A handspan-wide belt, mounting the biggest brass buckle Foster had ever seen, rested on the right shoulder and bisected the breastplate, a cased sword attached to its lower ends. Laying the shotgun near to hand, Foster drew the weapon and hefted it. The straight blade was at least a yard long, wide and thick and heavy, double-edged and basket-hilted. Foster had fenced, in prep school and college, but he had never before handled a sword like this. The only one he remembered even seeing at all like it had been a Highland broadsword. There was no balance to the dead man’s weapon, an the weight being in the blade. Even so, its condition testified to lengthy and hard service.
He was trying to pull a leather pouch of some kind from I under the dead weight of its former owner when the shrill • scream of an infuriated horse came from among the outbuildings and he glanced up just in time to see a man garbed exactly like the dead one level what looked to be a sawed-off shotgun and fire in his direction. Something spannngged on the corpse’s breastplate and caromed off, leaving a smear of silvery lead on the steel.
But Foster did not see it He had grabbed his own gun and was frantically rolling across the bare flagstones toward the tower, an angle of which offered the only nearby cover. He I heard two more of the booming reports before he gained the I partial protection of the rough-hewn stones, but arrived there unharmed, save for bruises and abrasions.
A cautious peek around the angle of the tower revealed only the outbuildings; the man or men who had been shooting at him were nowhere hi sight, though he could hear a voice shouting something or other from that area.
Abruptly, a trio of helmeted men trotted into sight from behind the largest of the buildings, each armed with two of the thick, stubby firearms. They seemed oblivious to the fact that they were all within easy range of the rifled slugs in Foster’s riot gun as they jogged forward, silent but for the jingle of their equipment and the clump of their boots, their stubbled faces grim.
The man in the center had a good start of a reddish beard and he showed a gapped set of yellow-and-brown teeth in a wolfish grin when Foster’s first shot—fired mostly in warning—plowed up dust and stone shards a few feet in front of his muddy boots, crackling something that sounded like “Un-duhsharshed!” before bringing one of his own weapons to bear on Foster’s hiding place.
As he shook the bits of rock and moss from his hair, Foster decided to stop being civilized and to start playing for keeps, as the approaching trio so obviously were. Jacking another shell into the chamber, he put the twelve-gauge slug into redbeard’s unprotected face. The force of the lead lifted the man clear off his feet, throwing him backward so hard that his armored shoulders clanged onto the paving fully eight feet from where he had stood.
At this second shot, a mob of at least a dozen of the helmeted men poured from among the outbuildings, shouting and waving those long, heavy swords. With only four rounds left in the shotgun, Foster dropped the two gunmen first As the two closest men tumbled, the mob stopped, wavered for a moment, then came on again, but more slowly this time, clearly no longer so sure of themselves.
Hurriedly, Foster jerked shells from the shell vest and fed four into the gun. Snapping his lanyard to the ring of his pistol, he drew it, jacked a round into the chamber, then removed the clip and replaced it with a full one.
“Six shells in the Winchester, eight in the .45,” he mused to himself, aloud. “I may not get all the bastards, but they’ll damn well know they’ve been in a firefight!” He loosened the trench knife in its scabbard.
‘Td forgotten, after ail these years,” he thought. “Forgotten how exhilarating this kind of thing can be. I wonder why I didn’t stay in the army after Korea?”
When the vanguard of the enemy—now grown to more than a score, as more men trickled out from among the outbuildings—had gotten to the bodies of the three gunmen, Foster opened fire, carefully, making every lead slug count He got five before they broke; a sixth one he shot in the back.