The Red Knight

‘I didn’t mean to cross you, Lachlan!’ the local lordling pleaded. He had that tone, the one Hector hated the most – wheedling bluster, he called it, when a man who had pretended he was cock of the north started begging for his life.

Hector hadn’t even drawn the great sword that sat across his hip and rump. He merely leaned his forearm on the hilt. He stroked his moustache idly and ran a hand through his hair, looked back down the long, muddy train of cattle and sheep that extended behind him, as far as the eye might see on the mountain track.

‘Just pay me the toll. I’ll – see to it you ha’ the coins back soon enough.’ The other man was tall, well-built, and wearing a chain hauberk worth a fortune, every link riveted closed, strong as stone.

He was afraid of Hector Lachlan.

But not afraid enough to let the long convoy of beasts past. He had to be seen to try and collect the toll. It was the way, in the hills, and his own fear would make him angry.

Sure enough, even as Hector had the thought, he saw the man’s face change.

‘Be damned to you, then. Pay the damned toll or-’

Hector drew his sword. He wasn’t hurried by his adversary’s anger, fear, or the fifty armed men at his back. He drew the long sword at his own pace, and allowed the heavy pommel to rotate the sword in his hand, so that the point aimed unwaveringly at the other man’s face.

And punched the needle sharp point through the other man’s forehead with all the effort of a shoemaker punching a hole in leather. The armoured man crumpled, his eyes rolling up. Already dead.

Hector sighed.

The dead man’s retinue stood rooted to the ground in shock – a shock that would last a few more heartbeats.

‘Stop!’ Hector said. It was a delicate art – to command without threatening them and provoking the very reaction he sought to avoid.

The body crashed to the ground, the dead man’s heels thrashing momentarily.

‘None of ye need to die,’ he said. There was a thread of the dead man’s blood on the tip of his sword. ‘He was a fool to demand a toll of me, and every man here knows it. Let his tanist take command, and let us hear no more about it.’ Lachlan got the words out, and for a moment the men he was facing teetered on the knife-edge of doubt and greed and fear and loyalty – not to the dead man but to the code that required them to avenge him.

The code won.

Lachlan heard the grunt that signified their refusal, and he had both hands on his sword, swinging a heavy overhand blow at the nearest man. He had a sword in his hand, but was too slow to save his own life; the heavy swing batted his parry aside and cut through his skull from left eyebrow to right jaw, so that the top of his head spun away, cleanly severed.

Hector’s own men started to come forward, abandoning their places with his herd. Which meant that when this was over, with all the attending noise, violence, blood and ordure, a day would be lost while they collected all the beasts who ran off into the glens and valleys.

Someone – some ancient philosopher Lachlan couldn’t remember from the days when a priest came to teach him letters – had said that the hillmen would conquer the world, if only they would ever stop fighting among themselves.

He pondered that as he killed his third man of the day, as his retinue charged with a shout, and as the doomed men of the toll gate tried to make a stand and were cut down.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The camp below the Abbey vanished as quickly as it had appeared, the tents folded and packed into the wagons, the wagons double-teamed and hauled up the steep slope into the fortress.

The first chore that face all of them was billeting the company. Captain and Abbess walked quickly through the dormitory, the great hall, the chapel, the stables, and the storehouses, adding, dividing, and allocating.

‘I will need to bring all my people in, of course,’ the Abbess said.

The captain bit his lip and looked at the courtyard. ‘Eventually, we may have to re-erect our tents here,’ he said. ‘Will you use the Great Hall?’

‘Of course. It’s being stripped even now,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘It is Lent – all of our valuables are put away already.’

One of the company’s great wagons was just crossing the threshold of the main gate. Its top just fitted under the lintel.

‘Show me your stores and all your storage places,’ he said.

She led him from cellar to cellar, from store room to the long, winding, airless steps that led deep into the heart of the living rock under their feet, to where a fresh spring burbled away into a pool the size of a farm pond. She was slower coming back up the winding steps than she had been going down.

He waited with her when she stopped to rest.

‘Is there an exit? Down there?’ he asked.