unharmed but with a tangle of splinters and kindling, held together with five cat-gut strings in my hand. I dodged the next blow, and hopped over a slash at my ankles, trying to get in close to use the misericorde – all the while, my brain yelling its inchoate warning – and as he was turning after his low sweep, I jumped forward, jabbed at him with the misericorde – a feint – and swung the wrecked vielle at his head. He avoided the blade with a neat half-turn but the rump of the smashed instrument pivoted around the back of his head, wrapping the cat-gut strings around his throat. Then I pulled. He dropped that wonderful sword and turned away, both his thin white hands flying to his neck to loosen the strangling cat-gut. I dropped the misericorde in turn, and leapt on his back, using my weight to drive him to the ground, my hands scrabbling for the cat-gut, wrenching it tight, the vielle strings cutting deeply into his long throat. I hauled for my life, with one hand on the neck of the instrument and one on the wreckage of the bridge. He gurgled wetly, his eyes bulged, his tongue protruded like some evil purple sausage as his body kicked and writhed under mine. I knew he was dying; all I had to do was hold on and pull the vielle strings tighter and tighter …
And then something exploded in the side of my chest, I heard the crack of bone as my body flew off the supine swordsman and flipped over. As I lay on my back, the cat-gut still in my grasp, still around the thin man’s neck, I saw a giant form, round as a glacial boulder, barely human, looming above me. I knew that I had been kicked in the ribs as I had never been kicked before; it felt like a hoof-blow from a fear-maddened stallion. I also knew what my brain had been screaming at me as I fought the swordsman: Where is his friend? Where is his giant, muscle-bound companion from the fireside? I knew now.
The ogre – for there was no way on God’s green earth that this monstrous fellow could have been wholly human – raised a gigantic foot, ready to stamp on my two wrists which were still half-hauling on the cat-gut and strangling the life out of the tall man. Hurriedly releasing the vielle strings, I pulled in my arms just as his foot came stamping down on the place where they had been moments before – and I swear I felt the earth shudder with the impact of his boot. I rolled away from the pair of them: the thin one, now kneeling and coughing and groping for his sword, and then rising, impossibly quickly, shining blade in hand; and the ogre, striding towards me with an insane gleam in his piggy little eyes. He appeared to be unarmed but, seeing his massive ham-like hands clenching and unclenching in front of him as he advanced on me, I knew that if I allowed myself to be caught by them, I was a dead man. My misericorde was gone, lost in the struggle, and I am ashamed to say that I did not hesitate for an instant. I turned and ran, as swiftly as I could with my damaged ribs. I ran like a craven hare into the trees behind me.
With a sword in my hand I fear no man; but unarmed against a first-class swordsman and a monstrous creature from some feverish nightmare … Anyway, enough of my poor excuses, I fled. I ran for my life. The ogre lumbered after me for twenty yards or so, panting and growling behind me like a bear, but my pain and fear drove me onwards and I soon lost him in the thick cover of the wood. As I ran, I could hear the shouts in German from a couple of men-at-arms on the walls. And above their harsh cries, I could make out the calls of my King in good, clean French, demanding to know what had happened beneath his prison tower. But he received no response from his loyal subject below. I needed all my wind just to run.
My ribs were giving me a deal of trouble. So much so that I found I could not climb the knotted rope that was still hanging down the side of the wall when I reached Tuckelhausen half