Gilliane (Roselynde Chronicles, Book Four)

by Roberta Gellis

  Thus, 1215 passed in relative peace. Gilliane was no longer beaten or given the dullest work. She was taught to embroider and do other “lady’s” tasks. No doubt Saer thought she was an idiot and would overlook years of ill-usage; Gilliane did not forget, but she did not give anyone reason to believe her hate was unchanged. In 1216, Saer’s attention was diverted from Gilliane by the news from England. Ordinarily, he paid little attention to any political situation that did not affect him directly, but this one had interesting possibilities. The barons of England had become so dissatisfied with their king that they had sent messengers to appeal to King Philip of France to send his son, Prince Louis, to destroy John and take on the kingship of England.

  Saer was indifferent to the relationship between John and his barons, but he knew, if Philip decided to let Louis go to England, the French king would be too wise to allow his son to depend on the good will of the rebellious English barons. Having broken their oath of loyalty once, they would find it easy to break it a second time and return to their allegiance to John. Thus, if Louis went to England, he would need a strong tail of good fighting men to back him. Moreover, it was those men in whom his trust would rest. When keeps were taken and men were needed to hold those keeps, it would be Louis’s French knights who would be given the lands. Throughout the spring of 1216, Saer paid close attention to the news from the French court and discussed the risks and advantages exhaustively with his eldest son. To Gilliane’s almost incredulous joy, when Louis went to England in late May, Saer and Osbert went with him.

  During the spring and early summer of 1216, Roselynde keep lay tightly shut and doubled guards marched the great walls and watched land and sea for enemies. Within, Lady Alinor alternately cursed King John in language that brought admiration to the eyes of her foulest-mouthed man-at-arms and worried about her loved ones. Her husband, Lord Ian de Vipont, was with the king, who lay brooding in Winchester. Her daughter and son-by-marriage were locked into Hemel keep, far too close to the rebel stronghold of London. Worst of all, her eldest son, Adam—eldest by being the male first born of her but still very young in years—held his own lands centering on the castle at Kemp—a pocket of resistance to Louis, who controlled most of the southeast of England.

  In fact, Lady Alinor had more to worry about in the case of Adam’s well-being than she knew. In July, Gilbert de Neville, Lord of Tarring, had abjured his oath to King John and sworn allegiance to Prince Louis. He had received the reward for his treachery rather more quickly and completely than most others, however. Within a month of shifting his loyalty, he had died in a tourney designed to entertain the idle hours of the French and English barons quartered in London. If some of the English lords had a faint suspicion that the accident was not totally accidental, their suspicion was lulled by the contrition of Saer de Cercy, at whose hand Gilbert had died, and by the urgent need to believe that Louis would not countenance murder by his men of his English supporters.

  There was comfort, too, in the fact that Louis had promptly dispatched men to help Gilbert de Neville’s son when he sent word that he was being attacked. Anxiety was reawakened by the knowledge that Saer was chief of the men sent to help Neville and by the news that young Gilbert had been sorely wounded in the battle and was like to die. However, by the end of August, Saer was back in London, reporting triumphantly that he had redeemed his unintentional slaying of the father by saving the life of the son. It was true, he reported, that young Neville would never be a man. A severe blow on the head had addled his wits and he had lost his right hand and part of his left leg—but he was alive.

  Now Saer proposed that, since young Neville’s virility was unimpaired, he should be married at once so that he could breed up children. Thus, the lands would remain with the blood of Neville, and the father’s death would bring no ultimate loss to the family. There were raised brows at this proposal, but Saer did not suggest a daughter of his own to be the bride, as many suspected he would. Instead he offered his ward, Gilliane de Chaunay, a girl of good estate and totally unconnected to him by blood.

  There were grumblings and mumblings because it seemed to some that Saer would still be tied too closely to the Neville lands, but such questions faded into insignificance before the fact that King John was stirring again. There was word that the king was gathering men and supplies and would soon take the field. No one wanted the thankless task of defending Neville’s property, which all knew bordered on territory controlled by a family that staunchly supported the king. In spite of angry looks here and there, no other solution to Neville’s problem was offered. A marriage contract, which stated the case very clearly and bestowed the lands upon Neville’s children should any be born, and upon Neville’s wife should there be no children, was drawn up, signed and sealed with churchmen as its guarantors and witnesses.

  His main purpose achieved, Saer returned to Tarring to survey his new domain. He found it incomplete. The port in a wide estuary some two miles south of the castle was endangered by a small keep on a rise of land called Telsey cliffs. No attack from Telsey had ever been launched on the harbor, but it was in the hands of a man opposed to Louis. Saer dispatched Osbert to bring Gilliane to England and determined to add a bit to the bride’s estate while he waited for her to arrive. He opened the strongboxes of Tarring and with that money hired mercenaries, who were plentiful. Then he rode out to invest the keep at Telsey cliffs.

  Saer was surprised and, at first, somewhat amused by the resistance he met. The little keep could not possibly hold out for more than a week or two without help—and what help could come? Saer had already determined that the overlord of Telsey’s castellan was Adam Lemagne, a boy of eighteen who was shut up, apparently for his own safekeeping, in his major stronghold at Kemp. Saer knew also that the boy’s stepfather, Lord Ian de Vipont, and his brother-by-marriage, Lord Geoffrey FitzWilliam, had the reputation of being redoubtable warriors and battle leaders. But the stepfather was with King John and the brother-by-marriage was protecting his own lands north of London. By the time either of them could come, Telsey would be safely destroyed. Not discouraged by the fact that his orders to yield were ignored and his first attack was beaten off, Saer settled his men for the night, determined that they would take the castle by assault the next day.

  It did not work out quite that way. About an hour before false dawn, when the night was darkest and the sentries in Saer’s camp were drowsy with watching and with confidence that no night attack would be launched from the keep, a whirlwind descended upon the besiegers. At its center was a giant with a voice like a trumpet.

  “Lemagne!” the trumpet blared. “Lemagne!”

  The appellation, Saer thought when he had time to think, was all too appropriate. “The Strong” fulfilled the promise of voice and name only too completely, each time the sword he used was lifted, red streams ran down its blade, and each time it descended, a man died or was maimed. However, Saer and his men were not novices. In a few minutes, arms had been assumed, weapons snatched up, defensive groups formed. The toll taken by the whirlwind lessened.

  As confusion in Saer’s party diminished, confidence was restored. It soon became apparent that they were by far the stronger. Slowly Adam and his men were forced back toward the walls of Telsey. Saer had a brief feeling of victory when it seemed that the castellan would not open the keep to take in his own overlord. At the last minute, however, the gates did swing wide—not, to Saer’s fury, to give entrance to the fighters and possibly also to their pursuers, but for the garrison to pour out and fall upon Saer’s force anew. So fierce was this second attack that Saer drew his men back to regroup and to offer the trap of seeming retreat. The bait was not taken. Instead, Adam and his castellan, Robert de Remy, called in their men and withdrew into the keep.

  By then the sky was pink with the rising sun and Saer could judge the extent of his losses. He was furious and appalled. It was particularly galling because there was no way of hiding the damage done him and because it had been done by a mere bo
y. However, the dead were carried away, the wounded tended, and the camp put back in order. Before the work was quite complete, Saer was hailed from the walls. He hissed instructions to a group of men near him and rode forward, helmeted and mailed, with his shield raised to guard against arrows from the wall, to hear what the besieged had to say. The young giant stood on the wall, bareheaded, his straight black hair lifting in the morning breeze.

  “You have made a mistake,” Adam said calmly to Saer, “and have been punished for your foolishness. Now take your men and go. I give you leave and pass my word I will not pursue you if you do not despoil my people further.”

  Saer choked at the effrontery. Even considering his losses, the combined force inside Telsey was inferior to his own. The probability of his being able to take the keep was still high.

  “Do not make another mistake,” Adam warned, “or think me a vainglorious boy child. My other men are summoned and will be here in two days’ time.”

  Saer laughed aloud. “You must really think me a fool to believe I would swallow so plain a falsehood. If men were coming, would you tell me?”

  Adam shrugged. “I have given you the benefit of the doubt. It so happens that I have more important bones to crack than yours. You have, as yet, done me no real harm, so I am willing to allow you to depart in peace. You will find—if you do not go—that I never lie.” A chuckle shook the mighty frame. “Sometimes I am not quite so open as I have been…”

  Three things happened simultaneously. Saer made a small gesture with his right hand, which he was sure could not be seen from the castle wall. The crossbowmen who had accompanied him threw down the shields behind which they had concealed their wound bows, raised them and fired. Adam dropped to a crouch behind his own shield, which had been leaning against the facing of the wall. Several arrows thunked into the shield. Several more flew just above it, where Adam’s broad chest had been, and another few whirred by still higher, aimed at his head. Even while the arrows were in the air, Saer’s party had set spurs to their horses and galloped away out of range of reprisal. However, no shafts followed them—only the sound of merry, contemptuous laughter and the trumpet voice calling, “I warned you not to make another mistake.”

  The laughter made Saer more uneasy than he would admit to himself. He kept his men hard at work through the rest of the day, finishing the scaling ladders and the ram for the gates, and he sent out small parties to scout the land to the west and north. To his captains, he said that one might know the cockerel was lying, but only an equally vainglorious fool would fail to take a cheap, easy precaution. It was most peculiar, however, that when the parties came back to report no sign of any force moving anywhere, Saer felt even less confident and sent other parties out to watch.

  Within the keep there was also considerable activity, although some of it would have puzzled Saer had he a spy to tell him what was happening. Most of the men and women were occupied with the ordinary tasks of war. Weapons were checked and readied, oil and sand heated for pouring from the walls, poles prepared for pushing away ladders. However, other parties were more curiously employed. All day water was drawn from the deep wells in the bailey until every barrel, pot, pan, skin—anything that would hold liquid—was full. As fast as vessels were filled, they were emptied—slowly, carefully, so that as much water would soak in as possible and as little be wasted. The water was poured over every flammable thing, particularly the foot-thick planks and bars of the gates that closed the walls.

  Toward evening, Saer’s men had finished their work and gathered around the campfires for a well-deserved meal. They did not unarm or relax their vigilance. One surprise had taught them that much, and it was a common tactic of desperation to launch an attack when one’s enemy was concentrating on eating rather than on fighting. They would have been even warier had they seen, as the sun set and the breeze began to blow off the land and out toward the sea, Adam and about twenty of his men stringing six-foot bows.

  When the bows were strung, each man took a handful of shafts tipped not with steel but with pitch-soaked heads of soft wood, and, carrying clay pots filled with red coals, they mounted the walls. The breeze freshened, faded, at last blew steadily offshore. On Adam’s signal, twenty shafts were thrust into twenty pots, lifted to the bows and sent flying out—out into the dry grass of the hillside on which Saer’s camp lay. The sentries called a warning when they saw the shafts black against the sky, but the flicker of flame at the tips did not show and the men snickered with contempt when they saw how far short of the camp the arrows had fallen.

  For a while, they continued to laugh as four or five more volleys followed, not coming much closer. It seemed a remarkably silly waste of arrows. The laughter checked when smoke began to rise from the hillside and little tongues of fire could be seen licking up from amid the uncut hay. The horses began to stamp and whinny as the smoke rolled down toward them, driven by the breeze. Some ran to quiet the horses, others to wet blankets to beat out the fire. Saer came roaring and cursing from his tent.

  In the midst of the confusion, trumpets could be heard blowing within the keep. The men fighting the fire rushed back to help saddle the horses. The fire was not really dangerous. Obviously it was a device to disorder the camp so that another surprise attack could be made. Horses, however, do not like fire. They kicked and sidled, delaying a process that ordinarily took only a few minutes. Meanwhile, the gates of the keep had opened and a substantial troop had ridden out. Saer’s men cursed but went on calmly enough with what they were doing. The fire worked both ways. If their horses were recalcitrant, so would those of Adam Lemagne’s men be. They could never drive the beasts across the widening band of smoking, scorching grass in any kind of organized charge.

  Calm purpose held until, suddenly, flaming pitch-headed arrows began to fly into the camp itself, setting tents and supply wagons alight, here and there striking a man or a horse so that shrieks and wildly bucking animals turned organized activity into panicky chaos. Those who could leapt into their saddles, but there was no way they could come at their tormentors directly, and, as they rode northeast to get around the burning area, they heard the laughter of Adam and his men drifting with the smoke on the seaward breeze.

  Long before any of Saer’s party could come upon them, Adam’s troop was safely back in Telsey keep. They had the pleasure of standing quietly on the walls and watching the besiegers lose at least half of their tents and supplies and all of their night’s rest while they fought the fires with inadequate means. Robert de Remy stamped his feet and slapped his overlord fondly on the shoulder.

  “My lord, my lord,” he laughed, “how did you think of that?”

  Adam smiled also, but his hazel eyes were bright and hard with anger. “The Earl of Leicester, who was my lord, God rest him, did not believe in expending men or money uselessly or in permitting his property to be damaged. If a subtlety could save lives or lands, he was not afraid to use it.”

  “A subtlety,” de Remy chortled, “a sweet, hot subtlety, but I fear those who must eat of it will not be grateful for their dessert.”

  He was punning on the use of the word subtlety to describe the towering food sculptures that customarily were constructed by cooks and bakers to signal the end of each course in great state dinners. Adam smiled again in acknowledgment of the pun, but his eyes narrowed with consideration as he watched the activity in Saer’s camp.

  “Set a double watch,” he said to de Remy, “and bid the men use their ears as well as their eyes. This device can work two ways—both are to our advantage, but we must be ready with the right action for either one. Perhaps that French reaver will lose his temper and come upon us tonight, as soon as they are safe from the fire, or perhaps he will wait over tomorrow to rest his men. If they come tonight, they will be half dead already from their labor and we will have no trouble casting them off.”

  “And if they do not come until tomorrow, we will have help from Devil’s Dyke and Trueleigh,” de Remy put in eagerly.

/>   “So I hope. The weather has held well, but we must be ready to protect ourselves if some accident should hold back William and Hugh. Hmmm…I wonder…”

  “Another subtlety, my lord?”

  “Not so subtle and more dangerous, I am afraid, but if they do not come tonight, set some men to watch where they store the scaling ladders they have made. It may be, if they are not kept too deep in the camp, we can send men with skins of oil and set fire to those.”

  Saer was livid with rage when he took account of the new damage Adam had done, but he was not so angry as to lose his common sense. Not only were his men exhausted from battling the fire while they kept one nervous eye on Telsey, lest more deviltry emerge to plague them, but they were beginning to feel inferior in spite of their greater numbers. It would be better to let them rest the next day while their captains inflamed their tempers and their greed with talk of the fact that they would be allowed to rape and loot unrestricted, owing to Saer’s anger. Nor did Saer forget, at midafternoon of the next day, to broadcast the news from his scouts that no force was approaching. Thus, either Lemagne had lied, thinking he could frighten them, or, better still, the men he had summoned had disappointed him.

  About the same time that Saer was announcing that Adam’s hopes of help would certainly not be realized before the attack, Robert de Remy was slyly contesting his lord’s will. He had not been trained in diplomacy, but he had lived thirteen years longer than his young overlord and had younger brothers. Therefore, when Adam said he would lead the raid into Saer’s camp, Sir Robert did not exclaim that it was too dangerous. What he said was that Adam should have more consideration for his men than to expose them to instant recognition.

  “No one,” he remarked dryly, “has seen any giants among the serfs carrying wood and water in de Cercy’s camp. Perhaps, had you hidden yourself in the fighting the night before last, or listened to me when I begged you to let me talk to him from the wall, the sudden appearance of a mammoth among their servants might be overlooked. I do not say it is likely, but…”