The Templar Salvation (2010) Read Free

bolt slammed into the knight by his side, thudding downward into his right shoulder and lodging itself deep into his chest cavity. The man—Odo of Ridefort, an ox of a man—crumbled to the ground, blood spurting out of him.
    Everard darted over to him and helped him back onto his feet, calling out to the others. Within seconds, they were all over their wounded brother-knight, three of them firing upward defensively while the others helped him into the back of the wagon. With the archers covering him, Everard sprinted to the front, and as he climbed onto the bench seat, he turned to shoot a parting nod of gratitude to Theophilus—but the Keeper wasn’t where he’d last seen him. Then he spotted him—a short distance away, down on the ground, motionless, an arrow through his neck. He glanced at him for no more than a solitary heartbeat, but it was still long enough for the sight to brand itself permanently into his consciousness—then he leapt onto the wagon and whipped the horses to life.
    The other knights clambered on board as the wagon charged through the gates and out of the city under a deluge of arrows. As Everard guided it up a hillock before turning north, he cast his eye over the glistening sea below and the war galleys that were gliding past the city’s walls, banners and pennants flying from their sterncastles, shields uncovered, bulwarks garnished, ladders and mangonels raised threateningly.
    Insanity , he thought again with a pained heart as he left behind the sublime city and the great catastrophe that would soon be upon it.

    THE ROAD BACK WAS SLOWER. They’d recovered their horses, but the cumbersome wagon and its heavy payload were holding them back. Avoiding towns and any human contact was more difficult than when they were just on horses and could roam away from the well-trodden trails. Worse still was that Odo was losing a lot of blood, and there was little they could to stop the bleeding while charging ahead. Worst of all was the fact that they weren’t traveling incognito anymore: Their exit from the besieged city hadn’t been as discreet as their entry. Armed men—ones from outside the city walls this time—would be coming after them.
    And sure enough, before the first day’s sun had set, they did.
    Everard had sent two knights ahead of the wagon and two others behind, early-warning scouts for any threats. That first evening, his prescience paid off. The convoy’s rear guard spotted a company of Frankish knights, thundering in from the west, hot on their tail. Everard sent a rider ahead to bring back the forward scouts before cutting away from the more obvious, and well-trodden, southeasterly route the crusaders would expect them to take and heading farther east, into the mountains.
    It was summer, and although the snows had melted, the bleak landscape was still tough to navigate. Lush, rolling hills soon gave way to steep, craggy mountains. The few trails that the wagon could take were narrow and perilous, some of them barely wider than the track of its wooden wheels and skirting the edges of dizzying ravines. And with every new day, Odo’s condition worsened. The onset of heavy rain turned an already terrible situation into an accursed one, but with no other options, Everard kept his men to the high ground whenever he could and trudged on, slowly, eating whatever they could forage or kill, filling up their gourds in the downpours, forced to stop when the light faded, spending the miserable nights without shelter, always tense in the knowledge that their pursuers were still out there, looking for them.
    We have to make it back , he thought, ruing the wretched upheaval that had been heaped upon him and his brothers without warning. We cannot fail. Not when so much is at stake.
    It was easier willed than done.
    After several days of sluggish progress, Odo’s condition was desperate. They’d managed to remove the arrow and stem the bleeding, but a fever had set in, the result of his