Son of the Night

by Mark Alder

  A third time. He threw up his shield and straight away knew his arm was broken. He vomited into his mouth with the pain of it. Behemoth was above him, its great paunch rubbing the floor, the stink of its tree of a cock in his nostrils. He stabbed up with Joyeuse and the creature screamed, wobbled and, oh no, sat down like a landslide. Oh God, his legs were trapped, his sword arm too, though he would not release his sword. He pulled and pulled on the holy weapon, tearing at the thing’s belly, engulfed in a tide of blood, hot entrails dropping around him like serpents. Behemoth howled and struck down with its sword, catching his helmet a glancing blow and skittling his senses.

  He’d taken worse blows in tournaments or in the mêlée, been thrown from horses, smashed by maces, and all that good practice came to bear. Another man might have ceased to fight; another man might have been rendered stone by the force of the blow.

  Eu shook it off. Why do knights bash each other’s brains out in tournaments? So, come the real fight, they have no more brains to bash. Tear, rip. He thought he would pass out with the pain but he couldn’t afford to do that. A footman was above him, grinning, a cruel dagger in his hand. He drew a finger across his throat and split in two, from the centre of his skull down to his waist as Behemoth swiped at Eu and missed.

  A beetle devil landed, clicking its mandibles. He twisted to get his sword free but the bulk of the devil would not allow him. The beetle approached, fitted its jaws around his helm, and bit. The steel creaked and groaned. Behemoth stood up. Eu tried to pull out his sword but it was still stuck in the creature’s belly. He found his misericord and drove it into the beetle’s eye, but the weapon bounced away. He’d forgotten to have it blessed! His vision blurred; his head felt as though it would burst as the beetle’s crushing jaws clamped down. The giant teetered above him, ready to fall. ‘Goodbye, Marie, goodbye, Celeste, goodbye—’ He was halfway through his farewell to his family when something struck Behemoth like a stone from a siege engine. A warhorse had come in at the charge. The giant fell back onto the cowards who still hid at its back, expiring with a great sigh echoed by the men beneath it.

  He felt the pressure on his head release. More agony as he was dragged across the cobbles.

  ‘Robert !’

  It was Bertrand and a party of his men, the men-at-arms driving around the monster to force the English back with cries and jabs. ‘Can you move?’

  Eu shook his legs and then stood. He had to get to his feet. His men could not see their leader down.

  ‘Very well, very good,’ said Eu. ‘Well, don’t just stand there looking as though you’ve been stuffed, Robert, get my sword! It’s in the creature.’

  ‘You killed it, sir, you killed it.’ It was his page Marcel. ‘I told you to go.’

  Bertrand ran to the fallen Behemoth and grabbed Joyeuse. ‘Give it, give it,’ said Eu. ‘Boy, unstrap my shield.’

  The page did as he was bid while more French poured in around them. The death of the giant had renewed the courage of his men and made that of the English falter. Fighting was all around them, the clash of arms, cries of exultation and of pain rending the air.

  Englishmen were already robbing the houses, emerging with fine carpets, clothes and what other plunder they could get while not ten paces away other men fought mortal duels.

  ‘And fetch a horse,’ said Eu. ‘A horse, now. Get one!’ The boy ran away into the mêlée.

  Eu had been prepared for this. His old tutor Chevalier De Tares had specialised in running him into the ground, beating him with a stave and pulling such tricks as tying an arm behind his back or putting a patch across one eye in his schooling with the sword and lance. Hard in the yard, easy in the fight was the way of it.

  He recalled the old man’s words: ‘One eye, one arm, one leg. A knight will always be better than ten ordinary men’. He took a breath and looked around. The bridge was holding but men were pouring over the river now, some wading, some in boats. The town was lost – no point in denying it. The castle on the other island was the only choice. The houses were forfeit and they had been idiots to try to defend them with so little preparation.

  He should have burned the lot of them to deny the English shelter. The page arrived with a horse. He recognised it – Chevalier Malpré’s. Very likely dead.

  ‘Help me up!’

  The boy knelt, offering himself as a mounting stool, and Eu winced as he scissored his legs over the high cantle of the saddle.

  The pain in his arm was great but he was secure, propped back and front.

  ‘Get on!’ he told Marcel. ‘Get on!’

  The page put up his hand, so Eu had to sheathe his sword and pull him up behind the saddle. The boy was light enough. ‘The keep! The keep!’

  His men poured backwards and he and Bertrand, knowing their duty, drove into the English on their horses, smashing them backwards, buying time for their men. Not too much, though; they could only hold the English for so long, blows bouncing off their greaves, off the horses’ caparisons.

  The little page stood on the horse’s back, grasping the back of the saddle to avoid the stabbing English.

  ‘Now !’

  With a great whoop they turned their horses, his warhorse throwing up its back hooves as it had been trained to do, smashing an Englishman to the floor. Then they were barrelling through the streets, the English in full cry behind them. He ran down one man who was emerging from a house with a big mirror under his arm.

  God, what sport!

  Over the bridge to the second island. The great gate of the curtain wall was still open, men pouring through. The English were behind them, though, or worse than the English. Lord Sloth, bounding on in a rattle of iron mane, chasing as quick as a horse.

  Fifty paces to go and his horse slipped, pitching the page from its back. There was no stopping the animal as it careered towards the gate. He brought it under control just below the portcullis and spun it around.

  Sloth was on the bridge, the page on the ground between them. ‘Get the gate down, this is no time to be a hero, sir!’ shouted a man-at-arms.

  ‘Then when is the time?’ Eu spurred his horse towards the fallen boy, towards the roaring lion and the English hordes at its back.

  PART II

  1346

  Aftermath

  1

  The battle of Crécy was done and Charles of Navarre lay in the barn, burnt, though not bloody. The impressions of the day shook his sleep – the shudder of the French charge, the scalding hiss of the English arrows, the angels dispensing fire from on high and then . . . And then, the dragon. A dragon as big as the sky.

  He had not slept, hardly could sleep, still in his armour but afraid to take it off in case he had to run quickly. He needed to be recognised as a noble, to be worthy of ransom rather than death. He was thirteen years old, nearly fourteen. The hope of the south, the hope of Normandy where his vassal lords lay. You’d have to be mad to kill him if you knew who he was. And yet at Crécy the low men had killed the nobles where they lay fallen. It had been as if they were tipping pots of gold into a bottomless pit. Did they know what they were doing, the riches they were destroying? Who knew? The cult of Lucifer had seized them and all the old certainties were gone.

  No sleep, then, but some blurry, restless cousin of sleep. The morning after the battle dawned grey, like the last moments of a winter dusk. The light, it seemed, had fled when the angels had been torn from the sky by that blazing dragon banner.

  At first, he thought it was a demon, trapped in the web where the roof beam met the wall. But Charles now saw that it was only a fly – fat and black, its legs moving hopelessly against its fate.

  It was not yet dead and he wondered if he could unravel the web that snared it. Charles took the fly carefully from the web. It was not too badly caught and he felt its quick buzz against his cupped hands. He released it.

  He had some fellow feeling with flies. Like him, they fed on rot and disorder, bloated themselves on misery. Ever since the angel at La Sainte-Chap
elle had told him he would never be king of France, he had dedicated himself to the country’s ruin, reasoning that if he could not rule then all rule should be impossible. He had sparked the too hasty charge at Crécy that had led to such calamity for the great houses of France.

  Not that Charles delighted in the misery of everyone – just the royals who called him ‘cousin’ and stood between him and the French throne.

  He could smile and laugh with the best of them; men thought him great company and he’d had already one or two sweethearts among the serving girls. He made them presents of sugar and lace – though nothing so fine as invoke the displeasure of the Almighty who, it was known, disliked seeing those he had appointed to low stations dressed up in the clothes of their betters.

  He breathed in. A terrible smell. He realised it was his own sweat. He had become awfully sensitive to bad odours of late. He took out a little vial of perfume and dabbed it on himself. He loved perfumes of all sorts and this was a fine musk scented with cloves. The sharp, pungent smell comforted him. Ordinary men did not smell like that – only the best.

  Charles went to his horse and untied it. It was skittish and nervous, still, spooked by the death of so many of its kind, spooked by the rattle of devils that fled from the whipping tail of the strange banner flying on the hill, spooked by the light-drained day but, above all, spooked by Charles.

  Horses had never liked him much and, since his misfortunes flying with the angel feather cloak, his devilish nature had begun to leak more from his human skin. He struggled to control the beast, though it was only a plodder – all the finer, fiercer animals dead beneath the English arrows on the field of Crécy. Charles’s face was burnt – the English sorcerer had thrown something at him and he felt mightily sick and weak. Angel’s blood, no doubt. It had burnt his fingers even as he wiped it away.

  He mounted and set off. He was no horseman, never having had much practice, but now his life depended on it – or at least his freedom. God, to get out of that armour – he’d had to sleep in it – to ditch the colours of Navarre, the red and gold chains quartered with the fleur-de-lys an incitement to any ransom-hungry knight or, worse, low man. If he should be captured by a mere soldier, the infamy would follow him for years.

  However, the armour and colours brought protection. No one would dream of killing a youth whose war kit was the price of a decent-sized town.

  Around his neck, his cats clung and mewed. He had brought only three with him, a fine black mouser, a lean tortoiseshell, and a puffy white thing that looked like a frozen explosion. Though they clawed and bit at his surcoat, he found them comforting. He was a magical creature, or half of one. It would take more than a peasant with a pike to capture him. And the dark was to his advantage, his eyes, those of an enormous cat, seeing better than any human could hope to.

  There was nowhere to run to, though, or at least nowhere he knew. No one had thought the battle could be lost and the very suggestion of making a plan of rendezvous after a defeat would have been considered traitorous. Along the hedgerows men who had escaped the fury of the English lay collapsed or dying. Two nobles screamed from the back of a cart – the low man who had rescued them doubtless rushing them to a doctor in hope of reward. The poorer men cried out or wheezed from the roadside. No help for such as they, and rightly. Charles thought of the spawning mountains of his homeland in Navarre – a hundred peasants to a sheep, or so it seemed. The poor were too many, he thought, a burden on the nobility, robbers, cheats and liars. A winnowing like this was welcome, as long as he got back to safety.

  He trembled when he looked up at the dark sky, seeing ympes – demons of Hell, the tiny prisoners escaped from their captive devils – like another swarm of arrows shooting past above his head. They turned and danced like starlings. What were they doing? A celebration ?

  Not far away, the English were moving through the country, howling out their victory cries. ‘The boar, the boar!’ – Edward’s battle name. Other shouts too. ‘Eden! Eden!’ Torches flashed in the gloom on the hill. Those horrible bowmen, stinking of shit and rebellion, calling out to Lucifer, friend of the many, when they should have been calling out to God. Charles should have had their leader eviscerated when he had the chance back at Paris. Too late now, too late. The country was in chaos and the poor had a place at the bargaining table. Were that to happen in his own country of Navarre or in one of his Norman provinces he would suppress it with vigour. Here in France, however . . . He smiled to think of the difficulties the mob might cause the kings of France and England.

  He glimpsed movement on the horizon and kicked the animal on, away from it. Two hours’ riding and he felt safer. The cries had died down and he allowed the animal to rest.

  The horse slowed through a wood, its flanks lathering, its breath sawing. Charles could now strip off his armour. Although, of course, he couldn’t. If he met up with the remainder of the French forces, he had to look like a king – a juvenile, sweating, battered king. He let the horse drink at a stream, looking behind him. The sun was a silver disc in a black sky, so faint he could look at it directly.

  He had seen the dragon eat the French angels. My God, what was that? Something from Hell? Charles was not a youth given to panic and before long, he had calmed himself. Night had fallen on France, literally and metaphorically. The English were triumphant, King Philip humiliated, the flower of French chivalry dead in the mud of Crécy. If he could just get back to safety, he might account this a good day. An angel might have told him he, doubly royal, born of the fleur-de-lys on both sides, would never be king, but he was determined that whatever Valois imposter did sit on the throne would be king of ashes. The French crown was in a terrible position but he needed to be near to the king and his idiot son John to make sure it did not by some miracle recover. The French prince doted on him and acted as his protector, though Charles felt nothing for him. The man was a dolt, albeit a mightily useful one.

  A party of crossbowmen, by their livery the Genoese who had taken such a battering in the opening exchanges of the battle, came panting through the gloom of the trees. Good – mercenaries, therefore buyable. He mounted his horse and kicked it towards them.

  ‘You, men of Genoa! You, men!’

  The mercenaries were nervous, several of them still with the white shafts of arrows poking from their thick coats. They all brandished weapons. My God, not a sword between them – a collection of picks, long knives and clubs. These men were not fit to even look at Charles, let alone accompany him. Still, needs must.

  ‘You. I am the king of Navarre, get me to a place of safety.’

  ‘Inglis,’ said one.

  ‘No, not English, you common clod, king of Navarre. Much gold, much reward if you get me back to— Whoa!’

  One of the soldiers leapt towards his horse and the animal, which had suffered enough frights for one lifetime, simply died underneath him.

  The horse wilted to the ground and the men were on him. Charles was a nimble and fast young man, but the obligation to wear armour meant he had no hope of outrunning the Genoese. Combined with the sickening effects of the angel’s blood, he was easy meat.

  They had him down and tied in only a few breaths. ‘I’m on your side, you idiots. Navarre. Charles of Navarre. Personal friend of France and paymaster of your captains. Don’t you recognise my colours? Charles of—’

  The next word was hampered by the presence of a tooth in it, the crossbowman having punched it out. Charles appeared to be sitting on the ground. They fell upon him, stripping his purse, his sword, his dagger, swatting off his cats. Annoyingly, they didn’t remove his armour.

  They got him to his feet and shoved Charles on through the unnatural dark. The armour chafed him; his underclothes were all but boiling him alive. He marched until the faint sun vanished and an iridescent dusk, crushed blue and purple, the colour of dying angels, and then the real night came down. Then they tied him, lit a fire.

  All through the dark, other fires were burning – the English a
rmy celebrating in the only way it knew how: rape and arson. The one consolation for a noble, he thought, is that virtually whatever is happening to you, something worse is happening to the peasants. He breathed in the smoke smell. His leg was numb and, if he didn’t get out of his armour, he feared the sores at the top of his thighs, and on his shoulders, would turn into life-threatening wounds. He had to piss where he was tied, which did his sores no favours.

  The men watched him. One pointed at him. They had seen his eyes, slit like a cat’s. One made the sign of the Cross. Charles would nail him to one as soon as he got the chance.

  His captors were divided between nervous chatter and brooding silence. They’d taken a pounding, first from the English bows – somehow the crossbowmen’s protective shields had been stuck in the baggage train – and then from the charge of the French knights who came through them as they fled.

  He had no sympathy. None, specifically for the plight of the crossbowmen or, for that matter, sympathy for anyone in general. They were paid to suffer and, in fleeing the field, had defrauded their masters.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  His Navarrese was not really near to the Genoese tongue, but he thought one of them might recognise it as neither French nor English and at least make an attempt to find out who he was. He took another kick in the guts. His gambeson and mail meant it was not painful, though it was demeaning. Other, more tolerant nobles would have made a particular note of the man who did that. Charles did not bother. They were all in for deaths that made Christ’s look like a blessing.

  The next morning they checked his armour was on securely. He was under no illusions why – first it would protect him if they were attacked, for he was after all a vulnerable prisoner. Secondly, they wouldn’t have to carry it.