For a long while nothing happened. The forest was silent. The only activity was from a flock of small dun-coloured birds. They were feeding in the willows to my left. They twittered and chirruped, hopped restlessly from branch to branch, then abruptly flew away, wings whirring. I thought I heard the distant sound of a twig snapping. A foraging jay chattered, and I caught a glimpse as it winged its way through the tops of the beeches.
To pass the time, I attempted to reconstruct what had happened during the banquet when I had been poisoned. I tried to picture the bowl of pottage as it was set in front of me, whether I had seen any slivers of mushroom mixed in my food, and who had served me. But inevitably my memory kept sliding away to the happier image of Bertha seated at the high table, and how beautiful she had been with her braids looped up and held in place with a headband. I recalled in vivid detail how she had looked at me when I completed my tale of Troilus and Polyxena.
A deep, rasping cough jerked me out of my day dream.
Directly in front of me, not thirty paces away, stood a colossal stag. The giant creature was staring at me belligerent and challenging. I had never seen such a towering animal. At the shoulder it was as tall as I was, and the rack of antlers rose another four feet above that. I was so close that I could see the nostrils opening and closing as the creature tasted my scent. The animal’s head and thickly muscled neck was in proportion to its immense size. A broad, shaggy pelt of matted grey-brown hair covered the chest. I had no idea how it had emerged from the forest and appeared right in front of me.
I froze.
For a long moment the creature gazed directly at me. I felt small and puny. Then, slowly, the majestic spread of antlers, six or seven feet across, swung away as the hart turned its head and began to walk slowly past me. I had been judged as harmless.
I felt a nudge on my elbow. Osric had crept up behind me the moment the hart had turned away, and was prodding me with an arrow he had taken from the quiver. I looked down. It was a war arrow, the heavy iron head three inches broad and designed to pierce scale armour.
The hart was moving to my left, away from the line of waiting hunters. There was no hope of turning it back toward them. I took the arrow, nocked it to my bowstring, and glanced across at Walo. The lad was half-crouched, mesmerized, his mouth slack and his gaze fixed on the great deer. He turned to face me and saw the question in my face. He nodded.
I drew back the bowstring, felt the heavy shaft slide smoothly across my left hand, and in the same movement, released the arrow.
I had practised my archery so often that there was no need to take deliberate aim. Some instinct told me exactly where to place the shaft, and the heavy arrow slammed into the ribs, just behind the shoulder.
Until that moment I had never appreciated the force of the curved bow. My arrow struck at the perfect angle. It plunged deep into the body cavity and ripped through the vital organs. The huge beast ran less than fifty paces, and then with a hoarse grunt, buckled at the knees and sank to the ground.
Walo was on the stag in a flash. He darted behind the stricken animal, dodged the kicking hooves, and crawled under the sweep of the antlers. At risk to his life he drew his hunting knife across the throat. It took three deep cuts before twin bright red spouts showed he had succeeded in despatching the animal.
The great head dropped to the ground and lay there, twisted at an ugly angle by the massive antlers.
Walo got to his feet unsteadily, his face and jerkin splashed with blood. He gazed down at the great corpse, and a tremendous smile spread across his face. Then he broke into a gawky dance, capering up and down with delight.
‘What do we do now?’ I asked him. I could scarcely believe that it had all ended so quickly.
He stopped his jig and fumbled for the hunting horn dangling from the cord around his neck. Putting it to his lips, he blew three or four unsteady notes. The effort was beyond him, and he tried a second time. On the fourth attempt he succeeded in completing what I supposed was the death call.
There was no response from the silent forest.
We began to gut the huge animal. It was a mammoth task. By mid-morning we were not halfway through butchering the carcass, though we had succeeded in retrieving my lucky arrow, undamaged. It had slid between two ribs and pierced the heart. We sliced and cut, pausing to pass a whetstone between us and sharpen our knives and to listen for other hunters. We might as well have been alone in a wilderness. We worked until we were hungry, and Walo went to fetch bread and hard cheese from a saddlebag on the pony and a leather bottle of ale. I wandered off in search of water to clean my hands made sticky with blood. I took along the arrow to wash and smooth the blood-stiffened feathers.