Chapter 16: Crucible

I was awoken by Laura’s boot softly kicking my foot. “Get up…” she whispered. “We’ll have company soon.”

I sat up and prompted the two girls to get up quietly.

“Have you seen anyone?” asked Asha.

“I heard a sneeze in the distance just now. I’d wager that they are getting into position, surrounding us. There isn’t much light except our fire.”

“Smother it,” I said. “We won’t be able to see their archers in the tree line, and they will be able to see us. Our fire helps them more than it helps us. At least we'll all be blind.”

One thing that Laura had prepared each night was a shovel of soft dirt by the fire on a blanket. It was amazingly efficient and the knight pulled the blanket over the fire and smothered the light with the damp earth.

“Mathew is correct. Girls, take positions opposite each other behind your barricades. Angle yourselves so you each cover the other’s gap. Mathew and I will sit behind the other two barricades and stab whoever comes through. Hopefully, our traps will reduce their numbers by one or two.”

The girls did as they were told and took cover. Without the fire, it was dark, but I found my eyes could see much better than I ever could. Asha and Erica were similarly moving around the camp without any issues. But with no moon above and a canopy obscuring any starlight, I could tell Laura was feeling her way to her place. I just hoped her skills and experience as a Knight would cancel out the fact she could barely see.

We didn’t speak. I was thinking it would be hard for the bandits to even see our covers in the dark and so a lack of noise might make it even harder for them. In the dark, I could hear them moving through the forest, quietly, but definitely there. I noticed my hearing was better too. The blessing of an elf was starting to show its usefulness.

Then came the first howl. A man’s voice calling through the night in pain and agony. Even if we’d all been asleep, the scream would have woken us. The spear trap that Erica had placed on a deer trail to the north had caught one of them. The cursing continued and we learned through the creative string of profanities that he’d been stabbed in the leg.

I could see, thank you elven eyesight, Laura grinning with satisfaction and the elves wide eyed as the howling continued. Then a harsh voice and a thud silenced the injured man.

I saw Erica draw her bow and loose an arrow into the night. There was a second thud and curse that told me she had hit her mark, but the voice that belonged to her target bellowed out in an angry tone to us, rather than the scream of someone who had been badly injured.

“OK, so we know you’re there and you know we’re here. Keep your bitch and give us the other two. We’ll let you ride out of here to the town and leave your stuff behind.”

I stared through the darkness to the two girls who crouched behind their barricades, wide-eyed. A thought occurred to me and I snuck across and whispered to the Knight who was hastily preparing some small clay pots from her satchel

“Hey Laura.” I hissed. “Can you see me?”

She jumped a little and stared through me. “I didn’t even hear you coming across. You’re more like a dark blur.”

I grinned. “Then I’m going to thin their ranks a bit.”

Laura thought for a bit, then grinned and nodded. “Be careful. Don’t use magic, you’ll glow slightly and give away your position.”

I slipped through the gaps in the barricade and moved towards the edge of the clearing. The bandit who had shouted at us was re-issuing his demand for surrender. I ignored him and picked out another target. The blessing of the elves seemed to give me some sort of ability to see in the dark, as well as better hearing and the ability to move silently and remain hidden. A man was crouching behind a tree with an arrow nocked in his bow. He was peering around the thick trunk to try to see any targets. I moved silently towards him and was about to strike when I felt Bambinae’s will.

Life is precious. Even theirs. Spare all you can.

I sighed internally and sheathed my knife. The kidney strike was out but that wasn’t my only option and Bambinae knew that. She wanted me to use restraint. I scolded myself; I was about to murder someone in cold blood. When did I get so comfortable with that?

Coming up behind the man, I cupped both my hands and brought them hard on each ear, to try to burst his eardrums. Whilst he was disoriented from the blow I snuck my arm around his neck and began the choke, with my other hand over his mouth. He was curiously clean-shaven for a bandit, so my hand was able to seal around his mouth and completely muffle his cries of alarm. The first few seconds were easy, the man hadn’t known what was happening, the strike to his ears had left him dazed, but after that I had to hold on for dear life. Luckily, I’d got the choke on properly and it was only four or five more seconds before he gave out and collapsed in a heap. I checked his pulse, he was alive. He’d have a rock-splitting headache tomorrow, and be deaf as a post for a few days, but he’d live.

I left him and moved on, it had only taken a minute to find him, approach and knock him out, but the bandit leader wasn’t waiting anymore.

“Your funeral. You had your chance. Fuck’em up!” he yelled.

I did some quick maths and realised we’d probably have four or five left to fight, but as I didn’t know, I raced across the clearing and tackled the next bandit I saw, a man who wielded a large bow and was moving forward with purpose and experience. I knew he couldn’t see much when he lowered his bow and took out a dagger. So, when I ran into him at full pace, I secured his knife hand in the struggle. The impact had knocked him into a tree and I used the distraction to snap his knife arm.

Another down… but I didn’t know how many more to go. A scream from within the barricade drew my attention and I heard a grunt and a thud of a body hitting the ground. My gut dropped into my shoes as I feared the worst. I released the bandit I had grabbed and, throwing caution to the wind, I raced back to the barricade. A pain in my left shoulder exploded as I moved, and I knew I’d been hit by an arrow. Some lucky bandit had not only chanced to see me in the near pitch black of night but also managed to hit me in a small gap between the pauldron and the breast plate. A one-in-a-million shot. Sadly, I was the one, not the million.

I collapsed, fell, and tripped behind a barricade to see a body lying on the ground. I breathed a sigh of relief; it was far too big to be one of the girls. He had the point of an arrow protruding from his back and had obviously been shot in the chest, and fallen forward, pushing it all the way through. His back sprouted another arrow as the man had also been shot from behind. Asha was curled up in a ball against one of the barricades, an empty bow in her hand and Erica, similarly crouched, eyes wide in panic on the other side.

A bright light exploded on two of the barricades and I smelt the undeniable acrid odour of burning fat. One of the bandits had become tired of our hiding in the dark and thrown some sort of fat-fuelled fire starter on our defences. It gave me a proper look around. Four men were advancing on us. Asha was frozen in fear. Erica, to her credit, was trying to nock an arrow but her hands were shaking and she was finding it difficult to keep it on the bowstring. Laura was just gone.

I was beginning to panic. Following the light of the fire increasing I heard the clang of metal outside of the barricades and knew that Laura must be fighting a fifth or even sixth bandit. I pulled myself up out of the dirt, despite the arrow completely ruining my shoulder. It was excruciating and I stumbled as the pain blinded me for a second. Erica finally nocked her arrow and shot it, panicked, at an advancing thug; but it went wide and didn’t even cause him to flinch. The man in front of me brought his club down and I had to stumble to the side to avoid it. My shield arm was wrecked by the arrow and I didn’t even have the presence of mind to try to counter-attack his obvious overswing. Asha screamed and whimpered behind me as a third man tried to stab me from behind. I luckily saw him in time and spun out of his reach, straight into the line of sight of the fourth thug. It was the man who had shot me before, and he loosed another arrow, this time glancing off my breastplate and skittering off into the darkness. But the bow was large and the arrow had surprising mass.

The impact spun me to the side and I dropped to a knee. It was like being punched in the chest and I struggled to regain my feet. The club-wielding bandit raised his cudgel to open up my skull when Asha screamed in a blood-curdling fury. The rage within her voice was palpable and I looked across to my elven lover to see her standing, bathed in blue electricity. She ‘shoved’ the air in front of her with both hands in the direction of the bandits around the three of us and a lightning bolt flew across the camp and into the men. They shuddered and convulsed for a second which gave me the opportunity to stab the closest one in the gut with my sword and scramble away from the other two.

Asha collapsed in a heap after the lightning, I didn’t know whether she was alive or dead, but she had obviously burned herself out to buy me time. I lifted myself off the ground once again to face the remaining three men. The one who had been advancing on Erica had now turned to face me, he was shaken but obviously Asha’s attack had merely stunned them for a moment. They moved forward and, with one arm still injured by an arrow and blood flowing freely down my shoulder, I raised my sword to meet them, determined to protect the girls as long as I could.

Then a figure swept into the camp through a gap in the barricade. Dressed in armour that reflected the firelight and wielding a sword and shield, she cut down the closest man with a ruthless efficiency before he knew she was there. It was Laura, covered in blood and enraged beyond anything I had seen. This woman was pissed. The archer loosed an arrow at her which missed when she merely slipped her head to avoid it. He was cut down a second later by a sword swing that cleft his bow in two before burying into his clavicle.

The last man turned with his knife but he was woefully underarmed for the situation. With no armour, outmatched and sporting only a dagger against an armoured knight with her sword, he was quickly run through by the irate woman. She grimaced as she pulled her blade from his chest and wiped the blood on the ground before looking concernedly to me.

“Report,” she commanded.

I braced myself on the barricade. “I knocked out one archer on the tree line and injured another. Got hit with an arrow as I came back here. It’s bad but should respond to healing. Asha and Erica have killed one between them and then Asha got scared when I was surrounded and used some sort of lightning magic to stun the remaining men. I took the opportunity to kill one of them, you came in a second later and killed the rest.”

Laura nodded and looked around, seeing that her assessment of the inside of our camp matched my report.

“Three more down outside, including their leader and the one you injured; he tried stabbing me with his good arm.”

I winced. “Brings the total to what, nine? Seems a little high l, don’t you think?”

Laura nodded but not convincingly. “Maybe. Don’t forget the one that was caught in the traps. It brings us to 10. This close to town it could be that a smaller or medium group absorbed some members of another to create a larger group. It’s also maybe why they attacked us at all. They obviously really need the score, to feed all those members, but also they figured that they could take us.”

I agreed and then moved to check on Asha. The arrow that was still protruding from my shoulder made my vision go white for a moment, then I brought myself back to reality and checked the young elf. Her pulse was steady, and her pupils reacted when I pulled her eyelids back. She was alive, just unconscious. I rolled her into the recovery position so to prevent her swallowing her tongue and turned to Laura.

“I’ve seen this before.” assured Laura, as Erica rushed over to her sister. She had been staring at the dead men all around us and particularly the one she had shot in the back. She now came to her senses and rushed over to Asha’s side.

“She’ll be fine. She over-taxed her grasp on the arcane weave and funnelled too much. Not a lot too much, but still enough to knock her out. For her first casting of a spell, it’s not surprising. She’ll be awake by morning.”

I sat back on my haunches, took a breath and let it out slowly. I knew there was more to be done, but I needed to fix my shoulder first.

“Laura... I’m assuming you have some experience getting arrows out of bodies?”

The knight grimaced and Erica looked at me, alarmed, she’d been so preoccupied with Asha that she hadn’t even noticed the arrow sticking out of my shoulders until I’d mentioned it.

“MASTER!” she squealed and Laura stuck her finger in her ear and winced at the shriek.

“Do you mind not doing that?” She mumbled.

“But Master! You’re hurt. You’re bleeding a lot!” Erica fretted.

“It will be fine if I can get this fucking arrow out.” I mumbled.

Laura instructed me to kneel down and she inspected the wound whilst Erica was torn between the unconscious Asha and her perceived duty to me. But with Laura fussing over me, there wasn’t much Erica could do or see, so she resigned herself to stroking her sister’s head whilst looking across at Laura and I for updates.

Laura, in the meantime, had snapped the shaft of the arrow off about two inches from the head and started to remove my chainmail shirt and gambeson to allow her easier access to the arrowhead. My winces and groans had not deterred her, and she eventually exposed my back where the arrowhead was lodged.

“Well, the good news is that the chainmail and gambeson did their job. The arrowhead was slowed by the chain and cloth, and it hit your shoulder blade, so it didn’t embed itself deep. I probably won’t even need the wire loop”

I didn’t even know what that was. “And the bad news?” I asked, almost certain there would be some.

“Uh... you got shot? Even with the armour and the location, this is still weeks or months of recovery time before your body can repair the damage to your trapezius.”

“Maybe he can heal it like he healed you?” suggested Erica hopefully.

It was worth a try and so, after Laura had pulled the arrow out of my shoulder and I had finished spitting out curses and promises to find the archer who shot me and intimately reacquaint him with the offending projectile, I tried calling on the blessings of Bambinae.

Nothing.

Not that I couldn’t feel the power of Bambinae there. But it wouldn’t work for me. I could see the scrapes on Erica and Laura where they had sustained minor injuries during the battle and I could feel Asha’s weakened state after her overdrawing on the arcane weave, but whilst I was sure I could fix all of those problems with power to spare... I knew I couldn’t heal myself.

“Looks like you’re not out of a job as a healer yet.” I chuckled remorsefully to Laura. “And I’m going to have to do this the hard way.”

The surgery was not kind. Laura gave me a leather strap to bite on as she sutured me up. She had a topical anaesthetic, and it helped some, but if I was resentful towards the archer before; I was borderline homicidal now. I almost blacked out several times. As tough as I thought I was back on Earth, I was quickly realising how easy life was compared to those in the Middle Ages.

Finally, she laid down her tools and wrapped up my shoulder. “You should rest. Don’t move about. Erica, keep him here next to Asha and don’t let him do anything. If he pulls the thread loose he can sew it back up himself.”

“Where are you going?” I asked as she grabbed her kit and started out of the area we’d enclosed with our makeshift barricade.

“There are at least three injured bandits out there who will probably die if I don’t help them... as much as I don’t like them very much at the moment, I can’t let them bleed to death.”