The younger outlaw gave him a cruel kick in the ribs as he dropped him to the floor and turned to see what Simon was going to do to the father.
‘Well done, Cornishman! Now we’ll punish the silly old fool for daring to attack us.’ As he spoke, Simon drew back his arm and punched Edwin in the face, splitting his lip and making his nose bleed.
‘That’s just a start — you can let him go now, Gwyn. I want to kick him around the garden for a bit.’
Gwyn reluctantly decided that this was the moment of truth.
‘Leave him alone, Simon. And the boy.’
The outlaw stopped with his fist already raised for another blow, a puzzled expression on his face. His two yellowed fangs stuck out as his mouth stayed open in surprise.
‘What the devil are you playing at, man? Get out of the way!’
By way of reply, Gwyn gave him a push in the chest that sent him staggering back into the younger outlaw. The cottar’s son was recovering by now and was leaning against the whitewashed wall, wiping vomit from his chin with the back of his hand. His father wriggled from Gwyn’s loosening grasp and went to the aid of his boy.
‘Look, we’ve done them enough harm already,’ barked Gwyn hurriedly, in an attempt to preserve his cover. ‘Wrecked their garden, driven off their pigs — why not call it a day and let the bloody foresters do their own dirty work?’
Simon stared at the big redhead in amazement. ‘What are you saying, you damned fool? Even if we weren’t being paid for this, I’d half kill these swine for this — look what they did to Ralph there!’
In a fury, he pointed to the other outlaw, who was groaning as he slowly pulled himself to a crouch, blood oozing from between the fingers he held to the side of his head.
Simon advanced on Edwin and his son, his cudgel raised, but Gwyn swiftly stepped between them, his own club held out as a protective barrier against the angry outlaw. ‘I said leave them alone!’ he boomed, resigned now to abandoning any hope of further deception.
The thug’s ugly face creased into a sneer and Gwyn recognised that here was a man who revelled in inflicting pain, suffering and humilation on others.
‘Right, you’ve had your chance, you big Cornish bastard!’ he snarled. Pulling a long dagger from a sheath on the back of his belt, he came at Gwyn, club raised in one hand, the knife in the other. The bearded ruffian was close behind him, as the other young outlaw struggled to his feet a few yards away.
Gwyn smiled beatifically at the prospect of a good fight. Though he had had a few skirmishes since becoming coroner’s officer, they were few and far between compared to his old warrior days, and he missed the rough-and-tumble of confrontation. As Simon lunged at him with the blade and swung at his head with the club, he dodged and used his own club to give the attacker a crack on the wrist that made him howl, the dagger flying off into the dirt.
‘Watch the other one!’ yelled the cottar, as the other outlaw dived at Gwyn, his heavy stick raised. The defender parried the blow, the crack of wood on wood echoing from the cottage wall as he brought up his foot and kicked the youth hard between the legs. With a scream, he backed away, clutching his groin, but he stayed on his feet. By now, Ralph had recovered enough to stagger upright and was fumbling to draw his own knife. Simon, his left hand numb from the blow he had taken, had dropped his bludgeon and groped for his fallen dagger. A moment later, Gwyn faced two very angry men clutching long-bladed knives and another with a large club and a score to pay for his bruised testicles.
The coroner’s henchman quickly decided that, in spite of his greater size and fighting experience, it would be politic to draw his sword. With a metallic rattle, he removed the tempered steel from its scabbard and waved it in an arc before the advancing outlaws.
‘That’s enough, boys!’ he snapped. ‘You’ve done enough here for one day. Now just go home, there’s good fellows.’
He was wasting his breath, however, as the men, livid with excitement and fury, came on to crouch in a semicircle just beyond the reach of Gwyn’s weaving broadsword. Edwin, a few feet away to the left, now drew his own knife, and his son had recovered enough breath to grope for his fallen stave of timber.
‘Keep out of it. These bastards are killers!’ boomed Gwyn, seeing the movement out of the corner of his eye. With Simon feinting with his dagger right in front of the Cornishman, the two younger outlaws rushed in from either side, creating a situation that even the battle-hardened Gwyn found disconcerting. He slashed his sword forward to keep Simon at bay, and simultaneously swung a massive arm towards Ralph, an arm that had an oaken cudgel on the end. It connected with the youth’s already battered face, and for the second time in a few minutes, Ralph staggered back to collapse on the ground.
However, Gwyn had but two arms, and without the intervention of Edwin and his son he would have been in serious trouble, as the other ruffian was coming at his side with a very sharp knife. The cottar dived at the youth’s dagger-arm just as the tip stuck into Gwyn’s thick jerkin of boiled leather. He stopped the momentum of the thrust and his muscular son followed up by jumping on the man’s back and getting his neck in an arm-lock. Between them they wrestled him to the ground, but not before Edwin suffered a long slash across the back of his forearm.
With both young villains out of the fray, Gwyn turned his full attention to Simon. The long reach of his sword completely outclassed the other man’s dagger. The outlaw now bitterly regretted having left his own at the camp, as he had expected today’s activity only to be an easy roughing-up of a simple freeholder.
‘Drop it, Simon, or I’ll have your head off your shoulders!’ bellowed Gwyn.
The man with the boar’s teeth stared at him for second, as if debating whether to chance an attack, then his knife-arm drooped towards the ground. ‘You’ll answer for this, Jess. What in hell’s name has got into you?’ he snarled.
‘Let’s just say that I’ve got a particular hate for bloody foresters. This poor fellow here should get a bounty for telling one to go to hell, not get roughed up.’
Gwyn began to wonder whether he could yet retrieve something from this fiasco, but Simon was not forgiving.
‘You’re dabbling in affairs you know nothing about. This is more than just stirring up some petty freeholder.’
Gwyn lowered the point of his sword. ‘Drop that knife, then we can talk about it.’
‘Don’t trust the swine!’ yelled Edwin, looking up from where he was kneeling on the young outlaw’s legs. His son had dragged the boy to the ground and was holding him there with the branch pressed across his throat, half strangling him. The other youth, having had his head cracked twice within three minutes, was crawling away across the garden on his hands and knees. These events distracted Gwyn’s attention for a brief moment, which was almost his undoing. Simon’s knife shot up again and he lunged at Gwyn with a ferocious cry.
Caught unawares, Gwyn was unable to step back as he was against the wall of the house, but his fast reflexes allowed him to twist sufficiently for the dagger to snag in the diagonal shoulder band of his baldric, which was hard leather a quarter of an inch thick. The keen blade sliced across the wide strap and embedded its point in his jerkin, but the force was lost and Gwyn suffered only a shallow cut on the skin of his midriff.
Though the Cornishman’s body was hardly injured, his pride at being caught off guard suffered greatly. With a roar of anger, he whistled his sword in half a circle above his head and brought it down on the outlaw, catching him between the base of his neck and his shoulder.
As the man crumpled in a welter of blood, Gwyn prodded him in the breast-bone with the point of the sword, so that he fell away on to the grass, twitching his last agonies at the edge of the garden that he had so successfully ordered ruined.