A Highlander’s Terror_A Medieval Scottish Romance Story Page 8

  He watched Sir Ivan and then defended himself again, again, and once more. Then, it seemed, there were no more assailants. Which was not a bad thing because his arm was tiring. He looked at his commander.

  “Finish it,” he said grimly.

  Rufus nodded and headed into the fray obediently. It was then that the blade came whistling from the side and he had only a moment to raise his own and block it before he went unheralded into the dark.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ON THE FIELD

  ON THE FIELD

  Amabel woke up. She realized she had been resting in her bedchamber. She blinked. The day had darkened to evening, the sun inking the horizon with red dye. She sat.

  Her memory fed her information segment-by-segment. She recalled being on a battlefield, with the clash and scream of fighting around her. She felt concern at the losses. She felt strength. She felt a sudden stab and then there was black.

  “Rufus.”

  She stood up and ran to the door. She felt a hand catch her forearm.

  “Milady,” a soothing voice said. Glenna came through the door. “Milady. What's going amiss?”

  Amabel shook her head to clear it. She wasn't sure. She breathed in deeply, realizing how challenging it was going to be to explain this to her.

  “I saw Rufus,” she explained. “The battle. Wounded.”

  Glenna made a soothing noise in her throat that was meant to be gentling, but made Amabel more overwrought.

  “Glenna!” she said, distressed. She let her lead her to a seat and then she sat there, her face covered in her palms as she tried to blur out the horror of it all.

  “Now, tell, please. Tell me, milady. You saw a wounding. Yes?”

  Amabel sighed. She realized she'd not told Glenna of Rufus. How would she know who he was? She breathed in deeply and tried to find reason.

  “You saw me dancing at the ball, yes? There was a man there...a tall man, with a dark eye-mask.” When Glenna nodded, she continued. “That's Sir Rufus Invermore. He's a swordsman,” she explained unnecessarily. She sighed. She knew she was babbling but didn't know what to say. How was she supposed to tell Glenna everything? That for some unbidden reason she'd seen a vision for a stranger, a vision in which he was badly harmed. Then, unbidden again, she'd dreamed of him. Felt the wounding. Been there beside him? She shook her head. “Glenna?”

  “I don't care what it is you tell me,” she said gently. “How barmy it is. I believe this.”

  Amabel nodded. Glenna, of all people, would believe. She drew in a shaky breath and sighed. “I saw him wounded. We must help.”

  Glenna frowned. “What could we do?”

  Amabel shook her head. “I don't know.”

  She had no idea where the men were. How far away. The battle had happened sometime before sunset. Therefore, they knew the place was within a day's reaching, but had no idea in which direction it could happen.

  “I have a notion,” Glenna began.

  “Mm?”

  “I know a fellow,” she said hesitatingly, “he works with the guard here. I could ask him.”

  “Oh, Glenn!” Amabel said, affectionately shortening her forename as she took her cheeks in her hand, squeezing them playfully. “Thank you!”

  Glenna blushed and sighed. “Well then, milady.”

  “Well then.”

  “We both made significant acquaintances.”

  Amabel chuckled. “Indeed so, it seems.”

  Glenna smiled. “But how can...”

  “Whist, Glenn,” Amabel chuckled, flapping a hand at her questioning. “I don't know.”

  She knew her companion was going to ask her something she couldn't answer, or didn't wish to think about – something along the lines of whether or not she could see her way clear to making her nobleman parents accept a soldier as a wooer, but she wasn't considering it.

  Whatever would happen, it would happen somehow. She wasn't going to contemplate it.

  All she was going to do was make sure that he lived.

  She drew in a long shuddered breath.

  “Right,” she said to Glenna. “We must prepare.”

  Glenna nodded. “I'll ask Ron if he knows where they are.”

  “Yes,” Amabel said, nodding. “Please do.”

  They made their plans. They packed a traveling pack which would go on Amabel's horse. Glenna would ride with her or on a palfrey they would borrow – and they would head out to the site of battle.

  As she checked through their supplies, Amabel wrinkled her nose discontentedly. They would need more.

  “Glenna?”

  “Yes, milady?” Glenna had returned from the practice yard where she had consulted with their informant and was busily organizing their clothes for the ride.

  “Will you cut up that old skirt of mine? The white wool under-dress? I think we need wool wads.”

  “Yes, milady.”

  Wordlessly, knowing it was another thing to try and explain and not caring, they carved up the under-skirt and packed it with the supplies.

  They would need all the bandages. Amabel had seen a lot of damage. They were riding to assuage it.

  Pain gnawed into Rufus. Something had a hold of his head and was savaging it. He groaned and batted out with his hand, trying to knock away the hidden thing that was mauling him, cutting down into the muscles of his jaw, making him want to yell or hit something.

  “I would lie still, sir,” a voice, thin and cool, said somewhere in the region over left side. He winced. “Exactly. I think it wise not to molest your physician.”

  Physician. He tried to make sense of the scenario. He had thought he was riding in the woods, thought he'd fallen from his hunting stallion and been caught by whatever it was – a boar, possibly – that chased him. He breathed in. The place where he was smelled of spirits, of some strange acid smell and dried herbs. More distantly it smelled of smoke and, closer and worse, like blood, recently flowed.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “You're here, in the healer's tent, to be precise. You are roughly in the center of a field that lies about fifteen miles south and west of Edinburgh, in a place called Glennock. Yes, I know none of that makes any sense to you right now. But that was the precise answer. The less precise, but more correct,” he paused, “solution to this query, is that you were recently unconscious, and now you find yourself awake, with a scalp injury and me to tend it. If I am successful, you will soon be on your way out of the tent. Is that a satisfactory reply?”

  He lay where he was and tried not to notice the intense torment of whatever was wrong with his forehead. The physician was doing something there that made him want to cry in agony.

  “I suppose so,” he said.

  “Good,” the physician replied. He seemed to decide to relieve the agony somewhat, as he reached to his left – Rufus heard things rattle on a table back there – and the agony stopped, to be replaced with pleasant warmth.

  “Am I working?”

  “Probably not,” the physician continued. He had a thin, spare voice, as if the effort and pleasure of talking were things he eschewed usually. He spoke flatly and only to answer his questions. “I won't ask if you can remember what happened. That is for you to find out later. I suspect your brain is addled somewhat. But now,” he added, with a gentle touch to the other side of his head, as if checking all was well there also, “you can rest.”

  “Thank you.”

  Rufus lay back for a moment, listening to the sound of the field. It was night, or close enough, for he could hear crickets chirping and he could smell wood-smoke that seemed to him to mean someone was roasting dinner. He pretended he didn't hear the noises close by – the whimpers and grunts of men in torment. The physician had gone away as silently as he had arrived.

  He knew the healer's tent was a grim place. In his years in the Holy Land he had learned that it was a place of blood, burning and wounding. A place where it often took three men to hold a fourth down while a physician worked on him, removing
barbs or stitching ragged slash-wounds. He tried not to go there if it was avoidable.

  “Now I wonder if I can sit.”

  He sighed. Talking aloud was painful – the cut extended to his jawline and he knew he must be stretching it every time he spoke. However, he had to move. It was better than staying here in the fetid, pain-infused semi-dark. He also had to find out what had happened.

  If we lost, I could still be being tended by the healer.

  It was probable that all the wounded would have been gathered up by whichever friars or monks supervised the local hospital. He himself had ended up sharing a ward with an ostensible enemy once, and was sure it happened more often. The Church tended to care equally for everyone. Except for the Infidel, of course. Though in the Levant he had not been wounded badly enough to discover whether or not there, too, monks took equal mercy for both.

  I should find out more.

  He slid his legs to the end of the bed, wincing as he put weight on them. Nothing happened.

  No injuries there.

  He stood, stretching to his hands, making his fingers cramp and uncurl as he flexed his arms. He was fine insofar as hands and fingers went.

  “All there, too.”

  No fingers missing, no cuts or scratches on his arms, even. He stared down in some surprise at his hands with their flat, wide knuckles, seeming amazed to see them again.

  Well, that all works. Now. Let's find information.

  He tried not to look around the tent. He had to, though – someone he knew might be here. The sight of the raw, blood-gelled injuries turned his stomach. It was worse because of the smell – the horrible smell of blood, clinging and metallic, which tore at the air and made his stomach clench.

  A man opposite him let out a rattling breath. He made himself look at the man, who had a bandage over his head, eye swollen. He heard him draw in a slow breath and then cough. He sat up.

  “Rufus?”

  He stared. “Is it you?”

  The man chuckled. “Well, if that isn't the best greeting I ever received...”

  Rufus sighed in disbelief. It was him! He was there with his head wrapped in a cloth, his eye swollen and his arm bandaged, but it was definitely the man he had seen before all of the madness started. Blanchard.

  “What happened here?” he asked. He pointed to the side of his head, forgetting that he was wounded there too. He winced.

  His friend smiled. “You, too, eh?”

  Rufus nodded. “Seems like that. Wish I could remember what happened.” All he could remember was being on the battlefield – the disorganization and shouting. He could remember nothing of what happened.

  “Well, I saw a bit,” Blanchard replied. “I saw you slide off your horse and march off to the front, finishing people off side to side. You're quite a phenomenon.”

  Rufus planted himself on the bench hesitantly. “I don't know,” he dismissed his friend's praise. “You remember anything about what happened with you?”

  Blanchard grinned. “I fell out the saddle and got hit between the eyes with a sword afore I got going. Saw you hurry off before I got started and reckoned I didn't want to get beaten to the front by you,” he added. “Does wonders for a man's career, mowing through the battle like that...” He trailed off, seemingly impressed.

  The wound on his head made Rufus wince. He felt sick. He at least knew what had happened to his friend and a bit of his own recent history. He just didn't remember what happened with their force.

  “What happened?” he asked, his hand pointing in the direction of the outdoors.

  Blanchard let out a breath. “We were the emerging winners,” he said finally. “But it was a close thing. The commander's somewhere in his tent. He was wounded, too.”

  “Oh?” That stirred something in Rufus. He seemed to recall their grizzled commanding-officer standing up.

  “He's out there,” he said, gesturing with his head toward the tent. He winced, evidently in some pain from his sore head.

  “I don't know if I'm up to heading back out,” he said, sighing. “I am capable of walking a straight line, but only over short time. I don't think I'm up to roaming around in the dark with things to trip over, searching for the commander tent.”

  Blanchard laughed. “I agree. I'm not about to leave. Besides, it's warm here.”

  It was, Rufus had to admit. The lamps were here, and someone had put coals in a wire surround, the glowing embers providing the air with ruddy heat. It was likely cold outside, the air shivering in through the tent to make the lamplight waver.

  “What should we do?”

  Blanchard grinned. “Hole up. Go to sleep. Might as well take advantage of having a comfy bed under one, hey?”

  Rufus chuckled. He couldn't sleep here. The tent was warm and well-lit, but the stench of wounds and the groans of pain were in it. He had too many memories of such. As well as no desire to spend the night here with them.

  He stretched, wincing as the wound ached wretchedly. “I'll go and have a look about out there...make a foray. It can't hurt, eh?”

  Blanchard gave a frown. On his swollen, pained face it was an unquiet look. However, he grinned. “Well, it might just.”

  In reply, Rufus snorted. “Only if I land on my head.”

  “That's what I mean.”

  Rufus sighed. He didn't make any answers and headed off into the growing dark. I don't want to think about the possibility of landing on my head. If I do, I might lie out here in the dark and be found in the morning, frozen and half-dead.

  As he reached the tent flap he heard a noise. It sounded as if there was a fight outside the door. He stiffened and listened, worried about what it might be. A scuffle? A raid?

  “Absolutely not,” someone was saying. He recognized the measured tones of a clergyman. “On no account could I allow such indecency.”

  “Indecency!” a voice intoned. “You will keep a mannerly tongue between your teeth, sir priest. I will have you know you will answer for that insinuation. Now let me enter.”

  He hissed in a breath. It wasn't possible. He must be asleep. Something had dislodged his sense and made him see things – as he thought, something had knocked him into final insanity.

  It sounded as if it was her.

  “My lady?”

  “No,” someone was saying, the priest again. “You will wait...”

  “You will wait.” Then there she was.

  Rufus stared at her. She was in the door with the lamplight warm on that pale white skin, her dark curling hair loose around her shoulders. She was wearing a long checked gown and a white under-shift and she had a pack slung over one arm. She was perched on sturdy boots, the extra height making her almost up to his nose, and she had a streak of dirt along one arm. She was lovely.

  “My lady?”

  “Rufus.”

  She looked at him and he looked back. Her blue eyes went enormous. Then with no further ado and threatening the priest with a death of shock, she hugged him.

  “Rufus,” she said. “Thank everything that's holy that you're alive. Thank God!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE AFTERMATH

  THE AFTERMATH

  The next day, Amabel and Glenna set to work. After a night passed comfortably in the nearby town, she and her companion rode to the flat piece of land where the battle had been fought. She looked around the healer's tent with distaste.

  “This place is a slaughterhouse.”

  The physician was oddly silent. Amabel had given him a horrid look when she first entered, and she felt she had managed to quash him. She had the suspicion it was more the shock of having a non-male person intrude in his personal domain that did the quashing almost as much as her look alone. No matter – she didn't mind what it was. He was mute and that was enough.

  Or, as someone might say, he's haulding his whist.

  She chuckled to herself. Glenna was at her shoulder.

  “Glenna, we're staying on.”

  Glenna sounded enthused. “Yes,
milady. What's happening?”

  As Amabel surveyed the tent she found orders springing to her as she saw what needed to be done. She had never known she contained such a natural authority, but apparently she did.

  “We need to move that bed out from in the sun. Gracious! However, that man will fry if he lies there much longer. He can't move himself. In addition, we need to put a poultice on that burn. And will someone please wash that table, the stench is appalling.”

  As she snapped out orders, she was amazed to see them being followed. Three men who had apparently been better healed or who were here visiting started to shift the stretcher from under the tent's edging. Glenna ran to tend the man whose wounds inflicted by the cautery were raw and oozing. A knight came to wash the table.

  She herself turned to Rufus. “How many of these men can walk?”

  Rufus looked at her as if she had spoken in German. Then he shrugged. “Men?”

  A few heads stared out.

  “Yes?”

  “How many of you can stand. Just try and stay standing when you manage.”

  Amabel blinked. That was simple but smart. She turned her attention to the ones who couldn't move. She winced, seeing a man who had massive wounds on his arm. She bent down to look at the injury, holding her breath at the smell of raw flesh.

  I am glad that my mother always kept me informed.

  She had seen wounds before and heard her mother's descriptions of the wounds that followed skirmishes and clashes on their lands. None of this was new to her, for which she was grateful. She reached into her basket for a bread poultice.

  “Here,” she said gently, as she applied it to raw and bleeding cuts. “It may hurt but hold it on.”

  The soldier, who she was surprised to see was even younger than herself, nodded. “Thank you, ma'am.”

  Amabel smiled. “Not at all. Now, we'll bind that on. Hold still now.”

  She worked busily, tying on poultices and overseeing the tent as she did so. She ordered water dispensed to all the men and told the three who sat around the worst-afflicted man's place to help them drink.