boil some water, sir.”
Granthon spoke up. “I’ve got one in my pack.”
The lieutenant left, and Tims watched as Will trimmed the points from the quills, leaving a blunt end with a large hole. “What are you doing?” asked the soldier.
“We’re going to take the point out of him, but I don’t want the barbs to tear him up,” said Will. Using his knife, he cut the entry hole in the wounded soldier’s chest a little wider. Then he inserted first one and then the other quill into the wound, slipping them over the barbed points.
“Start pulling on the shaft,” said Will. “Slowly.” Tims began pulling, while Will made sure each quill remained firmly over the tips of the barbs. Half a minute later, the head of the bolt was out, followed by a slightly stronger flow of blood. “Put pressure on it until we can clean it. I’ll start on the other one.”
Moving to the other man, he repeated the process with Granthon’s help. Then he instructed them to start a fire while he started searching for herbs. “Bring it to a boil and put some of the linen we cut into the water while I’m looking,” he told them.
He didn’t have much hope of finding anything useful, such as yarrow. It was the wrong time of the year and the terrain didn’t favor that plant, but he studied the grasses around them anyway. Eventually he settled on a coarse bush that grew in clumps not far from the road. In that strange way he had previously discovered, he could tell that the bush wasn’t edible, but neither was it poisonous, and he got the sense that it might keep the wound from festering.
Will gathered several large handfuls of the leaves and then returned. Once the linen had been boiled, he removed two large squares and used them to make two small pouches, which he filled with leaves. Returning to the pot, he dipped them in the still-boiling water for a minute and then removed them.
He was hoping that the heat had softened the leaves sufficiently, and he used the pommel of his knife to crush them against the side of the pot to help bruise them further. That done, he waited for them to cool and then dressed the men’s wounds with them before repeating the process all over again for the soldiers with leg wounds.
The sixth man had already passed away.
Together, the three of them waited with the injured soldiers until Doctor Guerin rode up an hour later. The chirurgeon examined the wounds carefully before addressing them, “Who did this?”
Tims and Granthon said nothing, so finally Will answered, “I guess you mean me, sir.”
“Who told you to draw the bolts? These men could have died!” said the doctor angrily. “And what’s in these poultices?”
Will explained what he had done, and after a few minutes the doctor was somewhat mollified. “You’ve had some training. Who told you about the trick with the feathers?”
“My mother, sir, she’s a midwife in Barrowden,” he answered.
“Hmmph!” said Doctor Guerin. “Well, I guess she knew what she was about, though I wouldn’t expect a midwife to have known how to extract a barbed head. How about the plant you used?”
“I don’t know the name of it, but I’ve seen her use it on wounds before,” Will lied.
“I guess we’ll leave it for now,” said the doctor, “but I’ll change it once the baggage carts get here. You men should return to your squads.”
***
That evening all the talk was about their brief engagement. As Will and his squad mates sat on their bedrolls, Dave asked him, “How did you see those soldiers?”
“The sun reflected off of one of their helms, I think,” said Will. “After that I just kept looking until I saw one of them pop his head up.”
“You got lucky,” said Corporal Taylor. “It was pretty cloudy today.”
Sven piped up, “I’m more surprised one of them was foolish enough to stick his head up. They were good enough to fool the scouts.”
“You must feel pretty stupid,” groused Dave. “All it got us was five men wounded and one dead. We didn’t kill a single one of them.”
Sven glared at the ex-cutpurse. “Shut up. People wouldn’t know what a damned idiot you were if you didn’t talk.”
“It’s the truth!” protested Dave. “Actually, now that I look back, I wish I’d been wounded. Those guys get to take it easy back in Branscombe.”
Corporal Taylor spoke up, “You should be glad he spotted them. Otherwise we