‘And the woman who swam in the mountain pool?’
Quint shrugged: ‘A naiad. Why not? Otherwise, as I suggested at the time, a shepherdess. Why should you think these women are the same person as Amaranta?’
‘In my mind they look alike. Her red hair is a wig, I saw her take it off in ... in the caravansaray at Dorylaeum. I think. The hair beneath is black.’
‘Red wigs are the fashion.’
‘She was acquainted with Jewish merchants.’
‘So am I. That does not make me Jewish.’
‘She arranged to have us killed -- first with a poisonous centipede and then with a giant spider.’
‘My dear Walt! Those were the normal sorts of accidents that can befall any traveller in lands where such beasts are native.’
Taillefer intervened.
‘You were not well. Certainly after receiving the blow from the Nicomedian soldier or constable, you were in pain, had fevers . . .’
‘And then, of course, there was the opium. It can have pronounced side-effects. But my dear Taillefer,’ Quint turned to the mountebank, ‘our friend here was already deeply disturbed. He suffered terribly in his mind after the battle: not just physically but his soul, I believe, was torn in two, and has remained so for two, three years. Only now is it coming together again.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Taillefer continued, plucking a silk scarf from the air. He balled it, put it in his mouth and drew it inch by inch from Quint’s ear. ‘It’s odd how it all links up - each person, each incident flowing into the next with a sort of logic of its own, a sort of sub-plot to the main story.’
‘Don’t do that!’ Quint batted the scarf away with an angry palm. ‘Yes. Precisely. Walt’s fantasies have exactly the logic of story-telling. Almost as if he were stringing together events in such a way that a listener would foresee connections Walt himself could not see. Thus creating a cheap sort of dramatic irony. It is typical of the way the human mind works, always trying to make reality and events follow or fit into a predisposed pattern. Just as we seek essences behind things to bind together a pebble and a rock instead of concentrating on the thisness of each, so we seek to impose the pattern of, in this case, narratives, such as the Golden Ass of Apuleius, on actual events, which in themselves occurred once and once only, never to be repeated or linked.’
‘I like the Golden Ass . . .’
‘How can you? In the first place the dignified, the ludicrous, the voluptuous, the horrible succeed each other with bewildering rapidity-’
‘But is not this precisely like life, as opposed to the patterned constructions of more formal narratives . . .?’
Quint ignored him and continued almost without a break.
‘. . . fancy and feeling are everywhere apparent, but not less so affectation, meretricious ornament, and that effort to say everything finely which prevents anything being said well. Moreover, and worst of all, it conceals within itself a load of hermetic neo-Platonism, the dire enemy of Aristotelian empiricism which alone can uncover for us the secrets of the universe . . .’ He turned on Walt who was now lagging behind and rubbing the back of his head with his stump. ‘And wherever,’ he asked, ‘did the name of Junipera pop up from?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Walt. ‘I must have made it up.’ He took a turn round the orchestra, and to change the subject, asked: ‘What is this place we’re in?’
‘A thee-a-tor,’ Taillefer pronounced. ‘A place of illusion and entertainment where once marvellous fictions were enacted to an enraptured audience.’
He leapt up onto the stage, struck a pose and declaimed.
“‘The raging rocks, and shivering shocks shall break the locks of prison-gates -- and Phoebus’ car shall shine from far and make and mar the foolish Fates . . .”’ He dropped the pose and sketched an elaborate bow to his friends below.
‘So what happened?’ Walt asked. ‘Why is it a thee-a-tor no more?’
‘Fucking Christians,’ muttered Quint. ‘Spoil everything.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
‘So,’ said Amaranta, using a silver knife to lever a substantial morsel of fish from the bones that lay in her plate, ‘you aim to be off the day after tomorrow? Joppa, is it, and then on to Jerusalem?’
‘I think so,’ Quint replied. ‘If the wind stays fair. There is no cabin room, but I doubt we should have been able to afford it if there had been. We shall be deck-passengers, unless the master manages to fill every available inch with cotton bales.’
He drank - white wine from a glass that hazed with cold. At dawn, traders who specialized in the commodity, had sent their fittest slaves up into the mountains to fetch down sacks and barrow-loads of snow. That evening anyone who was somebody in Sidé drank their wine ice-cold while their cooks prepared sherberts of the stuff flavoured with honey and the juice of pomegranates.
‘Then we must press on with the last fits of your story. It would be a great shame if we did not hear the end before you left. Let me see. Where were we?’
She pushed away the sea-bass bones and lifted a tiny braised cutlet of kid from the bowl her cook had placed in front of her. There were thirty or so, pungent with thyme and garlic, lying on a bed of almonds and cracked wheat. Alain strummed his father’s harp.
‘Harold and Walt,’ he said, ‘are at York, and have just received news of Duke William’s landing at Pevensey three days earlier.’
‘Ah yes. And before we return to Harold, your father was going to tell us about the embarkation, the voyage, and the landing, giving us an eyewitness account . . . Will you need your harp for this?’
Taillefer passed a broad hand across his thinning black hair and also helped himself to a cutlet or two.
‘I don’t think so, Ma’am. Alain can fill in the odd chord where he feels a musical comment is appropriate. But by and large, apart from the mew of the sea-birds, the splash and gurgle of water beneath the prow of our vessels, the creak of timbers and the rattle of tackle, there is little lyrical about what I have to recount. Nor heroic either come to that.’
‘Pray continue then as soon as you are ready.’
She dropped the thin wig-like rib to the floor where her grey Ethiopian cat had a spat with her long-haired lap-dog. The cat, of course, won.
‘The last days of September were calm and warm, a definite sign that the weather was at last shifting from the prolonged sunny but cool spell that had filled most of the month. However, on the morning of the twenty-seventh a decided breeze got up, a balmy warm breeze just such as the wine-makers long for at that season since it will put the finishing touch of sweetness to their grapes while the rain that may follow will plump them out --’
‘That will do. You’re no Virgil, you know?’
‘What I am trying to say is that we got what we had been waiting for -- a steady fair wind from the south --’
‘Say it then.’
‘I just did!’
Duke William gave the order that we should embark. But after the fiasco, muddle and indeed, losses that had accompanied our trip up the coast from the Seine, he had drawn up a detailed protocol as to how this should be achieved: which ships would be loaded first, with what and with whom, and so on, and what order we should sail in. So throughout the day viscounts, bailiffs, ships’ masters, clerks, commanders, grooms and what have you scurried up and down the quays and beaches, flapping notes and instructions many of them could not read, unlettered as they were, and all desperately fearful that they might be caught out in an error, doing something not prescribed or failing to do what had been ordered.
By midday the Duke became aware that things were not going as they should and took a hand. I can see him now in my mind’s eye, storming down the quay at St Valery, waving his arms about, sending soldiers this way, sailors another, pulling horse fodder out of one boat and refilling it with wheat for bread, ordering horses into the narrow gap between the rowers’ benches of a long ship and then taking them off again when the ostler told him they had not been watered. By late aft
ernoon, evening really, with the sun sinking into cloud on the western horizon, he was in a filthy temper. When one of Lanfranc’s clerks from Le Bec tried to point out to him that the fleet would sail in exactly the reverse order from that which he had previously ordered if he did not countermand his latest instruction, he pushed the poor man into the harbour, grabbed the reins of his black war-horse from the hands of the groom, and marched on to the Mora. Without further ado he ordered the crew to hoist sail and put out to sea.
Of course, everything went much more smoothly once he had gone and within an hour, and just before darkness fell, the rest of the fleet was pulling away from the coast and we were only a league or so behind him. It was not a big army - something like two thousand fully armed horsemen with horses, three thousand fully armed horsemen without horses, another three thousand light troops, not knights, mostly archers, and then the usual cooks, ostlers, farriers, armourers, comissariat and so on. In all, less than ten thousand.
During the night the wind dropped or shifted a point or two, so the first landfall, a couple of hours after dawn on the twenty-eighth, was Beachy Head, an impressive headland of very high, very white chalk cliffs a couple of leagues to the west of Pevensey Bay. Considering it had been a night crossing this was accurate navigation indeed -- the French pilot, a St Vale fisherman, knew exactly where they were, but then French fishermen very frequently trespass into English waters and know the way.
Within an hour or so the fleet entered Pevensey harbour, having first ascertained from an English fisherman that the Roman fort was ungarrisoned. There was a beach of mud and fine shingle between the moles the Romans had built and as the Mora’s prow nudged into it William, in full armour, leapt down, being determined to be the first of his host to touch English soil. Of course he fell over, in a foot or so of water, and had to be helped to his feet.
There were no more mishaps and by early afternoon the entire army had disembarked within the walls of the Roman fort, with their ships pulled up on the shingle behind them. It was all going well, too well. There was not a sign of an English soldier or ship to be seen. Naturally William suspected a trap. The locals, an old man or two and their wives, were threatened with torture and revealed that the troops who had occupied the fort, and also the ships in the harbour, had left a full fortnight earlier. William tried torture just to make sure, but got nothing more out of them and when one of the old women died he gave up.
Being more than naturally prone to suspicion and feeling suddenly rather frightened in this new and unprecedented situation, he now took the unnecessary precaution of building a second fort within the confines of the one already there, throwing up earth walls even higher than the Roman ones, and shoring them up with timbers he had actually brought over for the purpose. Meanwhile he sent horsemen scouring round the countryside and even up into the Downs with the task of finding out just what was going on. Not a man, not a horse, not a ship to be seen -- but the barns were full, Lanfranc had been right about that, and there were cattle and sheep in the fields.
As day followed day, he grew more confident, and indeed some garbled news did reach him that Harold had had to go north to deal with some unspecified threat and had taken his army with him. Nevertheless he still suspected some trap, some ruse, and feared that if he exposed himself at all, or moved any distance from his ships, the English army would rematerialise and annihilate him inland while the English fleet burnt his ships behind him. However, once he was sure there was no army within five leagues, or a good days march by his standards, he scuttled up the coast as fast as he could, six miles it was, as far as Hastings.
Pevensey was surrounded by marsh land which made it difficult for him to get supplies in from the surrounding farms to feed his army, and as a base Hastings was even safer. It was on a promontory between too rivers, the Brede and the Bulverhythe, had a harbour less exposed to attack from land or sea and was surrounded by rich farm land which he plundered extensively and thoroughly. There were very few men about -- the fyrd was quartered up beyond the hills in the forests waiting for Harold’s return -- and the few there were he hanged. The women were dealt with in the usual way and the children herded into stockades from which they would, eventually, be sold as slaves. The infants were impaled. Racial sanitation, he called it. Over that first week it became clearer that Harold and his army were many many miles away, certainly way north of London, and it was guessed that he had gone north to deal with a substantial threat - Tostig perhaps or even Hardrada and the Norse. This pleased William no end - the idea that his enemies were at each others’ throats definitely appealed to his sense of humour . . .
‘You didn’t really like William, did you?’
‘No, Ma’am. Not at all.’
Walt, chewing on the last of his kid cutlets, spoke through it.
‘Then why the fuck did you do what you did to Harold twelve months before?’ he asked. His face was a touch flushed - they had all perhaps drunk a little more wine than usual, the way you do when it’s served really cold.
‘Maybe I’ll tell you one day. Or Adeliza can, if she remembers it clearly enough.’
‘Oh, I remember, Daddy.’ She shook her head so her hair swung about her neck; she looked down at her plate, her lips tightening into a pout.
‘Go on, then!’ Walt was truculent. Amaranta intervened.
‘Later, perhaps. It would be an unwarranted digression just now.’
‘At all events I hope he’ll tell us just why he felt ready to lead the Bastard’s army into battle, singing and playing a guitar.’
‘Yes,’ Taillefer spoke drily, ‘I’ll do that.’
Nevertheless, when his war council proposed that under the circumstances he should march on London and either get the rich burghers on his side or burn and loot the lot, he refused. He felt snug and secure in Hastings where he was already building a castle, the first of many -- he really was obsessed with castles, and always he had his ships at the back of him. Clearly it was in his mind that if Harold came at him, as many said he would, with a vastly larger army, he’d just call it a day, re-embark and sail home.
On the seventh of October, nine days after the landing news from London got through. Harold had arrived there from the North with the vanguard of his housecarls, on the fifth, and William learnt of the two battles, Fulford and Stamford Bridge. It was good news. Hardrada was dead, out of the way. And, up until then, he had believed that Harold could probably field up to twenty thousand men, including the armies of the north. But they had been smashed at Fulford and Harold’s own Wessex and southern army, although victorious, had suffered serious losses at Stamford Bridge. It now seemed likely that they would meet on equal terms, even that William would have the advantage. The war council again urged him to advance on London before Harold’s army got up to full numbers. But he refused for one other thing had come clear from these reports - Harold was no slouch as a general, a leader, and his men were fighters. Hardrada was no pushover.
Of course that was not how he put it, though his given reasons were just as germane.
‘Number one,’ he said, rounding on Odo and Robert and the rest, ‘he’s still got that fucking fleet in the Thames Estuary, and from all accounts re-fitting and well manned. If we move away from our ships they’ll surely come by sea, burn them and thereby shaft us. Number two. If we move north and into the countryside all he’s got to do is fall back in front of us until his army is as big as he wants it to be. He can scorch the earth in front of us and starve us, and, finally, he can choose the ground he fights on. If he wants he can carry on a war of attrition through to Christmas or beyond sucking us into a hostile countryside where we’d be done for in three months.’
‘But your grace --’
‘Sire, Odo, sire. Or Your Majesty. We’re on English soil now, my soil.’
‘Sire. What else can we do? We can’t just sit here and wait for him.’
‘Yes we can. We have a snug castle now, and I want every barn and granary for forty miles around emptie
d, and the contents brought here. I want every sheep and cow, and every horse --’
‘There don’t seem to be any horses.’
‘Never mind, and every pig, chicken, duck and goose either killed or brought here, too. And while we’re at it, every village and town burnt, every woman raped, and every brat impaled . . .’
‘We’re doing that anyway.’
‘Do it properly. Make it hurt. Think of new ways of doing nasty things but always leave someone alive to tell the tale. I know these English. Milk-sops where their folk are concerned. They’ll put pressure on Harold to stop us. And he’ll only be able to do that by coming here. And if he doesn’t we’ll move up the coast to Dover or Sandwich or wherever and do the same all over again. Come on, Odo. Give our boys a good time and let them see the sort of goodies they’re here for, let them realise, one big push, one big battle won and they can live out their lives like pigs in shit . .’
Evening of Friday the thirteenth we heard the first of Harold’s troops were taking up a position five miles away in the Downs, just on the edge of the great forest, having marched from London in a night and a day and that it looked as if he would have no more than five thousand men. Before dawn on the fourteenth Roger Montgomery, a Flemish soldier who knew what he was about, went forward with five or six men on good, fresh horses to see what was happening. He was back, in William’s big tent, before the sun cleared the plain that lies to the east of Hastings –
‘You were there? You saw this?’
‘I was there.’
‘It’s a strong defensive position,’ Montgomery said. I can see him now, a lean mean-looking man with high cheek-bones. He wore a black woollen hat with two silver talismans in it over his right eye, the body of the hat pulled to the left. ‘I doubt he expects to be attacked there, not unless we can field double the numbers. And the truth is we can’t.’
The Last English King Page 37