Chapter two
Concerning feet caught in stirrups
Seg shot. As always, he shot superbly. Four shafts spat from his bow, rose-feathered slivers of death. Four flutsmen screeched and toppled to hang from their harness, the clerketers strapped about them, their weapons falling away beneath.
The birds’ wingbeats thrashed the air. Dust spumed. Some flutsmen circled, trying to shoot with their crossbows into the confusion. Some of my lads fell.
The majority of these aerial bandits, seeing the great preponderance of numbers on their side, just landed their fluttrells and jumped off ready to fight.
I, Dray Prescot, was not prepared to let any foeman, particularly not these unhanged rasts of the air, dictate the tactics of a fight. They might land and hop off their birds and prepare themselves to chop us up. Nath might very well have placed our lads in defensive positions, the proper course at the beginning when we expected to be shafted. Now, though, the situation was different...
There is something revolting about the easy, leisurely way some people prepare to kill others. This is nothing to do with the careful preparations that must be made, for killing is an arduous task, and not one to be undertaken lightly. No, I mean in these flutsmen you could almost see them licking their lips as they dismounted and drew their weapons for ground work and so, settling themselves, decided at last to advance and finish toying with us, ending their pleasurable anticipation for the real thing.
Well, they’d get no time allowed by me, no, by the stinking eyeballs and suppurating nostrils of Makki Grodno!
“Form!” I screeched it out, hard and high. Nath jerked as though I’d goosed him. “Form line, two ranks deep.Bratch!”
The lads here, many of my bodyguard corps, many from the Phalanx, were what one could call elite quality.
They bratched. They formed a two-deep line. I had no time to think of the panache of it, of the show-off I must appear. I leaped to front and center, yelling words like “Vallia! Charge! Get stuck into ’em!”
With a whooping yell we simply rushed pell-mell on the bunch of flutsmen as they were in the process of dismounting and thinking pleasant thoughts about carving us up.
They had not expected this reaction.
They were not panicked. Oh, no, flutsmen were not riff-raff. They partitioned off the sky to their own nefarious ends, and whenever we came across them we put them down. But they would not run away just because we charged them.
They usually had the pickings of fine weapons. Their crossbows could have been deadly; but I had had long experience of flutsmen and knew that once the crossbow was discharged the fighting fever of the fellow astride his fluttrell wouldn’t allow him time or patience to reload. This was a common tactic with them, as I knew. And here and now most of them had just landed to fight. Their weaponry would be the
