The Red Knight

More and more of the men-at-arms and archers emerged from beneath the trees, swords a ruddy green in the failing light.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ the captain said. He wheeled Grendel just as two arrows hit the horse’s withers, and he reared and grunted and then they were around.

There were Jacks at the edge of the trees, just to the north, their dirty white cotes shining in the last light of day. The polished heads of their war arrows seemed to flicker as they loosed.

Bootlick, one of the foreign horn-bow archers, took a shaft in the neck, right through his aventail. He went down without a croak, and his horse, well trained, kept formation.

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.