“They’re up there looking for us.” Since Philip was on his back, he had a better view of the battlements than David. They’d come a hundred yards from the castle by now and the glow from the torches on the wall-walk were all David could make out from a quick glance back. Then they swept around a bend and were hidden from view of the men on the tower.
The river was called the Sevre de Niortaise, translated as the weaning of Niortaise, whatever the heck that was supposed to mean, which at the moment David didn’t care. All that mattered was that the river had run right up against the edge of the curtain wall, to the point of starting to undermine it, the same as at David’s castles in Rhuddlan in Wales and Westminster in London. Thus, when Clare’s men had shot their arrows into David’s chest, and Philip had made them fall head over heels, the river had been there to catch them.
It was some consolation that at midnight it was so dark that anyone looking over the battlement of the chateau would have been hard pressed to see their heads in the water, even had David and Philip been directly below them. The archer who’d shot at them, or perhaps a companion or two, would have had to run around the wall-walk first, and most of Clare’s men were fighting David’s and Philip’s. Still, the farther downstream he and Philip were able to float, the safer they were going to be.
Over the years, David had made a personal study of battlements and their time travel potential. He had been in a hundred castles since he’d come to Wales in 1282. Especially since Dover, he’d made it a point to circumnavigate their defenses when he could in order to determine where the best place to fall might be so as not to kill himself if the time traveling didn’t work. While David had chosen to stand in that particular location on the wall-walk because of the view, he’d also stood at the best spot for traveling.
Falling through the crenel had genuinely been the last thing on David’s mind as he leaned through it to look down at the water, but if he had been thinking about it, he would truly have expected to time travel. And yet, inexplicably, the great gaping blackness hadn’t come. Apparently, his life hadn’t been in enough danger for that. Truth be told, Philip’s quick action had ensured that the archer hadn’t been able to fire off another shot, and, as it turned out, the arrows that had hit David hadn’t come close to touching his skin.
He’d always suspected that his time traveling wasn’t as simple as he’d pretended all these years. Since that first day at Cilmeri, he’d put himself in all kinds of danger, accidentally and on purpose, and the time traveling had always come through for him. It would have been a relief in a way to have found himself in the twenty-first century, because he could have dealt with Philip’s shoulder and then either left him (wouldn’t that have been a devious way to deal with Philip’s impact on history?), or returned with him—presumably arriving at the exact place and time he needed to in order to stop Clare from taking David’s kingdom.
In a way, David’s failure to time travel had loosed him from his moorings—much like coming to Wales for the first time at the age of fourteen had done. That day, his predominant emotion had been fear. Although part of David was supremely ticked off that the time traveling hadn’t happened, he also felt a little exhilarated to realize he didn’t know as much as he thought he did.
Putting his questions aside, David focused on swimming, pulling Philip into the center of the stream, which was the swiftest portion of the river. France, like England, had experienced a rainy spring, so the river was high, but because it was June, they wouldn’t freeze to death from the temperature of the water. Since one arm was occupied with keeping Philip above water, David was forced to swim with a modified breaststroke. Though he was clearly a better swimmer than Philip, he was out of practice and had never enjoyed swimming much anyway, beyond splashing around in a community water park. So when a log floated by him, David caught it and shoved it at Philip so he could hang onto it with his uninjured arm.
This country was truly a foreign place to David, and he had no notion what obstacles might lie ahead. He couldn’t see anything of the land around them, and even though he’d surveyed the landscape from the castle and noted that it was mostly flat, that wasn’t to say they wouldn’t find themselves swept over a waterfall if he wasn’t careful.
As Philip had noted, David had never set foot on the Continent before this week. The few days it had taken to ride from Bordeaux to Chateau de Niort, which had been built by David’s Plantagenet predecessors as part of their control of the Duchy of Aquitaine, were the only days he’d ever spent in France. But while David didn’t know the general geography of Aquitaine as well as he knew Britain, he knew that La Rochelle was somewhere to the west.
In the aftermath of Hythe, David had regained a significant territory that had been lost to the French crown at the Treaty of Paris in 1259, including Angoulême and the western portion of the county of Poitiers. Unfortunately for David, he’d entrusted the entirety of his defenses and the governance of the Duchy in the last months to Clare, as a way to distract him from his holdings in Ireland, which up until now had been David’s primary concern.
A bad mistake.
“They’re going to be searching for us,” Philip said. “We have to get to French territory. We’ll be safe there.”
“Are you sure about that?” David said. “Clare’s man shot you first. I imagine that all of your men are dead, as well as mine. Clare wants my throne. Who’s usurping yours?”
“I don’t know.”
David’s head was close enough to Philip’s that he could hear him grinding his teeth. He also had accepted without question David’s assumption that it was Gilbert de Clare who’d betrayed them.
“Meanwhile,” David continued, “your lands are miles away, and while Aquitaine might be technically in my possession, nobody knows me here. It isn’t as if we are dressed like kings either, or at least I’m not.”
Philip had no answer to that, so David continued to struggle in the current, keeping Philip and himself afloat. Finally, his lips turning blue and his limbs no longer able to bear the cold, David hauled Philip onto a sandy spit on the south side of the river. Both men collapsed, exhausted. David couldn’t help but agree with Philip in his instinct to keep to the north bank of the river and head to France. But while traveling in that direction might present a possible source of aid, David thought he was right about Philip’s rival. Someone in the French court was working with Clare. That meant retreating to Paris wasn’t the answer. While it was true that Chateau Niort lay on the south bank of the river, so did David’s way home.
“I should have known something was wrong when Clare wasn’t on the dock to greet me when I arrived,” David said. “I apologize, Philip. Clare was my man. It is my judgement that was faulty in trusting him.”
“We all trust where we shouldn’t.” Philip groaned as he rolled onto his back and flung his good arm across his eyes. “Clare will be in London, awaiting word of your death and mine.” Then he cursed in French, the word cut off by a gasp of pain.
David dragged himself up to kneel beside his companion. “Let me take a look at that wound.” Though it had been the arrow sticking out of Philip’s shoulder that had prompted David to stand in front of him and take the next two, he hadn’t actually gotten a good look yet at the damage.
“It’s nothing.”
Ignoring what he viewed to be a pro forma objection, David ripped Philip’s shirt at the shoulder to reveal the bloody mess beneath it. “The arrow shaft broke off in your shoulder, probably when you hit the water.” David grimaced in sympathy at what that must have felt like. As he explored the wound, he was careful not to irritate the sensitive tissue around it more than he had to.
“Can you cut out what’s left?” Philip said.
David’s mother called this battlefield medicine, and nobody liked it. If David left the arrowhead inside Philip’s body for even another hour, the wound could fester. It could fester anyway, especially given their stint in the river. David was also a little worried that the archer mi
ght have dipped the tip in poison, though perhaps if that had been the case, Philip would have died already. Regardless, the arrowhead needed to come out. Right now, however, it was plugging a hole in Philip’s body, so when he pulled it out he needed to be ready to staunch the wound.
David shifted slightly so he wasn’t blocking the moonlight from shining on Philip’s shoulder. Even with that light, however, it was too dark to see more than the outlines of what he had to do, and he ultimately was forced to probe the extent of the damage with his fingers. Each time the metal head moved even a millimeter, Philip flinched, and David winced in sympathy.
But then he sighed in relief. “I don’t need to cut it out. There’s still a little bit of wooden shaft attached. I think I can grab it.”
A pair of pliers would have been really nice since David’s fingers were slick with Philip’s blood, but pliers were (sadly) not part of his regular attire. Taking a chance that the flow of blood was slowing, David let go of Philip’s shoulder for a second in order to pull his tunic over his head and fold it to form a bandage. Then he retreated to wash his hands the best he could in the river. Returning to kneel beside Philip, he gently grasped the truncated arrow shaft. “When is your birthday, Philip?”
“June 14th—aaahhh!”
With a quick jerk, like ripping off a bandaid, David pulled out the arrowhead. He’d known when Philip’s birthday was and had simply been looking for a distraction. Then David pressed hard on Philip’s shoulder with the cloth. It was good that Philip was lying on his back, because gravity was working for him rather than against him.
Philip held out his right hand. “May I have the arrowhead?” His voice was more gravelly than normal, but he hadn’t passed out, which boded well for the future. Their journey was only just beginning, and they had a long way to go.
“Sure.” David was happy to give it to him. Like the arrow shaft in David’s boot, keeping the arrowhead was preferable to tossing it behind him into the river or dropping it on the bank. It wouldn’t do to leave behind any evidence that they’d been here. Clare’s men would know that the arrowhead had been pulled out of a living man.
After Philip stowed the arrowhead in his pocket, David had him press his own hand to the wound. That left David’s hands free to tear off Philip’s bloody sleeve so he could use the fabric to bind his shoulder. The wound was in an awkward place, but David managed to wrap the cloth under and around Philip’s shoulder and tie it at the collarbone.
“It hurts like the devil.” Philip lifted his head slightly to eye the wound. “And it’s bleeding still.”
“That’s often a good thing, according to one of my physician friends,” David said.
“Sacre Dieu.” Philip rested his head back on the sand. “How many times have you saved my life tonight?”
“It was you who got us off that battlement.” David swiveled on the ball of his foot to observe their surroundings. “We need to keep moving. Clare’s men will be searching for our bodies.”
“We can’t let them find us.” Philip moaned every time he moved, but with David’s help, he managed to reach his feet and stood in the sand, swaying. At least he hadn’t gone into shock. Focusing on the urgent needs of the moment—from flipping them over the battlement to staying alive in the river—might have saved Philip’s life more than David himself had—aside from David taking those two arrows for him.
“France and England have been ever at odds.” Philip shook his head, but the moon was bright enough to show David the small smile on his lips. “I should have known meeting with you was a bad idea.” As before on the wall-walk, he was making a joke. David was impressed that he could.
“Come on.” David ducked under Philip’s right arm and put his left arm around the French king’s waist. “We’d better get moving. I intend to make Clare regret our meeting even more than we do.”
Chapter Four
13 June 1293
David
“Is someone trying to depose you to take the throne in your stead, or is he thinking that he will govern as regent? I’m not sure what the rules are for succession in France.” While David was focused on their immediate survival, a significant part of his brain was working on the larger problem. He forced himself to relax and listen to his surroundings as they crouched beneath an old oak, his eyes searching and his ears perked for any sign of pursuit. Unfortunately, because the river wended its way sinuously across the landscape, they weren’t as far from the castle as he felt they ought to be.
“I’m being deposed so another can take the throne,” Philip said. “My sons are the same age as yours. They are not ready to rule, and nobody would go through this much trouble for just the regency.”
“I wouldn’t put anything past Clare,” David said, “and my sons wouldn’t be the first young princes to lose their lives at the hands of their regent.”
David spoke these words calmly, even as his heart was screaming at him. Beyond Clare’s treachery, what was preoccupying David most was concern for how quickly news of his death would reach England, and if he could possibly get home first. In his mind’s eye, David had no trouble picturing Clare walking into the hall at Westminster and telling Lili he was dead. The very idea was torture. She wouldn’t want to believe Clare at first, hoping perhaps that David had time traveled to safety, but if David didn’t return within a few days—or at least get word to her within a week—she would have no choice but to accept his death.
“Regardless,” David added, “I am very lucky that Clare chose this moment to betray me.”
Philip’s expression was a mix of astonishment and utter skepticism. “How are you lucky?”
“I didn’t come to Aquitaine with a full complement of advisers. Most of my closest companions remain at home—and none of them are going to go down before Clare lightly.”
Philip’s brows came together. “I noticed that lack and wondered.”
David gave a wry grin. “I left some at home on purpose, due to other commitments, but for the rest … we sailed down the Thames to the Channel, and then turned south, making for Bordeaux. But we’d only reached Dover when many of my people, including my squire and manservant, went down with an intestinal ailment that laid them so low they couldn’t possibly sail any farther. Rather than put off the meeting with you, which had taken so long to arrange, I continued with those who could still stand.” David shrugged. “At the time, I figured it would be okay to have so few men with me, because Clare’s men would meet me at Bordeaux.”
“They surely did that.” Philip’s laugh was mocking.
“We have to assume, Philip, that all of our men are dead. The only way Clare is going to get away with the outright murder of two kings is if he leaves nobody who isn’t loyal to him alive as witness to what happened.”
“Even then, those men who perpetrated the act might find their lifespan shorter than they hoped.” Philip canted his head. “You realize that the archer used a longbow, not a crossbow. He was English.”
“More likely, he was Welsh.” David gripped Philip’s good arm and helped him to his feet. He was ready to be done thinking about the larger picture because it was making him want to puke. “Let’s move.”
A road ran parallel to the river, not far from their stand of trees, and they turned onto it. On the whole it was probably a safer strategy to avoid the roads, but they could always get off it if they heard someone coming. The night was clear with a bright moon, and stars splashed across the sky in a way that David hoped he would never grow tired of seeing.
“What is your plan—to walk all the way to the sea?” Philip said between puffing breaths.
“Pretty much.”
“La Rochelle is forty miles from here!” Philip said.
“If I’m not mistaken, it’s your shoulder that’s wounded, not your legs,” David said.
Philip made a guttural sound, implying disbelief, but although he was keeping his right hand pressed to his left shoulder, he was, in fact, struggling along without the assistance he
’d needed earlier. Eventually, he would grow weak from pain and loss of blood, but as long as his legs still worked they could keep moving.
“My plan is to ask the Templars for help,” David said. “They’ve stationed the bulk of their fleet at La Rochelle, and the commanderie there is the largest in the region.”
Philip gave a low groan that had nothing to do with the pain in his shoulder. “Asking for help from the Templars would not be my first, second, or third choice.”
“That would be because you owe them money and haven’t kept up with the payments.”
A Templar such as Pierre de Villiers, the La Rochelle master, was on a par with David in terms of power and resources. If anywhere in Aquitaine was safe from Clare, it was their stronghold. The Templars had never had much of a presence in Wales, and hardly any Welshmen had become Templars. The order had always been predominantly French and Norman, which was why David hadn’t had much to do with them before he’d become King of England. The Order of the Pendragon, David’s own secret society, had been enough to be going on with—or so he’d thought.
Over the last year, however, David had begun reaching out personally to the Templars. Pope Boniface wanted David to go on crusade, and the Templars’ entire aim was to win the Holy Land for Christendom. Thus, it seemed like a good idea to be on civil terms with them. It was during those initial overtures that the Templars had told David that Clare might not be as loyal as everyone supposed.
By now, David’s relationship with the Templars had matured to such an extent that, before David had sailed to Aquitaine, Carew had taken him aside and offered him a password, the use of which at any Templar holding would gain the speaker instant help, no questions asked. David didn’t think Carew himself had any premonition of what was to come—the man lived as solidly in the here and now as anyone David had ever met—but he was cautious, particularly about leaving David to his own devices. The password had come from Godfrid de Windsor, Carew’s own half-brother and the current commander of Temple Church in London, since its former master was ill, perhaps to death.
Masters of Time Page 3