Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(15)
The bandit laughed, polluting the air with his halitosis. Drawing on the stored energy in my bear charm to increase my strength and speed, I began to mutter bindings in Old Irish, which they would probably interpret as nervous French. “Visiting from the continent, are we? Well, me chapped tits and snarling quim would welcome some French coin as well as English.”
His companions chuckled at his lame riposte, confident that they had the better of us, and the one on my left, with a broken nose and a boil on his cheek, gestured with his dagger. “Let’s begin with you getting off that high horse, Marquis.”
Shakespeare wouldn’t let that pass without loud comment, still directing his remarks at the man on my right. “Cease and begone, villain! You have all the dignity of a flea-poxed cur’s crusty pizzle! You dry, pinched anus of a Puritan preacher!”
Their gap-toothed smiles instantly transformed into scowls, and all eyes swung to the bard. “What!” the leader barked. “Did he just call me a bloody Puritan?”
“Not exactly,” Cheek Boil said. “I think he called you a Puritan’s bunghole.”
While keeping his hand on my horse’s bridle, the leader swung his dagger away from my thigh to point at Will, behind me. “Listen, you shite, I may be a bunghole,” he cried, brown phlegmy spittle flying from his maw, “but I’m a proper God-fearing one, not some frothy Puritan baggage!”
While they were all looking at Will, I triggered my camouflage charm, taking on the pigments of my surroundings and effectively disappearing in the dim torchlight. Using the boosted strength and speed I’d drawn, I slipped my left foot out of the stirrup and kicked Cheek Boil in the chest before falling to the right and landing chops on either end of the leader’s collarbones. They broke, he dropped both his knife and my horse’s reins, and I gave him a head butt in the face to make sure he fell backward and stayed there.
My attack drew the attention of the men watching the bard, and he was not slow to seize advantage of the opportunity. With the gazes of the two men pulled forward, he dipped the torch in his left hand and shoved it into the face of the man on his left. The man screamed and dropped his weapon, stepping back with both hands clutched to his eyes. That startled Shakespeare’s horse and it shied and whinnied, ripping out of the grip of the rogue on Shakespeare’s right. He began shouting, “Oi! Hey!” and then, seeing that his companions were all wounded or down and he wasn’t either quite yet, he muttered, “To hell with this,” and scarpered off whence he came, into the dark wet sludge of Finsbury Fields. The leader was discovering how difficult it was to get up with a couple of broken collarbones and called for help. Cheek Boil, who’d not been seriously hurt, recovered and moved to help him, not seeing me.
Fire Face, meanwhile, had morphed from mean to murderous. Nothing would do for him now but to bury his knife in Shakespeare’s guts. Growling, he searched for the knife he’d dropped in the dark. I scrambled in front of Will’s horse, dropping my camouflage as I did so, and drew Fragarach, slipping between Will and Fire Face just as he found his knife and reared up in triumph.
“Think carefully, Englishman,” I said, doing my best to emphasize that I was very French and not an Irish lad.
Fire Face was not a spectacular thinker. He was a ginger like me, perhaps prone to impetuousness, and he bellowed to intimidate me and charged. Maybe his plan was to wait for me to swing or stab and then try to duck or dodge, get in close, and shove that dagger into my guts. Perhaps it would have worked against someone with normal reflexes. I slashed him across the chest, drawing a red line across his torso, and he dropped to the ground and screamed all out of proportion to the wound, “O! O! I am slain!”
“Oh, shut up,” I spat. “You are not. You’re just stupid, that’s all.” Turning to Will, I said, “Ride ahead a short distance, Master Shakespeare. I will be close behind.” I slapped the rump of his horse, and it surged forward despite the protests of its rider. I kept Fragarach out and stepped around my horse to check on Cheek Boil and the leader. Cheek Boil was trying to help the leader to his feet but was having trouble without an arm to pull on. The pigeon-livered one who ran away could be neither seen nor heard.
“I’m leaving you alive, monsieurs,” I said, as I sheathed my sword and mounted my horse. “A favor that you would not likely have extended to me. Think kinder of the French from now on, yes?”
A torrent of fairly creative profanity and the continued wailing of Fire Face trailed me as I goaded the horse to catch up to Will, but I was glad I didn’t have to kill any of them. William Shakespeare would probably exaggerate the encounter as it was, and I didn’t need a reputation as a duelist or fighter of any kind.
The bard was jubilant when I caught up to him. “Excellent fighting, Marquis! You moved so quickly I lost track of you for a moment!”
Ignoring that reference to my brief time in camouflage, I said, “You were quite skilled with the torch.”
Shakespeare grinned at it, jiggling it a little in his fist. “And it’s still aflame! Finest torch I’ve ever carried.”
“Shall we return to London, then?”
“What, already? Fie! That passing distraction is no matter. We have hags to find.”
“I doubt we will find them in these fields. They seem to be populated by villains and pale vegetables, and fortune may not favor us a second time.”