The Gold Falcon

‘Ah. Well, that’s a relief!’ Cadryn turned in the saddle. ‘Gerran, have the men make camp.’

They’d just got settled when Lord Pedrys, one of Cadryc’s vassals, rode in to join them. He brought ten men and supplies with him, and as usual, the young lord was game for any fight going. When Cadryc, Pedrys, and Gerran gathered around the tieryn’s fire to discuss plans, Pedrys had an inappropriate grin on his blandly blond face.

‘I wonder if we’ll catch them?’ Pedrys said. ‘If the bastards are this bold, we’ve got a chance.’

‘Just so,’ Cadryc said. ‘If nothing else, we can see if Lord Samyc’s still alive. He’s only got five riders in his warband, but I can’t see him sitting snug in his dun while scum raid his lands.’

‘True spoken,’ Pedrys said. ‘Five riders! And you’ve got thirty all told, and me fifteen, and we can’t even spare all of them for rides like this. How by the black hairy arse of the Lord of Hell does our gwerbret expect us to defend the valley?’

Cadryc shrugged and began chewing on the edge of his moustache. ‘We’re going to have to ask him just that. We need help, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘It’s all well and good to say that, your grace, but what can he do without an army?’

‘He’s going to cursed well have to send messengers down to Dun Deverry and beg the high king for more men.’ Cadryc slammed one fist into the palm of his other hand. ‘I don’t give a pig’s fart if it aches his heart or not.’

‘I don’t understand why it does.’ Pedrys sounded more than a little angry. ‘Ye gods, his own father was killed by Horsekin!’

‘True spoken. But the gwerbrets of Cengarn used to rule Arcodd like kings, didn’t they? Oh, they sent taxes to the high king’s chamberlain, and they made a ritual visit to court once a year, but still –’ Cadryc shrugged. ‘The king never cared what they did out here. Now – well, by the hells! Everything’s changed.’

Both Pedrys and Gerran nodded their agreement.

Some thirty years before, the high king had begun encouraging his subjects to settle the rich meadowlands of southwestern Arcodd. Doing so meant creating many a new lordship and marking out many a new rhan. Technically, of course, all these new lords owed direct fealty to the gwerbrets of Cengarn, but it was the high king, not the gwerbret, who produced the coin and the men to turn these holdings into something more than lines on a map. Royal heralds had travelled throughout Deverry, offering freehold land to farmers and craftsmen if they would emigrate to Arcodd. A good many extra sons, who stood no chance of inheriting their father’s land or guild shop, were glad to take up the challenge, and a good many extra daughters, whose dowries were doomed to be scant, were glad to marry them and emigrate as well.

Men who could ride in a warband were harder to come by, but the lords put together the biggest troops they could. Everyone remembered the Horsekin, who years before had ridden out of nowhere to besiege Cengarn itself. Yet at first, the settlement of the Melyn Valley proceeded so easily that it seemed the Horsekin had forgotten about Deverry. Farms spread out, villages grew among them. The virgin land produced splendid crops and the farmers plenty of children. It seemed that the gods had particularly blessed the valley and its new inhabitants.

Then, some fifteen years before Neb and his brother came staggering out of the forest, the raiders struck at a village near Cengarn in the first of a series of raids. Each time they slaughtered the men, took the women and children as slaves, looted, and burned what they couldn’t carry off. Finally the gwerbret in Cengarn and his loyal lords had caught them and crushed them. Gerran’s father had come home from that battle wrapped in a blanket and slung over his saddle like a sack of grain. Gerran could remember rushing out into the ward and seeing two men lifting the corpse down. His mother’s scream when she saw it still seemed to ring out, loud in his memory.

‘What’s wrong with you, captain?’ Pedrys said abruptly. ‘You look as grim as the Lord of Hell himself!’

‘My apologies, my lord,’ Gerran said. ‘I was just thinking about the raiders.’

‘That’s enough to make any man grim, truly,’ Cadryc said, then yawned. ‘We’d best get some sleep. I want to be up at dawn and riding as soon as we can.’

‘Very well, your grace.’ Gerran stood up. ‘I’ll just take a last look around the camp.’

Scattered across the meadow, most of the men were asleep in their blankets by dying campfires. The warm night was so achingly clear that the stars hung close like a ceiling of silver. Nearby, guarded by a pair of sentries, the horses stood heads down and drowsy in their hobbles. Gerran was starting out to have a word with the sentries when he saw someone coming towards him. He laid his hand on his sword hilt, but it was only the gerthddyn, his pale hair strikingly visible in the dark.

‘Lovely night, isn’t it?’ Salamander said.

Although Gerran had been thinking just that, hearing this unmanly sentiment voiced annoyed him.

‘Warm enough, I suppose,’ Gerran said. ‘Tell me somewhat. What made you ride with us?’

‘I’m not truly sure,’ Salamander said.

‘You told our lord that you wanted vengeance.’

‘Well, that’s true enough. The Horsekin killed a good friend of mine some years ago. And I’m looking for my brother, of course. You may remember that when I last passed your way, I told you –’

‘– about your brother the silver dagger. What is this? Do you think you’re going to find him just wandering around the countryside?’

‘Imph, well, you never quite know where he’ll turn up.’

Gerran waited, then realized that Salamander was going to tell him no more unless he pried.

‘Well, now that you’re here, you’re riding under my orders,’ Gerran said instead. ‘I want you to stay well back out of the way if it comes to battle.’

‘Fair enough.’ Salamander bowed, took a few steps away, then suddenly stooped down and picked something up from the grass. ‘One of the lads is getting careless. I wonder whose bridle this belongs on?’

When he held up a brass buckle, Gerran could barely see it. Salamander pressed it into his hand, then walked on with a cheery goodnight. Gerran rubbed the buckle between his fingers as he watched him go. So, he told himself, that’s why he’s so cursed odd! There’s Westfolk blood in his veins.

Around noon on the morrow, the combined warbands reached a stone marker beside the road. The tieryn called a halt to rest the horses and let the men eat a scant meal from their saddlebags. Although the cairn, a mere heap of grey stones, carried no inscriptions, those who had been let in on its secret knew that a shallow canyon nearby led due south. The road itself ended at the marker, because extending it south would have given their enemies an easy path to the tieryn’s lands.

At the head of the canyon, a small waterfall trickled down over ragged shelves of dark rock, fringed at the edges with long streamers of ferns. The men dismounted and led their horses down a narrow path to the reasonably flat floor of the canyon, where a faint trail led along the edge of a stream through pine forest. After a mile or so of this difficult travelling, the canyon walls grew lower and began to splay out. The trail widened just enough to allow the men to mount up and ride single file. They could see bright sunlight and open space ahead through the trees where the trail widened once again. Gerran yelled at his men to fall into their regular riding order, two abreast and ready for trouble, as he remarked to Lord Pedrys.

‘Do you think the Horsekin would lay an ambuscade?’ Pedrys said.

‘I don’t know, my lord, but I wouldn’t put it past them.’

In dappled sunlight the men rode through the last of the pines. No one spoke; everyone kept one hand on his sword hilt and the reins of his horse in the other. Cut stumps appeared among the grasses and weeds of second growth. One last bend in the trail brought them to a long broad valley, green with ripening wheat and meadowland. A couple of miles off to the west the Melyn ran, a thin sparkling line at this distance. Gerran could just make out a patch of black beside it – Neb’s farm, he assumed.

‘I don’t see any Horsekin,’ Cadryc remarked. ‘Don’t see much of anything but grass.’

‘True spoken, your grace,’ Gerran said. ‘Most likely the bastards are long gone.’

‘We’ve got to get more fighting men down here. All there is to it!’

‘Or else stop these cursed raids once and for all, your grace,’ Gerran said. ‘If the king would lend us an army –’

‘That’s in the laps of the gods,’ Cadryc said. ‘We’ll worry about the grand schemes later. We’ve got a hard job to do right now.’

With a wave of his arm the tieryn led them forward. They rode on down to the smoking tangle of wood and ashes that had once been Brwn’s farm. The fire had leapt to the apple tree outside the earthen wall and left it as black and gaunt as a dead sentry, but the damp grass still grew green beyond. Nearby lay the corpse of a tall, burly man, its head torn half off its shoulders. In the hot sun he lay swollen and stinking. Birds and foxes had eaten a good bit of him. Salamander rode up to join Gerran and the noble-born.

‘Neb’s uncle,’ Salamander said. ‘What’s left fits the description anyway.’

‘Let’s get him buried,’ Cadryc said. ‘There’s naught else to do for him.’

‘We might as well wait and dig one long ditch,’ Pedrys said. ‘I’ll wager there’s more dead men ahead of us.’

Unfortunately, Pedrys had spoken the truth. When they rode up to the ruins of the village, they found the first corpses about three hundred yards from the bridge. Four men lay in a straggling line, cut down as they tried to flee. Another twelve lay in the village square, either rotting and spongy or half-burnt. The latter had most likely been killed in their houses, then caught under burning beams and walls.

‘But who pulled them free?’ Pedrys said. ‘What is this? Did the raiders want to count their kills?’

‘Most likely they just wanted to make sure they’d slaughtered the lot,’ Gerran said.

‘If so, they did a bad job of it,’ Salamander said. ‘Neb told me how many men and lads were in the village, you see. The women and children are long gone by now, of course, prize booty, all of them. So there should be twenty dead, not counting Neb’s uncle.’

‘Then that leaves four men missing,’ Pedrys said. ‘Maybe they got away in time.’