“I’ve already eaten, while you were asleep.” I looked about me, significantly. He smiled.

“…And you knocked off all six of them by yourself?” I said. He nodded.

“Good show. What am I going to do with you now?”

He tried to see my face, failed. “I do not understand,” he said.

“Where are you headed?”

“I have friends,” he said, “some five leagues to the north. I was going in that direction when this thing happened. And I doubt very much that any man, or the Devil himself, could bear me on his back for one league. And I could stand. Sir Corey, you’d a better idea as to my size.”

I rose, drew my blade, and felled a sapling — about two inches in diameter — with one cut. Then I stripped it and hacked it to the proper length.

I did it again, and with the belts and cloaks of dead men I rigged a stretcher. He watched until I was finished, then commented:

“You swing a deadly blade, Sir Corey — and a silver one, it would seem…”

“Are you up to some traveling?” I asked him. Five leagues is roughly fifteen miles.

“What of the dead?” he inquired.

“You want to maybe give them a decent Christian burial?” I said. “Screw them! Nature takes care of its own. Let’s get out of here. They stink already.”

“I’d like at least to see them covered over. They fought well.”

I sighed.

“All right, if it will help yon to sleep nights. I haven’t a spade, so I’ll build them a cairn. It’s going to be a common burial, though.”

“Good enough,” he said.

I laid the six bodies out, side by side. I heard him mumbling something, which I guessed to be a prayer for the dead.

I ringed them around with stones. There were plenty of stones in the vicinity, so I worked quickly, choosing the largest so that things would go faster.

That is where I made a mistake. One of them must have weighed around four hundred pounds, and I did not roll it. I hefted it and set it in place.