He leapt back to avoid a wild swing from another Tsurani swordsman, then lunged forwards, kicking at his deceptively fragile-looking breastplate while hacking down at another opponent.
There were shouts and screams of pain all around him, but Baron Morray was still on his horse, and Durine slapped the flank of the mare with the flat of his blade, sending the animal galloping down the road with the Baron clinging desperately, towards where Kethol and Pirojil were still mounted.
It was always tempting to underrate the locals – a professional mercenary, if he lived, survived far more fighting than all but the most seasoned Eastern soldiers, and far more than Westerners – but Tom Garnett was no green captain, eager to fall into a Tsurani trap: he was already leading the front of the column out onto the field, attempting to outflank the attackers quickly, and not simply galloping into the secondary ambush that almost certainly waited for the company down the road.
Durine found himself awash in a sea of orange-trimmed black armour. He lashed out with feet, sword, and his free fist, hoping to clear enough space to make his own escape before he was drowned in Tsurani.
He more felt than saw or heard Pirojil at his back, and moments later, Pirojil was joined by half a dozen lancers, who had apparently circled around to strike at the Tsurani from the rear.
One horseman impaled a screaming Tsurani on his lance, lifting him up and off the ground for a moment, until his lance snapped with a loud crack. Flailing wildly with the broken haft of his lance, the Mut managed to club several of them away before one leapt upon him from behind and bore him down to the ground.
Durine would have tried to go to his aid, but he was busy with two of the Tsurani himself. He kicked one towards where Pirojil had dismounted – Pirojil had just dispatched his latest opponent, and could handle an off-balance soldier easily – then he ducked under the wild swing of another Tsurani’s two-handed black sword, and slashed in and up, into and through the smaller man’s throat.
Blood fountained, as though he had pulled the bung out of a hogshead of crimson wine.
The look in the eyes of a man you were killing was always the same. This can’t be happening to me, it said, in any language. Not me. Durine had often seen that expression on the face of a man who was facing the imminence of becoming a thing, and he didn’t need to see it again; he kicked the dying man away.
Three Tsurani hacked at the legs of a big grey horse, sending horse and rider tumbling to the ground as the animal screamed in that strange, high-pitched horsy shriek that you never could get used to. But one of them miscalculated: as the horse fell, it fell on the Tsurani, crushing him in his black armour with a sodden series of snapping sounds.
It was all Durine could do not to laugh.
The Tsurani were, as always, determined and capable warriors, but they were outnumbered, and lying for hours in ambush in the bitter cold had slowed them down: it was only a matter of a few minutes until most of them lay on the ground, dead and dying.
The screams were horrible to hear.
Durine half-squatted, panting for breath. No matter how long you had been doing this, it still always took something out of you.
One of the Tsurani on the ground near Durine was still shrieking loudly. A wound to his groin that still oozed fresh, steaming blood onto the frozen ground. Durine straightened himself and walked over, then hacked down, once, at the back of the Tsurani’s neck. The man twitched once, and was still, save for the flatulent sound as he fouled himself in his death.
Sudden death was rarely dignified.
‘Wait.’ Tom Garnett dismounted from his horse and braced Durine. ‘We take prisoners when we can. That man could have been one of the slaves that the Tsurani keep, and be of no danger to us at all.’
Durine didn’t answer.
‘Well, man, did you hear me?’
‘Excuse me.’ Pirojil stepped between them. ‘I think you might want to see something, Captain,’ he said, kneeling over the dead man and turning him on his back. The Tsurani’s head flopped loosely where it was still attached to the body.
Pirojil stood, toeing away a dagger from the Tsurani’s hand. He waved at the dead Tsurani and said, ‘Perhaps, Captain, you would not have wanted to have your last thought to be that your mercy had been misplaced.’
Durine hadn’t seen any dagger, and it wouldn’t have mattered. The Tsurani was dying, anyway, and it hardly made any difference whether he went on his way now, or in a few minutes. At least this way his screams wouldn’t aggravate Durine’s headache.
They would be bad enough to face in his dreams.
The regulars had two sullen Tsurani prisoners, their hands tightly bound and then leashed by the neck, under the care of a pair of lancers, although that was hardly necessary, as they weren’t struggling. Captured Tsurani were either utterly intractable, and you eventually had to kill them, no matter how many times you beat them bloody, or how well you treated them while they were chained heavily enough to control them – or utterly tame. One of the locals had tried to explain to Durine that this was something to do with Tsurani honour: if captured, they assumed the gods cursed them or some nonsense like that; but Durine knew that once they gave up, they seemed resigned to spend the rest of their lives as slaves. Durine didn’t understand, and he didn’t particularly want to; where to put a sword in one was about all he needed to know. Though he did recall one of the Muts telling him the black-and-orange ones were called Minwanabi, and they were a particularly tough and evil bunch of bastards. Durine shrugged and walked away. He didn’t plan on staying in the north long enough to discover what the other tribes were named or how evil they were. All Tsurani seemed tough enough.
The two tame ones were the only survivors among the Tsurani, though. Easily two dozen of the enemy lay dead on the ground, accompanied in death by four Muts and two horses. One soldier wept as he knelt over his horse, feeling at its neck to be sure that its heart had stopped beating.
Silly man. Getting so attached to something made of meat. Meat died and spoiled.
Lady Mondegreen and Baron Morray sat on their horses, overlooking the scene. Baron Morray’s handsome face was impassive, if a little pale, but the lady’s complexion was almost green, and she was distracted enough to wipe a trickle of vomit from the corner of her mouth with her sleeve instead of her handkerchief.
‘I’ve … I’ve never seen a battle before,’ she said, quietly.
‘Battie?’ Baron Morray shook his head. ‘This was barely a skirmish.’
‘What are they going to do with them?’ she asked.
‘Leave it to the landholder,’ he said. ‘It will be his responsibility.’
Durine nodded. Just as well it wasn’t Durine’s job to break the frozen soil and bury the bodies; that would be long and hard work, but it was somebody else’s problem – disposing of the corpses would be for the local landholder or franklins to do, depending on whose field this was. The Mut soldiers would be wrapped in blankets and carried along to be given a proper cremation at Mondegreen. The Tsurani would probably end up fertilizing the fields.
It was all dirty work, certainly, but if the locals got to the scene quickly enough – and they would – there would be a couple of hundredweight of fresh horsemeat as payment for their work. An ignominious thing, perhaps, for a trusty mount to end up in a peasant stew, but that was the way of it.
Tom Garnett remounted his horse. ‘I’ve got half the company chasing after the archers who lay in ambush, and I’m going to have to take the rest out after those who ran away here. We’ve got to run these dastards to ground before dark, or they’ll be breaking into cottages and killing bondsmen. They’re no military threat, not now, but …’
Durine nodded. ‘But you still don’t want them killing