running through them. It was a perfect place for an ambush, the result of telling sullen English soldiers to cut turf and lay dressed stones from one town to another. Local roads were formed naturally, over centuries. They meandered past obstacles, detouring around old hills and ancient oaks. Not the English ones. Like the Romans before them, those forgotten teams of labourers had cut their routes in a straight line and dug up or burned anything in the way.
Thomas settled deeper into his crouch, knowing he was close to invisible on the hillside in his dark brown wool and hunter’s leathers, while commanding a good view of the valley for miles around. The road crest could well be empty, but he’d spotted fresh hoof prints by a gate that morning and followed them for half a day. The marks of iron horseshoes suggested the riders were not local men, few of whom owned even a small pony.
Thomas had his suspicions about the group crossing his land. He also had a longbow at his side, wrapped in oiled leather. He had no idea if the baron’s men knew he’d been a soldier before he became a wool merchant. Either way, if they showed themselves, someone was going to die. At the thought, he dropped his hand to the length of his bow and patted it. From a young age, he’d been told there were only three kinds of people in the world. There were those who fought: the earls themselves and their knights and armies. There were those who prayed: a group Thomas didn’t know well, but who seemed to be the younger brothers of powerful houses on the whole. Finally, there were those who worked. He smiled at the thought. He’d already been two of the three estates of men. He’d fought and he’d worked. If he surprised half a dozen horsemen come to raid his flocks, he might find himself trying a desperate prayer or two as well, to complete the set.
Lying utterly still in the bracken, Thomas was alert for any movement. When he saw it, he didn’t turn his head sharply. That kind of rashness could get a man killed. As something shifted on his right, he eased his gaze over. His heart sank and his eyes flickered back to the crest of the hill and the dark passage under the oaks, which had taken on an ominous look to his eye.
His son Rowan was on foot, dogtrotting, with his head turning back and forth as he looked for his father. The man in question groaned softly to himself, seeing his lad was blindly following the road towards the copse.
Thomas stood up sharply, raising the covered bow above his head to show himself. Down below, Rowan spotted him and even at a distance Thomas could see him grin and change direction to come up the hill.
Thomas saw shadows move in the copse. His stomach clenched in fear as a rider came hard out of the gloom. Two more followed on his tail and Thomas spent a sick moment trying to judge the distances.
‘Run!’ he yelled to his son, pointing back up the hill.
To his horror, the boy stopped and stared at the horsemen barrelling down from the trees. They had drawn swords, Thomas saw, holding them low and straight over their horses’ ears and pointing at his son. To his relief, Rowan broke into a sprint, seeming almost to fly over the rough ground. Thomas found himself breathing hard. The boy could run, at least. Rowan had grown up half-wild on the estate and spent more time in the hills than even his father.
‘Jesus keep him safe,’ Thomas muttered.
As he spoke, he slid the length of heartwood and sapwood yew out of the leather wrappings and fitted cow-horn tips to each end. The movements were second nature to him and as he worked he watched Rowan climb the steepening hill and the horsemen accelerating to full gallop.
Six riders had come out of the stand of trees. Thomas knew all the baron’s soldiers and he could probably have named each man. In silent concentration, he fitted the linen string and tested the draw, then unrolled the soft leather tube, revealing a quiver full of shafts. He had fletched each one himself in the evenings at home, cutting the feathers before gluing and tying them. The arrowheads had come from his own smithy in the village, sharp as knives and containing the iron barb that made them impossible to pull out of flesh without ripping a man open.
Below him, the riders slowed to cut across the bracken. They’d seen the lone man standing high on the hillside, but they were confident in their numbers and their armour and focused only on the climbing boy. Thomas showed his teeth, though it was not a pleasant expression. He’d shot arrows for two hours or more every Sunday after church since the age of seven. His local football team had been banned so the village boys would not neglect their bow work. Thomas’s shoulders were a mass of ridged muscle and if the baron’s men thought of him as a wool merchant, that was fine with him. He’d been an English archer first. He dropped the long strap over one shoulder, so that the quiver sat low, almost at the level of his knee. The arrows leaned out to one side so he could grasp them with just a small movement. Two colours of thread told him which type he would find. He had broadheads for deer, but half his stock was bodkin-head shafts, with square-sided points as long as his thumb. Thomas knew very well what they could do with the power of a yew bow behind them. He selected a bodkin arrow and placed it on the string.
‘Dropping ground,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Gusting wind from the east.’
The draw was so natural that he did not need to look down the shaft. Instead he watched the targets, the horsemen plunging up the hill and trying to catch his son.
The first arrow passed over Rowan’s head, snapping through the air. It struck the lead rider neatly in the chest and Thomas already had another on the string. As a much younger man, he’d stood in ranks of archers and poured thousands of shafts into a French advance until it collapsed. Today he was alone, but the body still remembered. He sent shaft after shaft with pitiless accuracy, punching them out into the air.
The horsemen behind may have thought the first man had simply fallen as his mount stumbled, Thomas didn’t know. They kept coming. Rowan finally had the sense to jink out of his aiming path and Thomas let the riders close on him. His next shot thumped high into a horse’s neck, making it rear and whinny in pain.
He could hear Rowan panting as he reached his father and stood with his hands on his knees, watching the riders coming. The young man’s eyes were wide. He had seen Thomas take deer before, but those had been measured shots in the stillness of a hunt. He had never seen his father stroke out arrow after arrow, as if the massive draw was nothing to him.
The shafts plunged into men with a sound like a thick carpet being beaten. Two of them had fallen. The riders were choking and yelling and Thomas began to breathe hard as he felt the old burn across his back. It had been a good few years since he’d last shot in anger, but the rhythms were still there to be called upon. He fitted and drew in just a few heartbeats, implacable and without mercy. Four riders were down, with two of the horses stumbling with loose reins, having lost their riders. The final two men had realized the folly of going on and they were shouting in panic to those dying on the ground.
Thomas ran forward suddenly. Twenty quick paces brought him to a range where he could not possibly miss. His grasping fingers found three arrows still in the quiver. A glance at the threads showed him two bodkins and a broadhead remaining. He shot two and held the final piercer ready on the string.
All six of the baron’s men had been unhorsed. Four of them lay still and unblinking, with stiff feathers standing out on their chests. The last two were groaning in agony and trying to rise. Thomas had shot eleven goose-feathered shafts in all. He felt a touch of pride as he looked over the crumpled mass of men and armour he’d created, even as he began to consider the consequences.
‘Look away now, Rowan,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘This is ugly work.’
He turned to make sure his son was staring out over the valley.
‘Keep your eyes on the hills, lad, all right?’
Rowan nodded, though he watched as soon as his father walked in among the men. At sixteen, Rowan was fascinated by the power he had seen. For the first time, he understood why his father made him practise until his fingers swelled purple and the muscles of his back and shoulders were like bands of hot rope. Rowan shuddered as his father drew a heavy seax knife and walked warily to the pair still alive. They had both been struck by broadhead arrows. One had pulled his helmet away to reveal a copper-coloured beard made wet with blood from his open mouth.
‘You’ll hang for this,’ the man wheezed.
Thomas glared down at him.
‘You’re on
The man tried to reply, but Thomas reached down and gripped his long, greasy hair. He ignored the mailed hand clutching at him and cut the man’s throat, pushing the body away before turning to the last.
Of all of them, the remaining horseman was the least wounded. He had one of Thomas’s arrows standing
