As the house imploded, splinters and dust gusting out in all directions, Lucan swung his body over the sharpened tips of the log palisade, hung with both hands and dropped. He hobbled up the rocky slope in pursuit of his comrades while the monster ape and its minions leapt and howled in the wreckage behind him.
Higher up, wounded and exhausted men clung to the boulders like survivors of a shipwreck. They regarded Lucan with white, haggard faces as he clambered among them. It was difficult to count how many were left — no more than twelve, certainly. Turold was one of them. His sword, still slathered with blood and ape-hair, was tight in his fist, but he had thrown off his helmet. His fair hair was a sweat-soaked mop, his tear-soaked features livid with rage.
“Up there!” Lucan shouted, pointing towards the cave.
Turold nodded tautly. Lucan continued up, encouraging the rest of the men to climb. They obeyed, although when Lucan reached the cave a wild shout from Alaric drew his attention back down the slope. Turold remained below, shrieking as he tottered towards the advancing baboons.
“Benedict!” he screamed. “This is for you, lad!”
One of them bounded forward and he felled it with a massive back-stroke. But another took its place, and when this was dispatched, another, and in short order they had swamped Turold and were dragging him down, burying him beneath fur and muscle.
Lucan watched from the cave mouth, helpless.
The giant baboon now thrust its way through the smaller ones, clutching a sharpened pole from the stockade. When Turold reappeared, the apes had ripped off his mail and woollen under-garb, and now they forced him face-down, yanking back his head by the hair and spreading his legs apart. The larger one, ululating with evil, positioned the sharpened pole point-first to his rear end.
Turold glanced to Davy Lug, the last remaining archer. “How many arrows do you have left?” he asked.
Lug produced a single shaft. “Just this, my lord.”
“Make it quick and clean, and half my lands and titles are yours.”
Lug nocked his final missile, drew its feathers to his ear and — as Turold’s distant shrieks took on a new, more piercing note — drove it down the slope. The arrow flew straight and true, striking Turold’s open mouth and plunging clear down his throat into the vital organs below.
The captured knight fell dead — long before his impalement was completed.
“You’re a rich man when we get home, Davy Lug,” Lucan said, grimly.
“Half your estate for killing a comrade-in-arms?” The archer sneered and spat. “Only a man vain enough and mad enough to have brought us to this fate in the first place could think I’d agree to such terms. You keep your blood-soaked lands and titles, my lord.”
Lucan glanced after him, but was distracted by a fresh outburst from below. The apes screamed and gibbered with rage, as their leader seized Turold’s body in both hands and flung him down on the rocks, again and again, until every bone in his corpse must be smashed to fragments. When the creature gazed up the slope to the cave, drool frothed from its maw — but an immediate attack did not follow.
Tense minutes unfolded as the tribe roared and howled and gestured, but made no advance. The men watched them tensely, drenched with sweat.
Lucan, trying not to think about the fate of his friend — the fates of other friends were still his responsibility — turned and stared up past the cave entrance. The rocky slope soon became sheer; there was no possibility they could climb further. He entered the cave. It narrowed quickly, so that no more than a handful could find shelter in it for long. It was not a cul-de-sac, but a passage formed naturally between fallen boulders. Though it tightened until it was barely passable, it appeared to wind on and on into the hillside, a darkened chink which might afford salvation to someone.
“No way through,” Maximion said, appearing alongside him with a firebrand.
“Not for all of us,” Lucan agreed, taking the flame and peering through the gap as far as he could. He turned again. “What’s happening here, tribune? This is Italy, is it not? A civilised land. And yet we’re overrun by a tribe of killer apes?”
“Elementary devilry for a sorceress of Zalmyra’s skill.”
“This is her work? Even though it destroyed one of her own villages?”
Maximion knuckled the sweat from his eye. “The Malconi care nothing for anyone but themselves. She’d think nothing of unleashing demonic forces, no matter what destruction they wreaked.”
“And which demon is this? The great ape?”
Maximion, so indifferent to pain or fear up until this point, looked haggard as he shrugged. “I heard tell of a story once. After Queen Cleopatra and her Roman lover, Mark Anthony, committed suicide, Caesarion, Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar, was forced to flee Alexandria. A group of Praetorians were sent in pursuit, but they never reported back. At length, they were tracked along the Nile delta to an abandoned citadel, where their remains were found. Each man had been disembowelled alive. It seemed they had been lured to this place by Egyptian patriots. It was once sacred to Babi, a desert demon who appeared as a hulking, ferocious baboon with an insatiable craving for man-guts. The stories hold that he could summon endless forces of cannibal apes.”
“My lord!” came a cry from outside. “They’re coming again!”
Lucan moved back into the light. Further down the slope, the baboons were venturing upward in a slow, cautious wave. The giant one — Babi, if that was indeed its name — was in their midst rather than leading them, which seemed to Lucan a cunning strategy; a simple animal would charge frenziedly, but a thinking creature would have self-preservation in mind.
“We can stand in this entrance two at a time,” Lucan said. “While two fight, the others rest. We change over when we can.”
Grey-faced with fear, the remainder of his mesnie nodded and hefted their weapons.
“Not you, Alaric,” Lucan added.
Alaric looked startled. “My lord…”
“Take your armour off, go to the back of the cave and worm your way through — find out where it leads. I ask because you’re the leanest.”
Alaric glanced towards the cleft in the cave’s rear wall. Blackness skulked beyond, but what his overlord said was true — no-one else could insinuate himself through it. Reluctantly, he began to strip off his mail.
During the baboons’ first attack on the cave, Gerwin fell.
The best fighter in the whole of Earl Lucan’s retinue, save the earl himself, he had volunteered to stand alongside Lucan for the first guard, but almost immediately was hauled from the entrance by three or four of them, dragged to the ground and hammered around the bare head with rocks and stones. Lucan fell upon them, but the gigantic one — Babi — lurched forward, and Lucan was forced back into the shelter.
Babi’s attack was the signal for a full-on second onslaught, the beasts cramming into the narrow arch. Lucan, now with Wulfstan by his side, let fly with a torrent of flashing steel. Monkey limbs fell; monkey faces were split from brow to chin. But the two knights were bitten and rent even through their mail. Hands strong as vices clamped around Wulfstan’s throat and started choking the life from him. He gasped, wheezed, and slid down the cave wall. Another of the brutes sidled past and infiltrated the cave proper — it took Davy Lug’s dagger to rip its belly open and spill its entrails. Lucan dispatched his two opponents and rounded on the one throttling Wulfstan, shearing through the nape of its neck.
Baboon corpses now filled the entrance, and this was enough to impede the third onslaught. Lucan stood back, leaning on the pommel of his sword, panting, sweating in rivers. Others took his and Wulfstan’s places, yet more baboons soon vaulted over the barricade of dead flesh. Swords, axes and mallets rang on bone and sinew in that dark recess, now foul with blood and the stink of dying breath.