Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [151]
Foix gave him a salute, drew his sword, and wheeled his horse around. The forward four men from the Daughter’s Order drew their weapons and fell in to either side of him, preparing to clear the way for the wagon behind them. It was not possible to see how much of the Jokonan column had already debouched onto the curving road ahead, though the number still to come, strung back through the brush on the valley’s steep side to their left, seemed to go on and on. Goram whipped up his team. The wagon groaned and began to rumble forward.
The Jokonans nearest them looked over their shoulders to see what was bearing down on them from behind. Shouts, the ring of weapons being drawn, the squeals of horses jerked around and spurred forward.
Arhys grabbed Ista by the upper arm and hustled her back to relative cover in the wagon’s center. The wagon bed bumped and rocked, and Ista dropped to her knees before she was pitched onto them. Illvin’s parade horse trotted beside the wagon, breaking into its rocking canter as the dray horses picked up speed. Illvin leaned over and shouted, “Arhys! I need a weapon!” His empty hand extended in demand toward his brother, who looked frantically around. Illvin glanced ahead. “Quickly!”
With a curse, Arhys snatched up the only pointed object in view, a pitchfork that had been fastened along the wagon bed’s inner wall. He swung it out to Illvin, who glared at his brother in extreme exasperation but grabbed it anyway, sweeping it around prongs forward. “I was thinking of a sword.”
“Sorry,” said Arhys, drawing his. “It’s taken. I need a horse.” His head swiveled to Liss, cantering along the opposite side.
“No, Arhys!” Illvin shouted over the rumbling of the wagon, the quickening hoofbeats, and the yells rising ahead. “Stay back! Have some sense!” He pointed to the unconscious Cattilara.
Arhys’s head jerked back, and he drew breath through his teeth not for air but for anguish, as he realized just whose body must now bear his battle risks.
“Stay by the royina! Ah. Here comes my sword—!” Illvin clapped his borrowed boots to his white horse’s sides; the beast’s broad haunches bunched, and it sprang forward with a startling bound. Illvin’s linen bed robe flapped open on his bare torso and fluttered in his wake. His tied-back hair streamed out behind him.
Ista clutched the side boards and stared out openmouthed. Wrong horse, wrong weapon, wrong armor—half naked qualified as wrong armor, did it not?—yelling like a madman . . . Illvin wrapped his right arm around the pitchfork and pointed it like a lance at the Jokonan soldier bearing down upon him, sword upraised. At the last moment, at some hidden pressure from Illvin’s knee, the heavy white horse swerved, caroming into the Jokonan’s mount. The pitchfork tines slid up on either side of the enemy’s descending sword wrist. A twist, a yank, a snatch, and Illvin was riding onward with the hilt clutched in his other hand while the Jokonan tumbled from his saddle and was half trampled by the horses of Foix’s two rear guards galloping after them. Illvin gave a whoop of triumph and brandished the sword, but, with a thoughtful glance at the humble tool gripped under his other arm, also hung on to the pitchfork.
Although their noisy charge succeeded in driving the Jokonans immediately ahead of them off the road and scattering them to the sides, the enemy cavalrymen formed up rapidly again behind and began to give chase. There seemed nothing aboard to throw at them but four trunks and some hard bread crusts, though Arhys’s page groped frantically through the gear for some better missiles. Cattilara’s woman clutched her mistress’s flaccid body and wailed. Galloping along on the wagon’s right, Liss had drawn her new dagger, but