Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

In the half hour that followed, buffeted and shaken by the wind until my clothes seemed useless and I was chilled to the bone, I wrought havoc among that herd, nocking my arrows with cold, nerveless fingers, keeping myself downwind at all times, so that the buffeting of the gale hit me directly in the face, and moving laterally in a narrow arc, hither and yon, remorselessly killing the beasts on the outside of the dwindling herd. A score of them fell to my deadly attack before the twenty-first, a massive-muscled young stag, leapt about and fled, bugling a note of panic. Watching him go, I wondered what had frightened him, for I knew by that time that it would not have been my presence. Perhaps, I thought, he had caught the scent of fresh- spilled blood, borne on an errant eddy of gusting wind. Whatever the cause of his fright, however, they were gone.

Slowly then, I walked around the scene of my slaughter, counting my kill. Twenty fresh deer, of a kind unknown to me, far bigger than the common red deer to which I was accustomed in these parts. Twenty large deer! I had not the slightest hope of being able to clean and dress them alone, but I had to do something with them.

Four hours later, shaking with exhaustion, I gutted the last of them and dragged it, with the help of my horse, to lie beside its fellows. After that I returned to my campsite and finally broke my fast before breaking camp and heading towards the spot where I had left my three-carcass kill the previous day, safely cleaned and, unlike the other twenty, hung high from the branches of an oak. The wind had died down a little, but the day was still unfit for man or beast. I arrived at the spot before any of the collectors had arrived, so I found a depression out of the wind beneath a fallen log, wrapped myself in my cloak and sat down to rest. The twenty deer might be discovered by a predator, but that was something over which I now had no control, and so I dismissed them from my mind for the present, concentrating, with a sense of well-being, on other, more pleasant things.

I must have fallen asleep, because the voices startled me into a panic- stricken crouch, my dagger in my hand and my knees protesting at the sudden movement. There were four men in the party, and I knew all of them. Even better, I had the pleasure of surprising them as much as they had me, for they had not seen me lying asleep beneath my log. Now I winged an arrow into a tree trunk beside them and laughed as they scattered, cursing and clawing for weapons. I stepped forward immediately and they shuffled together uneasily, crestfallen at the apparent magic with which I had "crept up on them" across an open glade. I said nothing to disillusion them, but set them quickly to lowering the three carcasses from the oak tree, and then I led them to the clearing where I had left my twenty new prizes. These had remained untouched, Fortune continuing to favour me throughout the day.

I still recall with pleasure the effect that cache had on those soldiers, for I had been through a sufficiently long period of self-doubt the previous week to enable me to revel in their wonder. Their eyes grew wide and their mouths gaped, for never had such bounty been seen as the result of one man's solitary hunting in a single day. Again, I offered no explanation of how I had achieved such a harvest, and such was their awe, they would not have considered asking me. I apologized, however, for the unskinned condition of the catch, pointing out that I had neither had the time nor the tools to skin all twenty beasts. I left them to their task then and they set to work immediately, muttering in wonder among themselves and casting superstitious glances my way whenever they thought they were unobserved.

Directly the men were finished loading the meat onto the wagon they had brought, I returned with them to Camulod and made my way straight to the bath house, where I spent little time in the intermediate pools before lodging myself for an hour and more in the steam room. Thereafter, although November's early darkness had not yet begun to fall, I sought my cot and slept like a baby.

They wakened me hours later, in the dead of night, with a hurried summons to present myself in the Praetorium, nominally my own working quarters but in fact the headquarters of the Officer of the Watch at any time of day or night. Alarmed by the appearance of the white-faced, stammering young soldier who had been sent to roust me from my bed, I threw cold water on my face, pulled on a heavy winter tunic, wrapped myself in my cloak and made my way directly to the Praetorium, where I found Ambrose, as tousled as I was, huddled with a group of senior officers including Dedalus, Rufio and Achmed Cato, who, as I perceived immediately from his immaculate uniform, was Officer of the Watch. They broke off their colloquy as I hurried in, each of them scanning me from head to foot as I approached. I saw and accepted that without a thought. I felt fresh and well rested, and I gauged I had already been abed for six hours or more.

"What's happened?" I asked as I strode up to the table. Ambrose reacted first, picking up one of the objects that lay on the table and tossing it to me as I drew near. The silence held as I pulled the flying object from the air and looked at it: part of an arrow, much like my own, save that the shaft had been cut through, leaving no way to tell how long the missile had originally been. Six more exactly like it remained on the table. I sucked in air as I glared at the thing in my hand. Its barbed head and the first handspan of its length were coated with dried and clotted blood, and the cut shaft had been deliberately severed with a sharp blade. I scraped the barbed iron head with my thumbnail, noting the way it had been made and the size and weight of it.

"This is Pendragon." I rapped out the words, an indictment in themselves, looking around at each of them. "Who has killed whom?"

Achmed Cato cleared his throat. "Are you sure of that, Commander? That it is Pendragon?"

"Don't be dense, Achmed. I'm as sure as you are. This was made for a Pendragon longbow. The arrowhead betrays that. It's far too large and heavy for a short bow." I turned to Ambrose. "No one has answered my question. Tell me."

Ambrose shrugged his shoulders and scratched beneath his armpit. " 'Whom' is some of us," he answered in his clear, ever reasonable tones. " 'Who' is unknown. One of our outposts has been wiped out: Calibri, the one farthest to the northwest, closest to the Pendragon lands. Fifty men, all dead, and all the horses stolen. Twenty-four animals—mounts for two squads, one with remounts. The raid occurred less than a week ago. The patrol from the next camp, Horse Farm, waited for them this morning, since they had been scheduled to join the Horse Farm group. When they had not arrived by mid-morning, Saul Maripo, the officer in charge at Horse Farm, led a contingent of his men to see what the problem was. He arrived at Calibri before noon and found everyone dead. A head count showed no one was unaccounted for. There were no enemy corpses."

"Shit and corruption! When did this occur?"

Ambrose shook his head, but it was Achmed Cato who answered me. "Maripo had been there five days earlier and all was well when he left then, just before nightfall. Whatever happened must have taken place the next day or the day after that. From the condition of the bodies, he estimates they had been dead at least three days."

"Damnation!" I curbed my angry reaction and looked around at each of them. All of them met my eyes, and I burst out again. "The raid, you say? Fifty garrison troopers dead and you think this was a mere raid? Are you all mad?" I paused then, looking about me again. There was something in the bearing of all of them that struck me as strange. "What is going on here?" I snarled at Cato. "You are the Officer of the Watch. Have you sounded the Assembly? I heard no horns."