Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

I was standing upright in my stirrups, swinging my lethal flail with all my strength, and whatever the iron ball struck it crushed and maimed. Germanicus bore me forward, his pace unflagging, adding his own bulk and momentum to the havoc we wreaked on that narrow pathway. A horse will normally attempt to avoid trampling a man, but a trained war-horse has no such scruples. Side by side, our charging mounts constituted an implacable and irresistible force, and the men on the ground ahead of us were too surprised, too tightly packed and too terror-stricken to offer anything in the way of resistance. In the sudden chaos, many threw themselves bodily into the dense brush on either side of the path to save themselves, and we were unopposed. For a long count of moments we were in utter turmoil, and then we were through the press and clear, with the barn where we had spent the night directly ahead of us. Ambrose had fallen slightly behind me on my left, but as I turned to see if all was well with him he drew level with me, leaning in to shout into my ear.

"Did you hear? They took us for Romans." I shook my head, concentrating on the tunnel of trees ahead of us, which led into the farm yard. "Ride straight through," he yelled again. " There's a small knoll to the north, at the far end of the farm yard. Some big trees on it. Keep going until we're over the brow and out of sight."

Suddenly we were in the yard itself, galloping past the rear of the farmhouse, our horses' hooves clattering over the hard-packed surface. The place seemed deserted, showing no sign of the people we had watched earlier.

"They won't be far behind us," Ambrose shouted. "Once they find we're not coming back at them, they'll come on hard and they'll be angry. I think I killed three of them . . . What about you?"

"Two, perhaps three," I yelled back. "If I hit them with this thing, they're as good as dead."

We were beyond the farm yard now, the sound of our hoofbeats changing as we surged up the tree-clad hill on the far side of it. As soon as we had cleared the summit, however, and dropped out of sight of the farm on the other side, Ambrose hauled back on his reins so that his horse halted in a skidding stop, almost on its haunches. He dismounted easily, stepping out of his stirrups and taking the cloak-wrapped bundle from where it hung by his saddle. I did the same.

When he had restrung his bow, Ambrose slung the quiver of arrows around his waist and shook out his cloak, reversing it so that its snowy white lining of fine wool was uppermost. He grinned at me, moving quickly, his teeth bared.

"Now, Brother, this is the insane part I mentioned. Take off your helmet. Did you notice the boulders?"

"What boulders?"

"Two of them, one to each side of the summit of the knoll. Listen!" He cocked his head, pointing his right ear in the direction of the farm beyond the hilltop. I could hear nothing, but he relaxed, his face breaking into a smile again.

"There are two large piles of rocks, one over yonder to our left, the other that way, on the right. I noticed them this morning. They are similar in size, and almost equidistant from the largest oak tree on the summit there." He nodded towards the massive tree that crowned the knoll above and behind us. "About sixty, perhaps seventy-five paces between them. Now, please don't ask me where the idea came from." His grin grew wider. "You wear the silver bear on your black cloak. Mine has no emblem. But both cloaks are white inside, so that, reversed, they are identical. And so are we, especially when we remove our helms and let our hair hang free. And even more when we do this." He had been looking down at the ground by his feet and now he stooped quickly to a small puddle that had been churned into mud by animal hooves, goats and sheep. The surplus water had soaked into the ground, and the remaining mud gleamed black and viscous. He scooped up a handful of the stuff and smeared it diagonally down the left side of his face, coating it from forehead to chin, so that the stuff caked in the hollow of his eye. He dug out the surplus with a fingertip before continuing.

"If you do the same thing now, carefully, we will be identical and indistinguishable from far less than a hundred paces. After that, as each of us steps from hiding, from behind his own pile of rock, in sequence, Brother, and never both at the same time, it will seem as though one and the same man is shooting, moving from rock to rock at magical speed, without being seen to move at all. What say you?"

I found my tongue at last. "What can I say? You're right, it is insane. Completely insane."

He laughed. "Aye, but it will work. These Saxons are a superstitious breed and for them, white is the colour of death, dread and mourning."

I expelled my breath in a gust and bent to scoop up my own handful of mud, which I then applied to my own face, taking care to do it exactly as he had, caking it thickly on my own forehead and in the hollow of my eye, between brow and cheekbone, before scooping it out again with a fingertip. As I completed the task, the sound of shouting reached us from behind the hill.

"It has begun," Ambrose said. "We should take our places now, while their attention is centred on the farm buildings. The most difficult part for us will be getting from here to the rocks without being seen from below, but if we move quickly and carefully, we should be able to manage it. After that, it's simply a question of staying out of sight once we're in place and hidden. Which side do you want?"

I shrugged. "Makes no difference. You realise our bows are completely different? Mine curves one way, yours another. They don't look even faintly similar."

"From the distance at which we'll be shooting? All they will see is a yellow-haired man with a white cloak, a half-black face and a long bow, and when they see how magically he moves from side to side they'll be too afraid even to notice, let alone analyze, the difference in our bows.

"Let's go, and wait for me to shoot first. When I have loosed, give me a count of five to hide myself again, then you step out and fire. I'll do the same . . . a five count after you, I'll shoot again. I'm nowhere near as good a marksman as you are, but let's hope they don't notice that down there."

It took me some time to work my way into position on the left flank of the hill, and I had to crawl through high bracken for about a hundred paces in order to reach the rock pile. Once there, however, I was able to observe what was happening in the farm yard below, slightly more than a hundred paces from where I crouched.

The inhabitants had evidently taken shelter in the main house, for the shutters were closed over the windows, barred from the inside. At least one of them, I saw, had a bow, because two helmeted corpses sprawled in the open yard before the house, the arrows which had killed them clearly discernible from where I was.

A knot of eight or ten of the attackers—their positioning made it difficult to see clearly—huddled in the lee of the outhouse closest to me, and I saw smoke wisping up above them. The other attackers were scattered around the farmhouse, keeping low and out of sight from the shuttered windows. They must have been driven off by the defenders while I was making my way down through the bracken on the hillside. Even as I looked, however, several of them darted forward towards the house from different directions, one of them swinging a great, two-headed axe at the door of the building and two others battering at the shuttered windows. At the same time, under the cover of these diversions, one of the main group broke away and ran towards the house, whirling a smoking object round his head and plainly intent upon firing the thatch of the building. I sensed, rather than saw movement to my right, and then Ambrose loosed his first arrow.