Read Online Outlaw by Angus Donald - Free Book Online

down the line blessing their bows. I stood there clutching the hilt of my sword, awaiting blessing and sweating with fear and excitement in the spring sunshine. I desperately wanted to piss. Time seemed to stand still. The hubbub from the circle of wagons seemed to quieten, though an ox would occasionally moan or a chicken squawk. I wondered if the spy had been mistaken. Where were they? Robin was cleaning his fingernails with a small knife and humming under his breath - it was ‘My Love is Beautiful as a Rose in Bloom’, but last night and our cosy harmonies seemed a thousand miles and many lifetimes away. Tuck was on his knees praying. I closed my eyes but, from nowhere, the image of the green-eyed girl coupling with her drunken beau in the farmhouse came into my mind. I opened my eyes quickly, and crossed myself. If I were to die I did not want my last thoughts to be of those sinners. And then, at last, at long last, I heard the drumming of hooves on a dry road and the enemy came into sight around the bend. A clattering mass of heavy horsemen, wrapped in steel and malice, and seeking our deaths.
    They were a terrifying sight. Thirty stone-hard men-at-arms, mounted on big, well-trained warhorses, each man wrapped in chain mail from toe to fingertip and crowned with a flat-topped riveted steel helmet with a metal grill that completely covered his face. Soldiers such as these had hanged my father. On top of their mail they wore black surcoats, slashed with red chevrons, and they carried twelve-foot-long steel-tipped lances, man-killers, and kite-shaped wooden shields, faced with leather and painted with the red and black arms of Sir Ralph Murdac. Long swords and shorter daggers were strapped to their waists; spiked maces and razor-sharp battleaxes hung from their saddles. They were skilled killers, the lords of the battlefield, and they knew it.
    They paused about two hundred yards away, their chargers snorting and pawing the grass, and they stared at our pathetic huddle of wagons, beasts, anxious peasant mothers and children, and our thin line of stunted bowmen. They looked like the steel monsters of some terrible legend, not flesh-and-blood men. Horsemen such as these had spread terror among the English folk for more than two hundred years, since William the Bastard came to take our land. Riders such as these had smashed the housecarls’ shield wall at Hastings, and, since then, their descendants had been hunting down the wretches who could not pay their taxes, slaughtering honest yeomen who stood in their way, raping any girl they took a fancy to, crushing English spirits beneath their steel-shod hooves.
    Two knights rode out in front of the horsemen, the leaders of the conroi, as these cavalry units are called, each with a dyed-black-and-red goose-feather plume atop his helmet. They began to order the troop into two ranks of about fifteen men each. As I watched the superbly trained horses shuffle and jostle into position, I heard Robin murmur: ‘Stand fast, lads . . .’ His archers drew their bowstrings back to their ears. ‘ . . . and loose.’ There was a rushing sound like a flight of swallows and a handful of arrows sped away, thin grey streaks against the blue sky. I heard Robin say again, perfectly calmly, ‘Fast . . . and loose,’ and then I watched in amazement as the first barrage smashed into the ranks of the conroi. Which erupted into screaming bloody chaos. Horses cried in agony, kicking out savagely at random as a dozen yards of fire-hardened ash wood, tipped with razor-sharp bodkin arrowheads, slammed deep into their chests and flanks. Two men-at-arms fell dead from their horses, killed by the arrows that punched through their hauberks into heart and lungs. What had, moments before, been menacing, orderly ranks of mounted men preparing for the charge, lances held vertically, perfectly in line, like the palings of a village fence, was now a circus of rearing terrified horses and cursing gore-splashed