by Dan Davis
It was quiet on the road.
South of Bruges, in peaceful years gone by, that same road in late-summer was thronged with merchants and messengers, villeins and freemen, churchmen and beggars and endless servants. The road would be filled from edge to edge with carts piled with produce, riders with lords, children with chickens.
But not that day.
We came across a small group of poor folk wrapped in cloaks and hoods who retreated far into a field as we passed them and watched us for a good long while with dark looks until we were away around the next bend.
Walt turned in his saddle before settling down again. “I reckon we’ll be finding trouble before long, sir.”
The houses on the side of the road were silent and cold. Whether they had been abandoned or were filled with the dead, entombed unburied in their bedchambers, I could not say for we had no intention of entering any of them.
“What tongue do the folks around these parts speak?” Walt asked as we made camp for the night in a scrubby copse of coppiced ash and hazel a few miles from a village.
I covered my eyes and stifled a groan and cursed myself for not bringing Hugh along instead of Walt.
“You have been to this country before, Walt,” I said. “Their tongue is Flemish. Most folk in the towns have French and the learned know Latin, just as it is everywhere. How did you converse with the pestilential harlot during your sordid excursion last night?”
“Oh, you don’t have to speak to them, sir. You give them the coins and point at what you want.”
“I am sure you do. It surprises me that the establishment is allowed to function at all, considering the keenness with which the men guard the doors to the town.”
He shrugged. “Only a couple of old dears in there now, seeing to the locals. Fellow before me was keen as mustard on account of his wife died a few days ago and now he can get his end away again. Ain’t take him too long, I tell you that much, he was in and out and looking happy as a pig in shit before I had time to sit down and take a sip of beer.”
“Is that so?” I said, getting up to move further away from him. “I believe I shall prepare my own meal this evening, Walter.”
Many a man of the knightly classes would despair at the notion of a meal consisting of a hunk of bread, a mouthful of cheese and a few slices of sausage, even if they were on campaign, and yet to me it has always been the simplest fare which brings the most nourishment to body and soul.
I had thought him asleep but Walt’s weary voice drifted out of the darkness on the other side of the embers. “Sir?” he began, “is it true that you don’t know the way? Only, our lad Hugh reckoned you don’t know the way to this land called Swabia but I said Sir Richard wouldn’t set out on such a quest without knowing where he was headed and no mistake.”
“I do know the way,” I replied. “It is to the south. We shall find our way the same way we do everywhere we go, Walt. By asking the way from one place to the next until we arrive.”
The extended silence led me to hope he had fallen asleep but then he spoke. “How far south is Swabia, then?” I was about to hazard a guess but he continued speaking. “Long way, ain’t it, sir. Long way to go to find a man who you say has a cure for the pestilence when it might be a lot of threshing for no nuts, if you catch my meaning, sir.”
I caught his meaning well enough. Black Walter was unnerved by our venture. He was frightened by the creeping death all around, even if he was too simple-minded to know it in himself. And I was leading him further into unknown lands that were peopled with folk he did not know when all man’s natural inclination when threatened with disease is to withdraw into a safe place. Into the arms of family and one’s own home.
“All will be well, Walter,” I assured him. “Rest easy, now, for all will be well.”
In fact, it would not be well. Not at all. Especially for Black Walter.
***
From Bruges, we made for Ghent, which was an even larger town. In fact, it was one of the largest and richest towns I had ever seen, rivalling Paris and was even larger, perhaps, than London. Unlike London, however, it was an almost pleasant place, as far as cities go. While London was just as mercenary and grasping at its heart, it was a magnet primarily for the poor, useless, desperate, degenerate, and the sinful, where Ghent was committed wholly to commerce and the people within were hard working and respectable.
Though there is no getting away from the fact that commerce is a soulless and empty pursuit, it is impossible to deny the benefits that it brought the people of Ghent. Merchants and their wives wore the finest clothes in colourful, embroidered cloth and the homes they built were tall and elegantly apportioned, some rising as if straight from the waters of the river. Their churches were impressive and the cathedral truly glorious. An enormous bell tower, still unfinished with empty scaffolding up two sides, soared above every other structure other than the cathedral’s tower and the tower of the Church of Saint Nicholas. Within the city, a man could find the answer to all his needs, if he had enough silver. My needs were to obtain as great a quantity of salted and dried meats as could be carried.
“You may not enter,” the porter said from the other side of the bridge.
“We carry no pestilence,” I replied in French. “Our coin is good. I wish to spend a great deal of it.”
The conversation was shouted across the short span of the bridge because the porter’s guards had ordered us to stop on the far side. Not that I would have forced the issue but two of the men held crossbows which they loaded and held ready and that demonstrated quite well that they meant what they said.
“None may enter,” he replied.
“Do you have the pestilence?” I called out.
“No!” the porter snapped. “And we shall keep it this way. Be off with you, you French dogs.”
Walt snorted. “Charming folk, the Flemish, ain’t they.”
I sighed. “They are merely protecting themselves.” Raising my voice, I held a purse, heavy with coins, aloft. “This is for the men who allow us entry.”
Three of the guards turned to the porter with hopeful expressions on their faces but the man cursed me and assured us that no man would enter, not for all the silver in England.
“What did he say about England?” Walt asked, putting his hand to his sword.
“Never mind that, Walter. We shall try the town of Brussels, further to the east. It has high walls but the men are not so full of their own importance as these bastards. We shall be there tomorrow before nightfall if we make good time.”
The land all around Ghent was marshy but usually firm enough for them to raise so many sheep that the landscape seemed to be made from wool. Yet the rains had turned those grassy fields to ponds and the sheep were long gone. After another night sleeping like outlaws in the trees, we continued on the road to Brussels. It rose above the marshy land and so the going was far easier and we made it soon after midday.
Brussels was open and they welcomed us, for visitors had been fewer than they had ever known it.
“Pah!” a red-faced old innkeeper said. “That pestilence will never come to Brussels. We are good folk here, good folk, I say.” He lowered his voice and glanced over his shoulder. “Other than my wife. She will certainly be afflicted. But, such is life.” He shrugged.
His wife showed us to our bedchamber and she was a strongly built, rather handsome young woman who seemed perfectly decent to me.
“What on earth do you suppose that fellow meant about his wife?” I asked Walt over our beer and food later that evening.
“She be a harlot, sir,” Walt said, hunched low over his pie and speaking with his mouth full, spraying flecks of pastry and gravy over the table.
I looked at the woman as she carried mugs of beer to a group of inebriated guildsmen on the other side of the ale room. “She seems to be a perfectly ordinary ale-wife.”
Walt shook his head, still without looking up at me. “Pinched my arse, sir.”
“She did what?�
�
“Earlier, sir, when you were looking at the bed. She pinched my arse and give me a saucy wink, she did.”
“Why on earth would she pinch your arse and not mine?”
He considered it for a while before pointing at me with his knife. “You’re too good for her, sir. A knight such as yourself is. You’re pretending you’re just an ordinary squire of middling means but it’s clear as day from your bearing and manner that you’re a man with noble blood and a practised harlot don’t want to be getting involved with the upper crust or it’ll be more than fines she’ll be paying in court.”
After regarding me warily for a moment, he continued to attack the meat within his pie.
“Are you mocking me, Walter?”
He looked up, aghast, radiating innocence. “Me, sir? Never, sir. Wouldn’t even occur to me, sir.”
I nodded slowly and he let out a breath before guzzling his beer and studiously picking the chunks of liver from every corner of the pastry crust.
It occurred to me that Stephen may have been right about Walter. I had perhaps been underestimating the depth of the cunning in my companion for many years. Never having spent so much time alone in his company before, I had always assumed his occasionally perceptive observations on the world were mere chance but I felt like I had just had a glimpse of his true self. His mask had slipped and the man beneath was illuminated.
Walt burped, cuffed his mouth and picked at something deep within his nose. I could not decide if he was truly so uncouth or if he was playing it up in the hope of throwing me off.
“What do you think of me, Walt?” I asked him.
He froze, one finger up his nostril. “Sir?” he replied, pulling it out.
“Do you wish me to repeat myself?”
“Just don’t understand what you want from me, sir.”
“You do not hold out much hope for our success in this venture, do you?”
He shrugged. “Seems like you always win when it comes to a fight, sir.”
“Ah. But it seems like I always lose when it comes to everything else?”
“Don’t rightly know about that, sir. But we been looking for the knight of the black banner for a long old time. Two years, is it? And we can’t find him nowhere. Now, with this new fellow, you reckon you’ll go to some distant land you ain’t ever even been to before and find a man you ain’t never met and who you don’t even know the name of. Don’t seem possible, is all.”
I nodded. “I would agree with you but for the fact that the knight of the black banner knows we are looking for him and he is hiding. He is most probably travelling around from place to place. Or he was one of the knights of France who has put away his black banner and his black armour and is posing as an ordinary lord, in plain sight. Whereas the man we are searching for lives in a cave, and so can be found in one place. Hiding, perhaps, yet known to the folk of the surrounding area as a wolf man. As something ancient and terrible. All we need do is find stories of this wolf man in the towns and villages and search the local woods for traces of such a creature until we find him. It should be rather simple. Not easy, perhaps, but simple.”
Walt scratched his face. “I suppose I don’t really need to understand it, do I, sir.”
A wise fool, indeed. “No, Walter.”
He nodded, downed the rest of his beer, glanced around at the innkeeper for a moment and lowered his voice. “Right then, sir. That cuckold seems busy. I got to meet the alewife in the cellar about now so I will most likely see you on the morrow.”
After Brussels, we headed south and passed through a landscape that I would come to know over four centuries later through battles at Quatre Bras and Waterloo. All I knew then was that it was Wallonia and that the villages and hamlets were terrified of outsiders. They hid from us or threatened us from a distance to keep away and we were glad to do so.
Our way south was hindered by the Ardennes, a land of dense forest and awkward hills, much fought over by Charlemagne. Assuming it might be hard going, I still decided to cut through the region rather than going around it by heading directly east but we found the road into a valley blocked by felled trunks. It was manned by a group of villeins who were wet and mud-stained but were armed with spears and bows and a few put on their helms as I approached on my horse. Walt was behind me to my left with the two pack horses.
“Good day, good fellows,” I said. “We wish to pass through this land on our journey to the south.”
“French, are you?” the lead man asked from behind their barricade. He gripped his spear so hard that his fingers were white.
Whether they considered themselves to be friends or enemies of the French, I could not guess, as in that area it could have been either.
“How much is it to pass?” I asked.
“Answer the question, Frenchman!” another fellow called from the rear.
I grinned. “Why, we are Englishmen and friends to all the folk of these parts.”
“English!” they cried, and levelled their weapons at us and all began talking at once. Some to each other, most shouting insults and curses at us. I had no idea what the English had done to them but it mattered not.
“Please,” I said, holding up my empty hands. “By God, will you listen? We mean no harm.”
Walt rode forward from behind me. “Come on, sir,” he shouted. “Let’s be off from—”
I watched a crossbowman aim at Walt and I drew my sword. The bow clanked and the bolt shot straight and flew true. Without thinking, I swung my sword and knocked the bolt aside with a terrible clang that jarred my arm to my shoulder. Our horses, untrained in the ways of war, decided that they would much rather be elsewhere and we retreated, dragging our other horses after us until we were well clear of the men and their barricade.
“By God, sir,” Walt said, “you knocked the bolt right out of the air.”
“By God, so I did,” I replied, laughing.
“We should go back there and slaughter the lot of them,” Walt said, his face clouding over. “They would have murdered me, sir. Murdered me!”
“They were simply protecting their families from the pestilence. Even that fellow who sent a shot at you may not have meant to do so. You know what the levies are like. No nerves at all.”
“Even so. It is the principle of the thing. The insult of it can’t go unpunished, sir.”
I must admit, I was tempted, and Walt could see it on my face. With a start, I realised that he was attempting to manipulate me by putting it in terms he thought I would respond to. Do my men truly see me as prickly as all that, I wondered.
“It is not worth the lost time,” I said, finally. “We shall go back to the crossroads.”
He said nothing but I sensed he had lost a little of the regard he held me in. For some reason, that bothered me.
***
“Paris is filled with the dead,” the priest said. “Fifty thousand, at least. Some say one hundred thousand. Rouen, too, is destroyed. Amiens has filled its graveyards, dug new ones, and filled those, too. The dead lie now in their beds, corrupted. Everywhere in France, it is the same.”
We met him on the road and, unlike most other travellers we had seen, he was keen for our company. His name was Simon and he was heading home to Strasbourg from his parish in Normandy, where he swore that every one of his parishioners had died. The man had lost his horse at some point and was walking in shoes that were almost entirely worn away and his feet were in a terrible, disgusting state.
“Flanders yet fares well,” I said. “They closed their towns.”
Simon shook his head. “Sensible folk, the Flemish. Bunch of bastards. They do not have the pestilence at all? That is good.”
Walt spoke up. “It’s there alright. Cattle wandering without herdsmen in the fields. Barns and wine-cellars standing wide open. House after house empty and few people to be found anywhere. Fields lying uncultivated. It’s there, sir.”
“Ah. As it is all across France.” He shook his head. “What did Man do to d
eserve such punishment? Are we not punished enough with our daily travails?”
“Some are saying this is the end of all things, brother,” I said. “What do you say to that?”
“It may well be so,” he replied, sighing and looking up at the darkness. “For how can those that live now go on in a world such as this? Perhaps when we are all dead, we shall all then rise and see Heaven made upon the Earth.” He put his head in his hands and sobbed.
Walt leaned forward and held out a skin. “Some wine to ease your suffering, sir?”
Simon jerked up and snatched it from him. “Praise God,” he said.
We each of us drank and in the morning we found that Simon had stolen one of our horses and some of our food and wine.
“I shall murder him,” Walt said, shaking where he stood. “I’ll bloody tear his throat out.”
“Not before I do,” I said.
But he had sold us a duck. He was most certainly not on the road to Strasbourg and we never found him before we doubled back and went on our original way again.
“All is well,” I said. “We have one spare mount and coin enough to yet to buy another.”
In truth, I cursed myself for trusting any soul and resolved not to let any man near us again. Walt was furious with himself and with me and he was mercifully silent for days on end.
We came to a small town named Saarbrucken where we found the people dying in great numbers of the sickness and so we did not enter for long. Bodies were being born in great numbers to the churches. Few spoke to us at all, save to warn us off but they did so without any malice. The dead were everywhere and the living were broken. Curates and parish clerks could barely keep up and they looked as though they were dead on their feet.
Passing on as quickly as we were able, we came to a well-fortified city called Stuttgart, where the buildings were grand and clean but the people were miserable and fearful.