Chapter 9 #2
When he looked back, the mules had closed the lane completely. Dawud's guards were on the far side of them, shouting, trying to push through, going nowhere.
The water carrier turned into an alley and stopped.
Torstein came round the corner a heartbeat behind Samira and saw why.
The alley was blind. It ended in a high wall. Four men stood waiting in front of it, cloaked, faces wrapped, and as Torstein watched, two more stepped into the mouth of the alley behind them.
Samira had already drawn her blade from her sleeve.
Torstein stood very still and understood, too late, exactly what had been done to them. The poppy had been the first throw of the dice, and this was the second. They had been drawn out of a house full of guards and led by the nose into a trap, and he had run into it as blindly as a green boy.
He drew his dagger.
"Stay behind me," he said.
Samira did not even look at him. "No."
The first man came at her. She moved to meet him, blade low and reversed along her forearm, and Torstein stepped across in front of her and took the man's knife on his own dagger. He drove him back with a shove that sent him sprawling.
Samira made a sound of pure fury.
She darted left to take the next man. Torstein was there first. She feinted right and went low, and somehow his shoulder was there too, broad as a door, between her and the steel.
"Get out of my way!" she snapped.
"No."
"I do not need your protection!"
"You have it anyway."
A blade came at his ribs and he turned it aside.
Another came from the left and he caught the man's wrist and twisted until something gave.
Every time Samira moved, he moved with her.
Every time a knife came toward her, his body was already in its path.
He did not think about it. He could not have stopped himself if he had tried.
She ducked beneath his arm, quick as a cat, and went for the man he had just disarmed. Her blade caught the man across the forearm. But a second had come in behind her, and his knife opened a thin red line along the back of her hand before she could turn.
Samira hissed and pulled her hand back. Blood welled across her knuckles.
Something surged through Torstein then that he had no name for.
"How dare you touch my woman!" he roared.
He landed a bone-crunching blow to the man's jaw. When Torstein was done with him, the man lay against the wall and did not get up.
The rest of them fell back a step.
Torstein stood over Samira with his chest heaving. She was staring at him with an expression he could not read.
Then the two men from the mouth of the alley came in behind them, and there was no more room for anything but the fight.
Torstein turned. Samira turned. Without a word, they put their backs together.
"Now will you let me fight?" she said, over her shoulder.
"Now I need you to," he replied.
And she laughed. It was short and breathless and entirely unexpected, and he felt it through his own spine.
They fought as they had fought two days before. When he stepped forward, she covered the ground he had left. When she lunged, he turned to hold the side she had opened. The men pressed them, and pressed again, and could find no way through.
One of the attackers lost his head wrap in the struggle. Beneath it his face was fair and his beard reddish, and the curse that came out of him was not Arabic.
"He is no Maghribi," Samira said sharply.
"No," Torstein said. "He is Norman."
A roar came from the mouth of the alley. Njal came round the corner with his sword drawn and Mathias close behind him, both of them having snatched their blades from the alcove at the gate. Behind them came Dawud's two guards at last, red-faced and furious.
The cloaked men broke. They went up and over the high wall at the end of the alley, hauling each other up by the arms, and dragged the man Torstein had felled with them. The water carrier went last. He did not look back this time.
The alley fell quiet.
Torstein turned to Samira and took her hand before she could stop him. He turned it over in his own. The cut ran across the back of it, shallow and bleeding freely.
"It is a scratch," she said.
"It is your blood!" His voice came out rough. He tore a strip from the hem of his garment without taking his eyes off the wound and began to bind it. His hands were not quite steady.
"You ruined your clothing."
"I have another."
"You kept getting in my way." Her voice rose. "Every time I moved, there you were blocking my path."
"So?"
"Do not 'so' me." She glared up at him.
Torstein stared at the feisty woman venting her anger at him, and he thought her the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld. So much so that he gave her a stupid grin.
Samira opened her mouth to shout at him. Then her gaze dropped, and she stopped.
"You could have been hurt!" Worry marred her features for a moment.
Torstein shrugged his shoulders. "Are you worried about me?" he asked.
"Never!" she snapped.
He chuckled then.
Behind them, Njal cleared his throat loudly.
"If ye two are finished," he said in Norn, "the merchant's men would like to take his daughter home before any more enemies come over that wall."
***