“We are unarmed!” called the wagon master toward the two brigands blocking the roadway. “We are prepared to submit!”
One of the flatbread bandits, apparently the leader of the group entire, motioned the pair of haunch-sitters farther forward. These now hefted their pikes and advanced with primary blades elevated. The other brigands, including the horse-holders, had all risen to their feet.
The wagon master advanced with hands held high, palms open and facing forward.
“I see no toll!” called the bandit leader. Apparently, David and other youths reckoned, an envoy of the brigands had made a midnight embassy to the inn and there negotiated terms of passage.
Fifty denarii.
“Come forward! You and the next two!” called the bandit chief. He and his fellow stood now thirty paces before the first freight wagon, which had stopped completely. Behind this vehicle the train and its foot-trekkers also drew up.
The wagon master motioned his number two and three to advance beside him. These scurried forward. Each held up his empty hands. The wagon master displayed one vacant palm. In his other hand he clutched a drawstring purse.
“Deliver!” shouted the chief.
The brigand leader and first three, then five of his cohorts now moved toward the point of juncture, maintaining the advantage of their upslope positions. Clearly they intended to hold the three teamsters at spearpoint until the entire train had passed, lest the wagoneers be plotting treachery.
“We’ll come nowhere near you!” shouted the wagon master. He displayed again the drawstring purse.
He slung this pouch toward the highwaymen.
The purse landed with a weighty splat upon the dust of the roadway.
David and his friends glanced to one another. They were having fun.
Now the bandit leader stepped into the road. He carried a heavy shepherd’s bow, the kind that stockmen use to protect their flocks from wolves.
“Forward!” he bawled to the wagon master.
No one of the bandits, including the leader, had made a move toward the purse.
“Take your money!” called the wagon master.
“I want you!”
With that, he loosed a bolt that flew screaming past the teamster’s ear and struck, with a sound like the crack of a whip, into the front pine facing of the wagon master’s box.
“Now!” the bandit repeated. He nocked a second arrow and drew tight.
The wagon master’s companions cried to him urgently to obey.
“Take your money and go!” cried the master.
The bandit shot again, this time at the master’s lead mule. The bolt struck the beast full in the neck. The animal bawled in the traces and attempted to rear. The poor beast’s hooves fouled in the padding affixed to the breastband. It toppled sideways, nearly pulling its three yoke-mates over with it.
“Aieee!” cried the wagon master. His face had turned the color of blood. The arrow may as well have struck him in the guts. He rushed to his wounded animal, clearly the man’s favorite, not to say, as the team leader, the mainstay of his very livelihood.
“Forward!” cried the bandit leader, drawing a third shaft. “Or the next one parts your hair.”
David felt his friends shinning rearward along the ground. Suddenly the game had stopped being an amusement.
“Go! Go!” shouted the wagon master’s two comrades. But the man either wouldn’t or couldn’t. He clung to his bawling, stamping animal, crying oaths toward heaven.
The bandit leader’s bow drew back to full stretch.
“We’re coming! We’re coming!” cried the second two teamsters, who now, passing the wagon master, scampered forward in terror toward the brigand leader and his confederates.
“I want him!” shouted the highwayman. He had come forward several strides and stood now within twenty paces of the wagon master. The mule in its traces continued braying in agony. Young David felt his own glance turn away, so piteous was the sight. The wagon master, in distress, retreated to the box of his vehicle. David thought, He’s retrieving some salve for his animal or perhaps an instrument to draw out the arrow.
No.
The man was getting a spear.
With a great cry, the wagon master rushed toward the bandit leader, clearly intending to run upon him with the killing point of the weapon.
The brigand fired.
The bolt struck the wagon master at the nexus where the throat meets the top of the chest, driving powerfully in above the inner point of the right collarbone. The master’s momentum carried him forward another three or four strides before he plunged face-first into the road. By the time his torso had hit the dirt, it had been driven through by two flung lances.
“Take them all!” cried the bandit leader.
The horsemen, mounted now and brandishing their lances, charged down the slope. The other bandits strode powerfully forward. Cries of terror rose from the teamsters and pilgrims of the train. These fled in all directions.
At this moment David felt his flesh stand up, responding involuntarily to a sound unlike any he had ever heard.
The man-at-arms appeared upon the slope above the bandits.
No one had seen or heard him approach.
Above his head the man-at-arms wheeled a leather sling, the kind shepherds carry to defend their flocks. David knew the power and range of such a weapon. Every boy did. But never had he heard such a keening cry as that that sounded now from this whirling, shrieking engine of death.
The man-at-arms slung.
David could not see the lead sling bullet, so swiftly did it fly. His glance took in only the nearest of the flatbread bandits as the projectile struck him square in the facing of his forehead and, seemingly simultaneously, the rear of his skull blew apart in a spray of bone and tissue. The man dropped like a sack of stones.
Now came the man-at-arms on a dead run.
His first hurled pilum split the guts of a second flatbread brigand beside the roadway. Before this man could fall, the fellow at his shoulder had been opened from throat to navel by a slash of the man-at-arms’ dolabra pickaxe.
Now it was the bandits who cried in terror.
David saw two dump their lances and turn heels-on to flee.
The man-at-arms slew one with a two-handed slash of his dolabra that severed the man’s spine and opened both his kidneys, and the second with an overhand throw that buried a battleaxe, whirling end-over-end, into the mass of muscle between the shoulder blades as this fellow turned to flee.
The bandit leader had wheeled about now. He drew down, from less than thirty feet, upon the man-at-arms. Clearly the brigand’s skill with the bow was such that at this range he could drill an enemy’s heart a hundred times out of a hundred.
The fellow loosed his arrow.
To David’s eyes, wide now as wagon wheels, the bolt seemed to fly as if time had slowed. The youth could see the blood gutter on the iron warhead, and the feather vanes as they rippled in flight.
He saw the man-at-arms elevate his open left hand and, with exquisite deliberateness, bat this shaft aside, so that its killing point nicked the ear of the fox-skin cap upon his head and passed harmlessly by.
The bandit leader, seeing this, turned now and sprang with the fever of terror onto the back of one of the led horses. David could see the fellow’s hips above the saddlecloth and his sandaled heels beating upon the animal’s flanks.
Without haste the man-at-arms elevated his Amazon bow.