by Dan Davis
All the men were filthy. The stench of stale blood and rotten meat was so bad I could not believe I had failed to smell them on the wind as they had approached.
A slow chuckle emerged from Hugo’s belly, deep as a rumble of thunder.
“It is too late to flee, Richard of Ashbury,” the voice said. “You belong to the Destroyer now. Come with me.”
“Hugo the Giant,” I said, my heart hammering in my chest at the thought of fighting such a monster. “I have come to bring justice to Earl William de Ferrers. I shall slay you also. As I will Hugh of Havering, Roger of Tyre and any man that stands against me.”
He stood grim faced and unmoved by my words. The Saracens and crossbowmen also stood and stared. The crossbows did not waver. One pointed at me, the other at Adelard or Elias over my shoulder.
I knew crossbows. A man can learn to shoot one in very little time. They are simple to point and squeeze and at close range a bolt will punch through mail and bury deep into flesh. Even a boy could use one with ease and the men with Hugo were experienced specialists.
Hugo the Giant spoke French with a strange accent and I recalled that he was from Antioch. “Come,” he said, his voice a landslide. “I swear you will be safe if you come with me. My lord loves you and wishes that you join with him. If you do not you shall be sacrificed to him and your blood will feed him and he will feed us with his Blessed Sacrament.”
One weakness of the crossbow was that you could pull too hard to release the bolt and then miss the target. This tended to happen when a man was panicking. The other weakness was the length of time they took to reload.
“He loves us?” I asked, picking a single drop from the torrent of madness simply to keep Hugo talking while my men shuffled behind me. I prayed that they would fight.
Hugo shook his giant head. “The Angel of the Lord has sent for you and you have come to him as—”
I threw myself forward at the crossbowman on the farthest left. By moving outward I hoped to stay away from Hugo long enough to kill his men. I looped around then changed direction and charged right at the man pointing a sharp steel headed bolt at me.
I roared a wordless battle cry and wheeled my sword over my head like a maniac. He panicked and squeezed the mechanism too early. I danced further left as he pulled. The weapon clacked and the bolt ripped through the air by my head. The crossbowman hesitated, reached for another bolt, thought better of it and raised his crossbow ready to block my attack. But anything other than immediate flight had been his final mistake. For I ran by him and swung the edge of my blade into his throat, crushing it into pulp. He fell, dying.
The other crossbow clanked too but the bolt shot toward Adelard or Elias. Both charged the other side of the enemy line.
I kept moving. The nearest Saracen knight closed in on me with Hugo looming behind him, striding around to the other side of me. I had to kill the knight before facing Hugo. Or I knew I was dead.
Heart slamming in my chest I closed on the Saracen, thrusting with the point of my sword to push him back away from Hugo. I had to isolate him, drive him from the others. Hugo was behind me and my fear of that giant threatened to overwhelm me. Still I pushed the attack. The Saracen gave ground.
Hugo the Giant charged in like a bullock. The giant’s arms were long, his sword was longer than mine own and it was twice as wide. So I had to duck and dance away from his powerful swings without ever being close enough to harm him. And so the Saracen closed on me again. Changing my direction I swung my blade toward Hugo. He checked his attack and blocked my sword with the edge of his. It was like hitting a boulder. The shock of it rang through my bones into my skull. I was afraid my blade would break and shatter but it remained whole. I retreated backward, my teeth aching from the impact. Hugo’s face was expressionless as he stalked after me, poking his blade at my face. I fended him off. The Saracen came at me full charge and I deflected and countered with a flurry of a flurry of blows. He blocked or dodged them, blades clashing in the night. My sword was being dented and blunted and I cursed myself for not having a shield.
The Saracen was so fast. The unnatural speed of his sword arm and footwork was just as it had been when William’s men killed me in my hall. As full of fire as he was, there was not much skill in the man and I would have bested him but for Hugo. The giant pushed forward and kept me from getting away. He was so slow but skilful and possessed an inhuman strength. So I kept my distance. I was faster than he was, faster even than the Saracen and I kept them both away. My point jabbed into the Saracen’s shoulder, hard, and he reeled away with a shout. The Saracen looked to Hugo, confused and clutching the point I had struck.
Hugo stopped. He looked at his Saracen. He looked at me. He had the tiniest fraction of expression on his face, something like curiosity or confusion. “You move like he does,” Hugo said, his voice like an iron door slamming in Hell. “How is that possible?”
I stamped my foot forward to feign an attack and drive him away so I could finish the Saracen. But just then one of my men cried out. I glanced toward Adelard and Elias. I did it so briefly that I could see nothing other than figures fighting across the far side of the rock platform. We were too far to help or hinder each other.
A glance was all it took. I was distracted enough for Hugo to decide to come at me, bellowing like thunder. It was immediately clear that Hugo’s relative slowness had been a trick. He was actually just as fast as his Saracen was. In fright I swiped his huge sword away, the impact jarring me to the teeth again. I stepped back into the path of the Saracen’s blade. That sneaking Saracen swept a glancing blow into my back, slicing his curved edge down the mail.
Such a blow could not cut me for my mail protected against cuts. But the force of the impact was enough to snap ribs and knock the breath from my body. And it threw me off balance. I ducked and swayed away from their blades in something close to panic, certain that I was going to die and stepped backwards as fast as I could, my heartbeat hammering in my ears and my breathing rattling my ribs.
I never saw the wall behind me. A little stub as high as my calves that sent me flying backwards. The hard earth slammed into my broken ribs and cracking into the back of my helm.
The Saracen leapt the wall and his blade sang toward my face. I swung my sword wildly, knocking his aside and kicked out at his knee as he landed on that leg. There was a loud pop as the bones there snapped and his knee crunched as the shards ground against each other. He fell on top of me, his helmeted head crashing into mine. My sword was gone and he was so close I could feel his hot breath on my face. Grabbing his head with both hands to hold him to me I sunk my teeth into his cheek and bit down as hard as I could. I was astonished that my teeth bit through his beard and muscle right through to his cheekbone. He screamed in my ear and jerked up away from me, pulling a strip of flesh off his cheek and spilling hot blood into my mouth. I held his head, biting down harder and he thrashed his head about trying to get away which simply served to tear his cheek right off his face. I had a glimpse of shining, bloody teeth and skull inside and I had to swallow the blood and drool that gushed into my mouth, lest I drown in it.
Hugo yanked the screaming Saracen away as if he were a child, tossed him down beside me still screaming and thrust down at my chest with his sword. I twisted my body sideways, rolling from the blow so that it sprang against the stones that had been under me. Immediately I rolled back onto the blade, trapping it against my mailed back and kept rolling until I was flat on my back. The blade bent but it could only flex so far and the sword was levered from Hugo’s grasp and flung out to the side.
I reached for my own blade laying just out of reach but Hugo yanked a dagger from his belt and sank toward me. He was monstrously heavy but he had about seven feet to descend and I was fast and filled with fury so I grasped his wrist, which was as wide as a ham and held the blade away from me. The rest of his body smashed into me and I felt more ribs popping in my chest as his knee landed, the breath squeezed out of me and I thought my he
art would burst.
But I held on. More than held on, I forced his wrist and the blade it held away from me to the side. Hugo finally allowed his face to show something; astonishment.
I used his own momentum to throw him over with my hips and rolled him over and down onto the Saracen who shrieking and cupping the hole where that half of his face had been. I twisted the dagger from Hugo’s massive hands and smashed his face with my armoured forehead. Again and again I struck him until he stopped moving and then I stopped. His head was like a horse’s; the bone of his skull as thick as stone and I wondered if I had smashed my own brains out.
Underneath his body the Saracen squirmed, trying to get out so I snatched up Hugo’s dagger and stabbed it into the Saracen’s throat to silence him.
Hugo’s face and skull was partly caved in but he was not dead. His massive hands groped blindly up towards my head. I stabbed the blade through the smashed cracks around Hugo’s eyes and into his brain over and over again. His hands fell away.
Only when I ran out of breath was it I realised I had been screaming.
I rolled from Hugo and fell down next to the bodies, my chest heaving, not sure what damage I had received. The Saracen knight and Hugo lay next to me one atop the other.
There were two others I had not killed. Another Saracen and a crossbowman had been fighting my men. Cursing and wincing I looked for my sword.
Footsteps scraped toward me in the dark from the other side of the low wall that I had fallen over and I scrambled to my sword and swung it up toward Adelard’s face. He blocked it with his shield. There was a crossbow bolt sticking into it. I let out the breath I was holding.
“You are alive,” I said, stupidly.
There was blood all over his head and hands. But it was not his.
“Elias is dead,” he said.
Together they had killed the other Saracen knight and the crossbowman but not before Elias had been pierced through the chest with the bolt. He had drowned and suffocated after killing the man who had shot him.
“Fast pair of bastards, they were,” Adelard said, shaking his head.
Antonius still lay tied up on his side, head craned up looking at me with fear in his eyes. That, at least, made me feel happy.
“There’s still those other men on horseback heading up here for us,” Adelard said. There was a black rage in him and he wanted more men to kill.
I was hurt from the fight and limped over to him. The monstrous weight of Hugo falling upon me had crushed my ribs and my back ached and I knew I would be massively bruised. But the thought of another fight to come made the pain melt away. My mouth still tasted of the Saracen’s blood. I felt it all roiling in my otherwise-empty belly and somehow I began to feel better. Strength returned to my limbs and my breathing slowed.
“How skilled are you with a crossbow?” I asked Adelard as he stood looking down at the bloody corpse that was once Elias.
“Held one a few years ago,” Adelard said. He was breathing hard. There’s nothing in all the world so tiring as battle and it was remarkable I was not more exhausted.
“Then I shall take both weapons,” I said and we gathered them, along with a half-dozen bolts and I stood at the point where the road reached the top of the plateau. The point where our pursuers would emerge. “You take your shield and wait behind that corner of wall. Ensure that they see you after they reach the top.”
I gagged Antonius again, dragged him squirming into deep shadow. I hid behind the walls beside the top of the path and glanced over the edge. The horsemen were climbing slowly but the scraping of their horse’s hoofs and clashing of their armour grew ever closer.
We did not have long to wait.
I was certain that they would have heard the fighting from atop our rock outcrop, the sounds travelling easily in the still night air. They would have heard it and then heard the silence that followed.
There were merely four of them after all. So certain their friends would have defeated us that they called out for them in the foreign tongue of the Saracens. No doubt they were imagining rest and sustenance awaiting them at the top and that was good for if men are unprepared for a fight then they make easy prey. They trudged up, making a huge noise and at the top of the hill they tied up their blowing horses near to our own.
I was in shadow but they came so close that if anyone turned in my direction they would see the gleam of the bolt upon my loaded bow, as well as the other loaded one sat ready upon the wall before me. I could smell the sweat and the stench of horse from the men in the warm night wind but I held my shot until they had stumbled closer into our trap.
They called out, becoming nervous that their friends were not responding to their hails.
One of them saw Adelard duck his head down behind the ruined wall and cried out a warning. I jumped up and shot a bolt into his lower back. He grunted and went down with his sword half out of his scabbard.
The other three were frozen in indecision when Adelard ran around the wall then charged toward them with his shield up and growling some guttural war cry. I shot another of them in the centre of the spine and he fell straight down like when you drop a rope. I tossed that second bow away and leapt over the wall.
A small part of me felt sympathy for the way the two remaining men turned to run from Adelard just to come face to face with me bearing down on them.
It was small part of me only. The rest of me was filled with a cool rage and I cut one down without hesitation. He hardly had time to scream when I smashed his head in with my sword. The idiot was not wearing a helmet.
I allowed Adelard to cut the other man down. The Saracen was staring up at me in confusion and terror when Adelard smashed him in the side of the head. I stood and watched as Adelard stabbed all four men in the throat with the point of his sword, just to be sure.
“Got to bury Elias now, lord,” Adelard said. “Can’t leave him for the vultures.”
“Fine,” I said, stretching my back. The Christian thing to do was bury him, I supposed but I was not going to waste my strength on it. “Pile up stones to cover him. You will never get through this ground.” Adelard should not have wasted his strength either and if I’d been a harder man, as hard a man as I later became, then I would have forced him to abandon his friend’s internment.
As it was, while he grunted and clanked rocks about I searched the ruins for the place where Hugo and his Saracens had crept out from. I had been distracted talking to Antonius when they appeared but there was no chance those five men had snuck up from any great distance and I knew there must be a way into the hill under our feet. There were too many shadows for me to find it without knowing where to look.
“Dear God,” Adelard said, standing at the head of the cairn he had built against one wall over the young man’s body. I went to join him. “Elias was just a lad. He never wanted much from life. To tell the truth he was half simple. But he was a good fighter. He never did nothing bad. He’s the sort of man you want up there, Lord. Amen.”
“Amen,” I said and tried to remember that this man’s death was on William’s hands, not my own.
“Don’t know how I’m going to tell my wife about this,” Adelard said in a whisper. “Promised I’d take care of him.”
“Go drink and eat, if you can,” I said.
“Good advice,” Adelard said. “You should take it yourself, lord.”
The blood in my belly seemed sustenance enough so I patted him on his shoulder and then stood over Antonius. “I swore that I was going to kill you should we be ambushed.”
He looked up, eyes shining.
“You will lead me to where William is. If you tell me the truth and help me then I swear I shall not harm you. If you lie or lead me astray I shall bury a blade in your heart. Do you understand?”
He nodded and I took the gag from his mouth.
“We should kill him now, lord,” Adelard said, chewing bread. “He’s no priest.”
“But I am,” Antonius said. “Saladin’s men sent
me to Acre to tell your people that the attacks on the caravans and pilgrims were not of his doing. I spoke French, I was a Christian, and they said I would be trusted. But I was taken on the road, brought before William. And then I saw.”
I shrugged. “William has Saracens fighting for him?”
“Saracens,” Antonius scoffed. “An idiotic word. Our lord’s followers were once Franks, Kurds, Turks, Arabs, Egyptians. Any man who drinks from him, no matter what he was before, sees the truth once they taste his blood.”
“How many followers?” I asked. “How many are knights?”
Antonius screwed his face up. “Twenty? Thirty? I never counted.”
Adelard groaned. “Lord, we must return with more men.”
I ignored him.
“You said before that you take William’s Eucharist,” I said, prompting Antonius.
“He saw in me that I was ready to receive the sacraments. The blood of Christ straight from William’s veins. It filled my arms with such power, such strength. My mind was sharpened like a sabre. My body was fast as a striking snake and strong as a lion. My wounds were healed in an instant. My eyes saw through this world to the edge of the next one. And I knew. I understood. Before me stood the cup of Christ in the form of a man.”
“You all drink the blood from William’s veins on the Sabbath?” I said. “Thirty of you?”
Antonius sneered. “Of course it is on the Sabbath. Unless the men are sent out to raid,” he said, bitterly. “Then they get it before they depart.”
“What day is it today?” I asked Adelard.
“Saturday, lord,” he said then looked at the sky. “Sunday, now, I suppose.”
I looked through the darkness to where the bodies of Hugo and the other men lay waiting for the sun to bring thousands of flies to feast and lay eggs in their flesh.
“Drinking his blood makes a man faster?” I asked Antonius. “Stronger?”
Antonius grinned. “Strong with the power of God.”
“And William’s knights also drink the blood of the innocent? Why?”
He shrugged. “It prolongs and increases the effects of the sacrament.”
