The Betrayal of Father Tuck: An Outlaw Chronicles short story Read Online Free PDF

screech, and Tuck put a hand on Edwinstowe’s arm. ‘God be with you, my lord,’ he said, ‘and may He send all our enemies to Hell!’ And he hurried north along the walkway behind the parapet, shouting in Welsh and English for the archers to form up.
    ***
    Three companies of men, dark in their Murdac surcoats, started forward from the church of St Nicholas. The foremost men held ladders in their hands, others held sword and shield, axe and spear, and they yelled their war cries, called on the saints and shouted the traditional insults as they began to run, a trot at first, straight up the gentle hill directly towards the main gate.
    Tuck’s archers, twenty leather-tough fighting men, many of whom had once been desperate outlaws in the wilds of Sherwood, nocked their shafts, pulled the rough hempen cords of their bows back to their ears, the stiff yew wood bending with a creaking sound like a huge door being forced open, and on Tuck’s command they loosed. A score of arrows slashed across the open space before the castle like a flock of slim birds, and scythed into the flank of the advancing horde. The yard-long ash shafts, tipped with man-killing, needle-like bodkin points, drove into the bodies of Murdac’s men-at-arms, punching straight through leather armour and even iron mail, deep into torsos and limbs, tearing flesh and breaking bone. A dozen men dropped, screaming, from the first flight of arrows – which were followed three heartbeats later by another equally lethal flight. A third volley smashed into the flank of the nearest company, and another ten men were transfixed, shafts sprouting absurdly from chests, necks, thighs, arms. Another volley of shafts, more ragged now, and another, and another, and the first company was all but destroyed. Wounded men staggered here and there almost at random, cursing their pain and tugging at deeply embedded shafts; a score or more bodies littered the slope before the main gate. Some men were stationary now, cowering on their knees behind shields – their wood-and-leather, kite-shaped protectors stuck with half a dozen quivering shafts. Others had abandoned their weapons, along with their claim to manhood, and were running back down the hill to escape the lethal, plunging, dagger-tipped yards of ash.
    But the arrow storm had barely touched the two other companies. More than a hundred dark-surcoated men, screaming like demons, waving axe and sword, crashed into the main gate. A dozen ladders swung up, and thumped against the walls, and howling, terrified men were desperately scrambling up these frail, bouncing wooden pathways, hurling themselves madly up at the castle’s defenders.
    ‘Pick your targets,’ yelled Tuck to his men, who were still mechanically hauling back their strings and loosing black lines of death down on to the boiling sea of enemies below the castle walls. ‘Kill the knights first; kill all the knights. Gwen, get that man there, the big one in the blue surcoat. Oh, you buffoon – you’ve missed him. Look here!’ The priest pulled back his own cord and launched a shaft at the knight who was waving an axe and urging his men up the ladders to the battlements twenty feet above. The arrow smacked into his neck, knocking him instantly sideways to the earth.
    At the battlements themselves, a furious mêlée had erupted; Lord Edwinstowe’s men held the wall with a glittering, constantly moving barrier of slicing swords and hammering mace and axe; for the enemy there was no way through this hacking hedge of steel – the rare brave man who hurled himself at the top of the battlements was cut down instantly by half a dozen swords. Most died before they could even strike a blow. As the enemy surged upwards, time and again they were smashed down, battered and slashed and stuck with long spears, pierced, cut and killed and forced back to drop bleeding to the ground. And still the arrows thunked into the mass of the attackers, streaking in from their right,