Into The Fire Read Free Page B

what they’ll have to do is lost, because he has seen what nobody else has seen and his stolen-borrowed hammer won’t do for this. He drops it and spins round, unarmed, frantic, looking for whatever he can find that—
    A bow!
    He leaps on it, fiercely. He is not an archer, to send a dozen arrows a minute with such accuracy that he can hit a wren’s head in a summer-leafed oak at three hundred paces, but it isn’t summer and there are no leaves and his target isn’t a wren’s head, or even an eagle’s.
    He’s aiming for a slight figure in unadorned plate, standing in the press at the foot of a ladder. He knows this shape, has been trying to find it in the havoc all day.
    And here, now … left hand to bow-belly, fingers to string, arrow to nock. A fine arrow, with a savage, bodkin blade to the head that will pierce plate, even good plate. Even plate commissioned by the weak-chinned, jug-eared idiot who calls himself King of France but never stirs himself to fight. What kind of king doesn’t fight?
    Rustbeard draws with the best smoothness he can muster, feels his shoulders bunch and sigh. He is a mess of contrary levers, and yet the bow is drawn, his lips kiss the string, his better eye sights along the arrow head and she is there, the demon in white plate, or the witch, or the heretic, or the boy, pretending womanhood because that kind of thing boils French blood and makes them go back on their winter promises of surrender.
    Eye. Bodkin. Armour. All in line. Others might send a prayer with the loose, but he’s not that kind of man. He sends hatred instead. Die, God damn you. Die.
    And … loose.
    A hit! He hears a curse in French, sees the white armour topple, hears a name shouted, feels horror ripple through the mess of men below.
    ‘She’s hit. The Maid, she’s hit. The Maid! The Maid! The Maid!’
    ‘Nicely done!’ Glasdale’s plated fist fetches him such a blow between the shoulders that he thinks he’s been shot. He staggers forward. Glasdale catches him in his other hand, lifts his bow arm and the bow in it so everyone must stop and turn and see him.
    Glasdale’s bull-voice bellows out across the barbican. ‘See? Rustbeard is more a man than the rest of you put together. It’s not a demon if it bleeds. It’s not a demon if an arrow can send it back off a ladder. We’ll beat the fuckers now. Get to the walls and build up the breaches and we’ll have the bastards and their shitty little town by sundown. Tomorrow, we’ll have their bastard king’s head on a dish.’
    A sword cut to his head slices open the red-gold light and nearly blinds him. Rustbeard ducks sideways, stabs forward clumsily, puts his shoulder behind the thrust and a Frenchman falls. He is too tired to feel the surge of satisfaction that fired him through the day, but at least there is space around him, here on top of the boulevard, and he can take another step back and chop with his axe to the left and slash-skitter his sword off someone else’s mail and another step back and Glasdale is off to his left somewhere, in the gloaming, and the sun is leaching the life from the sky and all he can hear is the surf of his own blood in his ears in the echo of his helm, and the ring of iron, as it has rung all afternoon, for the French saw the swing of the witch’s standard and found their courage again.
    French. Courage. Tod Rustbeard never thought to stitch those two words together in the same hour, never mind the same breath. He squeezes his eyes tight, takes another step back. There is stone in front of him now, which is something. He is nearly free of the rampart and back on to the Tower proper: les Tourelles. Only a temporary wooden bridge to cross and he’ll have real stone walls between him and the oncoming French.
    Someone passes him water. He drinks and tips back his face and splashes it on and feels it trickle back behind his ears, over his jugular, and the hot, hard pulse. He is not going to die here. He has orders, and they