Squire's Honor

by Peter Telep

  Once the arrow was cut halfway down, Christopher considered snapping it off to speed up the process, but he realized that the end would then be rough and splintery, and bits of wood might get caught inside Brenna’s arm. The cleaner the cut he made, the safer it would be to pull the shaft from her. So he sawed on, and he regretted each and every thrust of his blade. Sweat formed on his upper lip, and he licked and then blew it off. The cog rose, rocked gently to the left, and he almost lost his grip on the arrow. After several more swipes of the blade, the tip came away in his hand.

  Brenna took the bolt out of her mouth. “Is it off?” she asked through a gasp.

  He showed her the dark, gray point attached to a stubby portion of the shaft. He was ready to move in front of her and begin the truly cruel part of his doctor­ ing: the removal of the arrow.

  But before he could do anything, Brenna stuffed the bolt back in her mouth, clenched the arrow with her free hand, and, with a stifled groan, tore the shaft from her arm.

  Christopher felt a surge of sympathetic pain in his own arm as he gaped at the blood stained arrow in Brenna’s hand. “Why didn’t you wait for—”

  She looked to her arm. Blood surged beneath her beige shirt and stained it from the inside out. In a matter of seconds her sleeve was purpled and damp. As Christopher dropped the arrowhead in his hand and began a frantic search for something he could use to swathe the wound, from the comer of his eye he saw Brenna’s eyes roll up in her head. She fainted and fell back into the tied bundles of wool.

  11

  “I’ve one bolt left,” Doyle announced. “It’s time to move.”

  Jennifer nodded while anxiously spying two tofts behind the Customs House. The roof of one farmhouse supported and fed a hungry column of red-and-orange flames. “This way?” she asked, turning back toward the alley between the Chancellor’s and Customs Houses.

  He seized her by the shoulder. “Around the back. This way,” he said, indicating the direction with his head.

  Though the alley was a shortcut, they could easily be trapped in it. He assumed that they had already been spotted, thus they jogged off eastward, paralleling the Customs House, bound for a four-foot picket fence that connected with and ran straight down off the circular curtain wall of the abbey.

  “Oh, this hurts,” Jennifer said, then slid an arm under her breasts.

  “What?”

  “They’re bouncing all over. This dress doesn’t hold them very well.” Her grimace was met by his half grin, and she added, “but I’m sure you don’t mind.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Doyle said coyly, then turned from her, hiding his complete smile as they neared the fence.

  The night mist had thinned, and Doyle was able to see beyond the glowing windows of the peasant homes on the east side of the abbey and all the way down to the backs of the tarp-covered stalls along Merchant Row. With the cleaner visibility came a deeper sense of urgency, and he knew he wasn’t the only one with a bet­ter view of Blytheheart. If they were working under a glass, then he and Jennifer were just a few grains shy of being out of sand.

  Arriving before the fence, he saw that the horizontal beams of the enclosure that could be used to scale it were not on their side. He leaned his bow against a picket, clenched the three fingers of his bad hand with the fingers of his good one, dropped to one knee, and offered Jennifer a boost.

  “What if I slip?” she asked, looking slightly unnerved as she put a sandaled foot into his palms, then gripped a pair of pickets.

  “Swing your leg and get your foot on that top beam. Then I’ll push you over,” he said calmly. “You won’t slip.”

  As light as she was, the force of her body pressing on his hands was still altogether unpleasant. He brought her up higher, his vision obscured as her shift was caught by a gust of wind and whipped into his face. Another gust, and his head was completely under her dress, her bare hip brushing against his nose.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, her voice strained with the effort of trying to get her free foot perched steadily on the fence beam.

  “I’m trying to—” and abruptly she shifted her weight. His knee slipped sideways, and the rest of his weight fol­ lowed the knee. His hands fell away from her sandal, and he crashed forward onto his shoulder. He hit the earth with an involuntary thud that was answered by a very deliberate moan.

  He heard a giggle. And then another. He rolled over onto his rump, and as he brushed his shoulder free of dirt and bits of grass, he saw that Jennifer now stood on the other side of the fence and rested her arms on the pickets. “You were right,” she began, her eyes burnished by moonlight. “I didn’t slip.”

  Doyle couldn’t help but smile weakly over her wit, then he grimaced as he rose to his feet, feeling a bit of dissipating fire on his knee. He passed her the bow then boosted himself onto the pickets, and, favoring his good hand, swung himself over the fence. As he hit the ground on the other side he nearly slipped again. “No, I won’t fall,” he told himself aloud, and his body seemed to believe the prediction. They resumed their run down Lord Street, and Jennifer once again cupped her breasts with a forearm.

  Doyle shot her a sideways glance that fell to her chest. “If you need any help with those …” he let himself trail off.

  “If you could be a woman for only one day, Doyle, you wouldn’t be amused,” she said, growing steadily out of breath.

  They approached the intersection of Pier Street. To their right was the string of shops that looked out onto the wharves. He had set two of the six ablaze with his bolts. But the fire had spread to all of the shops, and not just by way of their roofs; the common walls between them were not constructed of stone, as Montague had informed him. He had tried to keep the damage mini­ mal, but the whole east side of the street was now a great pyre, and the wall of the shop that abutted Lord Street was now collapsing toward the cobblestone.

  “I thought you said we were only going to set a few small fires,” Jennifer said, her face bathed in a yellow glow that swept over her as the shop’s wall fell and sent a million tiny embers into the newly 1ising mushrooms of smoke.

  Though Montague was not present, Doyle shook his head and sighed disgustedly. Liar. “Come on.”

  Once they had swerved around the debris of the fallen wall, Doyle paused to tap the tip of his quicklimed bolt onto the stone, shattering the phial. He brought the exposed white-powdered end of the shaft close to a burning piece of timber, and the lime ignited. Trailing behind Jennifer, he hurried across the street and turned onto the wharf where the Pict cog was moored. He heard shouting from behind him, and he imagined that it came from a group of alarmed guildsmen who would employ their wives, children, and probably a few guards in a bucket line to try to save the shops—even though they were already too late.

  The row of rushes lay on the wharf—exactly as planned. Doyle breathed a sigh of relief. Jennifer slowed as she neared the small blockade, then stopped.

  “Run over them!” he ordered her.

  Tentatively, she stepped onto the wet-looking straw. The row was merely two feet high and about a yard wide. He wondered why she had stopped, but then real­ized that she hadn’t been present when they’d conceived this part of the plan—not that she had missed much. Doyle judged this element of the scheme as rather weak, even though it would probably work. If they had had more time, he knew he would have conceived something much more elaborate. But it was just as well they did it Montague’s way. Doyle would save his planning energy for the next time he decided to steal a Pict cog …

  Jennifer moved from the rushes onto the wharf. Bits of the lard-covered straw clung to her sandals, and she slipped once but did not fall. With the blazing tip of his bow pointed skyward, Doyle leapt over the rushes. He joined Jennifer and the two of them hustled toward the cog.

  Just ahead, a crossbow bolt struck the wharf, impal­ing itself with a tiny reverberation. Doyle stopped short, held Jennifer back, then squinted at the ship. He spotted three fuzzy lights dotting
the keel, an illumination from within that escaped from the starboard rowing holes. The light slipping through the rear hole was suddenly eclipsed.

  “Get down!” Doyle shoved Jennifer back toward the nearest piling. The arrow hit the wharf where she’d been standing, striking only her ghost. She turned toward the piling and dropped down next to it, then tried to get as far behind it as she could, nudging closer and closer to the edge of the wharf and the slick, sharp spines of the rocks that lay below.

  Doyle assumed a position on the other side of the same piling. He lifted his bow and looked down his fiery line of sight. Then he shot a look to the ship. He saw no sign of Christopher and Brenna there, but then again, they might be busy with those Picts in the hold.

  Or they might be dead.

  No, I won’t allow that, he commanded himself.

  The rushes were in place, and that probably meant that Orvin and Merlin were aboard. Now it was up to Montague to haul home his fat hide. By now—making the wild assumption that all had gone well—a load of timber had been deliberately dropped in front of Saints Michael and George Cathedral, blocking its main doors. Those who had attended Vespers—probably more than half the inhabitants of Blytheheart—would, unbe­knownst to them, be staying all the way until Matins and Lauds, for Montague had jammed the three rear service doors used by the abbot and monks. Doyle turned his gaze to the shore and let it sweep up Lord Street, where he spotted a horseman charging toward the wharf. Two more horsemen trailed not far behind the first.

  Doyle turned, just as another arrow flew a mere arm’s length past him. The slots in the cog’s keel made suit­ able loopholes for the Picts, and they were getting a lit­tle too used to shooting through them. He and Jennifer had to move. A new arrow came toward him—joined by still another fired from the forward row hole.

  He looked to the horseman and saw the grainy but distinguishable outline of Montague.

  “Doyle …” Jennifer sang his name, a dark, fearful tune that said she wanted out and wanted out now.

  He stole a look down the wharf. “Come on, Monte!”

  The arrows fired at Doyle fell short—but by only a pair of planks.

  Gritting his teeth, he removed his hand from his bow to scratch sweat from his beard. He realized his throat was unbearably dry; he swallowed. And it hurt. He took another look down the wharf.

  Montague crossed Pier Street and then slammed his heels into the ribs of the brown rounsey under him. The horse responded weakly to the fat man’s goading. He could hear the brigand shouting at the animal now as horse and rider closed in on the rushes. Montague looked over his shoulder at the riders fiercely pursuing him, and one of them, a guard wearing light armor and a helmet equipped with a nasal bar, screamed, “Halt”! He waved his quirt in the air, as if about to throw the whip.

  The fat man directed his attention forward and let out a roar that must have startled his rounsey, for the horse launched into the air at the foot of the rushes.

  Doyle turned his bow toward Montague, then closed one eye. He waited as the brigand’s rounsey hit the wharf in a hollow clatter of hooves and then galloped out of his flaming line of sight.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  The fiery bolt streaked toward the rushes, and the planks of the wharf beneath it grew alive with light and then fell back into the death of darkness. The bolt struck the center of the short wall of straw.

  The two guards leaned forward in their saddles and prepared to jump over the rushes, but the straw before them burst into a giant face of fire that exhaled clouds and clouds of smoke so heavy-looking that it was a mir­acle they rose at all.

  Doyle couldn’t see the guards anymore, but heard their mounts neighing and bucking. Then he did spot one guard falling over the east side of the wharf, appar­ently thrown from his horse; the man howled toward a future of broken bones.

  It had been Merlin’s idea to add the lard to the straw, and the flash fire and additional smoke it created had helped save Montague’s life.

  “All hands aboard!” the fat man yelled as he galloped past Doyle, unaware of the arrow fire coming from the cog.

  “Keep your head low!” Doyle shouted back, but wasn’t sure if the brigand had heard him. He rose and crossed to Jennifer, and she rose to meet him. They charged after Montague, moving as a tight pair, and Doyle kept himself on the cog side of the wharf to some­ what shield her from the incoming arrows. Three more missiles were fired at them in the time it took for them to reach the foot of the gangplank, and though Doyle felt the whispery passage of one near the back of his neck, both he and Jennifer arrived unscathed.

  Montague’s abandoned rounsey whinnied and bucked about the wharf near the gangplank. They hurried around the mount and made their ascent to the ship.

  At the top, Doyle hopped down from the railing and saw Montague, whose gaze was focused on the deck to his left. Jennifer looked there too, and she cringed as Doyle turned and saw a Pict sailor lying dead from a bolt that had struck him in the neck. A bit of chewed food leaked from one comer of the sailor’s open mouth.

  “Brenna,” was all Montague said. “Jennifer? Over here,” a voice called.

  Doyle turned his head and saw Orvin waving to Jennifer from behind the waist-high parapets of the fore­ castle. Doyle looked to her. She caught his gaze. “Go.” She nodded, then ran past him toward the ladder that would take her up to the small fortification.

  “Here,” Montague said, handing Doyle a dagger that the fat man had pulled from a hip sheath. “Probably tight quarters down there.” Montague withdrew a simi­lar blade from a sheath on his opposite hip. “Let’s see how many are left for us.” Montague turned away and walked to the main hatch, threw a latch, frowned, then tested it with his boot. The wooden door was sealed from below.

  “Let’s break it in,” Doyle suggested.

  Montague looked to the shoreline end of wharf. “That fire is not going to help us much longer.” Then, as if he’d drawn an idea from the landscape, he turned away from the hatch and strode past the thick pole of the mast toward the stem of the cog. He stopped before another hatch. From his angle, Doyle could not tell if the hatch was sealed. Montague waved him over, and Doyle hurried across the deck.

  “Look at the wood over here, laddie. She’s been bro­ ken in,” he said, pointing to the splintery inner rim of the hatch where a latch had once been. “Come on.”

  There was a ladder to the right that dropped into the shadows. Doyle considered using it, but decided he was not feeling particularly brave at the moment. The Picts were waiting for them down there. And not for tea.

  “Youth before age,” Montague said with a slight bow and a hand wave that pointed the way.

  Denying himself more time to justify why he shouldn’t go down because it was soggy and dark and dangerous and he’d met a beautiful woman and had something to live for now, Doyle clenched the dagger in his teeth, brought both arms close to his chest, and then jumped into the hole.

  He anticipated the impact perfectly, bending his knees to avoid most of the pain. As expected, he heard the snap of a crossbow trigger, but he was already rolling to dodge the bolt while simultaneously removing the dag­ger from his mouth. He slammed into a wall, then scrambled blindly toward a comer, hit it, and kept mov­ing. He discovered he was in a narrow alcove of sorts, with deeply shadowed comers. The moonlight falling in through the broken hatch picked out a hall that led into the hold. He guessed that his adversary waited just around one comer of the hall. Guessing that the man was windlassing his weapon, Doyle got to his feet and, sounding not unlike Montague as the fat man had taken his horse over the rushes, he let out a roar as he charged through the hall.

  He reached the end of the passage, turned a comer, swiped with his dagger, then whirled and swiped with it again into the opposite corner. He stood alone, panting.

  “Laddie?”

  “Monte, stay back there!” he yelled to the fat man as he hunkered down and slammed his back against a rear wall of the hold. “There�
�s one right here.”

  His warning to Montague was followed by the imme­diate reply of the unseen Pict’s crossbow, a sound which came from back in the alcove below the hatch.

  “Laddie,” Montague said in an odd tone, “he got me.” Doyle felt his face crease with shock, and then felt something drop inside him as he rose and spun back toward the hall. He’d thought the sailor had not been in the alcove but beyond it. The man had been in the room with him all the time. The Pict had hidden in the shadows or had known some other place to con­ceal himself. Doyle cursed himself for making the error, and if Montague was dead, he would blame himself.

  He ran through the hall and approached the brig­ and, who sat at the foot of ladder in the alcove. The moonlight made the blood on him appear black. Montague had put his hand out to block the incoming bolt, and the shaft had passed through his palm, had made a deep gash in his shoulder, tearing open silk shirt and skin with equal disregard, and then had stuck in a rung of the ladder behind him. Doyle was nearly at the end of the hall when the fat man looked up and his eyes became very round. “He’s right here, all right, laddie.”

  Doyle froze. “Where”? he demanded, feeling his panic slither up his back like a needle-covered snake. “Where? Where?” He took a step toward Montague—putting himself a foot inside the alcove—then spun around, expecting to find the sailor hiding behind either the port or stem side of the hall entrance. Nothing. But out of the corner of his eye he caught the flicker of a shadow in the far right corner, about three yards away from him. He ran two, three steps forward and dived. He stiffened his stomach muscles as he hit the floor, then was carried another few feet by his momentum. And out of the gloom came a pair of boots. He reached out with his free arm and wrapped it around the legs of the sailor while simultaneously punching his dagger into the side of one of the Pict’s legs, catching what he presumed was the man’s calf. The sailor made a sort of coughing, panting noise which was followed by a string of words. Doyle drew the man’s legs together and brought him down to the deck. He fought through the sailor’s wildly grasping hands and ripped his dagger from the Pict’s leg. Still trying to wrestle himself free, the Pict managed a blind swipe—right into Doyle’s blade. The noise that came from him now was unmistakably a scream.