Legend of The Young Master

Chapter 219: King

The archers opened the gate and the Warriors of the Lotus Order rode in, their black hooded robes hiding the gleam of armor, their black horses like nightmare creatures in the full dark.

Master Li Zhang rode to Wuyi, who was sitting on a stool, scraping dirt out of his armor to make it work properly. His whole body felt like a badly maintained machine.

"With heaven's help, you have conquered," Master Li Zhang said.

"If you like," Wuyi said. "We have conquered, for the moment. But only by the skin of our teeth, as old wives say. And where are the flying serpents? Where are the Yingmos? The Talons?" He gazed out into the last light.

Killing off the last of the Swamplings had taken another hour, and now the enemy stone throwers were throwing stones again.

The Attendants were stacking corpses outside the gate. The courtyard of the Bridge Castle stank of burned wood, dead Swampling, and ordure – horses killed in their traces, oxen butchered, men and Swamplings dead. The rotting meat smell rose like an evil sacrifice in the too-warm evening air, and midges were settling on the working men like an evil plague.

Master Li Zhang dismounted, his own armor ringing on. "Where indeed? I haven't seen so many evil creatures in many years."

"We saw them every day. Now they are gone," Wuyi said. "Next wave, perhaps?" he added. "That's my guess. Wear us out with the Swamplings. Then break us with the bigger creatures." He tested his foot on the ground.

"Then—"

"It's what I'd do. Bleed us with the easily replaced critters and save the others. He needs them to fight the king. This was all just to fix us in place."

"We can hold until the king comes," Master Li Zhang said. He was pulling his sodden arming guard off his head and paused to slap a demonic insect that somehow had flown near him.

"Despite flying serpents and Yingmo? I hope so," said Wuyi. He got to his feet. "Jia – tell the Attendants to serve wine and dishes." He smiled at Master Li Zhang. "It's going to be a long night." He looked around. "Jin?"

"My lord?" Jin said.

"I need you to do something insanely brave," he said. Jin shrugged.

"Can you get a message to the king?" Wuyi asked.

"In the dark? Through a host of enemies?" Jin smiled. "I can with heaven's help. And by my faith, Young Master, if you make a crack about Heaven not caring, you can take your cursed message yourself."

Wuyi got to his feet and gave the beastmaster his hand. "I am rebuked, Jin."

Jin shrugged. "Join me in prayer," he said.

"Let's not get carried away," Wuyi replied.

Jin laughed. "Why do I like you so much?" he asked.

Wuyi shrugged. "The feeling is mutual."

Half an hour later, Jin went straight into the river from the docks. He swam for fifteen minutes in the dark, and then went with the current for a while to rest. He heard, or felt, a flying serpent in the dark air overhead, and he went under the water and stayed down as long as he could. When he surfaced, his heart was beating so fast that he had to head for shore.

"There goes the bravest man in all my group," Wuyi said to Master Li Zhang.

"Because he faces his fears?" Master Li Zhang asked. "He has heaven's aid."

Wuyi shook his head but said nothing. He only watched the darkness and wished he was in the fort getting some rest.

✶ ✶ ✶

Back in the fort, Liwei tried not to go to the gate. She tried not to look out the window. When a group of warriors clattered in on exhausted horses, she forced herself to wait until the wounded came in.

A warrior told her that Wuyi was spending the night in the Bridge Castle.

When the last wounded were healed, she knelt in the pavilion hall and prayed. She opened herself, as the elders had taught her, to heaven. And she made heaven a hard, heartfelt promise.

✶ ✶ ✶

Away from the fort, Jin was tired and cold and very, very scared when he heard the sound of men's voices on the other bank, and he struck out for them. He swam quietly, as well as he could.

They had boats.

After some time, he swam to the boats, and a sentry warrior saw him.

"Halt! Alarm! Man in the water!" A crossbow loosed, and the bolt passed somewhere near him.

"Friend!" he spluttered. He was short of breath. "From the fortress!"

They were too alert, but they weren't great marksmen. He swam in, shouting that he was a friend. Eventually, they stopped loosing their bolts at him, and strong arms pulled him into a big barge.

"Take me to the king!" he said.

A big man pulled him over the side and put him on a bench. "Drink this," he said. "You've found the princess, not the king."

Jin was surprised for a while, but later he found out the whole story. The king, who had three children, had a princess who was the eldest and a warrior. When she heard that the eastern border was attacked and the king had led the army of warriors to attack, she couldn't control herself and snuck towards the east with her warriors.

Jin sighed. If he had found the princess, then he wondered where the king was.

✶ ✶ ✶

The king's magnificent golden armor and brilliant red and blue heraldry caught the first rays of the sun so that he seemed to catch fire. Behind him stood three hundred of the most heavily armored warriors the Tianqin kingdom had ever seen, their heavy horses left in camp.

The golden war helmet, covered by a mask, moved to the right and left, examining the dressing of the long line of chivalric warriors that vanished into the woods on either flank, each with his heavily armored warrior at his back. He had already received information from lotus order and knew where to attack.

His golden armored arm was raised high, then fell, and the line of the vanguard advanced along the line of the old Bridge Road. The three hundred warriors were each a man's height apart; their line was a half-mile long, and the men at either end had hunter's horns – noted horns, which they played back and forth like huntsmen.

The figure of the king seemed to dance forward joyfully

He pressed through the woods, and the woods parted before him. There is nothing in the woods that can impede a Qi warrior in full Qi armor– no branch, no trailing vine, no bank of thickset canes, no matter how Luding they are, will stop a man in armor. Or slow him.

The line ground forward at a walking pace. Half a mile. A mile. He raised his hand and his own horn bearer played a long note, and the line stopped.

Warriors removed their headgear and drank water, but the morning was still early, and it was cool in the dark woods. Men pulled the branches out of their knee armor, out of their elbow cops, out of the joints in their back armor. And then, with the sounding of two horn calls, the line swept forward again, like a great boar hunt. A mile behind them, the rest of the army lurched into motion.

The vanguard pressed forward into the woods, led by the king in person.

Talon, the leader of the Talons, saw the armored figures coming on foot, armored head to toe, and the bitterness in his heart was enough to melt steel.

"So much for Luding and his plan," Talon Leader said.

He turned to his subordinate, Jiang Xie. "There is something wrong. They have a spy somewhere."

Jiang Xie watched the inexorable approach of the armored men. "And we're in deep brush."

"Luding said they'd be mounted on the road," Talon Leader cursed. "Let's loose and get gone," Jiang Xie said.

"This is our day!" Talon Leader argued. "Today we kill the king!"

Seventy yards away, the king stood virtually alone. He stood in a shaft of light in the deep forest, and he raised his arms – he had a four-foot sword in one hand and a scabbard in the other. Talon Leader drew his great bow and, suiting thought to deed, loosed. Beside him, Jiang Xie's bow twanged deep, the harp of death. All along the line, Talons rose from ambush and loosed at the king.

The king's figure twinkled as he pivoted on his back heel and spun, his scabbard sweeping over his head, his sword scything through the first fall of arrows. All around him, warriors broke into a dead run, charging the line of archers. The king stood his ground – stepped and swung, stepped, cut, and then ran forward.

"Good heavens," Talon Leader muttered. Not a single arrow had gone home. "Too far – too damned far!"

But the Talons were robbers and hunters, not battlefield men, and they turned and ran. A hundred paces to the rear, the line of Talons steadied. Jiang Xie got them into a line at the edge of a meadow of flowers a third of a mile long and two hundred yards deep – an ancient beaver meadow, crisscrossed by a stream.

Talon Leader led them over the stream, emerging wet to the waist, and they formed a new line on the far side.

"Better," Jiang Xie said with a grim smile.

The warriors must have paused to drink water and rest. The sun was much higher when they came – and they came all together. Forward in a line. This time the leader yelled at them to pick their targets and leave the king to the master archers, and the shafts flew thick and heavy over open ground.