Some of the men had experience with this kind of fighting. They were also at least somewhat familiar with night missions. They had been hoisted out of their beds more than once during the time they’d spent at Nesson, and set to work in the dark. Those were their advantages, alongside the hoped for element of surprise that would leave their attackers scrambling and disorganised.
But there had been no time for scouts, and of the men in the troop, only Huet had even a hazy knowledge of this particular piece of ground. Lack of familiarity with the terrain had been a concern from the start. And as they rode, carts and wagons trundling behind, cheerfully making the right amount of muted noise to announce their presence to anyone scouting for them, the ground around them changed. Granite cliffs heaved up on either side, and the road was becoming a mountain road, with a gentle but steepening slope to the left and a sheer rock face to the right.
It was different enough from the terrain that Huet had imperfectly described to cause concern. Damen looked again at the cliffs and realised his concentration was slipping. It occurred to him that it was his second night in a row without sleep. He shook his head to clear it.
It was not the right terrain for an ambush, or at least, not the type of ambush for which they had prepared. There was no place in the terrain above them for any group of sufficient size to lie in wait with bows, nor could men ride down those cliffs to attack. And no one in their right mind would attack from below. Something was wrong.
He reined his horse in, hard, suddenly aware of the true danger of this location.
‘Stop!’ He sent up the call. ‘We need to get off the road. Leave the wagons and ride for that tree line. Now.’ He saw the flash of confusion in Lazar’s eyes and thought for a single heart-pounding second that his order might not be followed—despite the authority that Laurent had lent him for this mission—because he was a slave. But his words carried. Lazar was the first to move, then the others followed. First the tail of the column, reining around the wagons, then the middle section, and finally the head. Too slow, thought Damen, as they struggled past the abandoned wagons.
A moment later, they heard the sound.
It was not the hiss and spit of arrows or the metallic sound of swords. Instead, there was a faint rumbling, a sound familiar to Damen, who had grown up on the cliffs of Ios, the high white cliffs that every now and again during his childhood would crack, break off and tumble into the sea.
It was a rockfall.
‘Ride!’ went the call, and the individuals of the troop became a single lurching, streaming mass of horseflesh pounding towards the trees.
The first of the men reached the tree line moments before the sound became a roar, the crack and crash of stones, of huge granite boulders large enough to smash into other parts of the cliff and send them driving downwards. The thundering sound, echoing off the walls of the mountain, was frightening and panicked the horses almost more than the boulders at their heels. It was as though the whole surface of the cliff loosened, dissolved into a liquid surface: a rain of stone, a rolling wave of stone.
Wheeling, racing, plunging into the trees, not everyone saw the rockfall hit the road where they had been moments before, cutting them off from the wagons, but falling short of the tree line, as Damen had predicted.
As the dust cleared, the men, coughing, steadied their horses and found their stirrups. Looking about themselves, they found they were intact in number. And while they were cut off from the wagons, they were not cut off from their Prince and the other half of their band, as they w
ould have been if not for this ride, the rockfall slicing the road.
Damen dug in his spurs and forced his horse back to the edge of the road, giving the order for the company to ride for their Prince.
It was a hard, breathless ride. They arrived at the distant ridge of black trees just in time to see a stream of black shapes detach from the ridge and attack the Prince’s convoy, in a manoeuvre that was supposed to split the Prince’s troop in half, but which was prevented from doing so by Damen and the fifty horse he brought with him, riding into their attack, wrecking their lines and disrupting their momentum.
And then they were in the thick of it, fighting.
In the dense forest of slash and thrust, Damen saw that their attackers were indeed mercenaries, and that after the initial attack they had little in the way of tactics holding them together. Whether this disorganisation was indeed due to the speed with which they had been forced to muster, he couldn’t know. But certainly they had been surprised by the arrival of Damen and his men.
Their own lines held, their discipline held. Damen took point and saw Jord and Lazar close by, on the front. He caught a glimpse of Aimeric, looking pinched and white, but fighting with the same determination he had shown during the drills when he had pushed himself almost to exhaustion to keep up with the other men.
Their attackers fell back, or simply fell. Pulling his sword from the man who had tried to knife him, Damen saw the mercenary at his right fall victim to a precise killing.
‘I thought you were supposed to be the bait,’ said Laurent.
‘There was a change of plan,’ said Damen.
There was another brief burst of close fighting. He felt the shift, the moment when the fight was won. ‘Form up. Make a line,’ Jord was saying. Of the attackers, most were dead. Some had surrendered.
It was over; perched on the side of a mountain, they had won.
A cheer went up, and even Damen, whose standards in these situations were exacting, found he was satisfied with the outcome, considering the quality of the troop and the fighting conditions. This was a job well done.
When the lines were formed and heads were counted it turned out they had only lost two men. Apart from that, a few slices, a few cuts. It would give Paschal something to do, the men said. Victory buoyed everyone. Not even the revelation that they must now dig out their supplies and see about making camp could dampen the happy spirits of the men. Those who had ridden with Damen were particularly proud; they hammered each other on the back and boasted to the others about their escape from the rockfall, which, when they returned to the site to see about unearthing the wagons, everyone agreed was impressive.
In fact, only one of the wagons was smashed beyond repair. It was not the one that held the food or the mouth-rasping wine, another cause for cheer. This time the men hammered Damen on the back. He had achieved new status among them as the quick thinker who had saved half the men and all of the wine. They made camp in record time, and when Damen looked out at the neat lines of the tents, he found himself smiling.
* * *
It was not all revelry and relaxation, as there was inventory to be made, repairs to be started, outriders to be assigned, and men to be set on guard. But the campfires were lit, the wine was passed around, and the mood was jovial.
Caught between duties, Damen saw Laurent speaking with Jord on the far side of the camp, and when Laurent’s business with Jord was done, he made his way over.