Read No Law in the Land: (Knights Templar 27) for Free Online Page A

carefully. There was so much blood. If a man had been knocked down here, surely he would never have made it
     back to the main camp after losing all this blood.
    He heard voices. Retreating, he set his back to a tree, listening carefully, until he recognised one of them.
    ‘If you were trying to be quiet, you failed,’ he called.
    ‘Sweet Christ’s cods! Bill, what happened here?’
    ‘John, I wish I knew. All I can say is, whoever did this wasn’t just mad. A lunatic would have been far less effective.’
    ‘How could one man do this?’ John Weaver said. He looked about him, taking in the sight. At his side, Art Miller pulled a
     face at the odours.
    ‘It was a large gang. Question is, who were they?’

Chapter Two
    Woods north of Jacobstowe
    It had been a quiet night for Roger. The scene in the coppice last morning had shaken him more than he wanted to admit even
     to himself. Afterwards he had run quietly away. Before long he came to a vill, and crouched down, hiding. There was a woman
     in a little yard, calling and clucking to her chickens, a tall, strong woman, buxom and attractive, and he waited, watching
     her with something akin to longing, until she was done and went back inside, and he could hurry past and on to the north.
    No one wanted to be found near a scene like that, especially if a stranger to the area. Because if any man was ever to be
     thought a dangerous murderer, it was always easier to think such things of foreigners. Roger had no wish to be captured by
     men determined to find anyone who could suit the description of a stranger and outlaw.
    But it was not only the desire to put as many leagues as possible between himself and any posse that drove him on. It was
     also the memory of that appalling sight.
    In the past he had been used to such pictures of horror. There had been plenty of bodies to see after the French invasion
     of the territories about Saint Sardos, those of men and women, and none of them would come back to haunt him, he knew. Not
     even the little tableau of the two children would affect him. He had found them under a set of rugs, as though they had been
     hidden there with the heavy woollen material thrown over to conceal them, a little girl and a boy, neither more than four
     years old, if he had to guess. The boy had been cut almost entirely in half, as though someone had swung an axe at his breast.
     The girl’s head had been broken by a club or mace; her death would at least have been quick. Then the cloth had been cast
     over them again, untidily. Carelessly. They had been dealt with, so their covering could be returned.
    There had been many children slaughtered in Guyenne in the last months. Yes, he had come back to England to escape those sights
     now that the French officials were tightening their grip on the lands about Guyenne, but such things happened, and he had
     seen them, and he knew he was strong enough to survive this just as he had survived the others.
    No, the deaths themselves were not enough to give him sleepless nights or even to unsettle him. But he was disturbed now as
     he thought back to the scene.
    As he had entered the coppice, he had been prepared for it all. The smell of death lay over the place in the mizzly air like
     some foul miasma from a moorland bog, and he knew what he would see as soon as he reached it.
    He had stood silently a while, absorbing the images that came to him. A cart upended, the shafts pointing at the sky; a second
     collapsed where a wheel had been snapped away; two horses dead, one on its side, the other on its back, all four legs in the
     air, arrows in head and flanks, the rider nearby, with more arrows in his back. And another man near him, his head missing
     entirely. A woman … There were so many there, and none of them made any impression on him. He was a fighter – he had seen
     it all.
    Walking among them, he had found himself casting about carefully, for that was what a man did after a fight, but clearly