THE
SILVER HORN
ECHOES
A Song of Roland
Michael Eging
and
Steve Arnold
THE SILVER HORN ECHOES
A SONG OF ROLAND
Copyright © 2017 Michael Eging; Steve Arnold.
Cover Artist: Jordan Raskin
http://www.jordanraskin.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Certain characters in this work are historical figures, and certain events portrayed did take place. However, this is a work of fiction. All of the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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ISBN: 978-1-5320-2020-9 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2021-6 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2022-3 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017908429
iUniverse rev. date: 07/22/2017
CONTENTS
Prologue The Bastard of Normandy
Chapter 1 Lord of the March
Chapter 2 Campaign Season
Chapter 3 Imperial Whispers
Chapter 4 Of David and Goliath
Chapter 5 Champion Borne
Chapter 6 Saragossa’s Heart
Chapter 7 Reunions
Chapter 8 The Mettle of Men
Chapter 9 Knight of Swords
Chapter 10 Conspiracies
Chapter 11 Consequences
Chapter 12 Collateral of War
Chapter 13 A House Divided
Chapter 14 Chasing Secrets
Chapter 15 Ambush
Chapter 16 Barcelona
Chapter 17 Maneuvers
Chapter 18 Secrets
Chapter 19 Across Miles of Dreams
Chapter 20 Of Murder and Honor
Chapter 21 Fire from Heaven
Chapter 22 In God’s Hands
Chapter 23 The Price of Peace
Chapter 24 Whisperers
Chapter 25 Ganelon Triumphant
Chapter 26 Revelations
Chapter 27 Roncevaux
Chapter 28 The Silver Horn Echoes
Chapter 29 Retribution
Chapter 30 Love and Loss
Epilogue A Kingdom Won
Authors’ Notes
About the Authors
PROLOGUE
The Bastard of Normandy
Southern Coast of Britain
October 1066
Single-masted ships crowded the gray waters of Pevensey Bay, spilling the implements of war from their bellies onto the beach in a steady stream. Under the leaden sky, men, horses, and equipment surged through the swells of waves to track up the muddied rise onto the plain. William, duke of Normandy, known best to these men as their Young Bastard, scanned the flow of men and material to the blossoming camp with fierce gray eyes. Among the Normans, he was a tall man who stood with a confident martial bearing and yet bore an unpretentious appearance, clad in the worn and proven harness of a soldier—mail coat, plain helm, and a utilitarian sword belted to his side. His mud-colored hair was, like the meanest of his troops, trimmed tightly, as was the close-cropped beard shadowing his strong jaw. He glanced up at the autumn sky threatening rain and pulled his cloak tighter about his broad shoulders. A curse slipped from his lips. In his many hard-fought years, he had experienced few divine graces to inspire him to proffer words to the God who had cursed him from birth for his father’s sins. Such words would never move the heavens anyway, he reckoned. Even now drops of rain fell to the ground, ensuring the army’s progress would soon be mired in slop.
A grim smile touched his lips when he turned toward the encampment, which was bristling with steel and sinew. Soldiers struggled under the weight of sharpened logs that they carried from the forest then planted in mounds of earth to form a crude wall—nothing elaborate as the stone ramparts of Normandy, but serviceable enough and quickly made. Others bent their backs to dig a trench before those walls, stiffening the fortifications against the inevitable assault by William’s own cousin Harold Godwinson and his Saxon curs, who were even then on their way south from a narrow victory at Stamford Bridge over Harold’s brother Tostig and the Hardrada, Tostig’s patron and king of the Norse.
Yes, Harold, we will be prepared for your assault, the duke mused. You will not drive us back to the sea.
He mingled with the men slogging up the slope. Just behind him, his young squire struggled to bear the ducal banner, occasionally having to use the flagstaff for a walking stick through the slick mud. On the duke’s other side stood the gaunt figure of Aimeri, viscount of Thouars, protected from the weather by a thick cloak and trousers. He was a lean and unpredictable killer who carried himself with an air of strained control that motivated the youth to struggle all the more to keep the pennant and his feet moving toward the camp.
“Keep that out of the muck, you whelp!” Aimeri growled, swinging a boot at him and flicking mud across the youth’s pockmarked face.
The lad attempted a half bow and nearly slipped.
“No sense scaring the lad witless,” William observed. He turned to the boy. “Hurry on there. Stow that in my tent. Then see to the preparations for the council.”
A look of relief eased the youth’s muddied face. He rolled up the pennant, tucked it under his arm, and, in a squishing walk-run, awkwardly dodged through the traffic toward the center of camp.
“You’re too easy on the boy,” Aimeri muttered. “One day he’ll thank you for a cuff on the ear before battle. He’ll be grateful for you toughening him up.”
A wolf’s grin touched William’s lips. “First we finish this scrape. Then we’ll talk about toughening him up. I’m sure his father will appreciate if we return his eldest son to him whole.”
Aimeri snorted, and a trooper coaxing along a reluctant warhorse glanced their way at the sound. “What are you on about?” Aimeri said curtly, startling the animal. “Git up there and make sure you get that rust off your hauberk. You’ll want the sparkle for the Saxons when they arrive!”
William sidestepped the spooked horse, his steps sure from spending his life on campaign. He kicked along a clot of miry earth.
“And when they do arrive,” the duke said, “I want to hit them before they have time to breathe. Hardrada softened them up for us, and I don’t want to waste the opportunity to take Harold’s head.”
They made their way through the cantonment as the men pitched tents, stowed gear, and began foraging to keep the army warm against the chill autumn rain. Smoke from sputtering fires drifted through the air, and William took in a deep breath with relish.
This is where men sort out their differences, he thought, in the field looking the
enemy in the eyes. Not behind veils and masks, dressed in fine hose and vests, hoping to conceal their intent by perfumed smiles and droning banter. Yes, Harold, your sweet words of disinterest in the throne will bite you in the arse if I don’t take your head from your shoulders first.
A rider outfitted in the lightweight garb of a forward scout trotted against the tide of men. He sighted the duke, rode closer, dismounted, and came to a knee in the mud.
“Simon. What word?” William asked.
Simon hesitated, and William knew the man’s news was not what he wanted to hear.
“Speak, man! I’ll have it now, not cosseted away in my tent!”
“My lord, the usurper … his armies approach.”
Aimeri raised a hand to cuff the messenger, but William caught his wrist, stopping him short.
“But it’s a lie!” Aimeri hissed. “Godwinson couldn’t march his men from the north that fast. Not after the mauling they took from the Northmen.”
Simon continued. “’Tis no lie, honored lord. I saw their fires with my own eyes. He’s come with his host and his personal guard of housecarls at the center.”
He pointed past the ridge of hills toward the plain. “There!”
William spun on his heels and called for his horse.
The Saxon camps clung to the muddy hillsides, their distant bustle of rounded helms glimmering in the gray light like steely flies on a manure pile. From a sheltered perch atop a wooded knoll, William gauged the flood of troops streaming up the road.
“Damn. Damn him to hell,” he muttered. “How did he march them the length of England so quickly? Fulford is ten days from here!”
Aimeri shook his head. “Possessed devils. We’d heard they were days, if not weeks, behind our landing.”
William squinted and began counting men and animals milling about in the enemy camp. The early arrival of Harold’s force created a wrinkle in his plans. The battle at Stamford Bridge had pitted two armies in a bitter struggle to see who would face the Normans for final control of Britain. William had heard the Saxons, though victorious, had been forced to lick heavy wounds on the push south to meet him. They should have been days away, and yet here they were. The housecarls, Harold’s elite bodyguard, moved about the center of the Saxon camp with a martial efficiency that easily matched that of William’s own Norman knights.
“My lord,” Aimeri said urgently. “We must move along. Your cousin won’t allow us to remain here for long.” In fact a squad of Saxon infantry even now peeled from the distant host to approach their position.
William nodded curtly, remounted his horse, and led his companions back to the Norman lines.
Nobles crowded the table in the center of the hastily erected fortifications. An impatient William stalked in and took his place at the table’s head. Aimeri dominated the shadows behind him, a wraith of death that silenced the quick-witted among them with a glance, who then in turn hurriedly shushed their less attentive fellows.
William tossed a scrap of carefully lettered vellum that bore bits of Harold Godwinson’s wax seal onto the map spread across the table.
“He taunts us, this self-styled king. He taunts us, but that shall soon come to an end!”
“My lord,” offered Roger of Mortimer, bushy brows over intelligent eyes framed by short-cropped hair. “Meeting us here, before we can consolidate, is a feat of logistics.”
“But can he make them fight if they’re dropping from exhaustion?” William placed his hands flat on the map. “Then this plain called Hastings will be the final killing field. This will decide the issue. Once we have beaten Harold, the earls will flock to our banner as we march on London.”
“As you say,” Roger said, bowing his head. “But if we are to strike, we must make it soon so he cannot rest those troops from their miraculous march.”
“Yes,” William agreed. “We must grind them now. Then the earls will break.”
As the gloomy day deepened into evening, campfires sputtered from sodden fuel. Amid the flickering light and vaporous smoke, knights checked harnesses and weapons, sergeants inspected hauberks and helmets, and squires repaired worn gear. Those who had finished their labors stood in lines for one last hot meal on the eve of battle.
William drifted through the camp, his eyes keen on the tasks and his ears open to the tenor of the men who would soon battle and die in his name. Five paces behind him, close enough to be at hand while distant enough to be innocuous, his young squire trotted in similar plain garb. As he wandered the camp, the duke witnessed the campfires become smoldering hotbeds for gossip of the Saxon usurper Harold and his vaunted housecarls. Rumors of the victory over Tostig and Hardrada, the Norse king, grew with each telling from mouth to ear, from fireside to bedroll, throughout the camp as the men recounted what they knew and embellished what they didn’t.
“Possessed,” a foot soldier whispered. “The demon Saxon slew the reaver king Hardrada with his own bow—an arrow right through his eye!”
The men around him murmured.
“I remember when he was at court,” said a sergeant, looking up from oiling his sword with a rag. “Giant, he was—his arms as thick as my waist. When at sport, he put men down and snapped their backs …”
A younger man fitting woolen padding to his helmet ventured to speak up. “I hear his housecarls drink the blood of the fallen in some unholy ritual! And they bear Norse axes with runes on them. Marks that ensure if a man is nicked by one—why, he will bleed to death!”
A grizzled veteran grumbled, “Harold is but a man. The Saxon buggers will run sure enough when we sweep the field with horse. They’ll run, I bet my own mother on it.”
The first soldier, undaunted by the other, whispered conspiratorially. “He used the magic of Albion, I’ve heard, to transport his army so quickly from the bloody bridge. And I heard that he took Hardrada’s head with his own ax and stowed it in a faery bag as payment for the trick!”
The younger soldier nodded in all seriousness. “I reckon he spirited his army on the backs of swamp bats.” But pride in his contribution to the conversation was cut short when William stepped from the shadows, pushing back the cowl on his cloak.
“Horse shite,” the duke spat. “You’ll find them men when you meet on the field. And what are you? A pack of cowering curs?”
The men tumbled to their knees, heads lowered beneath the indignation of their liege lord.
“By God, get off the ground! You look like groveling worms! Norman blood flows in your veins! Don’t dishonor it. Let it burn within you!”
Before the men could stammer a reply, William whirled around and stalked away, his cloak lashing at shadows.
Between campfires, the squire ventured close. “My lord,” he said, “the whole camp whispers of Harold. The Norse king’s blood is barely cold, yet there he stands with his whole Saxon army.” His face belied the dismay that he strained to keep from his voice.
William paused, his face consumed by the very shadows that raged through the hearts of his men. “It’s not devilry, sorcery, or witchcraft. He is a soldier who demands much of his men. Nothing more!”
“Yes, my lord. But the men see the fires extend from horizon to horizon.”
William gritted his teeth. “You speak well beyond your years,” he said grimly. “But they can spread from here to Rome for all I care. It changes nothing. But I’ve a thought. Yes, I’ve a thought indeed.”
Joachim, the lanky minstrel, roared with laughter as the stocky veteran pulled a dagger from his belt and tossed it into the pile of bets. “You’d risk that? Your last kiss if all else fails on the battlefield?” he asked. His blue eyes were keen as he mentally tallied the pile of weapons and heirlooms that rode on one final roll of the dice in his fingers. He shook them. The rattle was reassuring, for luck was on his side.
“I’ll take my chances with our Bastard,” the soldier said, wi
ping a sweaty hand on his dirty tunic. “Harold may be a trickster, but his fortunes just hit a Norman wall.”
“Then we’ll roll on this …” Joachim tossed the knucklebones and watched them bounce before settling.
“And you keep your fine weapon for another day!” The tall dandy laughed and grabbed a wineskin. “Win or lose, when the earls come howling for your head, you’ll have her right at your side!”
William stepped forward from behind Joachim. The men around the bard scrambled to take a knee. The duke reached out a hand to the minstrel’s shoulder when he rose with a start.
“Lord William,” Joachim sputtered. He glanced nervously at the collection of belongings by the fire. “Just keeping their spirits up, my lord, you understand?”
William ignored the game. “We must talk, Joachim. It’s time.” The minstrel slung his lute over his shoulder and followed him into the fluttering shadows outside the campfires.
William walked in silence. The usually irrepressible Joachim swallowed his words, for he knew the duke to be a man who determined when and where speaking would be done. They stopped at the camp’s edge. From there, Joachim became acutely aware of the close proximity of the Saxons, strung out across a low ridge, sentries’ torches moving like midsummer fireflies against the starless night.
“There,” William said, gesturing across the gap between the armies. “The reason you’ve come on this adventure. The very jaws of the Saxon lion prepare for us on the morrow.”
“Yes, my lord,” Joachim hissed through clenched teeth. “Harold is quite a magicker.”
“Forced marches and filling the ranks of the fallen with farm boys and broken old wretches. I intend to rip the sheet from his sorcery. But that’s where I need you.”
The minstrel bowed his ragged flaxen head with a flourish of his hand.
“Of course, my lord. I knew it would soon be time to sing for my supper.”
“Yes, better a song than your head. This is not a recital for a party at court. Every one of my men must be able to hear the song. They must not faint before the morrow’s fight.”
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