The Archer's War: Exciting good read - adventure fiction about fighting and combat during medieval times in feudal England with archers, longbows, knights, ... (The Company of English Archers Book 4) (15 page)

       People see us marching along the track that passes through their fields and pastures and so do the travelers we meet coming the other way on the wagon path. 

       As you might expect, they all give us a wide berth.  But for the most part no one seems to be greatly excited by our presence.  The only exception is a knight who comes galloping out his castle to demand a toll – and quickly turns around and gallops back to raise his drawbridge when he sees the men walking around Leslie’s horse at the head of the column with crossbows and the crude old fashioned swords on their shoulders. 

      
It doesn’t escape me that Leslie has all three of his crossbow men walking with him at the front of the column.  The old swords look impressive but it is the armor piercing crossbow quarrels that concern knights and the length of their cast that affects castle sieges.  Longbows in the hands of a trained archer have almost the same cast and impact while shooting as much as ten times more frequently.

       “Captain Leslie, have you or the nobles hereabouts ever faced longbow men?” 
Have nobles such as Lord Cornell?  That’s the question I’m really asking.

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       My archers are walking with the Scots and they seem to be getting on well.  I did another count after Roger came back from London with four newly recruited archers and a couple of apprentice archers who will need a lot of additional training to strengthen their arms. 

       At the moment we have a grand total of twenty eight longbow men and just over a thousand arrows.  Leslie also has three crossbowmen with less than a dozen knight-killing metal quarrels apiece, a couple of bowmen with short bows and about twenty arrows per man, and about twenty pikes without the blade and hook we add to ours – basically just long pole with an iron spearhead on the end.

       Leslie and I are riding side by side at the head of the column so we can talk.  He likes to talk and I encourage him.

       “How would you and your men stop knights on horseback, if I might ask?”

       “Why Bishop, if they charge us we’ll get behind a line of our pikes and use our swords to slaughter them when the pikes knock them off their horses.” 

      
And what happens if they get through your single line of pikes without being knocked off their horses?

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        Cornell’s Hathersage Castle looks impressive and strong when we see it from a distance.  It looks even more imposing and difficult to defeat when we get closer.  It’s an awesome castle - its ramparts are manned and the drawbridge over its moat is raised.  They know we’re coming.

       Leslie and I sit side by side on our horses looking at it.  Roger and Leslie’s son are right behind us.  Finally I shake my head and tell him what I think.

       “We’ll never take it by force; either we gull them and they let us in or we lay siege on the castle and starve them out.”

       “Aye.  That’s God’s truth, it surely is.  It’s a siege for sure.”

       With that piece of wisdom ringing in my ears, I watch as Leslie begins leading his men in a great circle around the castle and begins assigning positions to his men.

       While Leslie is making his initial dispositions I ride into the nearby village where the castle’s serfs and churls live.  It’s totally deserted. 

       The fact that the village is deserted is encouraging.  It most likely means that some or all of the villagers have taken refuge in the castle and will join its defense.  That’s actually encouraging since we have no intention directly assaulting on the castle – it’s good because it means there will be more people inside to help eat up its stores of food; it’s bad because it means there will be more men for sorties.  It also means we’ll have someplace to shelter my archers and house Leslie’s mercenaries and their families.  

      
What we don’t know, and would dearly like to know, is how many people are inside the castle and the size of its food reserves.

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       It’s been three weeks of almost constant rain since we began the siege of Hathersage Castle.  So far there has been no sign of either its surrender or a relief force.  There isn’t much I can do here so I’m thinking about leaving Roger here with the Scots to continue the siege and returning to Cornwall.  I want to be with George and my students to make sure they are learning what they need to learn.

        My thinking changes when a messenger rides in from London with a parchment from Cornwall.  In his message William reports that pilgrims and merchants are again moving between Cornwall and Devon - and the travelers coming out of Devon all say that Cornell and four of his five household knights were killed on the River Tamar by an ambush of enemy archers. 

       William says he intends send a force of riders into Devon in an effort to see if the reports are true. If Cornell is really dead and the threat has passed, William intends to send all of our ships except a cog for training and two galleys back to the Holy Land.  He’ll send them with a goodly number of our archers and archer apprentices.

       Four days later another messenger arrives from William.  Cornell is dead for sure and William wants the siege to continue until Hathersage surrenders and we occupy it. 
He wants to add Hathersage to our holdings?
 

       It’s time for me to go home to Cornwall.

                            - End of Book Four -

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Books One, Two, and Three of “The Archers” saga are also available in Kindle editions.   The parchments for Book Five are being pieced together and translated.  Book Five will be released sometime in 2015.  Readers may also enjoy the similarly action-packed novels of the author’s “The Soldier” saga. 

All of Martin Archer’s novels are available as Kindle eBooks (Search Amazon.com for “Martin Archer.”) and will sooner or later be available in print. 

Other exciting eBooks by Martin Archer – “The Soldier” saga.

“Soldiers and Marines”   (The story of a young soldier fighting in Korea)

“Peace and Conflict”   (He fights with the Legion and the allies in Vietnam)

“War Breaks Out”   (The Soviet Union invades Germany and NATO fights)

“War in the East”  (The West gets involved when China invades Russia)

“The Islamic–Israeli War”  (An Islamic Coalition invades Israel and changes the Middle East.)

   Sample Pages from Book One of the Archer Saga

                       “THE ARCHER”

                     Chapter One    

“THE ARCHER AND THE BISHOP”

      The weary men straggle out of the desert and into the port late in the morning.  There are eighteen of them, all English archers, and most of them have walked every night for the past three days.  The only exceptions are two wounded men on a makeshift litter being dragged behind a dusty camel and a brown robed priest riding on an exhausted horse and holding a sleeping young boy. The boy is wrapped in a dirty priest’s robe to protect him against the chill of the spring day.

       The dirty and begrimed young man walking at the front of the column stops and waits until the priest reaches him. 

       “How’s George?”

        He gestures with a tired wave of his arm towards the sleeping child as he asks.

        “Your son is fine,” answers the priest as the horse stops. 

        The boy wakes up and twists around to get more comfortable in the Priest’s arms when the horse stops.  Then he sits up straight and looks around. 

       “Put me down Uncle Thomas, I want to walk with my father and the men for a while.  My arse is sore and I’m thirsty.”

       And with that he wriggles out of the priest’s arms and slides off the horse.  He is barefoot and wearing a rough brown shirt that hangs to his knees.   Edward the tailor made it for him before he’d been killed by the unlucky stone that had been catapulted over the wall by the Saracens and hit him in the head. 

       “Look Papa, what is that?” 

       The boy asks the question as he massages his rear with one hand and with the other points to the flat gray expanse of the Mediterranean that spreads out beyond stone houses and the ships in the harbor.

       “That’s the big water I told you about, the one that is so salty you can’t drink it.  And those things out there on top of the water are the big ships.  They’re called cogs and they carry people across the big water just like the boats on a river can carry people across the river.  The only difference is that those out there are much bigger.”

        The boy is not convinced as he stands there studying the scene in front of us.

       “They look little.”

       “They’ll look bigger when we get closer.”

       “Really?”

       The boy looks back intensely at the scene in front of him.  Then he shakes his head and looks back at his father questioningly.

       “Your Uncle Thomas is right, George.  All of us can fit on one of those cogs with room to spare.  The big ones can carry as many as a hundred men or even more.  That’s how your uncle Thomas and I and all the archers got here from England.  Almost a hundred of us came on each boat.  And that’s how we’ll go back – all together.”

      
Except we’ve got to get our pay so we can hire a boat and there will only be eighteen of us instead of the one hundred and ninety two that came out from England with King Richard seven years ago - and that’s if we can get the arrow out of Brian’s leg without it rotting and Athol the ox drover stops getting dizzy and falling down when he tries to walk.

       The city is so packed with Christians and Jews fleeing the oncoming Saracens that the city gates are closed and the master of the caravanserai adjacent to the city is only allowing his traditional merchant customers and rich refugees to enter.  Everyone else is camping and starving outside - thousands of them.  Even at a distance we can smell the people and their livestock and see the dust they are raising.

       Shouts and a great wail go up as we come into sight and the people see us walking in.  They know what our arrival means.  It means Lord Edmund’s castle and lands have been lost and the Saracens will be coming.  At best, these people will have to convert to Islam; and most likely they’ll all be put to the sword or taken as slaves.  And so will we if the Bishop of Damascus doesn’t pay us so we can get away or ransom ourselves to freedom.

       The caravanserai master himself, a great bearded man, comes to the gate with several armed retainers as we approach and the shouting and weeping crowd grows around us with their shouted questions and reaching arms.  He looks over my little column and then at me with a baleful eye as I stop in front of him with George holding my hand.

       “So it is true?  Lord Edmund and the castle have finally fallen?”

       “Aye, they have; the road to Damascus is open.”

       The caravanserai master crosses himself.

       “Well, everyone needs a caravanserai so I guess I’ll be a Moslem again until the Christians or Jews come back.  But these people,” he says as he shakes his head in resignation and gestures both towards the people gathering around us and the distant crowds, “I just don’t know.”

      
Well I know.  Anyone who stays here will either be slaughtered or become a slave. That’s why we left four days ago when Lord Edmund fell.

       Where is the Bishop of Damascus?

       “He’s in the city at the Church of Saint Mary.”  Then he gestures at the crowd again and shakes his head disgust and resignation, and adds “but you better hurry if you want to see him.  I’ve heard he’s about to run off and leave.

Read more:  Search Amazon.com for “Martin Archer”

                     or “The Archer.”

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Sample pages from Book One of “The Soldier” saga

                       Book One

       SOLDIERS AND MARINES      

       Dust and gravel periodically spray out behind the Jeep as it slowly backs up towards the top of the low ridge.  The early morning sun is bright and already hot, and the periodic sound of thunder in the background has been coming closer for two days.

       Three men are in the slowly backing Jeep as it moves over the abandoned farm land and up towards the ridgeline.  The passenger sits impassively almost as if he’s in a trance.  The gunner on the mounted machine gun crouches and squints down the barrel into the sun as he constantly moves it to the left and right.  He is chewing furiously on a mouthful of gum.