An arrow whistled overhead. She ducked, felt taut muscles pull, cursed herself for age and infirmity. A spasm tore through her back, but she felt no blood. Her horse faltered as she gasped, and then a soldier came up beside her and grabbed the reins out of her hands. He yelled something at her that she couldn’t understand; sound roared in her ears, but whether it was the cacophony of battle or only her own fear and discomfort deafening her, she could not tell. She let him lead her, and set her thoughts to that task that had been drilled into her in the convent: praying.
They trampled the line drawn up beyond the north gate, where three days ago she and Theophanu had crossed words with Ironhead’s bored and satiated guards. Now, Adelheid’s soldiers crossed swords with those same guards, cutting them down as their heavy horses thundered past. Wagons rumbled in their wake. Shacks crumbled under the weight of their charge, and then they were out on the plain. From this angle, she could see the cloud of battle before the eastern gate, observed only from this distance as a churning mass of maddened horses, thrown riders, smoke along the rampart, a seething struggle fading into a haze of dust. They pounded over abandoned fields, leaped irrigation ditches, skirted ranks of trees set up as windbreaks, and without further incident the front rank of cavalry with Adelheid at their head reached the first crumpled line of hills.
They paused there, looking back. Dust obscured the plain around Vennaci, all but the high towers. The soldiers cheered. Adelheid stared at the city she had left behind, her profile stark against the autumn-gold hills behind. She wore men’s leggings under her gown, which was hitched up over the saddle, and a cunningly worked leather coat fitted to her small frame with a capelet of light mail over her shoulders and red leather flaps reinforced with metal plates draping down over her hips. On her head she wore only a conical helm with a scarf wound ’round her hair for padding. The ride and the wind had uncurled the scarf and now it rippled behind her, making of her the banner which her men followed. She was young, and in that moment on the hillside with battle raging behind her and only a fugitive hope of escape ahead, she was beautiful in the way of saints and God-touched generals.
“We’re not out of danger yet,” she said abruptly.
“There should be sentries here.” Rosvita recognized the steep-sided little valley through which she and Theophanu had walked those three days ago. Her back still ached, but as the pain subsided, she realized that she had only wrenched it. As she watched the stragglers come up behind them, she knew she had been lucky. Horses arrived without riders. Of the wagons and servants, only one clattered up—Adelheid’s treasury, richly guarded by an escort of twenty armed riders of whom four had weeping red wounds on their bodies. Adelheid surveyed this remnant with an expression of fierce defiance.