Into The Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

Stephen is heavier, and slower. Mail shirt, a borrowed helm tied on with leather, mail gloves, a bastard sword, held two-handed. Stephen first, then.
    The armoury is on his left, the racks emptied of weapons but for a pike with a shattered haft left leaning on the wall.
    ‘Damnation, I thought there’d be more shafts here.’ He spins on his heel, a man with fortitude, in the midst of a defence. He flashes a bright smile. ‘Cyril, find us a pike or two. Anything long with something on the end sharp enough to kill a few Frenchmen. Stephen, help me break up the racks. We can jam them across the door.’
    Cyril runs back for the pikes; he’s young and ardent and doesn’t want to die. Stephen … Stephen is already dying, his throat sliced raggedly open, scalding blood a fountain in the air – step sideways, now, don’t get caught by the spume – his last breath frothing out as he tries to shout a warning – Tod Rustbeard! Traitor! – and finds his voice doesn’t work and he can’t think why, and already the light is fading from his eyes and he falls back into Rustbeard’s waiting arms, to be lowered to the floor; just in time.
    ‘I got the best I could, but there isn’t mu—
Oof!
’ And thus Cyril is poleaxed, the hilt of a sword smashed into the bridge of his nose so hard that the bones pop and his eyes are split open and he is crumpling before he can bring up the shield or the sword or the three pikes he has balanced across his forearms.
    They clatter as they fall, but none of his fellows is listening; they’re all at the front gate, placing barricades on barricades, getting ready to hold it for the night, for the next day, for as long as it takes for reinforcements to come. It’s not a bad plan, it just needs to fail.
    Cyril is still alive. Rustbeard rams his sword into his unarmoured gut. It’s blunted with a day’s use and won’t bite properly, so the first strike is a mess of mangled jerkin and barely a cut.
    He gives up and uses the back edge of his axe in a short, savage chop to the temple. He’s a hammer man out of choice, and the dent it leaves is satisfyingly deep, ramming hair and skin into bone and brain. He lets the lad’s body fall back so he can drive his sword home properly, up through the belly into the air-filled mess of the chest. He feels the sudden release of pressure, the pad-pad of a just-beating heart, stilled.
    There’s blood everywhere, but that is rather the point; blood and heroism are welded one to the other in French minds and he needs to be enough of a hero not to die as soon as they see him. He strips off his English colours, the red and the white, and wrestles them on to Cyril, who has lost his somewhere in the fight.
    At the front gate, French rams are pounding, but he knows this gate; it will not break easily; that’s why his offer of a back route in will be so very welcome. He straightens, runs his hands through his hair so it sticks up, stiff with blood, red as a cock’s comb, and as rigid. He thinks of childhood, and summer rivers, and his mother calling across the orchards.
Chéri! Viens ici.
    The postern gate is the height of a man, wide enough only to let through two at a time. It is held shut by three iron bolts, all well-oiled. The hinges sigh on goose grease; other men than he have planned secret entry or exit from here. Outside, the evening air is mellow. In Orléans, they are lighting fires of celebration, and on the south bank of the Loire. Bastards. Fifty yards away, two hundred Frenchmen are assaulting the front gate with rams and torches, pitch and hammers, blades, fists and feet.
    No going back now. He steps outside, where he can more readily be seen, brings to mind the names of those he saw from the tower top, cups his hands to his mouth and shouts, ‘
Patrick! Georges! Ricard! Venez ici! Ici, au nom de Dieu! Ici! Aidez-moi!
’
    A dozen men peel away from the mass and run towards him, blades out. He doesn’t raise his sword. In fact, he slams it