Stormbird wotr-1

by Conn Iggulden

  ‘One of my men sent me a warning about Maine. With all their king’s trips back to court, the French forces are moving so slowly they may not even get there until next year. Either way, the word is that Maine won’t roll over with its paws in the air. As close to Normandy as it is, there are a lot of old war-wolves living out their retirement in Maine. They have yeomen and farmhands by the hundred and they’re not the sort to bend a knee just because some French lord waves a treaty in their face.’

  ‘So King Henry must order York to do the work with an English army,’ Suffolk replied. ‘We’ve come too far on this road to see it broken apart now.’

  ‘I did think of that, William, as I still have a spoonful of wit in my head. York isn’t answering letters or commands. I’ve sent him orders under the king’s seal and it’s like dropping them into a pit. He’s letting this run its course while he keeps his hands clean. It’s a clever move, I’ll give him that. I have plans for Duke Richard, don’t you worry, but it doesn’t solve the problem of Maine. If fighting breaks out, your new French wife will be a hostage and we can’t let that happen.’

  Suffolk thought for a long moment, staring into the flames.

  ‘You want her in England.’

  ‘I want her in England, yes. I want her properly married to Henry before it all falls apart. In time, I can send another man to take command of the Normandy army, maybe Lord Somerset, maybe even you, William. If the king sends York to some other place — somewhere like Ireland, say — he’ll have to go. We’ll manage the evictions in Maine next year without any French lord getting his nose bent. I’ll arrange the wedding in England, don’t worry about that, but I need a bride for it. We can’t let them keep a valuable piece like Margaret while the evictions go on.’

  ‘The older sister is to be married in a month. Margaret will want to be here for that, I’m certain. Will they even let her leave?’

  ‘They should,’ Derry replied. ‘She’s already married, after all. It’s just a matter of etiquette now and they love all that. Henry will send an honour guard and a fleet of ships to bring his French bride home. We’ll make a great celebration of it. It just has to happen before they stop for winter.’ For a moment, Derry rubbed his temples and Suffolk realized how weary the man was. ‘This is just me thinking of everything, William, that’s all. It may be that King Henry will send York to Ireland and you’ll be the one putting our army into Maine to make the evictions run smoothly. It may be there’ll be no trouble at all and all my reports are wrong. But I’d be a fool not to plan for the worst.’

  ‘All your reports?’ William said suddenly, his voice back to a normal level. ‘I thought you said one of your men? How many reports have you had about Maine?’

  ‘So far, eight,’ Derry admitted, holding the bridge of his nose and rubbing away tiredness. ‘I don’t need to see the glow to know my house is on fire, William Pole. I can juggle the balls, I think, as long as you get your little princess back to England.’

  ‘How long do I have?’ Suffolk asked.

  Derry waved a hand airily.

  ‘As long as five months, as little as three. Go to the sister’s wedding, drink wine and smile at the French — but be ready to jump after that, the moment I send word. In truth, it all depends how quickly the French move north — and how many of our own people we can persuade to leave homes and lands they bought in good faith in that time.’

  ‘I’ll see to it, Derry. You don’t have to worry about this part.’

  ‘I’ll worry anyway, if you don’t mind, William Pole. I always do.’

  9

  The road led up a small rise, cresting through a copse of gnarled oaks. From his poacher’s spot, halfway up a nearby hill in the bracken, Thomas Woodchurch could see where the trees cast a shadow on the grey stones running through them. It was a perfect place for an ambush, the result of telling sullen English soldiers to cut turf and lay dressed stones from one town to another. Local roads were formed naturally, over centuries. They meandered past obstacles, detouring around old hills and ancient oaks. Not the English ones. Like the Romans before them, those forgotten teams of labourers had cut their routes in a straight line and dug up or burned anything in the way.

  Thomas settled deeper into his crouch, knowing he was close to invisible on the hillside in his dark brown wool and hunter’s leathers, while commanding a good view of the valley for miles around. The road crest could well be empty, but he’d spotted fresh hoof prints by a gate that morning and followed them for half a day. The marks of iron horseshoes suggested the riders were not local men, few of whom owned even a small pony.

  Thomas had his suspicions about the group crossing his land. He also had a longbow at his side, wrapped in oiled leather. He had no idea if the baron’s men knew he’d been a soldier before he became a wool merchant. Either way, if they showed themselves, someone was going to die. At the thought, he dropped his hand to the length of his bow and patted it. From a young age, he’d been told there were only three kinds of people in the world. There were those who fought: the earls themselves and their knights and armies. There were those who prayed: a group Thomas didn’t know well, but who seemed to be the younger brothers of powerful houses on the whole. Finally, there were those who worked. He smiled at the thought. He’d already been two of the three estates of men. He’d fought and he’d worked. If he surprised half a dozen horsemen come to raid his flocks, he might find himself trying a desperate prayer or two as well, to complete the set.

  Lying utterly still in the bracken, Thomas was alert for any movement. When he saw it, he didn’t turn his head sharply. That kind of rashness could get a man killed. As something shifted on his right, he eased his gaze over. His heart sank and his eyes flickered back to the crest of the hill and the dark passage under the oaks, which had taken on an ominous look to his eye.

  His son Rowan was on foot, dogtrotting, with his head turning back and forth as he looked for his father. The man in question groaned softly to himself, seeing his lad was blindly following the road towards the copse.

  Thomas stood up sharply, raising the covered bow above his head to show himself. Down below, Rowan spotted him and even at a distance Thomas could see him grin and change direction to come up the hill.

  Thomas saw shadows move in the copse. His stomach clenched in fear as a rider came hard out of the gloom. Two more followed on his tail and Thomas spent a sick moment trying to judge the distances.

  ‘Run!’ he yelled to his son, pointing back up the hill.

  To his horror, the boy stopped and stared at the horsemen barrelling down from the trees. They had drawn swords, Thomas saw, holding them low and straight over their horses’ ears and pointing at his son. To his relief, Rowan broke into a sprint, seeming almost to fly over the rough ground. Thomas found himself breathing hard. The boy could run, at least. Rowan had grown up half-wild on the estate and spent more time in the hills than even his father.

  ‘Jesus keep him safe,’ Thomas muttered.

  As he spoke, he slid the length of heartwood and sapwood yew out of the leather wrappings and fitted cow-horn tips to each end. The movements were second nature to him and as he worked he watched Rowan climb the steepening hill and the horsemen accelerating to full gallop.

  Six riders had come out of the stand of trees. Thomas knew all the baron’s soldiers and he could probably have named each man. In silent concentration, he fitted the linen string and tested the draw, then unrolled the soft leather tube, revealing a quiver full of shafts. He had fletched each one himself in the evenings at home, cutting the feathers before gluing and tying them. The arrowheads had come from his own smithy in the village, sharp as knives and containing the iron barb that made them impossible to pull out of flesh without ripping a man open.

  Below him, the riders slowed to cut across the bracken. They’d seen the lone man standing high on the hillside, but they were confident in their numbers and their armour and focused only on the climbing boy. Thomas showed his teeth, though it was not
a pleasant expression. He’d shot arrows for two hours or more every Sunday after church since the age of seven. His local football team had been banned so the village boys would not neglect their bow work. Thomas’s shoulders were a mass of ridged muscle and if the baron’s men thought of him as a wool merchant, that was fine with him. He’d been an English archer first. He dropped the long strap over one shoulder, so that the quiver sat low, almost at the level of his knee. The arrows leaned out to one side so he could grasp them with just a small movement. Two colours of thread told him which type he would find. He had broadheads for deer, but half his stock was bodkin-head shafts, with square-sided points as long as his thumb. Thomas knew very well what they could do with the power of a yew bow behind them. He selected a bodkin arrow and placed it on the string.

  ‘Dropping ground,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Gusting wind from the east.’

  The draw was so natural that he did not need to look down the shaft. Instead he watched the targets, the horsemen plunging up the hill and trying to catch his son.

  The first arrow passed over Rowan’s head, snapping through the air. It struck the lead rider neatly in the chest and Thomas already had another on the string. As a much younger man, he’d stood in ranks of archers and poured thousands of shafts into a French advance until it collapsed. Today he was alone, but the body still remembered. He sent shaft after shaft with pitiless accuracy, punching them out into the air.

  The horsemen behind may have thought the first man had simply fallen as his mount stumbled, Thomas didn’t know. They kept coming. Rowan finally had the sense to jink out of his aiming path and Thomas let the riders close on him. His next shot thumped high into a horse’s neck, making it rear and whinny in pain.

  He could hear Rowan panting as he reached his father and stood with his hands on his knees, watching the riders coming. The young man’s eyes were wide. He had seen Thomas take deer before, but those had been measured shots in the stillness of a hunt. He had never seen his father stroke out arrow after arrow, as if the massive draw was nothing to him.

  The shafts plunged into men with a sound like a thick carpet being beaten. Two of them had fallen. The riders were choking and yelling and Thomas began to breathe hard as he felt the old burn across his back. It had been a good few years since he’d last shot in anger, but the rhythms were still there to be called upon. He fitted and drew in just a few heartbeats, implacable and without mercy. Four riders were down, with two of the horses stumbling with loose reins, having lost their riders. The final two men had realized the folly of going on and they were shouting in panic to those dying on the ground.

  Thomas ran forward suddenly. Twenty quick paces brought him to a range where he could not possibly miss. His grasping fingers found three arrows still in the quiver. A glance at the threads showed him two bodkins and a broadhead remaining. He shot two and held the final piercer ready on the string.

  All six of the baron’s men had been unhorsed. Four of them lay still and unblinking, with stiff feathers standing out on their chests. The last two were groaning in agony and trying to rise. Thomas had shot eleven goose-feathered shafts in all. He felt a touch of pride as he looked over the crumpled mass of men and armour he’d created, even as he began to consider the consequences.

  ‘Look away now, Rowan,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘This is ugly work.’

  He turned to make sure his son was staring out over the valley.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the hills, lad, all right?’

  Rowan nodded, though he watched as soon as his father walked in among the men. At sixteen, Rowan was fascinated by the power he had seen. For the first time, he understood why his father made him practise until his fingers swelled purple and the muscles of his back and shoulders were like bands of hot rope. Rowan shuddered as his father drew a heavy seax knife and walked warily to the pair still alive. They had both been struck by broadhead arrows. One had pulled his helmet away to reveal a copper-coloured beard made wet with blood from his open mouth.

  ‘You’ll hang for this,’ the man wheezed.

  Thomas glared down at him.

  ‘You’re on my land, Edwin Bennett. And that was my son you were chasing like a deer.’

  The man tried to reply, but Thomas reached down and gripped his long, greasy hair. He ignored the mailed hand clutching at him and cut the man’s throat, pushing the body away before turning to the last.

  Of all of them, the remaining horseman was the least wounded. He had one of Thomas’s arrows standing proud from his armour, but high, passing through a point that ruined his right shoulder.

  ‘Truce, Woodchurch! Have mercy, man. Truce!’

  ‘You’ll get no truce,’ Thomas said grimly as he approached.

  The man stumbled to his feet and raised a knife in his left hand, slicing the air in loops as he tried to stagger clear.

  Thomas stalked after him, following closely as the man fell and rose again, trying to put distance between them. Blood was running out of his armour at the waist and his face was white and desperate. Fear lent him speed and Thomas was weary. With a soft curse, he reached for the last shaft. The man saw the action and turned to run.

  The shaft struck below the flailing arm, the needle bodkin punching through the segments of mail as if they were soft wool at such close range. The man collapsed and Thomas watched until he lay still.

  He heard the crunching of bracken behind him as his son came up to stand at his shoulder.

  ‘What will you do now?’ Rowan asked.

  For all his life, he’d known his father as an amiable man, a patient and honest merchant who bought and sold bales of wool in the town and had made a fortune doing it. In the brown cloth, with his left wrist bound in leather and a longbow in his hand, his father was a frightening figure. As Rowan watched, the breeze increased and Thomas closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath of it. When he opened them, the anger had almost gone.

  ‘I’ll cut my shafts out, for a start, if I can. And I’ll bury the bodies. You run back to the house for me and fetch Jamison and Wilbur … and Christian as well. Tell them to bring shovels.’

  Thomas looked thoughtfully at the horses. He’d hit one of them and it made him wince to see the animal standing and cropping at the grass with a shaft high in its neck. The whites of its eyes were showing. The horse knew it had been hurt and the great flanks shuddered in pain, rippling along the brown flesh. Thomas shook his head. He could hide the bodies of men, but horses were a different matter entirely. For a moment, he was tempted to fetch a butcher to the spot, but it would take half a dozen boys and two or three carts to carry away the meat. The baron would be bound to hear of it eventually. Horses were valuable and Thomas doubted there was a market in France that could take six trained mounts without news getting back to unwelcome ears.

  ‘God, I don’t know what to do, Rowan. I can hide them in the stables, but if the baron comes searching, it’ll look like guilt. He’ll have me up before the magistrate, and that man is too close a friend of his to listen to a word I have to say.’

  Thomas stood and thought for what seemed an age as the breeze grew stronger and grey clouds swelled over their heads. Rain began to fall in heavy drops and the wounded horse shuddered and trotted some way off down the hill.

  ‘Catch that one for me, would you, lad? I don’t want it wandering back to its stable, looking to be fed. Go gentle and you won’t spook it. We’ll put them in the old barn tonight. I know one man who might find a way out of this, if I can reach him. Derry Brewer might just keep my neck out of a noose.’

  He watched relief come into Rowan’s face before the boy went jogging down the hill, calling softly to the wandering horse. It raised its head and looked at him with ears pricked, then went right back to cropping the turf, unconcerned. The boy had a way with horses that made Thomas proud.

  ‘How did I get myself into this?’ Thomas murmured.

  He suspected Baron Strange wasn’t even a real noble, at least that was the rumour. T
here was something about a title fallen into disuse and a distaff branch of the family, but Thomas had never been able to pin down the details of the claim. Either way, Strange was not going to ignore the wilful murder of six of his soldiers, no matter whose land they’d been on or what mischief they’d been up to. The dispute between the adjacent landholdings had been simmering for months, ever since the baron’s men had fenced off a pasture rightfully belonging to Thomas. That was how he saw it, at least. The baron’s men told a different tale.

  It had been small beer at first, with his servants and those of the baron coming to blows whenever they met in town. A month before, it had taken a bad turn when one of Thomas’s men had been blinded in one eye. Some of the man’s friends had gone out for revenge that night and burned one of the baron’s barns, as well as killing some Welsh sheep in the fields. Thomas had raised welts on their backs for that, but it had grown into undeclared war from that night. He’d told his men never to travel alone — and then he’d spotted tracks leading through his land and done exactly what he’d warned them against. He cursed himself for a fool.

  Rowan came back leading two of the horses and patting their necks.

  ‘These are big, strong boys,’ Rowan said. ‘Could we keep one, maybe?’

  ‘Not a chance. I can’t be found with them. A night or two is risk enough as it is. I’ll wait for you to come back with the lads. We might get done before dark, if the rain doesn’t get much worse.’

  A thought struck him and he looked up.

  ‘Why were you coming out anyway? You knew I’d be away till dusk.’

  ‘Oh! There’s a meeting in the town tonight. Something about the French. Mum sent me to let you know, so you don’t miss it. She said it was important.’

  ‘Christ!’ Thomas said bitterly. ‘How am I supposed to get back for that and clear this carrion at the same time? God, some days, I swear …’

  ‘You could hobble the horses or tie their reins together. I can fetch Jamison and Wilbur and Christian. I can bury the bodies with them as well, while you go to the meeting.’