M3C9 - Osprey Eyes

The sun was barely up. Gray dawn.

We flew. We looked at stuff. We demorphed. We remorphed. We flew some more. The sun was coming up and we still had not seen anyone who we thought was Visser Four.

However, I’d seen some really cool armor. Mostly on the French side. The English guys looked pretty raggedy. And about half of them seemed to have serious digestive problems. Every five minutes you’d see one of the English soldiers run off into the bushes and … well, let me put it this way: What they did you don’t really want to see, especially with high-power osprey eyes.

I was over the English camp for about the twentieth time. The head guys, including this guy I thought might be the king, were attending an old-fashioned mass. You know, in Latin.

Their third mass. Which made me wonder if they had any hope of winning. I mean, one church service, maybe. But three? That’s not a sign of confidence. That’s more like “I’ll be there any minute now, Lord, so have Saint Peter make up my bed.”

The guys themselves, knights, soldiers, archers, and so on, were a nasty-looking bunch of humans. No one looked like they’d washed their clothes any time this century. Faces were dirty. Teeth were rotted and I mean yellow-and-black, gnarled-looking rotted. They were pompous, swaggering knights and whatever, who had literally four and a half teeth in their whole head.

And speaking of heads, here’s a clue: You didn’t want to have really good eyesight and see these guys’ hair. We’re not just talking fleas. We’re talking lice. And not one or two. Every head was like a Manhattan of lice. A Hong Kong of fleas. There were crawling little bugs packed onto some of these guys like fans at a Phish concert.

And skin? Scabs, rashes, bumps, boils, warts, things you thought might be beetles stuck on their faces but that were actually moles.

It was pockmarked city. Virtually every face looked like someone had fired a shotgun at it. Deep holes you could almost stick a finger into.

Smallpox, of course.

It was not an attractive crowd. English or French, it didn’t matter, except that the French had more horses and cooler armor.

Ax wheeled through the sky, twenty feet above me, closer to the French lines.

<I do not mean to insult your ancestors, Marco, but if the Yeerks had arrived in this era they would have left to find some other species to infest. These humans have all the parasites they could possibly support.>

<Oh yeah? What were Andalites like three, four hundred years ago?>

<We were relatively backward technologically,> Ax sniffed, <but we had managed to discover cleaning agents. These humans are universally filthy.>

<They are … Hey! That’s it! Jake! Rachel! Everyone! These guys are all dirty and lice-ridden and pockmarked!>

<It took you three hours to notice that?> Rachel demanded. <You’re a genius, Marco.>

<Well, duh, Rachel, guess who wouldn’t be all skanky?>

<Visser Four! Of course!> Cassie said. <He has a twentieth-century body! Twentyfirst century. He won’t have smallpox or lice or bad teeth!>

<That’s it,> Jake agreed. <Look for someone clean! That’ll be our boy.>

The sun was rising above the horizon now. The mass was breaking up. It didn’t look like they’d have another. I guess three were enough.

The guy I thought was probably the English king was hanging out with some of his boys, all laughing very loudly the way people do when they’re scared peeless but want to look cool.

I took a look at him. No, he did not have a twenty-first-century body. He was about as skanky as anyone. I checked out his boys, a bunch of burly-looking troublemakers. I guess they were his main knights, but if it hadn’t been for the chain mail and the swords you’d have figured them for a bunch of Mafia hit men.

They weren’t all buff like some Schwarzenegger action hero. Most were beefy, even fat. I doubted any of these guys had ever even heard the word salad. But they weren’t fat fat, they were like, “Ah-hah! Your blade merely penetrated my belly fat and one kidney! A flesh wound! Have at you, sir!”

These boys were trouble.

And now the king was talking to his troops. He jumped up on a fallen tree and started bellowing and waving his arms like a politician or a football coach.

I couldn’t hear everything he said, but the basic idea was, “Men, we’re outnumbered, but we’re here for a good reason, which is that I want to be king of France, so let’s go kick some French butt and we’ll all be mighty pleased with ourselves on the off-chance that we actually survive.” Basically the same kind of heroic nonsense we Animorphs tell ourselves before we go into battle.

Then, quite suddenly, I saw him.

Not a knight. One of the archers. He was carrying a bow and a quiver full of arrows. His clothes were the same uniform as the other archers: a sleeveless leather jacket decorated with steel studs over a chain-mail shirt; and pants that looked like they’d been sewed together by seamstresses with only three fingers and a ballpoint pen for a needle. He was with a bunch of archers moving toward the French lines.

<Got him!> I alerted the others. <Over there at the tree line. He’s an English archer.>

<On our way,> Jake said. <Stay cool. We need the right moment.>

<I think this battle is getting ready to start. If you want to buy some popcorn and Raisinets better hurry.>