Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [119]
They were outnumbered, sure enough, but the pass was too narrow for the bandits to mob them with their superior strength. The enemy were poorly armed, too, mostly wearing tacked-together bits of leather and splint, with only here and there a bit of chain. They had also never faced a berserker like Rhodry, who howled and yelped with laughter as he slashed into them. In utter silence Jill faced off with one man, slashed under his clumsy strike, and caught him full on his unarmored chest. Blood welled up through his shirt as he fell over his horse’s neck. The horse beside him reared, trying to avoid the corpse, but her battle-trained Sunrise merely danced by and pressed on. As the rearing horse came down, Jill gave a good strike at its rider. She stabbed him in the side just next to the edge of his leather cuirass.
Suddenly she felt a hard blow on her back, turned by the mail, but it half knocked the breath out of her. She had gone in too far. Blindly she swung around and caught a second blow on her shield just barely in time. While Sunrise tried to turn in the pressing fray she slashed out, parrying more than striking. When she heard Rhodry’s demon laughter coming toward her, she fought even harder, swinging this way and that in the saddle, parrying every blow that came her way, while Sunrise dodged and bobbed and bit viciously at the horses round him. The laughter howled closer and closer, shrieking above the shouts and the war cries; then the man at her flank went down, his neck split by Rhodry’s sword. He was through, and they fought side by side, stabbing as they worked free of the pack. Suddenly a bandit pulled free and fled down the pass away from Rhodry’s god-touched laughter. Screaming, another followed. With all the typical courage of their kind, the bandits broke, shoving and jostling each other as they turned from the fight.
“Let them go!” Rhodry yelled. “Fighting behind!”
His laughter wailed again as they wheeled and charged back to the caravan, where a few bandits had broken through the line. Jill saw one of their young guards fighting desperately to keep between Seryl and a hard-slashing bandit. Just as Sunrise carried Jill up, the bandit killed the lad. With a howl of rage Jill avenged him with a stab in the back that knocked the swine off his horse. When the other bandits tried to flee, Rhodry and the last two guards pulled round to cut them down. Jill grabbed the reins of Seryl’s horse. His left arm was bleeding from a long slice, and he was slumped over his saddle peak.
“I never thought I’d see the day when a lass would save my life,” he whispered. “But my thanks, silver dagger.”
Calming the panicked mules was almost a harder fight than the battle. At last those of the muleteers left alive beat and coaxed them into some kind of order, a huddled, miserable herd in the middle of the pass. Jill did what she could for the wounded while Rhodry and the guards searched through the corpses for anyone left alive. Their own men they brought to her, but the bandits they killed, slitting their throats as calmly as the king’s executioner. Jill had just finished bandaging the last wounded muleteer when they carried over Seryl’s manservant. He’d fallen from his horse and been trampled. Although he was still alive, he was spitting up blood, and both his legs were broken.
“Ah, ye gods!” Seryl groaned. “My poor Namydd.”
The lad looked up with eyes that obviously didn’t recognize him.
“We can’t move him,” Seryl snapped. “It would kill him.”
“He’s going to die anyway,” Jill said. “I’m sorry, good sir, but that’s the hard truth of it.”
Seryl groaned again and ran his hand through