“Why the milk?” asked Roper, leaning towards Keturah.
She turned to look at him, her pale green eyes a bright corona around huge dark pupils. “To line the stomach of course,” she said. “This will last for hours and I suggest you do the same, if you want still to be conscious by the time the food arrives. Husband,” she added with a smirk.
Roper took the buttermilk and then decided to try the beor, which was closest. It was horrible. He discreetly fed it to Keturah, who pretended to like it so as to tease him, and moved on to the more familiar birch wine.
Gray stood now, raising a horn of ale. “There were many heroes at Githru!” he called and Roper noticed that the table fell remarkably still for Gray’s words. “None more so than Leon Kaldison, who almost split Lord Northwic in two!” There was a mighty cheer and they raised horns to Leon Kaldison, a powerful guardsman on Pryce’s left who acknowledged the toast with a nod. This one had a big reputation, Roper knew, as one of the Guard’s most highly esteemed fighters. Even Uvoren liked to joke that Leon terrified him.
Through fifty toasts, the tale of the battle unfolded. It had hinged, as these battles so often did, on the Sacred Guard. Winds swept across Githru as the battle lines clashed, salty spray flying over the eastern portion of the field. The crash of the two lines striking one another was a punch to the guts; like an immense volley of cannon-fire, or a tremendous rolling wave of thunder. It was the sound of shields cracking and slamming into steel; of men smashing to the ground; of axes reducing wood to splinters. Beneath all that was a deeper, more subtle noise. It was the “ooph” of five thousand men having the air forced from their lungs.
The battle that had followed was quite as intense as had been reckoned. Roper had anticipated a contest of skill: heroic flourishing of the sword and men fighting one-on-one. But Githru was about muscle. The Anakim line exerted huge pressure onto their Suthern opponents, who were warping and buckling beneath it. Bodies falling backwards as if time had slowed, held between the pressure at their backs and the more powerful, more inexorable force pressing from the front. The Suthern line churning and tumbling like ploughed earth. Swords almost forgotten. A great wheezing escaping from that dynamic arc where the two forces met, as the Sutherners being trampled underfoot fought for air.
The stench was overwhelmingly of metal. The churning mud smelt of metal. The blood smelt of metal. The grinding armour reeked of it.
Three times they fought together and three times the result had been an exhausted standstill. The Sutherners would pull back before rotating their front line and assembling another wave which was hurled against the legions, still fighting for breath. The heavily armoured knights joined the battle line on foot for the fourth and final wave, going toe-to-toe in the centre with the Sacred Guard. There the brawling had reached a new pitch. They lost thirty-one guardsmen dead, another fifty or so injured. The knights well outnumbered the Guard, the legions were growing tired and being forced back from their positions. It had been Gray, Pryce and Leon who had saved the day.
First, Pryce had lost his mind and charged shrieking into a dense formation of knights, knocking them flat rather than trying to kill them. His savagery was enough to create a gap and Gray had been the quickest to react to it. He piled in with his protégé, creating a spearhead which the rest of the Guard used to drive through the formation of knights, tearing it asunder. Lord Northwic had been behind, roaring his men on and, when they had broken through, Pryce, Gray and Leon had charged his bodyguards. Protégé and mentor had defended Leon as he carved through the household warriors to cut off the head of the army.
That had been enough.
But there was one tale Roper still wanted to hear. He leaned towards Gray. “So the plan came off without a hitch?”
“It was just as we discussed, lord,” replied Gray. He did not attempt to keep his voice down, though Roper noticed that Uvoren had frozen a couple of places away. “We had enough corpses in the wagons for them not to bother inspecting those of us still moving. They let us right through to the surgery. Things got a bit sticky for a moment when the surgeons came poking around, but we managed to capture them all and hide in the surgery until we could hear you approaching. Getting to the Great Gate was just a case of looking like we belonged. Easy. The Hindrunn captured without a life lost.” Gray beamed at Roper, who thought that he might be Black Lord for another century and never again win such a victory.
The meat arrived, with the centre-piece a magnificent boar roasted in honey and crisped with salt, borne by six serving girls who received the biggest cheer of the night. It was accompanied by the Goose Legion, the Duck Legion and the Chicken Legion, a pig per table that oozed butter and the intoxicating waft of ramsons and two hundred loaves of thick-crusted bread.
Roper stood now (a little unsteadily)
