Tyrant

XIV

They did come at dawn. As soon as the dome of the sky above began to lighten, Brennan could see figures moving about at the base of the hill. They were not spreading out this time. Their tyrant had a new plan, and it looked to mean that thirty or forty of his feral warriors were coming straight up one flank of the hill. The blunt force of that blow would sweep the summit clean, Brennan knew.

He knelt with his bow and laid arrows flat on the ground beside him. Neatly arrayed so that they would not foul or hamper one another as he picked them up, one after another.

Marweh and a handful of others were with him. They had a few rocks to throw. Not many. One or two had spears or knives. None of them looked happy about what was happening, but nor were any crippled by fear.

Brennan saw a new kind of bravery in these commonfolk who stood alongside him. He had thought that lone Orphanidon brave for riding into the camp of those who were not his friends. He had thought, of course, every man and woman of the Free brave just for leading the lives they led. But this was different. More. This was the bravery of those cruelly undone by circumstance and ill fortune; trapped and doomed.

That made him smile as he watched those ranks of men begin their careful ascent towards him. He had always thought he would die for those who fought alongside him. He had meant the Free but he was content enough for it to be these villagers. These people so like those who would have been his family and friends, had he never left them.

And perhaps he never should have left them. Perhaps he had only ever been fit for casting and raising nets, scaling and gutting fish. And now, today, perhaps he and everyone else atop this bleak mount was going to learn the truth of that.

He glanced back over his shoulder. Lorin was getting unsteadily to his feet, leaning heavily on a couple of the children, who were trying their best to help him.

‘They’re coming,’ Brennan called.

Lorin only nodded.

The slavers had learned from the day before. They were expecting arrows. It made them careful, made them work even harder to find approaches that offered some concealment or cover. Even in the grey light, though, the hill was not generous in that regard. Brennan found his targets, and took his shots.

One, two, three. The arrows whispered through the morning, thudded into their warm new homes. Marweh threw a couple of stones, her arm strengthened by sheer anger. As far as Brennan could tell, they hit no one. But they sowed a little more caution, a little more unease among the attackers.

The slavers spread out, stretching their lines further and further until they encompassed perhaps a third of the hill. And they kept climbing. Brennan could hear someone shouting-screaming almost-furious orders. Or it could have been simple abuse; he did not understand the words. The tyrant, he guessed, and he searched eagerly for what would have been a worthy target.

Once or twice, he thought he glimpsed that shining helm. The tyrant, if it was truly him, was keeping himself well to the rear. He clung to the shelter of boulders. Cowardice and cruelty often went hand in hand to Brennan’s way of thinking. He loosed a couple of arrows in the tyrant’s direction but they rattled harmlessly off stone.

‘Move round that way,’ he murmured to some of the villagers beside him. ‘Do what you can.’

They went without protest. A spear, a knife, a handful of rocks. Bare feet. Arms and legs enfeebled by thirst and hunger. What they could do would be little enough.

That was when Brennan set down his bow. This was going to be a slaughter. It was a tale with only one ending, unless he changed its course somehow. So he would try that. If he was going to surrender his life, he was going to do it trying to kill the tyrant. He could, if nothing else, draw as many of the slavers to him as possible. He could keep them from the summit for a little longer. Perhaps someone might escape.

‘Have you still got that knife Lorin gave you?’ he asked Marweh quietly.

She did. It was tucked into her belt. She gave it to him without protest, though she wore a slightly puzzled expression. He took it in his left hand, his sword in his right. He did not look at her. He was staring down, searching for the tyrant.

‘I know you don’t want to,’ he said, ‘and I know you have no food or water. I know it’s no kind of answer. But you should all perhaps make for the plains. Scatter. Me and Lorin, we’ll be staying here.’

‘They’d hunt us all down in an hour,’ Marweh said fiercely. ‘And any they missed, the sun’d kill in a day.’

‘I know,’ nodded Brennan. ‘I just thought you might want to consider it.’

And he lurched to his feet, more than a little stiff and unsteady because of his wounds, and ran.

He had last seen the tyrant perhaps two hundred paces down below. Near some stunted bushes. That was as good a place as any to head for, so he did. The rock was hard beneath his feet. He could feel the first real suggestion of the day’s heat on his face. For a moment or two, he felt good.

An arrow whispered past his ear. Another rang off stone. A third hit him, in his left shoulder. It twisted him about slightly and he almost fell. He was barely in control in any case. He was falling as much as running.

Slavers came to meet him, but they had not been ready for this. They had not foreseen this kind of madness. Brennan laughed. He battered one man aside with nothing more than weight and speed. Another barred his path with a crude wicker shield.

His body was making Brennan’s choices for him now. He simply watched. Let it carry him. His lead foot went up and he sprang into the air. Hit the top of that flimsy shield, smashing it back into the face of its wielder. He ran over the man, slashing down with his sword as he went. The blade hit something, but he did not see what.

His injured leg was far too weakened for such acrobatics, and he landed badly. He tumbled, scraping his forehead and hand on rough stone. The impact jarred the wound in his side. The arrow in his shoulder snapped. He gave a short, sharp cry of pain. Just one.

He staggered to his feet. Kept moving. Down, always down. He saw the flash of the early sun on metal. Might be the tyrant’s helmet.

Come on, he imagined himself shouting. Come to me. Bring your blades, bring your bodies.

There was a kind of mad delight in him.

They were coming to him, as his madness desired. Many of them. And mad delight could only carry him so far.

He parried a spear thrust with the flat of his sword. Lunged in behind it with the knife, turning it as it went into the slaver’s stomach. There was a glancing blow on his back. He spun, squatting and swinging low in the hope of catching a leg. He did. The blade hacked into a slaver’s knee and cut him down.

Brennan wheeled and staggered on. He was getting dizzy. Sweat or blood was on his face. He could hear running feet, converging on him.

Come to the lion, all you hounds, he thought. I’ll die with my teeth on your neck.

He caught a sword stroke on the hand-guard of his knife. Broke his attacker’s forearm with his own sword. His left arm had been numbed by the blow though, and his knife fell from his fingers. Someone tackled him, enfolding his hips in strong arms and lifting him bodily from the ground. Throwing him down.

Brennan kicked free and rolled. A spear sparked off the stone where he had been lying. He managed to get onto one knee and somehow caught the shaft of the spear with his left hand when it came in for a second thrust. He pulled at it and stretched out his sword for the slaver to meet its point with his belly.

As the man fell, Brennan could see half a dozen more coming up behind him. Axe and mace, sword and spear. All coming for him. He was of the Free, here at the end, he thought. But even for a man of the Free, there was a limit to what wonders could be performed.

Then Lorin came on his horse. Charging wildly downhill. Scattering and trampling slavers. Flailing about almost blindly with his sword. Men fell. Lorin swayed in his saddle. Someone must have strapped him in there, Brennan thought.

He tried to rise, to follow after Lorin as man and horse went plunging on madly down the hill, but his legs were barely his own to command any more. He slumped sideways, leaning on a boulder.

Lorin brushed aside an axeman. He cut down a fleeing archer. Then his great, frightful horse put a hoof in a crevice and broke its leg and fell.

It twisted, crashing down on its side with Lorin’s leg beneath it. It rolled onto its back, crushing him. So hard and fast had been its charge that it slid like that, grinding Lorin beneath it, for another few yards. When it came to a halt, the animal screamed and writhed, trying desperately to rise. Lorin was not moving.

Brennan staggered over to them. He plunged his sword into the horse’s neck, setting his full weight onto the pommel to drive it home. The animal died.

Brennan looked at Lorin. He was dead too of course. Brennan sat with his back to the great horse’s flank. He could barely breathe. His chest heaved, and the air it hauled in and out was not enough.

And that, inevitably, was when the tyrant finally came to him. As he fought for breath, and his blood wetted the stone beneath him, and his body started to tremble, that was when the tyrant came. Brennan saw him advancing up the bare rock slope, a grimace that was half-grin, half-snarl on his face.

Cowardly as a vulture, Brennan thought. Come to pick at the broken carcass, now that others have done the hard breaking. The tyrant’s helmet shone, flicking shards of the morning sun this way and that. He held an old sword. Now that he was drawing near, Brennan could see that he had some kind of battered, dulled jerkin of chain over his breast. And pale, pale skin, like a drowned corpse.

Brennan had to lever himself up with his sword to regain his feet. It hurt a great deal. It was worth it for the passing shadow of surprise and hesitation that crossed the tyrant’s face. The man kept coming though. Brennan could guess what he saw before him: a bloodied, feeble victim. Closer to death than life. Easy.

Brennan took a couple of steps away from Lorin and his dead horse. Instinctively giving himself room to move, and to swing. Not that he had the strength to do much of either.

The slavers’ tyrant was muttering in a language Brennan did not understand. Cursing him perhaps, or promising him a painful death. Even had he understood, Brennan had nothing to say in reply.

He was not certain how long he could keep on his feet, so he went forward. No point in waiting. His sword felt heavier than it ever had before. He swung it though. He fought.

The tyrant was no trained warrior, no swordsman of skill or guile. But he was uninjured and angry, perhaps even desperate to recover some of the pride and authority that must have seeped away with the blood of his men on these barren slopes. Whatever the reason, he seemed to Brennan terribly strong, terribly fierce.

Every meeting of blades sent tremors through Brennan’s arm. Every step he took to avoid a thrust or swing felt unsteady. One of those thrusts caught him, slow-footed, and laid a cut across his upper arm but it was such a small wound among so many greater he had already taken that he barely noticed. And the tyrant paid for it. Brennan slashed under the slaver’s outstretched arm and landed a blow across his flank, his sword ringing on that vest of mail. There was not enough weight behind the stroke to do more than bruise and startle the tyrant, but it rocked him. It bought Brennan a few more heartbeats.

He felt light, as if his body or something within it was trying to rise away into the blue sky. There was a softness to his vision that took the hard edges off everything. He wondered, in a very detached way, whether this was what it felt like when life slowly loosed its hold upon a man.

The tyrant was shouting, his face contorted by anger. He rushed at Brennan, sword upraised. Brennan noticed absurdly that the man’s helmet had slipped just a little, slumping to an almost comical angle on his head. It made him want to smile.

He raised his sword to block the falling blade, and could do no more than turn it aside. He felt a glancing blow on his shoulder.

Enough, he thought. It was in the nature of the Free to find another way when things went awry. And never, ever to die easy. So be it.

He ducked his head and tackled the tyrant about the chest, trying to pin his arms to his flanks. The man was short and solidly built, but Brennan had the advantage of slightly higher ground, and of the reckless certainty that his cause was lost in any case. He bore the tyrant over backwards.

They landed heavily, locked together. Brennan’s sword sprang out of his blood-slicked grip. His hands, beneath the tyrant’s weight, rasped across the rough rock. For some reason that pain cut through where others had not, and he cried out as they rolled.

In that rolling they were somehow parted. Brennan came to rest face down, feeling warm stone against his cheek. He twisted his head. The sun’s glare all but blinded him. That and the wet smear of blood or sweat that he could feel spreading from his brow. Through it all he dimly saw a figure rising: the tyrant perhaps, though he could not be sure. He rolled onto his side, trying to get to his feet. There was nothing left though. No last store of strength to call upon.

Then the figure was gone. Or he could not see it any more at least. Brennan crawled-dragged himself, really-to a great boulder and managed to raise himself up on its face just enough that he could set his back to it. All the while, he expected the last blow to come.

He sat there, panting, and waited for it. He would have liked to do more, but he did not think he could. He did not think he could rise again.