And another ten-shaft volley was on its way. Will nodded to the ten men, who were watching him expectantly.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how you did.’
He began to pace across the open field, followed by the ten men who had just shot. There were markers set out down the middle of the field, marking one hundred, one hundred and fifty and two hundred metre distances. Position three, with the bow arm elevated forty degrees from the horizontal, should have equated to the one hundred and fifty metre marker. As they approached that marker, Will nodded with satisfaction. There were sixteen arrows slanting up from the turf within a ten-metre tolerance of the mark. Two had gone long, he noticed, and two more had dropped short. He studied the long shots. The shafts were numbered, so that he could assess how each member of the shooting line had performed. He saw now that the two overshoots belonged to two different archers.
Moving back to the arrows that had undershot the target, he frowned slightly. The arrows were both marked with the same number. That meant the same archer had dropped his shot short of the mark both times. Will took note of the number, then moved back to view the results of the final volley. The frown deepened as he saw that nine arrows were well grouped, with one falling short by the same margin. He didn’t really need to check, but a quick glance showed him that, once again, the same archer had undershot the distance.
He grunted thoughtfully.
‘All right!’ he called. ‘Recover your arrows.’ Then he led the way back to the firing point, the ten men following behind him.
‘Who was at number four position?’ he asked.
One of the archers stepped forward, hesitantly, holding up a hand and looking like a nervous pupil in school. He was a heavy-set bearded man of about forty, Will noticed, yet his demeanour showed that he was totally in awe of the young Ranger facing him.
‘That was me, your honour,’ he said nervously. Will beckoned him closer.
‘Bring your bow and two or three arrows,’ he said. The man picked up his bow, and selected two arrows from the bin that stood by his firing position. He was nervous at being singled out and promptly dropped the arrows, scrabbling awkwardly to retrieve them.
‘Relax,’ Will told him, unable to suppress a grin. ‘I just want to check your technique.’
The man tried to smile in return. He’d seen they were his arrows that had fallen short and he assumed he was about to be punished. That was the way life went for a slave in Hallasholm. If you were told to do something and you didn’t do it, you were punished. Now the brownhaired youth who was directing the session was grinning at him and telling him to relax. It was a novel experience.
‘Take a stance,’ Will told him and the man stood side-on to the firing range, left foot extended, left hand holding the bow at waist height.
‘Position three,’ Will said quietly and the man assumed the position that had been drilled into him all the previous day, his left arm holding the bow at forty degrees – almost maximum distance. Will studied him. There seemed to be little wrong with the man’s stance.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Draw, please.’
The man was using too much arm muscle and not enough of his back muscles to draw the bow, Will thought. But that was a minor fault and the result of long habit. There would be no way of changing that in the time they had left.
‘And … shoot.’
There it was, Will thought. A fraction of a second before the man released his shot, he relaxed the draw length slightly – letting the arrow ease down a little before actually letting his fingers slip from the string. That meant that, at the moment of release, the arrow was at something less than full draw, which in turn meant it was receiving less than the full power of the bow behind its flight. Halt and Will had tested all the bows to make sure they were similar in draw weight and the arrows were all exactly the same length to ensure results were as consistent as possible. The main cause for variation would be little technical errors like this one.
He looked down the range to where the coloured flights of the arrow were visible against the brown, sodden grass of the spring thaw. As he had suspected, it was short again.
Will explained the reason for the problem to the man, seeing from the surprised expression that he had no idea that he was relaxing the draw at the crucial moment.
‘Work on it,’ he told him, giving him an encouraging slap on the shoulder. Halt had impressed on him the fact that a little encouragement in matters like these went a great deal further than scathing criticism. Will had been surprised when Halt had put him in charge of the archers’ training. Even though he knew he’d be directing the archers during the battle, he’d assumed that Halt would supervise their training. But the Ranger had repeated his earlier sentiment.
‘You’re the one who’ll be directing them once we’re fighting. It’s as well they get used to following your orders from the start.’
Will remembered another piece of advice the Ranger had given him. ‘Men work better when they know what you have in mind,’ he told the young apprentice. ‘So make sure you tell them as much as possible.’
He stepped up onto a raised platform that had been placed here for the purpose of addressing the entire group.
‘We’ll break for today,’ he said in a raised voice. ‘Tomorrow we’ll shoot as one group. So if I’ve picked any technical faults in your shooting today, practise getting rid of them before the evening meal. Then get a good night’s rest.’ He started to turn away, then turned back, remembering one thing more. ‘Good work, all of you,’ he said. ‘If you keep this up, we’re going to give those Temujai a very nasty surprise.’
There was a growl of pleasure from the hundred men. Then they broke off, heading back for the warmth of the halls and lodges. Will realised that it was later than he’d thought. The sun was touching the tops of the hills beyond Hallasholm and the shadows were lengthening. The evening breeze was chilly and he shivered, reaching for the cloak that he’d hung from the platform railing as he’d directed the shooting.
A half dozen boys had been assigned to help and without orders from him they gathered the arrow bins and arrows, putting them under cover in one of the store sheds that fronted the practice field. Will couldn’t help noticing the admiring glances they cast his way as they went about their work. He was only a few years older than they were, yet here he was, directing a force of one hundred archers. He smiled to himself. He wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t enjoyed their hero worship.
‘You look pleased with yourself,’ said a familiar voice. He turned and realised Horace must have approached while he had been talking to the men. He shrugged, trying to act diffident.
‘They’re coming along quite well,’ he said. ‘It’s been a good day’s work.’
Horace nodded. ‘So I noticed,’ he said. Then, in a worried tone, he continued, ‘Evanlyn hasn’t been here with you, has she?’
Will looked up at him, instantly on the defensive. ‘What if she has been?’ he asked, an argumentative tone creeping into his voice. Instantly, he saw the worried look clear from Horace’s face and realised he’d misinterpreted the reason for the other youth’s question.
‘Then she has been here?’ Horace said. ‘That’s a relief. Where is she now?’
Now it was Will’s turn to frown. ‘Just a moment,’ he said, putting a hand on Horace’s muscular forearm. ‘Why is it a relief? Is something wrong?’
‘Then she hasn’t been here?’ Horace asked, and his face fell again as Will shook his head.
‘No. I thought you were being … you know …’ Will had been about to say ‘jealous’, but he couldn’t quite manage it. The idea that Horace might have something to be jealous about had too much of a sense of boasting about it. He saw instantly that such thoughts were far from Horace’s mind. The apprentice warrior had hardly seemed to notice Will’s hesitation.
‘She’s missing,’ he said, in that same worried tone. He cast his hands out and looked around the empty practice field, as
if he somehow expected to see her appear there. ‘Nobody’s seen her since midmorning yesterday. I’ve looked everywhere for her but there’s no sign.’
‘Missing?’ Will repeated, not quite understanding. ‘Missing where?’
Horace looked up at him with a sudden flare of asperity. ‘If we knew that, she wouldn’t be missing, would she?’
Will put up his hands in a peace-making gesture.
‘All right! All right!’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise. I’ve been a little tied up trying to get these archers organised. Surely somebody must have seen her last night? Her room servants, for example?’
Horace shook his head miserably. ‘I’ve asked them,’ he said. ‘I was out on patrol most of yesterday myself, keeping an eye on the Temujai approach. We didn’t get back in to Hallasholm till well after supper time, so I didn’t realise she wasn’t around. It was only this morning when I went to find her that I found out she hadn’t been in her room last night and that nobody had seen her today. That’s why I was hoping that maybe you’d …’ The sentence tailed off and Will shook his head.
‘I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her,’ he told his friend. ‘But it’s ridiculous!’ he exclaimed, after a short silence. ‘Hallasholm isn’t a big enough place for someone to go missing. And there’s nowhere else she could have gone. Let’s face it, she can’t have simply disappeared … can she?’
Horace shrugged. ‘That’s what I keep telling myself,’ he said morosely. ‘But somehow, it looks as if she has.’
United now in their concern for Evanlyn, the two apprentices headed for Halt’s quarters. All of the Araluan party had been assigned rooms in the main hall.
As Halt was their leader, he had been given a small suite of three rooms. At the door, Will knocked perfunctorily and heard Halt’s gruff reply: ‘Come.’
As they entered, he took in the fact that Erak was in the room with Halt. It was hard to miss the bulky Skandian. He seemed to fill most spaces he occupied. He was sprawled in one of the comfortable, carved wood armchairs that decorated the room – doubtless liberated on some wolfship raid down the coast. Halt was standing by the window, framed against the low-angled light of the late afternoon. He looked quizzically at the doorway as the two boys entered hurriedly.
‘Halt,’ Will began urgently, ‘Horace says Evanlyn’s disappeared. She’s –’
‘Safe and sound and back in Hallasholm,’ a familiar voice finished the sentence for him. Both boys turned to the speaker. Standing a little back, in the shadows of the room, she hadn’t been evident as they’d entered.
‘Evanlyn!’ Horace exclaimed. ‘You’re all right!’
The girl smiled. Now his eyes were accustomed to the darker part of the room, Will could make out that her face and clothes were smeared with grease and dirt. Her eyes met his and she smiled at him, a little wistfully. Then she upended the flask of juice that she had in her hand and drank greedily from it.
‘Apparently,’ she said, setting the flask down. ‘Although I have a thirst on me that I doubt I’ll ever quench. All I’ve had to drink in the last eighteen hours was a little rainwater that made its way through the canvas covers over the …’ She hesitated and looked to Erak to supply the word she was after. The Jarl obliged.
‘Forepeak,’ he said and Evanlyn repeated the word.
‘Forepeak, exactly, of Slagor’s ship,’ she said. Will and Horace exchanged puzzled glances.
‘What in the devil’s name were you doing there?’ Will asked and Halt answered for her.
‘The devil’s name is right,’ he said. ‘It seems our friend Slagor has sold out to the Temujai – and he’s planning to betray Hallasholm to them.’
‘What?’ asked Will, his voice almost cracking with surprise. He looked at Evanlyn. ‘How do you know?’
The girl shrugged her slim shoulders. ‘Because I heard him discussing it with the Temujai leader. They were barely two metres away from me.’
‘It seems,’ Halt put in, by way of explanation, ‘that your old friend Slagor sailed down the coast yesterday to a rendezvous with the Temujai Shan – one Haz’kam. And since our traitor obviously didn’t trust his new allies too far, he insisted on all negotiations being carried out on board his ship – just to keep Haz’kam’s retainers at a distance.’
‘Which is how I came to hear it,’ Evanlyn finished. But now Horace was scratching his head in bewilderment.
‘But … what were you doing on the ship?’ he said.
‘I told you,’ Evanlyn replied. ‘Eavesdropping on Slagor and the Temujai.’
Horace made an impatient gesture. ‘Yes, yes, so you’ve said. But why were you there in the first place?’
Evanlyn went to answer, hesitated, then stopped altogether. All eyes in the room were on her now and she realised she didn’t really have a logical answer to that question.
‘I … don’t know,’ she said, finally. ‘I was bored, I guess. And feeling useless. I was looking for something to do. And besides, Slagor looked sort of … shifty.’
‘Slagor always looks sort of shifty,’ Erak put in, helping himself to fruit from a bowl on the table in front of him. Evanlyn thought about it, then conceded the point.
‘Well, that’s true, I suppose. But he looked even shiftier than usual,’ she said. ‘So I decided someone had better keep an eye on him and see what he was up to.’
Truth be told, Evanlyn was quite enjoying herself now. She had gone from feeling useless and unnecessary to being the bearer of important, even vital news to Halt and Erak. She couldn’t help preening, just a little. Horace’s next reaction was exactly what she’d hoped for.
‘But … you could have been spotted! What if they’d found you there? They would have killed you,’ he said, his concern for her evident in the worried tone of his voice. That thought had occurred to Evanlyn on more than one occasion as she’d crouched in the damp space in the bow of the wolfship. Once she had fully realised the situation she was in, her skin had crawled with the fear of discovery with every second. But now she affected a nonchalant air about the entire episode.
‘I suppose so. But let’s face it, someone had to do it.’
She was delighted to notice that Horace was looking at her with something approaching awe. She glanced quickly at Will, hoping to see the same look of admiration there. His next words dashed that hope.
‘All very well,’ he said dismissively. ‘But the important thing is that Slagor is planning to betray us. How is he aiming to do it?’
‘That’s the point, of course,’ Halt agreed. He indicated a chart of the Skandian coast that he and Erak had spread on the table between them. ‘Apparently, friend Slagor plans to put to sea quietly the day after tomorrow and make for the same rendezvous point down the coast. Only this time, there’ll be one hundred and fifty Temujai warriors waiting. He’ll take them aboard and ferry them back here to Hallasholm –’
‘He’ll never fit a hundred and fifty men into one wolfship!’ Will interrupted.
Halt nodded. ‘Apparently, he has another two ships waiting for him out behind this island, halfway to the rendezvous.’
‘They left a week ago,’ Erak put in. ‘Supposedly, they were going to raid behind the Temujai lines. It seems the skirls are in league with Slagor and they’re waiting at this prearranged point.’ He tapped the map with his dagger, with which he’d been peeling fruit. A few spots of apple juice fell onto the parchment. Halt raised an eyebrow at him and wiped them away as the Jarl continued. ‘With three ships, they’ll carry one hundred and fifty men easily.’
‘Then what?’ Horace asked. Evanlyn, piqued that attention had been diverted from her and that Will had ignored the danger she’d been in, leapt back into the conversation.
‘They’ll be able to attack our forces from the rear,’ she explained. ‘Think of it, one hundred and fifty men, with the element of surprise, suddenly appearing behind our lines!’
‘That could be very nasty indeed,’ Horace said thoughtfully. ‘So what do we do?’
<
br /> ‘We’ve already taken the first step,’ Erak told him. ‘I’ve sent Svengal with two of my ships out to Fallkork Island here.’ Again he tapped the juice-stained knife on the map and again Halt raised his eyes at him. ‘To make sure Slagor’s other two ships don’t keep any rendezvous.’
‘Two against two?’ Will asked. ‘Is that enough?’
The Jarl cocked his head to one side and smiled at him. ‘Count yourself lucky that Svengal wasn’t here to hear you say that,’ he replied. ‘He’d consider his crew alone to be more than a match for two ships full of Slagor’s followers. But in fact, Slagor’s ships will have only rowing crews. They need all the space they have to cram those Temujai on board with them.’
‘But what do we do about Slagor?’ Will asked and this time, it was Halt who answered.
‘That’s the problem. If he gets wind that we know what he’s up to, he’ll simply abandon the plan. We’ll be able to prove nothing. It’ll be his word against the word of a former slave – and an escaped one at that.’ He smiled at Evanlyn to show he meant no insult, but was merely stating the facts. She nodded her understanding.
‘But if Slagor finds the other two ships at this island, surely that’s proof?’ Horace interjected and Halt shook his head.
‘Proof of what? The crews will hardly admit they were waiting to go fetch the Temujai,’ he said.
Horace sat back, frowning. This was getting too complicated for him.
‘Then what can we do?’ Will asked. But at that moment there was a heavy knock at the door. They all looked at each other in surprise. The clandestine nature of their discussion had made them speak in lowered tones and the sudden interruption had made them all start guiltily, as if discovered.
‘Anyone expecting visitors?’ Halt asked and, as the others shook their heads, he called once more: ‘Come.’
The door opened to admit Hodak, one of Erak’s younger followers. He glanced about the room, noting the identities of all present. He looked uncomfortable as he noticed Evanlyn.
‘Thought I might find you here,’ he said to Erak. ‘Ragnak’s calling a special council in the Great Hall. He wants you there, Jarl.’ He indicated Evanlyn. ‘And you’d better bring the girl with you.’
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