Hood

CHAPTER
41

arshal Guy heard the low, tight-mouthed cursing of the soldiers behind him and knew that something was amiss. Without stopping, he turned in the saddle and looked back along the trading ranks. He saw his sergeant and motioned him forward. "Jeremias," he said as the sergeant reined in beside him, "the men are muttering."

"They are, sire," confirmed the sergeant.

"Why is this?"

"Methinks it is the mice, sire."

"The mice, sergeant," repeated Guy, casting a sideways glance at the man beside him. He appeared to be earnest. "Pray explain."

With a tilt of his head, the sergeant indicated a branch at the side of the road a few paces away. Guy squinted at the overhanging branch, which looked no different from a thousand others seen that dayentirely unremarkable, except… except: hanging from the branch was a dead mouse.

The tiny corpse was suspended by a long hair from the tail of a horse, its sun-shrivelled body turning slowly in the light evening breeze. The marshal leaned from the saddle for a closer look and poked it with his finger as he passed. The little dead thing swung on its slender thread. Guy turned his face away and made a show of ignoring what he took to be a harmless, if somewhat sinister, prank.

The attitude was admirable but became increasingly hard to maintain. Try as he might to keep his eyes on the road before him, he could not prevent himself from glimpsing more of the things, and once he began to see them, he saw them everywhere. Swinging on their horsehair nooses from bushes and twigs, dangling from overhanging limbs and branches, high and low, on each side of the road, dead mice hung like grotesque fruit in an orchard of death.

The wagon train continued on into the gloaming, and the farther they went, the more of the weird little corpses they saw-and not mice only. Now, here and there amongst the hanging dead, were the bodies of larger creatures. He saw a vole first, and then another; then moles, shrews, and rats. Like the mice, the moles and rats were strung up with horsetail hair and left to twist gently in the breeze.

Soon, the soldiers were seeing dead rats everywhere-some shrivelled and desiccated as if dried in their skins, others that appeared freshly killed. But all, whether mummified or fresh, were hung by their necks, legs flat to their sides, tails stiff and straight.

Guy, glancing right and left, took them in with a shiver of disgust and, refusing to be cowed by the unnatural spectacle, rode on.

Then came the birds. Small ones first-sparrows, for the most part, but also wrens and nuthatches-scattered in amongst the rodents. The birds were dry husks of the creatures that had been-as if the avian essence had been sucked from them, along with all their vital juices-all of them suspended by their necks, wings folded tight against their bodies, beaks pointing skyward.

A few hundred paces down this weird gallery of death, the soldiers began seeing faces leering from the leaf-bordered shadows. They were not human faces, but effigies of twigs and bark and straw tied together with bits of leather and bone: heads, large and small, their eyes of stone and shell gazing sightlessly from the wood at the passing riders.

The muttering of the men became a low rumble. Everywhere a knight or soldier looked, another disembodied face met his increasingly unsteady gaze-as if the wood were populated with Greene Men, come to menace the intruders. Some of the larger ones had straw mouths lined with animal teeth, bared as if in the frozen rictus of death. These effigies mocked the riders. They seemed to laugh at the living, their mute voices shrill with the unspoken words: As we are, soon you shall be.

The soldiers proceeded along this eerie corridor in silence, eyes wide, shoulders hunched with apprehension. The farther they went, the more uncanny it became. The feeling of dread deepened moment by moment, as if each step brought them closer to a doom unknown and deeply to be feared.

Guy, resolute but anxious, was no less affected than his men; the weird sights around them seemed both purposeful and malevolent; yet the meaning of the macabre displayif meaning there wasescaped him.

Then, all at once…

"Yeux de Dieu!" swore Guy, jerking back the reins involuntarily. The big grey halted in the road.

Affixed to a tree beside the road was what appeared to be the figure of a man with huge hands and an enormous misshapen head, drenched in blood, his arms stretched as if to welcome passersby with a grisly embrace.

A second glance revealed that it was not a man at all, but a statue of cloth and straw affixed to a scaffold of tree limbs and topped with the head of a boar. The hideous thing had been drenched in blood and was covered with flies. "Merde," Guy spat, urging his mount forward once more. "Pagans."

The heavy wagons rolled slowly past this grisly herald. Knights and men loosed curses even as they signed themselves with the cross.

The road descended gently into a shallow trough between the crests of two low hills. The forest pressed dose, ominously silent. Guy, riding ahead, reached the bottom of the dell and, in the last light of day fading to the shadowy gloom of twilight, saw something lying across the road. Closer inspection revealed that a tree had fallen, its trunk spanning the road from side to side. There was no going around it.

Guy, now fully alert to danger, wheeled his mount. "Halt!" he shouted, his voice cracking loud in the deep forest hush. "Jeremias!" he said, indicating the tree behind him. "Remove it. Form a troop. Get it cleared away."

"At once, sire," replied the sergeant. Turning in the saddle, he called to the knights and men behind him. "First four ranks dismount!" he shouted. "The rest remain on guard."

Before the knights and men-at-arms could climb down from their saddles, there came a crashing from the surrounding woodsomething huge and clumsy crashing through the tangled undergrowth toward the road. The soldiers drew their weapons as the unknown entity lumbered closer.

The bushes beside the road began quaking and thrashing from side to side. Guy's hand found his sword hilt and drew it. The sword was halfway out of the scabbard when, with the mewling, inarticulate squeal of a host of lost and tortured souls, the branches parted, and out from the vine-covered thicket to his left burst a herd of wild pigs.

Half-mad with fear, the animals tumbled through the opening and into the road. Whatever was driving the pigs terrified them more than the men on horseback, for the squealing, squalling animals, seeing their only path of escape blocked by the fallen tree, swirled around once, then lowered their heads and charged into the halted ranks of soldiers.

The hapless creatures-four sows with perhaps twenty or more piglets-darted in amongst the legs of the horses, instantly throwing the ordered ranks into rearing, kicking chaos. Some of the soldiers tried to ward off the pigs by stabbing at them with their swords, which only increased the confusion.

"Hold!" cried Guy, trying to make himself heard above the frantic neighing of the horses. "Hold the ranks! Let them pass!"

Catching a movement out of the corner of his eye, he turned and saw something alight on the trunk of the fallen tree. It seemed to simply materialise out of the darkness-a shadow taking substance, darkness contracting to itself and coalescing into the shape of a gigantic birdlike creature with the wings and high-domed head of a raven and the torso and legs of a man. The face of the phantom was a smooth, black skull with an absurdly long, pointed beak.

Guy gaped at the unearthly creature. His shouted orders clotted on his tongue. He swallowed and found his mouth had gone dry.

The phantom perched on the massive trunk of the fallen tree, spread its great wings wide, and in a voice that seemed torn from the very forest round about, shrieked out a cry of raw animal rage that resounded through the forest, echoing amongst the treetops. Soldiers threw their hands over their ears to keep out the sound.

At once, the scent of smoke filled the air, and before Guy could draw breath to shout a warning to his men, twin curtains of flame leapt up on each side of the road along the length of the wagon train, which was now a confused mass of frightened men, pigs, and thrashing horses.

The phantom shrieked again. Lord Guy's grey destrier reared, its eyes rolling in terror. When Guy turned to look, the enormous raven had vanished. "Fall back!" cried the knight marshal. "Retreat!" His command was lost in the cacophony of pigs squealing, men shouting, and oxen bawling. "Turn around! Go back!"

As if in reply, the forest answered with a low groan and the shuddering creak of tree trunks cracking. The soldiers shouted-some pointing left, some right-as two huge oaks gave way on each side of the road, crashing to earth in a juddering mass of limbs and leaves. Knights on horseback scattered as the heavy pillars toppled, one atop the other, directly behind the last wagon in the train. The startled ox team surged forward, smashing into the stationary ranks directly ahead, overturning two horses and unseating their riders.

Trapped now in a corridor of flame and oily, pungent smoke, the wagons could neither turn around nor move off the road. The soldiers, still contending with the remaining pigs, strove to regain control of their mounts.

In the tumult and confusion, no one saw two furtive figures in deerskin cloaks rise from the bracken with pots of flaming pitch suspended from leather cords. Standing just beyond the shimmering sheet of fire, the skin-clad figures swung the pots in tight, looping arcs and let fly. The clay pots smashed into flaming shards, splattering hot, burning pitch over the sideboards of the nearest wagon.

The frightened oxen bolted, driving into the men and horses who could not get out of the way swiftly enough.

"Hold!" cried Guy. "Drivers, hold your teams!"

But there was no holding the terrified animals. They surged forward, heads down, driving into anything in their path. Knights and men-at-arms scattered, desperate to get out of the way of the wildly scything horns.

Some of the soldiers braved the wall of flames. Turning their mounts, they jumped the burning logs and struggled into the bramblebound undergrowth. Those in the rearward ranks, seeing the flames and chaos ahead, abandoned their uncontrollable mounts and scrambled through the branches and over the fallen tree trunks blocking their retreat.

In the chaos of the moment, no one gave a thought to their trapped comrades; thoughts ran only to survival, and each man looked after himself. Once free, the men-at-arms took to their feet, running back down the road the way they had come.

The wagons were burning fiercely now, driving the horses and oxen wild with terror. There was no holding them. Everywhere, men were abandoning their saddles to flee the panic-stricken horses and flaming wagons.

Marshal Guy, his voice raw from shouting, tried to order his scattered retinue. With sword held high, he repeatedly called his men to rally to him. But the preternatural attack had overwhelmed them to a man, and Guy could not make himself heard above the clamour of beasts and men lost in the frenzy of escape.

In the end, he had no choice but to desert his own mount and follow his retreating men as they fled into the night. Working his way back along the riotous commotion of his flailing, devastated soldiers, Guy reached the rear of the treasure train and climbed onto the bole of one of the toppled oaks. There he took up the call to retreat. "Fall back! To me! Fall back!"

Those nearest swarmed over the fallen trunks, tumbling into the road and pulling the stragglers after them. When finally the last man had cleared the fiery corridor, Guy allowed himself to be pulled away from the wreckage by his sergeant. "Come, sire," said Jeremias, tugging him by the arm. "Let it go."

Still, Guy hesitated. He cast a last look over his shoulder at the inferno the road had become. Terrified horses still reared and plunged, hurling themselves headlong into the flames; the oxen lay dead-most had been killed by the knights in order to keep from being gored or trampled; discarded weapons and armour were strewn the length of the corridor. The rout was complete.

"It is over," said Jeremias. "You must rally the men and regain command. Come away."

Marshal Guy de Gysburne nodded once and turned away. A moment later, he was running into the flame-shattered darkness of a strange and hostile night.