‘He’s in Hell for sure.’ Wat chuckled and leant up against the fireplace, the weight of the armour getting him down. Breathing was a labour. He’d forgotten just how heavy plate was, how much more a man weighs, the restricted movement.
‘Long may he rot in Hell,’ Jack said, pouring the wine into tankards. He passed cups to Wat and Harry. Young Sophia didn’t want any, was too busy petting Nobody in the corner, and Nick was outside minding the horses, so, good stuff, more for him and Wat to get down their necks!
Wat drained his cup in one. Before the alarm bells started tolling he had outlined his plan to go abroad to fight under a new name, and was awaiting a reply. ‘So, are you with me, Jack?’
‘Always. But we’re too old for the Free Companies, mate. Wouldn’t last a campaign.’
Wat leant forward and patted Jack’s ale belly. ‘Speak for yourself.’
Harry laughed at that, choked on his wine, coughing, spluttering it onto the stone flags. ‘Sorry.’
Jack shot Harry a barbed look. ‘Honesty is the privilege of old mates. So, here’s another helping – I’ve never seen you run away from anything Wat. Pains me to see it now.’
‘There’s Sophia to consider.’ Wat held his cup up for a refill. He was parched from the ride, tongue like a strip of leather.
Sophia looked up, chided him. ‘Don’t blame me. I don’t want to go to Flanders!’
Wat glared at her. ‘There is nowhere else to go, girl.’
Jack poured Wat another drink, and turned clumsily to Sophia. ‘To soften up that hard head, get your father to listen, would take another two bottles, but it would be worth it. He talks a great deal more sense on wine.’
‘All your friends and neighbours are sworn to press your case, Wat,’ Harry said, emboldened by the wine. ‘To the King’s Bench if needs be.’
Jack toasted. ‘Times like these you find out who your friends are.’
‘Doesn’t matter, does it? I already know my worst enemy. Knolles can buy any judge and jury in the land ten times over.’
‘You have to fight this, Wat.’
Wat shrugged. ‘We both know you don’t pick fights you can’t win.’
‘With an army of English archers behind him a man could win any fight he so chose.’
Wat thought about that statement. It was an undeniable truth. He’d give Jack that. The nobles relied entirely on archers to win their wars. They were the decisive weapon in France, and put the fear of God into the Frenchies. If four thousand archers could utterly destroy the Frenchie army at Crecy, and he’d seen with his own eyes what happened at Najera, what might ten thousand archers do to an army raised by the English nobles … Nobles who refused to speak English, only talked Frenchie, and therefore were just as Frenchie as the fucking Frenchies, and would die spitted with arrows just as easily as St Sebastian.
Jack clapped a hand on his mate’s shoulder. ‘I’m not going to Flanders. Bugger Knolles! No quarter. No retreat. No surrender.’
‘No surrender!’ Wat snorted a laugh. That was Bastard Knolle’s personal motto in spite of how much he avoided pitched battles: no quarter, no retreat, no surrender.
‘Worth a shot,’ Jack said.
‘It’s a long shot.’
‘That’s my kind of shot. The longer the better.’
‘An archer would say that.’ There was this queer voice in the back of his skull saying “steal away, separate, disappear”. Tomorrow you will cease to use the name Walter Tyler. You will become some other unknown man. Somebody Smith. Man-at-arms. For hire. If Jack won’t go to the wars, then go on your own.
XII
Witching cackles, hails of laughter and rowdy shouts funnelled down the warren of narrow cobbled streets. The mob was closing in, could only be a few corners away. Sleipnir stamped the cobblestones, sparks fizzed. Nick yanked on its reins. It was hard controlling two idle horses, one in each hand. He was sweating like a brigand in a brigandine.
A tailor rounded the corner at the bottom of the street, doing a queer jig, jabbing a pitchfork in the air. Stuck on the prongs like a standard, a severed head. The tailor clopped up the cobblestones in his clogs, lowering the pitchfork as he came on.
At the scent of fresh blood, Sleipnir threw his head up, wide eyes flashing red. Nick struggled to keep a grip on its reins.
The tailor pranced up to Nick, shoved the severed head at his face, and throwing his voice like a puppeteer, hissed: ‘I’m Magistrate Fastolf. Pay your poll tax, sonny, or we’ll cut your head off!’
‘Get that away from me,’ Nick yelled.
Gulders of laughter from the tailor, trailing away as he danced gleefully up the street.
With a clamour and din, Abel and a tall man in a ragged priest’s habit led an armed mob of hundreds up Cheap Street.
Sleipnir wheeled, tugged on the reins hard. Fearing he was about to lose the stallion, Nick cried out: ‘Master Tyler! Wat?’
Wat ran out of the tenement, quickly followed by Nobody and Jack. He confronted the angry mob with a scowl. ‘What is it, Nick?’
A washerwoman pointed at him and shrieked. ‘Kill the soldier!’
The front rank of the mob levelled their weapons and advanced in on their enemy, looking to stick him, to pin him to the wall.
Sleipnir neighed and dragged Nick off up the street, as if he was light as a young girl.
Nobody went wild in defence of his master, barking great gobbets of drool at the wicked, shrinking ring of weapons.
‘Wat’s no King’s Man!’ Jack told them, arms outstretched, fingers splayed. ‘He’s no soldier!’
Wat thought about drawing his sword but did not. It would only have provoked them further.
‘Stop this!’ Abel shoved his way out of the ranks into the circle surrounding Wat and had to yell at the top of his voice to be heard: ‘Stand down! This is Wat Tyler. Your captain!’
The men in the front rank reluctantly raised their pole-arms and stood down. One of them – who’d served in the levy, and been broken from the gaol awaiting hanging for robbery – hacked and spat. ‘I’ve missed all the fun at the castle, and now there isn’t going to be any sport here. Buggery, damn and blast!’
A tall gaunt man in the friar’s brown habit, long-limbed like an archer, long beard streaked black with filth, strode up to Wat, tapped him on the breast-plate, and laughed. ‘It … is … you!’
‘It is indeed me,’ said Wat, nodding. ‘Who are you?’
‘I dreamt of you in gaol. Like the Baptist, I have prepared the way for you. In the dream I baptised you in the Thames – when you resurfaced an eagle came down from heaven – and I heard the thundering voice of God: “This man is the Captain of the King of Heaven, and I am well pleased with him.”
Wat noted the fervour, the spirit blazing in the priest’s blue eyes as he spoke these absurd words. The man was so certain, so sincere, so damn loud, it made him laugh more. ‘I’m nobody’s saviour, brother.’
‘I am John Ball.’ And John offered out his hand. ‘You will be the saviour of us all. It has been fore-ordained.’
‘If you say so.’ Wat reluctantly wrapped armoured scales around dirty flesh.
‘Hear the voice of one crying out in the wilderness!’ John cried, right hand raised to heaven. ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked ways be made straight, and the rough shall be made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of the Lord.’
Wat waited a minute before he responded: ‘I’ve got a ship to catch.’
‘You want to run away from your destiny like Jonah? Stow away on a ship. Join the Free Companies, yes?’
The Free Companies! Wat was shocked. How could he have known that?
‘There is no running away from God’s will, no matter how hard you try. You can believe this or not, but I foresaw in gaol that your fight for justice, for righteousness, is our fight, and ours is yours. It is all one and the same. You will go to Nineve
h, like it or not. You will lead us in a Great Free Company to London, and the Boy King!’
XIII
It was a righteous sight. The meanest beggars of Maidstone fed the raging hunger of the bonfire gleefully with the fine furniture of the greedy local gentry, those who had lorded it high and mighty over them.
Sparks leapt high into the night sky from the bonfire tip, tongues of fire from the Holy Spirit, manifesting in the market square above the whirling dancing crowds of revellers. A newly freed man – and only a prisoner could know the true meaning of such new freedom – John sat and watched these tell-tale signs of God’s presence, fire and wind, and intoned a prayer: ‘I thank you Christ, that I am free. I thank you that we have secured the town and driven out the servants of the Evil One. Give your humble servant the strength to do your will: speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of the destitute, the rights of the poor and needy.’
There was nothing a man of faith might not achieve. This morning skulking in the darkness of the dungeon, one shaft of light to illuminate the world, lucis deus as he envisioned it, Jacob’s Ladder, the light of God streaming down from a barred window … it had seemed impossible that later he would have been sitting as an honoured guest at a feast in his honour. Impossible to be drinking the best wine from Gascony at the head of a fine banqueting table that had been liberated from the late Magistrate Fastolf’s house – before that dwelling place of evil was demolished tile by tile, and brick by brick, as many a townhouse belonging to men at law had been that day. Liars. Swindlers. Cheats. Traitors. These were some of the titles he bestowed on lawyers before he had them beheaded by axe. Norman law had enforced the status quo since 1066. It protected the rich Norman noble dynasties and afforded them many feudal rights. It made them powerful and the True English commons their slaves, bondsmen, villeins. It made true justice impossible to find for a good man. To his mind – the law of the Norman invaders and their descendants was a crime against the community, and the punishment for this crime should be death.
‘They make a handsome couple,’ Jack said to Wat, nodding to where Sophia and Nick were dancing, two silhouettes among many swaying shadows by the bonfire.
Wat nodded. Sophia and Nick were dancing together, having fun the way the young should at feasts. The minstrels – a fiddling cat, and a fox on the flute – played a merry love song but it did not ease his war-troubled, ale-addled mind. Flutes were sorrowful things, but it was the strings that plucked at his own nerves. And the lyrics, sung as a challenge for lovers to love, caused him to grip the tankard harder.
“If she whom I desire would stoop to love me,
I should look down upon Jove.
If for one night my lady would lie by me,
And I kiss the mouth I love,
Then come death unrelenting,
With quite breath consenting,
I go forth unrepenting,
Content, content, content,
That such delight were ever to me lent.”
It was the doe-eyed way Sophia was smiling at the boy, and the mushy way Nick was smiling back that was not at all good. It was not as bad as a dead taxman, a dead Royal Serjeant-at-arms, a beheaded magistrate, a town in open revolt against the Crown, all ascribed to his name, Captain Walter Tyler, but still, it was worrisome. A bondsman and a freewoman had no place in this world together, not even in the harmonies of an angel’s song. ‘When did that happen Harry?’ Wat asked in the voice he rarely had to use – stern father.
‘What’s the problem?’ Harry slurred.
Wat pointed. ‘Sophia and your boy.’
‘Ah.’ Harry shrugged. ‘They’re dancing.’
‘Shag it, I’m cabbaged.’ Jack belched loudly and slumped forwards onto the table.
Wat shot Harry a long, mortifying stare, and muttered: ‘Nothing better happen between those two. Keep an eye on them.’
Harry nodded, miserably.
The night breeze veered suddenly and the thick oak smoke from the bonfire flowed over like a river fog to cloak and choke all those at the table.
Wat coughed, eyes tearing into a multitude of blinks. He rubbed at them with his forefingers and thumbs. When his vision cleared, he looked up, and with stinging eyes, beheld John Ball somehow standing right by his side.
John spoke into his ear: ‘“And the crowds asked John, ‘What should we do?’ In reply he said to them, ‘Whoever has two coats must share with him who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise. Even tax collectors came to be baptised, and they asked him, ‘Teacher, what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.’ Soldiers also asked him, ‘What should we do?’ He said, ‘Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation and be satisfied with your wages.’’
‘What are these words?’ Wat asked him.
‘Do they seem familiar to you?’ said John.
‘Very,’ said Wat. ‘I have had more than my fill of corrupt taxmen and, you can see by the red cross on my chest, I was a soldier.’
‘It’s as if the words apply now more than they did when they were written more than a thousand years ago. They are from the Gospel of Luke.’
‘A thousand years!’ Wat shook his head.
John nodded. ‘The Bible, the holy word of God, demands that we stop these tax collectors and soldiers, and the dark lords that send them, corrupting the Kingdom. We must fight for justice, launch a crusade, a people’s crusade, like the crusades to save the Holy Land.’
‘A crusade?’ The thought gripped Wat’s imagination. He had never once fought in a just war, a holy war.
‘Amen. To that end, I have sent riders to Dartford, Gravesend, Rochester and Canterbury. They carry letters with instructions to light the watch-fires and raise the inland levies. With the exception of the coastal levies, who will defend us against the Frenchie and the Castilian pirates, the whole county will be up in arms. You will lead our crusade into the very Tower of London.’
The Tower. Wat downed his tankard of ale. It ran bitter right the way down and lay heavy in his stomach, heavier than it should have been, like it had been ore of lead. The enormity of his actions just the day before suddenly weighed a thousand times a thousand heavier on him than his armour. To be Captain. To wage war. This was the weight of the world, and it was not a load that could be shirked. He had somehow assumed this great responsibility. To be Captain of all these damn people.
Part Two
But it is certainly a great error
To see the higher estate
In danger from the villein class.
It seems to me that lethargy
Has put the lords to sleep
So that they do not guard against
The folly of the common people,
But they allow that nettle to grow
Which is too violent in its nature.
*
He who observes the present time
Is likely to fear that soon,
If God does not provide his help,
This impatient nettle
Will very suddenly sting us,
Before it can be brought to justice.
*
There are three things of such a sort
That they produce a merciless destruction
When they get the upper hand:
One is a flood of water,
Another is a raging fire
And the third is the lesser people,
The common multitude;
For they will not be stopped
By reason or by force.
Mirror de l’Homme by John Gower (circa 1376)
I
Trinity Sunday was a black day for England.
Chancellor Sudbury took a deep breath and entered the King’s bedchamber along with the full retinue of five servants of the body. The boy was not an early riser, indeed his moods in the mornings ranged from sullen, to fouler than Beelzebub. Best avoided before terce, never mind matins. But, with revolt seething in the air like the Blac
k Death, there was no choice. ‘Majesty, waken!’ he said.
King Richard started awake, knuckled his eyes, strove for focus. ‘What in God’s name, Simon-Says? Are you a cockerel now?’
‘Fiat lux!’ Chancellor Sudbury flung back the heavy curtains, letting the sun spill into the room. ‘And there was light.’
‘Get off me.’ King Richard slapped away the helping hands of his servants. ‘There’d better be a good reason for the King being so rudely awakened on a Sunday!’
‘The trailbaston we sent to quell the disturbance in Kent has been routed Majesty. Royal Serjeant-at-arms John Legge has been killed by rebels. His men were forced to flee under volleys of arrows.’
‘John Legge was cut from steel.’
‘He was flesh and blood like the rest of us, Majesty. That is not the worst of it. He was attacked by a rebel band not twenty leagues from Windsor itself.’
King Richard threw back the covers and slid out of bed. ‘What is happening! How is that possible! Tell me this is some summer game? Tell me, Sudbury.’
Chancellor Sudbury wished it was all a topsy-turvy jest that the peasants were playing on their lords for fun, as happened most years on the manors in June, but summer game it was not. Far from it. ‘It is not safe for Your Majesty and the court to stay here. Windsor is not a fortress; it is a palace. We must ride for the Tower. It is impregnable to any siege.’
‘Siege?’ King Richard sneered. ‘How could these animals, these lowly beasts, lay siege to Windsor?’
‘Who knows what devilry the common folk can do when they flock in numbers. Remember the Jacques, Majesty? I have reports that nobles from all over the home counties are fleeing their summer homes for the sanctuary of the Tower.’
‘The Jacques?’
Rex illiteratus est asinus coronatus – an uneducated king being a crowned ass – King Richard, though quick of wit and eager to know everything, was too young to have learnt his lessons from history. The lesson: ‘The Jacques of 1357 were savages, rapine murderers the devil vomited up from Hell. William Cale and Etienne Marcel, their names live on in infamy. They killed royal servants by the score and with impunity. Noble lords fled peasants in their droves—’
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