The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart [191]
The way grew steeper. The chestnut, sure-footed, breasted the rough track with heaving ribs and stride at last slackening to a heavy canter. Not far now. A gap in the boughs above let starlight through, and I could see ahead where a twist of the path took it round like a tunnel into yet thicker blackness. An owl cried, away to the left. From the right, another answered. The sounds burst in my brain like a war cry as the chestnut took the bend, and I hauled at his mouth, throwing my whole weight back on the rein. A better horseman could have stopped him in time. But not I, and I had left it just too late.
He pulled to a plunging, trampling stop, but travelling as he was his hoofs ploughed up the muddy track, and he hurtled half-sideways towards the tree which lay fallen full across the way. A pine, dry and long-dead, with its branches thrusting out pointed and rigid as the spikes of a cavalry trap. Too high and too dense to jump, even had it lain in the open moonlight and not just at the darkest bend in the track. The place was well chosen. To one side of the track there was a steep and rocky drop forty feet to the rush of the stream; to the other a thicket of thorn and holly, too dense for a horseman to thrust through. There was no space even to swerve. Had we gone round the corner at a gallop, the horse would have been speared on the boughs, and I myself flung headlong against their crippling spikes.
If the enemy lay hidden, expecting me to gallop hard onto the spikes, there might be a few seconds in which we could get back from the ambush and off the track into deep forest. I turned the chestnut sharply and lashed the reins down. He came round fast, rearing, scoring his side along the wall of thorns and driving the sharp end of some branch deep into my thigh. Then suddenly, as if spurred, he snorted and hurled himself forward. Under us the path broke open with a crashing of boughs. A black pit gaped. The horse lurched, pitched half down, then went over in a thrashing of hoofs. I was flung clear over his shoulder into the space between the pit and the fallen tree. I lay for a moment half-stunned, while the horse, with a heave and a scramble, floundered out of the shallow pit and stood trembling, while two men, daggers in hand, broke out of the forest and came running.
I had been flung into the deepest of the dark shadow, and I suppose I was lying so still that for the moment I was invisible. The noise the stream made drowned most other sounds, and they may have thought I had been flung straight down into the gully. One of them ran to the edge, peering downwards, while the other pushed past the horse and came warily forward to the edge of the pit.
They had not had time to dig this deep enough, only deep enough to lame the horse and to throw me. Now in the black darkness it acted as a kind of protection, preventing them both from jumping me at once. The one near me called out to his fellow, but the rush of water below us drowned the words. Then he took a cautious step forward past the pit towards me. I saw the faint glimmer of the weapon in his hand.
I rolled, got him by the ankle, and heaved. He yelled, pitching forward half into the hole, then twisted free, slashed sideways with his dagger, and rolled away quickly to his feet. The other threw a knife. It struck the tree behind me and fell somewhere. One weapon the less. But now they knew where I was. They drew back beyond the pit, one to each side of the track. In the hand of one man I saw the glint of a sword, but could see nothing of the other. There was no sound but the rush of water.
At least the narrowness of the path, while it made for a good ambush, had effectively stopped them bringing up their own horses. Mine was dead lame. Their beasts must be tethered somewhere behind them in the trees. It was impossible to scramble through