She could see the wall now, the one that intersected the broken ground, with dead heaped around it like sea wrack on the shore after a storm. Men were climbing over the dead and dying.
Beside her, Da was hollering, “Murtray, Murtray!”
The Gallowglass were now in the thick of the fighting. She had one glimpse of Reagan swinging his great claymore with both hands. He wore armor but had no shield. Her heart leaped to her mouth in a sudden conviction that he would die.
They would all die.
But for a moment—one suspended in time—the enemy began to waver and fall back. Men died by the scores, the hundreds. Yet the Scots had so many more men.
Did the king yet survive? And her Da…
In the noise of the conflict, she could barely think. The Gallowglass at the head of their company kept the knights and some of the ugly faces at bay for the moment, but could do naught about the arrows.
Da was screaming, trying to push forward, the warrior in him coming to the fore. Then he was not. Though he’d been running but an arm’s reach from Katrin, he disappeared as if winked magically out of sight.
She gasped, “Da!” and attempted to turn. But his men followed him, their motion like a boulder rolling downhill. She saw faces of men she knew, twisted in fear and agony. She saw the fallen. Others of the fallen, for if Da were not still beside her, there was but one place he could be.
She went back, facing now a forest of spears held by their own men. Scanning the ground, searching, searching. She found him not far back with two of his clansmen hunkered down supporting him, his grizzled head between their younger ones. For an instant, her heart stood still.
Dead?
But nay, for one of the young spearmen, named Rabbie, gestured to her. “Mistress.”
She threw herself at them, down onto the ground. Feet continuedto pound past and sometimes over them.
“The chief is struck!” cried Rabbie unnecessarily.
Aye, so he was. She met her father’s eyes and beheld the agony there.
The second young man, Davey, possessed a shield, which he held not to protect himself but his chief where he lay. For the arrows still rained down.
One had gone through Da’s thigh.
It looked monstrous there, obscene. Yet she knew in her heart it was not a mortal wound—at least, it need not be, if she could get him away out of this.
She looked at the sweat-and-rain-streaked faces of his men. “Ye maun help me. Let us get him fro’ the field. Finlay—”
She looked around for the man who had been so attached to her in both body and spirit that she assumed he’d moved with her now. He was not there.
He was not there.
Desperate now, she tried to look around. But they were at ground level with feet thudding by, over and around them, and she could not see him.
Oh God, oh God, she could not see him!
“Help me. Carry yer chief.”
Her first duty must be to her father. Get Da away, even if she felt like her heart had been torn out by the roots, and her very spirit flayed.
They rose to their feet, Katrin doing her best now to cover them with Davey’s shield, which he had handed to her. Still, looking around, she could not glimpse a red head—one particular red head—through the rain.
Had he fallen? Did he lie somewhere beneath all these feet? Bleeding his life away.
Bleedingherlife away. Because at that moment, she knew, if he lost his life, hers was lost also. She might, aye, live on. But to whatpurpose?
They moved against the tide of that mighty horde, fighting their way, Da groaning and protesting all the while. Saying he wanted to go back and fight. That his men should not be allowed to go on through battle without their chief.
A fine sentiment, but Da’s face was the color of bleached stone and all the courage in the world would not help him stand.
