“Well! What have we got here?” he said. Reining up, he dismounted and swaggered over. “Looks like you caught yourself some prisoners, Orthal!” He laughed then. “Yes, you surely did.”
“You know them?”
“Oh yes. Yes, I know them. I know them real well. This one especially.” He pointed to Macurdy, then actually rubbed his hands together. “I never forget a face, and that one I’d remember in hell.”
He told about the affair at the blowndown timber then, his account more or less factual, but incomplete. Finishing with, “He took our horses then, and our loot and weapons, and rode off with it.”
“Slaney,” Macurdy said, “you’re a liar as well as a coward. I left you horses enough to leave on, and what I took, I gave to the dwarves, as blood money for their cousins you killed. Anyone with even half a brain knows better than to start a war with dwarves.”
Slaney flushed, and with an oath drew his sword. Macurdy’s knife struck him just below the breastbone, and the bandit took one wobbling step before falling on his face. Rebels crowded around Macurdy then, punching and kicking, getting in their own way, until Orthal bellowed to let him be. Probably, Macurdy thought, he had his own ideas for punishment.
Then someone else spoke, Slaney’s second-in-command. “Are these the ones Burney told us about when we were riding up? That want to join?”
Orthal took a moment before answering. “That’s right. What about it?”
“What their leader said is true: They could have killed us all, or left us afoot. And if they want to join . . . When we stopped at Stoney Creek, Bekker told us recruitment’s down to nothing, since Dell’s band got massacred.”
“That’s us!” Verder said. “I was one of Dell’s. Some of us were taken alive. Dell and Liskor were hung up on the spot and used for target practice.”
Again there was uncertainty on many rebel faces.
“Counting the dwarves, there’s twelve of them,” someone added. “Enough to be worthwhile.”
“Eleven,” someone corrected. “The other one’s a woman.”
“I’m as good as most men in a fight!” Melody answered. “Anyone want to test me? Orthal?”
Orthal laughed. “Oh, I’ll test you all right. On your back, after we’ve executed these filth. Starting with him.” He gestured at Macurdy. “Then we’ll all test you.”
It was Melody, not Macurdy, that Orthal walked up to, as if to grab her. Her right fist caught him flush on the nose, and blood flowed as he stepped backward in surprise. Then, with a roar, he drew his sword.
Macurdy’s bellow stopped everything. “NOW WE SEE WHAT KIND OF SPINELESS COWARD ORTHAL IS!” he shouted. “TOO GUTLESS TO GIVE HER A SWORD AND FIGHT HER.”
Orthal stared bug-eyed at him for a moment, then gradually relaxed and grinned. “Larny!” he called, “give the bitch your sword.”
Some of the rebels laughed. Larny stepped forward, a massive shambling man not much taller than Macurdy but considerably heavier, mostly muscle. “It ain’t right, Orthal,” Larny said. “It’s too big for her. She couldn’t hardly lift it, let alone fight with it.”
“Will you shut up, Larny! Just give her the damn sword!”
“Just a minute, Larny,” Macurdy said, and stepped away from the spears at his back. “Let me see how heavy it is.”
Before anyone but Macurdy realized what was happening, Larny handed him the sword, and Macurdy leaped. Orthal never got his own sword up before Larny’s heavy blade thrust him through below the ribs. Macurdy wheeled then, sword ready. “What in hell,” he shouted, “does a man have to do to join this humping outfit?”
Someone laughed, then someone else, then others, but most stood indecisively, till a voice called from overhead. “Macurdy! Macurdy! Men are coming on your trail!”
“How many?”
“More than ten!”
“Someone go see who they are!” he shouted, and several rebels ran to their horses as if used to taking his orders. They’d barely mounted when a man galloped up from the sentry post in that direction.
“Tarlok’s coming! With recruits!”
The rebels seemed glad to turn their attention to this new development. They waited, and within three or four minutes, a dozen men rode into the clearing. Their leader trotted up ahead of the others. “Good news!” he shouted. “There’s been excitement in Gormin Town! The reeve strung up a couple dozen of Dell’s and Wollerda’s guys in the square. Then someone killed the guards and cut the prisoners loose, and the whole town went on a rampage! Burned half of it to the ground! Including the stockade!”