Casca 41: The Longbowman by Tony Roberts

Author:Tony Roberts [Roberts, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B00KQUL85A
Published: 2014-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The journey eastwards was punctuated with frequent stops. He was hungry and the horse required water and forage. Finally he decided to leave the horse at a farm and exchanged it for some provisions from a suspicious but grateful farmer. He persuaded him thanks to his fluent French that he was a Burgundian mercenary in the service of the French but he’d stolen the horse from the English and was going to rejoin the French army close to Paris.

The farmer was able to give Casca some information. The English army had passed half a day previously and was heading for a place called Nesle, but the defenders had been ordered to hold the English and wait for the main French army to close in on them. It seemed the trap was about to be snapped shut.

There were scattered units of French soldiers following the English, picking off stragglers, hanging a few, mutilating others and taking captive any who seemed important enough to warrant a ransom.

After getting the lie of the land from the farmer, he thanked the man and left, taking not the road to Paris, but the one that led to the nearby River Avre. The rain came again, lashing down hard, and he tramped on miserably, hoping to hell the river wasn’t blocked.

It wasn’t, and the crossing was reached. Three gruesome corpses hung from roadside gallows, poor stragglers unlucky enough to be caught and punished for the looting that had gone on.

The sign of the passing army was clear enough now. The town the crossing was by was held by the Burgundians, judging by the flags fluttering from the ramparts, so Casca called out to the guard atop the gatehouse. “Do you have lodgings for a lonely soldier?”

“Who asks?” the guard leaned over, suspiciously.

“An English straggler wanting to keep his head and hands!”

“English, eh?” the Burgundian looked even closer at Casca. It was getting dark but the lone man seemed harmless enough and the gates were raised and the doors opened inwards. Halberd-toting guards stopped him as he passed under the first portcullis and he was searched. His sword and dagger were taken and he was curtly ordered to sit in the guardhouse until the officer of the watch came to inspect him.

Casca rested his head against the cool wall of the guardroom, part of the ground floor of the gatehouse. A spiral staircase was off to the left, running left to right as all such staircases did, made deliberately that way in order to favor the defenders. Any attacker coming up the stairs would not be able to use their sword – unless they used their left hands, of course – whereas the defenders could. It wasn’t just by chance staircases spiraled that way. Apart from the open doorway through which he’d been brought, there was one more over on the far side and that was probably the entrance to the garderobe, the conveniences.

Casca wasn’t too concerned he was in a French town. The fact they

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