The Red Fox Clan

by John Flanagan

  Except Maddie.

  For three years, she had been trained to recognize and take advantage of a split-second opportunity. Now she had one as Dougal backed away and the boar hesitated, drawing back on its haunches and preparing for a final charge. She drew, sighted and released in one fluid movement. The arrow flashed across the clearing and thudded home, penetrating deep behind the boar’s left shoulder and tearing into its heart.

  The savage beast squealed once, reared onto its hind legs, then fell dead on the grass, its legs sticking out stiffly.

  Instantly, Maddie let out a panicked squeal of her own and let the bow drop to the ground in front of her. When the others realized where the arrow had come from, they turned to face her. But she was standing, shaking, her hands covering her eyes, and calling frantically.

  “What happened? What happened? Did I hit it?”

  Her companions heaved a collective sigh of relief. The tension went out of the clearing as they looked again at the dead boar.

  “You hit it all right, my lady!” said Ulwyn. “Killed it stone dead.” Stig and Hal echoed his words of praise. Dimon looked on in utter disbelief.

  Maddie took her hands from her eyes and looked at Ulwyn, wide-eyed. “I did?” she said in tones of total surprise. “But I had my eyes shut.”

  “She did at that,” said a voice behind her. “Had them shut tight the whole time.”

  It was Thorn. She realized that the old Skandian had been standing behind her and had likely witnessed the entire event—had seen her cool, disciplined handling of the bow, then her pretense at panic as she hurled it to the ground. She met his gaze now as Dimon knelt beside the boar and shook his head.

  “If that’s the case, that was the luckiest shot I’ve ever seen,” Dimon said slowly.

  As Maddie studied the old sea wolf, he let one eye slide shut in a surreptitious wink. If you don’t want ’em to know, I’m not saying anything, the movement said.

  * * *

  • • •

  They circled back to the lake, with Dimon and Hal carrying the boar and Stig and Thorn with the deer between them. They’d be hard put to carry any more large animals, and Hal looked appreciatively at the two carcasses.

  “Edvin will be pleased,” he said. “That’s plenty of fresh meat for the trip home.”

  They added to their bag at the lake, with Cassandra bringing down three more ducks and Maddie accounting for a goose and a mallard. Dougal, thoroughly chastened now, brought the birds ashore for them.

  “And there’s tonight’s dinner taken care of,” Cassandra said with a satisfied smile.

  They dined on roast goose that night in the refectory adjoining the kitchens. The rest of the Heron’s crew were summoned to join them, and it was a festive and cheerful occasion, marred only slightly by the fact that Dimon hurriedly excused himself, on the pretext of duty. Maddie noted again that he seemed somewhat uncomfortable around the Skandians. She puzzled over it for a few minutes, then dismissed it. Hal and his crew were excellent company—boisterous and cheerful, with a fund of exciting stories to tell. If Dimon chose to be prickly around them, that was his problem.

  They were demolishing a fig pudding after the main meal when a servant entered and spoke quietly to Cassandra. She listened, then pointed out Hal. The servant moved down the table to where the skirl was waiting expectantly.

  “Captain Hal, there’s a messenger here for you. He’s a Skandian and he says it’s urgent.”

  He nodded toward the door leading to the stairway, where a figure could be seen waiting just outside. Hal glanced interrogatively at Cassandra, who nodded. Then he beckoned to the waiting man.

  “Come in,” he said. And, as the newcomer moved out of the shadows into the light, he recognized him. “Is that you, Sten Engelson?”

  “Yes, Hal. It’s me all right.”

  Hal turned to Cassandra and explained. “Sten is the first mate on Wolfbiter.”

  “Wolfbiter?” Cassandra said. “Isn’t she the—”

  “The current duty ship, yes,” Hal told her. “Jern Icerunner is her skirl. We spoke with Jern two days ago when we reached the mouth of the Semath, where she was patrolling.” He turned his attention back to Sten.

  “Is there a problem?” he asked, although as he said it, he realized that Sten would hardly be here if there wasn’t.

  “Wolfbiter is damaged, Hal,” Sten said. “She went onto Barrier Rocks, south of the Semath. A rogue wave picked her up and dumped her heavily. Jern managed to get her to the beach, but he thinks her back might be broken. He wants you to take a look before he decides to abandon her.”

  Stig leaned toward Maddie and said in a low aside, “Hal is an expert shipbuilder as well as a skirl. If Wolfbiter can be repaired, he’ll be able to tell them.”

  Hal was rubbing his chin. “I’d best go and take a look,” he said. Then he turned to Cassandra. “We’ll leave straightaway, my lady,” he said. “That way, we’ll just catch the outgoing tide. I don’t like the idea of the duty ship being out of action any longer than it has to be.”

  Cassandra nodded. “Neither do I, with this Red Fox Clan disrupting things,” she said. “How long do you think you’ll be?”

  Hal paused, screwing up his eyes while he considered the problem. “A week, maybe ten days at the most. If we have to abandon her, I’ll need to bring her crew back with us—and we’ll need to provision the ship for the trip home. We can finalize the details for the archers then too,” he added as an afterthought.

  “I’ll have the papers ready to sign, Hal. And I’ll have the boar and your deer salted and ready to go as well,” Cassandra said.

  Hal nodded his thanks, then turned to his crew. “Right, lads, we’d better be moving. The tide won’t wait for us, and it’ll be hard rowing if it turns.”

  There was a clatter as benches were pushed back from the table, and the Heron’s crew rose to their feet and began making their way toward the door.

  Stig paused halfway and turned back, reaching across the table to tear a leg from the carcass of the goose. He ripped a large chunk off with his teeth and grinned at Maddie.

  “I never waste good food,” he said.

  Hal snorted derisively. “You never waste any food,” he said. “Now let’s get moving.”

  28

  By dint of much pushing, pulling and swearing, they got the horses up the last part of the hill and into the fort. The supply wagon was a different matter. The vertical wall was too high and too steep, and Horace was disinclined to waste time building a ramp for the wagon. In the end, he had it unloaded and left it on the path below the gate.

  “If the Foxes try to mount an attack, we can always push it over the edge and let it run down on them,” he said.

  While Horace had been bringing the rest of the force up the hill, Gilan had discovered the use intended for the barrels. There were four drains dug along the front wall of the palisade, two on either side of the gate, spaced five meters apart. He experimented by pouring a bucket of water down one of them. A minute or so later, he saw a stream of water spurt from the edge of the path.

  “If we pour water down them, it’ll wet the grass slope below the last section of path,” he told Horace. “That’ll make it even harder for the enemy to climb.”

  Horace nodded, grinning at the ingenuity of the original designers. He had the barrels moved so that they stood by the four drains, then set a party of men to filling them with water. Initially, the old dried-out seams leaked profusely. But as the water soaked into the staves and expanded them, the leaks slowed to a trickle.

  Night fell and the men lit cooking fires. The supply wagon had carried bags of grain for the horses. If they rationed it carefully, it would last a week or so. The horses would be hungry, and their fitness and strength would suffer. But they were unlikely to be mounting a cavalry charge while they were in the fort.

 
Horace posted sentries around the walls, with strict instructions to wake him if there was any sight or sound of the enemy arriving. He considered it unlikely, however.

  “If you’re right,” he told Gilan, as they sat by a small fire nursing mugs of hot coffee, “they will have waited for nightfall to cross the river. My guess is that they would have camped on the meadow by the river for the night. They’d hardly want to go blundering through the forest in the dark in case we were waiting in ambush for them.”

  “Maybe that’s what we should have done,” Gilan suggested, but Horace shook his head.

  “Night battles are too risky. Too many things can go wrong. We might thin their numbers out, but we could lose a lot of our own men. And we don’t have a lot to lose.”

  “So we wait here for them.”

  “We wait here for them, and see what they have in mind.”

  “You think they’ll attack?” Gilan asked.

  Horace looked deep into the fire before he answered. “I think so,” he said. “They’ll have to test our strength at least once. But they’ll take a lot of casualties if they do. My guess is, once they’ve tried, they’ll pull back and surround the hill. We don’t have enough men to mount a frontal attack on them, so we can hardly break out.”

  “Which means if we don’t get help, we’ll be bottled up here,” Gilan said thoughtfully.

  His friend nodded. “And I’m beginning to think that’s what they’ve had in mind all along.”

  Gilan frowned. “What makes you think that?”

  “There are a lot more of them than we expected,” Horace replied. “And they’re better organized than we were led to believe—and better armed. Maybe this whole thing was designed to get us out of Castle Araluen, and leave the garrison weakened.”

  Gilan took a deep sip of his coffee and thought about what Horace had said. “That makes sense,” he said at length. “But Araluen is a tough nut to crack, even with half the garrison missing. Dimon is a good man, and of course, Cassandra has been in her share of fights over the years. If there’s an attack, they’ll be able to hold out.”

  “I suppose so,” said Horace. But he didn’t sound happy about the prospect. “And in the meantime, we’re stuck here, sitting on top of a hill and out of the way.”

  Neither man said anything for a few minutes, and then Horace added, “And nobody knows we’re here.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The enemy column arrived an hour after first light. Horace and Gilan stood on the catwalk inside the palisade, peering down the hill to the flat land below as the files of men marched out of the forest and formed up on the open grassland.

  “There’s a few less than there used to be,” Gilan remarked.

  Horace grunted. “Still more than a hundred and thirty of them. They still outnumber us more than three to one.”

  Three officers rode forward, stopping at the base of the hill, where the track began its sinuous path upward. Gilan could make out the leader from the day before in the center. The white bandage and sling on his right arm stood out in the early morning light. The man urged his horse forward and started up the steep spiral path, shading his eyes with his unwounded hand and peering up at the fort high above him.

  “Think he knows we’re here?” the Ranger asked, not really expecting an answer.

  But Horace gestured to the smoke from their cooking fires, thin gray columns that rose unwaveringly in the still morning air. “Oh, he knows all right,” he said. He glanced across the fort, making sure there were lookouts on all four walls, ready to keep an eye on the enemy leader as he spiraled upward, with the other two officers following his lead.

  The three riders pushed on, leaning forward in their saddles against the slope, and disappeared from sight around the first curve in the track. Horace called to a sergeant on the west wall.

  “Got them in sight, Sergeant?”

  The sergeant waved acknowledgment. “In sight, sir. Still coming up!”

  A few minutes later, his opposite number on the rear north wall raised a hand. “Enemy in sight, sir! Still climbing!”

  Then, as the three riders continued up and around the hill, a similar warning came from the eastern wall. There were five men stationed at each wall, three troopers and two archers. As the enemy came into sight, one of the archers on the east wall held up a hand.

  “Try a shot, sir?” he called.

  But Gilan motioned for him to stand down. The enemy leader would be within long bowshot now. But he would be aware of the danger and would certainly have his shield in position to intercept any arrows from above.

  “Save your arrows,” Gilan called back.

  The archer shrugged, a little disappointed.

  Gilan turned to Horace. “Pity Maddie’s not here with her sling. A lead shot bouncing off his helmet might give him pause.”

  Horace grunted noncommittally. He didn’t share Gilan’s wish that Maddie were here with them. This was a dangerous situation and not one he wanted his daughter to be involved in.

  “Coming into sight now, sir!” called the lookout at the eastern end of their wall, and within a few seconds, the trio of riders appeared around the bend. They were on the second-top tier of the path. One more pass around the hill would bring them up to the top level.

  “Get ready to put a warning shot past his ear,” Horace said, and Gilan stepped forward, drawing an arrow from his quiver.

  “That’s far enough!” Horace shouted.

  A second later, Gilan drew back and released. The arrow hissed down, passing within half a meter of the Fox leader’s face. He jerked hurriedly on the reins and brought his horse to a stop. As Gilan had predicted, his long, triangular shield was deployed on his right side—the side facing the fort—covering most of his body and legs. His head was covered by a full-face helmet. He reached awkwardly with his left hand, now holding the reins, and pushed up his visor.

  “I’ll give you one chance to surrender!” he shouted. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched, although that might have been because of the tension he was feeling. “One chance only!”

  “And then?” Horace replied.

  The man gestured to his troops, at the base of the hill. “You can’t hope to escape!” he said. “We outnumber you four to one. You’re stuck here on this hill.”

  “And we’re quite content to stay here,” Horace told him, although, after the thoughts he’d expressed earlier, that wasn’t true. “If you have so many men, why don’t you come and drive us out of here?” His best chance was to goad the enemy into making an attack. The hill was an excellent defensive position, and Gilan’s archers could decimate any attacking force.

  “I’ve got a question for you,” the Fox leader shouted, anger evident in his voice. “While you’re twiddling your thumbs up here, what do you think is happening at Castle Araluen?”

  Horace’s expression darkened. That was what he had been worried about. He was being held here, unable to do anything constructive, and Castle Araluen was left vulnerable to attack. But he wasn’t going to play into the enemy’s hands by debating that position.

  “I’ve got a question for you,” he called in return. “How are you planning to get back down that hill?”

  The rider was stunned into silence for a second or two.

  In a quiet voice, Gilan spoke to the two archers on the south wall. “Archers, forward.”

  The two archers stepped forward to the edge of the palisade. Below them the rider saw the two heads appear above the wooden wall, their bows in plain sight. His horse snorted, sensing his sudden fear, and tried to rear. He held it in check, cursing it. Then he called to Horace.

  “You can’t shoot me! I came here for a parley!”

  Horace smiled grimly. “I didn’t invite you,” he said. “And I don’t see any flag of truce. I’m perfectly within my rights to order my men to sh
oot.”

  The Fox leader, having got his horse under control, was backing it nervously down the path. If he turned, his shield would be on the downhill side, exposing him completely to arrows from the wall. He would have to switch the shield to his left arm again, and that would be a slow, clumsy movement, with his right arm injured and bandaged.

  Gilan knew that Horace would never order his men to shoot at a virtually helpless man—even an enemy.

  “Might save us some trouble if we did kill him,” he suggested mildly.

  But Horace shook his head. “Someone else would take command,” he said. “And he might know what he’s doing.”

  “So we let him go?” Gilan asked. He had been trained by Halt, who had no false illusions about honor or fair treatment for an enemy. So far as Halt was concerned, if you had your enemy at a disadvantage, you didn’t let him off the hook.

  Horace turned a hard look on him, knowing what he was thinking but refusing to be swayed from what he knew to be right.

  “We let him go,” he said. Then he added:

  “For now.”

  29

  Life at the castle went back to its uneventful routine after the departure of the noisy, irreverent Skandians. Maddie found herself wishing that they had stayed longer. They had brought a breath of fresh air to the castle.

  However, she had work to do, and the following evening she set out to keep watch at the old abbey.

  She waited till the castle had settled down for the evening, then crept surreptitiously down to the cellars. As before, she took a full lantern with her. She also took her sling and her saxe, and she wore her Ranger cloak over her normal daywear of jerkin, leggings and boots.

  She let herself into the concealed chamber at the end of the cellar, pausing to light her lantern from one of the lamps that were kept burning there. She eased the concealed door shut behind her, confident now that she would be able to open it on her return the following morning.