Franke and Axel were not at all keen to try ‘special tactics,’ but then again, they were not at all keen to argue the toss with Heinrich. He outlined the plan, shouting over the rumble of the cart wheels like this,
‘We are on a straight, leading to a hairpin; the road below comes back underneath us. You must leap from the fast cart, slide down the cliff face and then jump out into the road and shoot the driver. Even if you miss, you will succeed in halting their progress as the cart will definitely be slowed if it has to run over your bodies. You must do this for the glory of France!’
Franke looked at Axel. Axel looked at Franke. They both looked mutinously at Heinrich who produced his sword. Franke and Axel jumped. It was not as bad, jumping from a speeding donkey cart, as they had supposed and they both managed not to injure themselves in the fall. ‘Sliding down the cliff’, which sounds easy, when you say it, proved to be rather more demanding. Both guards tried hard to give the concept their best shot, however they were both too afraid of falling to really let go and slide. ‘Stuttering down the cliff’ would have been a more accurate description, and their hesitant progress angered Heinrich who had leaned out of the back of the cart to shout directions. He was on the point of ordering the other guards to start shooting at them, when, fortuitously, they slipped and began to roll down the cliff.
‘That’s more like it!’ he yelled encouragingly, ‘go on; get down there!’
Franke and Axel eventually landed, battered, bruised but still breathing on the roadway below. Surprisingly, they had retained their weapons and what could charitably be described as ‘their wits.’ They dragged themselves into an upright position, just in time to see Banshee and Beowulf’s cart bearing down on them. Due to the extreme speed of Banshee and Pedro’s reckless driving skills, they had only the two or three minutes it would take for the cart to reach them in which to get ready, aim and bring the chase to an immediate end by shooting the driver. As it was, they both shot early and missed; reloaded, aimed again, and missed, contemplated reloading, realised that there was not enough time for another shot; thought about Heinrich’s plan of getting run over to slow down the cart, decided against that and threw themselves against the cliff wall as Beowulf and the Louis’ trundled by.
‘Get down to the next level! If you miss again, jump on board,’ screamed Heinrich furiously as his cart passed the cowering guards, who obediently scurried across the road in between Heinrich’s cart and Eugene D’Orbergene’s and, once again, hurled themselves down the cliff face.
‘If they fail,’ I have a plan, shouted D’Orbergene to Heinrich, ‘It may be crazy, but it just might work!’
Heinrich shuddered and hoped that the two guards would fall awkwardly and block the road. In the meantime he contended himself by shouting, ‘Go faster!’ at Rousseau.
‘Ees a beet dangerous, thees jumpeeng een thee road,’ observed Pedro to Beowulf.
‘Just continue to drive, we will escape them in the town,’ said Beowulf.
‘Eef we make eet!’
‘Where was I?’ asked Roscow, ‘I remember! I was explaining that we came to France, possibly to help Louis and depose Louie-Louie at the request of Marshall Gney; but we might also have been going to depose Louie-Louie, in order to annoy the Pope and please the Duke of Jutland; however, that means that we might also have to consider not deposing Louie-Louie on the grounds that not deposing Louie-Louie would really infuriate the Duke of Jutland, against whom Beowulf understandably holds a grudge. If that wasn’t complicated enough, when we got here the Britons asked us to depose both Louis’ and restore Lewis here to his rightful throne-’
‘Which is what you are doing, isn’t it?’ asked Amarilla, anxiously looking at Lewis; who did seem to be doing a good job of keeping up with the conversation, which was being held in English for his benefit.’
‘Is it?’ demanded both Louis’ anxiously, looking at Roscow. At this point Roscow realised what an error it had been to start this particular conversation. He shrugged,
‘I don’t really know,’ he explained truthfully, ‘does it really matter who we pick?’
He was mightily relieved to be interrupted by Pedro shouting ‘Look out!’ again.
Franke and Axel landed on the next stretch of road with a loud thump that would have cheered Heinrich greatly if they had not immediately begun to move.
‘The fools are still alive,’ he muttered, as his hopes of having a human roadblock receded.
Franke was limping badly and Axel had hurt his arm, neither had managed to keep hold of their crossbows. They did not look as if they would present any kind of challenge to the cart of Beowulf which had just completed another hairpin and was clomping towards them with all the speed of a rather tired donkey pulling a very heavy load.
This was not the case. Showing a degree of resourcefulness that had not been there before, that could be attributed either to their fear of Heinrich, or a blow to the head; they began to pile rocks up in the road.
‘’Ees rocks!’ shouted Pedro, ‘What shall we do?’
‘Hit them,’ said Beowulf calmly, thinking to himself that this was one of those times when a belief in fatalistic determinism and the general unimportance of human life was a great comfort.
‘They’re going to hit them,’ shouted Heinrich triumphantly, ‘Get in there, boys!’
Axel and Franke, who had stayed at their post until the last moment, determinedly building the rock pile, threw themselves out of the way. Franke, remembering Heinrich’s admonition, grabbed hold of the edge of the cart and pulled himself upwards. Axel mistakenly jumped the other way and crashed down the cliff face towards the next straight on the road.
Franke pulled mightily and found himself face to face with Louie-Louie,
‘Your Highness!’ he gasped, ‘rescue is at hand!’
In the light of Roscow’s revelations, Louie-Louie couldn’t decide whether it was more dangerous to be rescued than captured; however, before he could decide; Banshee dodged, and the cart hit the pile of rocks. The impact made a terrible crunching sound and the left hand wheel came loose and began to judder. All the people in the cart were thrown down into its centre, apart from Beowulf and Pedro who held on to the driving seat. Franke was thrown up into the air. He soared over Beowulf’s cart and landed directly in front of Heinrich’s. Quicksilver was forced to swerve and Heinrich’s cart also hit the stones, but with slightly less of an impact.
‘I’ve seen enough of this incompetence!’ shouted D’Orbergene from the second cart, ‘I’m going for it!’ He began to enact his plan.
In the cart, the situation had deteriorated.
‘Thief,’ shouted Louis, pummelling his brother, as the cart bumped along.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ wailed Louie-Louie, half heartedly fighting back, ‘It is not fair that you got all the stuff, just because you were born first.’
‘But he wasn’t born first,’ argued Amarilla, who was trying to crawl out from under the struggling Louis’, ‘Lewis was.’
In the panic following the bump everyone had resorted to their native French.
‘Speak English, please!’ pleaded Lewis who had extended a hand to Amarilla, helping her back to a seat.
‘Thee wheel, I theenk ‘ee come off soon!’ warned Pedro.
‘Just drive,’ laughed Beowulf, ‘we’ll probably live!’
‘Look at that!’ said Roscow pointing behind them, as he saw D’Orbergene put his plan into action.
D’Orbergene was a true ‘man’s man.’ He was a daredevil; he was reckless, wild and foolish. He was these things because that was how men, who impressed other men, impressed other men. He knew how things were done and he did them. He was no lily-livered, backsliding, yellow-bellied, weak-at-the-knees, half-hearted milksop. He saw his chance and he took it. In this particular case what he did was particularly foolish, although it would surely have won the approbation of many manly, like minded males who were just as stupid as he was.
Firstly, he steered his donkey to the cliff edge,
where he cut the donkey free, enabling the terrified beast to stagger away from the precipice and into the path of Cardinal Bull’s cart. D’Orbergene had lined his cart up to try the ‘sliding down the cliff’ stunt, but this time in a cart. Most of the other guards in the wagon had the sense to bail out before he took them over the precipice, so only D’Orbergene and a pike man, who had a bad case of hero worship and an underdeveloped sense of danger, were still in it as it slid over the edge and accelerated down the nearly sheer rock face beneath.
‘This is the way to get ahead!’ cried D’Orbergene.
‘Weeeee!’ yelled the pike man whose name was Giscard.
D’Orbergene was correct in one important sense; he was now getting ahead of Beowulf’s cart: but in a much more important sense, he was wrong. For ‘this’ to be ‘the way’, ‘this’ would need to be somehow controllable, or perhaps even, ‘survivable’. As it was, the direct effect of steering the cart over the edge was to have it plummet, at an ever increasing velocity down the cliff face. The wheels, bounced, the frame shuddered, the structure rattled but by some means held together until it hit the stretch of track below; here the horizontal plane of the road acted as a dynamic emergency brake and ripped the wheels from the cart.
‘Oh,’ moaned D’Orbergene.
‘Weeeee!’ shouted Giscard, whose foolishness seemed to be of the resilient kind.
For a moment it looked as if D’Orbergene’s mad plan had paid off, as the cart slowed, slithering across the mountain track, promising to block the road.
‘Aha!’ he shouted triumphantly, as the cart teetered on the edge. He leaned back towards the hill in the vain belief his weight could slow the cart’s edge bound progress.
‘Weeeee!’ squeaked Giscard as the cart just failed to hold and slid over the edge again. From then on it was a lost cause; the cart careered rapidly down each of the remaining slopes, hitting each straight of the road, cracking and buckling it’s structure, before crashing off the road altogether into the woods on the outskirts of town.
Beowulf watched it disappear with a smirk of satisfaction and listened carefully to enjoy hearing one more ‘Weeeee!’ drifting up through the night air, before the much louder sounds of carnage and destruction.
‘That’s one third of the pursuit accounted for,’ he told Pedro.
‘Thee wheeel, eet ees just steel weeth us,’ Pedro observed, ‘wee may not bee compleetlee deestroyed after all!’
Heartened by this favourable report, the argument in the back of the cart kicked off again.
‘Lewis is the rightful King of France!’ declared Amarilla with passion, ‘he is the first born, and he was his Father’s choice!’
‘We’ve never heard of him, and he can’t even speak French!’ declared Louis with contempt.
‘I think you fancy him!’ added Louie-Louie with more than a trace of jealousy.
‘I think you’re right, brother!’ said Louis in an unprecedented show of fraternal accord.
‘You two; be quiet!’ ordered Lewis, ‘if Amarilla says that I am the King of France, then that’s how it is.’ He smiled at her in what he hoped was a winning way.
‘Really!’ sneered Louis in disgust.
Meanwhile, the cart had creaked on and turned another hairpin; this left them still pursued by Heinrich and Bull who were gaining on them due to the damaged wheel. Also, in front of them was Axel, who had somehow survived his last slide down the cliff and now stood facing the oncoming cart. Something must have happened to him on his rocky descent down the mountainside; he pulled himself to his feet, like a gladiator. He glared at the oncoming cart and let out a feral growl,
‘This is for Franke!’ he shouted and began to limp towards the cart. His appearance frightened Banshee, who swerved away from him, swinging the back of the cart right to the edge of the narrow track. Pedro straightened the frightened donkey, but Axel had managed to grab hold of her bridle and was trying to climb onto her back. At the same time Heinrich’s cart had come very close up behind.
‘We’ve got them,’ he shouted excitedly, ‘prepare to board!’
The guards had swarmed to the front of the cart and were looking to jump across.
‘Rescue me!’ shouted Louie-Louie, standing up.
‘Sit down,’ said Roscow, who had jumped to his feet and moved to the back of the cart, ready to repel the guards.
‘Get down,’ shouted Beowulf to Roscow, who dived into the body of the cart. He was just in time to do this, as Beowulf, in a desperate move had wrenched the reins from Pedro, and in a move similar to D’Orbergene had steered Banshee off the side of the road.
Fortunately the off road area, at this point, had slightly widened out and instead of the earlier cliffs there was merely a steep, scrub and boulder filled slope to navigate. The cart skidded, bumping over the rough terrain causing Axel to lose his grip and fall. Banshee whinnied with relief. Axel, grunted, bounced and was left behind.
Heinrich had chosen to follow Beowulf, but the uneven ground made it impossible for him to get close enough to enable his guards to jump across. They were however, still able to keep in close pursuit, as Beowulf steered the cart round in a gradual semi circle, aiming to cut the corner and rejoin the road on the next straight.
Bull, who had not followed this manoeuvre, was still on the road, and because of the better surface, was now travelling far quicker than Beowulf. He ordered his driver to accelerate and their donkey (named ‘Ironhead’ for his stubbornness and determination) surged forward trying to cut Beowulf off and prevent him regaining the road. As they swung around the second to last hairpin before the village it was apparent that Ironhead had the edge in speed and was going to be able to cut off Banshee’s path to the road.
‘Go faster in the name of all that is Holy!’ shouted Bull in anticipation, ‘Let us crush the unbeliever. Let us swat this damnable insect like the louse he is. Go on, go on!’
Ironhead, enthused by the frenzied Cardinal and his own natural inclination, dug deep and produced even greater effort. He was (as far as a small donkey pulling a heavy cart can be) flying.
Beowulf who had seen this danger and realised that his path on the road was going to be blocked, countered by pulling hard on the reins.
‘Make him stop!’ he shouted at Pedro.
‘Thee wheel!’ cried Pedro in warning. As Beowulf and Pedro had pulled the reins to slow Banshee, the cart had slid and the loose wheel had hit a rock and finally abandoned its valiant effort to stay with the cart. With a splintering sound it separated from the axel and bounced off down the mountainside. The cart slowed and slid further, causing Bull’s cart, which had kept going, to speed past it. Heinrich had also been forced to break heavily in order to not run into the back of Beowulf’s cart.
The three carts were now lined up on the straight approaching the last bend before the village. Bull’s cart, which was laden with guards, was first and travelling very quickly (Ironhead having, as it were, ‘got the bit between his teeth). Beowulf’s cart came next. Banshee was obviously labouring to keep the heavy, one wheeled cart moving in something approaching a straight line. The people in the back had all lost their balance again as the cart bumped and lurched along. Heinrich’s cart was just behind them, but moving much more capably. Heinrich, Brutus and the other guards were massing ready to board the injured cart as soon as it was possible to do so. It was at this moment that Naiman decided to intervene.
He had followed the chase down the mountainside, marvelling at the reckless antics of Franke and Axel and the enormous stupidity of D’Orbergene. If he had not been working he would have viewed it all as a splendid entertainment, however, as he was working, he was alert, focussed and dangerous. He had been delighted to find that Burro Rapido was, although not in any way at all a racehorse, easily able to keep pace with the overloaded donkey carts. He had been able to remain discreetly behind Bull, conserving his mount’s strength, until Ironhead’s great surge of speed had surprised him and left them behind.
This h
ad left him ideally placed for what he had in mind. He was now just behind Heinrich’s cart that had slowed significantly to avoid running into the back of Beowulf, as both carts had rejoined the road.
‘Go Burro,’ he whispered, and the sprightly mule had trotted around the side of Heinrich’s cart. He drew alongside,
‘Good evening!’ he shouted at Heinrich, ‘And a very fine evening it is too!’
Heinrich stared at the stranger in disbelief. Heinrich was involved in a wild downhill chase on a treacherous mountain track and an odd looking fellow in black had just ridden up beside him and wished him a good evening?
He was still thinking it over when the stranger produced a small hand crossbow and shot him in the chest.
Heinrich stared in surprise at the bolt that had embedded itself in the armour on his chest. Then, without a word he fell backwards into Brutus and Rousseau, causing the driver to lose the reins. Without guidance, Quicksilver veered uphill and off the track. As she ran on, crashing through the rocks and scrub the guards tumbled out of the cart until finally it overturned and she stopped. Brutus, who had fallen out on the first bump sat up and spoke to the prone figure nearest him.
‘That was close! I thought I was a goner there!’
Heinrich, who was lying very still, had no answer to that.
Naiman rode on and was about to grab the back of Beowulf’s cart when he was distracted by what was happening ahead.