Defiant Unto Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

beneath the road bridge, each man pushed two of the half-barrels roped together, their staves already cracked by axe and covered in sackcloth to hold back their seepage. At times the men’s feet touched the bottom, giving them purchase as they pushed through into the water meadow, easing aside lush grass and reeds, praying that the breeze would cover the reeds’ movement. Once they were beyond the stronghold’s walls they dared to look back and saw the iron-studded doors and gatehouse, where the gloom of the closing day revealed the figures of two sentries guarding their posts. There was no sign of any others. The French commander had grown complacent. So well placed was the garrison it seemed obvious that the only way an enemy could approach would be along the road.
    Blackstone took one of the channels into the marshland; Guillaume and Perinne, who had tied a piece of wood beneath his chest, pushed their way into others. In the distance a church bell rang. A hundred yards further and they wedged the casks into the knotted clumps of vegetation and prised the cracked staves further open. Their flint and steel, and the tinder they carried beneath their leather caps to ignite the oil, would be kept safe and dry until the signal was given. Somewhere across the wasteland that same church bell would ring out in darkness, its lonely chime signalling the time to attack.
    Blackstone paddled back to the two men. The wind had dropped and the stench of marsh gas that bubbled from beneath the surface soured the back of their throats. Smoke drifted lazily from the garrison, the cold, heavy air pushing it down towards the river’s surface. They shivered not only from the wet and cold, but from the belief that lost spirits of the dead, trapped between heaven and earth, could rise from the bubbling, stinking underworld. Blackstone grabbed Perinne’s shoulder, forcing aside his own fear of the place.
    â€˜They won’t rise at night, Perinne. If they manifest it will be now in the half-light. Don’t confuse that curling smoke with anything else. Get yourself onto this clump of reed and stay out of the water. You know what to do.’
    â€˜Aye, Sir Thomas. I know.’
    â€˜My life depends on you, as it has in the past. I need your courage tonight more than ever. And if there are spirits about they’ll be of our dead friends sent to protect us.’
    Perinne grinned. His teeth had almost stopped chattering. ‘Next you’ll be telling me my mother wasn’t a whore,’ he said.
    Blackstone pulled himself away through the tangled undergrowth. Arianrhod sat in the hollow of his throat, listening to his whispered prayer for protection as his naked body was caressed by submerged weeds and rotting fingers of roots. But his mind pictured the floating dead reaching up for him; it was all he could do to keep from crying out. The place was rank with evil. Yet he swam back twice again with the uncomplaining Guillaume, pushing his own fear aside and the remaining barrels into place. Guillaume would keep Perinne close to him. Two men’s courage was better than one man alone in the cloying mist. It was almost dark when Jennah’s men hauled the shivering Blackstone aboard and, as Meulon reported that he had sent Gaillard and two others forward with coils of light rope to mark the way, he rubbed himself dry with sackcloth, scouring his skin back to warmth. He could feel the boat moving in a gentle rise and fall as it scraped against the mud bank, straining for its release in its desire to join the ebb tide. A sullen bell marking vespers – the end of the day – sent its haunting sound across the marshland.
    Meulon took the men over the side and onto the riverbank, waiting for Blackstone.
    â€˜Your two men in the water, their shields are still aboard,’ Jennah told him.
    â€˜We can’t take extra weight with us. Do as you wish with them,’ said Blackstone, slinging his own shield