The Tolls of Death: (Knights Templar 17) Read Online Free PDF Page A

second, her face registered astonishment. Then her face tightened, and resumed its expression of anguish. In her eyes was no pleasure, only a grim horror, as though she feared any man she met.
    Even him.
    It was almost a whole month later that two men stood high on a hill at the coast, one disconsolately throwing pebbles at an ant scurrying about a rock. He looked up again, a dark man with a dark face, and said emphatically, ‘No!’
    The tall knight with him turned and gave his companion a stare. ‘Are you sure of that, Simon?’
    ‘Quite sure, thank you, Baldwin. I want no more of your damned boats,’ rasped his friend. ‘First I nearly die of sickness on the journey to Galicia, then I nearly die on the return, then we are blown from our course to hit those benighted islands,
then
we both nearly died under attack on those islands! And now we have struck our homeland again, thanks to that drunken oaf of a shipmaster, and you ask me to take another sour-bellied whore of a ship? God’s thigh! Be damned to you, man! I’ll take
no more vessels
. For me, it’s dry land from now on.’ He shuddered. ‘Christ save me! I could be seasick just walking over a puddle! No, leave me to ponder your fate while you go on alone!’
    The two men stood staring down at the little vessel which had brought them this far and which had now failed them. One, a tall, rangy knight with the strong arms and shoulders of a man who had trained for his vocation since a lad, the other a thickset fellow with the ruddy complexion of one who had spent much of his life in the open, his hair bleached by the hot sun of Galicia.
    ‘It would be a great deal faster,’ the knight said mildly. ‘All I wish is to return home to Furnshill as soon as possible and see my wife and child.’
    His friend sighed. ‘Baldwin, I want to get home too, home to Meg and Edith and Peter – but I don’t want to die in the process. Every attempt to travel since we first left home has left us close to death. For me, the land is so much more secure; I’ll take no other route.’
    ‘Yet the land itself holds dangers, Simon,’ said Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, his attention travelling inland. He had penetrating black eyes, which some said could see through a man’s skin to the sins beneath, but that was the merest nonsense and he was intensely irritated to hear such chatter. He simply had the skill of listening, and usually heard when a man spoke untruthfully.
    ‘Yes, all right,’ Simon Puttock agreed. ‘But at least the risks you take on land are the sort which a knight like you and a man like me can protect ourselves against.’
    Baldwin nodded. His companion, the Bailiff of Lydford Castle in Devonshire, was more than capable of defending himself, and the pair of them had been involved in many fights both together and apart. It was the strength of Simon’s courage in battle that Baldwin found so confusing: a man prepared to brave a sword or arrow shouldn’t fear the sea so much – not in Baldwin’s opinion, anyway.
    ‘If we were to sail, it would be a great deal faster,’ he attempted.
    ‘I will not sail.’
    ‘It should be more comfortable, too,’ Baldwin pointed out. ‘No lurching nag, but a gently rolling deck …’
    Simon flinched. He had been so badly seasick during the last voyage that he had prayed for death. ‘Give me a lurching brute. I
prefer
a lurching brute.’
    Ignoring him, Baldwin blithely continued, ‘And wine available from a smiling fellow sent to serve the guests …’
    Simon held up his hand. ‘All right, all right – you want to travel by ship? Very well.’
    Baldwin tried not to gape. ‘So we can continue by ship when she is mended?’
    Simon glanced over his shoulder. The sun was low in the sky, and the western horizon, away over the land, was gleaming pink and gold. Leaves were licked with fire, and even Baldwin’s face shone with an unearthly glow that lit up the thin scar on his cheek. It was a knife-mark, Simon knew, nothing