He laid me carefully against a heap of rubble, where I sat and coughed the filth out of my lungs. I was drenched in a film of blood and sweat and dirt. My heart rattled like a drum. The pain in my ribs throbbed in time to my heartbeat until I felt dizzy with shock and nausea.
Yet I was fortunate. I had come out of that evil vault alive and reasonably whole, which could not be said for many of my comrades.
The earthly remains of Roger Floure were carried past me on a stretcher, his head a mangled ruin, the broken end of a pick still buried in his scalp. Save for his forked ends of his russet beard, now slick with blood, I would not have recognised him.
Henry was among the last to emerge from the mine. His fine silver armour was spattered with dirt, and he carried a wounded miner over his shoulder.
“Water,” he snapped. His companion, Sir Robert Umfraville, carried none, so I took the leather flask from my belt and offered it to him.
Henry took the flask with a curt nod of thanks, and knelt to put the nozzle to the miner’s bruised and swollen lips. The man was insensible, but the water revived him. As he coughed and spluttered, Henry dropped the flask on his lap and straightened up.
“God’s teeth,” he said, grimacing at the long line of wounded and bedraggled men being helped out of the tunnel, “what folly was this? I swore never to gamble with the lives of my men, and yet I have done just that. Christ forgive me.”
“At least the mine has held firm,” remarked Sir Robert in his thick border accent, “once the hole is sealed up, work can resume.”
Henry wiped a smear of dirt from his scarred cheek. “No,” he said firmly, “I was a fool to try and undermine the walls. We have few enough men, without risking their lives in such a perilous venture. The mines shall be filled in.”
Sir Maurice Bruyne appeared, supported by two esquires. I had lost sight of him in the fight. Blood trickled between the joints of his leg-armour, and he was clearly sore wounded.
“What cheer, Sir Maurice?” asked the King, “I blame myself for the wounds you earned today. My own physician shall attend to them.”
“My thanks, sire,” the veteran knight gasped, “though I am already in Your Majesty’s debt. But for your timely intervention, we would all have perished.”
Henry shrugged that off. “I thought to inspect the mines,” he said, “and ended by slaying a French knight. He was a valiant man. I wish I had asked his name.”
This was how our nobles - true nobility, high-born lords of ancient stock, not bastard country esquires like myself - spoke of war. It was a game to them, hedged about with the laws of chivalry, in which one politely asked a man’s name and lineage before driving a sword into his head.
Sir Maurice turned to me when the King strode off to talk with Kilmaine. “Still alive, then, Page,” he said, “I see you took a knock or two. Will you write a few verses of this day’s work?”
“Unlikely, my lord,” I replied, “fighting in the dark, like so many blind rats, is not for me. I would rather forget it.”
He sniffed. “All part of a soldier’s duty. Perhaps you are not suited to the military life.”
He limped away and left me to chew on his words. Was I really cut out to be a warrior? The savage brawl in the mine, and the violent death of so many comrades, shook my resolve.
For a year I had cheated death. How much longer could I hope to evade his scythe? I needed a respite from war, and to get out of harm’s way without sacrificing my reputation.
God took pity on me, for once, and offered a way out.
18.
“Poor men, women and children who had nothing to live on, also priests, women, young women, bourgeois and elderly who were in need and who had nothing else or no other way to help them.”
This was how a French chronicler described the poor citizens of Rouen, driven out of the city by their own people to starve in the ditch between the walls and our siege lines.
The chronicler did not lie. With my own eyes I witnessed them herded out of the gates at spear-point, many hundreds of helpless starving wretches, considered useless mouths by the garrison and thus expelled to live or die, as God or King Henry willed.
This happened near the end of December, the coldest and bleakest part of the year. Our army was slowly throttling the city to death, and Henry was prepared to sit and wait until every living thing inside had expired. He would have Rouen for his own, even if it meant turning the place into a mass grave.
Men become prey to sentiment as they get older. My eyes cloud with tears when I remember the suffering of the people in the ditch. Even now I can hear some dim echo of the babies, wailing as they cried for their mother’s milk. I saw them, suckling in vain at the teats of their dead mothers, who had perished of sheer hunger and exhaustion. A few infants were born inside that nightmare pit, and hoisted in baskets over the city walls for baptism, before being sent back down to die.
Stripped of their humanity by the madness of hunger, the starving fed on the dead to keep themselves alive for a few more hours. Women prostituted themselves for a few scraps of food, and rutted with any man who would have them, careless of who watched.
There were plenty of hard cases in our army who pretended to care naught for the suffering of French peasants. Even their hearts must have bled a little at the sight of so much relentless misery. There were also a fair number of decent men, with wives and children back home in England, who could not bear to look upon the horrors being perpetrated in the ditch. More than one of our nobles and captains went down on their knees before the king, and begged him to allow the citizens to pass through our lines, or at least feed them.
I have heard it said that Henry callously refused all such pleas, and sent no aid to the people in the ditch. This story became accepted as truth over the years, and even now his name is a curse in Normandy - not for all the men he slaughtered in battle, or the towns and cities he conquered, but for what passed at Rouen.
The story is a lie. True, Henry would not let the citizens pass, and gave them no official help. I think he saw their expulsion as a deliberate ploy on the part of the French, to force him into showing the weakness of compassion. If he had bowed to the pressure, all would have seen that the would-be conqueror of France was not the man of iron he pretended to be.
Henry was not tricked so easily. He let it be known, through word passed via his officers, that any man who wished to might take food to the citizens in the ditch, without being punished for it. Thus he squared his conscience and rebuffed the efforts of the French to discredit him.
Not that he regarded the suffering of the citizens as his responsibility. “Who put them in the ditch?” he demanded of a French envoy, “not I. It is none of my affair if your people choose to abuse each other.”
In my poem I was careful to praise the king’s great charity and mercy:
“Henry hath now more compassion,
Than doth the entire French nation,
That God who is full of might,
Grant him grace to win his rights...”
The Siege of Rouen now ran to some fourteen hundred lines, jotted down on a great heap of parchment leaves I kept stuffed in a satchel in my tent. The common soldiers cared little for my verses, but they were popular among the nobles, who warmed to my shameless flattery and exaggeration of their deeds.
As the poem grew more famous, until I heard whispers that the king himself was fond of it, so my desire to quit the army increased. I was sick of the dreary, never-ending siege, and feared I would run mad if exposed for much longer to the vice and cruelty and squalor of that terrible ditch.
Desertion was too risky. The king treated deserters the same way as looters, and strung up their bodies for the crows. I had my precious reputation to think of, and no desire to return to the life of a fugitive, hunted by English and French alike.
Salvation arrived one chill January eve. The night was crystal-clear, and I lay stretched out on my bedroll and gazed at the stars. They twinkled like so many tiny lan
terns, scattered across the velvet arch of the sky.
My mind was once again being drawn to heretical thoughts. The church taught that God ruled the heavens and the stars, just as He ruled us. Some believed that the pattern of the stars could be used to predict the future, though the church generally disapproved of this astrology or ‘magic science’, as it was known. My old tutor in Kingshook, Father Stephen, had dabbled in this practice, and once told me that Jewish scholars equated the twelve astrological signs with the twelve tribes of Israel.
What if, I wondered, there were other civilisations, somewhere out there in the broad universe, where faith in God was unknown? Where the sacrifice of Christ meant nothing? What if it was only mankind, stranded on our little planet, just one star among countless billions, who held to the truth of the scriptures? After all, mankind had written them.
What if man had invented God?
“Page.”
A stern voice jolted me out of these dangerous musings. I sat up and reached for my dagger.
“My apologies,” said the newcomer, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He was little more than a tall silhouette in the light of my supper fire. I glimpsed the red and gold of Plantagenet livery under his dark woollen cloak. The light also sparkled off the gold rings on his fingers, and the jewelled hilt of his sword.
“Come,” he said, his face still hidden in darkness, “the king wants you.”
I wordlessly got up and followed him, through the neat rows of tents, torches and banners and pavilions and hanging shields, the alert sentries and groups of men yawning about their campfires.
To the east rose the vast shadow of the city wall, a permanent and unbreakable landmark, speckled with lights near the summit. The quiet waters of the Seine flowed past to the south, and in all other directions stretched the rich, undisturbed fields and forests of Normandy.
My guide picked his way through the camp with the ease and silence of a ghost. I stumbled after him, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, and almost tripped over the guy-ropes of Sir Robert Umfraville’s pavilion.
Sir Robert’s esquire, who slept outside like a faithful hound, leaped up and shook his fist at me. I ignored him and followed my mysterious companion towards the royal pavilion.
This miniature palace of silk and canvas dwarfed the lesser pavilions that surrounded it. Twelve men-at-arms, all wearing the cross of Saint George, guarded the entrance, and the interior was lit by the rosy glow of braziers.
There was nothing unusual in King Henry receiving visitors after dark. Like Caligula, he only needed a few hours of sleep, and frequently worked long into the night. I often saw his nobles, pale and heavy-eyed after being forced to attend a royal council that lasted into the small hours.
My guide exchanged salutes with the guards, and beckoned at me to follow him inside. Gulping down my nerves, I ducked through the flap.
The interior was warm and stuffy, and blazed with light. I stood blinking foolishly, trying to get my bearings, until someone touched me on the arm.
“Kneel,” whispered the stern voice. Panic swept through me as I remembered I was in the royal presence, and dropped to one knee.
I kept my eyes fixed on the ground, which was covered in thick carpets displaying images of Jerusalem and Damascus and Constantinople, among others: all the great cities of Outremer and the Near East, worked in gold and silver thread. It was the great ambition of Henry’s life, after he had finished the necessary business of conquering France, to lead the united armies of Christendom in a Crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the infidel, once and forever. Alas, the pictures on the carpets were as close as he ever got to Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
The air was not only over-warm, but heavy with the odour of incense. There was a square of meadowsweet laid between the carpets, which gave off a pleasant smell when crushed underfoot. It made for a pleasant change from the stench of horse dung and unwashed bodies and gunpowder that permeated the camp.
“Rise, John Page,” said the King. Sweat trickled down my back as I slowly got to my feet and lifted my eyes to meet his.
Henry was seated on a high-backed couch, padded with red silk cushions. He wore a long, loose robe of some rich dark stuff, and sipped wine from a slender golden cup. Steam rose gently from the brim. Our warrior-king, it seems, was a martyr to the cold.
His armour, freshly oiled and polished, hung from a rack in the corner. I had never seen him out of his metal shell before. Without it he looked much smaller, almost delicate. I was shocked at how thin he was, and the tightness of the milk-white skin stretched across the fine bones of his face.
The only other soul present was my guide. He was unknown to me, a slim youth with buttery yellow hair and mild blue eyes. Doubtless some knight or esquire of the royal household.
The king set down his cup on a little silver table and laced his slender fingers together. “I saw you at the mines,” he said, his hazel eyes bright as they raked me over, “are you recovered from your wounds?”
“Yes, sire,” I replied truthfully. The pain in my ribs still irked me, and the livid black bruise would take weeks to fade, but there was no break or fracture.
“Can you ride?”
I tried not to wince. Riding would be sheer torture, especially over rough ground, though I dared not say as much. The king hadn’t summoned me to enquire after my health. He had thought of some use for me, and I lacked the courage to admit weakness to that cold, severe, priest-like countenance.
“Yes, sire,” I repeated.
Henry raised his left hand in a languid gesture of dismissal. The fair-haired youth bowed and ghosted out of the pavilion.
The king was silent for an uncomfortably long time. Henry studied me with cool, practical detachment, as he would any kind of weapon.
“My brother Clarence has agreed to lend me your services,” he said finally, “you are no ordinary man-at-arms, Page. I have read your verse. Gower and Chaucer might have scorned them, but I detect a certain wit.”
I ducked my head in recognition of the almost-compliment. “You honour me, sire,” I said, risking a smile.
A sense of outrage swelled inside my breast. I had been passed about among the royal brothers, from Gloucester to Clarence to the King, as though I was some chattel, with no say in my fate.
I was almost tempted to remind this royal icicle that I was a free-born Englishman of noble blood, at least on the maternal side. A loyal servant, not a slave.
“It is foolish to waste a man of unusual talents,” Henry went on before I could muster the courage to speak, “I have to make use of all the tools at my disposal. You were recommended to me.”
“Recommended, sire?” I said, “by whom?”
He snapped his fingers. A female figure detached itself from the darkness at the rear of the pavilion and strode into the light.
For a moment I forgot to breathe. The woman was Catherine, the French whore I lay with in Caen. She still wore her red shawl, though now her mass of curls was bound up in a linen coif, and she wore a dark blue woollen gown in place of a ragged smock.
She said nothing, though her blue eyes twinkled at me. There were gold studs in her ears, and more gold adorned her wrists and fingers. Her long knife, which she had used to slay the archer who tried to rape her, rested snugly inside a sheath lined with dark red velvet.
“I believe you two have met,” said Henry, “Lady de Santaella was good enough to spare me the details.”
There was a dry undertone to his voice. He took another prim sip at his wine, and for one terrible moment I thought he winked at me.
“Majesty,” I stuttered, “this woman is an enemy. With my own eyes I saw her kill two of our soldiers at Caen.”
Henry’s full lips twitched. “An enemy? If so, then you stand guilty of fraternising, Page. You need not describe her sins. I know them well enough. The deaths she caused were regrettable, though at least one was fully deserved. Had I caught the men who attempted to ravish her, I would have hanged them.
”
“My lady had a role to play,” he added, “she played it well, and brought me useful information concerning the citizens of Caen. Their virtues and vices. Who could be bought, and who could not. Things of that nature.”
I stared at Catherine. “You’re a spy,” I hissed, “why didn’t you tell me?”
She glanced at Henry for permission to speak, who granted it with a nod. “For that same reason,” she replied, “spies who reveal their true names to strangers cannot expect to live long.”
The heavy French accent had gone from her voice, replaced by something more exotic. Spanish, I thought, or maybe Portugese.
“But you’re perfectly willing to bed them,” I threw back with pointless malice. She merely grinned, and raised her delicately plucked eyebrows at me.
I was angry at being fooled, and yet intrigued. Henry had called her Lady de Santaella, which suggested noble blood. I could well believe it. She carried herself with the proud insolence of the high-born, and there were traces of refined breeding in her dark, angular features.
“Catherine the whore is just one of my guises,” she said, “my true name is Constanza de Santaella.”
“Lady Constanza is the daughter of a Castilian knight,” said Henry, “and widow to another. Her late husband, Ruy Garciá de Santaella, was a loyal friend to the English crown. His father fought for my ancestor, Prince Edward, at the Battle of Najéra. Before I first sailed for France, two years ago, Ruy came to England to offer his sword to our cause.”
Henry crossed himself. “He was a bold and valiant knight, and it was my good fortune to know him. Dysentery took him at Harfleur, as it did so many of our brave fellows.”
“Lady de Santaella hates the French, every bit as much as her late husband. Other men of her family also served Prince Edward, and she has lost a number of kinsmen to French swords.”
He talked of Constanza as though she wasn’t there, and the effect of his words was obvious. Her eyes sparkled with anger, and she gripped the hilt of her dagger until the knuckles turned white.
The Wolf Cub Page 15