The Seventh Book of Lost Swords : Wayfinder's Story, Fred Saberhagen [13 ebook reader TXT] 📗

night’s companions and their friends might be outside. What sounded like the clumsy muttering of six or eight might instead be a much cleverer attempt by two or three men to suggest greater numbers.

      Well, he would soon find out how many men were outside, and whether they were bluffing. He would go out and see. But he would do so without announcing his real intention first.

      Ready for action now, he bellowed a defiant challenge, to the effect that if they wanted him, they were going to have to come in and get him.

      Then, as quietly as possible, he slid down the ladder from the hayloft to the dirt floor of the barn. And then, pitchfork in hand, he came out fighting.

      Ben’s youth was behind him, but he could still run faster than anyone would be likely to expect from a man of his size. He went out, moving fast and hard, through a small door in what he would have called the rear of the barn. The suggestion of numbers, he saw with a sinking feeling, had been no bluff. At least five armed men were waiting for him among the manure piles in the back, but at first they recoiled from him and his pitchfork, yelling.

      The bass voice that had commanded Ben to give up now shouted orders meant for other ears, screaming hoarsely that if they wanted to survive this day themselves, they had better take this fellow alive. These commands and threats were issuing from a squat oaken hogshead of a man, somewhat shorter than Ben himself, but apparently little if any lighter. Not one of last night’s tavern companions. Ben would have remembered this one.

      Ben now had his back against the barn wall, hemmed in by a semicircle of lesser men, most of them fierce-looking enough to inspire some measure of respect. They kept him at bay, turning this way and that. While feints came at Ben from right and left at the same time, one of them got almost behind him with a clever rope. A moment later Ben’s pitchfork had been lassoed, and a few moments after that several strong hands had fastened on him, and his dagger was plucked from his belt.

      “We got him, Sarge!”

      But in the next instant Ben proved to those who grasped his arms and legs that they really hadn’t. Not quite, not yet. He used his arms to crack a pair of heads together with great energy.

      The blade of a very keen-looking knife, coming up under his throat, stopped this effort.

      One of the Sarge’s wrists, prodigiously thick and hairy, came into Ben’s field of vision. The enemy leader, striking out at his own knife-wielding man, seemed to have suddenly become Ben’s ally. “Alive, I says! He’s the one Blue Temple wants!”

      That name made Ben redouble his efforts to break loose. It was useless, though. He might have been able to fight off two or three of the ill-clad, ill-equipped bandits at a time, and the remainder of them might have been poorly coordinated or plain cowardly enough to stay at a safe distance. But when the Sarge himself jumped in and grabbed him, using the biggest hands that Ben had ever seen or felt, while two of his more stubborn minions still clung on, Ben no longer had any chance of wrestling free.

      This time he was down flat on his back. Raising his head as well as he was able, he peered through a drifting haze of dust and barnyard chaff to take a count. There were six or eight of them altogether, and two of them at least, the ones whose heads he’d banged, were just as flat as he was. He hadn’t done so badly at that.

      Now, though, four or five held Ben more or less in position, and another was commencing operations with a coil of thin rope brought from the barn, tying his wrists skillfully behind his back.

      Ben, looking at the world through a reddish haze of exhaustion, his chest heaving, his pulse thudding in his ears, had the sudden notion that at forty-two, give or take a year or so, he was definitely getting too old for this kind of thing.

      Now, Ben’s arms immobilized, a couple of his stronger captors took him by the arms and heaved him to his feet.

      It seemed there were going to be formal introductions.

      “Sergeant Brod,” growled the walking hogshead, standing directly in front of Ben, and extending one enormous hand as if Ben ought to be able to snap free of his bonds and shake it. “Better known to some of me own followers as the Sarge. I am the leader of this small but efficient band.”

      “Pleased to meet you,” said Ben. Squinting at Brod and the men who surrounded him, Ben decided that Brod’s men all appeared to be more or less afraid of him, and with some cause.

      Brod’s coloring was fair, right now still red-faced from his recent efforts. His features were fairly regular except for a nose that approached the size to qualify as a disfiguring defect.

      Fancy tattoos adorned the Sarge’s massive shoulders, which bulged out of a sleeveless leather vest. His dirty hair, some indeterminate shade between blond and red, was tied in long pigtails.

      From inside his vault of a chest, his bass voice rasped out what sounded like an accusation: “You’re Ben of Purkinje.”

      Ben blew a tickle of straw free of his upper lip. Trying to get his breathing back to normal, he replied as nonchalantly as he could: “You have the wrong man. My name is Charles, and I’m a blacksmith.”

      The Sarge had a good laugh. He really enjoyed that one.

      “Aye, and my name’s really Buttercup, and I sell cobwebs for a living!” Fists on hips, he sized up his prisoner’s size and shape, and appeared delighted with what he saw. He clouted Ben a friendly buffet on the shoulder, rocking him on his planted feet.

      In another minute the little gang was on the march, away from barn and farmyard. Ben, arms bound,