The Heretic

by David Pilling

  SOLDIER OF FORTUNE (II): THE HERETIC

  By David Pilling

  Copyright David Pilling 2016

  More Books by David Pilling

  Soldier of Fortune (I): The Wolf Cub

  Folville’s Law (I): Invasion

  Leader of Battles (I): Ambrosius

  Leader of Battles (II): Artorius

  Leader of Battles (III): Gwenhwyfar

  Leader of Battles (IV): Drystan

  The White Hawk (I): Revenge

  The White Hawk (II): Loyalty

  The White Hawk (III): Sacrifice

  Caesar’s Sword (I): The Red Death

  Caesar’s Sword (II): Siege of Rome

  Caesar’s Sword (III): Flame of the West

  Robin Hood (I)

  Robin Hood (II): The Wrath of God

  Robin Hood (III): The Hooded Man

  Robin Hood (IV): The King’s Pardon

  The Half-Hanged Man

  The Best Weapon (with Martin Bolton)

  Sorrow (with Martin Bolton)

  Follow David at his blogs at:

  www.pillingswritingcorner.blogspot.co.uk

  Or contact him direct at:

  Davidpilling56@hotmail.com

  Glossary

  Chevauchée - An organised system of plundering and devastating enemy territory

  Destrier - Medieval warhorse, ridden by knights and men-at-arms

  Hons - Bohemian unit of measurement (about 125 steps)

  Howitzer - Type of field gun, first used by the Hussites

  Pavise - A large convex shield used to protect the entire body

  Rouncy - a common, all-purpose horse used by poorer soldiers, and as packhorses

  Routier - French term for a mercenary soldier

  Sallet - type of military helmet

  Sipahi - Freeborn Turkish cavalry, split into feudal and household troops

  Springald - A device for hurling large bolts, and less often stones and Greek Fire

  Tulwar - Type of Turkish sword, usually with a curved blade

  1.

  Constantinople, 1453

  Sir John Page stood before the window of his prison and gazed at the dark waters of the Bosphorus as they slid past, some twenty feet below.

  The words of an old song rose unbidden in his memory:

  “Ye who are God's warriors and of his law,

  Pray to God for help and have faith in Him;

  That always with Him you will be victorious...”

  He was interrupted by the voices of the muezzins. The eerie call to prayer swept through the streets of Constantinople five times a day, summoning the faithful to worship.

  Constantinople, city of the Roman Emperors and cradle of Eastern Christianity for a thousand years, belonged to Islam now. The city had fallen into the hands of the Turkish Sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror, and the last Emperor vanished under the blades and clubs of Mehmed’s janissaries.

  Page closed his eyes and let the weird, ululating chant wash over him. He would never admit it, at least in the company of fellow Christians, but he drew comfort from the Muslim call to prayer. There was a mesmerising, almost trance-like quality to it. He took similar comfort from the voices of Christian monks raised in plainchant.

  Perhaps the truth of God lies in sound, he reflected, rather than the words we shape with it.

  “Dogs of Mahomet,” shouted his companion, “will they never quit their wailing?”

  Page turned to look at George Phrantzes. He was not easily moved to pity, but it was impossible not to feel a shred of compassion for the former imperial courtier and friend to the late Emperor.

  Phrantzes had lost a deal of weight during the weeks of imprisonment. The strain of knowing their lives rested on the edge of a tulwar - that the Sultan only kept his prisoners alive so long as they amused him - had taken its toll. Added to this unbearable tension was the knowledge that Phrantzes’ wife and children had been sold into slavery, and even now were probably being used as playthings by some rich Turk.

  He sat with with his elbows resting on the chamber’s single table, staring miserably at the blank parchment laid on the board. More blank leaves of parchment lay in a neat pile beside it.

  Phrantzes’ task was to write down the tales that Page dictated. They were drawn from Page’s military career in France, Bohemia and Italy, and each had to be completed inside three days and nights. At the end of that time, a Sipahi officer took them to the Sultan.

  The tales were read out to Mehmed during his leisure hours. He had enjoyed the first cycle enough to spare the lives of his helpless captives. Now they had to produce another to save their necks from the executioner’s blade.

  “Tell me, Phrantzes,” asked Page, “have you ever seen men so drunk on God they had no real fear of death?”

  “Yes,” replied the other man, wiping his bloodshot eyes. “During the siege I saw the Sultan’s accursed janissaries crawl towards our lines even with their legs blown away and bodies riddled with bullets. The power of faith can make gods of men, if only for a little while.”

  He blinked owlishly at Page. “Why did you ask?”

  “Because I, too, have seen such holy warriors. I marched and fought alongside them. Shared their rituals. Slew their enemies.”

  Page turned back to the window. Only a touch of mental effort was needed to recall the Hussite banner of the golden chalice, flying over countless shattered battlefields; the boom of gunfire over the hills at Kutna Hora; the screams of German trumpets as they sounded the retreat; the shrieks of burning heretics.

  The screams melded into the high-pitched wail of a newborn infant. Page once again looked into his baby son's eyes. Those eyes, in later years, would be full of rage and suspicion as they looked upon their father. At this moment they were pure, blue and full of innocence.

  He shook away the memory. It was useless to dwell on past mistakes.

  “Warriors of God,” he went on, “I saw a rabble of peasants, including women and boys, with barely a helm or a mail corselet between them, shatter the finest armies in Christendom. Faith, as you say, can make gods of us.”

  Phrantzes took up his quill. “I’ve heard you mention them before,” he said, “I also know the words of that old song you recited. You speak of the followers of the Bohemian heretic, Jan Hus.”

  Page smiled. “You call him a heretic. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps the Roman priests were right to declare him the enemy of God. If so all those fought in his name, myself included, are heretics too. Our souls are damned.”

  “Though I hope not, for the Devil’s sake. With my old commander Zizka at their head, the Hussites would storm the gates of Hell, cast down every demonic prince, and make it a house of God. The communion in two kinds would be taken on Satan’s own threshold, and his benighted halls echo to the sound of Hussite songs.”

  Phrantzes dipped his quill in a small pot of ink and wiped away the excess. “Tell me of your time with them,” he said, “tell me of Hus, and Zizka, and the wars in Bohemia.”

  Page cleared his throat, fixed his gaze on the clear blue skies over Constantinople, and remembered.

  2.

  After the disaster at Baugé, the Company of the Wolf was reduced to just thirteen men. The survivors preferred to stay with me, their captain, rather than stay in France and risk their necks in what, at that moment, seemed a losing cause. The only English army in France had been shattered at Baugé, King Harry was still in England, and the French seemed poised to sweep our scattered garrisons back into the sea.

  Before us lay a long, hazardous trek to Bohemia. Only one of us, my servant Ralf, had any firm knowledge of the world beyond the eastern borders of France. A mysterious, soft-spoken Cumbrian of unfathomable depths, he claimed to have spent part of his youth travelling through Germa
ny and Austria with a wandering troop of actors.

  “We passed through Munich,” he told me, “and spent Christmas in the beer-cellars. From there we proceeded north, to Nuremberg, where the citizens thought our play obscene, and flogged us out of the city gates. My back still carries the scars.”

  He smiled, as though it was a fond memory. “You can speak the language, then?” I asked impatiently.

  “I was reasonably fluent,” he replied, “doubtless I can pick it up again.”

  This was the second night after our flight from Baugé. The French had stayed at the town to celebrate their victory and gloat over the corpse of Clarence, the defeated English commander. Even so we were on our guard: unhappy, war-torn France was plagued by bands of roving mercenaries and cut-throats, many of them larger than our decimated company. These scavengers were happy to prey on each other, and would not hesitate to slaughter us and take our gear and horses.

  We had to be careful. King Harry loathed deserters. My former service in the English cause would have counted for nothing if his men caught us. In spite of all these dangers, I was resolved to follow my conscience to Bohemia.

  You may laugh, O Sultan, at the thought of a mercenary with a conscience. It is true that for much of my life I have followed the same venal path as any other soldier of fortune. Yet there was a kind of fever raging through Christendom at this time. It infected even the most hard-headed of men, turning them away from the pursuit of their own glory to something greater.

  The fever was carried by a name. Jan Hus. I have mentioned him before in these chronicles. Hus, a Bohemian priest, had spoken out against the evil and corruption of the Catholic church. For this he was burned to death as a heretic, but nothing could destroy his message. The followers of Hus had declared they would have their own church in Bohemia, cleansed of every form of earthly vice. They drew up four rules or articles, which I shall repeat below:

  I. The Word of God shall in the Kingdom of Bohemia be freely and without impediment proclaimed and preached by Christian priests.

  II. The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of God shall in the two kinds, that is in bread and wine, be freely administered to all faithful Christians, according to the order and teaching of our Saviour.

  III. Priests and monks, according to secular law, possess great worldly wealth, against the teaching of Christ. Of this wealth they shall be deprived.

  IV. All mortal sins, particularly those that are public, as well as all disorders which are opposed to God’s law, shall in all classes be suppressed by those whose office it is to do so. All evil and untruthful rumours shall be suppressed for the good of the commonwealth, the kingdom and the nations.

  These, the Four Articles of Prague as they were called, were the foundation stones of the Hussite cause. I still carry them in my heart, especially article three. No true man of God, from the Pope himself down to the meanest hedge-priest, has any business dealing in worldly wealth.

  God must have approved of my purpose. Our luck held in the following weeks as we rode through the fresh green countryside of southern France. It was early spring, and the dust and blood and horror of Baugé seemed like a distant nightmare. We gave Tours and Orléans a wide berth, and at times were forced to act like scavengers ourselves, riding into little villages and demanding food and lodging at swordpoint.

  At one such dirty, pox-ridden place, a few miles west of Nancy, some of the local peasants banded together to oppose us. They were led by the village smith, a huge fellow with an overgrown russet beard and shoulders like an ox.

  I gave them fair warning. “Stand aside,” I ordered the little gang of village idiots and red-faced farm boys, with the gigantic figure of the smith at their head, “stand aside or be ridden down.”

  They stood their ground, the fools, barring the dusty track that led into their village. With a sigh, I drew my sword and led the Company of the Wolf in a full-blooded charge, straight through the middle of them.

  “No bloodshed!” I cried as the peasants scattered and ran for their lives, howling like whipped dogs. My men, who had no wish to kill, pursued for a short distance, whacking the fugitives with the flats of their blades.

  Only the smith refused to run. He stood rooted to the earth like the ox he resembled, head down, little eyes full of rage. I cracked him on the head with my sword-hilt and he went over like a fallen tree, stretching his length on the grass.

  “Dolt,” I remarked, sheathing my sword, “in future he will know better than to lead peasants against soldiers on horseback.”

  “Our own native-born peasants have often humbled the chivalry of France,” Ralf reminded me.

  I laughed. “The archers of England are mostly freemen. Trained in the use of the war bow from childhood. You can’t compare them to these poor rustics.”

  For a commoner, Ralf knew much of history. While we plundered the cottages for bread and cheese and flitches of baron, he lectured me on victories won by peasant armies of other nations: the famed ‘blue-nails’ of Flanders, common dyers and tradesmen, who destroyed a French army at Courtrai; the Scottish pikemen of Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn; the lightly armed woodsmen of the Swiss Confederacy.

  “The Swiss go into battle wearing no body armour,” he told me as we chewed our stolen bread, “save planks of timber strapped to their right arms. Yet they crushed the Austrians and their mercenary allies. The finest armies in Christendom failed to stand against them.”

  I had known Ralf for two years. He rarely spoke with any emotion, but now there was a definite note of passion in his voice. I looked sidelong at him, wondering at his true character.

  He was teaching me some German, though I already knew a little thanks to the teaching of my late friend, Herr Hartmann, killed at the siege of Melun. Ralf also taught my archers a few words of the language, though they were reluctant learners.

  “Take heart, lads,” I told them, “we’ll be safe once we get across the border into Germany. No more lodging in flea-bitten cottages for us. It’s a fair land, so I’ve heard, bursting with wine and women and all manner of good things.”

  Their glum faces lifted a little at the thought of the pleasures I described. They were rough soldiers, interested in pay and plunder and little else (or so I thought). How much longer would they agree to follow me? I was on a personal crusade, to join the so-called heretics in Bohemia and fight with them against the corrupted church of Rome. Few, if any, of my archers would wish to follow me on such a dangerous and unprofitable enterprise. The risks were great. Jan Hus, the idol of the Bohemian heretics, had been burned alive for his beliefs. If defeated, his followers could expect the same treatment at the hands of the papal inquisition.

  We safely crossed the border and reached Stuttgart, a town of pretty half-timbered houses, narrow streets and cobbled squares. It was also crawling with soldiers. After stabling our horses at one of the larger inns, we wandered in a daze among the bustling throngs of knights, archers, men-at-arms, the air filled with the chatter of countless foreign tongues: Bohemians, Moravians, Hungarians, Frenchmen, Germans, Switzers, men of Brabant and Westphalia, Poles, Aragonese, Castilians, even a few Scots and Welshmen. And Englishmen, of course. They were all mercenaries, sell-swords from every corner of Christendom, hired for the sole purpose of crushing the Hussites in Bohemia.

  The crusade - for so it was called - had proved an abysmal failure. This much we learned from an Englishman who marched up to us in the street. A big, burst-bellied, broad-shouldered fellow he was, his face a swollen bag of broken veins and mottled cheeks.

  “Heard you talking,” he boomed, crushing my hand in an iron grip, “English voices, by God! Made me shed a tear for home. Dear old England. Haven't seen the place in years. Well, couldn't leave you moping in the street, could I? I'm Hugh Venables. Come and have a bite to eat.”

  To my surprise and relief, his friendship didn’t come at a price. Rather, he bought dinner for us in one of the many brothel-cum-taverns tucked away in the alleys of Stuttgart.

>   It was a happy place, full of harlots swaggering about with painted faces and exposed breasts, serving cheap wine from battered tin flasks and heaps of plain but plentiful food. The plaster on the walls was a grubby shade of off-white, cracked and peeling, the floor scattered with dirty rushes that hadn’t been changed in a twelvemonth. While we got good and drunk, a couple of fiddle players scraped away in a dirty corner, switching between melancholy airs and fast, swirling reels. The customers roared tunelessly, while some of the drunker fellows danced with the whores, staggering about in crazy circles, stamping and clapping in time (more or less) to the wild music.

  The songs were in many tongues, most of them filthy and unrepeatable to your royal ears, O Sultan. At least one was in English. I still recall the words, so many years later, swirling around the fug of the packed whorehouse:

  “Now it is the time to drain the flowing bowl,

  Now with unfettered foot to beat the ground in dancing,

  Now with Salian feast to deck the couches of the Gods!”

  “Fill your bellies, comrades,” cried Hugh, tipping the contents of yet another flask into our cups, “drink, eat and fornicate, else the Devil might be disappointed.”

  This man, I had to remind myself, was a crusader. “You served in Bohemia?” I asked him, raising my voice above the riotous din.

  He nodded and took another gulp of rotgut wine. I suspected him of being minor English gentry like myself, some cadet branch of a noble family, long since fallen on hard times. His only possession of value was a fine gold-hilted sword, either stolen or an heirloom. The heavy bags under his eyes, cheap jewellery, broken veins in his sunken cheeks, stained doublet and cracked boots, completed a vile picture. I saw myself in him, twenty or thirty years on, and shuddered.

  “Yes, I was in Bohemia,” he shouted back, wiping spillage from his untidy grey beard, “for my sins, which are many and varied. I was a distinguished member of the mighty host that sat outside Prague last summer, starving on half-rations and regularly getting our backsides kicked by Jan Zizka and his band of heretics. The priests insisted that God was with us. If so, God is a shit general. Even worse than Sigismund, the fat German swine, and that’s saying something.”