The Wolf Cub

by David Pilling

  Once again Henry risked his own person in combat. In the stifling hell of the mines I saw him fight hand-to-hand against the French commander, a knight named Arnaud Guillaume de Barbazon.

  Henry failed to kill Arnaud, which gave him a problem after Melun was conquered. He was furious with de Barbazon for putting up such a stout resistance, and wanted to execute him. The laws of chivalry forbade this, since he had engaged the man in single combat. Henry contented himself with hanging the man alive in an iron cage. The garrison met the same fate as their comrades at Caen and Melun.

  Herr Hartmann, I am sorry to say, was killed at Melun. A sharp-eyed marksman on the walls shot him as he stood outside his tent and drank his morning ale.

  The arrow hit my friend in the neck, just above the collarbone. Two archers carried him to a surgeon, who did his best to extract the barbed head with the aid of a knife and a red-hot iron.

  Surgery, especially battlefield surgery, is sheer butcher’s work. The surgeon was of the worst sort, a self-trained drunkard with an unsteady hand.

  Herr Hartmann was strapped down down to a wooden pallet inside a pavilion full of other wounded men, and subjected to the most appalling torture, worse than anything he suffered at the hands of the Baron at Red Keep.

  One of the archers who carried him to the pavilion knew he was my friend, and came to fetch me before the end. I hastened to the pavilion, and stood by while the wall-eyed fool who called himself a doctor poked and prodded at the arrow. He had broken off the shaft in his clumsy efforts to cut it out of my friend’s neck, and left a jagged fragment firmly stuck in the wound.

  There were far too many wounded for our surgeons to cope with, and many were simply dumped on the grass and left to die. A few of the lucky ones were dosed with poppy juice against the worst of their pain. Others shrieked and writhed on their blood-slathered pallets as surgeons and attendants laboured to saw off shattered limbs before they could turn bad.

  The pavilion stank like a charnel house, rank with the odours of sweat and blood and fear, mingled with something else, a sweet-rotten stench that is every soldier’s worst nightmare: gangrene.

  Herr Hartmann was semi-conscious. “Where am I?” he murmured, “something hit me....I fell...I knew nothing more...”

  I caught his wavering hand. “You were stung by an arrow,” I said gently, “take heart. You are in the best of care.”

  This was a lie, and he was too experienced a soldier to believe it. “No surgeons!” he moaned, “I’ll not have some wine-breathed sawbones cut me up like a side of beef! Let me die on my feet!”

  The pallet jumped as he strained against the leather bonds that held him down. At a sign from the surgeon, two pale young attendants laid their hands flat on his chest and forced him to lie still.

  “Bloody German,” growled the surgeon, “I have plenty of good Englishmen to tend to. If he doesn’t want to be treated, I’m happy to leave him be.”

  “No,” I said urgently, “he is in pain, and doesn’t know what he says. Please, for my sake, do what you can.”

  Muttering under his breath, he passed his knife to one of the attendants and reached for the cauterising iron, which lay among a heap of hot coals in a brazier.

  “Failed to cut the arrow out,” he muttered, his hot wine breath hanging in the air like a fume, “have to try and burn it out instead.”

  I looked away as he pressed the sizzling tip of the brazier against Herr Hartmann’s neck. My friend shrieked, and my throat and nostrils filled with the smell of roasting flesh.

  The agony caused him to swoon. He never woke, thank God, for the surgeon made an unholy mess of it. The arrowhead was finally extracted, a bloodied lump of iron, but by then the shadow of gangrene was already stealing over the ragged lips of the hole gouged into Herr Hartmann’s neck.

  “A pity,” said the surgeon, throwing the arrowhead into a bucket, “I thought I had saved him. Ah well, Decipimur speci recti, as Horace has it.”

  He patted me on the arm with his hand, still rank with Herr Hartmann’s blood. “To translate very roughly - we are deceived by the appearance of rightness.”

  It was tempting to knock the incompetent dolt to the floor, but my friend deserved some dignity in death. Brawling over his corpse would have been an insult to the memory of the only true friend I had made in France.

  I sat by him awhile, thinking on the times we had known. Often, when we were alone together in the great hall at Red Keep, he had spoken of his heretical beliefs, and his admiration of the Czech preacher, Jan Hus.

  “You are the only living soul I have told of my heresy,” he would say, “I trust you, John, more than I trust my own brother.”

  Now he was dead, and his secret would go with him to the grave.

  “It is my fate,” I murmured, folding his big, lifeless hands over his breast, “to be left alone in the world. My comrades die like flies, and yet God insists on keeping me alive. To what end? What purpose?”

  God sent no answers. In truth, I knew them already.

  30.

  Herr Hartmann was laid to rest in the cemetery of a little church outside Melun. The padre was dead or fled, so there was none to object as his body was lowered into French soil.

  The only mourners were myself and my household - Ralf, Pepin, and the five archers, all of whom followed me back to the wars. We had left Red Keep deserted, and the people to prosper or perish. I had ceased to think of them.

  Once my friend was buried, there was the question of what to do with his few possessions. His suit of heavy plate was far too big for me, so I sold it to a French armourer in Melun.

  “One cuirass with spaulders,” he muttered as he carefully inspected the ironmongery laid out on a bench in his shop, “one bascinet with visor, a pair of gauntlets, one mail corselet, a pair of greaves, a pair of sabatons...”

  He droned on, listing all the parts of the dead man’s harness, while I gazed sadly at the hollow metal shell that had once contained Herr Hartmann.

  “Part of this suit are old,” said the armourer, “and damaged in places. See the scars on the cuirass?”

  “The previous owner was a veteran of many wars,” I replied absently. He shook his head and muttered something unintelligible in French. In other circumstances he might have quibbled over the cost, but I was armed, and Melun had barely recovered from the slaughter and damage inflicted by our army in the recent siege. The evidence of English cruelty was all around him, and he was too sensible a man to risk becoming another casualty of war.

  “Twenty livres,” he said, “you won’t get a better price anywhere else.”

  Twenty livres at that time was roughly the same as fifteen English pounds, five times the amount King Henry gave me to set up a household at Red Keep. I accepted the offer, and left his shop with my saddle-bags bulging with coin. There was too much money for one horse to carry, so Herr Hartmann’s destrier had to carry some of the weight.

  The money was safely locked away in an iron chest, kept in the cellar of a guildhouse in the town centre, with my archers to guard it. I raised more funds by selling my late friend’s destrier to one of the Earl of Warwick’s knights. The beast was getting on in years, but still strong and hale, with good wind, and after some argument I got fourteen livres for him.

  It might be said that I profited from Herr Hartmann’s death. What of it? He had no more use for earthly chattels, and his kin were in far-off Westphalia. I had signed a new indenture with the army, and couldn’t travel to his brother’s damp little castle, high in the forested German hills, even I was so inclined.

  With the new-found wealth I was able to buy new gear for myself, and to draw up serious plans for the resurrection of the Company of Wolves. That had been my ambition, ever since I discovered my father’s old banner at the bottom of a strongbox at Steventon. Fate, and a chronic lack of cash, had conspired to undermine that ambition, but now I was in a position to realise it at last.

  First I bought some black silk and red and gold thread,
and hired a seamstress to create a new pennon, based on my father’s.

  “I want the same arms as these,” I instructed her, tossing the ragged bit of fabric on her lap, “a red wolf’s head, with golden eyes. Exactly the same. Understand?”

  She nodded and creased her toothless mouth into an ugly smile. I left her to it, and went off to buy a new bascinet and a breastplate of Milanese design.

  I had the breastplate inscribed with the word ‘Avaunt’, which Sir Roland had used as the signal to murder his cousin. His betrayal saved my life, and I had the word chiselled onto the steel as a constant reminder of the whims of fate, and the faithless nature of mankind. I wore the breastplate almost to this day, O Sultan, until your servants took it from me after my capture in the Hagia Sophia.

  Before I could leave the army and carve out a career as a mercenary captain, I had to fulfil the terms of my indenture. That Christmas was spent in Paris, where King Henry, his new ally Philip of Burgundy and the mad King Charles, entered the city with great pomp. The Paris mob, thinking this an augury of peace, welcomed us with cheers, and showered rose petals on our heads from the upper storeys of shops and houses.

  Henry left them in no doubt as to who was the master. He took the Louvre for his lodgings, where he kept the feast in royal splendour, while Charles and his threadbare household were packed off to the far less grand surroundings of the Hotel de Saint-Pol.

  I heard that Charles’ remaining servants chose to abandon their master, and left him alone to celebrate Christmas with a bowl of gruel and a single page for company. Consider, O Khan of Khans, the fate of this man, once the most feared and admired monarchs of Christendom, and have pity on his memory!

  There followed a lull in the war, due in part to the season, and to King Henry’s decision to return home and show off Queen Catherine to his English subjects. He left the Duke of Exeter in command of Paris, with a garrison of five hundred archers.

  While we waited for the King to return, I made the best use of my money. I had it fetched from Melun in a covered wagon, guarded by my archers, so I could hire more men. There were plenty of masterless soldiers in the capital - deserters, some of them, along with mercenaries of all Christian nations, and men who had either lost their old captains as a result of war or sickness.

  I was able to afford another thirteen hobelars, which made eighteen in total. Along with Ralf and Pepin, I now had the beginnings of a company. I was still a knight of the royal household, and my recruits had to sign formal indentures to join the king’s army. As soldiers of the King, they were paid out of army funds, and to ensure their loyalty I added a penny a day out of my own war-chest.

  “Don’t worry, lads,” I assured those who were reluctant to sign up for another year’s service, “this war will soon be over. Once we have the Dauphin’s head on a pikestaff, and King Harry has his rump on the throne of France, we can ride away and look to make our own fortunes.”

  “Where to, John?” was the question put to me by Constanza. She occasionally visited me in Paris, when she could spare the time from her various mysterious errands.

  I never asked my occasional lover about her work, and she rarely let slip any secrets. For all I knew, she may have kept an army of lovers scattered about France. Ours was a purely functional arrangement For all that, she seemed genuinely concerned for my future.

  “Will you go south,” she said as we lay together in my modest lodgings two streets away from the Louvre, “to the Italian city-states? There is always work for mercenaries there. You could be like your fellow countryman, Sir John Hawkwood, and end your days with rich estates in the Romagna and Tuscany. Your grateful employers might erect an equestrian statue of you, all in white marble, and place it beside the fresco of Hawkwood in the Duomo in Florence. Wouldn’t that be fine?”

  I agreed that it would, though hardly likely. “Italy is one prospect,” I admitted, “though I have another in mind.”

  “Where?” she asked, her eyes gleaming with an insatiable desire to know the thoughts and dreams of others, “east, perhaps, to Constantinople? The Greeks shower any man with gold if he brings them enough Turkish heads.”

  “Not so far east as that,” I answered, “Herr Hartmann used to speak of a war brewing in the Kingdom of Bohemia. I have a mind to go there.”

  She frowned. “Bohemia? A godless place, full of heathens and heretics. The country is nothing but mountains and forests and barren waste. You would hate it. No, you must not go to Bohemia, John. A mercenary captain cannot afford to follow his conscience.”

  For once, she failed to see into a man’s heart and divine the truth. Constanza assumed that I wished to ride east to fight the so-called heretics, inspired by Jan Hus to take up arms against the tyranny of the church. God knows how she would have reacted if I told her I dreamed of joining the heretics, and leading them in a glorious anti-crusade against the church.

  She gave me further advice, on how I should take greater care of my lands at Rougemont-sur-Seine, and do more to win the King’s favour. Since rejoining the army I had performed no brave deeds, accidentally or otherwise. My concern was to keep a whole skin and survive the war with enough money to forge my own career.

  All my plans were brought crashing down thanks to the actions of one man: my old lord Thomas, Duke of Clarence.

  Henry’s greatest mistake in France was to return to England with his bride and leave Clarence in a position of command. Perhaps filial love blinded him to the duke’s faults, his rampant envy and ambition. Or maybe he pitied Clarence and wished to give him an opportunity to win the glory he so desperately craved.

  Whatever the truth, Clarence was given command of four thousand men and ordered to lead a chevauchée into Anjou and Maine. His instructions were to wreak as much havoc as possible, burn and pillage and despoil in the old style, render the lands waste and scare the people into accepting Henry as their rightful King. Clarence’s ultimate aim was to seize Angers, the provincial capital of Anjou, and gain control of the entire region.

  I might have stayed out of it. The Duke of Exeter would have kept me and my fledgling company in Paris, where he needed good men to keep the volatile city in order. We never knew when the citizens might take into their heads to rise up in revolt, and the presence of armed men at every barracks and street corner was the best way of keeping the mob quiet.

  Constanza had other ideas. “Offer your sword to Clarence,” she urged, “with the King out of the country, it is the only way to win fame and glory.”

  For such a chilly woman, who never spoke of love or even hinted at it, she took a great deal of interest in my affairs. I believe she regarded me as a project, a challenge to keep her wits sharp when she had nothing else to do. After all, if she could take such inferior clay as John Page and turn it into gold, what might she not achieve?

  “Fame and glory I can do without,” I lied, “but wealth is different. Wealth, and land, and more castles to call my own.”

  “Then serve with Clarence,” she said, “he will have good memories of you. If nothing else, it will add to your reputation as a fighting soldier, and attract more men to your banner.”

  She knew how to play on my vanity. I agreed, and rode out with the Duke of Exeter and a hundred hobelars to join Clarence’s muster at Bernay.

  We invaded Anjou in the early spring, fourteen hundred and twenty-one years after the birth of Christ, and twenty-seven years after mine. I was in the prime of youth and strength, with a company of hobelars under my command, and my new banner fluttering overhead. The seamstress of Melun had made a beautiful new pennon from the raw materials I gave her, and the red wolf’s head once again rippled over the fields of France.

  I was tempted to think my task was done, that I had redeemed my father’s name and reputation. This was hopelessly premature. As yet I had won no victories in my own right, gained no lands save one poor and unprofitable barony, inspired no troubadours to sing ballads of the Wolf-Cub and his exploits.

  Our army pushed furth
er into the fair green province of Anjou, ancestral homeland of the Plantagenets. Everything seemed possible. In time my fame would grow to eclipse that of my father. One day I would return to England, full of years and honours, to set up a splendid tomb in his memory. His bones would be removed from under the black oak near Steventon, and re-interred as befitted a Christian and a soldier.

  All these dreams came to ruin, thanks to the murderous folly of Clarence.

  31.

  The Duke was in a hurry to secure Angers, and force-marched his troops across the River Huisne at Pont-de-Gennes, east of Le Man. We met with no resistance, and were able to swing south-west to another river crossing at the Loire. Within days of departing from Bernay, Angers was in our grasp.

  At this crucial moment, Clarence hesitated. Our scouts and foraging parties reported that Angers was strongly held, and he dithered over whether to press on and lay siege, or fall back to some convenient bastion.

  His captains, among them the Earl of Salisbury and Sir Gilbert Umfraville, nephew of Sir Robert, gave him conflicting advice. As a mere knight banneret, I ranked too low to offer an opinion, but was all for pushing on to Angers. King Henry would not have hesitated, regardless of the strength of the garrison.

  The duke, however, was not his brother. “We will fall back,” he said at last, after several hours of head-scratching and bitter argument, “and consider what is best to be done.”

  What is best to be done. It was a phrase full of ill omen, and reflected the uncertainty of his mind. You know only too well, O Sultan, how a general must be decisive, and allow no time for doubt to creep into the hearts of his officers. The furrowed brows and dark looks on the faces of men like Umfraville and Salisbury, both far abler soldiers than their chief, filled me with anxiety.

  The army turned around and made camp at Beaufort-en-Vallée. Our men would have marched a great deal faster had we known that an enemy host was advancing west from Tours, to block our line of retreat back to Normandy.