‘What about your own oath?’ Robert asked.
I frowned. ‘I don’t understand, lord.’
‘If this latest assault fails, will you keep your oath to me, or might you be among the deserters you spoke of?’
Only then did I understand the real reason why he had hesitated. My words had betrayed my own frustrations.
‘If this assault happens, then I have to wonder whether any of us will even live by the end of it,’ I answered. It was evading his question, but it was the truth.
Robert, however, was not fooled. ‘You know that’s not what I asked.’
‘Lord,’ I said, ‘I am bound to your service. I pledged my allegiance upon holy relics, in the sight of God.’
He sighed. ‘I realise that I have not fulfilled my duties as lord as well I might. Would that things were different, that I had the means to reward you and your friends for all that you have done for me and my family, and I fervently hope that such means will come back into my possession soon. As things are, I barely have the money to repair my own halls and keep my retainers fed and equipped. I only hope you understand, and that you see I need good men now more than ever. I need your sword, Tancred, and your patience.’
I had been patient for nine months already without receiving so much as one silver penny, I wanted to say, but managed to resist the temptation. He was desperate; I could see it in his eyes. Everything around him was unravelling, while all he wished for was respect, both from the king and from his own followers. As long as I had known him he had been a good lord as well as a good friend, always fair in what he asked of me. A man of sound judgement, and honest too, which was more than could be said of many in these troubled times.
‘I will not desert, lord,’ I said. ‘You have my oath, and you may hold me to it, or my life is forfeit.’
He nodded, satisfied, as if there was any other answer I could have given. I couldn’t break my oath to him, especially after I had failed in my duty to his namesake, my first lord, Robert de Commines. He had paid for my failure with his life, and I was determined not to let the same thing happen again. I would not suffer such dishonour twice. Nor had I any wish to surrender Earnford, my home, which I held only as Robert’s tenant and which was worth more than anything in this world to me. That was what would happen if I broke my vow. I would become one of those lordless, landless, wandering warriors, despised and distrusted by all. That was not a fate I wanted for myself.
Beneath his cloak my lord’s shoulders hung low. His angular features looked more gaunt, and even in the gloom I spotted the dark patches beneath his eyes. Suddenly he seemed much older than his years: no longer as commanding a figure, or as confident. As always, he was dressed all in black from his shirt and tunic to his trews and boots, and even his scabbard. It was an affectation he had always considered fashionable, but which now lent him the appearance of a mourner, and perhaps he was indeed mourning: for the loss of his family’s former standing, for the loss of all his hearth-knights who had been slain at the hands of foemen in this last year.
Perhaps, too, he was already in mourning for his father, the once-powerful Guillaume Malet, whose health, it was said, was rapidly worsening. He had first fallen ill during his imprisonment by the Danes last autumn, and although he had recovered somewhat in the months since then, that illness had never completely gone away, but kept returning, and every time it did it left him all the weaker. None of the physicians summoned had been able to say exactly what it was that ailed him, or rather each one had his own opinion and clung rigidly to it, shouting down all the others whose assessment differed. Neither had they been able to agree on any one course of treatment, save for the usual bleedings and poultices and herb-infused ointments, none of which seemed to bring any relief.
Knowing how he was suffering, it seemed strange that King Guillaume should have demanded the elder Malet’s services on this campaign, especially since he showed no inclination to call upon his counsel. As with everything, the king wished it, and so it happened. For the first few weeks all had been well, and it was hoped that whatever ailment troubled him had passed. Within days of arriving here at Brandune, however, Malet had succumbed once more, and this time he seemed worse than ever.
‘How is your father?’ I asked.
‘He suffers still. This foul marsh air does him no good. Every day he is plagued with bouts of flux. He eats little and what he does manage he often heaves back up. Let me take you to him, and you can see for yourself.’
I wasn’t sure that Malet would wish to see me, and doubtless Robert must have known that, but he was already halfway towards the door and so I kept my feelings to myself as I followed him outside. A scrawny grey cat that must have been left behind by whoever had previously owned this hall looked up from licking its paws as we crossed the yard towards a smaller building that stood opposite the turf-roofed hall. Smoke rose thickly from the hole in its thatch, obscuring the stars. I had hardly even seen Malet in recent weeks, let alone had a chance to speak to him. Much of the time he was too weak even to leave the house where he was quartered, while I was often out on patrol or escort duty. For a brief time I had served him, just as I now served his son, but after the business with the priest Ælfwold, he had dismissed me from his employ.
‘I fear he will not be with us much longer,’ Robert said, his voice low as we neared the building.
‘I pray that he recovers.’ In spite of the bad blood that existed between Malet and myself, the sentiment was heartfelt.
Robert shook his head sadly. ‘He will not recover. It is simply a matter of how long he can cling to life.’
I didn’t know what to say to that, but thankfully I did not have to, for at that moment Robert opened the door. Inside it was warm, much warmer than the hall. A freshly stoked fire burnt; against one wall was piled enough wood to last all night and all the next day too, I didn’t wonder. Malet, my erstwhile lord, sat on a stool facing the hearth with his back to the door, wrapped in furs as he sipped at a bowl of steaming broth. Beside him, stirring an iron pot that hung from a spit over the flames, crouched a man in his middle years, dressed in loose woollen robes. Around his neck hung a wooden cross carved with an intricate pattern of intertwining vines, and I took him for Malet’s chaplain. His face held a stony expression as he saw us come in.
‘My lord is not strong enough to receive anyone at this present moment, I’m afraid.’ His voice, unlike the fire, was entirely lacking in warmth.
‘Not even his son?’ Robert asked with a frown.
‘Come, Dudo,’ Malet said to the priest. He gave a cough and slowly set the bowl down on the rushes beside him. ‘I am not as frail as all that. Besides, where are your manners?’
‘I simply think, lord, that it would be better if you rest. The hour is late and—’
Malet waved him silent as, with not a little effort, he rose to his feet and turned to greet us, a gentle smile upon his face.
A smile that vanished the instant he saw me.
‘It’s you,’ he said, scowling. ‘Why do you continue to plague me? Am I not sick enough already?’
Robert began: ‘Father—’
Malet raised a hand against his son’s protest. ‘What have you come seeking this time?’ He almost spat the words. ‘More gratitude for your good service? Further plaudits for your prowess at arms? Your weight in gold coin, perhaps? I can tell you now that you will find none of those things here.’
‘I ask nothing of you, lord,’ I said.
But he was not listening. ‘I do not wish to see this man,’ he said to Robert. ‘Why have you brought him here?’
He had never fully forgiven me for the treachery, as he saw it, that he had suffered at my hands. That was why he had dismissed me from his service: because, in his eyes, I had betrayed the trust he’d placed in me, even though I’d done so for good reason and in good conscience. At the same time, however, he couldn’t deny that he owed me, and that was why he resented me. Twice I had rescued his hide in the last few years
. More galling than the knowledge of that debt was his continuing inability to pay it. Each time he saw me must have seemed a further insult. Nonetheless, a little more gratitude would not have gone amiss. He’d hardly had a single kind word to say to me since the night of that battle in Beferlic all those months ago.
‘I come bearing no ill will,’ I tried to assure him. ‘I merely wished to know how you were faring.’
He snorted scornfully, as if he didn’t believe a word that came out of my mouth. ‘Leave us,’ he snapped at Dudo.
The priest said nothing but bowed. Without meeting either my eyes or Robert’s, he made for the door, although I sensed he wouldn’t venture too far in case his lord needed him. Why it crossed my mind just then I do not know, but for some reason I found myself thinking again of Ælfwold, the Englishman who had been Malet’s previous chaplain and who had met his end some two years earlier. A kind-hearted man, he had tended to me while I was recovering from injury and fever. From our first meeting I’d taken to him in a way that I could not to this Dudo, which was a strange thing to admit given what Ælfwold had later done, and yet it was true, since for a time at least I had counted the Englishman as a friend.
‘This enmity must end,’ Robert said when the priest had left, his tone sharp and his eyes hard as he glanced first at his father and then at me. ‘I will not have the two of you at each other’s throats.’
This was the real reason why he had brought me here, then. To try to forge a reconciliation between us.
‘Why should I waste my breath dealing with him?’ Malet asked, and turned his back.
‘Because I wish it,’ Robert said.
Shaking his head, Malet limped stiffly across the room to where a pitcher stood on a table beside a stack of parchments, and poured himself a cup. I remembered when our paths had first crossed, in his richly decorated palace at Eoferwic, a very different place to this. How long ago it all seemed, though only two years had passed. How far his fortunes had fallen.
Certainly it was true that I’d never had any especial love for him. While he was more astute and quick-minded than most great barons, many of whom had won their reputations through the sword alone, he was not nearly as cunning as he liked to think. Indeed Malet had always seemed to me arrogant, aloof in manner and calculating: everything that his son was not. But even though I had little respect for him as a lord and a leader of men, I would never wish any harm upon him, and it saddened me to see him brought so low.
‘It was Tancred who came for us at Beferlic,’ Robert said. ‘How can you hold a grudge against a man who risked everything to help save your life?’
‘He never came for me,’ Malet said, almost spitting the words. ‘He came for you, Robert. You are his lord. He would have left me to my fate otherwise.’
The barb stung, but what stung harder was the realisation that there was probably a grain of truth in his words.
‘No, lord—’ I started to protest, but he cut me off.
‘You would have done better to leave me there,’ he said. ‘I would have rotted away as a prisoner of the Danes, rather than live only to rot away here. What difference has it made? What good am I to anyone now?’
His face was ashen, his hair had grown long and was turning the colour of snow, and his deep-set eyes had a weary look about them. Even huddled in his cloak he looked thinner than I had ever known him. Thinner, and also somehow shrunken. It was hard to believe that this was the same man I had witnessed not so long ago leading conrois into battle: a fearless fighter, ambitious and lacking nothing in conviction. All the fire that once he had possessed seemed to have gone out of him, which perhaps was no surprise given that he was then by my reckoning almost fifty in years. Whilst I had come across men of sixty and seventy and even older, they were rare, and fifty was in truth a good age, especially for one whose living and whose reputation were made by the sword, as his had been. War exacted its toll, not just upon the body, as my many battle-marks would attest, but also upon the soul, and Malet had seen more battles in the last few years than many saw in a lifetime. And so in spite of his hostility towards me, I felt sorry for him.
‘Have the physicians been to see you this evening?’ asked Robert, his voice quieter now. He had come not looking for a confrontation but hoping to settle matters. Now those hopes were dashed.
‘I sent them away,’ Malet said. ‘They bleed my veins dry and are continually arguing between themselves, but they do nothing to take away the pain. At least I have Dudo. He reads to me, and prays for me, and sometimes we play chess, which I always seem to win. I suspect he lets me, although he insists that is not the case. I do not want pity, from him or anyone. And besides, my mind still works well enough, even if this husk of flesh is failing me.’
No sooner had he finished speaking than he hunched over and began to cough: a dry, rasping sound that shook his entire body and was painful to hear. A dirty rag hung from his belt and he raised it to cover his mouth. When he lifted it away I saw it was flecked with blood, and even I, who was far from well versed in the healing arts, knew that was never a good thing. Robert passed him the cup from the table; Malet took it in his bony fingers and lifted it to his lips, and after he had taken a few sips his son helped him back to the stool by the fire.
‘We will be leaving soon,’ said Robert as he knelt by his father’s side. ‘The king is preparing for another assault upon the Isle and so he is ordering most of the army back to Alrehetha.’
‘So I am informed,’ Malet said. ‘And I shall come with you.’
‘No, Father. It is better if you stay here and save your strength. Dudo will care for you.’
‘My strength will leave me eventually. I would rather be there to witness our victory over the rebels before I die than simply waste away uselessly in this filthy hovel.’
Robert shot him a reproachful look. ‘You should not speak so.’
‘And why not? There is no sense in denying it. My time is short. We both know it to be true. The physicians think the same, although of course they will not admit it openly, since what then would be the point of us paying them? And so does Dudo, although he is too loyal to say so. No, I have made my decision and will not be swayed from it.’
Robert nodded sadly as he clasped his hands around his father’s, and in the light of the fire I glimpsed the glisten of a tear as it rolled down his cheek. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will return in the morning, shortly before noon. Until then, rest.’
Malet gazed back at him, but it seemed to me that there was no hint of sadness or regret in his eyes, no sense of self-pity in his demeanour, but merely an acceptance of his fate, and despite everything that had happened and his hostility towards me, I admired that courage.
Robert rose, and after bidding a final farewell we left Malet to his fire and stepped outside, where, as I had suspected, Dudo was waiting, standing so close to the door that he must have been eavesdropping. We’d said nothing of any importance, but even so, I gave him a cold stare as we passed. His face betrayed no feeling, and he spoke not a word to us, but afterwards I could feel his eyes on my back. An odd little man, I thought, at the same time wondering where Malet had found him and how he had come to enter his service.
‘I don’t like that priest,’ I confessed to Robert when we were out of earshot. ‘I don’t like him, and I don’t trust him either.’
‘He is harmless. Strange, I will grant you, but entirely harmless. In any case, it doesn’t matter what either of us thinks. My father trusts him and that is all that matters.’
I supposed he was right, although that did nothing to stave off my suspicions.
‘You must realise, too, that his anger isn’t reserved for you,’ Robert said as we walked back across the yard, which the recent rains had turned into a quagmire. ‘He’s angry at the circumstances he finds himself in, and the knowledge that he will never accomplish all that he set out to do. He is a proud man, Tancred, and always has been. He hates for others to see him looking so weak. Seeing you reminds h
im of a time when his fortunes were better, when men did not spit his name but instead held him in esteem.’
‘If you say so, lord,’ I said, though I didn’t entirely believe him.
We trudged on through the mud until we arrived back outside the hall’s great doors.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you suggested,’ Robert said as we were about to bid each other farewell. ‘About how, if we could only find the right passages through the marshes, we might be able to surprise the enemy, or at least inflict some damage in return.’
‘Yes, lord?’
‘I want you to take a boat out into the marshes towards the Isle. See if you can capture one or more of the rebels and bring them back alive.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Tonight,’ he confirmed. ‘Take Eudo and Wace with you, and as many other men as you think you might need, so long as you go unnoticed and you return by first light.’
‘And how do you expect us to be able to do this, lord?’
‘I hoped you might have some plan in mind. You were the one who suggested it, after all. Unless, of course, you think yourself incapable of such a task.’
He gave a mischievous smile as he spoke. He meant to goad me, for he knew that I rarely refused a challenge when one was laid before me.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘For you this should be simple.’
Conquest 03 - Knights of the Hawk Page 7