charged through the crowd on his horse, heading straight at Gricenchos.
The Fomorians screeched, maybe warning their king, maybe protesting at the unfairness of it all, but Gricenchos didn’t turn and run. Instead he stepped to one side and brought his sword round with both hands. The horse’s head flew, and General Tua was thrown from its saddle, the horse flipping over and landing on top of him. Gricenchos didn’t even do him the honour of killing the general himself. He left Tua to the stabbing of the Fomorians, and turned back to the Hibernian soldiers, awaiting his next challenger.
Fleece was sent stumbling out of the crowd. The Fomorian king looked down at him. Beneath the horned headpiece his nose was long and his mouth was wide, filled with sharp black teeth. He was not, even as far as Fomorians went, particularly handsome. Fleece clasped his hands in front of him.
“Please don’t kill me,” he whimpered.
“Coward!” Iron Guts roared, breaking away from the Hibernian men, swinging his sword for Gricenchos’s head.
The Fomorian king moved faster than Fleece would have thought possible for someone his size. Steel clashed and Gricenchos sent Iron Guts stumbling away. He brought his great sword down but this time it was Iron Guts who moved, deflecting the blade with his shield and shifting sideways, as nimble as a dancer, although Fleece would never have said that aloud. He watched the man and the demon go at it, snarling and spitting at each other, swinging savage cuts, feinting and parrying and doing all the things that Fleece had once been shown by his father, but which he had never paid that much attention to. Pity. Such a skill set would have come in very useful today.
Gricenchos battered the shield on Iron Guts’s arm, driving him to his knees, showing his back to Fleece and letting him, from his low vantage point, look right up between the scales of his attacker’s armour to the green skin beneath.
Something strange and foreign seized Fleece’s heart. Courage? Was that what he was feeling? He highly doubted it, but couldn’t think what else it could be. This was his chance to turn his life round, to do something heroic and brave and noble. Only on the battlefield, he despaired, would plunging your sword into someone’s back be considered noble.
The Fomorian king splintered the shield and Iron Guts, the only friend Fleece had in the whole of Hibernia, fell back. Fleece narrowed his eyes, focused in on the gap in Gricenchos’s armour. His hand went for his sword, and clutched stupidly at air. It wasn’t in his sheath! Why wasn’t it in his sheath? His eyes widened as he remembered. He’d left his sword in his tent.
Gricenchos split Iron Guts’s head wide open, roaring as he did so, and kicked the corpse away from him. He turned back to Fleece, who only had his little knife.
Fleece had had that knife since he was a boy. His father had done his best to teach him how to throw it. His younger brothers had learned well enough, but Fleece himself had grown bored of practice after a few weeks and never returned to it. It was fairly basic, though, from what he remembered: hold the tip of the blade, get the balance right, throw with the arm and flick with the wrist, and the blade embeds in the target with a solid thunk, he thought. Simple. Basic. The only chance he had left.
Fleece flipped the knife so he was holding the tip, and hurled it at the Fomorian king. It spun through the air between them, miraculously on target, catching Gricenchos just inside the curve of his headpiece. What a throw! It would have been a legendary throw, a throw talked about through the ages, sung about in songs, celebrated as the throw that pushed back the demon hordes, if only it had been the blade that had hit Gricenchos between the eyes, and not the handle. As it was, the knife bounced off the demon’s face, dropping into the slush and the mud and the snow, and Gricenchos growled.
Fleece scrambled to his feet as Gricenchos stalked forward, his massive hand closing round Fleece’s slender neck. He lifted Fleece off the ground. Fleece gasped for air, legs kicking and body twisting. It felt like his head was going to pop off and float away into the air. Bright lights were exploding across his vision and the battle raged all around him but all he could see was Gricenchos’s snarling face.
He dug a hand inside his tunic, grabbing the small pouch he kept in there. He pushed out the stopper with his thumb and flung the cow’s blood into the Fomorian king’s face. Gricenchos snarled and snapped, but finally had to drop Fleece in order to wipe the blood from his eyes.
As Fleece tried to crawl away, his own side swarmed the area. Someone kicked him as they ran by and he sprawled on to his back, gazing up at the grey sky with the grey clouds drifting across it, bringing the promise of more snow. Then someone else stepped on his face and he gladly sank into unconsciousness.
When he woke, it was snowing and there were hands on him. He kept his eyes closed. The battle still raged, but it sounded further away. In the distance. The hands rifled through his pockets. The breath was foul. The touch was cold. Demon or human, he couldn’t tell. He cracked open one eye, then immediately closed it. A Fomorian. One of perhaps half a dozen who were combing the area. A small, scrawny thing. Not soldiers, but scavengers, picking through the dead and dying in search of valuables. He’d let them. He never carried anything of value on to a battlefield anyway. He didn’t own anything of value.
The Fomorian whispered curses in that strange language of theirs, and abruptly knelt on Fleece’s groin. Fleece shot up, howling, and the Fomorian leapt off him with a scream. Like frightened birds, the scavengers took off, leaving Fleece alone with the dead.
Soldiers, both human and demon, lay like freshly cut wheat around him, covered in a light frosting of snow. To the north, the fighting continued. Fleece didn’t know who was winning, and found he didn’t much care. Such was the cynicism of the battle-hardened warrior, he supposed. For that was what he was now, and no mistake. No more Fleece the Thoroughly Unsuited to Battle – instead, he would be Fleece the Cowardly, Fleece the Craven, or Fleece the One Who Drops to His Knees and Begs His Enemies Not to Kill Him. A proud name to have, to be sure.
He checked his face to see if he had any scars to showcase his deeds, maybe one along his cheekbone to emphasise how sharp they were. But while there was some swelling and bruising, there didn’t appear to be anything too dramatic. Well, maybe next time.
He was sore, though. All that pushing and jostling had taken its toll. Still, he’d picked a nice place to lie down. He settled back in the mud, arranged his arms in a suitably splayed pose, turned his head to the side and opened his mouth in a silent, frozen scream. The only good thing about battles in winter was the lack of flies on the bodies. When he’d played dead at battles in the summer, those lazy, bloated flies would buzz at his nose and ears and crawl into his mouth and he’d have to lie there and take it. He didn’t miss the flies. He missed the heat, of course. By the gods, it was freezing. If he continued to lie out in the snow like this, he’d catch his death.
He sat up, shivering, and saw a hand raised in the middle of a clump of bodies, its fingers curled. It was a familiar hand. He crawled over to it, grabbed the remains of a Hibernian soldier and grunted as he shoved it away. Beneath, still trapped under the bodies of more of Fleece’s countrymen, was the corpse of the Fomorian king.
Fleece looked around, wondering what the procedure was at a time like this. Surely