Bad Tom was a pebble in a crumbling sand castle.
He threw back his helmeted head and bellowed.
The irks quailed.
He killed them.
His sword was everywhere, and he was faster than they, taller, longer, stronger.
They went where he wasn’t, but the other men-at-arms knew what Tom was like, and they stuck to him like glue. Francis Atcourt stood at his shoulder, advancing when Tom advanced, retiring when the big man spun away. He had a short spear, and he used it sparingly. He let Tom kill the irks. He only killed those who could threaten Tom.
They began to retreat off the breach. They couldn’t hold it – too many of the men-at-arms were down.
Atcourt saw movement above him on the ridge. ‘Sortie,’ he called.
Tom was frozen.
‘Troll coming,’ he said. ‘Francis, clear what’s behind us and open a lane to the tower.’
Atcourt didn’t need to be urged. He tapped the captain’s squire and three other men on the helmet as he passes them. ‘On me!’ he called.
An irk appeared in his range of vision – paused, surprised, perhaps to find men in the town, and not on the wall, and died with Atcourt’s short spear in its forehead.
‘Michael!’ he called. ‘Get to the tower. Tell Cuddy and Long Paw to cover us.’
The squire had excellent armour, lighter and better than any of the professionals. Besides, he was the youngest.
The great troll ran through the irks. At the base of the rubble-strewn slope up into the breach, it paused, glaring around like some eyeless worm seeking daylight or warmth – or human blood. Then it picked its way to the top of the breach, clearly unwilling to move quickly in the bad footing. When it reached the top it paused again, caught sight of the men-at-arms and threw back its head and roared its challenge, its grotesque mouth, back- hooked fangs and black gullet on display as it sounded its challenge.
The sound rang through the woods, and echoed off the ridge and the walls of the fortress high above. The Abbess heard it at her prayers, and Amicia heard it in the hospital. Thorn heard it and clenched a mighty fist. The captain didn’t hear it at all. He was preparing to work.
Bad Tom stood his ground, threw back his head, and roared back.
The sound crashed back and forth – from the fortress walls to the woods, and back.
They charged each other.
A stride from contact, Tom side-stepped – the monster hesitated, and Tom’s sword swept through. The troll’s antlers caught him and slammed him to the ground.
The troll’s momentum carried it a dozen steps, and it turned.
Tom got a leg under him. He put the point into the ground and used his great sword as a lever to get to his feet.
The troll completed its turn, and put its armoured head down.
Tom laughed.
Cuddy leaned out over the tower wall. The troll turned, and he let it turn, reasoning that its arse couldn’t be as well armoured as its front. He raised a chisel point above the wall, leaned into his draw, and loosed.
The arrow struck with a sound like a butcher’s blade into a leg of mutton.
The troll stumbled. The arrow had struck from behind, between its shoulder blades, and sunk in all the way to the fletchings. The troll gave a moan and raised its head.
Tom stepped forward.
The monster flinched, and then punched for Tom’s throat with both stone-shod hands.
Tom cut.
Struck, and was struck to earth in turn.
Ser George Brewes leaped over Tom’s body to face the troll in his place. ‘Go!’ he roared at the rest of the men-at-arms. ‘Run!’
But Francis Atcourt came and joined him, and Robert Lyliard too.
The troll eyed them, pawed at the earth once, twice, and then slumped slowly to it and lay still.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Lyliard said. He stepped forward and slammed his hammer into the thing’s head.
‘Get Tom!’ Atcourt called. The irks had the breach, and the troll’s death didn’t seem to make any difference to them.
They all got a hand on him. He weighed as much as a war horse, or so they swore later.
And then they ran for the tower, the irks hard on their heels.
The archers shot right into them, Cuddy and Long Paw assuming that their armour would hold.
Mostly, it did.
The irks fell back – flooding the Lower Town, but letting the men have a path to the tower – and the postern opened. Long Paw loosed a shaft right down the line of men-at-arms and then drew his hanger and his buckler, flinging his bow through the door behind him. He stepped out, and the men-at-arms carried Tom past him.
There was a brief flood of irks. They were all armoured in scale mail and carrying round shields – warriors.
Long Paw’s sword and buckler swept up, bound as if they were one weapon – his buckler slammed into the face of one irk’s shield, and then, in the same tempo, his sword beheaded another. In the same flow, he swept his sword back into guard, fell back a step, and parried not one but two spear thrusts with a single sweep of his blade. He stepped in, passed his buckler under the spear-wielding irk’s arms, wrapped them, slammed his pommel into the irk’s unarmoured face, and used his advantage to throw the lighter creature into his mates.
Stepped back again, and the postern crashed shut.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
Ser Jehannes had halted the sortie two-thirds of the way down the ridge, when it became clear that the breach had fallen. Now the sortie turned and rode silently back up the road.
The captain was waiting in the gate.
‘Right,’ he said to Jehannes. ‘Good call.’
Jehannes dismounted, gave his reins to a farmer – the valets were all in harness – and started to turn away. ‘The Lower Town is lost,’ he said.
‘No,’ the captain said. ‘Not yet.’
Over their heads, the trebuchet lashed out again.
‘You are risking everything on the hope that we will be relieved. By the king.’ Jehannes was obviously restraining himself. The words were very carefully enunciated.
The captain put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Christ be with us,’ Jehannes said.
West of Albinkirk, South Bank of the Cohocton – Gaston
Gaston had done his exercises of arms, and had prayed. And now he had little to do. He’d had enough of his cousin, and enough of the army in every way.
He mounted his riding horse, left his valet at his tent door, and went for a ride.
The camp was enormous – a sprawling thing as big as a market fair or a small town, with more than two thousand tents, hundreds of wagons drawn up like a wall, and a ditch all the way around it, dug to the height of a man and with the upcast flung back to form a low rampart.
No man was allowed outside the ditch on pain of punishment. Gaston understood – better than his cousin – that he needed to set an example, so he rode slowly around the perimeter, nodding to the Alban knights he knew, and their lords.
He saw a pair of younger men with hawks on their wrists, and he was envious.
He thought of home. Of sun-drenched valleys. Of riding out with his sister’s friends, for a day of wit and wine and frolic, chasing birds, climbing trees, watching a well-formed body on a horse, or by a stream . . .
