In The Shadow Of The Beast (13 page)

The heartbeat began to thump more
insistently, the sound moving steadily closer. It seemed to grow
and throb between Sigourd’s ears, inside the space of his skull. It
was there to the exclusion of all else, as if his brain had
filtered the unnecessary noise of the forest at large.

Thump, thump, thump. Closer. Louder.

Sigourd tried to appear relaxed, as if he
expected nothing. He had to convince the other man that he was
oblivious as to how close to peril he was, and therefore lure the
wild man into making his attack.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

That racing heart was now hammering so fast
in Sigourd’s ears that the beats were almost running together in
one long percussive drone.

Louder, closer, louder, closer.

And then it happened, a rush of displaced
air in Sigourd’s ears as the wild man broke cover, springing from
the foliage of the forest canopy like a cat. His sword staff raised
above his head, its lethal tip aimed squarely at the space between
Sigourd’s shoulder blades ready to be thrust viciously through the
hardened leather bodice, through flesh and muscle and soft tissue
to pierce the organs beneath.

Just as Sigourd had predicted, the wild man
had assumed he’d taken possession of the element of surprise, and
had deemed his opponent’s exposed back as an opportunity not to be
squandered.

Sigourd pirouetted to his left, twisting
into his opponent’s headlong leap and chopping down with his
forearm, the ornate vambrace that sheathed it thunking off and
deflecting the blade of the sword staff with a piercing ringing.
Following up, Sigourd’s other hand clamped around the haft of the
staff as he drove his weight, shoulder first, into his silent
attacker. The wild man was sent sprawling to the forest floor.

Rotating the blade expertly between his
hands Sigourd brought its spinning tip to a sudden halt barely
inches from the face of the stunned wild man, who’s eyes crossed as
he focused on the narrow blade hovering dangerously close to the
end of his nose. Upon his face he wore an expression of
disbelief.

‘
You broke me bloody toof!’
spat the man incredulously, a piece of cracked enamel flying from
his bloodied mouth.

‘
I am Sigourd Fellhammer,
heir to the land of Uthura. Why have you attacked me?’ demanded
Sigourd, who kept the tip of the sword staff leveled directly at
the muttering wild man.

‘
My breakfast,’ snorted the
wild man glumly.

‘
Explain
yourself.’

‘
Tha bleedin’ pig. You
scared it off didn’t you. Coming bumbling along the garden path
like a poxy circus clown, making as much racket at a box full of
mad chickens!’

The wild man felt at the stump of yellowed
tooth protruding from his gob, before throwing his arms up in
frustration, ‘I was looking forward to a bit of bacon for my
brekkie, and now I’ll have to go without thanks to you.’

Sigourd hesitated, but held the weapon
ready, ‘ I apologize, sir. I had no id--

He never got to finish his sentence, as just
then an almighty braying as of some great and terrible beast,
shattered the calm of the forest. The sound was seemingly never
ending, echoing around and between the ancient trees like the
foreboding blast of a war horn before the charge.

Such was the terrifying force of the sound
that flocks of birds, nesting high in the forest canopy, took
flight in a flurry of beating wings and scattered feathers.

Sigourd and the wild man both looked up,
casting about for the source of the sound which seemed to come from
everywhere at once.

And then they saw it. Emerging into the
scattered sunlight that fell here and there about the forest floor,
a creature that matched in appearance almost exactly the small boar
that had bolted terrified past Sigourd earlier.

Coated in thick tufts of dirty fur, and
snorting through a large snout set brutal looking tusks undoubtedly
near the foot long mark, the only significant difference between
the first boar and the one standing not twenty yards from the pair
was the rather unsettling matter of around four hundred pounds of
lean muscle and a maddened glaze to the eyes.

There was a moment between the two men and
that mad boar. A moment of clarity twixt man and beast. There were
to be no amicable agreements here. The boar wanted blood.

‘
Mummy’s pissed...’
muttered the wild man.

The boar eyed Sigourd and the wild man a
moment longer, as if measuring their potential threat, and from
behind big black eyes glazed with fury, something ticked over.

The boar bellowed once more, the sound
thrumming in Sigourd’s bones. It lowered its head before springing
forward into a headlong charge.

The impact alone from such tonnage, moving
at such speed, would pulp any man unlucky enough to be caught in
the beast’s path. But that was of course not before those dirty
great tusks would have eviscerated such an unfortunate
individual.

The wild man rolled to his feet and began to
sprint for the cover of a nearby tree. Sigourd, not being slow on
the uptake himself, had already lowered the sword staff so that it
would not impede his ability to pick up his legs as he ran for his
life in the opposite direction.

The ravening boar would be forced to choose
one of them to pursue, thereby leaving the other man to flee into
the safety of the deeper forest. A fifty fifty chance that Sigourd
could more than live with.

Glancing over his shoulder Sigourd cursed
the god’s for his rotten luck. The boar was heading straight at
him, bearing down on its chosen target with what Sigourd was
convinced was an expression of impassioned determination. Mummy was
pissed indeed.

Cutting suddenly left and then diving to his
right was the only thing that saved Sigourd from getting one of
those tusks up the arse. The boar missed him narrowly, passing him
on the left it careened into an outcropping of closely grown young
trees, its unstoppable bulk splintering the saplings like
matchwood.

Sigourd looked up in time to see the boar
wheel around, shaking its head in mild confusion at having ploughed
the saplings instead of its intended target.

He scrambled to his feet as the boar sprang
again, moving with a quickness that seemed impossible for a
creature of its massive dimensions.

Meanwhile, the wild man had had foresight
enough to escape the boar’s wrath by scurrying up the trunk of a
listing oak, its gnarled and crooked form providing a convenient
means of escape.

He watched with some fascination the
proceedings below, but was not inclined to jeer or scoff at the
predicament of a man he’d tried only moments before to kill. He
realized full well that his efforts would be better spent trying to
figure out a means of shaking the boar once it had trampled the
clumsy toff beneath him to death. Something that was easier said
than done given that said man was now being chased by
aforementioned boar in the very direction of the listing oak up
which the wild man now huddled.

Sigourd marveled at the speed of the boar,
and regretted immensely that it did not seem the least inclined to
give up the chase. He knew that he would have to do something soon
to get the thing off his tail before it eventually ran him down and
gored him into the soft earth.

The creature was only feet behind him, the
thunderous pounding of its heavy, powerful feet churning up the
forest floor, kicking up great wads of dark earth and soil. It was
so close that Sigourd could smell its noxious sour odor, like off
milk mingled curiously with the scent of damp moss. Far too close
for comfort.

Ahead of Sigourd lay another thicket of the
sapling trees, densely packed but not so that he wouldn’t be able
to nimbly duck between them and put a natural barrier between the
beast and himself. It might obliterate the first few saplings with
the momentum of its charge, but there were far too many of the
young trees in this part of the clearing for it to get through them
all. At least without slowing its charge.

Reaching the thicket, Sigourd slipped
quickly between the branches of the trees, cutting left and right
to negotiate his way between their dark trunks, as an instant later
the boar crashed into the trees behind him. As before, the trees
were no match for the irrepressible driving charge of the boar, and
were shattered before it.

Sigourd ducked as bark and branches whipped
about his head, the trunks of surrounding trees swaying
precariously in the aftermath of the terrible impact.

High above, the wild man was caught squarely
in the face with a branch as it whip lashed viciously. The blow
catching him totally by surprise he only had the wherewithal to
yelp ineffectually before toppling backwards off his perch amongst
the branches of the sturdy oak. He hit the ground beneath with a
resounding thud that knocked him insensible, if not entirely
unconscious.

That thud instantly drew the attention of
the boar, who was indeed by now struggling to negotiate its hefty
bulk between the remaining sapling trunks in an effort to get at
Sigourd.

The creature swung around, leveling its
dirty tusks at the prone wild man, who was groggily struggling into
a sitting position, and was in no state whatsoever to offer any
chance of resisting the boar and saving his own skin.

Seeing an opportunity to claim a far easier
prize than the one it had originally pursued, the boar sprang again
into a leaping charge, its baleful eyes glaring death at the
hapless form before it.

The wild man looked up, and even through the
fog of pain that dulled his senses, he realized that he was bearing
witness to his own imminent doom.

He struggled to rise, but his legs would not
obey him, and gave out before he could find his feet.

The boar was only meters away, its thickly
muscled and hirsute form growing larger and larger as each moment
passed.

The wild man had heard tales of people at
the moment of their demise bearing witness to the entire course of
their lives flashing before their eyes. From birth to the very
moment of their death, the saw it all. Every deed and action
committed, good and bad.

The wild man experienced no such
transcendental phenomena, and in truth the only exceptional
occurrence he could honestly lay claim to in these final moments
was a slight loosening of the bowels, and a twinge of regret that
filling his pants was the final and perhaps most telling statement
in this life.

The noise of the approaching boar was
shockingly loud, like rolling thunder breaking open the heavens
above, and the things brutal stink filled his nostrils.

The wild man closed his eyes, shut them
tight so that he would not have to see his doom befall him. He
raised his hand out before him, as if he could fend the beast off,
as if that futile gesture might indeed save his own bacon, as
if...

There was a crunching, thudding, thundering
crash, and a tremor in the ground that jolted the wild man causing
him to fall back once more, his legs kicking up before him, the
soles of his bare feet facing the forest canopy above.

And then silence.

Slowly, he cracked open an eye, squinting to
sneak a peek at what fate had actually befallen him. Apparently
death was less painful than he’d imagined. In fact it had been
entirely painless, which came as no small surprise.

Slowly, tentatively, he cracked the other
eye, entirely reluctant to spy the mangled wreckage that his body
now resembled.

What he saw then was as big a surprise as
the wild man had ever received in all his many summers.

The boar lay face down in the soft earth,
its forelegs collapsed under it with the hind legs splayed and
upright at the rear, so that its ample posterior pointed absurdly
toward the sky.

The creatures snout had ploughed deeply into
the ground before it, part of its face and one tusk buried in the
black soil of the forest floor.

The wild man was even more surprised to see
his very own sword staff, the device standing erect straight out of
the top of the creatures skull where it had been used to skewer the
brutish animal’s undoubtedly tiny brain, and standing over the
fallen beast the arrogant young toff , a look of snarling
determination carved into his face as he stared down at the limp
corpse at his feet.

Slowly, Sigourd looked up from the boar, his
eyes fixing upon the wild man who looked upon him now with no small
measure of weary respect.

‘
Still in the mood for that
bacon?’ he asked of the wild man, and with a quick yank and a sound
like the sucking of pulp from a garana fruit, he jerked the sword
staff from the skull of the beast.

The small fire crackled quietly, its low
flames dancing hither and to as boar meat cut into strips and
suspended above the open flame spat and fizzed.

The wild man reached into the fire with a
blackened stick, turning the charred wood so that it might burn
more effectively. After a moment he inhaled deeply of the aromas of
burning wood and roasting boar meat, sat back with a satisfied
smile upon his face.

‘
So this bird of yours...’
he said.

‘
Isolde,’ said
Sigourd.

‘
That’s the one. You’ve got
no clue as to who took her and why, and all you do have to go on is
the ramblings of some old bat that works for your rich
oldsters?’

Sigourd considered this sparse evaluation of
his quest, sighed to himself, ‘Yes, that’s about the size of
it.’

‘
Sounds like a fools errand
to me. Leaving behind the safety of your home, a castle no less, to
go sniffing around out here after a bit of old hearsay.’