Then he paused a moment before adding, “You idiot.”
Fleece smiled weakly, and did as he was told. He didn’t want to antagonise his only friend, the only man in the army who had not yet threatened to kill him. He was sweating beneath his chain mail and his shoulders ached from its weight.
He sighed; he was already exhausted and it wasn’t mid-morning yet – the battle hadn’t even started and he needed a lie-down. This did not bode well for any heroics he might later be required to perform. Not that he was ever required to perform any heroics, unlike the men around him with their glorious names. Ranfield the Raging. Wolftooth the Cruel. Iron Guts the Bloody. If anyone would ever be suitably motivated to come up with a name for Fleece, it would probably be something along the lines of Fleece the Thoroughly Unsuited to Battle, or Fleece the Far Too Pretty to Be Hit, or, the most likely option, Fleece the Where the Hell Has He Run Off to Now?
Bravery was not one of his strong points. It wasn’t even one of his weak points. The fact of the matter was that bravery just wasn’t one of his points. During armed conflict, Fleece liked to pick a little section of the battlefield, somewhere along the edge, and pretend to be dead. He kept some fresh cow’s blood in a pouch inside his tunic, and he’d give himself a healthy splatter when he got comfortable. Then, when all the fuss was over, he would miraculously recover, and hurry back to camp with all the other survivors. It was a tricky business, and once or twice he had come close to actually encountering a living enemy, but his luck had held. So far.
He didn’t like the turn this day was taking, however. He was jammed right in the middle of ten thousand Hibernian soldiers. When Tua gave the order to advance, he’d have to slip sideways to the edge, which wasn’t going to be easy. He looked up, trying to peek over the brutish, ugly, stinking men in front of him, and saw the top of Tua’s head as he rode back towards them.
“For freedom!” Tua roared, and Fleece winced as the troops bellowed, “For Hibernia!” and then, in another bellow, even more animalistic than the first, “For the king!”
Swords were drawn and held aloft and the roaring went on and on. Fleece didn’t know how anyone could have drawn their swords when they were this tightly packed in. Leaving his in the sheath by his leg, he instead waved his little knife and shouted a bit. It was all fairly ridiculous. Getting worked up about freedom and Hibernia was one thing, but the king? The king was a fat slug who’d had his golden throne shipped over just so he could sit back in the camp and eat and drink while his loyal subjects fought and died for him. Naturally, Fleece didn’t count himself among their number.
“Advance!” General Tua roared, and the troops surged ahead violently.
Fleece was thrown forward, his face squashed against the man in front. Trying to regain his balance, his feet were clipped by the man behind so he had to take tiny quick steps. He got an elbow in the face and howled as he reached out to steady himself. His knife nicked someone as he did so and they cursed at him.
“Sorry!” he called. He could feel his face already starting to swell. He tried to slip sideways, to the edge of the throng, but there were no gaps between the hulking, shouting, grunting soldiers.
Suddenly they were moving faster, jogging, but Fleece’s feet were no longer touching the snow-covered ground. He was being carried along with them, held aloft by the huge shoulders squashing in on either side. Now he could see over the heads of the men in front. Now he could see the Fomorians, their green skins covered in armour and leathers and furs, as they sprinted towards them. He started shrieking.
The front line of Hibernian soldiers clashed with the Fomorians and Fleece jerked to a painful halt. He watched as swords cleaved skulls in two. Axes hacked at necks and arms and legs. Spears skewered. Arrows pierced. Knives sliced.
“Let me down!” Fleece screamed, but nobody heard him above the roar of their own insanity.
He struck out in desperation, heaved himself higher. Somehow he managed to clamber over the heads of his comrades-in-arms, terrified, trembling like a leaf on the surface of a fast-flowing and ill-tempered stream. Hands reached up, redirecting him, sending him straight to the front line.
“Wrong way!” he screamed. “Wrong way!”
A spear was pressed into the chest of the man beneath him and Fleece tumbled down. He was kicked and kneed and thrown about by soldiers bizarrely eager to get at the enemy. Through the gaps he could see the Fomorians – one in particular, the biggest he’d ever seen, stood out, his green skin slimy beneath burnished-red armour that was already splattered with human blood. His left foot was missing but that didn’t seem to slow him, and his headpiece was magnificent, a helmet carved into horns, a devil’s face on the head of a demon. Only one Fomorian wore such a headpiece, Fleece knew. This was Cichol Gricenchos, the Fomorian king.
A Hibernian soldier charged. Gricenchos’s sword was a massive thing of shining steel. It knocked the Hibernian’s blade from his hand and separated his head from his body in one lazy swipe, cutting through armour and chain mail like it was nothing. Two more Hibernian soldiers went at Gricenchos, and two more were dispatched with similar ease.
A circle of sorts had formed in the midst of the battle, an arena where the Fomorian king took on all comers. Fleece wondered what it felt like for the other demons to know that their leader was with them at times like these. It was probably inspiring. Not like for him and the other Hibernians with their fat slug of a leader back at camp. The only threat he’d pose to an enemy would be if he rolled over them on his way to the chicken.
A heavy wave rippled through the ranks, knocking Fleece to his knees, and then General Tua charged through the crowd on his horse, heading straight at Gricenchos.
The Fomorians screeched, maybe warning their king, maybe protesting at the unfairness of it all, but Gricenchos didn’t turn and run. Instead he stepped to one side and brought his sword round with both hands. The horse’s head flew, and General Tua was thrown from its saddle, the horse flipping over and landing on top of him. Gricenchos didn’t even do him the honour of killing the general himself. He left Tua to the stabbing of the Fomorians, and turned back to the Hibernian soldiers, awaiting his next challenger.
Fleece was sent stumbling out of the crowd. The Fomorian king looked down at him. Beneath the horned headpiece his nose was long and his mouth was wide, filled with sharp black teeth. He was not, even as far as Fomorians went, particularly handsome. Fleece clasped his hands in front of him.
“Please don’t kill me,” he whimpered.
“Coward!” Iron Guts roared, breaking away from the Hibernian men, swinging his sword for Gricenchos’s head.
The Fomorian king moved faster than Fleece would have thought possible for someone his size. Steel clashed and Gricenchos sent Iron Guts stumbling away. He brought his great sword down but this time it was Iron Guts who moved, deflecting the blade with his shield and shifting sideways, as nimble as a dancer, although Fleece would never have said that aloud. He watched the man and the demon go at it, snarling and spitting at each other, swinging savage cuts, feinting and parrying and doing all the things that Fleece had once been shown by his father, but which he had never paid that much attention to. Pity. Such a skill set would have come in very useful today.
Gricenchos battered the shield on Iron Guts’s arm, driving him to his knees, showing his back to Fleece and letting him, from his low vantage point, look right up between the scales of his attacker’s armour to the green skin beneath.
Something strange and foreign seized Fleece’s heart. Courage? Was that what he was feeling? He highly doubted it, but couldn’t think what else it could be. This
