The Hoodsman - Killing Kings

by Skye Smith

  "There it is," Hereward murmured and pointed. "See that glade with three trees about halfway to the tower and a bit south? Mark it in your mind. I want to go to Tatecastre that way. That is where the Byzantine archer doubled back and ambushed us. "

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  THE HOODSMAN - Killing Kings by Skye Smith

  Chapter 16 - Walking to the Coronation, Winchester in August 1100

  Winchester had another restless night under the full light of the full moon, but again the folk that grouped in the streets waiting for something to happen, were disappointed. Due to the moon there was a night market and music and some dancing, all of which Gregos and Risto enjoyed. Eventually the city quietened to the occasional shout of the watch warning drunks to get off the street, and it remained quiet for at best two hours before the hollow echo of heavy wheels on cobblestone woke everyone. John's drays were on the move.

  In the morning everyone got an early start with an early meal. With their packs on their backs and a good portion of bread and cheese and skins of weak ale with them, Raynar and his two wards set off. They first walked along the street that followed the river bank towards the north gate of the city. Mar joined them as far as her woolbarn.

  The barn was a beehive of activity. The carters and their families were unloading and carrying the heavy bales of wool from the drays into the barn. They all wanted to get finished so they could enjoy some rest and some of the city's promised festivities, before they set out on their carts again to collect more bales.

  Inside the barn John and his son Acca, who was as tall as John but still slim, were grading the wool and organizing the bales by grade. The stacks were already reaching the rafters along the back wall. Some half-grown lads were holding the wooden spacers in place while their fathers piled the bales. The spacers were required to keep the air circulating around each bale, so that they would dry or stay dry.

  The sunlight was shimmering through the heavy dust in the air. The dust from wool was well known to fireflash if an open flame such as a candle were brought into the barn, so boys were using brooms and buckets of river water to dampen the walls and the floor of the barn.

  Four years ago John had his best year ever because the barn of a Norman competitor had one night turned into an inferno. Foul play was suspected because the owner's eldest son had been accused, numerous times accused, of rape. Nothing was ever proven about the rapes or the fire or any connection, but the son was sent away to Normandy.

  After two rounds of goodbye hugs, the three travelers started on the first of the fifteen miles to Basingestoches. The Greeks had agreed to speak in English as much as possible in order to improve their tongue. Within the hour, they had passed the village of Worthy and the road was no longer running beside the river.

  In Worthy, Raynar was forced to give his wards a lesson in English water, because they stopped to drink water from a running stream. It didn't take long for his own English to fail him because there were no craftspeak words to describe the science of water. For such words he had to switch to Greek. The banter of the three travelers quickly turned into Greeklish.

  "You must not drink from open water. This is not Al-Andalus," Raynar warned. "In Al-Andalus you have kept the knowledge and the skills of the Roman and Greek empires. Here, as in your land, the Romans built water ways and aqueducts so that every town had a constant source of safe drinking water. In Al-Andalus they still work, but here in England such knowledge was lost. No, not lost, that is wrong. The men with the knowledge simply left England, first to Brittany, and then to other parts of the empire."

  He pointed to a pile of dressed stones that used to be an aqueduct. "If the men with the knowledge to fix those had stayed here, they would have been burned as wizards by the new folk migrating here from the north of the Roman borders.

  The new folk were Angles and Jutes and Saxons and they were being pushed south by repeated crop failures and early winters in their own valleys far to the north. Their reality was move south, or starve, and even the Romans could not halt that movement.

  Today in Al-Andalus you can stop at any village and quench your thirst, but in England in the dry season, unless you know that the water is safe, you must drink only ale or soup. That clean-looking stream will have cows and sheep and sick children shitting in it, just around that bend ."

  Risto was shocked. "But that cannot be. You mean to say that in England you are forced to drink ale else you may die of the water sickness? No wonder there are so many drunks in this kingdom."

  "Ah, but I said only in the dry season. It is very short in England. No longer than the wet season in Cordoba. For the rest of the year, safe drinking water falls from the sky." Raynar sighed. "My own youth was changed by a spring of pure drinking water, in a place where almost all the surface water was tainted with poison."

  "Tell us of it, Raynar," Gregos said. "Always you promise to tell us of your adventures, and you never do. What better time than now while we have nothing to do but walk. Tell it in English if you must, so that we can practice listening to your strange tongue."

  "Then do you mind me beginning with a story from my youth? It would help you to understand what formed me," offered Raynar.

  "Please" said Risto, in English.

  Raynar began. "I was a miner's son in the Peaks Arse area that straddles the Saxon shire of Mercia, and the Danish shires of Yorkshire and Derbyshire. It is a wild, empty area they call Peaks Arse because of the sound the caves make in the wind. I had just reach eighteen years at the conquest, so that would have me born about 1048 while Edward the Confessor still reigned."

  He looked at Risto to make sure he was understanding the English. He seemed to be nodding so he continued. "There is a castle there now, to control the passes and to control the mining wealth. So crucial were the mines to William the Bastard that they were entrusted to one of his mistress's sons. The son was called Will Peverel and he was also made the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire. Before the castle was built, and the village that sprang up around the castle, it was a wild valley of miners, and porters, and shepherds."

  Risto nodded to him again. He was keeping up.

  "Before I go further, you must understand the weather of the Peaks. You would call them hills but to we English they are mountains. Like mountain weather everywhere it could change in an hour with no warning, and folk sometimes died of the changes. At any time there could be fog. Heavy white mist that hid landmarks and trails and caves, and got people lost or tripping over cliffs and into sink holes.

  At any time there could be rain. Wet-you-to-the-bone rain. Rain that turned all to muck and mud. Rain that made mountain paths slippery and treacherous. At any time there could be wind. Ferocious wind. Blow-you-off-the-path wind. Wind to blow grit and other gifts from the weather, like snow, hail, and freezing rain. Days of endless wind that would drive men crazy.

  The winters were long, with snow and ice and wind, but the most deadly weather was the freezing rain. Have either of you ever been to such a place?"

  Risto spoke first. "All high mountains have dangerous weather. I too, was a shepherd from the mountains, and I have experienced what you describe."

  Then Gregos. "It sounds like the Pyrenees mountains that keep the Franks out of Al-Andalus. There is an ancient people there, that thrive in the mists and the wind and the treacherous pathways, where all others perish."

  Raynar continued. "There were no cartways, just porterways and sheep tracks. The ways hugged the valleys as long as possible to hide from the wind, and when they crossed the open land, those parts were as short as possible and any travelers were at the mercy of the weather.

  There were few cottages above the valley floors, but many caves. Caves saved lives, saved sheep, and were the start of the mines. In the open land there was nothing to burn, not even peat. If you were caught in the open when the weather changed, your best chance was to know a cave or to run to the closest valley."

  "This is good Raynar," said Risto. "It is good t
hat you use small words. Keep the sentences small, too."

  Raynar nodded. "The porters were mostly Saxons. The shepherds were mostly Danes. The miners were mostly Welsh. Through the passes, Wales was three days' hard walk. My Da was Saxon-English born somewhere near Chester, and had come to the valley for the well-paid work in the mines.

  My mother was the widow of a Danish farmer, and though pretty, she had not produced children so she was grateful when my father married her, for all others shunned her. I think she was a Frisian maid who was sold into her first marriage to cancel a debt."

  "So not barren then, after all," Gregos pointed out.

  Raynar blushed. "My father worked in a lead mine until his back was cracked in a cave-in. The cave-in would have killed a dozen miners, except my Da used his back to shore up a support post until the rest of the miners got passed him. They then dragged him to safety out through the rubble.

  His twisted back was a blood debt to all the Welshmen that he had saved, and they never forgot that debt. We had no other kin in the Peaks but we did not starve as paupers. We had the brotherhood of Welsh miners to watch out for us."

  "Saxon, Dane, Welsh. Were there no English?" asked Gregos.

  "They were all English, ever since Knut the Great got all the folk to realize how much they all had 'in-common', and made that the standard everywhere in his empire, like 'in-common' law and 'in-glish'. But the folk here still distinguish themselves by their forefathers. You can still tell them apart after all these generations by face and by language and by customs. My birth tongue was not Saxon, but Saxon-English or Saxglish.

  Anyway, Sundays were a day of rest for the miners. One Sunday when my Da was healed enough to walk like a hunchback, he took me and a couple of Welsh miners down the eastern valley, the Hope valley, along the porterway.

  Halfway down the valley the porterway climbed around a blockage from an old slide, and up into the weather. My Da took us on a perilous scramble around the blockage and showed us a small hidden glade with grass, a few trees, a scoop of a shallow cave, and a spring.

  In the distant past, the porterway must have run through it, before the landslide blocked the way. We all tasted the spring. Most of the water in these valleys was poisoned by the mines, but this was a spring fresh from the ground. It was sweet water, safe and delicious.

  My Da sat us down in the scoop of the cave out of the wind, and told us his plan. Using mine tools and miner muscles it would take but one hard day's work to clear that block. With the block gone, the glade could become a porter rest stop, right where one was needed. If the miner brotherhood opened the block and cleared the old way, then they could claim this sheltered glade and run it for the benefit of injured miners like himself.

  The next Sunday, the heads of each mining clan walked with my Da back to the glade. They all agreed that it was a good plan. The Sunday after that, a troop of miners and tools attacked the blockage. Once the blockage shifted and fell off down the slope, they dug a safe path and cleared the loose rocks.

  Youngsters found and cleared the old way below the glade and made it passable through to the point where it rejoined the existing porterway. My family and three others were set up with tents and a basic kitchen under the shelter of the scoop of the cave so as to lay claim to the place under common law. One day's work had created a pleasant shelter on one of the bleakest sections on the porterway.

  The men folk of the families at the shelter were all crippled, but could still direct the work of the women and children, and could work at anything that could be done sitting on stools or laying propped up on a pallet.

  Within weeks, the glade was a thriving rest stop where the water was clean to drink for folk and animals, where simple meals were offered, where overnight camps could be made, and where porters and travelers could escape the worst of the weather.

  Within a month it was paying for itself and feeding the families that ran it. Within two months the miners returned to raise a large low roof to extend the shelter of the cave scoop and also a smaller roof above the kitchen. They were well-pleased. It was like a spa for recovering miners, and yet it paid for itself.

  Every month the families made improvements. A series of pools were made to collect the spring water for use by animals and for uses other than drinking. Before winter, firewood was stacked to create walls and windbreaks on the open sides of the roof. When winter weather came, the old porterway was abandoned by porters and travelers in favor of our sheltered way. That was when it became known as the Porter's Glade.

  If the glade had been wider, it would have become a village. Instead, the glade stayed as just a rest stop. It was as good a place as any to raise a family, though eventually as the men healed or died, the Welsh families would all return to their villages and their kin along the border with Wales. Mining was dangerous work, so there was always other mining families in need, who would be brought to the glade for healing."

  Raynar stopped talking while they hurried passed a line of slow-moving ox carts. The screeching of the axles sent shivers up his spine.

  "I was forbidden the mines by my Da, despite the coin to be made there. When I was young, I was hired out to a shepherd who took flocks from the low valleys to the high valleys in the summer. I grew big and strong on sheep milk and cheese and mutton, and learned about sheep and wool and survival in the mountains.

  When the sheep were forced back down to the farms by the weather, I was hired out as a porter. I was not yet nine and my sister perhaps seven when my mam died in childbirth. My Da with his twisted back was outliving all the other mining cripples. The others mostly had organ problems or black lung, so the long harsh winters would kill them no matter how thick the wool of their sheepskin beds.

  Though the fathers were all sickly, and the mothers were all wary of the constant stream of strangers through the glade, we children had a wonderful and interesting life. There was always something happening and interesting folk stopping by.

  From the shepherds I learned to speak Daneglish. As a shepherd, I learned to enjoy my own company, and to be patient, and to use a sling. With endless rocks and endless time to practice, I became a crack shot with a sling. I am still a hand with one.

  From the Welsh I learned a whole new language, that was very different from the Englishes. They taught me the bowcraft of their Welsh bow, that is now called the longbow. I learned how to choose a likely stave from the holy Ywen tree, how to cure it, how to carve it and shape it. I learned about arrows, too. The types, the uses, the different flights, the different points. And of course how to shoot them.

  From the porters I learned maps, packs, knots, and the staff. How to use the staff for stability, and balance, and protection. From them I also learned how to live with nothing so that you carried as little unpaid weight on your back as possible.

  From the foresters that would often overnight at our glade, I learned to track and to hunt.

  From the weather I learned how to survive using just what was at hand.

  From the wives and widows I learned how to trade. There were few coins in the glade. Most everything was by trade. And the wives kept us well-fed and well-clothed despite the lack of coin. I learned the healing craft from our healer and her daughter."

  "Aye," chuckled Risto with a lusty grin, "and what else did all those young widows teach you, eh? Wasn't it a village of widows, or nearly widows, and all short of coin, and you so handsome?"

  Raynar flashed an angry face at the Greeks. "They were Welsh widows, and they knew the old ways. They taught me to respect women. They taught me that children are our future, and if men respect the mothers, then the future will be good."

  "Risto, get your mind out of the brothels," Gregos scolded. "In a Christian village a widow's life is a horror. It is not like a Mussulman village in Al-Andalus where a widow immediately becomes the second wife of her husband's brother, and her children become his children. Remember our neighbour in Cordoba? He had three second wives."

  "His life was hell," Ris
to pointed out.

  "In any case," Raynar continued, "from my Da I learned counting and how to solve problems through invention and trial. It was he who planned the improvements and showed us how to build them. The water courses, the dams, the cellars, all were of his design. He adapted tools to be useful to crippled men, and could fix whatever we traded for or scavenged from the porterway."

  "And to read. Which of them taught you to read?" asked Gregos.

  "Not one person at the glade knew how to read or to write, but as a porter I worked for an abbey, and a good monk taught me to read and write, and how to keep ledgers.

  My own prized invention was my porter staff. As I grew bigger and stronger I was spending more and more of my year as a porter, and a porter needs a staff in his hand. The problem was that I loved my Welsh bow, but I could not carry it. I decided to make a bow that was also a staff. I started with a stave made from cured ywen, but too heavy for a bow. I left the lower part thick and heavy to be strong when used as a staff, but then I carved and shaped the upper part like a bow.