The Death of Robin Hood Read Online Free PDF Page B

men-at-arms scrambling against each other to avoid being dragged down to the depths in their heavy armour.
    I plucked up another boulder, almost as big as the first, and hurled it on to the wreckage of the boat and its few struggling survivors.
    I snatched a look along the bridge and saw a big Westbury man-at-arms called Hal, a devil with an axe in any fight, tossing a head-sized rock over the edge, shouting an insult and bending for another. But beyond him – disaster. Mastin’s men were no longer loosing, as far as I could see in the torchlight flickering above the north entrance to the bridge. Three empty boats bobbed at the pillar below. A mob of half a dozen men-at-arms were on the bridge itself, surging all around Mastin and his men, bloodied swords in the air, hacking and cutting. And more black shapes, glinting with wet steel, were swarming up the side of the bridge and over the rail to join them. Robin’s archers, supreme killers with a bow, were mostly no hands at all with a blade; up close the enemy would slaughter them.
    And that slaughter had already begun.
    I looked behind me. Robin’s detachment was still shooting, some men leaning far out over the rail to aim straight down into the huddle of packed boats that were now massed below us, scores of craft,hundreds of men. Robin himself leaped up and stood tall on top of the rail, balancing with the grace of a tumbler, no mean feat for a man who had seen fifty winters. He drew his bow and loosed a shaft that smacked into the eye of an older man urging his soldiers upwards just ten feet below Robin. The arrow tore through the man’s skull, showering brains behind, and knocking the fellow out of the boat with a splash. Robin plucked another shaft from the bag at his waist …
    Mastin! I scooped up my shield, pulled Fidelity from its scabbard and charged away from Robin, towards the northern end of the bridge, screaming ‘Westbury! On me, on me!’
    I ran along the bridge at full pelt, dimly aware that most of the rest of our men were running at my shoulder. A helm-less black-headed man hopped over the rail right into my path waving a mace and I separated him from the top of his head with one swinging hack of the blade. I saw another fellow, dripping wet, behind him, cowering at the rail looking at me with vast eyes but ignored him.
    I had to get to Mastin.
    With half a dozen good men at my back, I slammed into the struggling knot at the north end of the bridge, my sword crunching into a mailed back. The man I struck turned, snarling, and I punched him full in the face with my shield, knocking him aside. I stepped into the space he had vacated, Fidelity chopping down. A huge blond fellow lunged at me with a two-handed axe, trying to hook my shield and pull it down. I slipped the shield sideways, out of the grip of his axe, and lunged down at his left leg, steel point biting into his calf, half severing the lower leg, crippling him. He screamed as he fell. And I got my first glimpse of Mastin, pinned against the rail and laying about him with his bow, using it like a quarterstaff, the broken string lashing impotently through the air. There were dead and dying archers all round him, and two still living at either shoulder, fending off the attackers clumsily withtheir swords. I parried a sword blow from a knight and my counterstroke hacked into his mailed neck. He wobbled and I smashed my pommel into the side of his helmet. My men were all around me, cutting, hacking, slicing into the foe. We made short work of the enemy around Mastin, Hal splitting one man’s face along the line of his mouth with a colossal blow from his axe, while I disembowelled a fat man-at-arms in a raggedy gambeson with a lunge to the belly and a swift twist of my blade. Then there were no more enemy on their feet before me and my men were swiftly dispatching the fallen, punching their swords down into dead and wounded alike.
    Mastin looked at me with relief in his eyes, the only part of his