Chapter Fifteen #2
Unsheathing his enormous broadsword, the one with the serrated edge, he began stalking the individual groups, coming up behind the unsuspecting French soldiers and lobbing off a head or two.
God, he felt powerful when he did that. It was his favorite thing to do in battle.
When word started getting around about the English knight who was beheading men, some of the French began to flee.
Mylo, who had been fighting off a particularly vicious group, threw caution to the wind and began going for the neck like Bric was.
Soon enough, the fighting began to break up as the French began to retreat.
The River Nar ran just to the south of the priory, and Bric watched Mylo rush down to the river because there was some heavy fighting going on down there.
He lost sight of Mylo because it was so dark, so he returned to his duties of cleaning up the field of battle by dispatching any remaining fighting.
More often than not, men would simply scatter when they saw him coming, and sometimes they would scatter in the direction of the river.
Bric wasn’t entirely sure how many men were down by the river now, so he thought to take a look.
If there was more fighting going on, then he would hasten to disband it.
It was so dark down there, however, that he took some of the soldiers away from the priory entrance and had them carry torches down towards the river so he could see what was happening.
What he saw unfold was disturbing.
The French had regrouped down by the river and were fighting the de Winter army furiously.
When Bric saw this, he bellowed to the men near the priory, telling them to pass the word to send every available man down to the river.
In a rush, the English were coming, all of them rushing down to the river to engage the French who were being stubborn.
The River Nar was a wide body of water, but not very deep at all, and the foliage around it was quite heavy, making everything seem darker than it was.
Bric charged into the foliage, swinging his sword when he was certain he was swinging it at an enemy.
His horse, however, was snapping at anything that moved, French or English.
Unfortunately, the near total darkness in the river made fighting chaotic and dangerous.
Bric could only really see occasional movement, and the grunting of men, and the torches brought by the English soldiers didn’t illuminate much at all.
At one point, Bric stopped swinging his sword, fearful he was going to kill one of his own men.
He resorted to kicking and punching mostly, or knocking the heads he could see.
It was as much as he could do considering he couldn’t see anything, nor could anyone else.
It was fighting in total darkness, a deadly situation.
Light came unexpectedly when soldiers with torches suddenly appeared in the area that Bric was fighting in and he saw that he was right in the middle of the stream, with mostly French soldiers around him.
When the French saw the big English knight with the bloodied blade, they began to run, and Bric tried to catch them before they could get away.
But just as he was turning to charge after them, he heard someone yell behind him.
“Bric! Behind you!”
Bric heard Mylo’s voice in a panic. An attack was imminent and Bric could feel something off to his right, like the breeze when something rushed by, and the water splashed heavily next to him.
He heard a growl, saw the flash of a blade, and ducked low on his horse, hoping to miss the weapon that was flying out at him.
His sense of survival kicked in; determined to defend himself, Bric brought up his sword to counter, or even kill, the man attacking him.
He heard a grunt of pain a split second before he brought his sword around and plunged it into the neck and shoulder of the man who had suddenly appeared next to him.
He could see the body in the darkness, but nothing more, and at this moment, anything in the darkness was his enemy.
He wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
But he noticed too late that man next to him was on a horse.
There was also another man between them, on foot.
The man on foot fell into the river, as did the man on the horse, but Bric couldn’t tell what had happened.
He couldn’t see anything. He began screaming for light and a soldier with a torch rushed into the area and the foliage, the water, lit up with a golden glow.
Bric looked down to see a dead Frenchman lying in the water and Mylo lying on top of him with his head half-cut off.
Horror seized him.
Bric leapt from his horse, into the freezing water, screaming for the soldier with the torch to come closer.
Falling to his knees in the bloodied, cold water, he pulled Mylo up, seeing the wound in the man’s shoulder and neck and knowing he had put it there.
God help him, he knew. He could see how easily the sword had cut the flesh, something his serrated blade did easily. It was made for lobbing off heads.
“Oh, God,” he breathed. “Oh, God, no… Mylo? Can you hear me?”
Mylo was ghostly pale, with blood pouring from his neck and shoulder. His eyes opened at the sound of Bric’s voice.
“He… he was going to kill you,” he murmured. “I… had to… stop…”
“Stop what?” Bric demanded, his voice cracking. “What happened?”
“I… put myself between you and… you could not see him. I had to stop him.”
I had to stop him. The confusion, the horror Bric experience was now transforming into something unspeakable as the situation became evident. The warrior who had never shown emotion in his life on the field of battle was feeling a rush of it as he realized what had happened.
He’d killed his own man, who had been trying to save him.
“Sweet God,” he gasped. “Mylo, you yelled a warning. I could not see in the dark and I thought you were the man coming to kill me. I did not know it was you!”
Mylo tried to swallow, to breathe, but everything was cut. He was bleeding out all over Bric, his bright red blood seeping into the man’s tunic.
“I… know…” he rasped. “Not… your fault, Bric. You did not know it was… me…”
With that, he breathed his last. Bric stared at him, unable to comprehend what he had done. The fighting around him had died down, but he didn’t notice. At that moment, all he saw in the entire world was his knight in his arms.
The man he had killed.
The sound that came out of him next was something every man in the de Winter army would remember for the rest of their lives.
“No!”
It was a scream that reverberated off of the priory, startling the monks who were hanging out the windows, watching the battle dwindle.
But down in that heavily-foliaged river, Bric held Mylo against him and wept as he’d never wept in his life.
He cried for the life he took, for the man he loved who had sacrificed himself to protect him, and for a young son who would never know his father.
He wept until he could weep no more.
As he sat there in the river with Mylo’s cooling body against him, he noticed perhaps the only thing he would have noticed under the circumstances.
Somehow in the fighting, in the twisting and the turning, his talisman had managed to escape from underneath his hauberk and he could see it outlined beneath his tunic.
As he looked at it, the words inscribed on it suddenly came to mind.
A maiorem caritatum nemo habet.
Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friends.
That was what Mylo had done. He’d laid down his life so that Bric could live, and he felt painfully unworthy of those words.
Without hesitation, Bric yanked off his helm, his hauberk, and pulled off the talisman.
He put it over Mylo’s head, thinking that Mylo was much more deserving of the talisman than he was.
He’d made the greatest sacrifice of all.
Pearce, who had come upon the shocking scene of Bric and Mylo in the middle of the river, ran to the castle to tell Daveigh what had happened.
Daveigh flew away from the castle in a panic, determined to get to Bric and Mylo to see for himself what a devastated Pearce had told him.
His heart was in his throat, tears in his eyes, as dozens of his soldiers ran with him, lighting the way through the darkness.
When he finally reached the scene, the carnage was horrific.
Daveigh entered the river only to see it running red with blood, and the dead and dying littering both the river and the river bank.
It was so bloody that it was as if every man there had been through a meat grinder, and he plunged feet-first into the river, running to the spot where Bric held Mylo, both of them half-submerged in the freezing water.
When Daveigh saw what had happened, he wept, too.
Oh, God… it was hell.
But it only grew worse as the night went on.
Bric wouldn’t move and he wouldn’t let anyone take Mylo away from him.
He simply sat in that freezing river and held the knight who had tried to save his life.
That was all Bric could comprehend, and as morning began to dawn over the meadows and lands of Norfolk, Bric finally picked himself up out of that water and carried Mylo to the shore.
But he didn’t stop there.
With the dead knight in his arms, Bric began to walk. It was as if he couldn’t even function, his mind devoid of reason. All he knew was that he’d cut down his own knight, and his mind simply couldn’t accept it. He wouldn’t let the man go, and he wouldn’t mount his horse to ride back to Narborough.
All he did was walk.
All the way back to Narborough.
The army, seeing that their High Warrior was devastated beyond words, simply walked with him. Not one man mounted his horse, and not one man spoke a single word. Bric was walking home, and so would they.
They would escort him and Mylo home.
It was a tragic and poignant sight.
As Bric carried Mylo down the road, heading west as the sun rose, it was an agonizing reminder of the fragility of life.
What the French couldn’t accomplish in a day and a night of vicious fighting, and what dozens of armies over the past twenty years couldn’t do, a single stroke from a serrated broadsword managed to achieve.
The High Warrior was finally broken.