S.T.A.G.S. by M A Bennett

Author:M A Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471406775
Publisher: Hot Key Books
Published: 2017-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

chapter twenty

Now I thought of A Knight’s Tale and the lady watching her knight jousting, and beating every other competitor in the lists.

Henry’s Crusader blood surfaced again, and I thought it sweet (sweet!) that he wanted me to watch him. The only thing was, I was feeling a small, niggling doubt that he could actually beat Shafeen. Shafeen had been looking over at us at lunch with a strange set expression, and now he strode to his place in the line with a grim determination. In a western, he’d be twirling his gun right then, not carrying it broken neatly over his arm.

Now we were much closer to the action than we had been before lunch, and the noise was incredible. The guns all wore ear defenders over their flat caps, but we bystanders didn’t have any, and I felt as if my ears were bursting. There was that weird smell again, the acrid burning smell of the cartridges, and they popped out of the guns and fell bouncing to the grass. Henry was taking aim and firing in quick succession, and had a pretty good hit rate. But Shafeen was amazing. He was an absolutely crack shot. I would never have thought it of him. He was like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird – a fine upstanding character, but put a gun in his hand and he was totally accurate and deadly. He tracked the birds with his gun, and shot them cleanly out of the air one after another, swapping his shotgun with his loader like a relay runner without even looking behind him. The pheasants rained down from above, landing on the damp grass with a dull thud. One of them narrowly missed me and lay at my feet like a tribute.

I picked the pheasant up and held it in my hands. It was quite, quite dead but still warm – so weird to think that something could be dead and warm at the same time. The little head lolled over my hand. All I could think about was how beautiful it was – there were about fifty colours in the feathers, from sort of teal green to dark red and loads of different browns in between. As I looked at it, its little golden feet already curling up in death, I felt really sad; like when-you-really-feel-like-you’re-going-to-cry sad. I hated both Shafeen and Henry at that moment.

Then a properly strange thing happened – this black spaniel trotted up to me, very politely took the bird from my hands and carried it, careful as a mother, over to Henry’s pile of feathered bodies.

Shafeen lowered the barrels of his gun. ‘That was my bird,’ he called furiously.

Henry turned to Perfect, who was, of course, his loader.

‘Yours fair and square, m’lord. Right over your head it was.’

‘Looks like the score’s even, old chap,’ said Henry to Shafeen, squinting against the sun.

Shafeen looked from one to the other. ‘Oh, well, if you can’t win like a gentleman,’ he said contemptuously.

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