Season of the Sword (part 6 ) - A Revision

[DoctorM]

[This is the sixth part of the revised version of a story I wrote back in the Long Ago. We come at last to the battle at Iomaire. Do let me know what you think.]

Season of the Sword (Part 6) - A Revision

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He stood in the false dawn pouring heated water over himself. His squires busied themselves around him, toweling him off and scraping razors across his face. He held up his arms and they pulled his tunic over his head. He pulled on boots and they laced his hauberk around him. The surcoat dropped over his head, a sudden blackness in the tent. The squires brought him heated wine and cold mutton while he fastened his belt with its silver wolf's-head buckle. Falkenberg slipped a dagger against the small of his back and pulled the end of his sword belt tight. His squires gathered up his shield and lance and he went out into the chill of the morning.

There were running men all through the camp. Squires jogged back and forth, hauling at the lead ropes of their knights' warhorses. The morning damp clung to the coats of the horses. Squires and grooms clustered round the horses, forcing bits between their teeth and flinging saddle rugs over their backs.

His squires led the chestnut over and he ran his fingers through its mane, whispering to it while he yanked the girths tighter. The horse raised its head and snorted at him, excitement quivering along its flanks. He pulled himself up into the saddle, still morning-stiff, and settled his helmet over the mailed coif. The nasal pressed flat against his face, shadowing his eyes.

The Daerborne men-at-arms jogged off north. The foot soldiers trailed after them, spears and bows and axes on their shoulders. Guy de Langenay rode beside them, shouting orders as they filed onto the crest. Falkenberg trotted his horse out to the head of the line. Standards lined the crest: his own black and white, the scarlet and black of Courcelles, the colours of the other southern lords. Rainier de Courcelles and Morgánn sat underneath the banners with a clutch of southerners; their voices rose and fell over the sounds of horses and metal.

"Ricardo." Morgánn sat pale and alien in his jazerant, the mail-veiled southern helmet in the crook of his arm. His horse glared at the chestnut, sullen-eyed and over-shaggy, a good hand shorter than the other warhorses. Morgánn stroked its neck, gentling it. "How's the morning?"

"Bleak enough. Roses and swords. Maybe too much wine for some people." He looked over at the others. Imredy and FitzAlan and Viskovics-Barany looked white as milk. He sighed. "Keep them together, Rainier. We all go to Valoret together."

There were cheers at the center of the line. He looked back. Carismont was wheeling his great grey before the royal knights, haranguing them. The silver Carismont star streamed out on its field and David de Carismont invoked God and loyalty in his rich, sad voice. The knights cheered for him, and behind the ranks Falkenberg could see Ariella on her black steppe-bred horse, slender and stiff in her armour, ringed by her lifeguards. She raised her hand in salute and her men took up the cry: "Carismont! Festil! Festil!"

Falkenberg slid his arm through the straps of his shield and took his lance from a squire. He waved his men into line and looked out across the field, waiting for Carismont's war-horns.

The plain spread out between the ridges, covered with vetch and charlock and speedwell, the flowers purple and gold and white. Across from him he could see blue banners, the Michaelines massing against him on the rebel left. They were a sea of mail and pennons, frothing at the lip of the ridge. A flood of them, he thought, priests and westerners come to take Daerborne from him. The anger spread inside him and he rose up in his stirrups.

"Watch the banners! A hundred silver marks to any man who kills Murdoch of Caithane! Bring me the head and it's double!"

Beside him, Morgánn laughed. He lifted his veil and turned to his crossbowmen. "Kill the priests! Kill the Michaelines first."

Across the plain the rebel infantry were beginning to move down the ridge. Horns sounded in the distance and the rebel horsemen began to ride down the slope. Carismont raised one arm and pointed west. War-horns blew along the center of the loyalist lines and the Torenthi moved out in a wedge, their steppe horses moving with a stiff, high gait. They trotted out onto the plain and moved off together, all in silence. Their swords came out almost together, the curved eastern blades shimmering in the morning. The wedge widened and they slowly picked up speed. They cried out, a long, wailing Eastern howl, and they cantered through a first, distant shower of rebel arrows and struck the rebel van in a vast shriek of metal.

The Michaelines had reached the plain. Falkenberg raised his hand. The line moved over the slope and jogged down. The blue banners moved closer, and the mass of horsemen began to dissolve into individual figures. He saw their lances swing down and he spurred the chestnut, his breath caught in his throat. He brought up his shield as the arrows began to fall. They shivered on the face of the shield, long splinters of yew wood spinning away.

He heard the voices around him— Daerborne, Faucon! —and the Michaelines rose up before him. He cried out and stabbed overhand with his lance, It slid along a shield face and the next man galloped past. He got the point past the man's shield and felt it go home. The man shrieked and fell backward. Falkenberg felt the point break free and he let the lance go. He worked his sword clear and shifted it in his hand. Axes bit at his shield and he spun the horse away, whipping his sword around him. He saw his brother beside him, a good dozen of the mounted crossbowmen shooting all at once. The Michaelines flinched away from the quarrels, and he led his men into them, his shield gone, flailing out with the longsword.

****

The horses milled about at the base of the rise, and Falkenberg pulled his helmet off and sank into the thick grass. Sweat lay like a second skin under his armour. The sun burned at mid-morning, and he looked out at his men. The plain was churned into mud; the cries from the wounded reached back to the high ground. He looked up at Rainier and and shook his head. His arms ached, and he could feel bruises and thin trails of blood along his ribs and thighs. He pushed himself to his feet and reached for his sword. He grabbed at Courcelles' bridle.

"Get them all out on the far right. It's narrow, but they'll flank us if they can."

Rainier nodded and spurred away. Falkenberg drew in his breath. Horns were blowing down on the south. The Eastmarch men-at-arms were running back before the rush of Kincardine's men. Black Alasdair galloped at their head, his great sword rising and falling, his surcoat crimson and silver in the sun.

Falkenberg hauled himself back into the saddle and called for his standard-bearer.

****
The second melee went on into the afternoon. Horses foundered across the wreck of the plain, stumbling across armoured corpses, trampling the purple and white flowers into the mud, hock-deep as they staggered out.

War in the south had smelled like salt and ocean spray. He tried to remember that. Mud and horse sweat and the taste of blood filled his senses. Sweat streamed down the nasal of his helmet. There was nothing around him but the rise and fall of the sword. Pain ran through his shoulder muscles and he could feel nothing under his gloves. The Michaelines battered at them  and fell back and battered again, too few to make headway against the massed crossbows, too many to drive away.

Blue and silver surcoats rose up before him. The enflamed crosses of their badges were all around him, and he could hear them calling out: St. Michael! St. Michael! He crashed his horse into them, the sword alive in his hands. He lashed out around him, flailing at them, the blade slamming into steel and bone. The sword fell around him like a whip. They cannot have me! They cannot move me!

They fell back away from him and he clubbed them down, the sword slick with blood. The last two pitched from the saddles with crossbow quarrels driven into their chests. Morgánn grabbed at his reins and pulled him aside. Rainier and Guy de Langenay swung shields up over him and they led him back to the ridge. Morgánn glared at him, his eyes two dark holes in the chain-mail veil.

"Have you lost your goddamned mind?" His brother's voice was all shreds and raw whispers. "What's the matter with you? Did you even know how many of them there were?"

Falkenberg's arms went limp. He shivered, unable to stop it, his eyes blind with light and sweat, He sat back in the grass while his squires scurried around him, handing him water bottles. He let water run down over his head. His hands shook. He saw Stefan Viskovics-Barany's squires lifting their limp lord from his horse, blood leaking from his hauberk. The field stood empty for a moment. He shuddered, empty of everything.

Courcelles rode by. He looked up at Rainier. "There's no way we're going to get across."

"I know. They have the numbers. I think half everybody's dead."

Horns blew again, all up and down the line. He saw Carismont and the Torenthi re-forming in the center. On the crest of the ridge was a small figure that had to be Ariella, pale and hard as ice. He looked back. Morgánn was there on his shaggy, thick-set, sullen horse, his crossbow across his pommel. His brother pulled his veil up and shook his head. Falkenberg stared down at the ground. He mounted again and rode to marshal his knights.

****

Late in the afternoon, the Torenthi rode away. They left in formation, silent and aloof. All down the line the two armies drew apart, watching. The shreds of the Cameron and Culdi men they'd faced stood among their own dead, unable to give chase. The Torenthi rode away with their banners flying, their sabres still bloody in their hands. The loyalists sat silent on their horses, exhausted beyond despair. Cheers went up across the plain, the rebels tasting at victory.

Atop the ridge the war-horns blew. Morgánn grabbed at his brother's arm and pointed, Carismont on his great grey galloped across the field, the silver star catching at the breeze above him, the indigo surcoats of his knights spread out dark behind him. They drove into the gold and scarlet of the rebel center, pushing toward the standards of the Haldane pretender, but the silver star wavered and fell away. The knights in indigo howled in rage and despair. The great grey stallion trotted riderless across the plain.

Falkenberg watched his brother turn his face away. A sob escaped his own throat, and of a sudden he could taste it: the sea air sharp across the dunes. Not a viscount. Nothing. I am only an outlaw now.

He spurred to Rainier, pointing back up the ridge with his sword.

"Get them up! Get them back! Cover the Queen! Cover the Queen!"

All along the line, men were breaking away. The foot soldiers scattered across the field, abandoned by their lords. The last of the war-horns blew, and the remnants of the Kincardine knights formed behind Black Alasdair in a thin line of silver and crimson to await the onrush of the Culdi men. Cries and smudges of smoke rose up from the left: Sighere's men were sacking the royalist camp.

They kept the standards up, the white wolves and the scarlet aurochs head, and fell back behind the screen of Morgánn's crossbowmen. They scrambled east and north into the trees, running into the dusk behind the royal lifeguard. The gloom of the tree line folded around them. There were cries behind them, Michaelines hacking at stragglers.

Morgánn clawed off his helmet and tossed it away. He rose with his mounted crossbowmen at the rear, shooting into the weaving shadows of the Michaelines while Falkenberg and Courcelles rode on ahead. Voices cried out, and he could see the shadows of men and horses running through the trees behind him— black shapes moving through the dark on both sides, pursuers and pursued, all form lost. In the distance he could hear war-cries: St. Michael and no quarter!

He could hear steel ahead. The sound rang through the trees, thin in the distance. The cries echoed back to him— St Michael! and then the answer, Dex aië!, God's help, the cry of the royal household knights. He yelled out to his crossbowmen, calling them back and around. They spurred off after the rest, shoving their way through the pines in the dusk. The cries and the crash of metal stopped. RIchard and Courcelles were lashing their horses ahead in a wild rush, and Morgánn pushed his horse toward them.

The air tasted of rain and summer lightning, the smell of sorcery and something burning. Horses lay dead on the forest floor, horses and then men. Morgánn rode by them into a clearing, his horse stepping over a swathe of dead Michaelines and royal lifeguards. The dead lay almost atop one another in black pools of blood. They had died where they stood: a last, bitter, hopeless affirmation of loyalty. The taste of it choked him, blood and sweat and the charred smell of sorcery. There was a violet pinprick of light on the ground, and Morgánn swung down from his horse at the trot and ran to it, his mouth dry with fear.

The last one on his feet: you could tell that from the bodies. Damien de Corayne lay in the corner of the glen, his green Healer's cloak soaked through with blood, the sword with its amethyst pommel still in his hand. Morgánn reached down to close Damien's eyes. Chest, thigh, groin, the left arm almost shredded through at the elbow, Damien had died by pieces, and there were three of the blue-surcoated Michaeline knights dead behind him on the ground. On his hands and knees at the end, he had died crawling to keep himself between the hunters and the Queen.

There was a single massive body that lay past Damien, face down and hidden in the shadows. Morgánn strode across and kicked at the body, driving his boot into the side of the blood-smeared hauberk.

"Bastard! Bastard!"

He caught the lightning taste then, but it wasn't all from the dead thing at his feet. He raised his eyes to the far edge of the clearing. Courcelles and his brother were standing there with their backs to him, motionless in the dark. He heard it, then, the sound of Richard crying, and he knew without looking what they'd found.

The steel had missed the spine. Falkenberg tried not to think how long it would've taken her to die. He squeezed his eyes shut but the image stayed with him: the slender body pinned back against the tree, the trails of blood running from her mouth. The metal of the sword was seared black, and the tang of scorched metal choked him. Beauty dead, and the last of royalty. My Queen. My Queen. Oh God, Ari—. The tears ran down his face. Daerborne and Gwynedd and its last queen, all gone in an afternoon.

Courcelles looked over at him, his face white as salt. "Better," he said. "They'd have done worse to her. Better steel than hanged for treason. Or burnt alive."

"Goddamn them. Goddamn them." Falkenberg crossed himself and tried to think of prayers. "She was a a queen, and what are they? What are they?"

Guy de Langenay pushed forward, his horse fidgeting at the smell of death and sorcery. "My lord, they're coming." He looked at Ariella's body, pale-faced and sickened. "Horsemen, my lord."

"No," Falkenberg said. "Not 'my lord'. Not even that anymore."

"Richard." Courcelles pulled him back. "We have to go. I'll go anywhere you're going, but we have to go now. We have to leave."

Falkenberg looked back. Maybe fifty of them, his own and Rainier's. A handful of southerners, too. Michael Imredy and Brian de Szent-Endre were there on their horses next to Guy de Langenay, blank-eyed and shaken. Morgánn stood by a fallen Michaeline body,  Damien de Corayne's sword in his hand.

"South," Morgánn said. "Beldour, and then we buy our way south. There's nowhere else."

"They're coming," Courcelles said. "Richard—"

He remembered her at court, the corners of her mouth drawn down, measuring him that first night she'd spoken to him. He remembered her too at that final moment when the war-horns blew, her fist raised in salute.

He breathed out and reached in the dark for his reins. He pulled himself into the saddle.

"East," he whispered. "East and then south."

Fifty of them. The Carminha were in Beldour. Silver and safety. He still had the little chest of stones. There was that, too. Beldour— I owe them that. They followed me here. I promised them Valoret. I can give them Beldour.

His face was slick with tears. He shook his head in the night air and then jerked the horse around. The trees and the night closed around him. The taste of despair flooded over him, emptying his thoughts.


*****

There was snow in off the water, drifting out of a slate-coloured sky onto the strand. She came down from the rise, her boots sinking into the sand. The wind caught at her, whipping at the tails of the woolen scarf wound round the bottom of her face.

Morgánn stood next to his horse in the lee of the dunes, running his hand over the animal's shaggy side, looking out to sea. She slid her arm around her husband. He looked down at her, the amethyst of the pendant he always wore bright against the black of his winter riding cloak.

"They're all here," Sabrine said. "The count of Fianna and the Christian lords. They'll have bonfires at dusk. You should come back to the villa."

"Soon enough," Morgánn said. "Soon enough." He stroked his horse. "He's a a brave little thing. I rode him all the way down out of Torenth. He'd have been in procession today. We'd all have ridden through Valoret behind the Queen to the cathedral for Twelfth Night."

"Morgánn—" She pressed herself against him. She looked up at him out of eyes as violet as the pendant he wore. "You're not happy."

He pulled het hand free and pressed his lips to her wrist. "It's not that. I'm with you and I'm happy, querida. I came back to the Forcinn for you. But you can look out from here and it's only twenty miles at the narrows to our old lands. You can look out from here in the mornings and see Daerborne lands. I wanted to see you at court at Valoret, put you in some fancy dress gown slit to the hip on both sides and dance with you 'til dawn. You're barely seventeen, girl. You haven't seen enough exiles. We all drink too much and we look out to sea. You should understand that: next year in Jerusalem, right?"

"Like Ricardo."

Morgánn glanced up at the crest of the dunes. His brother was sitting with his arms wrapped round his knees, staring into the storm fronts rolling down from Mooryn. He kissed Sabrine's eyelids. "Like Ricardo."

She slid one booted foot along his leg. "It's too cold. Come back." Her arms tightened around him.

Twelfth Night... From the crest, Falkenberg could see the heavy clouds lowering over the sea, masking the Gwynedd coast. Blank-eyed, he looked at the Daerborne crest on the signet he still wore. Twelfth Night at Valoret, with Kincardine and Carismont on the dais and Ariella bidding him to the dance.

He looked back for the horses and saw Morgánn with his new bride in his arms. He pulled his gloves back on. In the spring, he'd command the Carminha caravans east out through the deserts.

They still call me visconde here. The city senates and the count of Fianna still call me that.

East-of-east in April. Dom Davíd's caravans going out to worlds he'd never seen. In the spring, her son would be past a year old, growing up in Beldour. He'd promised her that, not to abandon Marek. Now and in all generations... I swore her an oath. I swore her an oath.

He pushed himself to his feet and looked down at Morgánn and Sabrine.

I'll go in the spring. I'll decide in the spring. But I know what I'll decide.

He looked north out over the sea into the fine flurries of snow and the vision held him: Gwynedd and Daerborne, grey and lost beyond the sea.

[Jerusha]

Well done; very well done.  Does Richard go back to Beldour to keep his promise to Ariella and not abandon Marek?

[DoctorM]

Jerusha--- I would think he does. He's a man who takes his obligations seriously, and there's no doubt what he felt for Ariella. And, hmmm...I think there's another story waiting there, one set some years later. I'll have to see what I can do about that.

(And thank you for the kind words!)

[DerynifanK]

A fascinating story Dr. M. Once i started reading, I couldn't stop. Rarely do we hear the other side of a conflict as the victors generally write the history. I did sometimes find it a little difficult to keep so many characters straight and remember who was who. But I  particularly enjoyed exploring the relationship between the Falkenbergs and the Festils. Would love to hear more about Richard and Ariella. Good job Dr. M. A good writer always leaves his reader wanting more and you certainly did that.

[DoctorM]

A fascinating story Dr. M. Once i started reading, I couldn't stop. Rarely do we hear the other side of a conflict as the victors generally write the history. I did sometimes find it a little difficult to keep so many characters straight and remember who was who. But I  particularly enjoyed exploring the relationship between the Falkenbergs and the Festils. Would love to hear more about Richard and Ariella. Good job Dr. M. A good writer always leases his reader wanting more and you certainly did that.

Thank you very much! I do appreciate the kind words. I think I did create/add characters just to have a world around my main characters, to show that politics and court life were complicated things. I may very well write a story about Richard and Ariella--- something that gives a flavor of Imre's court that's not quite part of the main Camber story.

[Laurna]

This is a good story savored for twelfth night to bring to full ending. Thank you DoctorM.
The battle was real and well done, leaving me on edge to know how Richard and Morgann did through it all. I was hopeful for Richard and happy to see Morgann(if only for his name) make it through the devastation of that quintessential day. Richard may never know what truly transpired there at the end with his queen,  nor the decisions that would be made in that glen which would change Gwynedd for all time. Yet he had bared witness to the causation of that change. At the end, it was good to see he and his brother on the south shoreline still alive and thinking of what lay ahead.

[DoctorM]

Thank you, Laurna! I'm glad you picked Twelfth Night to read it, too. I like Twelfth Night as a holiday.

Richard, I fear, is the sort of man who'll spend the rest of his life gnawing at himself about that glen in Iomaire, telling himself that if he'd been only a few minutes sooner, he could've saved her. He'll go on to see other lands and other times (he's only just at thirty), but Ariella and what was lost will haunt him. And he will be loyal to the Festils, something that his family will inherit. I very well may write about him again.

[Jerusha]

Please do; I look forward to it.

[DoctorM]

I have a couple of things in draft (or at least various stages of drafting), so I will work on it!