Free The Last Four Things by Paul Hoffman Page A

himself a section five feet long and a dozen thin poles and hurried to
catch up. Following for the rest of the day he found a small puddle of green andbrown water and decided to risk it. He’d tasted worse but not often. Dunbar and his men stopped an hour before darkness and Kleist had to work quickly in the fading light. The bamboo was still green, which made it easy to cut it into thin lashings to twist and use for a bow string. Then he split the bamboo down the middle into three staves, each one shorter than the last. By the time it was dark he’d bound one stave on the other with the lashings like the leaf spring of a cart. He slept little and badly when he did. The next day he began work as soon as it was light, following as they moved off, and finished the bow as they stopped for a couple of hours at midday. He would have liked to recurve the ends for more power but there wasn’t time – it was a complicated process. The sun came out and tormented him with thirst but while it desiccated him it did the same
to the bow, drying it fully and binding everything archer-tight. There was flint enough lying around and it took only ten minutes to make an arrowhead.
    A maggoty crow provided the feathers for the fletch, but crow feathers were hard to work and he’d wasted most of the best getting the technique right. Binding them accurately with the bamboo and twine was a bastard. Still, while Redeemer Master Arrowsmith Hart would have given him a good hiding for the results, they weren’t too bad all considered. Good enough as long as he could get in close to cause some serious evil. He was exhausted, thirsty, hungry and in a foul temper. A few quick practice shots out of sight eased his weariness with a mixture of satisfaction at his skill and a douse of malice. But he’d let them get too far away and thinking he’d lost them almost walked into the camp they’d hidden in a thickish cloud of trees. In the light that remained he only had the time to crawl around half of thecampsite and see what was what. By then he had placed four of them but not the fifth. Sunset meant
that the hoped-for attack would have to be delayed. He would have preferred to wait out the night where he was so as not to risk a re-approaching in the morning. But the failure to spot the fifth man meant he thought it better to withdraw a few hundred yards. Tricky either way and a bloody nuisance.
    Nine hours later and with a splitting headache he was back and watching. Still only four men but the one missing yesterday was back and Lord Dunbar was gone. Frustration and excitement and fear made the hammering in Kleist’s brain seem like it would break his skull but he daren’t do a thing until all five were together. And then, around eight, Dunbar crawled out of what looked like a large bush at the edge of the camp. In a few seconds he was urinating at the edge of the camp and shouting orders for them to strike it. Arrow into bow, string pulled, the huge power of his right arm and shoulder and back tensed and a deep breath and then loose. A scream from Dunbar as the arrow took him in the left hip. Three-second pause – the other four stared. ‘What?’ called one.
    Another arrow hit Handsome Johnny in the mouth and he fell back waving his arms. A third raced off, slipping and sliding in terror to the cover of the trees. An arrow, pulled badly, hit him in the foot and he hopped the last few yards, shouting in pain, and vanished into the trees. Another unscathed raced out of the camp in the other direction. The fifth man in the almost centre of the camp did not move. Kleist took aim, the bow creaking with the bend and let loose into the middle of his chest. A dreadful gasp of anguish. He bowed another arrow and drew it back, carefully and quickly making his way into the camp, moving thepoint back and forth over the points of threat. Handsome Johnny wasn’t going to be any trouble. The man kneeling with his