‘And that of my crew?’ growled Jarl Sigtrygg.
‘And that of your crew,’ Sir William confirmed.
The foreigner sucked air through his teeth as he stared at the Norman. He didn’t like the situation in which he found himself on the muddy riverbank in Wales. Defeat was not something that he was used to, and he hated the idea of being used like a servant by the haughty, pink-cheeked lord who commanded the warriors who had defeated him. He especially did not like that some of the locals were picking through his ship. His crew had been at sea for more than three months, circumnavigating Ireland during their spree of coastal violence before selling a number of slaves at Dubhlinn and making the crossing to Mann. There, Jarl Sigtrygg had been told of the rich pickings to be had in Dyfed, the disorder of the Norman lords and the incompetence of the Welsh chieftains. It was on the way home to Veðrarfjord, so the jarl had led his crew south and eastwards. However, all that he had found in Gwynedd were tumbledown settlements deserted by their inhabitants for the high hills and their summer grazing sites. Ceredigion had proven more fruitful with a greater number of monasteries and isolated seaside villages. This small success had emboldened Jarl Sigtrygg and rather than turn back towards Veðrarfjord, he had jibed and put the wind behind his ship, River-Wolf, setting her bows towards the Norman lands of Glamorgan. It was then that his troubles had started.
In St Bride’s Bay the Bishop of St. David’s warriors had tracked them on the shore, preventing them from making land. At Melrfjord they had been able to barter wine from a Gascon trader and honey-mead from a local Dane in return for some of the shaggy cow hides that he had taken in the lands of the Uí Néill, but there had been no chance of plunder and so they had pushed on down the coast, rounding the Gower Peninsula with a biting wind filling their sails, and made for the old Norseman’s port of Sweynsey. One drunken night in the company of a talkative miller had given Jarl Sigtrygg his next target – the Abbey at Nedd.
Jarl Sigtrygg looked again at River-Wolf as two Normans in their grey chainmail argued over who would take a crate of the honey-mead. They had not yet found his secret store of silver coin wrapped in pieces of cloth and hidden in a hollowed-out kne beneath the steering oar, but he knew that it would only be a matter of time. Then he and his crew would be utterly impoverished. He was relieved that he had decided to cut up the golden cross and cup stolen from the church on Kerlingfjord and store the pieces in the same strongbox rather than leave them intact with the other plunder of which the Normans were robbing him.
‘The longer you tarry,’ Sir William warned, ‘the more you will lose.’
Jarl Sigtrygg growled in frustration. ‘What would you have of us then?’ he asked. The daybreak wind was cold as it wafted the braids in his hair and beard.
Sir William led the jarl away from the prying ears of Sir Richard de Grenville towards the muddy little tributary which wound its way back towards the monastery and the church which it served. ‘I want you to kill someone for me,’ he told the foreigner. ‘Three people, actually. I’d like it to be done quietly without my name becoming attached to the act.’
‘Killing is what we do,’ Jarl Sigtrygg returned. ‘It can be done secretly, but it will cost more.’ He turned back towards River-Wolf where Richard de Grenville stood counting the captured foreigners. ‘And how will you free my crew?’
‘Silver is a powerfully persuasive friend. Are we agreed then?’
Jarl Sigtrygg clenched his teeth. ‘Agreed, but I want paying up front.’
‘You’ll be paid when the deed is done and not before,’ Sir William countered. ‘And I will be keeping all your plunder and three of your men hostage to make sure that you keep to your task and do not disappear back to Ireland.’
Jarl Sigtrygg bristled in anger, partially at the affront to his trustworthiness, but mostly because he had indeed hoped to flee to his homeland at the earliest possible opportunity. He should never have come to the accursed land of Wales, he now realised. What should have been an easy theft had turned into a nightmare. All he wanted to do was to get back across the sea to Veðrarfjord with his plunder and pay back Konungr Ragnall what he owed once and for all. But the Normans had already killed four of his men and he was not willing to bring about the death of three more of his crew if he left them behind in Wales. The thought of parting Sir William de Braose from his heavy purse of silver also helped make up his mind.
‘So,’ Jarl Sigtrygg asked, ‘who do you want dead and where do I find them?’
Chapter Four
Through a summery Dorset and Wiltshire, by Salisbury, Ludgershall and Reading they pursued him. Following the Thames Valley, they spent nights at Windsor, Wallingford, and Woodstock. They were always a day or two behind. It wasn’t until they called at the great abbey of Ely that Strongbow and Raymond again caught word of his movements. The king, the monks said, was making for Westminster.
Everywhere Strongbow and Raymond had camped on their journey they found evidence that Henry’s court had been there before them: trampled ground and abandoned barrels, the remains of cooking fires, horse faeces and fly-covered food waste. At each fortress people were pale-faced as they described the sudden and unanticipated appearance of the king and how they had been commanded to provide food, drink, entertainment and accommodation for his court as he had stayed in their region overnight. New justices had been appointed, they described. Landowners had been summoned, cases had been tried, and land disputes going back to Stephen’s reign had been settled. Everything had been recorded by his army of clerks. Then, as abruptly as he had arrived, Henry was gone and his huge entourage with him, and the townspeople were able to breathe easily and count the cost his visit. The king’s whirlwind progress through the kingdom was nothing new. It was said that Henry set a fast pace to his life in an effort to stave off weight gain. When he wasn’t travelling with his court, he was hunting, hawking or riding in the countryside with his friends. The only time he stopped was to eat and even then he couldn’t keep still and proudly walked around, reading aloud from books purchased at great price from Irish monasteries and the Muslim states of Spain on subjects as diverse as law and medicine. Even the business of his vast state was conducted from the saddle.
‘I heard one ambassador dropped dead of exhaustion right into Queen Eleanor’s warm lap when Henry toured Aquitaine last summer,’ Raymond joked to his conrois. Alice of Abergavenny was the only one to laugh. Everyone else in Strongbow’s retinue was too exhausted to join in their captain’s merriment.
A frustrating week at sea had brought their company to the mouth of the Loire and three more days had taken them to the city of Tours. It was only as they prepared to make the overland journey to Poitiers that they heard that King Henry and his eldest son had already passed through Anjou into Normandy and thence onwards across the Narrow Sea to England. And so the weary men of Striguil had clambered back into their lord’s ship, Waverider, and pursued the king northwards. By the time they had landed at Wareham in Dorset, Henry was already halfway to Westminster and they had been forced to give pursuit for another two weeks on horseback. Their efforts had left each of them angry, bored and exhausted. Everyone, that was, except Raymond. He was in his element. By day he teased, chivvied and babbled incessantly to his men, setting them tasks such as scouting ahead of their column as well as leading them out to hunt in the evening. Every day he had something new for his men to do, inspiring them to work hard despite their exhaustion and the summer heat which roasted their backs. He laughed at their jokes, took his turn on the picket line and none dared complain too loudly when their captain did more work than any two of them combined. While Strongbow feasted with the local lords and took rooms in their castles, Raymond spent time amongst the men of the conrois in the towns below, drinking long into the night with one and all, swapping news and rumours from around Henry’s dominions.
Raymond was happy. He had Alice.
Despite Strongbow’s protestations, Raymond had insisted that she join the conrois which had
crossed Henry’s lands and, dressed in a leather jerkin over her flowing blue gown, Alice had proven hardy enough to keep up with the men of the company. Since the first time that they had slept together in Striguil, Raymond had been caught in a web of lust which she made sure he enjoyed at every possible opportunity. For Raymond it was a new and fascinating experience. He had enjoyed the companionship of women when he could, but he had never had a long-standing mistress or a wife. He had always told himself that it was due to his lifestyle which he believed left little time for a marriage, that he had not the stable income to afford a wife, or support a family. In truth it had always been because of his pitiable and impossible love for Basilia de Quincy, daughter of the Earl Strongbow.
With Alice it was easy. Yet Raymond still felt a crumb of discomfort with their liaison for, despite not being married to Basilia or ever having any hope of making her his, he still felt shame that he had bedded Alice of Abergavenny, as though he had been unfaithful to Strongbow’s daughter and that if she discovered his treachery, his dream of being with her would be over forever. That feeling of guilt had lessened the further that he had travelled from the March of Wales, and now, hundreds of miles from Striguil, while he sensibly did not flaunt it, he was becoming ever more used to their arrangement. In return for his protection and patronage for her brother, Raymond received something that he hadn’t realised he had been missing for a long time: intimacy. That his relationship with Alice relied solely on his ability to promote Geoffrey’s interests at Abergavenny with King Henry was not forgotten. Theirs was a relationship that would end whatever the outcome of their visit to the royal court. Success for their claim would mean that Alice would become a great lady and could no longer be associated with a landless warrior like he. Defeat meant that an alliance with Raymond was pointless, and he would be cast aside like an old sword that no longer kept its edge. Whatever happened he would lose Alice. Raymond hoped that they would never catch up with the royal court and that the happiness of the last month could continue further.
Now, heading towards the great Palace of Westminster, Raymond hummed a portion from the Song of Roland and watched the outline of Alice’s backside, hidden below the stylish blue gown, as she perched on the saddle of her new palfrey just ahead of him. In the bright sunshine which poured through the alley of leafy trees, she looked stunning as she talked to her brother, schooling Geoffrey in what to say if and when he met King Henry.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it,’ Strongbow said as he fell in beside his captain. Raymond blanched, but one glance at his lord told him that the earl was not admiring Alice’s arse as he had been, but the Middlesex countryside, full of fields of wheat and locked by sunshine and flowering plants.
‘Yes, Lord,’ Raymond answered with a small smile. ‘It certainly is that - soft and bountiful.’
Strongbow sighed. ‘What are the chances that Henry has already left Westminster, this silly coronation done and dusted, and headed back to France? Should we have waited in Normandy?’
‘We have no choice but to press on, Lord,’ Raymond replied and glanced at Alice, hoping that Henry had indeed continued onwards towards the south coast. It would mean another few days in her company. ‘Unless you mean to abandon Diarmait, your marriage to Princess Aoife and the crown of Laighin?’
‘Never,’ Strongbow uttered, showing a resolve which Raymond had seen only rarely. ‘We press on until we catch up with him, even if he leads us a merry dance all the way to the gates of Jerusalem.’ The earl nodded his head as if he was still trying to convince himself of the truth of his proclamation.
Strongbow may have been exhausted from the long journey, but it was the stress which was hurting him most, Raymond determined. At every great fortress town of England Strongbow had mentally steeled himself for the momentous meeting with King Henry only for it to have been in vain as they found the king already departed. His lord had developed a cold and Raymond wondered how long he could keep up the punishing pace and the constant anxiety which the approaching royal meeting put upon him.
‘Hold there,’ a loud voice suddenly demanded ahead of the column which shuddered to a halt, ‘in King Henry’s name stop.’ Two horsemen in the swaggering lion livery of the Angevin King of England stepped onto the road followed by a band of over twenty crossbowmen with their weapons trained on Strongbow’s men. The warriors on foot were routiers, mercenaries from Spain, Flanders and Germany, loyal only to the English king’s purse and damned to Hell by the Holy Father for their irreligious profession.
‘Goodness gracious,’ Strongbow expressed at the unexpected appearance of the ragtag band of crossbowmen.
‘Well, we’ve finally caught up with King Henry,’ Raymond replied with a hint of reticence.
At his side Strongbow began to splutter.
Raymond deflected the sword thrust with his shield and brought his own weapon down on the helmeted head of the man wearing the colours of the Earl of Oxford. Dreigiau turned quickly, allowing his master to bounce a spear lunge from another enemy over his head and then punch the pommel of his sword into his new assailant’s face. The man’s great helm rang like a church bell and Raymond was sure that he heard the man encased in armour cry out his surrender as he fell from his saddle to the hard, dusty earth.
‘Raymond de Carew,’ called an excited voice from behind him. ‘Get back into formation. Now!’
He considered ignoring the order. The Earl of Oxford’s men were ready to break and run from the tourney field and Raymond wanted to take more of enemy knights captive and so quench his desperate need for money. Strongbow’s bribes and Alice’s upkeep in the inn in Westminster had left him in significant arrears and the arms, mail, trappings and mounts of captured knights could be sold to clear some of those debts. Their ransoms would make him rich for the first time in his life.
‘Bollocks to you,’ he said under his breath and kicked his courser forward to meet another of the Earl of Oxford’s men. The knight’s lance was only a few feet from striking his chest when Raymond nudged Dreigiau to his right and clear of the point. Once past that danger he stood in his long stirrups and struck the helpless knight twice in succession as their momentum took them passed each other. When Raymond turned sharply the rider was on the ground and his weapons loose of his grip.
‘Damn you, you bloody fool! Come back here,’ Roger de Clare, the Earl of Hertford, cried again as Raymond repelled two strokes from another rival. He brought his sword down on the knight’s outstretched arm. The blow was not enough to break the skin, but the man dropped his weapon from his nerveless hand and tried to steer his horse away from the attack. Raymond forced Dreigiau in front of him, backhanding the knight with the rim of his shield in his steel-covered face. The man crumpled onto his back as Raymond circled around with his sword aloft.
‘I offer you a pledge, I offer you a pledge,’ the man shouted and held up his hands. Raymond smiled and pulled out of the downwards sword thrust.
‘Get their names and oaths,’ he ordered Geoffrey of Abergavenny. The Earl of Oxford’s men were retreating at top speed from the mêlée and there would be no more ransoms from this encounter. Raymond spotted a small copse of trees in the distance which might offer them some respite and assumed that was where the Earl of Oxford would hide out and regroup.
‘Raymond, you Welsh dullard, get back in line,’ Lord Hertford, commanded sternly as he removed his great helm. Whether or not he was jealous at Raymond’s three successes so early in the tourney was hard to say, but the earl was certainly annoyed that he had paid two shillings to have such a wayward lance like Raymond in his conrois.
The captain from Striguil cast a grin at Lord Hertford as he passed him and took his place in the crimson and gold line. The earl was one of the most valuable targets on the field and any fighter from the eight other competing teams in the tourney would love to claim the vast ransom by capturing him. Raymond reckoned that the nobleman was probably nervous and that was what made him so prickly. As Hertford shouted orders up and down
the line, Raymond cast his eye over the meadows on either side of the London Road. Two miles to the west he could see Sir Robert Dagworth’s men take on the conrois of the Lord de Ros while closer to Westminster, a Breton count took on a small conrois led by a Yorkshire knight in a white and blue surcoat. Raymond did not recognise him, but he was impressed by the way he directed his unit. Beyond that, Sir Nigel d’Evecque led his few warriors in a flanking attack on the rear of Lord de Ros’s conrois in conjunction with Dagworth’s men.
‘Dagworth and d’Evecque have joined forces,’ Raymond informed Hertford. His words were lost as a thundering charge from the west saw the entry of Prince Harry into the mêlée. A hundred or so knights followed their lord’s command and plunged into the fray and from the crowds on the far side of the river a cheer went up. To a man they had gathered to watch the young prince’s company compete.
‘God for Anjou,’ the prince shouted as he hoisted his lance in the air and pointed the way for his men. The audience echoed his call and applauded King Henry’s eldest son as his knights attacked Dagworth’s flank. From this distance, Raymond could make out little but it seemed that Prince Harry’s huge conrois smashed right through Dagworth’s men and into those of Lord de Ros and d’Evecque. He could not imagine how much it would have cost to put such a huge number of knights in the field. No less than fifty pounds, Raymond considered with a disbelieving shake of his head. It was as much as his father’s estate at Carew Castle would make in a decade.
‘We are going after Oxford,’ the Earl of Hertford announced as he cantered up the line, ignoring the prince and the cheers of adulation. ‘I want his armour to adorn my feasting hall! And you,’ Hertford turned on Raymond, ‘make sure and stay in the line this time.’ The earl’s voice was muffled and steely below the great helm which covered his head. ‘My noble cousin Strongbow may think you a good fighter, but the mêlée is different to anything that you will have seen in Gwent. So stay in order,’ he snarled. Hertford could not believe how a man mounted on such a small horse could possibly hope to survive the tourney, but Strongbow had insisted the stout warrior was worth the gamble. Certainly, he had shown a brute strength in taking three ransoms, but the tourney was about discipline, not the wild fighting he would’ve seen on the Welsh March. ‘Must I explain the rules of the tourney for a third time?’ the earl asked.
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