Telamon’s arm lowered.
He stared at the girl.
“Who are you?”
He turned from the child to David and to the witch.
“Who are all of you?” the man-at-arms cried. “And how, by the sunless track to hell, has my life become so entangled with yours?”
− 21 −
THE WADI
THE PARTY WAS CROSSING A torrent when they heard horses.
David spun and saw a dozen black-hooded phantoms at the gallop, pounding across a mudflat toward the roaring watercourse.
Telamon’s company had been checked for a quarter hour by this flooded riverbed. They had roped it to fashion a crossing. The mercenary had waded over first, securing a line above the far bank. He had next carried Michael, then with David’s aid had gotten the sorceress and the girl over. The child was mounting the bank immediately above the youth. David could see her bare toes digging for purchase into the mud. The witch had climbed out before the girl. She scrambled, now, over the top of the cut. Michael knelt above her on the summit, extending a hand to help her up.
At this instant a black arrow buried itself to the vanes in the muck beside David’s cheek. Another followed, screaming past his opposite ear.
In the fight at the Narrows, time had seemed to slow. David recalled arrow shafts passing before him in their flight as if they were floating; his eye could make out every detail of shaft and fletching; he could even see the bolt flex and rotate as it flew.
This now was the opposite.
All action quickened. Minutes became seconds. Seconds compressed to instants.
David saw the leading pair of riders plunge at the full gallop into the torrent. He saw the horses’ knees churn into the mud-colored flow. He saw Telamon, calf-deep in the stream, take up that station he called “castling.”
The man-at-arms unhorsed one rider with a slash of his entrenching tool. The blow severed the man’s rein arm at the elbow.
Another swing took down the second man.
David clawed with all his strength up the bank. He clutched in his right fist the remaining pilum, the five-footer that Telamon had not jettisoned. The youth thought, I will “castle” at the peak. I will make my stand there.
In the stream Telamon had fallen upon one of the raiders he had unhorsed. From this man’s grip he wrested a Parthian-style composite bow. He stripped this same attacker of a xiphos, a Lakedaemonian-style shortsword.
The marauders galloped wide around Telamon, two on the downstream side, three on the upper.
The mercenary bawled to David, “Face toward the foe! Don’t let him see your back!”
The youth glanced for an instant only to the bank summit at his rear. He saw the witch snatching stones from the ground, bracing to hurl them. The girl too armed herself with rocks for throwing. Michael, for all his wounds, made his way to the child’s side, empty-handed, seeking to defend her with his flesh alone.
One of the black-garbed specters spilled from his mount when the beast balked at the wadi wall. David saw the rider leap powerfully free and mount to the crest on foot, sleeves billowing, a curved slashing sword in his right hand.
This demon rushed straight at David.
The youth planted both feet in the muck and braced to receive the fellow’s onrush.
The man hurtled past David.
He made for the girl.
The Nazarene defended his daughter.
Stepping into the path of the assailant, Michael received the brunt of the man’s onslaught. The pair fell and tumbled. The girl vaulted into the fray, clawing with bare hands at the attacker. The pirate sprang to his feet.
Again he flung the Nazarene aside.
Again he went after the child.
David could hear himself screaming. He felt in the flat of his palms only the buck and shiver of the pilum’s shaft as he drove the warhead with all his strength into the meat between the attacker’s shoulder blades. The iron deflected as it made contact with the fellow’s dorsal spine. David could feel its nose deviate downward and to the right as it entered the lung. The youth hurled all his weight into the thrust.
The pilum snapped at the joint where the iron met the ash.
David did not see the next two attackers. This pair too, dismissing every other of the fugitive party, rushed past seeking only the child.
The boy did not see Telamon hamstring the first of these as the man hurtled across the summit flat, then pierce the fellow’s liver from behind with a thrust of the xiphos he had taken from the first attacker in the torrent.
David did not see, across on the flat, the second black-hooded banshee stalk with furious strides upon the girl, clutching a sica dagger and bawling some unintelligible war cry. He did not see Telamon let fly two arrows in such immediate succession that the iron head of the second seemed to fly from the bowstring before the vanes of the first had cleared the horn-and-sinew of the grip.
Two more attackers fell.
Telamon mounted before David now, clambering up the bank from the torrent. The first black-robed assassin yet writhed beneath the boy, struggling to rise against the youth’s weight and the lance head of the shivered pilum. The mercenary, with two furious back-handed slashes, lopped the attacker off at the neck. David felt his pike plummet, dragged down by the weight of the collapsing foe; then Telamon’s right hand wrested him under the arm and hauled him upright.
At once David’s sight and sense returned.
He saw a sixth attacker, afoot as well, stalk directly upon the girl. The child’s father, hobbling upon limbs that could barely support his stationary weight, flung himself into the path of this man. The assassin beat Michael down with a blow of his fist. He seized the child by the scruff of her robe and lifted her before his eyes, crying some demand that was lost in the din of the torrent.
The girl spat in the killer’s face.
The man raised his blade.
Telamon stood directly behind David. The boy could hear the man-at-arms’ bowstring draw. The shaft hurtled past David’s ear, so close the boy seemed to feel the vanes themselves flick his skin. The warhead struck the black-garbed man-killer’s upper right arm, which clutched the dagger meant to open the child’s throat, and drove through its muscle and sinew into the bone of the attacker’s cheek. This it pierced as well, entering the well of the skull with a sound like a maul hammering a spike. David saw the attacker rock and shudder, then pitch sideways as his knees and shins collapsed beneath him.
Before David could command his own limbs to move, Telamon had crossed to the girl’s side. With a sweep of his right leg, he drew the child behind him, shielding her with his belly, thighs, and calves. Simultaneously his upper body, head, and eyes swung to scan the field of conflict, seeking any attacker who might still pose peril.
“Search among these!” Telamon commanded David and the others. “Find me one yet breathing.”
The mercenary lingered an instant only over Michael, enough to reckon that the Nazarene stood in no immediate hazard.
A glance to the child determined the same of her.
Telamon stood now to his full height. His chest, neck, and face were black with blood and tissue. The veins of his temples stood out like ropes. He spat, once and again, and wiped his face of mud, blood, and sand.
David felt all breath leave his lungs. Could every attacker indeed be fallen? For moments the boy could not believe the clash was over so quickly and with such finality. But Telamon’s sense, as with all matters concerning mortal strife, remained infallible. Nine black-hooded figures sprawled motionless—four in the river, two on the bank, two at the summit, with the final dagger man yet tangled limb upon limb before the trembling, wide-eyed child.