The Heroes

numbers. The fields were crawling with them already, surging south towards the hill in a dully twinkling tide. But it took more than a pack of angry apes to make Sergeant Gaunt nervy. He’d watched the numberless Gurkish charge their little hill at Bishak and he’d cranked his flatbow just as hard as he could for the best part of an hour and in the end he’d watched them all run back again. Apart from those they left peppered in heaps. He grabbed Rose by the shoulder and steered him back to the wall.
    ‘Never mind about that. The next bolt is all that matters.’
    ‘Sergeant.’ And Rose bent over his bow again, pale but set to his task.
    ‘Crank, lads, crank!’ Gaunt turned his own at a nice, measured pace, all oiled and clean and working smoothly. Not too fast, not too slow, making sure he did the job right. He fished out another bolt, frowning to himself. No more than ten left in his quiver. ‘What happened to that ammunition?’ he roared over his shoulder, and then at his own people, ‘Pick your targets, nice and careful!’ And he stood, levelled his bow, stock pressing into his shoulder.
    The sight below gave a moment’s pause, even to a man of his experience. The foremost Northmen had reached the hill and were charging up, slowing on the grassy slope but showing no sign of stopping. Their war cry got worryingly louder as he came up from behind the wall, the vague keening becoming a shrill howl.
    He gritted his teeth, aiming low. Squeezed the trigger, felt the jolt, string humming. He saw where this one went, thudding straight into a shield and knocking the man who held it over backwards. Rattle and pop as a dozen or more bows went on his left, two or three Northmen dropping, one shot in the face, going over backwards and his axe spinning into the blue sky.
    ‘That’s the recipe, lads, keep shooting! Just load and—’ There was a loud click beside him. Gaunt felt a searing pain in his neck, and all the strength went out of his legs.
    *
    It was an accident. Rose had been tinkering with the trigger of his flatbow for a week or longer, trying to stop it wobbling, worried it might go off at the wrong moment, but he’d never been any good with machines. Why they’d made him a bowman he’d no clue. Would have been better off with a spear. Sergeant Gaunt would have been a lot better off if they’d given Rose a spear, that was a fact most definite. It just went off as he was lifting it, the point of the metal lath leaving a long scratch down his arm. As he was cursing at that, he looked sideways, and Gaunt had the bolt through his neck.
    They stared at each other for a moment, then Gaunt’s eyes rolled down, crossed, towards the flights, and he dropped his own bow and reached up to his neck. His quivering fingers came away bloody. ‘Gurgh,’ he said. ‘Bwuthers.’ And his lids flickered, and he dropped all of a sudden, his skull smacking against the wall and knocking his helmet skewed across his face.
    ‘Gaunt? Sergeant Gaunt?’ Rose slapped his cheek as though trying to wake him from an unauthorised nap, smeared blood across his face. There was more and more blood welling out of him all the time. Out of his nose, out of the neat slit where the bolt entered his neck. Oily dark, almost black, and his skin so white.
    ‘He’s dead!’ Rose felt himself dragged towards the wall. Someone shoved his empty flatbow back into his bloody hands. ‘Shoot, damn you! Shoot!’ A young officer, one of the new ones, Rose couldn’t remember his name. Could hardly remember his own name.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Shoot!’
    Rose started cranking, aware of other men around him doing the same. Sweating, struggling, cursing, leaning over the wall to shoot. He could hear wounded men screaming, and above that a strange howl. He fumbled a bolt from his quiver, slotted it into the groove, cursing to himself at his trembling fingers, all smeared pink from Gaunt’s blood.
    He was crying. There were tears streaming down his face. His hands felt very cold, though it wasn’t cold. His teeth were chattering. The man beside him threw down his bow and ran towards the top of the hill. There were a lot of men running, ignoring the desperate bellows of their officers.
    Arrows flitted down. One went spinning from a steel cap just beside him. Others stuck into the hillside behind the wall. Silent, still, as if they’d suddenly sprung from the ground by magic rather than dropped from the sky. Someone else turned to run, but before he