Bill Hook – Bootlick’s man-at-arms – was off his charger in a flash of white armour, lifting the fallen archer onto his crupper. He was struck twice – both blows at long range, falling on his breastplate, and he didn’t even stagger.
The captain pointed Grendel’s armoured head at the edge of the wood. If someone didn’t stop the Jacks from shooting, his column was going to be dead in heartbeats. Most of the archer’s light horses weren’t even armoured.
Grendel rose from a heavy canter to a flowing gallop, apparently unemcumbered by a hundred pounds of double mail.
An arrow struck his visor, and two more struck his helmet. The steel heads screamed against his bascinet and were gone, but each blow rocked him in his high-backed saddle. Another heavy arrow struck the bow of his saddle and another whanged off his right knee cop and then it was like riding through hail, and he put his armoured head down and pressed his long spurs to Grendel’s sides.
He had no way of knowing whether anyone was behind him, and his whole world was narrowed to what he could see from the two eye slits of his helm.
Not much. Mostly, Grendel’s armoured neck.
Clang.
Clang-clang-clang-whang-ping.
All hits on his helmet and shoulders.
Thwak-tick-tock-clang!
He sat up in the saddle. Got a hand on the hilt of his war sword and drew, and an arrow caught the blade, shivering it in his hand.
He got his eyes up, and there they were.
Even as he watched, they broke and ran. There were only six of them – All those arrows came from six men? and they ran with a practised desperation in six different directions.
His sword took the nearest neatly, because killing fleeing infantryman was an essential part of knightly training, taken for granted, like courage. He let his arm fall, and the man died, and he used his spurs to guide Grendel after the second man, the smallest of the group. One of his mates stopped, drew, and shot.
Cursed when his arrow glanced harmlessly off the captain’s right rerebrace, and died.
Grendel was slowing, and the captain turned him. If he exhausted the war horse he’d be stranded and dead. Besides, he loved Grendel. He felt he and the horse had a great deal in common.
A healthy desire to live, for example.
The four surviving Jacks didn’t run much farther than they had to, as they heard the hooves pause.
Whang, came the first arrow off his helmet.
It was a matter of time before one of those shots found his underarm, his throat, or his eye-slits.
Ser Jehannes came out of the woods to the archer’s left, at a full gallop. He rode around the great bole of an ancient tree, and the ruddy-haired Jack lost his head in one swing of the knight’s great blade.
The other three ran west, into a thicket.
‘Thanks!’ the captain called.
Jehannes nodded.
He’s never going to like me, let alone love me, the captain thought.
He gathered Grendel under him, turned his head, and started moving east.
The fields to the north of him seemed to ripple and flow – boglins running in their odd hunched posture, low to the ground, irks, their brown bodies like moving mud.
But they were too late, and the handful of boglins who paused to loft arrows were ineffective.
At the edge of his effective casting range, the captain reined Grendel in. He stripped the gauntlet off his right hand, and pulled a small patch of charred linen from the palm.
He stepped into his palace.
‘He’s waiting for you,’ Prudentia said.
‘He doesn’t know what I can do, yet,’ the boy said. He’d already aligned his symbols. He walked to the door, but instead of opening it, he merely raised the tiny iron plate that covered the keyhole, and a waft of fierce green shot through.
‘He’s waiting for you,’ Prudentia said again.
‘He’s going to have to keep waiting,’ the boy said. He was proud of his work, and his careful preparation. ‘Look, it’s sympathetic Hermeticism. The wicks on the fire bundles are all made from the same piece of linen and soaked in oil. I have a scrap here, too, already charred.’
The breath of green touched his symbols.
‘You are the cleverest boy,’ Prudentia said.
‘Were you and Hywel lovers, Prude?’ the boy asked.
‘None of your business,’ she shot back.
He rose in his stirrups, and his charred piece of linen caught and burned red hot.
On the bank, forty-four firebombs made of oiled tow and old rags and wax and birch bark burst into flame with one, simultaneous roar.
Harndon City – Edward
Edward cast the first of the master’s tubes in the yard. He cast it in sand, and used the same mandril, polished to a mirror shine, as the model for the wax tongue he put in the mould to make it hollow. He cast the walls of the tube a finger’s width thick, as the master requested.
When it was done it wasn’t much to look at. Edward shrugged. ‘Master, I can do better. The hole would be better if I bored it, but that would require-’ he shrugged ‘-a week to make the drills and other tools. I’d like to add decoration.’ He felt incompetent.
The master picked it up and held it in his hands for a long time. ‘Let’s try,’ he said.
He bored a small hole in the base of the bronze with a hand drill, and Edward was fascinated to watch his careful patience, coaxing the fine steel drill through the heavy bronze. Then he took the tube out of the shop and into the yard, and packed it with his burning mixture – four scoops. He searched for something to put down atop the powder.
Silently, Edward handed him a one-inch hawk bell. It wasn’t perfectly round, and it was hollow, but it fitted well enough for purpose.
The master tied it to the oak tree, put wick in the hole, and lit it. They both hid behind the brick wall of the stable.
Which was just as well.
The fizzing, burning mixture made a flash and a bang like – like something hermetical.
It stripped a handspan of bark from the tree.
The tube had torn loose from its bindings and had smashed through a horse trough – a solid wood horse trough – flooding the yard with dirty water . . . and it was a day before the apprentices found the hawk’s bell. Even then, they didn’t find the bell itself, just the neat round hole it had punched through the tile roof of the forge building.
Edward looked at the hole and whistled.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The captain had six magnificent bruises from the archery. Other men had worse. Bootlick was dead, despite Bill Hook – known to the gentles as Ser Willem Greville – despite his best efforts at rescue. Francis Atcourt had a Jack’s arrow right through the join in his cote of plates – through his gut. Wat Simple and Oak Pew both had arrows in their limbs and were screaming in pain and mortal afraid the heads were poisoned.
If they hadn’t had the nuns, all of them might have died of their wounds.
As it was, the skill and power of the nuns seemed to mean that any man who wasn’t killed outright would be healed. The captain, who was just coming to terms with the idea of a convent of women of power, was staggered by the healing power they poured into his men – Sauce had six badly wounded men, including Long Paw – one of their best men in every respect.
But the barrage of phantasm was more effective than the barrage of arrows had been.
The captain walked through the hospital ward in his arming clothes. The wounded were cheerful – as any man or woman might be, waking to find an ugly wound completely banished. Oak Pew, a woman whose dark wood-coloured skin and heavy muscles had given her the name, lay laughing helplessly at one of Wilful Murder’s stories. Wat Simple was already gone, the captain had seen him playing at piquet. Long Paw lay watching Oak Pew laugh.