When he was gone, Patrice arched a questioning eyebrow at me.
“An old battle injury,” I offered. “See if he requires a physician.”
With that, I shut the door and buried my face in my pillow to muffle my sobs.
There are times that we contrive events in an effort to control them—and times that events control us.
I knew I must be the rock at sea’s edge, immutable and impervious to the crashing of waves, but in truth that was no more than a façade, for I was the sand that shifted and flowed with the wash of the current.
6
Young Edward:
Weardale — July, 1327
Every day when I awoke, I prayed to find the Scots, so we could defeat them. And every night after we failed to find them, I gave thanks that we had avoided battle.
When I left my mother at York, her apprehension had seethed through her skin and gathered in the sweat of her palm as I took her hand. What good would it have done to tell her that I, too, was afraid? None. Even as a king, I knew I was not immune to the mortal cut of a sword or the piercing of arrows, for as Will often told me when we were practicing at weapons, ‘’Tis the dead man who believed himself invincible.’ It was only the promise of seeing Philippa again—of having her as my wife and queen—that lent me bravery.
The Hainaulters had brought something called a ‘cannon’, a large metal barrel which, packed with a curious powder and set afire, could shoot an iron ball far into the distance with a force so great it could fell a castle wall in one blow. Accuracy, however, was another matter. I had seen Mortimer’s trebuchet at Bristol. The surprise was terror enough in itself, however. I would not have wanted to be inside Bristol’s walls, wondering when or where the next stone or rotting corpse might land.
Mortimer had delayed his departure from York, claiming pain from an old injury. A feeble lie. He simply wanted to dally with my mother a day longer. By the time he arrived at our camp three days later, I saw no signs of discomfort in his stride, not even a grimace. I said nothing, lest my peevishness show, but I was also relieved to have him with us. While in France, he had told me many stories of his days in Ireland. If anyone was prepared to fight the northern heathens, I knew it was him. Certainly not Lancaster, that overblown swine. Thankfully, Lancaster headed off toward Newcastle, hoping to cut off the Scots should they take the eastern route, while the bulk of our army remained in the midlands near the River Swale, closer to Durham.
Every day scouts were dispatched in broad arcs. And every day they came back without news. Our column crept and meandered through the hills, progress hampered by the heavily laden wagons that carried our needed supplies and extra weapons.
I twisted around in my saddle to cast a look behind us. Our column trailed away for miles, its tail disappearing around a bend in the road, where a swath of marshland ran along the Swale.
“We could move faster without the wagons,” I complained.
Yawning, Mortimer gazed straight ahead. He freed his feet of his stirrups and stretched his legs, then arched his back, as if he were fighting boredom and sleep. “A starving army is a weak army, my lord. Who knows how far north we’ll have to go. They need their strength.”
“I’ve heard the Scots have no wagons. That they drink from the rivers and carry only small sacks of oats tied to their saddles and make something called ‘bannocks’ on hot stones. And when they butcher a cow, they cook the meat in its own hide.”
“They do, but they’re nearly animals themselves.”
“Can we beat them?”
Finally, he looked at me, his dark eyes boring through my false shield of courage. A lopsided smile broke the firm lines of his mouth. “Your grandfather did, many times. More than likely, though, we’ll never encounter them. The Scots, you see, are afraid to meet us in outright battle. They are lightly armed, fewer in numbers, and fierce, though undisciplined. Face to face, we would crush them into oblivion. So they attack unprotected villages while they’re beyond our reach and run before we can get to them.”
“But if there is a chance of us coming upon them, why even come so far into England when it could mean their end? Why lurk and taunt? Why not just fight?”
“Because, as I said, they’re animals. It’s their way.” He returned his insouciant gaze to the empty road ahead. “Still, never underestimate them, my lord. Night or day, always expect they’re waiting around the corner just ahead, beyond the next line of hills, hidden in the forest to either side.”
A shiver rippled down my back, despite the day’s heat. I clenched my reins. For the next several hours, I studied the land around us, searching for shadows among the woods that stood in scattered patches all around us. At midday, a scout returned from the northern road ahead of us. Again, nothing.
The next day we arrived in Durham. But before we were settled and fed, to the southeast, beyond a stretch of hills we had passed the day before, a plume of black smoke curled upward toward snow-white clouds. The Scots.
At last, the rabbit is out of the hole. The hunt begins.
***
We turned back the way we had come from and then swung east through a narrow valley, the spiral of smoke beckoning. This time the scouts brought back reports of a village burned to the ground by the Black Douglas barely two days past. When we arrived there, smoke hung over the buildings like a pall of death. The army halted outside the village and I rode in with a group of thirty knights, including Mortimer. There was no danger. The Scots had been here and gone long ago.
Not a single house had been left untouched. Fire had consumed the thatched roofs and inside the walls that were no more than shells, timbers still smoldered. Barrels, baskets and emptied sacks were strewn all about. Stock pens lay in shambles; a pair of goats skittered in front of a band of riders, while a white-faced sheep bleated from behind the broken table of a potter’s stall.
The cries of grieving women rent the air, their screams so raw and primeval it was like a knife shoved in the ear and twisted, its keen blade scraping away flesh and blood. As we passed the first home on the edge of the village, a little girl, no older than my sister Joanna, stood bawling. Her small face was blackened with soot. Behind her, a charred and smoking body lay beneath a collapsed doorway. It ... it looked like a side of pork left on the spit too long.
I turned my head away and retched. My stomach heaved again—the convulsion so deep I thought my insides would spill out—until bile spewed over my tongue and chunks of that morning’s breakfast splattered over my leg.
Will rode up beside me, offering a kerchief. I grabbed it, dragged it across my mouth, and then mopped at my chausses. I held the stinking kerchief out, to give it back to Will, but he had already ridden on. At the next house, he climbed down from his horse and circled a body sprawled in the road. The last bundle of thatch on the roof, still smoking, fell to the floor inside. A cat yowled and leapt through the window out into the road.
Will jerked at the flash of movement and drew his sword. The cat hissed at him, then scampered away, tail whipping. Will leaned down closer, poked at the body with the tip of his blade. It twitched. Cautiously, he jabbed it in the side and an arm, half an arm, flailed toward him. Will sidestepped the bloody stump as it flew past his knee. He kicked the dying man in the shoulder.
The man’s eyes, red as the reddest harvest moon, flew open. He let out a ghoulish moan, slammed his half-arm onto the ground and tried to push himself away. It was then that I saw the hole in his gut, his entrails oozing out, and the pool of congealed blood beneath him. With cold mercy, Will plunged his sword into the man’s heart, held it there, and waited for him to die.
Like that, I watched a man die. In slow, terrible agony. An Englishman. And I knew then I would see more of death and suffering, of cruelty and greed, of evil and apathy. I fought the urge to turn and ride away. Then I remembered that I was the one who insisted on coming along; no one had demanded it of me. If I ran, if I left this to others, what would they say of me?
I must
be strong ... and brave, for I am a king and kings do not cower.
I closed my eyes, gripped my knees to my mount’s ribs, fighting to stay upright until my head stopped reeling and my breathing steadied. Someone called my name. Footsteps plodded on the packed dirt of the road, coming closer. Finally, I forced my eyelids apart.
My uncle, Edmund, Earl of Kent, stood before me, head bare, his shield slung loosely over his left arm and his sword at his hip. “Everything all right, my lord?”
Drawing a lungful of smoky air, I fought back a cough, swallowed to wash back the burning taste of bile and raised my chin. “Fine. Where are they?”
“Headed”—he pointed toward a vague line of hills in the distance—“that way.”
I nodded, suddenly noticing the men who were gathering around me. “Let’s find them, then. Kill the bastards who did this.”
***
For over a week, we followed a trail of smoldering ashes—a trail which grew colder with each passing day. Our supply train was too slow. Paths which might have shortened our journey and put us closer to our quarry were impassable with the cumbersome wagons.
We were encamped outside the town of Bishop Auckland, awaiting the return of a scout, for another cloud of smoke had been spotted to the southwest. The division commanders were summoned to my pavilion. Impatient, I emerged from the suffocating air of the tent to wait outside. Nearby, Will Montagu cupped his hands and dipped them into a bucket of water. He dunked his face into the pool in his palms, and then scrubbed vigorously with his fingertips. I handed him a skin of wine.
“Damn cannons,” Will muttered. He gulped down the drink and handed it back to me, empty. “A team of horses can barely get them up a steep hill at a crawl. And through the marshes?” He scoffed. “Useless things almost sank in one yesterday. Wasted effort to bring them all the way from Hainault.”
“Hainault?” Sir John stepped through a crowd of soldiers, sweat pouring from his broad forehead. He looked questioningly at Will.
Will grinned, held open the tent flap and waved him inside. “I said it’s a good thing you’ve come all the way from Hainault. Doubtless, once we catch up with those dastardly Scots, you’ll give them a good drubbing with those cannons of yours.”
Sir John laughed heartily and pounded Will on the shoulder, then ducked inside.
A sneer curled Will’s lip. I flashed him a warning glare. “Need I remind you of the Count of Hainault’s hospitality during the months we spent at Valenciennes?”
“No, my lord.” With a few deft twists of his fingers, Will had unfastened the buckles of his arm plates. “I’m not at all ungrateful. Just smart enough to know when to cut loose the stone dragging me underwater, that’s all. Do us all a favor and convince them of that.” He inclined his head toward Kent and Mortimer, then gathered up his weapons from the ground and left.
I went inside and a moment later Norfolk joined us. Mortimer flicked open a map and laid it on the small table in the center of the pavilion. I bent over it, studying the names of the rivers, towns and villages from Northallerton to Newcastle. By now, I had a firm idea in my head of where each was situated, sometimes even the distance between them.
“As of this morning,” Mortimer said, pressing his finger on the map, the name of the fortress barely a faded scratch on the tattered parchment, “they were here—Barnard Castle.”
“How many miles?” Sir John asked.
Mortimer tapped his finger on the spot, and then traced it back to our location. “Sixteen ... by the most direct route.”
“Within striking distance,” Kent added. “But why haven’t they gone further afield? Why loiter so close by?”
“Because,” Mortimer said, looking up from the map, “Douglas is well aware of our unwieldiness. He taunts us because he can. He has no intention of ever meeting us in direct battle, even though he’s brought his hobelars further into England than any Scottish army has ever been before. And he’ll leave, like the coward he is, when he’s tired of the sport. So let me ask you, my lords, how do we catch them and bring them to battle?”
Mortimer’s gaze passed from face to face. A thick silence pervaded the space. Although he had declined command of any sort, clearly they were all looking to him for answers. Finally, his eyes met mine.
“My lord,” he said, “have you any thoughts on the matter?”
Beneath my mail, an itchy rash demanded I scratch at places I could not reach. Sweat trickled from my temples, down my neck, dampening my padded gambeson. I spread my fingers on the table’s edge and bent closer to the map. “Why not unload ourselves of our burdens,” I offered, then quickly added, “I mean ... since they’re so close, couldn’t we catch them in a day or two, if we could move more lightly—like they do?”
Stroking his stubbled chin, Mortimer eased back from the table. “Lord Edmund?”
Kent flapped his eyelids and shrugged. “I suppose we could leave the supplies and cannons here with the infantry. Take the cavalry, our best archers, some swift-footed men-at-arms as well maybe, and go after them. They’ll have to cross the river somewhere. There is a ford at Corbridge, another one at Tyne.”
“We’d have to march through the night,” Mortimer said. “If we don’t, they’ll be out of reach again by tomorrow.”
Norfolk nodded at their every word. He seemed unwilling to openly disagree with anything. “They’d never expect it of us.”
“Do you agree, Sir John,” I said, hoping this sudden shift in tactics would not erupt into a heated argument and thankful Lancaster was not with us, or else it surely would have, “that if we are to trap them along the river, we must abandon the cannons for now? We’ll need your mounted knights.”
Readjusting his sword belt, he nodded. “I will do as you command, my lord.”
His ready obedience took me aback. I expected that one day I would hear the same words from all my lords, but not so soon. I barely knew how to block Will’s blunted sword in training, let alone how to lead an army into battle.
It was not enough to be a king in name; I had to act as one, even if that meant stepping aside when those around me knew better than me how things should be done. Not doing so had been one of my father’s greatest failings. I would not make the same mistakes. I would seek counsel, listen to it, learn, and when the time came that I knew, beyond all hesitation, what needed to be done, I would do it.
But today ... today was not the day. I was not ready to carry that burden on my slight shoulders.
***
We left in blackest night, stars shrouded by a blanket of clouds. The infantry, the cannons, and any supplies that could not be carried on our saddles were left behind. The road to Barnard Castle twisted and turned. The miles went on and on. I was lulled by a monotony of endlessly plodding hooves, the mournful creak of leather and the sporadic jangle of bits. I closed my eyes and must have fallen asleep, for my body jerked upright as my horse skittered. A stag, its great pronged horns gleaming white in the darkness, bounded onto the path before us. It turned with a kick and crashed into a thicket of woods, branches snapping.
The jolt had more than awakened me, it set my heart racing. My thighs were cramped, my back aching from lack of rest. Again, I closed my eyes, my horse following my standard bearer before me.
From time to time, I took a glimpse around me and for hour after hour everything was black and oddly silent. I kept waiting for dawn’s first light to break beyond the western hills, but the clouds remained thick, the world beneath a cavern of nothingness.
A burst of light blazed across the sky, followed by the ear-splitting crack of thunder. The shrill whinny of horses rent the air. Moments later, lightning flashed again and again, until night became day then became night again. Then, the rain began. It poured from above as if we stood beneath a mighty waterfall and could not move from it.
The sky was a watery gray, every image around me blurred by the deluge. Yet we rode on, shoulders slumped beneath the pounding rain, water leaking into the cracks of our armor
, soaking our shirts beneath. Wind stirred across my face. Shivering now, I realized it must be morning, even though there was no sun to be seen.
The front line lurched to a halt at a row of pine trees spread across the top of a hill. In the valley before us lay a mud-engorged river. A stone bridge, leading to a small town, spanned its width. Surprisingly, there was no sign that the Scots had laid ruin to the town. Had they indeed run back north? Or had we passed them in the night as they watched from the forest depths, laughing? Somewhere in the branches above, an irritated ‘chuck, chuck’ sounded. I glanced up to see a red squirrel grasping its pine cone, tufted ears pointed alertly forward.
Mortimer blinked against the rain pelting his face. “Haydon Bridge.”
“What river is that?”
“That, my lord, is the South Tyne. But it doesn’t look as if they’ve crossed here. We should rest a few hours, allow the men to eat.”
I nodded dully. A burning cramp spread from my neck through my shoulders and upper back. I reached inside the sack slung from my saddle and groped for the loaf of bread. My fingers met a soggy lump. I pulled it out, wrinkled my nose, and tore off a piece with my teeth. Rank with mold, I spit it at the ground and then flung the entire loaf away. It smacked against a tree with a dull thud. The squirrel scampered down the pine’s trunk, tail flicking wildly as it eyed the tainted food.
My stomach groaned. I unstoppered my flask of wine and took a long swallow, even though I was too wet to be thirsty and knew it would do little to fill my belly. I might have asked for a cake made of oats, but there would be no fires in this downpour. “What next then?”
Climbing down from his saddle, Mortimer glanced about. The others had already staggered beneath the trees, but there was no dry shelter to be found there, and so they crumpled into sodden heaps beneath their horses’ bellies, reins clutched in stiff hands, or made a tent of their cloaks barely big enough to keep the rain off their faces.
The King Must Die (The Isabella Books) Page 8