Master of War

by David Gilman

  Blackstone bent from the waist and picked up a broken piece of rock that lay tumbled from the damaged wall. He eased the weight upwards, testing his injured leg, demanding his crooked arm play its part. He felt the pinch in his leg, but it was little more than the wound objecting to his effort. The leg would hold and if he was careful he would not tear the lesion apart. The blackened stitches kept the slash closed like the sewn lips of a heretic. His left arm was weak compared to its power before the German’s sword had smashed down across the bones. But the crooked arm was only slightly out of true and would let him use a knife or hold a shield in close-quarter fighting. That is, if he stayed entrapped in the walls of Castle de Harcourt and learnt the skills. Jean de Harcourt had spoken the truth; Blackstone would be of no use to the English army unless he could fight. He had to ignore the temptation that tugged at him like a bird returning to its roost, and make his way back to discover who had survived the great battle.

  And Christiana? For the past weeks he had felt her hands on his body as she tended to his wounds, like a servant to a master, except she had servants of her own, and could easily have given her nursing duties to one of them. But she had not. She had tended to him out of something that was more than duty or kindness, and the fragrance of her closeness tormented him in a manner he could not describe. His own base instincts had been tempered by his father’s prohibition on ever bringing shame on his allegiance to Lord Marldon, who had granted him his freedom and friendship. But that family pledge had been broken and the bitter taste of the shame still lingered. His memory goaded him more insistently than the pain in his wounded leg. It was impossible to smother the truth of what his brother Richard had done. If only the memory could be buried as would shovelling dirt into a deep grave bury his mutilated body – now little more than a carcass lying undiscovered among the thousands on the battlefield at Crécy. Blackstone made a silent vow: he would not let these dark harbingers of recrimination torture him further. The truth was simple: Thomas Blackstone had survived, his wounds were healing, his strength returning. His capacity to inflict violence on an enemy was diminished, but not for much longer. A man who was once an adversary, and who, secretly, might still be, had extended his hand as mentor to serve the command of the English King. As the clouded waters of his mind began to clear he realized a plan was emerging that showed him the way to his future. Everything that had happened up to this time would become a source of strength, a stone-built fortress that would never be breached again by contrition or regret. He would learn how to fight as a man-at-arms and earn the honour bestowed on him.

  Blackstone wielded the stonemason’s hammer and began to build the wall.

  The late autumn months saw the English King’s army still besieging Calais in Edward’s dogged determination to secure the port that gave him the gateway to France. Neap tides swept in across the marshland around the walled city and the English were constantly forced to move their tents and wagons back and forth, and little progress was made despite the King’s efforts. The siege was to be a long, miserable affair.

  Crops failed that year due to the unseasonably wet weather and the harsh winter added to French misery as the English army foraged far and wide to feed itself. News was slow to reach the castle deep in the Norman countryside, but retreating knights, abandon­ing the French King, would pass by and share what news they had as they returned to their estates to try to protect their families from elements of the English army who controlled almost all of south-western France. Only the road from Bordeaux northwards to Paris remained in French hands. If Edward could close the northern and southern jaws and take Paris, the crown would be his. But not this year. There were still French lords who sided with Edward and took his payment for their loyalty even as the bodies of nobles and princes who fell at Crécy were disinterred from the burial ground at the Cistercian abbey of Valloires, where Edward had first buried them after the great battle. King Philip held state funerals for them and honoured their families – but theirs were estates without their lords, and disorder and discontent swept through many of the French nobility with the bitterness of the north wind.

  Jean de Harcourt slashed the sword in an upward sweeping arc. Pain seared through Blackstone’s body as he stumbled backwards.

  ‘You’re an archer, you’re trained to stand bracing your left leg and if you do that I’ll take it off with one sword stroke. Protect your legs with a low parry. A ten-year-old boy training to be a squire could kill you. You don’t have to be a damned wall of resistance; use your feet! Pass and evade! Block high, strike down, step back. How many times do you need telling? Again!’ de Harcourt shouted.

  Blackstone shook his head in an attempt to clear the agony from the flat-bladed blow that Jean de Harcourt had just delivered against his wounded leg. He regained his stance, holding his bent left arm forward, extending the small buckler, his only means of defence. His tutor was using wooden training swords, the kind that pageboys and squires would be given to learn their skills. But in two swift strikes de Harcourt had nearly crippled Blackstone. He felt blood oozing behind his bandaged leg and knew it would already be seeping through the breeches he had managed to fit into that morning. Neither man wore protection from the sleet that stiffened his limbs other than a linen shirt and sleeveless leather jerkin. The cold gripped his leg, slowing his agility, making him vulnerable to de Harcourt’s expert strikes. The Frenchman had not even broken into a sweat after demonstrating all the attacking and defensive guards to Blackstone for the tenth time that morning. Now the lesson was being applied in its most basic and brutal manner short of causing serious injury. The day already seemed long and arduous, and Blackstone wondered if his injured leg would hold out.

  It was Blackstone’s anger that kept him on his feet. He raised the sword and struck out at de Harcourt who barely moved. He was on the balls of his feet, then slightly sidestepped and struck Blackstone across his ear with the flat of the sword. The stinging blow made him swing back wildly in a crosscutting arc and this time the swiftness of his movement and the weight of his body behind the sword caught de Harcourt across his arm and he could see he had scored a painful point in retaliation against his tutor.

  The two men stood a few feet apart, each waiting to see who would make the next move. De Harcourt lowered his guard.

  ‘You made three mistakes. First was to lead with your left leg without covering yourself properly with your sword. Second to lunge and throw yourself off-balance. Your reactions were good and a crosscutting strike was lucky. But I will keep on hurting you until you learn.’

  ‘You said three mistakes,’ Blackstone said, eyes blinking against the cold rain.

  No sooner had he spoken than de Harcourt was suddenly upon him, his left arm fully extended, the buckler’s face turned outwards ready to receive any striking blow Blackstone might have delivered, which he did not. There was no time. The sword blade whirred left and right, top to bottom like a spinning sycamore seed. The force of the attack pushed Blackstone off-balance and he fell heavily into the dirt. De Harcourt stood over him as Blackstone lay looking up at the point of the sword and realized that had this been real combat it would not be a wooden training sword at his throat, but sharpened steel that would plunge through his gullet.

  ‘Three. I’ve told you before, Thomas: never stand and wait for your opponent to make the decisive move. Always attack.’

  Blackstone realized that de Harcourt had lunged at him with a ruthless efficiency that came from years of training. His heart sank: what chance did he have even to get close to those skills?

  ‘That’s enough for today,’ de Harcourt said. ‘See to that leg.’

  He turned away without offering to help Blackstone to his feet. He would struggle, and de Harcourt knew he would have it no other way. This Englishman owned a stubborn pride the likes of which had defeated the greatest army in Christendom.

  Blanche de Harcourt watched as her lord and husband stripped the wet clothes from his body. His scars were healing well an
d the weight he had lost during his convalescence was beginning to return. When she gazed on his nakedness it showed a tapestry of hurts from battles fought. By now she could touch almost every blemish and scar and know which conflict had given them. And if she felt that about her husband why should not Christiana feel the same about Thomas Blackstone? She had watched the girl and had the servants report to her if she had gone to Blackstone’s room at night. Servants slept in corridors in whatever nook or doorwell they could find and she ensured that one of her most trusted would strip the linen from Blackstone’s bed each week and check for signs of a virgin’s blood. Time and again the servant had reported that Blackstone still slept on the floor and the linen did not bear even the creases from his body. Blanche wondered if Christiana had realized that she was being watched whenever she was out of her company. Each stable-hand, servant and scullion was told to report what they saw of what went on between Christiana and Blackstone. But so far there had been no indication of intimacy.

  Blanche waited as Jean eased himself into the steaming water of the wooden bathtub. Her lust for her husband was something she always handled with care, not wishing to offend him with her desire. She slipped the gown from her body as she walked in front of him, the light from the window behind her, softening her shape, making her even more desirable. She could tell from his expression that the sensuous image she had offered would not be rejected. She slipped into the warm water and straddled him. Lust needed to be controlled to allow the full pleasure of its fulfilment.

  As she felt him enter her, his hands and mouth unable to resist her breasts, she knew that sooner rather than later Christiana would lie with Blackstone. Women had little control over their lives but a man’s bed could alter such poverty of influence. And she, Countess Blanche de Harcourt et Ponthieu, a woman of rank in her own right, had made sure that her ward was versed in these ways that could bring such influence into her own life.

  The straw man was stitched into old sackcloth, and hung sus­pended like a common thief, his legs splayed, tied by rope to stakes in the ground. Blackstone scuffed the dirt beneath his feet to aid his footing, and focused on his helpless victim. The first flurries of snow had fallen but the full force of winter had yet to settle itself upon them. Day after day, time and again, de Harcourt had repeated the several positions a swordsman could take when preparing to engage his enemy. Blackstone’s bruises and welts were testament to these lessons that were being beaten into him. Now he stood alone in the training yard while those in the castle went about their business, their heightened activity heralding the anticipated arrival of visitors.

  The scarecrow gazed blindly at the figure before him who moved his feet and arms in a tightly configured dance of death. Blackstone’s right leg held his balance, arms bent forward against any high strike down across his legs. His left arm covered his chest with the buckler while with the other he rested the weapon flat-bladed on his crooked arm, like a fiddler about to scrape a tune. It was a guard to protect legs and vital organs. The voice in his head commanded obedience – balance and movement, sidestep and strike – the balls of his feet turned him a stride as if stepping around an opponent, and then he slashed the sword down and the straw man flinched.

  Once again he repeated the attack and then extended his arm, bringing the small buckler shield to his front, the sword now resting on his right shoulder, cutting edge to the sky, his thumb pressing against the crossguard above the grip to give added strength and impetus to a strike. His left leg shuffled forward, the angry welt still fringed by the black piercing of its stitches, still painful at the stretch, but stronger now in its support of his upper body, with its additional strength of archer’s muscles across back and shoulder. He had not told de Harcourt of his own regime of constant exercises using a length of iron, heavier and more cumbersome than any sword, which he lifted and swung, day in, day out.

  Wolf Sword still kept its place by his bed – the blade sharp and bright, the corded grip darkened by old blood. It waited like a sentinel, needing a worthy hand to heft its deadly edge against an opponent. Blackstone knew he was not yet worthy.

  Nock, mark, draw and loose! The rhythm that had given him his skill as an archer now gave way to another lethal combination of movement. His wounded leg protested as he pushed it forward in a sudden change of stance, bringing his sword arm to the front of his face, the honed edge uppermost. This head-guard strike enabled a powerful downward cut from right to left that severed the straw man’s leg at the thigh. The wooden sword’s edge must have found weak stitching.

  The discipline of the fighting sequence flooded him with energy and bolstered his confidence, but in that moment, as he struck, a clamouring vision of the final moments at Crécy leapt at him from a subdued memory. That attacking blow had been the very one that the German knight had used against him, but somehow Blackstone’s instincts had turned him out of the blade’s killing range, exchanging a severed limb for the wound that he now carried.

  The memory of the hulking knight who had slain his brother and then scythed his way towards the English Prince was shrouded in the evening’s gloom. It had all happened so quickly. His mind’s eye held the mute vision. Blackstone stood unmoving, sword arm lowered, body turned at the hips, the butchered torso leaking straw in the wind. He had been so close to being cleft by that knight that only now as he learnt the killing techniques did he sense the blessing that a few vital seconds had afforded him.

  Out of the turmoil of the memory an insistent voice called his name.

  He turned. Christiana stood ten feet behind him wrapped in a cloak, looking concerned, as if she had been too scared to approach any closer.

  ‘I’ve been calling you,’ she said against the buffeting wind. Then smiled, hoping it would penetrate the glazed look of incompre­hension on his face. ‘Thomas?’

  He nodded and stepped towards her, pulling her small body into his own, then brushed a snowflake from her nose.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he told her. ‘I was being attacked by a scarecrow.’

  She laughed as he tossed the wooden sword aside and led her away from the memory.

  The straw man surrendered to the wind and scattered across the darkening sky.

  13

  Blackstone eased in the last piece of cut stone on St Nicholas’s Day, as the darkening sky threatened a heavy snowfall. His wall now stood at the height of his shoulder and would serve as a defensive redoubt should intruders scale the walls, as had happened before when lawless scum had slaughtered de Harcourt’s soldiers and servants. It was no great feat of stonemasonry, nor would a lord of the manor see it as vital, but de Harcourt had indulged the Englishman and silently admired the boy’s skill. He would find a use for it, perhaps it would serve as an enclosure for his serfs to let loose a pig then chase it to see who could be first to club the animal to death. It would be good sport, a gift of their lord’s Christmastime generosity.

  Blackstone washed the dirt from his arms and watched the fevered activity going on around him. It was no surprise for him to learn that a half-dozen Norman lords and their entourages would soon be arriving to celebrate Christmas. The horses would need to be cared for with almost as much hospitality as the guests themselves. The air carried the smell of roasted and boiled meat, as Jean de Harcourt’s household made final preparations for the feast that would follow the days of fasting.

  Fresh straw and extra sacks of oats had been brought into the castle over the previous week from the surrounding villages. Farriers’ apprentices worked tirelessly at their bellows, as hammer met steel, forging new shoes for de Harcourt’s horses. De Harcourt had returned before midday from an early morning hunt with half a dozen retainers. The falcon on his arm was now hooded but the raptor’s victims, heron, swan and crane, were tied across the pack-saddles, as were several deer carcasses, bloodied by the spear points that had pierced hearts and lungs.

  Since arriving at the castle Blackstone had seen servants scuttling about darkened corridors but now more of them see
med to have crept into sight, as if from the wall’s cracked lime mortar. Barked commands echoed across courtyard and halls as servants dressed in de Harcourt’s livery scurried about their duties with a tangible air of excitement. They prepared rooms, linen was aired, dried herbs were scattered through the halls and chambers to offer the guests sweet fragrance underfoot. Corridors and privies were swept and cleaned; ornaments of silver were laid out as silk-embroidered cloths were draped on tables and benches. A steady procession of peasants carried bushels of kindling and firewood on their backs from nearby villages, cursing as they were shouldered off the narrow paths by grooms leading pack horses laden with victuals. The thought of more French knights arriving at the castle worried Blackstone. They would be men who had fought the English and probably, like their host, survived the slaughter of Crécy. How could de Harcourt have him under the same roof without causing dissent? Now that his strength was returning he felt even more the need to go beyond the walls, and perhaps if these men turned out to be bitter enemies he would be forced to escape their anger. Jean de Harcourt’s hospitality would not be dishonoured, of that he was certain, but an assassin could be bought cheaply these days.

  The candlelight flickered as Blackstone peered at the manu­script that lay open on the table before him. The neat copied text was smudged in places, evidence that sweat from a monk’s skilful hand had caught the trailing words at the edge of the page. As much as Blackstone’s eyesight struggled in the gloom his mind fought the lesson being given by Christiana.

  ‘Why don’t you try again?’ she said, and went back to rubbing the soothing olive oil and lavender into his slashed face.

  ‘I’ll smell like a woman if you keep putting that on me,’ he said.