Murder Most Medieval

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  “Stand.”

  The voice of Thomas Hindwell, owner of Fillette, so owner of Flut, too. As they stood, an arrow swished past them and twanged in a wooden target fixed to a willow. Then three more, striking the target so close together that the feathers of their flights touched. Thomas and his archers practicing, showing that at least they could shoot as well as anybody else there, though in this far corner there was nobody to watch. Thomas gestured to the horse to walk on. He was young and tense, every gesture larger than necessary, as if commanding a whole army instead of a handful of men. Thomas Hindwell was a remote kinsman of Sir William Herbert, so when the call had come he’d burnished his father’s sword and helmet, left his estate of a hundred rocky acres, and marched the twenty miles to Mortimer’s Cross with his entire male household—nine all told. Three good archers, five servants with pikes or axes, untried in war, a farm lad too young to be much use, who might pass as a squire. That wasn’t counting Flut. Nobody counted Flut. He settled the horse in her shelter of branches, fetched hay for her from the wagon, and stood by the fire, watching as the archers unstrung their bows and checked their arrow flights. They were in good humor. There was more meat and ale, even in their small part of camp, than they’d seen in three Christmases.

  “You ready for the fight then, Flut boy?”

  “A slummuck like ‘im? When meat pasties grow on thorn trees.

  Flut just grinned and went to sit alongside the horse, cross-legged on the cold ground.

  “Thomas Hindwell.”

  A call from the edge of their trodden patch. A young man waited, a few years older than Thomas and a head taller, warmly wrapped in a cloak of russet-colored wool, a big white hound beside him.

  “Ralph.”

  Thomas gave his bow hastily to one of the archers, wishing his rich cousin had found him with a sword, a gentleman’s weapon.

  “Comfortable here, cousin?”

  Ralph and his hound came to the fire without waiting to be invited. A smoldering branch fell and smoke from damp wood came pouring out like juices from a pudding. The household men drew back from the fire, leaving their betters to talk.

  “More comfortable tomorrow.”

  “After the battle.”

  “After the victory.”

  Six hours they’d have, at most. Six hours of winter daylight to win all that Ralph had as a right, and Thomas had only learned the lack of in a few bitter days in camp. Ralph had arrived leading fifty men with helmets and good weapons, dressed in their master’s livery, a wagon of silver plate to gleam in the firelight and make even a muddy field a feasting place. Above all, with a smile of greeting from Edward himself like the sun coming from behind a cloud: “Rejoiced to see you, Ralph, my cousin.” Then an invitation to drink wine in the ducal, almost royal, pavilion. If Edward was declared king on the battlefield tomorrow, Ralph would rise with him. And Thomas? If everything went well in those few hours, then Thomas would rise, too. There’d be no need to trail back to the sheep-nibbled, furze-spiked acres, no need to waste life as his father had, not much better than a border farmer with sword and helmet rusting on the chimney breast and fingers curled inward from the joint-rot of the rainy borderlands.

  “They’re talking in there.”

  Ralph gestured over to Edward’s pavilion, glowing in the dusk from the candles inside.

  “Planning the battle.”

  Thomas said it like a man of the world, but his stomach lurched. Ralph gave him a sideways look.

  “You think so?”

  “What are they talking about then, if it’s not the battle?”

  Ralph smiled, teeth as white in the firelight as his hound’s pelt.

  “Peace, my dear cousin. Peace.”

  Thomas thought at first he was being told to keep quiet, hold his peace, but there was more than that in Ralph’s smile.

  “How can it be peace? Edward won’t give way, not after what they did to his father.”

  “So the father’s head is hacked off and the son has to bowl his own after it? Will that really seem a good game to him, do you think?”

  “Edward can’t give up his claim and march away, not after bringing us all here.”

  “Depends what the king’s side’s offering. If they were to promise to make him regent, say, declare him Henry’s rightful heir, we might be laughing and drinking with those over there tomorrow night.”

  “You believe that?”

  Ralph shrugged. “Pembroke’s no fool. Winning or losing will hang on a hair tomorrow. Buy time. Bargain with us. That’s what he’ll try.”

  “And would Edward accept?”

  Another shrug.

  “Then what would we do?”

  “Back to our fields, cousin, and keep our peaceful sheep.”

  Ralph could joke. He had friends, a fortune, a world before him. And yet Thomas sensed there was a purpose in the joke, a question he was supposed to ask.

  “Is that what you wish for, cousin?”

  “It is not. There are no reputations or fortunes to be won in peace, eating buttermilk cakes by the fire, and watching your old mother spinning.”

  They both laughed, and yet Thomas felt a cold hollow round his heart and a sudden wish to taste the warm doughy crumbs on his tongue and know that the whirring sound was his mother’s spinning wheel, not blades on grindstones. He crushed it down.

  “If he makes peace now, it’s a mockery of us all.”

  Ralph’s hand came down on his shoulder, warm through cloth and leather.

  “Well said, Thomas. And yet when Bluemantle rides out tomorrow, it’s quite likely a truce offer he’ll be carrying. Think about that.”

  A horse whinnied from the other side of the field. Fillette replied, high and sharp. Ralph glanced toward her.

  “Has that mare seen a battle before?”

  Thomas shook his head.

  “I thought not. Your Fillette’s too fine and bright for work like this. I’ll buy her off you now and breed from her back home.”

  “No.” She was his only horse.

  “Just as you wish. To tomorrow then, Thomas.”

  “To tomorrow.” Ralph strode away, the hound at his heels, and Thomas stood so deep in thought that when the guest was gone and his men could move in to roast their collops of meat at the fire, they kept to the other side so as not to disturb him. Flut would get the rags of fat and gristle left when the other men had finished eating so he kept his distance, squatting on the dry bracken under the shelter of branches he’d built for the mare, listening to the men’s talk as they waited for their meat to cook.

  “Doesn’t look too glad, does ‘e?”

  “Thinking about tomorrow?”

  “What else?”

  “Never been in a battle, ”e ‘asn’t.“

  “You neither.”

  “Tell us what it’s like then.”

  “Not much.”

  “Not much what?”

  “Not much to tell about. You wins, you walks away. You don’t, you runs away.”

  “If you’re lucky.”

  Fillette stirred and pawed at her bedding. Flut ran a soothing hand down her foreleg. Fighting he knew about, not battles. Fighting was men punching and wrestling over a woman or a stolen sheep, knocking teeth out or breaking bones. When they’d arrived at the field by the river and seen more people than he’d ever seen in his life before, more than he even knew existed, he’d pictured them all wrestling and writhing in the mud like rats in a rain barrel. Slowly, watching them at practice with their swords, axes, and arrows, he realized he’d been wrong.

  “They’ve got Irish,” one of the bowmen said, pointing with his chin over to the enemy fires. “Want looking out for, they do. Not as much armor between the lot of em as would cover a flea’s arse but fight as if God had given em all ten lives to waste.”

  “About running…” one of the untried men said.

  “Don’t think about it before you have to.”

  “If you don’t think about it, ow do you kno
w when you ave to?”

  “You’ll know.”

  “It’s not our lot’ll do the running tomorrow,” an older bowmen said. “Pembroke’s foreigners’ll run so fast even she couldn’t catch them.”

  He looked at Fillette, quietly nosing her hay.

  “Wish I ‘ad ’er. Safer up there on a ‘orse with a good sharp gisarme.”

  The untried man mimed a blow downward with a battle-ax.

  “That’s not what it will be tomorrow. They’ll ride up to the front line, just—then get off and fight on foot like all the rest of us.”

  “Where’s the sense in that?”

  “More sense than sitting up there making yourself a target for arrows.”

  The archer took up the mime, drawing a bow toward Fillette’s heedless chest. Flut made a noise of protest, unregarded.

  “Proper target she’ll make, that bright in the sun. Won’t last an eye-blink.”

  The archer squinted toward her, released his imaginary arrow. Another, sharper noise came from Flut. He jumped in front of the horse, running his hands over her chest where the arrow would have hit, glaring at the archer. The other men laughed.

  “Gone and scared the poor gawby, you ‘ave.”

  Flut, still glaring, squatted back in the bracken and didn’t take his eyes off them. They ate their meat, heated dagger blades in the fire, and plunged them hissing into leather cups of ale, heating it so that it soothed throats aching from the damp and stored a little warmth to comfort the stomach in the night. The stars came out and the frost came down so cold you could hear the twigs and grass blades crackling as it caught them. The men arranged small branches near the fire, spread baggage sacks over them, and lay down wrapped in their cloaks. Fires across the camp died to a red glow, but the lights in Edward’s pavilion glowed as bright as ever. Fillette finished her hay, sighed, and folded herself down for the night. She rested neatly as a cat on her side, long legs tucked up and Flut curled against her, letting her warmth flow into him and his heartbeat and breathing slow until they were indistinguishable from hers. One hand was still on her chest at the point where the archer had aimed his imaginary arrow. He slept and woke like that through hours of darkness. He knew now that he’d die the next day. The proper men, who knew battles, were sure that an arrow would let the warm life out of her, so the life would go out of him, too. It wasn’t grief or loyalty—he didn’t know about those—but simply a matter of fact, like a trout dying when you took it away from the water. It was, after all, an insecure bundle of warmth that a man carried round inside his own skin. Just an arrow or lance prick would send it spilling into all that cold waiting outside. All he could do was lie there looking up at the stars through the branches of the shelter, hug her warmth while the night lasted, before the man they called Blue-mantle rode out in the frosty morning and said the magic words that would start arrows flying.

  Then, for the first time in his life, something started growing in his head that troubled him more than the thought of being dead. It was the thought that he might be able to do something about it. Things were done to Flut, not by Flut. The possibility that it might be otherwise turned the world upside down—as upside down as it would look to a trout flipped onto the bank and looking down at the water. And yet the trout twitches and tries with every fiber of its body to live. In the darkest hour of the night a twitch much like the fish’s brought Flut upright and shivering. The horse stirred in protest. He bent just long enough to stroke her neck to quiet her then trotted away, feeling the warmth of her still on his hand, raising his fingers to his nostrils to sniff her comforting smell as his cloth-wrapped feet padded over frozen grass.

  FlLLETTE WITHOUT FLUT SLEPT uneasily, starting at the slightest noise. Then, with the sky deep black and even the voices of the watchmen gone silent, she untucked her legs and was on her feet in a moment, quivering.

  “Easy girl, easy Fillette.”

  A man’s leather gloved hand was on her neck, stroking and calming. She gave a little snuffling sound, quivering her lips, pushing against his chest. A hand came out from under his cloak and unclasped to offer her hazelnuts.

  “Easy girl. Good girl.” She ate and allowed herself to be led softly past the sleeping men and outside the enclosure to a willow tree by the river. A saddle and bridle were waiting there and although the man fumbled, fitting them with frozen fingers in the dark, she stood patiently. He got her to stand beside the tree so that he could mount from a knot in its trunk, then guided her J along the river that ran black against the white grass. They followed it until they were past the watchmen’s fire, then struck out over the pastureland toward where the enemy’s fires glowed no more than a mile away across the fields, like a reflection of the camp they’d left. About halfway between the two lines, the rider made her stop behind a tangle of bushes and brambles on a bank overlooking three bare oak trees. They waited. Twice the noise of something moving near the oak trees made her prick her ears and tremble, but the man’s hand calmed her, and she stood quietly until there was the faint stirring in the air that comes before daylight, and the eastern edge of the sky began to turn the same color as the frozen land.

  As the light broadened, mist rose up from the river so that men moved in it as if wading, with only heads and upper bodies visible. They beat frozen hands against thighs or nursed them under armpits to supple them enough to cope with buckles, gulped bitter mouthfuls of ale from beakers that had necklets of jagged ice inside the rim. It was some time before Thomas’s household realized that both their master and his horse had gone. “Gone out already, ”e ‘as. Wouldn’t wait for us.“ ”Don’t be a dunny. How would he go on his own with nobody to fettle the mare for him?“ ”Where’s ’e gone then?“

  “Somewhere around he’ll be. Just go and look for him.” Some of them looked all round the camp, but found no sign of him, and with the light growing everybody was too occupied with his own business to worry about an obscure man and his handful of followers. When the men who had gone to look came back to report failure to the others, even the battle veterans looked sick. You had to have a leader, somebody to fight around. Without that, it wasn’t a battle, only a confusion. Thomas’s men stood and stared at each other and at the Fillette’s shelter, empty except for droppings and scattered bracken. As they stared, the sound of a trumpet drifted over from Edward’s pavilion. Bluemantle was on his horse and had started his short and lonely ride toward the enemy lines.

  MOVING IN THE DARK., moving near the ground were natural to Flut, who never expected to be far away from either. His chapped and callused fingers had never been nimble, so the cold was less of a clog to them than the fingers of quicker men. He did what needed to be done doggedly and slowly in the dark, by feel rather than sight, then huddled up between the tree roots, waiting. When he heard the bugle note drifting over from the camp, he got up, tightened the rags round his feet, and jumped for a low branch of the nearest oak. It took a lot of ungainly scrabbling, but at last he managed to wedge himself with his back against the trunk and his legs astride the branch, watching. Up on the bank, Fillette stirred again, hearing scrabblings from the oak tree.

  “Easy, girl, easy. Only a pigeon waking up.”

  But the rider’s voice was strained. He looped the reins over the pommel of the saddle, unhitched the longbow that was slung at his knee, thumbed the bowstring into its slot. It was morning now. Although the sun was not up, the sky above the mist was white and taut like the silk of a banner, and a man could have seen colors if there were any to see in the white and black landscape of rime and river. Then there was color, one patch of it coming quite slowly at easy walking pace, shining out against the black and white. Quarterings of blue and red, a gleam of gold, a blue plume on a hat, and the fall of a blue mantle. The rider took an arrow from the quiver on his back, notched it into the bowstring.

  BLUEMANTLE’S BAY WENT AT a collected walk. It was against a herald’s dignity to hurry, and nobody would want or expect fighting to start until the sun was well clea
r in the sky. For the next hour both armies would be waiting on the word of the heralds and, whether for war or peace, the thing must be done in proper order. The bay hardly needed guiding because there was only one sensible way between the battle lines—a causeway at some distance from the muddy ground closer to the river, passing between oak trees. For most of the journey he kept his eyes straight ahead to the line of pavilions and white and gold standards that marked the enemy camp of the Earls of Pembroke and Wiltshire. Then at the last moment a gash of color much closer and to his right caught his eye. Against the mist and standing on ground a little higher than he was, Fillette seemed a gleaming giant horse from legend, a horse out of the sun. Bluemantle gasped in surprise, raised a hand. At that moment, the arrow struck his throat, tumbling him backward out of the saddle with the weight of the mantle pulling him to the ground.