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"How many people?" I could see movement around the tents, but I couldn't see well enough to take a reliable count.
"I can't see inside the tents," A
It looked like just the kind of target I had been hoping for.
"We're not going in to see how many we can kill," I said. "Rip a few tents, scatter the horses, scare anyone we can. We don't fight unless we have to fight to get out."
"We'll have to fight," A
"Let's get going," I said.
It looked as if we might be able to get within two hundred yards of the tents before we lost our cover if we were careful and took a wide arc to the left, around the hill we were on. I didn't want to be out in the open any longer than necessary. That would give our targets too much warning, and The Charge of the Light Brigade wasn't at all what I wanted to stage. I pulled my Cubs cap down tight and drew the claymore. Using the elf sword one-handed and on horseback would be awkward as hell, I knew, but it would be a hell of a lot more impressive than my own sword. And I did want to impress the locals. That was the whole point of the exercise.
"When we get close, make a lot of noise," I said as we came out of the trees and charged the tents.
Once more, the horses that A
A few of the revelers at the Fairy picnic looked like civilized versions of the trolls we had seen, more like the one troll soldier on the beach. There were also tall, fair folk who had to have elvish blood. There were squat dwarfs, and normal humans. Most of them were sporting weapons. Even the ladies all seemed to wear long, thin daggers at their waists, and some had bows or swords as well.
As soon as I saw weapons-not drawn, just there-I knew that we wouldn't get through the encampment without violence. A
We headed directly for the center of the camp. Lesh cut picket lines and tethers and chased off horses. Harkane did some fancy stunt riding, leaning way over to grab several hunks of" burning wood from a bonfire in the middle of the camp-hardly slowing down at all. Then he circled around to use the brands to fire all of the tents and open pavilions. The silk, or whatever it was, burned fast.
A few of the Fairy folk stood ready to meet us-apparently not at all discomfited by the change to their schedule. The four of us were well separated by then, so everything happened as a series of individual duels. A
An axe-wielding dwarf jumped out in front of me and tried to chop my horse out from between us. I jerked hard on the reins and the animal reared and came down hard toward the dwarf, forcing him to back off. By the time he stepped forward again, I had my horse turned so I could meet the dwarf with Dragon's Death. The claymore quickly shortened the dwarf by a head. I noticed that I was whistling again, the same eerie melody I had whistled while we were fighting the mountain trolls. Although the elvish sword didn't glow as it had in the night, I had no trouble handling it, even one-handed. There was no nonsense of the sword doing its own fighting regardless of me, or dragging me along with it. I was always in control, but that sword proved to be as easy to use as a reed wand.
Just after I cut down the dwarf, something hard hit me in the back. The impact pitched me forward. If I hadn't managed to get my left arm hooked around the neck of my horse, I would have been thrown over his head. The pain in my back was like being hit by a pitch-a hard fastball. My vision blurred for a moment. I fought to push myself upright in the saddle again and puffed, trying to get my breathing in order. I hadn't seen what hit me, but I assumed that someone had thrown a spear-with one hell of a lot a force behind it. The lance wasn't sticking out of me, so I knew that my chain mail had turned the shaft aside. The spot where it hit was-well, "sore" doesn't begin to approach an adequate description of how it felt, but I couldn't stop to check the extent of the damage. The thrower-one of those tall, pale types that I assumed had elven blood-ran at me, drawing his sword. He was on foot and his blade was just a normal broadsword, but he didn't see at all intimidated by my longer weapon.
We didn't play games. My back hurt so badly that I had to grit my teeth against the pain. My only thought was to end this duel as quickly as possible. I parried his swing, then my sword whirled around full-circle, whistling through the air, and took off his sword arm above the elbow. I kicked out to knock him back. The shock went all the way up my leg to the pain in my back. But the guy did go down and he didn't bother to get back up.
I left him lying there and backed my horse through a circle, looking for the next threat. The Fairy camp was a shambles. Every tent was burning, and so were two of the wagons. Quite a number of revelers were down, dead or wounded. Their horses had all run off, except for one with a broken leg. That horse rolled on the ground and neighed in panic and pain. We had done everything we could hope to do.
"Let's go!" I shouted. I waved my sword above my head until that aggravated the pain in my back too much to continue, then led the way out of camp, due south. The others closed up quickly behind me. Even A
I could feel my eyes tearing up from the pain in my back, but I couldn't take much notice of that yet, not until we had some space between us and the people we had just attacked. When we were not quite out of sight of the burning tents, we cut right sharply. I hoped to leave the impression that we were going northwest, that we had simply made a tiny little error, turning just a couple of minutes too soon. Then, when I was absolutely certain that none of the elvish folk could still see us, we turned south again and drifted back to our original course. It was another hour before I dared to stop and dismount so we could rest our horses and check out my back.
Getting my chain mail off brought new agony. I lay down on my stomach-almost fainted and fell-and A
"There's a puncture, not too deep," A
"There may be a broken rib or two, lord," Lesh said.
A
"Look in my pack," I said. "I think there's a roll of gauze and some tape. If I've got a busted rib, it needs to be bandaged as tight as possible." I didn't remember seeing anything like aspirin. Mother wasn't likely to think of something like that.