Swords: 10 - The Seventh Book Of Lost Swords - Wayfinder's Story by Fred Saberhagen Read Free Book Online Page A

wooden structure if he didn’t immediately come out and surrender.
           The bass roar was almost instantly repeated: “Ben of Purkinje! We know yer in there!”
           Despite the besieged man’s huge size, he came up to his feet softly and promptly amid the hay, the wooden floor of the hayloft creaking under the shift of weight. At the same time he took a quick inventory of assets. Through recent misfortunes his personal weaponry, apart from his own mind and body, had been reduced to one middle-sized dagger. Leaving the dagger at his belt, he caught sight of a pitchfork not far away, and swiftly and softly took possession of it.
           A certain urgency within his bladder next demanded his attention, all the more so with impending combat probable. Relieving himself quietly into the hay, regretting the lack of heroic capacity that might have served to put out a fire, Ben listened for more shouts but for the moment could hear only the throbbing of his aching head.
           Doing his best to give the situation careful thought, he decided that allowing or encouraging the barn to burn down around him would be a waste of time for all concerned, and a waste of some perhaps innocent farmer’s property as well. Ben had no real idea how many of last 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