Robert Adams - Horses of the North

At least, that had been his plan, but he had not backed up more than two or three short steps when he himself shrieked in pain and surprise and let go his wife’s hair to clap the freed hand to a smarting and now bleeding buttock. Still grasping his cudgel, he spun about to confront a lithe nomad woman who held a cursive saber in a businesslike way, the blade of the weapon an inch back from the fine point now cloudy-pinkish with his blood.

“How dare you, you godless, pagan hussy!” he yelped. “You have no right to interfere with the high and holy work of the Lord. Get you gone ere I smite you.” He raised the cudgel in a threatening manner, but she just smiled mockingly at him.

“You try laying that club on my body, dirt-scrabbler, and I’ll take off your damned hand at the wrist, for all that your scrawny neck does offer me a most tempting target, and I doubt me not that you could do most comically a rendition of the dance of the headless chicken, to the amusement of all of us.”

“Woman of Satan,” said Falconer, in a heated anger that completely overrode his fear of this obviously demented nomad strumpet, “you know not to whom you speak. I am the—”

“You are the shitpants coward who needs must have a heavy club to attack a woman half your size from the rear, with no warning,” the swordswoman sneered. “That’s what you are! And if you don’t get out of this camp quickly you’re going to be a very dead shitpants coward.”

“The … she … this woman is my wife, and you have no right to interfere in domestic affairs,” stated Falconer, conveniently forgetting how often he had done just that to his parishioners, and generally to no real or lasting good effect. “She is my God-given helpmeet, and her proper place is in my home caring for me and our children. It is her duty, ordained by God’s Holy Will.”

He had hardly finished speaking the last word when there came a whhuushing noise from behind him and the long tail of a stock whip suddenly wrapped around his billet and then jerked it from out his grasp. An identical noise immediately preceded what felt to him to be the laying of a red-hot bar of iron upon his shoulder and diagonally across his back. He screamed then and bent to retrieve his cudgel, whereupon the same or another hot length of iron bar was pressed across his already sore and wounded buttocks. Forgetting the billet of wood, forgetting his mutinous wife, forgetting his empty stomach, indeed, forgetting everything save only his unaccustomed pain, the Reverend Gerald Falconer leaped forward in a dead run, heedlessly knocking the lightly built swordswoman asprawl from out his path. His long legs took him with some speed, nor did he stop until he once more had attained the safety of his empty house, with a barred door between him and his tormentors, whose mocking, shrill laughter and obscene, shouted jibes still echoed in his ears, where he leaned against the mantel, panting.

Emmett MacEvedy had been at the door of the chapel for a good half hour, having arrived a bit before the appointed time, when the parson made his appearance, walking slowly and a bit stiffly, wincing every now and again, as if some injury might lie under his black vestments. The large silver pectoral cross hung from his neck on its silver chain, the polished surfaces glinting in the sunlight. Arrived before the chapel, the parson seemed about to climb the four steps up to the stoop, then he apparently changed his mind.

“Are you ill or injured, Reverend Falconer?” inquired the director solicitously. “If you are, perhaps we should postpone our plans until another day, when you possibly will be feeling better.” Emmett MacEvedy would just as soon have postponed their act of desperation indefinitely, having experienced some very foreboding presentiments as regarded it.

“No, no, I am well and uninjured, Emmett,” Falconer assured him, possibly sensing that did he expect the MacEvedys to act in accordance with his directive in this matter it were best done now, at once. “I … I nearly fell and think I have only strained a muscle in my … uhh, leg. Yes, that’s it, I slightly pulled a muscle in my leg, but it will no doubt improve with careful use.

“Where is your son, Grant? He too should be here by now.”

“Oh, he’ll be along, Reverend,” said MacEvedy. “He’s often tardy for things he doesn’t care for. You should remember that about him from his school days.”

“Yes, yes,” Falconer said impatiently, “but it speaks ill of him to be late for this, the Lord’s work.

“How of you? Did you do as I told you? Did you spy out the present whereabouts of the Beast?”

MacEvedy nodded. “I could not find him for a while, but then he and Ian and some of the other officers came out of the main building of the fort. Moray and Ian are now in the space before the main gate, overseeing the construction of carts in company with that other prairie rover chief, Scott. Most of the men and bigger boys of both station and fort seem to be thereabouts, too.”

“Very well, then,” said Falconer, “immediately your son, your laggard son, comes, we will go to the fort and do God’s work, perform the task He has set us. Come, come, Emmett MacEvedy, smile. You should feel pride in having been chosen to be an instrument of the Lord.”

Although Emmett was able to coax his lips, at least, into a grimace that parodied a smile, the load of encroaching doom was weighing heavier and ever heavier upon him; he knew, knew without knowing, that no good would come to him this day, knew that all three of them—him, his son and Falconer-moved in the bright sunlight under an invisible but horrifyingly palpable black cloud of deadly and irrevocable doom.

“Oh ho,” muttered Ian Lindsay to Milo. “Yonder comes trouble.”

Milo turned to look in the direction indicated by his companion. The Reverend Gerald Falconer was pacing in their direction as fast as his awkward limp would permit, his black vestments swaying about his ankles and the big silver cross bouncing up and down on the front of his torso. Some pace or so behind the parson came Director Emmett MacEvedy, trudging slump-shouldered, his demeanor that of a convicted felon bound for his execution. A few steps behind the director came his son, his shirttails flapping out and his arms supporting an angular bundle that looked very much like a crossbow wrapped hurriedly and most inexpertly in an old rain cape; MacEvedy fits did not look any too happy either, and his pale, beardless cheeks both bore the red imprints of recent slapping hands, while tears glittered unshed in his eyes and his Sips could be seen to be trembling.

Milo disliked the look of it all. He had already been apprised as to Falconer assaulting his wife and being whipped out of camp by Manda and Sally Kahrtuh, Chief Bahb’s two youngest wives. Yes, it had been extreme, to say the least, but he agreed that Falconer had fully deserved every last stripe he had been awarded, for not only had he clubbed to death an old hound for no apparent reason, his vicious attack upon his wife had broken at least three of her ribs, several fingers and her right lower arm, both bones of it.

So now, deserted by all of their subordinates and personal dependents, these three approaching men were become desperate, and desperate men are often wont to do or attempt to do mad, desperate things.

“Chief Gus,” said Milo swiftly and softly to the Scott chief at his other side, “arm as many bowmen as you can quickly and unobtrusively. At least one of those three is armed with what seems to be a crossbow, but he doesn’t apparently want anyone to know of that fact.”

“Why not let them get a little closer and drop them before they have a chance to do whatever they’ve come for?” asked Scott. “They hate you and Chief Ian and care little, they’ve made it clear, for me or Jules or any other rover. You throw a knife every bit as accurately as do I, and Chief Ian has his belt gun, so what need have we three of archers?”