by Jason Vail
He wiped his brow — moving dung piles was hot work — and went into the house.
Chapter 8
Nothing happened for another hour or so. Then Stephen heard voices shouting orders at the end of the street. He tucked a large sausage he had found in the pantry under one arm and his helmet under the other and stepped into the street.
The end of the street had been blocked off by a half dozen spearmen. Another twenty more led by a mounted man-at-arms followed a pair of wagons.
The man-at-arms halted by Stephen and looked him over. Recognizing that Stephen was a knight, even if a dirty one, he said, “What are you doing here, sir?”
“Getting a head start,” Stephen said. He took a bite out of the sausage and offered the sausage to the man-at-arms.
The man-at-arms took a bite himself and returned the sausage to Stephen.
“Anything in there of interest?” the man-at-arms asked, indicating Mildred’s house.
Stephen shrugged and bit into the sausage again. While chewing, he said, “The usual — household stuff, some decent plate, but it looks like pewter.”
“Well, that’s worth something, sir,” the man-at-arms said. “But at least there’s food.”
“There is that,” Stephen agreed.
“Anybody home?”
“No. Oddly, they seem to have got away.”
“They’ll be rounded up before long. There’s nowhere to go.” The man-at-arms turned in the saddle and shouted to some of the men about the wagons to investigate Mildred’s house. The sounds of women screaming and crying now began to echo up and down the street.
“What was the man’s business, sir?” the man-at-arms asked, turning back to Stephen.
“Looks like he was a tailor.”
“Well, the cloth ought to be worth quite a lot, then.”
“And you’ll see it gets to the collection point.”
“Of course, sir.” The man-at-arms grinned. Although pillage might look haphazard, there was actually method involved. The men were not allowed to keep anything for themselves, apart from the pilfering of food, which couldn’t be stopped. They were required to gather all the loot, especially the drink, and bring it to a central place, usually the market, where it could be valued and then divided, the commander getting one-third and the rest split among the men.
“You know,” the man-at-arms said, “I don’t recognize you, sir.”
Stephen’s heart lurched. He had been afraid of this very question. In small armies, everybody knew each other.
He was about to give an excuse, when the man-at-arms asked, “Are you with Henry de Montfort?”
Stephen’s mind raced. Then he remembered that one of Simon de Montfort’s sons was named Henry. He shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Yeah. Joined up yesterday afternoon. You?”
“I’m with the earl of Derby,” the man-at-arms said. In other words, his lord was Robert Ferrers.
“Neat trick, the way you got into the town so easily,” Stephen said, recalling the accolade he’d heard thrown at Ferrers, earlier in the day.
The man-at-arms grinned. “Weren’t it now, sir? Easy as pie. Over the walls of the castle — not but five men holding it, if you can imagine that. Then through the gate and on to the bridge to let you boys in.”
“A fine piece of work.” Stephen turned back toward Mildred’s house. “How’d you know the castle would be so lightly held?”
The man-at-arms grinned and put a finger to the side of his nose. “We had a bit of inside help.”
A window opened on the first floor and a man above cried, “Look out below!”
Blankets and bedding cascaded into the street, followed by stools and bits of clothing. A cabinet tipped out an upper story window, crashing into pieces in the street, scattering shards of wood; several clay pots joined the mess as well as a chest of old clothes that burst like the cabinet. The same chaotic scene was being repeated at other houses up the street — all in fun, the sheer love of destruction that always accompanied plundering. Stephen had to dodge out of the way to avoid being struck by the torrent, of which the salvageable pieces were scooped up by other soldiers and deposited in one of the wagons, while yet more soldiers emerged lugging boxes and barrels which also went into the wagons.
“I best hit the pantry again before there’s not a morsel left,” Stephen said. “I missed breakfast this morning and supper last night.”
He re-entered the house, greatly relieved to be out of the inquisitive man-at-arm’s sight.
There wasn’t much left in the pantry or the buttery. What had been neat rows of pots in the pantry was now a mess of smashed crockery and broken shelves, stinking of fermenting cabbage, carrots and beets which lay scattered in soggy messes on the ground. The neat lines of hanging sausages had disappeared, and the piles of sacks and barrels of God knew what were fast disappearing as a line of men hurrying like industrious ants carried them out to the wagons. The buttery, the repository of the household’s wine and ale, had already been stripped — butteries usually being the first places to be looted under the eyes of some senior man to ensure that nobody got drunk. One man was relieving himself against a wall as Stephen looked in.
Stephen went into the back garden to check on things, but no one had bothered with the dung pile so far.
He wandered to the house’s upper floors, poking his nose in this room and that for no other reason than to appear busy. He felt relatively safe from discovery as long as he seemed to have some purpose. Yet he couldn’t afford to tarry without igniting some suspicion, so he left by the rear door, and hopped a fence into a neighboring garden to repeat his charade of inspection.
The scene in this house, however, was grim. There was a dead man in the front hall, his forehead stove in by an axe. A woman about Stephen’s age, her wimple gone, her hair askew and her gown torn to reveal her breasts, sat beside the body, stroking the man’s face, while looters carried the house’s contents outside, paying no heed to the woman’s grief as they swerved around the tableau. Two boys about eight and ten stood behind the woman, looking too stunned to cry.
This was too painful to witness so Stephen went to the next house. It had been cleaned out and no one was there but a few stragglers poking in the corners, packing away bits of clothing that no one else had bothered with, although there was some secretive activity in the buttery. When Stephen poked his head in there, having heard hushed voices, three men spun toward him, guilt written on their faces. They even bunched together in a futile attempt to conceal a small keg behind them on the dirt floor.
“What have you boys got there?” Stephen asked, knowing very well what it was from the fact this was the buttery and the men has spilled liquid on themselves, soaking their beards and shirt-fronts.
“Nothing, sir,” one of them muttered, eyes on the ground.
Stephen stooped for a leather cup that someone had tossed on the ground to the right of the door. “Well, for God’s sake man,” he said, advancing toward them with the cup. “You could at least spare a cup!” He dipped the cup into the keg — its top having been stove in — and filled the cup. He drank, glad for the earthy thickness of the ale. It was small ale, the stuff people drank every day, and had been flavored with juniper and a hint of smoke, which came from drying the malt with fire. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was until he downed that cup. He refilled it, downed that too, and handed the cup to one of the soldiers. “You should at least put a watch on the door, you idiots.”
“You don’t care, sir?” one of the soldiers asked cautiously, as if suspecting this was somehow a trick to catch them in the act, even though the evidence of their disobedience was already enough to earn a flogging.
Stephen shrugged. “Is that the only keg?”
“Yessir.”
“Then no harm done. Just don’t come away smelling like ale. Or staggering.”
“Not enough here to get drunk on, sir,” the soldier who had accepted the cup replied as he swilled down the contents.
; “So you say,” Stephen said. “Be careful, if you know what’s good for you.”
Stephen left the soldiers to their celebrations and climbed to the top floor of the house. He leaned out a rear window to check on the root cellar with its roof of dried dung. No one was in the yard, which he was glad to see. The last thing he wanted to do was to have to rush down and kill someone poking about in the pile. There was nothing like murder to attract unwanted attention.
Before he pulled the shutters, screaming sounded across the orchard, faint but unmistakable. The looting of Bridge Street had just begun. He tried not to think about the human cost; there was nothing he could do about that. But he did spare a moment to regret the loss of the horses, which had been put up in the stable of the inn. He could do nothing about them either. He felt guilty about his selfishness in giving more of a care for four horses and tack than the lives of those suffering in the town. But regret was a luxury that he could not indulge in for any length of time. It clouded the mind and disturbed the judgment, which had to be sharp if he were to survive.
He sank down by the window and put his hands over his ears so he did not have to hear any more. Darkness could not come soon enough. For only then would the town’s suffering end and they could flee. Yet darkness was a long way off.
The first indication that Stephen might be in more danger than from discovery as a fraud came upon the wind. Towns always smelled of smoke from all the hearth and cooking fires that never went out, even in the summer. So no one paid smoke smell any mind; it was an ever-present thing and you hardly noticed it any more than the frequent failure of people to take baths. But this smell was different: more sharp, more intense, as if he was sitting by the fire.
Stephen chinned himself to look out the window. It was late afternoon and the sun was low in the west, the shadow of the town wall encroaching upon the orchard. Across the rear orchard, one of the houses on Bridge Street a hundred yards away was on fire. Flames stabbed high in the air, growing higher as the thatched roof caught. Dense black smoke roiled above the flames, drifting toward him, carrying orange embers that twinkled and went out. Even this far away he could hear the crackling of the timbers and the thatch. As he watched, the fires spread to the houses on either side. Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw flickers at a house to the right as it too began to burn. Here and there along the street to the right he now saw flames in the windows that were open, as if parties of men had gone house to house to light them, and he realized with a stab of fear that the invaders were burning the town.
The house where Stephen had taken refuge was built like many of its kind. At the front on the ground was a shop with bed chambers on the floors above. Behind the shop at the center of the house was the hall, and at the rear were the pantry and buttery on the ground floor and more chambers above them. The front and rear chambers were connected by walkways on the first and second floors overlooking the central hall.
Stephen dashed along the top walkway to the front room overlooking the street and peered over the thatched roofs of the houses across the way toward the cathedral to the south. Columns of smoke billowed skyward everywhere he looked.
Stephen went back to the walkway, but did not cross it because he heard voices below, and then men bearing torches entered the hall. He jerked back so as not to be seen, heart pounding. They were firing this house. He thought furiously about what to do but came up with only a series of hiccups: what! what! what now! Then the voices stopped. He chanced a glance around the door jamb. The fire-starters had gone, but flames crackled below at the hallway to the shop and more flickered in the doorway to the pantry. The hall was rapidly filling with smoke.
The smoke was not thick yet, but there was enough of it that Stephen could barely breathe and his eyes stung. He covered his nose and mouth with the collar of his tabard. He heard the crackling of the fire and felt the heat. He dared to open his eyes and saw that fire was licking at the bottom steps of the flight of stairs reaching the ground, which descended on the far side of the hall. In moments, the entire stairway to the ground would be aflame. He couldn’t get down now.
He groped his way along the walkway to the rear chamber where he had spent most of the day. Smoke began seeping through cracks in the floorboards. He felt the heat of the fire through the soles of his boots.
He hadn’t been able to draw a breath since he’d crossed the walkway, and he leaned out the window. He sucked in a breath gratefully, heedless of the smoke coming out of the door to the back garden and the rear windows. A wall of flame confronted him when he glanced back, and malevolent orange lines met his eyes when he looked at the floor — it would not be long before the floor caught fire.
The only escape was through the back window. It must be twenty-five feet from the sill to the ground, a drop that Stephen did not wish to make: the chance of injury from such a fall was great, and he could not afford to be hurt. He might never get away then. But the alternative was perishing in the fire.
He tossed out his shield; it spun to the ground and landed with a thump. His helmet and sword followed. He threw his left leg over the sill. He sat upon the sill for a moment, shrinking inwardly from the prospect of the fall.
A gust of wind surged through the window, dissipating the smoke, and he saw something in a far corner that made his heart leap — a broken stool. One of the legs had split off, leaving a spear-like point. Ordinarily, even a stool was an object of plunder, but evidently no one had wanted the broken thing.
But Stephen did.
He ducked in the window and scrambled on his hands and knees across the room, holding his breath against the choking smoke and barely able to see. He fumbled about in the corner, found the broken leg, and hurried back to the window.
Flames had begun to eat away at the floor and the heat was so intense that Stephen felt like a chicken on a spit. At any moment, he might start to sizzle.
He drew his dagger and held himself on the sill long enough to drive the dagger into the plaster next to the window, avoiding the timber beam that supported the window frame. The walls of timber buildings were not solid. They consisted of interwoven wands, usually willow, but any young tree would do, so that the finished product resembled the sides of a basket wedged between the timbers. This wattle was covered with a mixture of straw and mud which was painted with limewash when it had hardened. It was enough to keep out the worst of the weather but not anyone intent on breaking into or through it — hence the crime of breaking-and-entering, since a favorite means of access to ordinary houses was often through the wattle rather than a door or window. Stephen had even done so himself once, breaking into the guildhall at Leominster.
Stephen felt the dagger penetrate between some of the plaster-covered wands. He had no idea whether the dagger would support his weight, but he had no choice but to risk it. He let go of the sill, dangled for an instant on his dagger, and drove the broken stool leg into the wall. The dagger slipped a bit but he was able to arrest a fall with the stool leg.
He hung there for a moment, gulping relatively fresh air, glad he did not crash to earth.
Then he repeated the maneuver, this time first with the stool leg, since it seemed to provide a more secure hold than the dagger.
In this way, he inched down the wall, a pair of stabs at a time, until he passed a window on the first floor, where flames had begun to lap out.
He had thought he might reach the ground in this unconventional way, but the fire in the window made him change his mind. Moreover, he could feel heat beyond the wattle filling of the wall. No doubt it would be only seconds before it caught fire, too.
So, he cast his dagger away and let go of the stool leg.
It might be more than ten feet from the window to the ground, but Stephen’s feet — since he was six feet tall — had a lesser distance to travel. Still, he struck hard, driving lances of pain through his bad foot, and even with a roll, which took him away from the flaming house, the impact knocked the wind out of him.
He w
as of a mind to lay there in the grass until his wind came back, but a thundering crash from within the house — the falling of a ceiling, it sounded like — persuaded him to put as much distance between himself and the pyre as he could. Burning buildings did not always collapse downward. Sometimes they had an irritating habit of collapsing outward, to the bad luck of anyone nearby.
He recovered his dagger and inched away on elbows and knees, coughing convulsively and wheezing from the smoke, because he could not make himself stand. When he was about thirty yards from the house, he lay back and stared at the sky. Although much of the sky directly above was obscured by smoke, gaps in the smoke revealed a bright blue sky, the clouds spangled with deep yellow and orange from the setting sun. It was a sight one would ordinarily like to admire with a pot of ale on the thigh. But there wasn’t time for that this evening, nor any ale.
Stephen gagged and spit; it came out gray with flecks of black. He forced himself to stand. He collected his shield, helmet and sword.
There were others in the back gardens now, same as Stephen. Some were just emerging from houses and clambering fences to the orchard. Others had already gained the orchard and collected in clumps for mutual comfort, watching with shock and dismay as all the houses turned into a solid wall of fire and smoke. Stephen had never seen anything like it, even during his time in Spain, where pillage and plunder were a way of life in the borderland between the Spaniards and the Moors. Even the burning of the middle bailey at Clun Castle by the Welsh, a spectacle which Stephen had enjoyed from his hiding place beneath a pile of corpses, had not been as horrifyingly magnificent.