Authors: Miles Cameron
Father Arnaud smiled. ‘I’m certainly not offended that you like pretty women, Ser John. I misdoubt God is offended either. He made them.’ He grinned. ‘As to dinner – I’m always in favour of dinner.’
The two archers, Odo and Umphrey, were too junior even to have nick-names, and they were both looking a little pale. Ser John smiled at the two. ‘You boys like camping?’ he asked, and went to check the pack horses. When he was satisfied, he changed from his palfrey to his warhorse.
Ser Richard did the same, and then both of them pulled on helmets and gauntlets.
Ser John looked at the priest. ‘Isn’t that skull cap a little light?’
The priest nodded. He took a full helm out of the bag at his saddle bow and put it on his head – Ser John noted with professional interest how the lugs he had scarcely noticed on the skull cap engaged with corresponding tracks inside the great helm, locking the massive steel helmet in place and creating a protective system of two layers of hardened steel. He whistled.
Father Arnaud dropped the great helm home with a click.
They rode for a mile at a cautious pace. From the Royal Road, which ran west to Lissen Carrak and then crossed the Bridge Castle and on to Hawkshead, they could see the open sky of the devastation just to the north, between the road and the river. Sometimes they lost it, but then they would spy it again and, after a mile when the road cut north, they slowed to a walk, and the road entered the devastation.
They picked their way carefully for about three hundred paces, and then they were deep in. Ser John reined up, raised a hand and shook his head. He pushed up his visor.
‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘We need to come back with the archers, clear the road, find whatever did this and kill it. As it is, we’re in its terrain and our horses are useless.’
Ser Richard raised his visor. ‘I agree. I’m already tired, and my poor Arrow will probably bite me right through my harness if I make him jump another log.’ He turned his horse. Both men looked at the priest, who was perfectly still on his black charger.
He was looking past Ser John’s shoulder, and he’d just drawn his sword.
There was a loud
snap
as a branch was broken. Everyone froze.
‘Blessed Virgin,’ Ser Richard said.
Ser John saw movement in the downed trees. ‘Dismount!’ he shouted.
Ser Richard didn’t dismount. He put his horse at the downed tree immediately behind them and his horse made the leap – man and armour and all. Ser Richard had a royal education – so he rode like a centaur.
The archers and squires dismounted. Jamie took the horses’ heads and pulled them clear of the men, but the downed trees on the road made the space so restricted that any fidgeting from the horses would crowd the men, or worse.
Ser John’s eyes met his squires’. ‘Get them out of here,’ he barked.
Jamie began to thread his way through the fallen timbers.
The archers were still stringing their great war bows.
‘What is it?’ asked Ser Richard.
‘No idea,’ spat Ser John.
‘Giant,’ said the priest. Like Ser Richard, he was still mounted.
Behind him, the smell of something foul reached the horses, and they panicked. The pack horses ran – one misstepped, and its leg broke with a sickening crack. The horse screamed.
The scream acted like a signal, and two giants rose out of the downed trees and struck.
They were huge.
And, unlike legend, they were fast
.
In forty years of fighting, Ser John had never seen one, and he was rooted to the spot for a fatal moment. His mouth framed the word, ‘Christ.’
The priest went forward, and his horse leaped a downed spruce, despite the weight of the armoured man on his back, and the priest’s sword took a finger off the giant’s reaching left hand and he was by.
The monster was shaped like a man, if that man were very ugly, had legs only as long as his torso, and no neck. And only one great eye.
And carried a club roughly the size of a small boy.
But for some reason, the thing threw its blow at the screaming pack horse, as if its cries pierced the thing’s enormous shell ears, or the pain of the wound to its hand disoriented it.
‘It
is
a giant,’ said Odo the archer, unnecessarily. And then his first shaft, thirty-five inches long and weighing four royal ounces, slammed into the giant’s thigh. The livery head with a bodkin point went so far into the giant’s meat that only the fletching showed.
The giant roared, and the woods shook with the sound.
Off to his left, Ser John heard Ser Richard call his war cry and heard the pounding of his horse’s hooves.
Umfrey loosed a shaft and missed.
Sir John made himself move forward at the giant, which was just about three times his own height. Its club had pulped the horse’s head and spattered all of them with gore.
Lord Wimarc followed at his shoulder, a fine gold-chased pole-axe in his hand.
‘What— What do we do?’ asked the younger man.
‘We kill it,’ said Ser John.
The giant was as fast as a man. It turned to face the two armoured men, and while Odo missed, Umphrey’s second shaft went right through the thick muscles of its upper right arm, spoiling its blow at Lord Wimarc. Most of the blow went into the ground, but the club skipped and caught him, breaking both his legs and knocking him flat. He screamed – a nasty, choked sound. Despite the wound, Wimarc swung his pole-axe at a finger the size of his wrist, and connected despite lying flat on his back. Only then did he lie back and scream in earnest.
Ser John didn’t waste his free moments. He had a hammer with a five-foot haft and a spiked back. He slammed it full force into the giant’s right foot, shattering bone, and then stepped in between the reeking thing’s legs and lifted his hammer, catching the giant’s dangling testicles with the spike and ripping – pivoting on his hips and passing the pole-arm through a whole butterfly to slam his third strike into the giant’s left knee.
Its scream sent every bird for four miles into the air. Its mate paused, turned and took Ser Richard’s lance in its belly.
She cut down with her club, shattering Ser Richard’s shield, breaking his hand and arm, but Ser Richard put spurs deep into the side of his beloved Arrow and the big horse responded in a rage of injured horse-friendship, plunging forward into the bad smell and pushing the lance head deep into the she-giant’s belly.
Umfrey and Odo saw the male giant go down, turned together like veterans, and engaged their second target. Neither missed. They drew and loosed, nocked, drew and loosed, their bows singing every few seconds. The female giant was only ten paces distant, and she had no cover.
Ser John slammed the point at the end of his hammer into her rump as she fell, got between her legs and turned and hit again.
It made a piteous sound, and fell to hands and knees across Lord Wimarc. Ser John was behind it, and he broke its thigh with his hammer on his third blow. And then started on where its kidneys ought to be.
The female plucked Ser Richard from the saddle, breaking his collarbone and dropping him on his already broken arm and hand. But she didn’t seem to be able to understand where the heavy livery arrows were coming from, and she slapped at them after they hit her, like a small child slapping insects that have already bitten and left.
Ser Richard rolled over on training alone, cut at the ankle and connected. He cut again, screaming his terror and his war cry at the giantess, and she ignored him and turned and saw the archers.
Umfrey’s bow broke with a snap – he’d been drawing hard, with every shot, in something like blind panic. ‘Uh-oh,’ he said.
Odo put an arrow into her face, but he missed the eye and the arrowhead bounced off the bone. He reached for another shaft but there weren’t any more. The rest were on the pack horse.
Umfrey drew his sword and turned to run.
Odo caught an arrow in Umfrey’s belt by the head and pulled it clear. He nocked.
Ser Richard cut with everything he had at the giantess’s hamstring and then fainted.
Father Arnaud appeared behind the giantess. His horse rose like it had wings, and his sword went in to the hilt – in with a long over-arm thrust, out again like a deadly needle punching living flesh, and he was past again, and her blow missed him as his horse bounded away like a deer.
Ser John’s giant voided his bowels and collapsed. Ser John couldn’t see Ser Richard – the other knight’s horse was kicking at the giantess, and she stood stock-still on one foot. There was an arrow in her eye, and Odo was standing, watching her with a curious look of triumph on his face.
Her club pulped him.
But when she stepped forward to finish his mortally wounded mate, her right leg gave under her, the hamstring completely severed, and she fell.
Umfrey saw Odo die and went berserk. He shouted. He screamed. He wept, and his sword hacked at the downed giant as fast as a woodpecker eats insects, striking along her dangling breasts and into her shoulder. She screamed and tried to rise.
Father Arnaud hit her in the back of the head with a mace plucked from his saddle bow, full force, and the mace head broke the back of her skull with a spurt of blood and pulverised brains.
Darkness was falling when Helewise, who listened every night for such things, heard voices from the gatehouse, which had become a sort of barracks for their newer folks. She had sixty people now – far more women then men, and most of the men were older, but everyone worked and the fields had been cleared.
She wasn’t yet undressed, but she ran a brush through her hair in hope and then ran down the steps from her solar to the main hall of the old manor.
‘Blessed Saint Katherine, what is that smell?’ she asked before she was out the door.
The yard was full of horsemen and Phillippa was there, and both the Rose girls and old Gynn and Beatrice Upton. Then there were torches.
Ser John appeared among the men. He was in full armour, and he looked
old.
But he managed a smile for her. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘I’m covered in shit.’
She flinched back, and saw that there were other knights – a man on a stretcher between two horses, and a bundle that held the particular quality of a corpse. She put her hands to her mouth, but only for a moment.
‘Hot water,’ she called. ‘And get Sister Amicia!’
‘I’m here,’ said the nun. She was dressed only in a shift, and she ran across the yard to the man on the horse-stretcher.
Ser John swung a leg over his horse and dismounted slowly. His squire came and took the horse.
‘He fought a giant. By himself,’ said Jamie.
‘Crap I did,’ said Ser John. ‘Sister, Ser Richard isn’t dying. This boy is.’ Ser John led her to another man, also on an improvised stretcher between two pack horses.
Helewise went to the man called Ser Richard. She waved to the girls. ‘Let’s get him inside,’ she said. ‘Smartly with the stretcher.’
‘I know what I’m doing,’ her daughter said with her usual attitude.
She and Jen got the stretcher unlashed from the saddles and they carried the wounded man inside, grunting at his weight. He was a big man in full harness. The two young women grunted but they got him onto the hall table, while Mary Rose took the cloth and rolled it away, moving the two great bronze candlesticks that the looters couldn’t break, and dropping a heavy salt-cellar on her foot and cursing.
‘Christ, they stink,’ said Mary.
There was a glow of gold-green light outside, and then they heard Sister Amicia praying.
‘Oh,’ said Phillippa. ‘I want to see her miracles!’
‘You can stay right here and help me with these buckles,’ said her mother.
Golden light like the rising sun played outside.
‘Oh! It’s not fair!’ said Phillippa.
‘Be a help and not a hussy,’ spat Helewise. ‘Get his arm harness off.’
While she fumbled with the unfamiliar buckles under the man’s sword arm, Ser John and the priest and Sister Amicia came in. Phillippa suddenly became very serious about her buckles.
Sister Amicia had hair going every which way, and there were lines under her eyes. Helewise had never seen her look so old.
But she put a hand on Phillippa’s hand. ‘You must be even more gentle,’ she said. ‘Look – collarbone is broken, and the arm, and all these bones in the hand. And his breastplate – see where it is bent?’ Amicia took a deep breath. ‘All those ribs are broken, and they can’t even spring back until the breastplate is removed.’ Her voice emitted a sort of warm calm, like a mother’s love made palpable.
She took a deep breath and turned the collet on her ring so that the bezel was out. ‘Oh, my sweet Lord,’ she said.
Six hundred leagues to the east, the Red Knight paused, his breath caught, and for a moment he was sitting hand in hand with Amicia the novice, under the magical apple tree on the wall of the convent at Lissen Carrak. The feeling was so powerful that he
was
there.
She didn’t seem to ask, but he gave her every scrap of his horded
ops
– the deep reserve he kept for the moment he might have to face Harmodius.
She took it all.
Ser John reached past Phillippa and undid the side-straps on the other knight’s breastplate – one, two. But the third moved something inside, and Ser Richard gave a choked scream.
Ser John looked at the nun, and she shook her head.
He drew a dagger and cut the strap, and the armour hinged open, and the man’s body made a wet sound.
‘Helewise!’ Ser John said, and she got a hand in with his and they rolled the man a little, and the priest got the backplate off as he coughed blood.
‘No!’ said Amicia. ‘Lay him flat. Gently.’
Phillippa finally had the last straps on the arm undone, and Ser John opened the left vambrace with a sticky, wet sound.
Ser Richard’s eyes opened, and he screamed and then choked and said, ‘Awfully sorry.’
Sister Amicia put a hand on his shoulder. Her face grew pale, then almost leaden. The ring flared like a diamond in sunlight, and then like a small sun.
She sighed. And slowly smiled.