Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [126]
“Meer, I do see some odd thing out there. There’s a tall man at the back of the cavalry, like, and he’s got some kind of long pole or suchlike in his hands.”
“As long as he be not another bard to challenge my cry to the gods, I care not. Hand me that water bottle, lad.”
Jahdo unstoppered it and put it into Meer’s hands, then retrieved it when the bard was finished. Meer wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, then picked up his drum and raised it high again. Down below the walls, the infantry saw him and raised a cry, more despair than battle lust. Meer took one of those amazing breaths, pounded the drum, and began to chant. Jahdo scrunched down behind a merlon and looked out. It took him a moment to find the strange man and his gray horse. The battle line had moved up past him; except for one other fellow, mounted and holding the gray’s reins, he now stood alone.
And he had strung the bow.
“Meer!” Jahdo shrieked. “Not a pole. It be a longbow! Meer! Get down!”
In his trance of chant, the bard never heard him. Jahdo sprang up and grabbed his arm—too late. An arrow fell, silent in the shouting, and struck Meer full in the chest. The bard cried out a death shriek, delivered with all the force of his chant-trance, to ring out over the battlefield. Another arrow sped to its target and knocked Meer back. The bard twisted, shoving Jahdo behind the safety of the merlons with his last bit of life, then fell, his back arching, his arms flung out, his drum falling before him into the city as he seemed to sail down and hit the cobbles, a broken twisted thing.
Down on the battlefield, the Horsekin screamed in raw terror. The line broke, infantry churning and pulling back, horsemen turning to gallop away from the impious sight of the murder of a bard. Jahdo never knew what happened to the archer, any more than he could ever remember climbing down the ladder to the ground. Suddenly, he was running to Meer’s body, falling to his knees into a pool of blood to stare into the bard’s dead face.
“Meer!” He heard his voice wail like a stranger’s. “Meer, Meer, Meer!”
Men came running. Mallo grabbed Jahdo’s arm and hauled him up.
“Lad, lad, there’s naught you can do for him. Help me pull him away from the walls. You’ll both be trampled, staying here.”
Choking and gagging on his own tears, Jahdo followed orders. Once Meer’s body lay under the relative safety of a wagon, he fell across it and keened, sobbing out a long wordless litany of grief. Draudd and the squad from the dun ran to join him. The young warrior was sick-pale and shaking as he knelt by Meer’s corpse.
“Forgive me my jest,” he stammered. “Never did I think you’d come to harm, good bard, or I never would have mocked. Forgive me in the Otherlands tonight, when you reach them.”
As soon as he saw Meer fall, Tren slung the bow over his back and mounted, yelling at Ddary to do the same. They turned their horses and fled the field just ahead of the general rout from the east gate. Tren let his horse run where it would, following Ddary; he was weeping too hard to see or care where their retreat would take them. He had slain a bard. That the bard was a foreigner made the crime no more tolerable. He had murdered a sacrosanct man—at his Goddess’s bidding, truly, but still he had committed the worst crime in Deverry, worse even than murdering your blood kin.
“They gave me no choice.” He was howling out the words, not that anyone could hear him. “She gave me no choice.”
But his honor screamed back that he’d had a choice, that he’d taken the cursed bow and promised its price, and all for his own revenge.
When the eastern attack crumbled, the men in the southern drive found their flank unprotected and were forced to retreat as well. Cengarn’s defenders yelled and jeered as the Horsekin pulled back, screaming curses at walls and warriors alike. From her place on the catwalk near the southern gate, Jill studied the retreat. This Horsekin army was of a kind new to her. Although she’d seen organized legions down in Bardek, those were all infantry, and citizen volunteers