by David Gilman
Sir Gilbert cuffed him across the back of the head.
‘Wake up! My lord speaks to you.’ Sir Gilbert grimaced at de Harcourt. ‘Apologies, my lord, perhaps I chose badly. His dumb ox of a brother might have been a better choice. His is only a dumb insolence.’
Godfrey de Harcourt ignored him, and stared at Blackstone, who went down on one knee in penance. ‘Forgive me, lord.’
‘Common men seldom get so close to the King’s son. Stand up,’ de Harcourt commanded. Blackstone obeyed but kept his eyes averted for fear of appearing impertinent.
‘You would serve your Prince?’ de Harcourt asked Blackstone. ‘Look at me, boy.’
Blackstone looked into the deep brown eyes of a man who was considered by most in France, except for other feudal lords in Normandy, as a traitor.
‘I would, lord. With all that I have.’
‘And what you have, according to Sir Gilbert, is the ability to use what lies between your ears. And the knowledge of how a fortress is built.’
Blackstone had never cut stone for more than Lord Marldon’s manor, but he could read a plan and understand geometric designs. Did that qualify him? Sir Gilbert obviously thought so and to deny it would surely place Sir Gilbert in a poor light.
‘I have, my lord.’
‘Then you know where a weakness may lie. And how to breach such a place.’
Blackstone was uncertain whether it was a statement or a question, so he simply nodded.
‘Then you will ride with Sir Gilbert to Caen. We will scourge St Lô tomorrow, but Bertrand has four thousand men-at-arms with Genoese crossbowmen waiting for us, and a citizenry ready to fight at Caen. If they decide to defend the city then we cannot afford to be held there. I have not seen it since before I was exiled to England. We need your eyes to find the weakest defences. The Prince leads the attack. We must seize the city, but the fortress is impregnable. You will see what is for the taking.’
‘I will, Sir Godfrey.’
De Harcourt studied him a moment longer and took a silver penny from his purse. ‘Today is St Christopher’s Day. A saint who was strong, simple, kind, and dedicated to one thing – serving his Lord by serving his fellow men. You saved lives in the ambush and at the barn, young Blackstone, because you used your instincts. Or was it your intelligence? We shall see. You have a reward.’ He flipped the coin, and Blackstone caught it.
He nodded to Sir Gilbert and turned away.
‘Sweet suffering Jesus, you get rewarded for not scratching your arse. Go back to Elfred, tell him to secure food and fresh horses. We’ve thirty miles ahead of us,’ said Sir Gilbert irritably, cursing quietly that he was to be denied a chance of plunder. St Lô was indeed a rich prize. Less deserving men, even common soldiers, would load the baggage wagons with cloth and its citizens’ wealth.
‘Thank you, Sir Gilbert.’
The knight scowled. ‘For what?’
‘You must have told the marshal about the ambush.’ Blackstone’s brother sat with four other men whom Blackstone had not seen before, replacements for the dead archers. They played dice and one of them, a man with a ravaged face from a life of womanizing and drink, and bearing scars from tavern brawls and warfare, grinned his blackened stumps and slapped Blackstone’s brother on the shoulder.
‘You win again, donkey,’ he said, dropping the dice into the leather cup and shaking it in front of the boy’s face. ‘Can you hear that, you dumb bastard, them’s dice waiting for you. Come on, lad.’ He rubbed finger and thumb together, wanting Richard to bet.
Blackstone stepped up to the group and touched his brother’s head. The boy looked up and grinned, making a grunting noise that indicated excitement and pleasure of being with the men, and of having two silver coins in front of him.
‘Let’s go,’ Blackstone said quietly, gesturing to his brother.
Richard made another unintelligible sound, and picked up the two silver pieces. He was winning, why should he leave?
‘We must,’ Blackstone insisted, and tugged gently on his brother’s sleeve. But the boy pulled away defiantly.
The new men looked up at Blackstone. The one with the black stumped teeth didn’t smile when he spoke. ‘He’s got our money. We want a chance to get it back.’
‘You know he can neither hear nor speak. You’ve let him win, he has nothing to give you other than that.’
‘Leave him be. Everyone’s been looting. He’s got something,’ the man snarled.
‘No, he hasn’t.’ Blackstone bent down, grabbed the coins, and tossed them back into the man’s lap. Before the man could get to his feet, Richard snatched Blackstone’s arm, and catching him off-balance, threw him to the ground. Men scattered, anticipating a fight, and formed a circle around the two archers.
Blackstone was taken by surprise. Richard’s weight on his chest winded him. His brother had seldom shown petulance. When he was much younger his father had spent hours calming the boy’s rage and frustration. Richard had never attacked him before.
There was no doubt that Richard was the stronger. And for the first time Blackstone saw something in his brother’s eyes that frightened him. Anger clouded the boy’s thoughts. The caged restraint had been released. Blackstone couldn’t shift the weight from his chest and shoulders. His brother nodded and grinned. The spittle dribbled from his malformed jaw. He was the strongest. Perhaps he was the best. The boy looked at those around him and from his silent prison saw men mouthing and shouting, faces twisted, fists clenched, urging him to beat the man beneath him.
Blackstone hadn’t moved, deliberately not resisting. His brother’s eyes changed as realization cleared the rage. He rolled free, sweeping an arm against the jeering men, as a chained dog lunges at its tormentors. The archers backed away. Blackstone got to his feet. His brother faced him and Blackstone eased him gently away.
‘Take your money. Leave him be,’ he said to the men.
As the brothers moved towards the horses tethered in the treeline, Elfred approached the replacements. He had witnessed the confrontation.
‘You men ready yourself. Draw salted cod from the supply wagon. Two days’ worth. Your name?’ he said, pointing at the ravaged man.
‘Skinner of Leicester.’
‘You’d do well to leave the deaf mute. The boys are brothers. They’re Sir Gilbert’s sworn men.’
Skinner gathered up his arrow bag and put the coins in a pouch, then spat. ‘So what?’ he said.
The tears that welled in Richard’s eyes were blinked away. Blackstone kept his distance, staying back a few paces as his brother sheathed his new bow, and checked his haversack, then attended to the saddle. How many times had Blackstone wanted to hear words chatter from his brother’s throat, like John Nightingale who could tell tales and laugh without a care? No cares now for him, though. He walked to where Richard waited in the shade of the tree. Blackstone reached out and placed his hand on his brother’s heart. In a few simple gestures he mimicked a mother cradling a child. He opened the palm of his hand three times. Three times five fingers. He took the penny from his pouch and gave it to him. It was Richard Blackstone’s fifteenth birthday. Blackstone bent forward and kissed his brother on the lips. No greater sign of affection could be offered. His brother was now of the legal age to go to war.
Elfred rode at the head of the archers. Roger Oakley served as ventenar – a sergeant for twenty of the men – and Blackstone and Richard fell into his company. Sir Gilbert led the hobelars. The small reconnaissance group was the King’s eyes. Sir Gilbert would rather have been the King’s sword arm. There was little pleasure to be had from burning the abandoned hamlets and villages they came upon. Once the war had passed by, these cob and thatch hovels could be easily replaced and the villagers would return to their miserable existence. The peasants had driven their livestock away from the approaching army, making it more difficult for the horde of men to feed off the land. Where wheat and barley had been gathered, and hay for the livestock, it had been either carted away or bu
rned before the soldiers could take it. Another village was destroyed. There was a surge of horsemen. Skinner came alongside Richard, twirling a burning torch, laughing, encouraging the boy to throw his own. It was only a moment, but Blackstone caught the man’s eye before Skinner yanked the horse’s head around and galloped away past the burning houses. He knew that the gambler’s attempted friendship was a pretence; he was trying to encourage Richard to join him for no other purpose than entertainment. Blackstone had promised his father that Richard would always be at his side, that he would be responsible for him. He was keeping that promise. Warfare brought differing kinds and conditions of men together, and many of those from his own county were dead. These new archers did not share laughter. They were different – like wolves.
A pig squealed, breaking cover. One of the hobelars lowered his lance and pierced its squirming body and although it was only a small pig, it was a prize, and it would feed the hobelars when the others had only salted fish.
Blackstone threw a burning torch into the thatch of one hovel. It was no different from his own village. His sense of regret turned to one of bewilderment. Was it the confidence of being an archer or something more? he wondered. Whatever it was, he knew that if this were his village his bow would be strung and by now half of these twenty men would be dead. He would have fought for his home. And his pig.
Plumes of smoke blackened the horizon. Every building that lay before the advancing army was burned. The English King wanted his enemies to know that nothing would be spared that stood in his way. The countryside was being stripped bare, the people forced into the cities, to give the French defenders bigger problems to deal with. The Prince’s vanguard division had swept through St Lô, and would reach Caen soon after dawn the next day. Sir Gilbert wanted his men fed and ready to fight. No fires would be permitted that night to give away their position. The hobelars may have had pork, but a broadhead arrow the archers used for killing horses in battle brought down a sheep, which Skinner butchered, that being his trade. Fresh mutton instead of the salted fish would do a better job of filling a belly for the fight ahead.
Sir Gilbert took Blackstone forward to within a mile or so of the city on the high ground to the south-east in order to observe where the main resistance from the defenders would be.
‘We don’t have an army big enough,’ Blackstone said when he saw the city walls rising up like cliffs from the marshy ground, bordered by the Orne and with the Odon winding through it. Buttressed walls and towers bristled with armed men; conical-roofed bastions would allow the French to pour crossfire into the English ranks. The English were going to be slaughtered. Those archers who knew had told him that Caen was Normandy’s largest city after Rouen; ten thousand people lived there and with Bertrand’s army and Genoese crossbowmen it could be a deathtrap for an invading English army. Banners flew from the towers and steeples and from William the Conqueror’s fortress, which stood in the northern part of the city. Several of the rivers’ channels and adjacent marshland offered defence for the city and its southern suburbs, which, by the look of the houses and gardens, Blackstone took to be the wealthiest area of the city. His eyes searched the city walls for weaknesses, but wherever one existed defenders had dug trenches and erected palisades. The massive castle at the northern end of the city held his eye. He knew that generations of masons would have laboured on it.
‘That fortress could not be taken without siege machines,’ he said to Sir Gilbert without taking his eyes from the vastness of the city.
‘The King won’t lay siege – he hasn’t the time – but he can’t leave a French force to his rear. We have to move north and get across the Seine for Paris. You can be sure the French will have every bridge defended or destroyed. This is where they want to slow us so Philip’s army can come from the south.’ He flicked a piece of meat from his teeth. ‘Then, young Blackstone, we are as skewered as that pig we roasted.’
Blackstone nodded and let his eyes follow the contours of the city’s old walls, across the marshlands and the river, to the road that led directly to the bridge that was being heavily fortified.
‘It’s been a dry summer, the marshland will be low, it should be firm underfoot, and the riverbeds won’t carry much water. I don’t think you could use horses down there, but men could run across.’
Sir Gilbert followed Blackstone’s gaze.
‘And hard fighting it’ll be as well. But you’re right; we could assault them across there. That’s the Ile St Jean.’ He pointed to the merchant’s suburb completely surrounded by the river. ‘That’s the city’s soft underbelly and there’s plunder to be had, but that bridge…’ He let his words trail away. The bridge that connected the suburb to the city was heavily fortified and barges had been moored and manned by crossbowmen.
For an hour they sat in the shade of a tree and watched the people moving through the streets. Soldiers and men-at-arms had crossed over the bridge and built barriers of overturned wagons, palisades, stacked doors ripped from their hinges and furniture taken from houses. The barbican towers manned by crossbowmen at one end of the stone bridge and the barricade at the other made it impassable. Sir Gilbert made a tutting sound. ‘The fools,’ was all he said. And then a moment later, ‘Tell me what you see.’
Blackstone gazed at the scurrying people below. Soldiers and citizens alike were still barricading the bridge, crossbowmen were clambering aboard barges moored against the riverbank, others had climbed to the upper floors of the houses and lifted the window shutters that allowed them to fire down into the streets.
‘They’re defending the main bridge to the city and the walls to the east.’
‘When you fight a war you choose your ground. Where you fight is as important as how you fight. Look again,’ Sir Gilbert told him.
What Blackstone could see was that the biggest obstacle would be to fight through the densely built-up streets. Even though one of the rivers looped around the southern part of the city, and another bisected it, the merchant’s houses on the Ile St Jean, with their own strips of land, were definitely the weakest point on the south. If men could get through those streets and across the bridge into the old town in sufficient numbers the city could be taken. But not now. Not with the new defences being put in place. Sir Gilbert picked his teeth, his eyes staying on the sprawling city.
And then Blackstone realized what Sir Gilbert had already seen.
‘They’re defending the Ile St Jean and the city rather than the fortress. Most of their defences are on that south bridge. If our men get inside the city and attack from behind them they’d be trapped by their own making.’ He pointed along the western wall. ‘There. A gate in the wall. Do you see it? It’s old, the masonry will be crumbling and the gates will splinter. And it’s poorly defended. That’s the weakest spot in the wall.’
Sir Gilbert stepped further back into the dappled shade where their horses were tethered.
‘We’ll make a soldier out of a stonescraper yet,’ he said.
Blackstone spent the night huddled on the hillside watching thousands of flickering torches, fireflies in the darkness, as the people below prepared to defend their city. He didn’t know if they were as frightened as he felt, because the time was coming when he would be face-to-face with the enemy and not killing from a distance. When Sir Gilbert told the men where he thought their attack would be, Blackstone watched their faces. They wanted to kill. Caen was going to give them wealth and women.
The English army had risen and moved before dawn. Three divisions of four thousand men apiece came across the hillsides. Blackstone saw the pennons and banners emerge over the dull grey horizon, the breeze catching the cloth like fluttering birds of prey. The Prince of Wales’s vanguard moved towards the northern outskirts, and behind them a swarm of non-combatants swelled the English ranks – wagon drivers, cooks, grooms, blacksmiths and carpenters. They halted well behind the vanguard as if they were another battle division, a deception to make the French think the advancing army was bigger
than they had expected. The King’s division moved directly in from the west. Thomas Hatfield, soldier and clergyman – he was also the Bishop of Durham – commanded the rear.
Elfred kept Richard at his side as Blackstone rode off with Sir Gilbert to report to Godfrey de Harcourt.
Blackstone felt the trepidation beating in his chest. He was riding directly towards the Prince of Wales and the marshals of the army. Knights in armour, shields and banners bearing coats of arms, their jupons with the cross of St George on their sleeves, a bristling forest of lances held by esquires, thousands of footsoldiers, archers and Welsh spearmen tramped forwards. Blackstone’s view was a confusion of gold, scarlet and blue – woven images on surcoats, snorting destriers eager to gallop, scenting the excitement of the warriors – and he wondered how anyone could not fear the approaching horde. The trumpets blared so loudly it seemed they could crumble the city’s walls.
‘Why do I have to speak to Sir Godfrey?’ Blackstone asked as they rode closer to the approaching vanguard.
‘Because it’s not every day a common man from the ranks has the chance to report to a marshal of the English army. He wanted your opinion, he expects you to give it. It’ll do you no harm to be noticed. He’s a Norman, for Christ’s sake, he’s as common as you are. Only difference is, he had someone important fornicate with his mother,’ Sir Gilbert answered.
‘But you saw their defences before I did,’ said Blackstone.
‘If I’ve a choice I prefer not to talk to traitors, no matter whose side they fight on,’ Sir Gilbert said. He pulled up and waited. A troop of horsemen galloped forward bearing Godfrey de Harcourt’s colours of gold and red.
‘Well?’ the lame baron scowled at the archer. ‘Have you found a way to spend my reward on French whores?’
5
Blackstone ran hard and fast, gulping lungfuls of air, his cheeks smeared with tears of exertion, his grip on his bow so tight that his knuckles ached. He and the other archers had waited for the command to attack, coiled and cursing, desperate to unleash the strength that they held in check – a witch’s brew of fear and exultation – as they yearned to surge ahead and strike.