Black Jade

Tarmond to draw arrows and sight upon our targets below. These were four archers standing behind trees with their backs to us.

I whispered, 'Draw!'

As one, we held stiff our left arms as we drew the feathered shafts of our arrows to our ears.

'Loose!'

The crack of our four bowstrings seemed as loud as a thunderclap; our four arrows shot out through the air. Tarmond's and Atara's struck dead true at the center of two of the mercenary archers' backs. They cried out in their death agony. My man, perhaps sensing my murderous intent, moved just as I loosed my arrow, which drove through his armor oft center and perhaps pierced a lung. He, too, cried out a hideous, bubbling scream. Maram's arrow missed altogether, thudding into the trunk of a tree.

'Oh, Lord!' he moaned to me. 'I told you! I told you!'

'Mount!' I shouted at him as I dropped my bow.

The screaming of the three stricken archers had alerted Harwell and his men. This large 'knight,' whose gray hair flowed out from beneath a conical helm, turned about and pointed at us as he cried out, 'We're under attack!'

Four of his mercenaries immediately covered themselves with their shields but the men working on the mantelets were slower to take up theirs. One of these Atara killed with an arrow through the throat; Tarmond, at the same moment, loosed an arrow that buried itself in the remaining archer's chest.

While Tarmond continued firing arrows at them, Maram, Atara and I mounted our horses and we charged down the gentle slope through the trees upon our enemy.

Harwell had the presence of mind to form up his mercenaries in front of the wagon, so that it might protect their backs and provide cover against arrows being loosed from the longhouse behind it. They stood in a line of ten men, locking shields as they faced us. As we pounded closer, I caught a whiff of terror tainting the air. The mercanaries' eyes were wide with astonishment: they had no spears with which to withstand a charge of mounted knights. They must have been utterly mystified by Atara, with her white blindfold and her great Sarni bow, firing off arrows as she bounded down the slope straight toward them.

'Aieeuuuu!'

A terrible cry suddenly split the air; it was something like the roar of a whirlwind and a tiger's scream. And then Kane, like a tiger, like a veritable whirlwind of steel and death, burst from around the side of the wagon and fell upon the mercenaries' rear. He chopped two of them apart with his sword almost before they realized that they were under assault by this new and maddened enemy. This proved too much for Harwell's remaining men. All at once they broke, running off in different directions toward the woods.

This made it all the easier to kill them. Atara fired an arrow at point black range with such force that it pierced a mercenary's mouth and drove straight through the back of his head. While Kane set to work with his sword and Maram ran down another man, putting his lance through his back, I drove my lance at a great, red- bearded mercenary. He was quick enough to get his shield up; my lance point struck into the painted wood and then snapped as the mercenary threw down his shield. I drew my sword then. The mercenary tried to meet my attack with his sword, but like the rest of his companions, he was of little prowess and could not stand against a real knight. I swung Alkaladur, and my shining sword cleaved through his poor armor, and through flesh and bone. Then I killed two other mercenaries nearby with a coldness like unto that of an executioner. I hated this mechanical butchery almost even more than the maddened fury I bore inside toward Morjin.

Soon the battle was over. I turned to see Maram, leaning over the side of his horse, pull his lance from the neck of the dead Harwell. Maram's face had fallen a ghastly gray, but it seemed that he had taken no wound. Neither, I was overjoyed to see, had Atara. She climbed down from her roan mare and began retrieving arrows buried in the bodies of the three men she had killed.

'… six, seven, eight,' I heard Kane muttering as he stood over a dead mercenary counting the bodies of our enemies. 'Nine, ten, eleven — all here. Did you take out your four archers?'

'Yes,' I told him. 'And you?'

'Indeed — it was as Atara said: there were four of them, spread out. Their attention was on the house, and they didn't notice me coming out of the trees.'

He patted the hilt of his dagger; I hated the smile that broke upon his savage face.After that, Tarmond walked down the hill toward us as the doors of the longhouse opened and the villagers of Gladwater began pouring out.

Chapter 12

Tarmond, I saw, clutched at his bloody shoulder, from which the broken shaft of an arrow protruded. He said to me, 'The fourth archer shot me just as I shot at him.'

His deeds, no less ours, were the wonder of the villagers, who gathered around us. There were twenty-five of them: mothers and grandmothers, children dressed in poor woolens and a few bent old men. For a while, we traded stories with them. The only man of fighting age was a broad-shouldered woodsman, who had a thick beard and shaggy dark hair. From between a gap in his reddened teeth, he spat a stream of an evil-looking liquid. He was dressed all in green. Tarmond presented him as Berkuar. As this rough, rude-looking man took in Tarmond's wound, he said to him, 'That was some fine arrow-work I saw today, old friend.'

He turned toward me and my companions and added, 'You used the sword and the lance well, I suppose; I am mostly unfamiliar with those weapons. We of the forest rely on these.'

So saying, he held up his longbow, and he touched the sheath of his long knife.

'The Crucifiers, too, bear swords,' he said, staring at me. He stepped forward and poked a dirt-stained finger into the opening of my cloak where my mail showed through. 'And armor, as well though nothing so fine as this steel. You say you are knights bound for the Red Desert?'

We told him the same story that we had prepared for Tarmond, and he told us his. Berkuar, it turned out, was one of the Keepers of the Forest, or the Greens, as they were called. He had come to Gladwater to test a young man named Taddeum for recruitment into his society. But one of Taddeum's rivals, Grimshaw, had betrayed them, calling Harwell and the mercenaries down upon Gladwater. In the battle that had ensued, Harwell's mercenaries had slain nearly every fighting man in Gladwater — and many others — and threatened to burn down the entire village as punishment for sheltering Berkuar. We had come along just in time to witness the survivors' last stand inside the longhouse.

'It's a terrible choice we had,' a middling-old woman named Rayna told us. 'Fire or the cross. Of course, sometimes the Crucifiers put you on the wood and then set it on fire anyway. I was ready to slit my daughter's and grandson's throats, and my own as well.'

Here she wrapped her arm around the shoulders of a young woman giving suck to a newborn as she showed us the dagger strapped to her belt.

And then she told us, 'We owe you our lives, and we would make a feast for you, if we could. But there is no time. What happened here will be reported, and then the Crucifiers will come here by the score — perhaps even the Red Priest called Vogard or Arch Yatin himself. We have time to bury our dead, perhaps, but then we'll all have to take to the forest.'

It pained me to think of these poor people hiding among the trees, and living wild and hunted. But it seemed that there was no help for it. Rayna, for one, however, had no pity for herself — only an immense gratitude to be still alive. As she put it, she was an Acadian, one of a tough and resourceful people who had thrived off the bounty of the forest for thousands of years and who would survive for many thousands more.

One of those who hadn't survived, though, was the riverman, Gorson. He had died, it seemed, defending his boats from the Crucifiers. It turned out that the flatboat he used in secret to ferry his countrymen across the Tir was unharmed. Tarmond told us that we should take it as our reward, if we could manage to work it ourselves.

'I would come with you, if I could,' he told us. Then he gripped his wounded arm. 'But an arrow-shot old man is no companion for a band of pilgrims such as yourselves. And my place is with my people.'

As he spoke, Liljana and Master Juwain. with Estrella and Daj came down the hill trailing their mounts and