1356

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘A surprise?’

  ‘The wine is just horrible. Tastes like cow piss.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘That’s a question worthy of Doctor Lucius. Are you sure you want to do this?’

  ‘How the hell else do I get out of the city?’

  ‘The trick of it,’ Keane said, ‘is to wriggle between two of the barrels. Just worm your way in to the centre of the cart and no one will ever know you’re there. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to wriggle out.’

  ‘You’re not hiding with me?’

  ‘They’re not looking for me!’ the Irishman said. ‘You’re the fellow they want to hang.’

  ‘Hang me?’

  ‘Jesus, you’re an Englishman! Thomas of Hookton! Leader of the Hellequin! Sure they want to hang you! There’ll be a bigger crowd than Whore Sunday!’

  ‘What’s Whore Sunday?’

  ‘Nearest Sunday to the Feast of Saint Nicholas. The girls are supposed to give it away that day, but I’ve not seen it happen. And you’ve not a lot of time.’ He stopped as an upstairs shutter opened across the small square. A man looked out, yawned, then vanished. Cockerels were crowing all through the town. A pile of rags stirred in a corner of the square and Thomas realised it was a beggar sleeping. ‘Not a lot of time at all,’ Keane went on. ‘The gates are open so the wagons will be rolling soon enough.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ Thomas said.

  ‘You’ll smell more like Judas Iscariot when you’re done. I should jump on now, there’s no one watching.’

  Thomas ran across the small square and pushed himself up onto the rearmost wagon. The smell was enough to fell a bear. The barrels were old, they leaked, or rather oozed, and the wagon’s bed was inch-deep in slime. He heard Keane chuckle, then took a deep breath and forced his way between two of the vast tubs. There was just space between the rows for a man to be concealed beneath the barrel’s bulging bellies. Something dripped on his head. Flies crawled on his face and neck. He tried to breathe

  shallowly as he wriggled his way to the centre of the cart where he pulled the hood of his cloak over his head. The mail coat with its leather lining offered some protection from the slimy muck, but he could feel the filth seeping beneath the mail to soak his shirt and chill his skin.

  He did not need to wait long. He heard voices, felt the wagon lurch as two men climbed up to perch on the foremost barrels, then the crack of a whip. The cart jerked forward, its single axle squealing. Every jolt banged Thomas’s head against the seeping side of a barrel. The journey seemed endless, but at least Keane had been right about the guards, who must have simply waved the three carts through the city’s gate with no attempt at an inspection because the wagon did not stop as it went from the shadows of the city to the sunlight of the countryside. Keane was walking just beside the oxen, chatting happily to the drivers, and then the cart gave an almighty lurch as it was driven down a bank. Liquid slopped in the barrels and some spilled over onto Thomas’s back. He cursed under his breath, then cursed again as the wagon juddered across some ruts. Keane was telling a long story about a dog that had stolen a leg of lamb from Saint Stephen’s monastery, but suddenly spoke in English, ‘Wriggle out now!’ The Irishman went on with his tale as Thomas inched backwards through fresh muck, every jolt of the cart driving the filth deeper into his clothes.

  He threw himself off the back, landing on the grassy ridge between the track’s wheel ruts. The wagon, oblivious that it had held a passenger, rumbled on. Keane came back, grinning. ‘Jesus, you look just terrible.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I got you out of the city, didn’t I?’

  ‘You’re a living saint,’ Thomas said. ‘Now all we have to do is find horses, weapons, and a way to get ahead of Roland.’

  He was in a sunken lane between two high banks beyond which were olive groves. The lane dropped to a riverbank where the first cart was tipping its barrels into the water. A brown stain drifted downstream. ‘And how do we find horses?’ Keane asked wistfully.

  ‘First things first,’ Thomas said. He slapped at a fly, then climbed the roadside bank and walked north through the olives.

  ‘So what’s first?’ Keane asked.

  ‘The river.’

  Thomas walked till he was out of sight of the three carts, then stripped off his clothes and plunged into the water. It was cold. ‘Jesus, you’re scarred,’ Keane said.

  ‘If you want to stay beautiful,’ Thomas said, ‘don’t be a soldier. And throw me my clothes.’

  Keane kicked the clothes into the river rather than touch them. Thomas kneaded them, trampled them, scrubbed at them with a rock till no more stain coloured the water, then he plunged the mail coat in and out of a pool, trying to rid the links and leather of the stink. He ducked his head a last time, ran fingers through his hair, and climbed onto the bank. He wrung out the clothes as best he could, then put them on still wet. He carried the mail coat. It would be another warm day and his shirt and hose would dry fast enough. ‘North,’ he said curtly. The first thing was to find the men-at-arms he had left at the ruined mill.

  ‘Horses and weapons, you said?’ Keane asked.

  ‘How much are they offering for me?’

  ‘The weight of your right hand in gold coins, I heard.’

  ‘My hand?’ Thomas asked, then understood. ‘Because I’m an archer.’

  ‘That’s just the beginning. The weight of your right hand in gold and the weight of your severed head in silver. They hate English archers.’

  ‘It’s a small fortune,’ Thomas said, ‘so I dare say the horses and weapons will find us.’

  ‘Find us?’

  ‘Soon enough folk will wonder if I escaped the city, so they’ll come looking. Till then we keep going north.’

  Thomas thought of Genevieve as he walked. She had been terrified when he first met her, and why not? A pyre had been made outside her prison and she was supposed to have been burned as a heretic, and the prospect of that holy fire was a scar in her memory. It would be torturing her now. He assumed she and Hugh were safe for the moment, at least until Roland could find Bertille, but what then? The virgin knight was mocked for his rectitude, but he was famed for being incorruptible, so would he meekly exchange Genevieve and Hugh for Bertille? Or would he think it his sacred duty to give Genevieve to the church so it could finish the business it had started so long ago? Thomas desperately needed to reach Karyl and his other men-at-arms. He needed men, he needed weapons, he needed a horse.

  They were following the river northwards. The sun rose higher and the olive trees gave way to vineyards. He could see five men and three women tilling between the terraces a mile or so away, but otherwise the countryside was empty. He kept to the low ground where he could, but always heading towards the hills. Roland, he thought, would be at least five leagues away from the city by now. ‘I should have killed him,’ he said.

  ‘Roland?’

  ‘I had an archer aiming at his fat head. I should have let him shoot.’

  ‘A hard man to kill, that one. He looks willowy, doesn’t he? But I saw him fight in Toulouse and, by Jesus, he’s fast! Quick as a snake.’

  ‘I need to get ahead of him,’ Thomas was talking more to himself than to Keane. But why Toulouse? ‘Because it’s safe,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Safe?’

  ‘Toulouse,’ Thomas said, ‘we can’t follow him into Toulouse. It belongs to the Count of Armagnac, and his men patrol the road north, but that means it’s a safe route for de Verrec.’ De Verrec needed to keep Genevieve unharmed till she was exchanged. Then the answer was tumbling in his head. ‘He’s not going to Toulouse, he’s taking the road through Gignac.’

  Keane looked blank. ‘Gignac?’

  ‘There’s a road through Gignac, it joins the main road north from Toulouse. He’ll be safer on that route.’

  ‘You’re sure the man is going north?’

  ‘He’s going to Labrouillade!’ That was the obvious destination. Genevieve coul
d be held there until Bertille was surrendered.

  ‘How far’s Labrouillade?’

  ‘Five or six days on horseback,’ Thomas said. ‘And we can go through the hills, it’s quicker.’ Or it would be quicker if he was sure that no coredor ambushed him on the way. He needed his men-at-arms. He needed his archers with their long war bows and goose-fledged arrows. He needed a miracle.

  There were villages ahead. They had to be skirted. The countryside was coming alive as more men went to the fields or vineyards. Those labourers were all far away, but Thomas had grown up in the countryside and knew that such men missed nothing. Most of them would never travel more than a few miles from home in all their lives, but they knew every tree, bush and beast within that small area, and something as small as the flight of a bird could alert them to an intruder, and once they thought that the reward of gold equal to the weight of a man’s hand

  was within their reach they would be implacable. Thomas felt despair. ‘If I were you,’ he said to Keane, ‘I’d go back to the city now.’

  ‘Why, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Because I’m wasting my time,’ Thomas said bitterly.

  ‘You’ve reached this far,’ Keane said, ‘so why give up now?’

  ‘And why the hell are you with me? You should just go and fetch that reward.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, if I have to sit through another year of Doctor Lucius’s lectures and listen to that miserable worm Roger de Beaufort I’ll go mad, I will. They say you make men rich!’

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘I want to be on a horse,’ Keane said, ‘riding the world like a free man. A woman would be nice, or two. Three even!’ He grinned and looked at Thomas, ‘I want to be outside the rules.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I’m never sure because I was never good at counting, but it’s probably eighteen by now. That or nineteen.’

  ‘The rules keep you alive,’ Thomas said. His damp clothes were chafing and his boots had broken a seam.

  ‘The rules keep you in your place,’ Keane said, ‘and other people make the rules and thump you if you break them, which is why you broke them, yes?’

  ‘I was sent to Oxford,’ Thomas said. ‘Like you I was meant to be a priest.’

  ‘So that’s how you know the Latin?’

  ‘My father taught me from the first. Latin, Greek, French.’

  ‘And now you’re Sir Thomas Hookton, leader of the Hellequin! You didn’t keep to the rules now, did you?’

  ‘I’m an archer,’ Thomas said. And an archer without a bow, he thought. ‘And you’ll find I make the rules for the Hellequin.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘We share the plunder, we don’t abandon each other, and we don’t rape.’

  ‘Ah, they said you were remarkable. Did you hear that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A hound? Two perhaps? Giving tongue?’

  Thomas stopped. They had left the river and were walking faster because they had entered a chestnut wood that hid them from prying eyes. He heard the small wind in the leaves, a woodpecker far off, then the baying. ‘Damn,’ he said.

  ‘Could just be hunting.’

  ‘Hunting what?’ Thomas asked, then moved to the wood’s edge. There was a dry ditch, and beyond it neatly bound stacks of chestnut stakes that were used to support vines. The terraces of the vineyard curved away and down to the river valley and the sound of the dogs, there was more than one, came from that low ground. He ran a few paces into the vineyard, keeping low, and saw three horsemen and two hounds. They could have been hunting anything, he thought, but he suspected their quarry was an archer’s hand. Two were holding spears. The hounds had their noses to the ground and were leading the horsemen towards the chestnuts. ‘I forgot about dogs.’ Thomas said when he was back among the trees.

  ‘They’ll be just fine,’ Keane said with a blithe confidence.

  ‘They’re not after your right hand,’ Thomas said, ‘and they’ll have our scent by now. If you want to leave me this would be a good time.’

  ‘Christ no!’ Keane said. ‘I’m one of your men, remember? We don’t abandon each other.’

  ‘Then stay here. Try not to get savaged by a hound.’

  ‘Dogs love me,’ the Irishman said.

  ‘I’m relying on the idea that they’ll call the hounds off before they bite you.’

  ‘They’ll not bite me, just you see.’

  ‘Just stand there,’ Thomas said, ‘and be quiet. I want them to think you’re alone.’ He leaped for the low branch of a tree and, using the huge muscles made by the war bow, hauled himself up till he was hidden among the leaves. He crouched on a branch. Everything depended on where the horsemen stopped, and surely they would. He could hear them now, hear the heavy fall of the hooves and the faster sound of the dogs who were racing ahead. Keane, to Thomas’s astonishment, had fallen to his knees and was holding his clasped hands high in prayer. Much good that would do him, Thomas reckoned, and then the hounds were in sight. A pair of grey-coated wolfhounds with slavering jaws who raced towards the Irishman, and Keane simply opened his eyes, spread his arms and clicked his fingers.

  ‘Good doggies,’ the Irishman said. The wolfhounds were whining now. One had laid itself at Keane’s knees, the other was licking an outspread hand. ‘Down, boy,’ Keane said in French, then scratched both dogs between the ears. ‘And what a fine morning it is to be chasing an Englishman, yes?’

  The horsemen were close now. They had slowed their horses to a trot as they ducked beneath the low branches. ‘Goddamned dogs,’ one of them said in astonishment at the sight of the wolfhounds succumbing to Keane’s blandishments. ‘Who are you?’ the man called.

  ‘A man at prayer,’ Keane answered, ‘and good morrow to you all, gentlemen.’

  ‘Prayer?’

  ‘God has called me to His priesthood,’ Keane said in a sanctimonious tone, ‘and I feel closest to Him when I pray beneath the trees in the dawn of His good day. God bless you, and what are you gentlemen doing abroad this early in the day?’ His black homespun gown gave him a convincingly clerical appearance.

  ‘We’re hunting,’ one of the men said in an amused tone.

  ‘You’re not French,’ another said.

  ‘I am from Ireland, the land of Saint Patrick, and I prayed to Saint Patrick to quell the anger of your dogs. Aren’t they just the sweetest beasts?’

  ‘Eloise! Abelard!’ the horseman called his hounds, but neither moved. They stayed with Keane.

  ‘And what are you hunting?’ Keane asked.

  ‘An Englishman.’

  ‘You’ll not find him here,’ Keane said, ‘and if it’s the fellow I’m thinking you’re after then surely he’ll still be inside the city?’

  ‘Maybe,’ one said. He and his companions were to Thomas’s left, Keane was to his right, and Thomas needed the horsemen to be closer. He could just see them through the leaves. Three young men, richly dressed in fine cloth with feathers in their caps and long boots in their stirrups. Two were holding wide-bladed boar-spears with cross-pieces just behind the heads, and all three had swords. ‘And maybe not,’ the man said. He kicked his horse forward. ‘You come here to pray?’

  ‘Isn’t that what I said?’

  ‘Ireland is close by England, isn’t it?’

  ‘She’s cursed by that, right enough.’

  ‘And in town,’ the rider said, ‘a beggar saw two men by the Widow. One in a student’s gown and the other climbing aboard a shit-cart.’

  ‘And there was me thinking I was the only student who got up early from bed!’

  ‘Eloise! Abelard!’ the owner of the dogs snapped their names, but the hounds just whined and settled even closer to Keane.

  ‘So the beggar went to find the consuls,’ the first man said.

  ‘And found us instead,’ another man said, amused. ‘No reward for him now.’

  ‘We helped him to a better world,’ the first man took up the tale, ‘and perhaps we can
help your memory too.’

  ‘I could always do with help,’ Keane said, ‘which is why I pray.’

  ‘The hounds picked up a scent,’ the man said.

  ‘Clever doggies,’ Keane said, patting the two grey heads.

  ‘They followed it here.’

  ‘Ah, they smelled me! No wonder they were running so eagerly.’

  ‘And two sets of footprints by the river,’ another man added.

  ‘I think you have questions to answer.’ The first man smiled.

  ‘Like why he wants to be a crow,’ the dog’s owner said. ‘You don’t like women, perhaps?’ The other two horsemen laughed. Thomas could see them more clearly now. Very rich young men, their saddlery and harness were expensive, their boots polished. Merchants’ sons, perhaps? He reckoned they were the kind of wealthy young sons who could break the city’s curfew with impunity because of their fathers’ status, young bucks who roamed the city looking for trouble and confident that they could avoid the consequences. Men who had apparently killed a beggar so they would not need to share the reward with him. ‘Why does a man want to be a priest?’ the horseman asked scornfully. ‘Perhaps because he isn’t a man, eh? We should find out. Take your clothes off.’ His companions, eager to join the sport, kicked their mounts forward and so passed under Thomas’s branch. He dropped.

  He fell onto the rearmost horseman, hooked his right arm around the man’s neck and seized the boar-spear with his left. The man fell. The horse reared and whinnied. Thomas slammed onto the ground, the unseated rider on top of him. The man’s left foot was trapped in the stirrup and the horse skittered away, dragging the man with him, and Thomas was already rising, the spear in both hands now. The other spearman was turning his horse and Thomas swung the weapon fiercely, and the flat of the blade cracked hard against the rider’s skull. The man swayed in the saddle as Thomas ran at the leading horseman, who was trying to draw his sword, but Keane was holding the man’s forearm while the horse circled frantically. The dogs were leaping at Keane and the horse, thinking it a game. Thomas swung the spear, and the wide blade sliced under the horseman’s ribs. The man yelled in pain, and Keane dragged him from the saddle and brought his right knee up to meet the man’s head and the rider dropped, stunned. The first man had managed to disentangle his foot from the stirrup, but he was dizzy. He attempted to stand, and Thomas kicked him in the throat and he too went down. The dazed rider was still in the saddle but he was just staring at nothing, his mouth opening and closing. ‘Get the horses,’ Thomas ordered Keane, then ran out of the trees, crossed the ditch and used his knife to cut the twine that held the bundles of chestnut stakes. ‘We’ll tie the bastards up,’ he told Keane, ‘and if you need a change of clothes, help yourself.’ He hauled the third man from his saddle and dazed him even more with a slam of his hand that drew blood from the man’s ear.