Children of Clun

by Robert Nicholls

  Jeremy’s training, though, had a different focus. In close or well away – those were the only safe options, he’d learned, when facing a man with a broadsword. And since he wasn’t limber enough to get well away, as the sword arced overhead, he scurried straight in, brushing past the knight and popping up behind him. If Cyril was surprised, it didn’t show. He pivoted instantly, powering the sword’s momentum into the turn. Bracing himself for a knife to the ribs. In the process, turning his back once again to the steps where Maude and Jenny Talbot were appearing.

  “Whoa!” crowed Jeremy, whistling lightly as the broad sword’s point danced before his breast. “Careful now, young knight! Someone’ll be hurt for sure, you wavin’ that sticker about like that! Be a sad day . . .” the lightness fled from his voice, “. . . if it turned out to be you. Wouldn’ it now!”

  “You . . .!” Sir Cyril stuttered with rage and took a step forward.

  “Aye!” Jeremy took an equal step back but he also smiled, showing his gums, and lifting his cap. “Me it is. And me it is who doesn’ want to be strugglin’ wi’ ye, young cockerel! I promised me sister. So whyn’t ye put the weapon away, eh? I’ll take me friend an’ no harm done; what do ye say! We’ll all three live to crow another dawn.”

  “You took my sword, my horse!”

  “Oh, aye, I did. But then, you drank from my stream! Now a calm man might ask himself what’s more important?” Jeremy showed his open empty hands and gave his most engaging smile. “Is it a cooling drink? Or a dented piece of steel an’ an ol’ nag of an ‘orse?” He shrugged and dropped his hands. “You’d take the water every time, now, wouldn’ ye! So ye got the better o’ the bargain, Sir Knight!”

  “That was no ‘dented piece of steel’, old man. That sword was the finest I ever owned. It’s cut many a man clean in half, armour and all, and never suffered the least dent,” growled Cyril.

  “Ah well, there you go. I been usin’ it down the back garden, for choppin’ me firewood. Dented all to buggery now, it is!”

  Cyril hissed at the old man’s effrontery and took a step forward. “Keep laughing, old clown! I’m going to have your guts!” He wagged an elbow in the direction of the prostrate Brenton. “And then I’m going to have his.”

  Jeremy’s dodging of the first swing had been a neat trick, but it had left him with his back to a blind alley. The only escape now would be past the knight. And the likelihood of achieving that a second time was slim. He began a slow retreat.

  For Cyril’s part, the day had induced in him a level of wariness that was not usually part of his nature. First, he was sure someone had slipped him a poison – hence the squits – that he had survived only through his enormous personal strength. Then the huge peasant, LeGros, had engaged him in a surprisingly damaging fight, which only showed how mad these Marchmen were! There was a time when a peasant wouldn’t have raised his eyes to a knight of the realm, let alone a fist. In any event, his usually dormant sense of caution had been prodded into wakefulness and his advance on Jeremy was unhurried.

  “If you have a weapon under your cloak, old man, I tell you freely – you need it now!”

  Jeremy kept his hands and his smile in sight and kept talking in his calmest voice.

  “Can I not talk ye out o’ this, young knight? It’s a rash fault of character, ye know! To be wavin’ swords about . . . tryin’ to kill folks. What would yer ma’m be thinkin’ of ye . . . if she could see ye now? Would she be grabbin’ yer by the ear . . . givin’ yer head a rattle by any chance?”

  It was that moment, as the two men edged away from Brenton and from the door behind which Madeleine and Anwen remained captive, that Jenny Talbot decided to take her chance. Rattling through her keys and with Maude close behind, she dashed into the hall, straight to the locked door. Cyril heard, of course. The pain in his bruised neck wouldn’t allow him simply to glance back but, keeping his sword trained on Jeremy, he managed to swung his back against the wall and swivel his eyes. They flicked back to Jeremy – back to the females – back to Jeremy. Calculating. Calculating that Jeremy could not get by him; that he could dispatch the two women in the briefest of moments and still come back for the old man. He stepped sideways, once, twice, brought his sword into two hands and tensed to spring.

  “Uh uh uh!” Jeremy tutted, at last moving aside his cloak and drawing out the very sword he’d taken from Sir Cyril in the forest. It was not a weapon Jeremy was versed in or comfortable with, but smuggling a long bow into the castle had been out of the question. And besides, the person he’d actually come for would have a much healthier respect for this weapon than for any other he could muster.

  “My sword!” Cyril stammered. “That’s my sword!”

  “I b’lieve it was your sword,” Jeremy said softly. “Mine now!”

  Cyril’s attack was immediate and ferocious, caution abandoned as completely as a two-legged sheep dog. Overhand blows, he delivered; stroke after stroke, as though the sword had become an axe and Cyril a crazed axeman obsessed with pounding a bit of ironwood entirely out of existence. Jeremy’s years of experience in battle and his hard service on the land had made him a tough little nugget – the resilient knot that could unexpectedly stun the axeman’s shoulder. But nothing had prepared him for the fury of Cyril’s attack. In seconds he was stumbling and back-pedalling, warding off blows that would have broken a lesser sword. Maude and Jenny both wailed with horror, certain that the old man’s death was at hand. A prospect which, though he had no time to wail, was also crossing Jeremy’s mind.

  In the meantime, however, Madeleine and Anwen were freed. Madeleine leapt directly into Maude’s arms, Anwen flung herself onto the prostrate Brenton and Jenny Talbot wrenched and kicked at all of them.

  “RUN!” she howled, pummelling first Maude, then Maddie toward the stairs. “RUN!”

  They didn’t. They couldn’t. They couldn’t wrench their eyes from the chaos of the hall; Brenton, insensible on the floor; Anwen, crouched over him, as though her frail body could protect him; the old man sinking steadily under the ringing onslaught of Sir Cyril.

  They couldn’t run and they couldn’t do more than stare with blind panic, even as Jenny Talbot’s screams altered to, “A weapon! A weapon!” They knew there were none. Her pleas bounced off them and fled away into the rafters, chased by the clatter of steel on steel, even as Jeremy’s back met the wall. And so it was Jenny who followed her own instruction and ran. She ran, searching, into the empty room, wailing still: “God! Please! A weapon!”

  It was then that Brenton’s eyes opened. Glassy with pain and incomprehension, perhaps in some vague impression of being back on the battle field and certainly in response to Jenny’s shrieks, he gasped, surged and tried to rise. And that agonised effort, hopeless in the extreme, lit the spark that spelled the end of Sir Cyril’s onslaught.

  It was the start of a new rage which, though short lived, would burn as brightly and coldly as any in the whole of Shropshire, and it burned in the heart of Anwen. Still wearing a smudge of dark blood from Roland’s earlier casual strike, she rose up, her eyes blazing hatred, her mouth twisted like a washerwoman’s dishrag.

  With a banshee scream that would have made the average All Hallows demon cringe in horror, she lunged into the room where Jenny searched and charged back a moment later with the brimming chamber pot. Really, it was no more than a wooden bucket snatched from the scullery for the girls’ use. But it was solid and well made. And it was full.

  Cyril, with his back to the girls, had entirely missed the significance of that throat-rattling scream. Hack after frenzied hack he continued to deliver, bringing Jeremy at last to his knees. So immersed was he in the nearness of the kill that victory had become an actual taste in his mouth!

  A taste that was suddenly, horrifyingly replaced by that of cold, ammoniac urine! A deluge of it! A flood of it! It fell on him, it seemed, by the quart, soaking his hair, burning his eyes, filling his nostrils, running into his open mouth and sizzling against his split and br
oken gums. It slid with cold sliminess under his leather tunic and slipped down into his lungs. It stunned him with horror and made his insides, so recently tortured by the dose of buckthorn, flip-flop like a flat fish on a board. It stopped his attack in mid-stroke. He might have heard Anwen’s howled curse.

  “You goat’s turd! You stinking pile of shite!”

  Then again, spitting and spluttering, straining to clear his vision, aghast at the vast indignity, he might have been momentarily deafened. He raised not a hand – hadn’t even turned to look when Anwen’s arm, with the wooden bucket at the end of it, began to rotate like a water wheel in spring run-off. Once, twice around, in a great loop! Until, with a crack like a dropped rock, the bucket boomed against his noggin.

  Amazingly, neither the bucket nor the noggin shattered. Even more amazing was the amount of time that Cyril remained standing. He staggered, and his sword slipped from his hand. And into his mind there popped a brief picture of his metal helmet, sitting where he had left it, on the floor in the garderobe. He got so far as to reach one hand out for the wall and start the other on the long journey to the top of the head, where a lump the size of a hermit’s goitre was already beginning to emerge. Before the hand and the lump could meet, however, the great knight’s consciousness crept quietly away. He crumpled to the floor, felled by the least likely opponent and with the least likely weapon he could ever have imagined. So it should be with bullies everywhere.

  * * * *

  In that moment, Cyril’s part in the All Hallows debacle at Clun was brought temporarily to an end, but the others had more to do. Most particularly, Clun Castle was still a fortress and they, being stuck on the inside, were all on the wrong side of its walls. Madeleine, Maude and Anwen, supporting the thoroughly broken and helpless Brenton between them, headed for the lower levels and, following Jenny’s hasty instructions, the postern gate – a narrow exit that, with luck, might be less well guarded.

  Jeremy and Jenny, cackling with delirious relief, could not resist propping Sir Cyril against the wall and leaving him with the upturned piss bucket on his head. Then they too headed down the stairs, returning to their original plan. Moments later, at the door of Sir Roland’s chambers, Jeremy took off his cloak and gripped the edges as though it was a curtain he could hide behind. And Jenny knocked on the door.

  “Lady Margaret? It’s Jenny Talbot, the cook! Mr Rowe has sent me with a nice, warm surprise for you!”

  Chapter 33 – Struggles Without

  Behind the ancient embankment, invisible to one another in the darkness, the villagers and the Children of Owain shared both concealment from, and a dangerous risk of collision with, the powers that ruled their land. Jack and Roger in particular, sharing as they did a fugitive history, were sick with nervousness. They lay on an isolated piece of ground, shoulder pressed to shoulder, peeping over the ridge. In the distance, they could see the flickering pinpoints of torchlight on the castle wall and the faint glow from windows behind which candles burned.

  “What’s gonna happen?” Roger whispered.

  “Whaddya think? Jeremy’s gonna come dancin’ out the gate wi’ them girls an’ we’re gonna go roast a pig to celebrate! How should I know?”

  “Good, good!” nodded Roger, as though he’d just been told that the last devil had been clapped in a jar for safekeeping.

  Jack shook his head in exasperation. “We should be closer, that’s what! What if they get to the gate an’ the guards are chasin’ ‘em? What’ll they do then? If we ‘ad the ‘orses in closer, we could rescue ‘em!”

  “Us?” queried Roger.

  “Why not us? An’ what good’s sittin’ way out ‘ere anyways? If we could . . . ! Ah never mind. I gotta pee. Wait ‘ere, all right?”

  He edged away into the darkness, toward where the horses were tethered. If the boys were nervous, it might be noted, the horses – the same ones that Sir Cyril and Sir Angus had borrowed for their ill-fated expedition – were well and truly miffed! Here they’d come almost all the way home but, for reasons unappreciated, they’d been made to stop, almost within sight of their stables! Just over there, there was a warm barn, a feed of oats and a rub-down! They’d hardly paused in their disgusted sighing and paddling at the ground.

  It happened that Jack, on his pee journey, stopped rather nearer to them than he’d intended, the darkness having made their huffs of impatience seem further off than they actually were. And anyhow, his attention was more on the villagers off to the left, murmuring like a hive of dreaming bees. And then it was on the splash of his urine at his feet. And then it was on the greater silence of the forest.

  Not just the silence, but the unity of silence and darkness. How naturally the two complemented one another! Like freedom and happiness. Like bacon and beer. When the water finished draining out of him, just as an experiment, he tried to let the breath drain out of him as well; to allow the utterness of the moment engulf him. Even the night creatures, the owls and the foxes, seemed to be still and waiting. He raised his arms over his head and stood there, not breathing, imagining himself suspended in the belly of a vast lake.

  It was while he was in the midst of this reverie that Roger stumbled into him. “Aii-yeee!” Jack squealed, leaping in fright further into the darkness, like a dreaming fish that’s been pricked by a fisherman’s hook.

  “Wa-eeee!” Roger yammered, falling to the ground and covering his head.

  The sound caught the attention of the villagers. Jack’s movement – one large leap, a spin and several tiny reverse steps – caught the attention of the horses. The villagers fell silent to listen but first one then the other of the horses jerked in fright, tearing loose their reins and setting off at a canter for home.

  “Jesus Lord, Rog’! Was that you?” Jack whispered frantically. “That better o’ been you!”

  He crawled forward, reaching out for the whimpering soul he could now hear ahead of him. He crawled through the stinking little puddle his urine had made and continued on until he found Roger, wrapped as tightly as a badger around his talismans. It would be only the count of twenty before Silent Richard came to investigate. But by then, the boys were gone, following the horses, vainly hoping to recapture them before they reached the gates of Clun Castle.

  * * * *

  There was, of course, no hope. But still, the boys persisted, stumbling across the open fields, crouching low to the ground, clutching at one another for support. They fell into ditches, they crashed into hayricks and they hunkered down behind bushes. They were like two frantic mice on the nighttime floor of God’s great barn. But when they reached the edge of the village they still had not spied the horses. What they did spy was the line of torch-bearing soldiers emerging from the castle.

  Jack knew he and Roger couldn’t be seen, but he nonetheless slowed and stopped. What were the soldiers doing? Were they bringing Maddy and Anwen home? Were they coming for more hostages? A creeping paralysis of indecision rose within him, despite Roger’s continued enthusiasm.

  “Let’s go, Jack! Let’s go! We c’n save ‘em, us!”

  “No, wait! Wait!”

  He dragged them both to the wall of a village house. If they were caught, Owain had warned, it wasn’t just a thrashing from the reeve they were risking! Sir Roland might well have them killed! He glanced back the way they’d come. It was like looking into a bag of black fleece.

  Fortunately for him, it was a short-lived dilemma as a shadow loomed up behind them and a pair of hands snaked out of the darkness, clamping over both their mouths. The hands were as dry, solid and commanding as a pair of bibles and smelled, to Jack’s mind, like Armageddon. He jerked into motion but, with barely a moment’s hesitation, the hands clapped his head against Roger’s, stunning him into aggrieved silence.

  “Knuckle-heads!” a voice hissed in his ear. “Are ye lookin’ to have your throats cut?”

  The words were menacing, his head was ringing and a tide of bile had bounced a little higher in Jack’s gorge. Nonetheless, a ti
ngle of relief surged through him. It was the voice of Gwilym. He’d listened to the big reeve’s speech in the alehouse, not three hours earlier, and had heard Gwilym’s decision: all the other villagers would certainly join the Plant Owain at the forest’s edge. But he would not. If Jeremy’s plan worked, he’d insisted, and his daughters were brought safely to the castle gate, he would be there to guard them the rest of way home.

  “The horses are loose!” Jack whispered desperately. “We’re tryin’ to catch ‘em!”

  He could feel Gwilym’s constant twisting, searching the darkness for signs of movement. “We can ‘ide in an ‘ouse ‘til the soldiers go by!” he hissed. “We want to ‘elp!”

  “They’ll search the ‘ouses,” Gwilym hissed. “An’ I’ve already tied the ‘orses! Stay low. Come away wi’ me.”

  And taking a handful of each boy’s tunic, he towed them off into the darkness – not back the way they’d come, but in a looping movement around the paddocks, toward the river and, indirectly, toward the castle.

  Scuffing amongst the pumpkins, they passed within fifty yards of the common ground that lay open before the gates. Jack could even see the outline of Myfanwy’s cart, faintly lighted as it was by torchlight from the castle wall. And despite his terror, he made special note of its position, promising himself that, before he left Clun again, he would be speaking to that woman, demanding more of whatever magic it was that she’d concocted for Owain’s much-needed relief.

  “Over there!” Gwilym growled. His great hands twisted their heads toward the riverside of the castle wall. “Over there is a postern gate. A little gate – jus’ big enough for a lone man to pass through. Here’s what yez do!” Gwilym commanded. “Ye stay ‘ere – quietly. Ye watch that spot. If anyone comes through, ye check to see if there’s two little girls. If they come out, ye bring ‘em to the forest. Understand? Jus’ to the edge. No further. Jus’ so they’re safe. Understand? If soldiers come this way, move down closer to the river. Into it, if you have to. Got it?”