The Betrayal of Father Tuck: An Outlaw Chronicles short story by Angus Donald Read Free Book Online Page A

my chest – and I wanted desperately to vomit, to piss, to void my own bowels. I could feel tears burning the backs of my eyelids, and it was only by using a great deal of force on myself that I fought back these unmanly urges. I turned my head and looked over my shoulder at the sleeping camp. All was quiet. So far, it seemed, no one had noticed anything. But for the limp, shit-drizzled corpse lying under me, it might never have happened.
    I tugged my jelly-slick blade from his lolling head, plunged it into the turf to clean it, wiped it on my sleeve and shoved it back into the leather sheath in my left boot. I saw that in his death spasm he had bitten into the meat of the middle finger on my left hand, but I could feel no pain in that moment as I bound the finger tightly, quickly, with a scrap of linen torn from my undershirt. Then I pulled his corpse off the road and, with some difficulty, stripped the black-and-red surcoat from his dead weight and pulled it over my own sodden black clothes. I took off his helmet and gathered up his spear and sword and set them to one side. Then I recovered the bag from the lee of the stone wall and, peeling back the moist sacking, I pulled out a massive sticky lozenge of meat and bone, about a foot and a half long, complete with pointed ears and white, still eyeballs; it was the severed head of a wild moorland pony, cut from the neck below the animal’s square jawline, and very nearly drained of blood. I looked round anxiously at the sleeping camp; there was still nothing stirring.
    Using the boy’s own sword, I hacked off his young head as neatly as I could, a difficult job in the dark with a long unwieldy blade, sawing and slicing through spine, windpipe and the muscles and tendons of his neck as quietly as possible. The sword was a cheap one, blunt, notched and with the wooden handle loose and rattling on the tang. It was not neatly done, and I was terrified that the wet sounds of my cack-handed butchery could be heard in the camp, but finally I finished my grisly work and, trying my best to avoid bloodying my clothes, I propped the headless corpse in a sitting position in the ditch by the side of the track and balanced the wild horse’s head on the trunk, between the shoulders, where the boy’s would have been. I secured the beast’s head in place with the thin muddy rope that had been attached to the sack; tied it over the equine crown in front of the ears and round under the boy’s armpits, then sat back and surveyed my handiwork with a shiver of satisfaction. It looked truly gruesome; eerie and unnatural – a man’s body with a long horse’s head atop. The boy’s own sightless poll I grasped by its lank hair and hurled as far as I could, away into the darkness. It might be recovered, eventually, but the terrifying animal-headed corpse would still do its work on the men who discovered it.
    I made the sign of the cross over my gory confection to keep his spirit quiet, mumbled an apologetic prayer to St Michael, the sword-wielding archangel and patron saint of battle, and gathered up my victim’s helmet, sword-belt and spear. Then I began to trudge up the muddy track. My whole body was shaking, every step I took was unsteady, and suddenly the pain in my bitten hand came roaring out of nowhere like an angry bear. I switched the spear to my other hand and fought the reeling giddiness in my head. My victim had been slightly shorter than me, even before I hacked off his pimply head, and a shade thinner, but I calculated that on that dark night, from a distance of a hundred yards or so, if I walked in his tracks, I could pass as his double before an unsuspicious eye. I finally won control of my body and mind and banished the thoughts of the infernal deed I had just done; I slumped my shoulders a little and tried to emulate his resentful slack-kneed slouching as I walked away from his mutilated cadaver.
    As I reached the brow of the hill, and paused, pretending to scour the area