He put his helmet on, brandished his shield and, drawing Heaven’s Messenger from the scabbard hung over his wolf-fur, continued on foot. The village gate remained ajar, although the narrow gap afforded no glimpse of what might wait on the other side.
The gate swung open easily when Lucan pushed it.
Immediately beyond there was a large weapon which the Romans called a ‘Scorpion’: a wheeled crossbow with a pivotal base, two thick bundles of sinew rope twisted down the centre of its rectangular frame, adding immense torsion power. Eighteen four-foot bolts currently rested in its grooves, its hempen string at full stretch. But there was nobody there to aim it, or to release the missiles. The village’s main street, which was narrow and stony, was also deserted. Lucan ventured through and stepped around the war-machine. To his left a ladder led up to the guard-walk on the stockade, which was also unmanned. He looked further afield. The houses were simple affairs, log-built and of varying shapes and sizes. In the centre of the road lay a stone trough filled with water.
Everything he saw told him that this settlement had been abandoned; doors stood open, windows were half shuttered, but he knew that something was wrong. And then he began to spot clues: red-spotted feathers scattered in one of the animal pens; a wood-axe lying on the road with its handle broken. Some of the window shutters, he realised, were hanging from twisted hinges. Open doors had been smashed in, their timber frames splintered.
He turned back to his men and signalled. They advanced on foot, leading their steeds.
“This place was sacked,” he said, as they joined him.
Wulfstan lifted his visor. “By our Roman friends? I didn’t think they’d have the wherewithal.”
“I’m not sure.” Lucan forbade them from watering their horses at the trough, and ordered them to search the village, and to be cautious. Now that he looked more closely, he saw what appeared to be claw marks on some of the smashed doors. Blood was daubed in many places. And yet there were no bodies.
“Whoever attacked, they didn’t come through the front gate,” Wulfstan noted. “This Scorpion hasn’t even been discharged.”
“How did they get hold of such a weapon?” Turold asked.
Maximion dismounted alongside them. “Some of the men probably did military service. They may have looted it from a battlefield, or perhaps been granted it as a boon for good work… something to protect their village.”
“So where are they?” Turold asked.
“My lord… my lord!” came a shrill voice. Benedict, at the far end of the main street, Malvolio beside him. They stood in front of a barn, the door to which they had just opened, but they now stood back, grim-faced. Alaric reached them first. He half-entered the barn, only to back out with a grimace. The rest of the men converged. Lucan shouldered his way through last, waving away a cloud of droning flies.
The villagers were heaped inside.
Or what remained of them was, a great tangled mass of torn flesh and contorted limbs. It was not just the men; there were women and children too, even small babies, all steeped in thickening blood. Their skulls had been crushed and their throats ripped out. Belly cavities gaped, and coils of glistening intestine were strewn about like strings of sausages. Bizarrely, their animals lay beside them: dogs, chickens and goats, even a shaggy highland cow, all rent and mangled in a frenzied, bestial attack.
“Our Roman foe did this?” Turold said, aghast.
“No,” Lucan replied. “This is something else.”
“These bodies are practically fresh,” Wulfstan said. “My lord, these people have only recently been slain.”
“And they were dumped in here because the sight of them would have alerted us before we entered the village,” Turold added.
Lucan spun around, shouting: “Prepare for attack… quickly!”
They clumped together in the main street, weapons drawn, watching over the rims of their shields. The village remained deserted.
There was a prolonged silence. A slight breeze whipped up eddies of dust. Down at the far end, near the entry gate, the horses grew skittish, pawing the ground and tugging at their tethers.
And then there was a chilling, ululating cry, and a huge object came whistling through the air. At first Lucan thought it a boulder, but when it struck full on Benedict’s helmet, crumpling it like tin, he realised it was the anvil from the smithy.
On all sides, figures scuttled into view — on the roofs of the houses, at the ends of alleyways. They crouched, simian-fashion, their thick, muscular forms covered with dark, greenish-grey fur, their faces and elongated snouts striped blue and scarlet.
“Apes!” someone shouted. “In these mountains?”
“No ordinary apes!” Maximion replied, equally astonished. “The Berbers call them baboons! These beasts dwell in Africa!”
“Do they normally carry weapons?” someone else said, stunned to see that many of the creatures carried stones or lengths of timber.
More and more of the baboons now appeared, hemming in the small party of warriors. Though squatting or crouching, they were the size of men. They snarled, roared and screamed, their fang-filled mouths gaping horribly.
At the far end of the street the horses panicked, ripping their tethers and bolting this way and that. One ape, a grotesquely vast specimen, had smashed its way in through the gate. It must have been concealed somewhere down the valley, following the men in to spring the trap, closing off their only avenue of escape. With a deafening howl, it grappled with one of the packhorses, lifting it bodily and bouncing it down across its knee, shattering its spine.
This was the signal for attack.
With a chorus of demonic screams, the simian tribe hurled their missiles and surged forward, leaping and scrambling over each other, two or three to every man. The mesnie fought back with a courage born of desperation. Gerwin buried his pole-axe in a baboon’s skull. With a single stroke of Heaven’s Messenger, Lucan cut clean through one simian neck and shore deeply into another. But the assailants were stronger, faster and fiercer than their human opponents. They shrieked like damned souls as they battered and tore and bit, dragging their hapless targets to the ground. Brione of Bullwood had his faceplate rent away, and his eyes clawed out by jagged, dirty fingernails.
Alaric fended them off with his shield, before it was yanked from his grasp. He drove his sword through the belly of one baboon, only to be struck on his sallet with a heavy stone, which knocked him senseless. He toppled to the ground behind Lucan. Lucan spun around, distracted by that and by Wulfstan, who he saw face-down in the dirt as two of the beasts pounded him with rocks.
Lucan lunged, his blurred steel striking in lightning flashes, shredding flesh, fur and muscle. On all sides, his men were beaten with clubs and mauled by claws and teeth in a frenzy of speed and savagery. Hundreds of the apes flooded the compound, and now their gigantic leader, having killed three horses, lumbered forth. It grabbed two men up, one in either hand, and slammed them on the ground, like a washerwoman drying rags. Its third victim was Malvolio, who, having fortuitously impaled one of its smaller cousins in the breastbone, was snatched into the air before he could even shout. The abomination glared at him face-to-face, and then flung him, cart-wheeling, over the heads of his comrades.
Maximion had grabbed up a spear, and tried to hold them off with its barbed point as he backed towards the nearest longhouse. “Earl Lucan!” he cried. “Earl Lucan!”
Lucan glanced around. Maximion was pointing into the building. It would be easier to resist this ravening horde in an enclosed space than out in the open. Two more baboons came at him, leaping, howling. He smashed the iron boss of his shield into the face of one, and smote the other in the groin, dragging Heaven’s Messenger sideways, ripping the brute in half, its blood and intestines exploding.