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"I'm sorry, Rudi, but it's necessary," the priest's voice soothed.
A hand took his; he knew it was Mathilda's, and tried to remember not to crush her fingers. Then he realized he couldn't, not even if he tried; her hand was carefully gentle on his. His whole body felt like the limp blood-and-matter soaked rag, hot and weak and stiff at the same time, with localized throbbing aches in his shoulder and back. He could speak, but he simply did not wish it. Even lifting his eyelids was too much effort.
"There was a fragment of the arrowhead still in the wound," Ignatius said as he worked. "But this time the probe found it as I was debriding the dead tissue. Praise to the Lord in His infinite mercy! And Praise Him that Rudi was delirious through it. It's far too close to the Great Sciatic."
"Will he heal now?" Mathilda said anxiously.
"That is with God. But there's a better chance."
Another voice: Odard's. "He needs proper food and warmth and a real bed," the Baron said. "So does Mary. My lady, let me take a little food and try to find a settlement. Ingolf, you said-"
"-that they're not all Cutters in this part of the country, south of Yellowstone, yes," the big Easterner said. "But the operative word is not all. And my information's a year out of date-a year ago, Deseret was holding out, too."
"I'm willing to chance it," Odard said.
"Are you willing to not talk, if they do take you?" Ingolf said.
"I… think so," Odard said.
"Thank you, my old friend," Mathilda said softly.
Then a complex whistle came from outside; Ignatius' hands finished fastening the band across Rudi's back, and he heard the soft wheep of a sword leaving a scabbard, and the little rustle of an arrow twitched out of a quiver.
"Gil sila erin lu e-govaded vin!" Ritva's voice, and then in English: "I've found friends!"
Then in a strong ranch-country twang: "Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha, y'all!"
"We've got to move you, Chief," Edain Aylward Mackenzie said gently.
The blue-green eyes opened, more like jewels than ever in the shockingly wasted face, and Rudi smiled at him.
"Good… glad to be… going somewhere," he said.
Edain swallowed. "It's going to hurt."
"Means I'm not dead yet!" Rudi said.
He looks different, Edain thought. Better. But still sort of… like glass.
"Glad to have you back with us, Chief," he said.
The strangers had a stretcher with long poles on the cave floor now, next to the injured man; it could be rigged as a horse litter, and it was padded with sheepskins. Together they eased him onto it; the thin face convulsed a little as they set him down.
"Sorry, Chief!" Edain said.
"Glad… to have you… there, boyo," Rudi said.
"I don't know why," he said suddenly, as if a boil had burst inside him. "I got you wounded! And-"
Rudi opened his eyes again; he looked tired, but more there. "Bullshit," he said crisply.
"What?" Edain rocked backwards, as if slapped on the cheek.
"You were going to say you couldn't save Rebecca. But you did save her, in the fight with the Rovers, remember?"
Edain shook his head. "And killed her later!"
"So you couldn't save her always. You're not going to live forever, boyo. You've saved my life more than once-but I'm not going to live forever either! Someday I'll die whatever you do, or I do. It's not just going on that makes life. That's fear talking; or the fear of losing someone. I've… wrestled Thanatos knee to knee, this last while, and I know. It's when you beat fear every day, that's when you're immortal. And I want you with me."
He reached out and caught Edain's wrist. "You're my friend… you're my comrade of the sword and my brother. My brother doesn't run out on me!"
Edain gulped, and took a deep breath. "Right, Chief. It's just.. ."
"Grief's hard."
"That it is." He straightened his shoulders. "So's the work halfway through harvest, but that never stopped me."
TheScourgeofGod
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"They're holding out there!" Sir Ivo said. "St. Michael must be looking out for them!"
"You're right," Tiphaine said.
She resisted a temptation to sip at her canteen, despite the dry dust blowing across the land. What you had to go through to pee in one of these steel suits…
Ivo crossed himself, and she reflected that sometimes it was a bit lonely, being one of the last agnostics.
"God grant that they're still alive when we get there," she said with pious hypocrisy.
Even my girlfriend's a believer, she thought. Just a different set of beliefs.
She raised her binoculars again, adjusting her visor as it went tick against the leather-covered metal of the field glasses. The thin chamois on the palms and fingers of her gauntlets let her adjust the screw easily enough. The action was nearly two miles west of the Pendleton city wall, on a hill about twelve hundred feet high. It was bare and not too steep, and several hundred of the enemy cavalry were swirling around it like bees around sugar, surging up the slope to shoot with their recurves and then back again in the quicksilver Eastern style.
The binoculars brought it suddenly, startlingly close; there were about a dozen Dunedain on their feet, hiding behind rocks and ridges, and as many wounded. A party of the Pendleton horsemen surged up to their position with shetes in hand, and then a giant figure rose beneath the hooves. A long blade glittered as it hacked through both a pony's forelegs to cast the rider screaming down at the man's feet, where he died an instant later. The rest of the Easterners rode away, shooting behind them as they retreated…
This is so tempting, she thought. What a song the bards would make of Astrid's Last Stand… that overgrown peasant Hordle with a circle of his foes at his feet and a broken sword in his hand… blood-stained ba
Her knights were out of sight from the enemy's position behind a ridge. In the little dry valley ahead waited two hundred of the CORA cowboys under Bob Brown of Seffridge Ranch. Their commander was looking back at her; she raised a gauntlet and chopped it forward with her hand extended like a blade. The cowboys had their bows out and arrows ready on the string; they started their mounts forward. The agile quarter horses managed to build speed even as they climbed the little rise ahead of them, and she could see the sudden alarm on the other side as the solid block of horses and men came over the crest.
"Yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-"
The alarm call rang out as the Easterners started to draw together to meet the CORA attack, turning westward and away from the beleaguered little party on the hill. Cow-horn trumpets blatted as the two loose swarms headed towards one another, and the Western Ranchers' shout went up:
"Cora! Coraaa!" interspersed with raw catamount shrieks.
"And about now," she murmured, and in that instant the foremost in either band rose in the stirrups and shot.
The arrowheads twinkled in the midmorning sun as they plunged downward. That was how they liked to fight out here in the cow-country, only coming in to close quarters when an enemy had been savaged by arrow-fire. Normally for heavy horse to try and strike them was like trying to beat water with a sledgehammer. Water whose spatters turned into viciously dangerous stinging wasps as it flew away.
But ah, if you can trick them into bunching up to receive a charge, she thought, with a slight cold smile, as she returned her binoculars to their padded steel case. Then it's more like using a sledgehammer on a bowl of eggs.