Blood They Brought by Ed Kurtz

Author:Ed Kurtz [Kurtz, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JournalStone
Published: 2018-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

BLOOD THEY BROUGHT

Ranulf knew what they were. Though he never saw one in the flesh (if indeed it was flesh from which they were made), he had heard tales enough to identify them the moment the dripping crimson peaks of their caps came into the full hoary glow of the moonlight.

Dunters.

Bloody Redcaps.

The vile little bastards scampered over the broken pikes and axes, abandoned hackbuts and, of course, the multitudes of bloody dead. The moor was absolutely soaked with blood, more than enough for the lot of them and more still, but Ranulf remained completely still nonetheless. No sense in tempting them. His blood was still fresh. Still warm.

He held his breath until it hurt and went on doing what he’d been doing since mid-afternoon: playing dead. There came some sleep, but little. Largely Ranulf spent the day with the odor of rot in his nose and flies swarming his eyes, and he thought about burning Brumehous Tower while women and children screeched with terror inside. It was all a lark when he’d joined up with the other English borderers—war, after all! And a war for love at that, a war to make a marriage, to unite the kingdom, to make an adventurer and a hero out of lowly Ranulf Pettigrew. Cor, they had five thousand well-armed men in their ranks, men who razed and pillaged and burned little babies to death without a care in the world. So when a scant group of Scotsmen ran into the encampment to tease them, the Englishmen tasted blood on their lips, every man Jack of them.

Men who burned towers full of women and children. Men who didn’t give a fig for the fucking rough wooing—they wanted only to fight. To kill.

The adventure—the romance!—of war.

Ranulf could have laughed.

From a throng of ten or twelve, one Redcap veered away, stabbing at a dead German mercenary’s eye with his staff. The staff was carved down to a sharp point, and the point sank easily into the corpse’s pupil with a muted wet pop. The Redcap kicked his legs up and tittered, his weathered face crinkling into a leathery sneer.

“The Inglismens all riven doune,” it rasped. “Scottismens brought blood by their speares.”

Plenty, thought Ranulf. A thousand lads set off after them, to the foot of Palace Hill and over it, only to find the whole of goddamned Scotland hidden for the imminent slaughter. The Englishmen couldn’t even see for the setting sun in their eyes, and what with the hackbuts spewing gunsmoke in their faces and the pikemen tearing them apart even as they tried to rally…

Ranulf joined at the last, firing a ball straight through a Scotsman’s skull before a red-bearded Scot borderer jabbed a dagger in his side. One of their own, at that—one among Sir Brian Layton’s assured Scots, who tore the English cross from his coat before tramping over the hill to join his countrymen in the massacre.

Cor.

“Blood they brought,” hissed the eager Redcap. “Drips wet from the stanes.”

With one eye cracked open, Ranulf regarded the foul creature.

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