Roadside Assistance

"Oh ho," said a big bearded one with rotted teeth. "Look at all those fine casks bound for the market. And me and my boys out here all thirsty for strong drink. That's kismet, it is. An answered prayer from the gods above. Who are you to defy their will?"

When the men came from the woods, Kline knew how it would end. He knew there would be dead, many dead, but then some of the men looked dead already. He gave a quick look back and he could see the men were already preparing, they had been in enough scarps to know how they would react.

The smiling bandits began to converge on the wagons with shouts of triumphant glee, even as several approached Kline on his horse with some added wariness for a mounted man wielding a spear.

"Get up and start walkin'," said the bearded man, directing the harsh, mocking words at the wagon driver and the others hirelings that were in plain sight. "That's right. Walk on home to your lord now. We'll be takin' your wagons an' horses too!" He let out a sardonic snicker. "How else can we haul all of this off otherwise, eh?"

The bandit leader had a strange, mad gleam in his beady brown eyes, as though suffering from a mind-melting disease of some sort or other. He glanced back at an unseen audience, and from out of the dense forest on one side of the road came a chorus of raucous shouts from even more of the fiends still waiting to emerge from the treeline. With cruel, predatory laughter, the bandits advanced on Kline, his men, and the shipment, intending on taking it readily along with their lives.

Kline looked down at the men surrounding him. “I am going to gut you like a fish.” Is all he said before the horse wheeled. The steed had seen him though many battles and it knew a fight. The turn was made to hit the men around him, the bigger beast using its size and mass to knock them to the ground, and the one who jumped back found that a horse could bite. No one really thinks about a horse biting them, but the crunch of his shoulder and crushing of his collar bone reminded the man the horse was used to biting down on many hard things.

The rider started to bare down, the spear lancing through a man, and was left in him as a reminder to the others of what was coming. With the sword free, it was just a matter of the right angle and the blade would make short work of a man. Those who did not move out of the way found the horse more than happy to run him over and the hooves were far worse a weapon then his blade, for his blade would kill you, not leave you broken and mangled on the ground.

He knew poets and bards would say battle is like a dance, something with grace and beauty, but he saw it as something else. To him it was savage, vicious and brutal, where you did what you needed to live, you pulled every trick and played every card, and some of the cards were dealt by the demons. So it was with him, he found no joy in his work, but he also found a singularity, a place where all the complex ideas and politics fell away and he was driven to one goal, to survive.

The horse gave him an advantage, and so he took it, the men charging in were quelled by the steed, the massive size, and the fact it could hit anyone around him with a hoof, or his blade. He felt an arrow hit his thigh, there was not pain, in the heat of the fight pain was something that came to him after all was done, at least pain from wounds that would not kill him. It felt more like someone poking him in the leg very hard and fast, another hit him in the back at his shoulder. The bandits were trying to use the trees for a few of them to shoot from.

One of his men was on a cask with the crossbow shooting down at the men who were firing from the trees. The others moved out and were riding in circles around the wagons keeping mobile and evasive to not let the bandits form any clear line of attack.

He learned long ago to shut off the tunnel vision of battle, it was something that killed many men on the field. If you failed to see the enemy coming at you from the side, you were good as dead. Because of this he saw the rider come into the fight from the tree line.

He initially turned his horse to charge the other rider, a bandit on horse would change the whole dynamic of the fight. He stopped because they were killing the right people, and he was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

As he turned his horse back around the big guy was there and swung an axe. The blade cut through the neck of his horse and nearly severed it off completely, the animal reared up and he leapt from it, the head flinging back, attached by the spine, blood spraying in a gruesome arch. He landed and rolled, the arrows in him snapping as he did. The body of the horse stood between him and the big man, Kline was on his side, resting on his shield. His sword was still gripped in his hand, luckily.

They must have really hurt his numbers for the big man to come into the fray. Kline started to stand and he was given a sharp reminder that there was an arrow in his thigh.