ALTDORF (The Forest Knights: Book 1) (2 page)

At first, as the warm breeze reduced great banks of snow to puddles, it was a welcome respite to a hard winter. But as the air continued to warm and the moisture was wicked out of the countryside, throats dried out, and animals became uneasy. Once the people recognized it for a föhn, the wise ones hastened to the safety of their homes to latch their shutters and bar the doors.

They knew what chased the wind.

Erich felt ill at ease, but he could not be sure whether the cause was the föhn or the six horsemen that had appeared with it. He had shadowed them from the woods for the past hour.

Their mounts were great long-legged beasts, with heads held high and chins tucked in; not the sturdy mountain ponies that fared better in this land of hills and steep mountain passes. At first he thought they might be soldiers on patrol to Einsiedeln, or one of the other wealthy monasteries in the area under protection of the Holy Roman Empire, but they were not dressed like any Austrians Erich had ever seen.

Unlike the heavy wool and sackcloth garments Erich had on, the riders wore layers of simple dark clothing of lightweight fabrics, the likes of which Erich had never seen. In addition, each man wore a black chainmail shirt, the mesh so fine and light, it seemed more a vest than armor.

A single one of the mail shirts would fetch a price large enough to keep a family in these parts fed for years. But first it would need to be removed from the man wearing it, and that, Erich knew through experience and by looking at the weapons each man wore at his side, could only be accomplished one way.

He waved to a man concealed in the woods a hundred yards up the road, who in turn, relayed the signal to more men hiding beyond a bend in the road ahead.

Brigands. Highwaymen. Desperate men turned predators, who singled out the weak to provide for their own existence. Now in his late twenties, Erich had made his life amongst men such as these for nearly fifteen years. His band of almost thirty men was one of the most lucrative gangs working the road leading north out of Saint Gotthard’s Pass. Traffic had been good of late, and by targeting nobles with insufficient escorts, the occasional small trade caravan, and local peasants as poor as the raiders themselves, Erich’s group managed a comfortable existence, unlike most in the settlements surrounding the Great Lake.

But they never ascended far up into the pass. The craggy peaks were the domain of demons, and were to be avoided lest one risk the corruption of his soul. And, besides, there was no profit to be had on the other side.

A number of years past the Duke of Milan had purchased the area and built a great fortification, the Castelgrande, which sat atop a rock bluff overlooking the southern approach to the Saint Gotthard Pass. Regular patrols from the castle had almost eliminated all banditry in the valleys on the south side of the pass. However, once the merchants managed the winding climb from the narrow valley floor out of the tree line and over the barren summit, which was covered in snow eight months of the year, they were in Austrian lands, and there were no longer any Milanese patrols to protect them. Austrian patrols were rarely seen this far south.

It was this pass that the six men had recently climbed, and they now rode slowly, relaxed. The weary slump to their shoulders told of a great distance traveled. Although tired of the road, they exchanged easy banter and laughed often, with one man standing out by his immense size.

Clean-shaven and blonde, he sat astride one of the largest horses Erich had ever seen; yet the animal seemed no more than a pony the way the man’s legs dangled around its torso. He talked non-stop, emphasizing his words and laughter with grand gestures from his brazier-sized hands.

The fair-haired man was such a spectacle that Erich was surprised to find his attention always drifting to the darker man riding beside him. Though he appeared small compared to the giant, Erich could tell he was taller than most men. He wore his chestnut brown, neck-length hair untied, and although beardless, his face was darkly stubbled, except for the area that a long, jagged scar passed through. The thick, pale tissue started under the man’s left eye and ran down his face in a graceful curve to fold over the line of his jaw.

He led a riderless spare horse, two hands taller than his own, saddled and ready to be mounted. On his belt he wore a long knife, and hanging off his saddle was a mace with a heavy flanged head. His movements were relaxed and his eyes never once left the road ahead to search the woods on either side, but there was an uneasiness about the way the man sat straight in his saddle that bothered Erich.

Erich scanned the woods for his three hidden archers. He could not see them but he knew they would be ready. Around the bend ahead the road narrowed with thick stands of pine on either side. At his signal, he and his archers would open fire on the horsemen from the rear and then the bulk of his men would emerge from the woods to chase them, leaving the riders with no option but to flee straight up the road. More men would be waiting with ropes stretched across the road that would unhorse the men from their galloping mounts. It was a tried and true system that had passed many a test.

Erich nocked a noisemaker arrow to his bowstring, aimed into the sky, and let fly. A piercing whistle shrilled through the air. Seconds passed—nothing happened.

Where are my archers?
A sinking feeling sifted through him and settled in his guts. Something was wrong.

He scanned the woods to see twenty of his men scrambling out of the trees, shouting and screaming as they charged up the road towards the six horsemen. For bandits, they were well armed with heavy clubs or decent swords taken from previous conquests. Some wore unmatched pieces of armor, usually leather, but the occasional gleam of chainmail could be spotted when one of the intermittent patches of sunlight found it through the trees.

Erich tried to wave them off but to no avail. They were too caught up with adrenalin and bloodlust to spot him in the foliage as they rushed by, each man mindlessly intent on being the first to reach the victims.

At the sound of the screams from behind, the six horsemen turned their mounts and formed up in a single line, the road just wide enough to accommodate all of the large horses. Their movements were precise and unhurried. As one, they drew their weapons. The tall man said something and held his mace high into the air. He turned his head and looked directly to Erich’s hiding spot; his features obscured by the forest’s shadows save for the long pale line, which even at this distance, seemed to pulsate with a cool white light.

He reined in the riderless destrier close to his side with one hand, and lowered his mace in the other to point at the attackers running up the road. The horsemen seemed to merge together into a single, multi-headed beast as they began to trot ahead, each man’s knees close enough to touch the man’s next to him. Then, as one, the great warhorses leapt into a full gallop.

Destriers bred and trained for this very situation, they snorted with excitement as they gathered speed and charged through the band of brigands as though they were nothing more than tall blades of grass. Men screamed as they tried to dive out of the path of the frenzied animals. Bodies were blown aside like leaves in a maelstrom; bones snapped, shoulders dislocated, and chests caved in under the heavy iron-shod hooves. Once through the tangled maze of bodies, the riders turned their mounts with their legs and formed up for another charge.

The road was littered with men on hands and knees, some still and lifeless, others groaning, crawling, trying to pull themselves to the safety of the woods. Those that were fortunate enough to have avoided the charge stood on trembling legs, their eyes darting from their trampled comrades to the demons on horseback readying their mounts for another charge.

The horsemen were only twenty yards from Erich now. He stood and nocked an arrow. The tall man held his hand high again as the warhorses snorted and pawed at the earth. Erich took aim at the leader’s throat and pulled his bowstring back.

“Hold,” came a whisper so close to Erich’s ear he felt the word’s heat. A sharp point contacted the back of his neck and he felt the coolness of blood trickle from the scratch.

“Lower the bow and let that shaft fall to the ground,” the voice said softly.

The riderless horse.

Erich grimaced. There were seven—he had led his men into a trap. Erich’s back muscles trembled with exertion as he eased back the string and dropped the weapon. The arrow slithered beneath a tangle of scrub still brown from the winter snows, and disappeared.

He turned slowly to see a mahogany-bearded man pointing a small crossbow at his face and holding another larger one at his side. His hair was cut short but the reddish brown beard was braided into a fork that reached down to his upper chest. The man lightly pressed the point against Erich’s forehead.

“It may be small, but it will tear a hole clear through your head, boy. In fact this bolt is under so much pressure, and the tickler so touchy, it goes off by itself sometimes. Stay very still.”

He raised the other heavier crossbow, took his eyes off Erich for a moment to sight down its length, and shot one of Erich’s men standing forty yards away through the chest. With a pop, the bolt spread apart the man’s chainmail like thin spring ice and embedded itself far into his chest, the leather vanes on the back end of the shaft all but disappearing.

He turned to Erich and said, “Walk.”

On the road the horsemen began their second charge. A few unwise bandits raised their swords and tried to sidestep the horses but were cut down by the riders’ weapons. Most fled into the trees, as did the others further up the road that came from around the bend to see what the screaming was all about. In minutes it was over.

The bearded man marched Erich through the trees. They passed Erich’s three archers crumpled in the underbrush, lying in pools of their own blood with their throats cut. One of them still in his teens. Erich knew the circuitous route back to the road was taken solely for his benefit. He fought to push down the guilt building inside.

***

Thomas took a slow drink from a water skin and then rotated his mace arm to work out the throbbing in his shoulder. The ligaments had been stretched one too many times, but he refused to admit he needed a lighter weapon. He watched Ruedi march his captive out of the trees and force him down hard on his knees in front of the small group of men.

“This one is the leader,” Ruedi murmured through his forked beard.

Thomas nodded, his dark eyes narrowing. He appeared tall because of his lean, wiry build, but he was still a full head shorter than Pirmin Schnidrig, the fair-haired titan of a man standing next to him.

“Just a kid,” Pirmin said, his words strongly accented.

“Old enough to put a knife in your back if you show it to him,” came another voice. Hermann Gissler, an angular man bordering on gaunt, with small eyes and black hair greying at the temples, strode forward and put the tip of his long sword in the middle of Erich’s chest. “Do we hang him? Or spare the tree, and run him through now?”

“Not worth the rope,” said Urs, a short, stocky man with forearms thickened by years at the forge. “Let us take him to Schwyz and turn him over to the Vogt. Judging from the size of his band they must have been quite active in this area. Might be a reward.”

“Waste of time,” Gissler said shaking his head. “He will only slow us down, and no village in these lands has money for a reward. Besides, they would just hang him anyway.”

Thomas gave his sore shoulder a hard squeeze to get the blood moving, and looked at the dead men littering the road. He turned to the man on his knees, who looked straight ahead, head held high and eyes unseeing. A small crucifix hung from the man’s neck.

He was healthy and better fed than the few people they had seen since crossing the Gotthard, nevertheless, his eyes showed no hope. He had the look of a man who knew he was going to die. And perhaps that is what he deserved. Thomas had no way of knowing how many innocent deaths this man was responsible for, and he did not care.

He had, of course, killed Christians before. But they had always been a threat in some way to the Christian Kingdom in Outremer; Saracen spies, or lowly mercenaries loyal to God only until the gold ran out. But here, in this cold valley, hidden in the shadows of rocky peaks so high and numerous you could ride for hours without seeing the sun, it felt different. Senseless. As though God had no interest in how the lives of these people played out.

“We let him go,” he said.

Gissler looked at Thomas, eyes wide in disbelief. “We might not spot him next time. To show his appreciation for the mercy you have shown, he will put a quarrel in your back first chance he gets.”

“You confuse mercy with indifference. We are God’s soldiers, chosen by Our Lord to protect those who follow the one true faith. This man wears the cross at his neck. It is not our place to discipline half-starved ruffians.”

He looked at the brigand, whose eyes had come alive and were darting side to side with a newfound hope that he may not be killed.

“You forget Thomas, we no longer fight in His army,” Gissler said. His mouth moved to say more but he stopped himself.

“Bind him to a tree. By the time someone sets him free, we will be hours away,” Thomas said. His tone left no room for debate.

Gissler narrowed his eyes but lowered his sword. He knew there was no point arguing with Thomas once he decided on a course of action. But then he brightened, as a new solution presented itself in his mind.

In one fluid motion he reversed the grip on his sword, stepped in and slammed the pommel into Erich’s forehead. Stunned, Erich fell forward and reached out his hands to catch himself on the ground. Gissler whipped the blade onto Erich’s right hand, cleanly severing away half of his first three fingers. The sword clanged as the steel made contact with the rocky ground, and just as swiftly, Gissler wiped and resheathed his blade.

Erich screamed and pulled his hand into himself, curling up into a ball.