He dropped the bow and drew his sword.
The second attacker veered away from Llywelyn to meet the danger. He was a small man who would not match Anton in brute strength, so Anton ducked low and swung upward. Their sabers rang as the horses passed, and he managed to continue his parry into a backhand riposte at the enemy horse’s rump. That would make it unresponsive for a while. He reined in Avalanche alongside Llywelyn, who was upright again, white eyes staring out of a muddy mask. Llywelyn grabbed for the saddle with his good hand, Anton reached down to grip his cuirass strap, and they both heaved.
With the wounded bowman draped over his withers, Avalanche made a game effort to run, but he was grievously overloaded and the footing was treacherous. Help was coming, though. Horn sounding, Notivova was leading his gallant band to the rescue. By luck or inspiration, he and his four riders had spread out and the aspens made it hard to judge how many they were. The Wends were fewer than they had seemed at first sight, maybe thirty or forty, but now half of them were between Anton and his rescuers.
“The odds are good,” he shouted cheerily. “Good for a good fight, I mean.”
Llywelyn was whimpering with pain, probably because his wounded arm was trapped underneath him and he needed his other hand to hold the saddle, lest he slide off, headfirst or feetfirst.
“Very grateful, my lord.”
“I’m only doing my duty like you were. Hang on.”
Two Wends were converging on Avalanche, timing their approach so they could strike simultaneously. Anton prepared to take the one on his right, a big, ugly, hairy brute.
It wasn’t going to work, though. He had no shield, nothing to parry the other attack with except his vambrace, so he might well come away from this encounter with a broken arm. He might even lose a hand.
Shock!
He wheeled Avalanche to meet the other assailant, but his sword had disappeared. Blood was trickling out of a round hole in his right rerebrace. And also from a matching hole on the other side of it. He had apparently taken a quarrel through his upper arm. It was strange that he could feel no pain. He was spouting blood. He might lose his arm. He was thinking in patches. What should he do now?
Finding his way blocked, Avalanche had stopped, puffing hard and flickering his ears at the stench of blood. Llywelyn uttered a groan and slid to the ground. He tried to land on his feet, but collapsed in a heap among the reeds.
“Yield, my lord?”
A ring of mounted Wends surrounded them, with a dozen spanned crossbows aimed at Anton Magnus’s heart. Not a likely-looking nobleman among them. Yield to a commoner? If he had a sword he could try to take one of the vermin with him. But black mist was starting to swirl around him, and even Vlad had yielded at the Battle of the Boundary Stone.
“I yield.”
“Wise of you, Count Magnus.” The new voice came from his left, and apparently from a priest, since he wore a jeweled pectoral cross and bore no arms or armor. He was clad in black robes and an odd pot-shaped hat; even his horse was black. Above a black pillow of beard his right eye was watching Anton with amusement and contempt; his left was studying the mountains.
“I don’t yield to priests.”
“You will yield to death very shortly if you don’t get down and let us attend to your arm.”
His accent sounded like pottery in a waterwheel, but what he was saying was probably true, and descending voluntarily would be more dignified than falling off in a faint. Anton kicked out of his stirrups and leaned forward to pull his right leg over. From habit he put weight on his right arm. That brought on the missing pain. He screamed, fell off Avalanche, and landed on top of Llywelyn.
He could not have been unconscious very long, but long enough for his captors to strip off his spaulder, vambrace, and rerebrace to expose the wound. A soldier who looked like a swineherd and smelled like the swine was stitching one of the wounds with a needle and gut. Another man was holding the other hole shut until it could be treated. There was no lack of pain now, murderous thunderclaps of agony.
Close by, Notivova and Big Herkus were tending Llywelyn.
“If you live,” remarked the priest, watching from horseback, “then you will have some loss of strength in that arm. But a wound like that is very likely to lead to lockjaw or gangrene or just severe wound fever. You had better speak with your confessor as soon as you get back to Gallant, my lord.”
“You are sending me back?”
The priest laughed. His age was hard to assess under that beard-mid-thirties, perhaps. “We don’t have a jail handy, and you do more good for our cause botching up the defense of Castle Gallant than you would rotting in a cell in Pomerania. Who would bother to ransom you, Anton? We shall empty the Bukovany coffers soon enough without selling carrion to the castle.”
“Who are you and why is a priest leading a band of raider scum- Yeaew!”
“Beg pardon, my lord,” said the surgeon cheerfully. “Did I pull on that too hard?”
The priest was still smiling. “I am merely a humble servant of the Lord, Anton, doing good works in His name. Do not mock, my son. I just saved your life. My unkind companions wanted to leave you there, bleeding to death.”
The surgeon tied the last knot and trimmed the ends of the blood-soaked string with a dagger. Another man wrapped the arm with a strip of Anton’s shirt.
“His own men can dress him,” the priest said. “Let us be on our way home to report a successful day’s work. Tomorrow morning, Anton, you must send a party under flag of truce to collect your dead. After that, any Jorgarian found near here will be put to death. Go with God, my son. I suggest you leave warfare to grown men in future.”
He made the sign of the cross, but he did it from right to left, backward.
CHAPTER 19
The rain had stopped. The afternoon was sunny and not far off being warm. Wulf insisted that he was well enough to get dressed and go outside. Madlenka insisted that he was not.
“I’m as good as I ever get,” he retorted. “Or do you mean I should go outside before I get dressed?”
It was very childish humor, but one of the surest ways to recognize lovers was how easily they laughed at each other’s jokes. What he felt for Madlenka Bukovany went far beyond mere attraction. It was more than lust or admiration or friendship. It was the best thing that had ever happened to him. It was an all-consuming, once-in-a- lifetime passion. Nothing else in the world mattered. He would do anything to win her or please her, and he was certain that she felt the same about him. Neither had mentioned it. They did not need to, and must not. It was a forbidden, impossible match, and perhaps that was the very reason the madness had come upon them so quickly. Giedre knew all this as well as they did, and scowled disapprovingly in the background.
So, wearing clothes that had belonged to Petr Bukovany and trying not to show how every movement hurt somewhere, Wulf emerged on the curtain wall battlements, escorted by the future countess and her lady-in-waiting. The air was cool and sweet, the sun warm, the snowy mountains both menacing and beautiful. A steady trickle of families was heading down the road to High Meadows, but Anton would not be displeased to see those extra mouths depart, even if he lost some strong men in the process. His edict putting the town on a war footing had roused the warlike and scared the peaceable.
Down in the bailey a hundred more-or-less able-bodied men were being outfitted from a heap of all the arms and armor that a thorough ransacking of the attics of Cardice had turned up. Wulf ought to be down there, helping. Tomorrow, perhaps.
“This is a very beautiful place,” he said, studying the scenery as he strolled along the battlements with his love at his side. The urge to offer his arm or take her hand was a torment, but they were visible to half the town, and Giedre was walking close behind, so it must be resisted.
Madlenka said, “Ha! It’s cold and bleak. All my life I have dreamt of living in a gentler land, in a big city with gaiety, with music and dancing.”
