The rider now stood up in his stirrups, ignoring his victim and looking about him. He slammed his visor closed with the crossguard of his sword and pulled his horse up into a rearing dance before launching it forward, and I found myself face to face with a charging knight at a distance of less than forty paces. He was enormous, as was the armoured creature beneath him, and the high crest on his visored helm made him look even larger. The crest was a rampant green lion, and the rider’s shield and surcoat were pale blue with the green lion, jarringly familiar, blazoned across the front of both. I knew this knight, had seen him somewhere before, perhaps even met him, but that faded to insignificance as he set spurs to his mount with a savage, rowelling kick and came thundering towards me and the three women huddled beside me. It never crossed my mind that he had seen us. I knew that with his head encased in his massive steel helm, his vision was severely restricted. He could see solely what was directly ahead of him, and that imperfectly, his sight constrained by the slits in his visor, and this close to me and my three charges, thundering directly towards us, he was no more than a blind and lethal juggernaut. His enormous warhorse, though, trained to kick down and kill any assailants in its path, was Death incarnate.
I started to crouch down, to cry to the women to get out of the creature’s way, but even as I did so I hesitated, appalled by the lumbering spectacle of the beast’s approach, and so I merely crouched there, wide-eyed with terror and unable to move, watching death come towards us.
But then an arrow struck squarely in the centre of the knight’s breastplate with a clean, violently metallic clang.
Bodkin, I thought. The bodkin was a war arrow with a solid, cylindrical head that tapered to a point, and it was designed to pierce plate armour. That they seldom did nowadays was due, I knew, to their being deflected more often than not by the newer, harder steel being forged by smiths today. Sure enough, in less time than it took for its impact to register in my awareness, the missile had vanished, spinning off into the distance. Nonetheless, the mounted man felt the full brunt of the impact and reeled in his saddle, almost unhorsed by the savage weight of the strike. He threw both arms up, fighting against the thrust of the missile’s impetus, and his shield went whirling away, end over end, ripped from his grasp. His horse, too, went down on its haunches, driven backward by its rider’s rapidly shifting weight. The horse quickly regained its balance and heaved itself back up onto all fours with a triumphant scream, and precisely at the moment when it looked as though the knight had won and would wrest back control of his animal, a second arrow struck, entering one of the slits in the rider’s visor and piercing his skull, killing him instantly and hurling him out of the saddle.
I stood stunned, weaving in shock. Someone grasped me by the shoulder and pressed me down towards the ground, and I sank gratefully to sit beside the women, my legs shaking. The man standing above me, his hand still on my shoulder, was an archer called Jinkin’ Geordie, so named because of an affliction that rendered him incapable of remaining still for any length of time without twitching. Even as I looked up at him, he twitched nervously. But it was plainly true, as I had heard before, that his affliction failed to affect his prowess in a fight.
“Was that you?” I asked him, a little breathlessly.
“Was what me?”
“The knight … Did you shoot him?”
“Aye. Can I ask ye somethin’?”
I was staring at the fallen knight, and I assumed that the fellow wanted to ask me something about him. “Of course,” I said, asking myself already what I could possibly know about the slain man. “Ask.”
He fixed me with an intense, furtive look. “I’ve been hearin’ folk talk, about what we’re to do. Sounds to me as though we’ll be killin’ priests afore this day’s oot, and I don’t know if I like that.”
I felt my jaw fall in shock. “Killing priests? In God’s holy name, Geordie, how can you even think such a thing? Of course we won’t be killing priests. The very thought is an abomination.”
The archer jinked—there really was no other word to describe it—his chin twitching down towards his right shoulder, which jerked forward to meet it as though in sympathy. “Aye, maybe so, right or no’,” he added. “But that’s what folk are sayin’. We’re goin’ to be killin’ priests this very day. I ken they’re there, too, the priests. I saw them mysel’, last night, frae up on the cliffs, aboon their camp. There was half a hunnerd o’ them.” He nodded emphatically. “Aye, easy,” he added. “Frae a’ the noise they were makin’, a’ the singin’ an’ chantin’, easy half a hunnerd.”