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But at least it?s mortal peril I can do something about. The helplessness was the worst part of being locked up.
A squad of Denson?s men waited outside the door at the end of the corridor, most of them holding their crossbows at port arms, along with a scared-looking screw Ingolf recognized without affection from his habit of spitting in the prisoners? food before he pushed it through to them, and laughing when they complained. As they passed, Denson jerked a thumb over his shoulder and spoke: ?Don?t you men hear the riot?? ?Riot, sir?? the sergeant of the squad said. ?Yeah, the criminal scum are out of their cages and ru
Then he nudged the turnkey with an elbow; the man was still gaping in thick-witted bewilderment. ?What about this sad sack of shit, Captain?? ?Ah, too bad about the way the prisoners hauled him through the bars and took his keys off his dead, mangled body,? Denson said. ?Still, it was fucking careless of him to get that close to the cells, right??
The turnkey blinked in alarm as the words began to penetrate; the sergeant gri
And struck again with his elbow-this time into the man?s throat, a quick savage jerk of a blow without warning, and then followed it with a steel-toed boot to the side of the head when the man collapsed. One of his men dragged the body behind the file of troopers as they went through the massive door and then closed it behind them with a clunk and a rattle. Ingolf winced as he and the police captain walked away, and then again. Faint from the cell block he?d shared came the sound of screams, screams and then the deep tung of crossbows.
Denson?s doing me a big favor, Ingolf thought. Why doesn?t this make me feel as optimistic as it should? ?Don?t sweat it,? Denson said, at the gray of his face.?It isn?t you, right?? ?Right,? Ingolf said tightly.
I?ve got to live, he thought. I?ve even got to let Denson help me. Too much depends on this mission coming off. Mary… all her friends… Christ, I think the world may depend on it. I want to have someplace we can go when this is all over.
TheSwordoftheLady
CHAPTER FOUR
?A woman had a baby boy
She loved him much and he gave her joy
The Good Folk came and on a whim
They took the boy away with them-?
Edain sang as he worked, loud but tuneful; his voice echoing oddly off the cracked, crumbling concrete of the highway overpass where the Southsiders were camped and over the quiet murmur of voices and clatter of tools. The wild-men had put up screens of woven branches, so not much of the hissing rain outside blew sideways into the sheltered spot. Acrid smoke from their campfires curled upward and hung beneath the arched surface, joining the soot that blackened it-this was one of their regular stops. The goaty smell of wet-but-not-washed humanity, wet dog, half-cured hides and cooking food was strong, under a stronger scent of damp earth and greenery and the silty water of the nearby creek. ?Eggs and crumbs and milk and grain
Bring my baby back again-?
Rudi didn?t sing as his hands moved sharp steel across the six-foot length of wood clamped between his booted feet and bare knees. He was a competent journeyman bowyer, as many of the folk of Clan Mackenzie were, but no more than passable compared to Edain. That meant he had to concentrate to get any sort of results, particularly when he didn?t have any tools besides knives and a hatchet. Edain?s father was a master at the trade-it was one of the reasons he was called Aylward the Archer-and the younger Aylward had grown up as familiar with it as he was with plowing a field or shearing sheep or ski
And to be sure, concentrating makes me worry less. I must get those wagons back to Iowa! But I ca
He took the stave and ran it through his hands. Mountain-grown yew from the Cascades was the finest of all woods for a stick-bow, because the sapwood and heartwood were a natural laminate-strong in tension and compression respectively. This was tough springy hickory, which was a fair second best and abundant here in the east. ?What do you think?? he asked his companion.
Edain laid his piece aside and glanced down the length of trimmed wood; he?d finished two bows and half done another to Rudi?s one, as well. His face was wholly intent, lost in the task; Rudi envied him that.
A few of the Southsiders grouped around sighed unhappily when he stopped singing-they were mad for new tunes. The warrior-hunters in the front rank stayed silent, focused as sharp as augers on the making. ?Dad would laugh,? Edain said.?Or cry. Cer
Rudi had been in and out of the Aylward household down in Dun Fairfax all his life; it was only a half hour?s walk from Dun Juniper by the short forest path, and the two young men had been friends ever since a difference of a few years in their ages stopped seeming a chasm. Sam Aylward had been one of Lady Juniper?s right-hand men from before Rudi?s birth, as well. His son braced the central grip across one knee and slowly bent the stave with his hands braced wide apart on it; muscle bunched on his thick bare arms. ?Sixty-five pounds weight at a thirty-inch draw, near as I can tell without a proper tillering frame. Between sixty and seventy, at least.?
That was only a little more than half the draw of their own longbows, but those were designed to punch through plate armor at need, or send a stout bodkin-head shaft three hundred paces and hit hard when it got there. Sixty pounds draw-weight was plenty for even heavy game, boar or bear or tiger, and it would deal with light armor well enough if the range wasn?t too great. It was certainly ten times better than anything the Southsiders had had before they came. ?Without proper vises and clamps and drawknives and gouges and.. . and proper bloody everything,? Edain grumbled.?Hmmm… by Lugh of the Many Skills, I think it needs-?
He braced it as Rudi had and took up the knife, holding the blade by the thick back and carefully shaving off a few long dark curls of seasoned wood. Then he repeated the flexing process. ?There!? he said.?Nice balanced draw. Not a bad job, Chief, considering what we?ve got for the workin? of it.?
The wood itself wasn?t bad at all; thoroughly dry, at least, and from fair-sized timber that he and Edain had split into proper triangular-section rough blanks along the grain. The Southsiders left billets in sheltered places to season on their rounds; hickory was a fine wood for spearshafts and tool handles as well. Unfortunately that seasoning and hacking some vaguely bow-shaped object out of the results was about the limit of their bowyer skills, and the product was barely worth that degree of effort. They didn?t even know enough to unstring them when they weren?t in use, and so they became worthless in a few months, though they?d grasped the fact fast enough when the clansmen told them.
The simple tapered sticks he and Edain were making had none of the walnut-root risers and polished antler-horn nocks and subtle reflex-deflex curve of Sam Aylward?s masterworks, or those of his many pupils. They might have made him laugh or frown, but they did have the true taper and D-shaped cross section, and an arrow-rest of sorts at the right point; they?d boiled a little glue from the hooves of a deer and attached tufts of rabbit fur for the shaft to rest upon, and to fasten the fletching feathers of the arrows.