Commander Cantrell in the West Indies(12)
But why a blunt quarrel? wondered Hugh. That fleeting puzzlement didn’t slow him any more than the front stairs. He leaped down all five, already running as he landed. As he approached the corner of the house, he heard a dull thud, a grunt, and the muffled bump of someone bouncing off the pliable up-timer wall-shingling that they called “vinyl siding.”
Hugh went low as he snaked around the side of the house, saw Michael Jr. face down on the ground, a cloaked figure over him, club ready, reaching toward him—
But not trying for a quick kill—a split-second observation which, again, did not delay Hugh. Trusting that the unseen crossbowman had not had time to both reload and aim his weapon, he leaped forward, saber whirring back and then forward with the speed that only a trained wrist can deliver.
The cloaked assailant looked up, quickly raised his club: a reflex more than a purposeful parry. Hugh’s Toledo blade clipped the wooden truncheon at an angle. The wood stripped back and then splintered.
Michael’s attacker was thrown back by the blow, alive only because his club had absorbed a cut that would have gone through his collar-bone. But, rebounding from his own collision with the house’s vinyl siding, the thug turned his momentum into a sideways barrel-roll that brought him back up to his feet in a moment. He sped into the darkness—
And I’m out of time, Hugh thought—and dropped prone just a second before a crossbow bolt sliced through the air where he had been standing. The quarrel impaled the vinyl upon the wood behind it with an almost musical throoonk. Hugh did not need to look up to know that this bolt had not been the kind used to stun small game. He jumped to his feet, sprinted along the reverse trajectory indicated by the quivering tail of the quarrel. He found the weapon that had fired it abandoned on the ground twenty yards away, in the lee of the neighboring house’s shed. The dark night was quiet all around.
Staying low—as a lifetime of habit and training had taught him—Hugh frog-trotted back to Mike Jr., who was already raising himself up on his elbows. The displaced earl of Tyrconnell put an arm on his friend’s not-inconsiderable bicep. “Here. Let me help you, Don Michael.”
For a moment, Hugh thought that his middle-aged host was going to refuse. Then he felt the arm sag a bit as Michael grunted his gratitude and allowed Hugh to roll him into a sitting position, back against the house. But he was evidently not too stunned to speak. “So now I’m ‘Don Michael,’ too? What does that make me—royalty?”
“Aristocracy,” Hugh corrected gently, wondering how the up-timers could command such wonderful knowledge of machinery and the physical sciences, and yet make social errors that would mark even a five-year-old down-timer as slow, perhaps simple. “I should have used the title before now.”
“Before now, you were using it only on my da. I figured that was because he’s almost eighty. So am I really ‘aristocracy’—or just another old coot who can’t defend himself any longer?”
The answer came from the corner of the house. “Speak for yourself, sonny boy.” Michael McCarthy, Sr., was there, on his feet and unaided, but with one hand firmly clutching the corner-board for support. The gnarled fingers of his other hand were wrapped around the grip of a .45 automatic.
Michael Jr. goggled. “Da—you shouldn’t be walking on your own. And is that your pop’s old service pistol? I didn’t know you kept—”
“Plenty you still don’t know about me, Junior,” interrupted Michael McCarthy, Sr. He tried to suppress a wry grin, almost did, but then his efforts were undermined by a bout of violent, phlegmy coughing.
Hugh was over to the ailing father in a moment. Michael Jr. following only a second behind, remonstrated, “Dad, you shouldn’t be up—”
“Someone was shooting at my son and my guest—and damn if he didn’t bust a window, too. So yes, you’re God-damned right I got up, and brought a little bit of persuasion with me.” He shook the .45 for emphasis—just as his wheezing phrases became a spasmodic coughing fit that was painful for Hugh to hear. He’d heard similar sounds often enough. War-time camp conditions in the Lowlands had killed almost as many of his men as blades and bullets. Now, lessons learned from up-timer books had begun to change that. Dramatically. But for a chronic condition such as Michael Sr.’s, there was little to do but delay the inevitable.
As they helped Michael Sr. back around the corner of the house, the door banged open and spat out the old man’s German nurse, Lenna. Her fierce glance conclusively damned the two younger men for all the martial (and therefore male) idiocy that plagued the world. She almost shoved them aside in her outraged urgency to help Michael Sr. up the stairs, but at the top, he stopped, turned, snapped the .45’s safety into place, and tossed the weapon down to Michael Jr.