Christian Cameron: Castillon: Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part One

After lunch they rode quickly. The notaries were, as usual, excellent company, and for more than an hour all conversation degenerated into Latin jokes, most of them bawdy.

In a little hamlet of perhaps a hundred villagers, Swan asked the two lawyers to wait under the tree in the central square while he asked directions. He rode into a walled compound. He leaned down from the saddle in front of the stone house that seemed to function as the auberge.

‘Have you seen a convoy of wagons?’ he asked the man sitting on the bench.

‘Maybe, and maybe not,’ the man said. ‘Who are you?’

Swan shook his head and made a face. ‘No one of any importance,’ he said. ‘But I wish to catch my master. How long ago did they pass?’

‘Before noon – hey! Give me a penny, master!’ The man was suddenly wheedling. He got up off his bench. ‘I told you what you wanted to know.’

Swan shrugged. ‘I don’t have a penny of my own, friend.’

The man glared. ‘I guess if that horse is all you have you don’t have much.’ He nodded. ‘Your boots are nice.’

Swan nodded. ‘Is that a professional opinion?’ he asked.

He didn’t order wine. He backed his horse out of the yard. The two Italians were looking at him. He waved a hand and they moved out of the village at a trot.

‘ Brigandi ,’ Swan said. and touched his heels to his horse’s flanks.

They rode for almost a mile before Swan pulled up.

‘Where?’ asked Cesare. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The peasant in the auberge was no peasant. He was a soldier slumming, wearing a peasant smock.’ Swan was watching the hillsides.

‘How do you know?’ Giovanni asked.

Swan shrugged. ‘I can’t tell you. Maybe that he was so bad at begging. His hands were clean. He had wrists like me. But I can’t pin it down.’

‘But you’re sure,’ Giovanni said.

‘Yes.’

‘Sure enough to go back and find another way?’ Cesare asked.

Swan looked back and forth between the two Italians. ‘Messires, you are both older than I am,’ he said humbly. ‘But if you will be guided by me in this, you will not go back.’

‘What do you propose?’ Giovanni asked.

‘That we move fast and stop for nothing. We ignore mothers with wounded sons and priests who only need a moment of our time.’ Swan suited action to word and touched his boot-heels to his horse, which responded with a burst of what, in a better horse, might have been a canter.

The three of them rode along, leaving a dust cloud, for ten minutes. By then, Swan’s horse was flagging, and he felt like a fool. He reined in. ‘Perhaps you two are better without me,’ he said.

‘Nonsense,’ Giovanni said.

They went on at a walk. Swan looked behind them.

‘Gentlemen, I’ve made a number of mistakes. The dust cloud,’ he pointed behind them, ‘is like a red flag.’

Cesare winced. ‘Why us?’ he asked. ‘What brigand wants us?’

They were climbing steadily, and Swan could see a long, sharp slope ahead, a set of rapids in the river, and tall bluffs. He stood in his stirrups, trying to make out the path of the road.

‘The road crosses the river at a ford,’ he said.

Before a nun could say three paternosters, they were across.

On the far side, just where the road turned rocky as it passed over the end of the eastern ridge, was a wagon. It was one of the wine merchant’s wagons, and there were four men by it.

They looked uncertainly at the new arrivals.

They were not any of the men who’d been dancing the night before, and none of them wore livery.

Thirty yards away, by the stream-bed, Swan saw a pool of blood and an arm sticking out of the weeds. The arm was blue and red.

‘It’s a trap,’ he said quietly. ‘When I attack them, ride like lightning.’

‘Why?’ asked Giovanni.

Cesare muttered.

Swan’s horse was tired, so he rode straight up to the nearest man. From a few yards away, he called out, ‘Wheel trouble?’

The man nodded. But he didn’t speak. He was watching Swan as a cat watches a mouse – and yet he was utterly confounded when Swan whipped his sword from his scabbard and cut him down with a powerful blow from above.

The other three men stood rooted to the spot.

Giovanni, who had a fine Arab, put his spurs to her, and she went straight to a gallop.

Cesare did the same, but aimed his Arab’s head at one of the men by the wagon and rode him down.

Swan whirled and his horse misstepped. Swan cursed and slid from her back, ducked, and moved with her a few horse lengths while the other three men shouted at each other. He burst round the end of the wagon, catching the man Cesare had knocked down by surprise, and rammed his sword into the man’s gut despite his coat of plates. He almost died trying to get it out. The point was wedged between two plates. The third man had a falchion, a heavy sword like a scimitar, and he cut overhand at Swan, an untrained blow but nevertheless a powerful one. Swan saw the twitch in the man’s stance that heralded the blow and pulled on his hilt with a sudden burst of strength. The sword-point grated and came free, and Swan got his guard up and wished he had a buckler. The two swords rang together.

The man was essentially untrained, and obviously scared to death.

Swan was scared, but he did as he’d been taught. He pivoted his weight, let the heavier sword ‘win’ the bind, and cut sharply down with little more than the pressure of his wrist. Two of the scimitar-wielder’s fingers fell away, and the man dropped his sword and screamed. Swan stepped in and drove his pommel into the man’s mouth, teeth sprayed, and the wounded man was down. Even as the fourth man ran at him from beyond the wagon team, Swan plunged his sword through the body of the man writhing on the ground.

His mother’s brothers all said you had to do it. ‘ Don’t leave anyone behind you ,’ they said, when they drilled.

The fourth man had a spear.

Swan got into a low guard. His knees were weak. He’d practised this. It hadn’t usually gone all that well. But the spearman was no better trained than the falchion man, and he thrust ineptly, a tentative attack, which Swan beat remorselessly aside with all the energy of doubt and fear. He stepped through, got a hand on the shaft, and killed the man with a simple cut to the neck – and then cut him twice more as his body fell.

He stood, breathing like a bellows.

He could hear hooves, and the sounds of shouting.

I killed them all .

He was kneeling beside the last man. He wanted to vomit, wanted to take some action. Wanted to pray.

It was all more personal than the battle had been.

He watched his hands cut the man’s belt and take his purse and dagger. Then he went to the falchion man and did the same. He tottered to his horse and tried to get a foot over the old thing’s back. He was shaking too badly to mount.

But the hoof-beats were still distant. Across the ford, he could see dust, and more steel moving on the hillside beyond the ford. He had a little time.

He went to the first man he’d cut down. There was a stunning amount of blood around the man – a pool like a small lake, of a red opaqueness like magic wine. He’d never seen so much blood.

He threw up into the pool of blood.

His horse and saddle saved him, and he stood there, one hand in his stirrup leather, for as long as a man would say a benison. Without the horse, he’d have fallen in the blood.

Then he unbuckled the man’s belt and took his purse and dagger. He had to touch the blood. But he did. Then he put all three purses in the leather sack the first man had been carrying.

Even in the shocked reaction to his first real killing, he eyed the wagon. The canvas was split, and he could see the cargo. On the wagon box, where the drover sat, was a chest with iron reinforcement. It had a lock. They’d been trying to force the lock when he came up.