Lady Of The Helm (Book 1) (25 page)

“We are soldiers. W
e seek to prove our mastery of our craft in the greatest battle of our time.  Yet hear I am, still fifty leagues from where that battle is being fought.  I am too late.”  There was tangible sorrow in her voice, but Kimbolt seized upon her words.

“What battle, L
ady?  Where?”

“The battle that decides a kingdom.  Grund
urg will be there and Xander with enough force that even that fool could not lose, but I am here kicking my heels in the ruins of the Salved’s great folly.”

“Who are th
ey fighting, tell me Lady, who? Has King Gregor taken the field?”

She shook her head and looked him up and down.  “There will come a time Captain, when you will have t
o make a choice, a real choice, as I have done.  I trust that when that time comes you will choose wisely.”  While he puzzled at her meaning and fretted as to the battle of which she spoke, the Medusa stood up and bid the orcs and outlanders back about their business.

“In the meantime, another of his serva
nts has failed our Master,” the Medusa said. “And so it falls to Dema to rescue the situation.  To make another desparate ride to accomplish an impossible mission. To do it in expectation of little praise or reward save her own satisfaction and the begrudging recognition of an ill-trained slave.”

“Another mission
?”

“Aye, it’ll be a while yet before you are re-united with your servant girl, Captain.  W
e ride east to prove yet again, that one should not send a little wizard to do a soldier’s work.”

“East? to Medyrsalve
?”

She ignored the question, muttering to herself. “
Odestus, how many times have I had to save your skin?”

The Sun was getting low in the western sky as Xander looked up again at the flame flecked ridge.  The day was drawing to a close and in another couple of hours the royal army would be able to melt away into the forest behind them.  But they had not got another couple of hours. 

T
he day had had its frustrations for the returning exile, the time it had taken to find the enemy, the setbacks as first the traps and then elven archers and sorcerers had disrupted the initial assault troops. The thunderous charges of the royal cavalry that had repeatedly repulsed the wolf riding orcs.  However, sheer weight of numbers had at last begun to count.  The boulder throwing ogres and the flame wielding outlander wizards had punctured great bloody holes in the battle lines atop the ridge.  Try as the enemy might to re-deploy their numbers and maintain a solid front, it was now a fragile line, at best no more than three ranks deep.   And, at last, Maelgrum himself had arrived, along with the rest of the wizards shepherding the shambling stumbling reserve force.  Xander yanked back on the bridle to steady his shying horse as the animal caught the scent of the fearsome late arrivals to the battle.  The traitor Prince grinned as he imagined the reaction on the hill when Maelgrum’s special guard advanced and kept on advancing.

He drew his sword, and swung it above his head to urge this latest attack.  Orcs and outlanders alike, parted to let the legion through.
The fading sunlight glinted off the blade as Xander urged them.  “Go on you beauties, tear them apart, bite their faces off, feast on their flesh.”

The lurching shambl
ing creatures made no reaction, oblivious to all but the wizardly will which drove them forward and upward, urging them to climb the hill and feed.

A movement on the ridge caught Xander’s eye.  The Royal cavalry moving through the ranks to make one last charge down the slope.   “You fools,” Xander murmured as four hundred horsemen charged towards the heart of Maelgrum’s army.

It was a magnificent sight, desparate heroism as the royal banner streamed out from the head of the wedge shaped formation.  Gregor himself must be riding with them, abandoning the protection of the hill for a suicidal dash into the centre of the enemy.  Xander cackled.  “Get ready to embrace death brother, it will become you.”

However, the laugh died in Xander’s throat as he realised the direction of Gregor’s charge.  It was not directed at some
nebulous centre of the enemy. It was personal.  The cavalry were charging straight for him all four hundred of them.

With a cry of alarm Xander
spurred his horse to action, and together with his outlander escort fled for shelter behind the advancing legion.  There was a cry of “Morsalve” as the wedge of cavalry crashed into the lurching creatures of the night. The momentum carried them well into and almost through the enemy ranks, but as they slowed the creatures gathered around.  The riders hacked with axe and sword, carving away through, but Xander heard the shouts of alarm as the horsemen found their opponents fought on even when limbs were lopped off.  There was the frantic neighing of horses as teeth sank into fetlock and hamstring. 

The traitor P
rince paused in his flight and looked back.  Gregor’s horsemen were surrounded by the cloying leering creations who fought with teeth and bare hands, hands that fought on even when separated from their bodies.  But even as he watched the vanguard of the cavalry hacked their way through the dreadful legion the royal standard fluttering still as a hundred or more knights came through into open country beyond the legion a mere four hundred yards from Xander’s refuge.  Shaken by, but shaking off, the frightful experience of Maelgrum’s legion the cavalry gathered their wind and resumed their personal charge after Xander.

Although his escort
of a hundred and twenty now marginally outnumbered the king’s still Xander fled from his brother’s furious charge.  He screamed at a division of resting wolf mounted orcs to come to his aid.  The orcish cavalry needed no encouragement to repay the insult of their early repulse by the Royal Guard.  With a howl they charged towards the flank of Gregor’s diminished force.  The king did not hesitate or deviate.  At a shouted order half the king’s men peeled off to meet the wolves head on.  Outnumbered as they were, the detachment could only buy the king time, but that it seemed was all Gregor wanted as his fifty knights closed in on Xander and his outlanders.

At last Xander deemed it right to make a stand. He wheeled his company round and ordered the charge.  With grim deter
mination the once exiled horsemen spurred their steeds towards the remnants of the royal guard.  Xander watched them go, watched them close the hundred yards gap and heard the clash of steed and steel as the forces collided.  He had kept his half-dozen personal body guards about him, and waited with a mix of impatience and fear lest Gregor and his men should break through this latest layer of defence.  But they did not.  The screams rang out, outlanders fell, but so too did the King’s men as Xander’s troops hacked and carved their way towards the King’s standard.

Xander spurred his horse into a trot
towards the fast fading battle, the crash and clatter of steel diminishing as the number of combatants fell.  “Hold,” Xander commanded when he saw the King’s standard fall.  Then he pushed his way though to the centre of the melee.

His troops had formed a circular enclosure, ab
out twenty yards across and there, in the centre stood Gregor, surrounded by his fallen knights.  The king’s armour and shield were dented in a dozen places and blood ran down from a puncture in his thigh. Yet the sword he swung was blood red and the bodies of a dozen outlanders were testament to the threat posed by this cornered lion.

“Xander,” Gregor cried.  “Come out, face me!”

“I am here brother,” Xander urged his horse forward into the circle.

“Aye an
’ if it did not dishonour our mother I would call you a bastard as well as a traitor.”

“Oh,
I am wholly of your blood and you of mine,” Xander replied drawing his own sword, the twin to the one Gregor carried.  “As this weapon which I recovered from that prick Prince Thren bears proof.”

“You murdering bastard.”

“I gave your son the same gift I will give you brother. A quick death!”

Gregor laughed.  “You think
you can kill me, little brother?!”

But Xander had already stung his horse to actio
n, charging at his weary siblling.  Gregor parried the first blow with his shield and, when Xander turned and charged again the King ducked to the side and drove his sword into his brother’s horse.  The animal collapsed in a heap and Xander just managed to roll free of the flailing body before Gregor was upon him, swords locked hilt to hilt.

“You struck my horse. ‘T
is against the laws of chivalry,” Xander rebuked him in genuine surprise.

“What do you know
of chivalry?” Gregor spat.

Xander managed to snap an elbow up into his brother’s face and jerk a knee into his midriff. As they rolled apart, both men scrambled to their feet, but Xander, unencumbered by any wounds
was faster.  Gregor was on his knees as his brother swung a blow at him.  The king got his battered shield in the way, but neither it nor the armour beneath could withstand the ancient enchantment of Xander’s blade.  The sword clove through shield and armour and into the flesh and bone beyond.

Everything stopped.

Xander looked at the sword buried to the hilt through his brother’s shield and announced simply, “you are dead, brother. I am now King.”

Gregor, his skin a waxy white, his
eyes already dulling, gave a bitter blood specked cough.  “I will see you in hell, Xander.” 

Enraged, Xander pulled the blade free and whirled it above his head to strike again at his dying brother.  But even as the king fell forward with a bloody cough, his body turned to dust and it was but an empty suit of armour on which Xander rained down blow upon furious blow.

Hepdida pretended to rest against the cartwheel
, eyes half closed as though asleep.  The handful of weak and wounded orcs who had been assigned to guard the baggage train were gazing towards the distant battle, some clambering onto the carts laden with Grundurg’s booty to better see the unfolding carnage.  The top of the ridge was a seething mass of bodies from which roars and wails of combat drifted on the light wind. Hepdida’s guards let fly with guttural cheers and whoops at their army’s moment of victory.  She took advantage of their distraction to bend her head and once more set to the task of chewing through the rope that tethered her to the heavily laden wagon. It was thick hemp, but her furtive gnawing had scraped away the surface threads to expose the fresh white cable beneath.

A sudden nervous
ness overcame her orcish companions who hastily dismounted from the cart or busied themselves tending to the lowing oxen. Hepdida hid the scarred portion of rope beneath her legs as Grundurg and a dozen orcs rode their baying wolves into the baggage camp.  As his steed reared and whirled, the orc chieftain used both hands to wave his latest trophies at those who had been kept from the fighting.  Hepdida did not look, but the frenzied cheering of the non-combatants suggested Grundurg had scaled new depths.

She heard the jangle of stolen jewellery on battered armour as he dismounted and drew near, but still s
he feigned an exhausted sleep, until the kick in the belly forced her into a coughing wakefulness. “Look! See what Grundurg did.”  The orc was waving two severed heads in her face, fine featured, dark skinned and sharp eared. “Grundurg kill elves, drink their blood. Plenty dead elves.”

Hepdida wanted to shut her eyes, but knew that would only earn another kicking
.  She tried to look without seeing, not letting the image on her retina register in her mind.  “Battle won. Tonight Grundurg celebrate.”  He bent close exhaling his foul breath in her face. “Grundurg celebrate, with you.”

Drunk with his part in the triumph, the Orc breathed in the heady scent of her fear.

“You are to keep me safe, the Lady said,” Hepdida stammered.  While the orc had made a point of making her witness all manner of atrocities he had not yet physically harmed her. But now there was a deeper menace in his manner and she could not help but tremble as she repeated, “the Lady Dema told you not to harm me.”

Grundurg grinned.  “Snake Lady not coming back, not now, not soon.  Snake lady for
get you by time she comes back, if she comes back. Grundurg not going to wait. Grundurg going to celebrate.”  He shook the severed elven heads for emphasis.  “Grundurg has plenty to celebrate.”

To the victors came the spoils. The undead Lord stalked the corpse littered ridge in company with Xander, Haselrig and an orcish escort.  Haselrig nervously noted the thin trails of condensation that drifted from Maelgrum’s presence, testament to some displeasure despite the total victory.

“Our lossesss are greater than they ssshould have been.
  The Lady would not have been ssso profligate with our troopsss.”

“Yet even those who have died may
be made to serve us once again.”  Xander, distracted by his own concerns, ventured an unwise opinion.  A cloud of vapour condensed immediately in Maelgrum’s wake.

“The power to raissse my legionsss is
ss not a sssubsstitute or excussse for poor generalship,” the wizard snapped; his icy tone alerted Xander to his peril.  “There are more battlesss to be fought ‘ere thisss land fallsss wholly into my power and the legionsss are not sssskilled in the sssiegecraft that we musssst yet undertake.  True ssservantsss should not presssume upon my power to make good their own manifessst failingsss.”