Gulling The Kings

by Martin Archer

  Chapter Seven

  I meet the Germans.

  My toe was totally forgotten as I ran to my father. “What happened?” I cried as I ran up to him and the crowd around him continued to grow. “Is he wounded?”

  “I just got tired all of a sudden and had to sit down,” my father said as he looked up at me with a wan smile.

  “Still weak from the pox, that’s all. Here, help me up,” he said as he extended his arm. I instinctively grasped it and pulled—and he staggered as I pulled him up, and would have fallen if Henry and I hadn’t grabbed him and held him up.

  “Take the captain back to Samuel’s galley and get him out of his chain,” Peter ordered my father’s apprentice sergeant rather emphatically. He was my father’s first lieutenant and was taking charge because the company’s captain was unable to continue. It was right and proper that he did.

  “You and Josh help the lad get him there and then stay with him,” Peter ordered one of the men standing nearby. “And find the sailing sergeant who is on board and tell him I said to have his sailor men ready to push off and anchor in the harbour on a moment’s notice in case of trouble.”

  I watched in dismay as my father began to be walked to Samuel's galley with his arms draped over the shoulders of the two archers and Gerald, his young apprentice sergeant, anxiously leading the way.

  Peter immediately began giving orders. Within a few moments, Henry was leading a group of archers off to search the village hovels and I was standing among the dead and badly wounded Germans banging on the door with the handle of one of my wrist knives, and shouting in English, French, and Latin for the door to be opened immediately.

  “If the door isn’t opened and you don’t come out immediately," I shouted loudly in each language, “we’re going to burn the church down with you in it.”

  Samuel and the archers in his crew stood in a loose semi-circle behind me amongst the dead and wounded German guards. Their longbows were at the ready in case the men inside the church sallied out to attack us or to try to escape. They seemed quite impressed with my ability to make threats in so many languages.

  Somewhere behind me I heard a thud and the groaning instantly stop as one of the badly wounded Germans was given a mercy. The rest of the Germans in the village and afloat, following my father’s orders before he left the field, were to be kept alive for questioning. Only the British and French among the galley slaves were to be freed immediately; the rest would stay in chains until they could be properly sorted out. It was our tradition.

  The church door opened a crack.

  “Who are you?” a quavering voice asked in a strange language I didn’t understand and then was repeated in heavily accented and barely understandable Latin. “What do you want?”

  “We want you to come out,” I immediately replied in Latin. “We will burn the church down with you in it if you do not come out immediately. I will count to one hundred, and then we will burn the church.”

  The door was pulled shut and I began counting out loud in Latin until I reached one hundred. Nothing. But we could hear talking and shouting inside the little church.

  “Send some of your men to bring wood and burn the church,” I shouted in Latin with a touch of disgust in my voice. “Some brands thrown into the thatch should do it,” I said. And, of course, the men around me hadn’t understood a word of what I had said until I turned around and repeated it to them in English.

  Samuel nodded his understanding, pointed at some of his men, and shouted an order; within seconds some of the bowmen who had been standing at the ready in front of the church door were rushing off to gather firewood; others were taking firestones and pounded iron from their pouches and preparing feather sticks to catch the sparks that would occur when the stones were hit against the iron.

  Peter and Henry walked up as I stood in front of the door to the little church and waited for the men to return with the pieces of wood that would be lit and thrown on to the thatch to burn the church. They had very strange and angry looks on their faces. I instantly knew something was wrong, very wrong.

  “We found some of the villagers,” Peter said with anger and disgust in his voice. “Women and children mostly; in a pile behind the village. They’ve been dead for several days and left out to rot.”

  Peter would have said more, but at that moment the door to the little church opened a crack, enough for me to see a middle-aged man of about thirty years peering out with an anxious look of his face. He was heavily bearded, wearing a priest’s robe, and holding up a cross for me to see; it was as if he thought the cross was a shield that would somehow protect him.

  “This is God’s house and there are priests in it. You will burn in purgatory forever if you destroy it or hurt God’s priests,” he said in a strange tongue, probably for the benefit of those in the church with him, and then again in Latin for my benefit.

  My refusal to accept the priest’s argument must have been clear on my face for he quickly added in Latin, “We also have a great treasure of gold and coins with which to buy some priceless religious relics for the Pope. Surely you wouldn’t want to destroy them and bring the wrath of the Holy Father down upon you?”

  “Gold and coins can be wiped clean and the church can be rebuilt,” I said. “Either come out immediately or we will burn the church down on top of you,” I replied as I gestured toward one of the men behind me who was blowing on the sparks in his feather stick in an effort to get it to burst into flames.

  I was quite emphatic about burning the church down; I truly meant to do it if they didn’t come out. Behind me I could see men arriving with pieces of wood to throw on the roof and a man striking a fire stone to put sparks into a pile of wood shavings with another man using his knife on a piece of wood to make more shavings. The priest could see them also. He held up his hand in a motion to indicate that I should wait briefly and closed the door.

  Once I heard about the women and children, I knew the fate of the men in the church was sealed no matter what they said or did, and rightly so; but I didn’t tell them. If it wasn’t for the questions we needed answered, I would have started the fire myself and enjoyed listening to them scream as they burned. Innocent women and children; can you believe it?

  Again the church door opened a crack.

  “Will you swear in the name of God not to kill the priests if everyone comes out?” the voice asked in Latin from inside the church. “It was the knights and their soldiers who did the killings.”

  “Of course, we won’t burn the priests,” I replied.

  “I promise in the name of God not to burn any of you—but only if each and every one of you answers our questions truthfully. And make no mistake about it, we’ll be separating you when we ask our questions so we’ll know if anyone is lying. One lie or refusal to answer from any of you, just one, and that man will be tortured until he begs to die.”

  I promised not to burn them; I didn’t promise not to hang them or cut their damn throats if they deserved it.

  ******

  A few minutes later the church door opened and the men inside slowly and tentatively came out one after another with anxious looks on their faces. They were mostly priests, six of them holding up crosses, plus a couple of the guards who had escaped through the door in time to avoid being stuck by an arrow. Several of the priests were richly dressed and wearing bishops’ mitres.

  I cautiously passed through the church door holding my short sword and entered the church as soon as the men stopped coming out. Samuel and some of his men were right behind me with their longbows at the ready with arrows nocked and ready to be instantly pushed.

  The church was not empty. The first thing I saw as I entered was a dying man on the dirt floor near the wooden altar. He was holding tightly to the shaft of an arrow stuck deeply into his stomach with both hands. He continued moaning and writhing about on the church’s dirt floor until I nodded in response to a questioning gesture by one of Samuel’s archers—who promptly gave the poor fello
w a mercy by cutting his throat.

  There were also wooden crates of all sizes stacked along the side of the wall with numbers scribed on them. I thought I knew what was in them and tried to lift one of the crates to make sure. I was right—Otto had sent his men with coins to buy the relics in the event they couldn’t be seized. At least that much of what we’d been told was true.

  ******

  The scene outside was confusing as I left the church to report the existence of the coins to Lieutenant Peter. There was a crowd around the priests who’d come out the church and Henry’s young apprentice sergeant was being berated by one of the bishops, an older, heavyset man with a great brown beard and a fine gown. He was speaking angrily and rapidly to the boy in Latin and shaking his finger in the boy’s face.

  Peter and Henry and some of the archers were standing there and looking at the tirade. From the looks on their faces I could tell that they didn’t have a clue as to what the bishop was saying to the lad and he didn’t know how to respond. I hurried over to them—and I did not have a friendly thought inside my head.

  “Silence,” I roared in Latin and then in English.

  The German bishop promptly turned and began shouting and waving his finger under my nose in an effort to intimidate me. Bad mistake. My wrists knives came out as I reached him, and, before he could blink, I had the tip of each knife in one of his nose holes and he was starting to stand on his toes to avoid slicing himself.

  “I said silence,” I roared in Latin and then repeated in English for the benefit of the men who were watching. “One more word out of you, just one, and I’ll cut your nose.”

  Sure enough. He wouldn’t stop talking.

  I jerked my right hand knife upwards and he immediately stopped talking—and started screaming and sputtering in disbelief as blood began pouring through his hands as he tried to hold together his now-split nose. I'm right-handed, don't you know?

  “You and you,” I said as I pointed with my bloody knife towards two of the archers standing nearby with amazed looks on their faces, “take this man over by that fishing boat and guard him. Cut off one of his ears if he says so much as one word.” I repeated the order in Latin with a snarl in my voice.

  Henry and Peter stood silently by my side as I ordered the astonished and now-silent priests to be taken under guard to various places on the beach so they could be questioned separately. The Germans looked quite worried, as well they should be, as they moved off with their guards. Then I smiled at the two lieutenants and told them the good news.

  “The coins they brought to buy the relics are in the church.”

  ******

  At Peter’s suggestion, the three of us, Henry, Peter, and I, moved into the church to spend a couple of minutes talking privately about the situation and what we should do next.

  We’d know more after we questioned our prisoners, of course, but so far the good news was very good—we had the coins, the German galleys and transports had been empty except for their sailors. And we had taken them without hardly any fight at all, both in the harbour and along the shore. And we had rescued some of the villagers who had apparently been taken to become German slaves.

  On the other hand, the bad news was very bad—some of the St. Ives villagers had been slaughtered, including women and children. Even worse, several Germans had escaped on horses and would almost certainly warn the German knights of our arrival and our capture of the coins and their shipping. Also, and quite significant, we did not have a clue as to where the German knights and their army might be, only that they were marching overland towards Restormel in order to cut us off from the sea so we could not carry the relics to safety.

  Peter quickly divided up what needed to be done and gave us our assignments. Henry would supervise the moving of the crates of coins and the surviving villagers into three or four of our galleys for safekeeping; Peter would use the German-speaking wain wright to question the Germans we’d caught in the village and on the galleys; and I would question the German priests.

  While we were doing that, the senior of the two four-stripe galley sergeants commanding the fully-manned galleys in the harbour would lead an inspection of the prizes and, as was our tradition, immediately free any British and French slaves; the rest would stay in their chains and be freed when we got back to Restormel and had time to sort them out.

  The local priest, one of the few in Cornwall outside the monasteries, never appeared; he was probably among the pile of dead villagers out behind the little village’s only alehouse.

  ******

  The youngest of the German priests was the first priest to be questioned. He was a relatively young man with whispy beard and a very weak chin, almost certainly one of the bishops’ well-born assistants who was too frail for his family to send for training as a knight. I could see from the look on his face that he was more than a little afraid of me, terrified actually, because he’d seen me slice the nose of one of the bishops instead of deferring to him.

  Not a word was spoken at first and it was undoubtedly obvious that I was not in a good mood. And I certainly wasn’t—I’d just come from looking at the pile of bodies behind the alehouse.

  I just walked up to the priest, crooked my pointing finger towards him to make a couple of “come here” gestures, and turned around and walked back into the church. He hurried along behind me between the two archers who had been assigned to be his guards and keep him from the other priests so he wouldn’t know what the others were telling us.

  I went through the door and walked to the little table that served as the church’s altar. Then I turned around, slipped one of my wrist knives out of my sleeve, and placed it on the altar.

  “Now then,” I said in Latin after I took a deep breath to settle myself. “I will tell you, just once, what is going to happen. I am going to separately ask you and each of your fellow priests the same questions. The first time I find you have answered me false, I will come back and cut off one of your ears; the second time I will cut off your bollocks. Do you understand?” I hope he does for I surely meant it; I have children the age of some of the little ones in the pile behind the village alehouse.

  The priest was sweating and trembling as he nodded his understanding.

  His name was Father Franz and I asked him many questions. They were the questions you might expect: What was his position? Who was in command? What was the role of the bishops? How many mounted knights and men on foot had marched inland? Who killed the women and children? Did anyone protest the killings and try to stop them? Why did they bring the coins if they intended to take the relics by force? That sort of thing.

  So far as I could tell, Father Franz answered my questions truthfully as best he could. When I was finished with him, I sent him away and had the others brought to me one at a time, including two of the priests who later came back for a painful second visit and much more intense questioning.

  I saved the bishop whose nose had not been sliced for last. He turned out to be King Otto’s chancellor and the head of the relic-purchasing expedition, a great, fat, pompous arse who couldn’t keep his eyes away from the severed ear lying on the altar. According to the German priests, he wanted some of his king’s coins for himself.

  By the time I talked to the bishop, I knew all about him and King John’s involvement. I also knew all about the orders he and the commander of the German soldiers, a Teutonic knight named Von Hildesheim, had been given—and who had stood by silently and made no effort to stop the soldiers from slaughtering the villagers, and who had spoken up in an effort to stop it.

  Bishop Von Zell, for that was the chancellor’s name, admitted almost everything and proclaimed his willingness to recall Von Hildesheim and his men and proceed to purchase the relics. He put aside the slaughter of the villagers and the German army’s laying waste to the countryside as something unimportant and the natural behaviour of soldiers which “we as leaders must try to understand.” We as leaders? We? The patronizing bastard; he doesn’t know my
position and didn’t ask; he’s just trying to spread fresh butter on my bread.

  “And what will you use as coins to pay for the relics?” I inquired most politely of the chancellor even though I was seething inside my head behind my eyes.

  “We have all the coins necessary to buy them,” was his prim reply as he gestured towards the chests.

  “No, you do not,” I said. “Not any more you don’t. You have no coins; the coins you brought with you have been taken as the spoils of war for the war you started.” Then I leaned forward and repeated it with a hiss “you started.”

  Then, after a pause, I leaned forward again and continued speaking with real menace and a bit of delight in my voice as I looked at him, “and then there is also the question of justice and revenge for the women and children who were killed by your men either because you ordered them to do so, or you stood by and let it happen without saying a word.”

  Chapter Eight

  Justice and marching.

  “You will be taken in chains to Beirut and sold to the Moors as slaves when you finish helping one of our galleys row to the Holy Land,” I said to the two priests standing next to me. Actually they won’t because we don’t sell slaves to the Moors; they’ll probably just row for a while until we decide what to do with them. Harold will decide.

  “Thank you, Sergeant George,” the older of the two priests said softly with a bit of a catch in his voice. “We are grateful for your kindness.”

  Of course they were grateful. It was late in the afternoon and we were standing and watching as the last of their begging and pleading priestly companions hanging at the end of a rope let loose his final shite. I spared the one who had spoken because three of the priests said he had spoken up in opposition to the killing of the women and children, and the other because he was so young and confused and weak.

  ****** George

  It was late in the afternoon by the time we got all of the archers’ weapons and supplies ashore and organized. There was hardly a sliver of moon that night and the was a thick cover of clouds overhead to prevent whatever light the moon might shed from reaching us.