Standard of Honor

by Jack Whyte

  Sir Henry looked puzzled. “Your pardon, but do you mean me to go home before your coronation, or after it?”

  “Are you mad, Henry? Before it, of course. This new need is far too important to put off for an entire month, especially over religious mummery. I want to see you gone within the week. I’ll tell you all about the coronation when next we meet, you and I. Now, let us be up and away, for we have several miles to go and I want to start work on these plans tonight.” He twisted his body to look at Baldwin of Bethune, who was sitting some distance aside from them, waiting to be summoned. “Baldwin, we are leaving now. Gather up what needs to be gathered and follow us, quickly as you can.”

  As Baldwin rose smoothly to his feet, Richard did the same, then reached down his hand to Sir Henry and pulled him up. “You have done well, Henry … justified my faith in you. Don’t ever stop thinking the way you do. Now, mount up.”

  FIVE

  Sir Henry St. Clair sat spear-straight on his horse, looking down from a reviewing stand at the top of a high, sloping ramp. In front of him, stretching away on both sides, lay an enormous drilling field, its edges lost in distance. At his back, beyond the width of its protective moat, the high walls of the Castle of Baudelaire towered above him, cloaking him in a late-afternoon shadow that stretched far ahead of where he sat. The entire area to his right was given over to horses and horsemen, groups of knights and formations of mounted men-at-arms riding hither and yon, all of them deeply involved in their exercises. Henry was content to leave them to themselves. He was far more interested in what was happening in the left half of the field, where seemingly endless rows of crossbowmen, the closest of them almost directly below his reviewing stand, shot in aimed volleys at ranked targets far ahead of them. Farther away, beyond the concentrations of crossbowmen, he knew Richard’s English yeomen were working with their deadly longbows, but they were so far distant that St. Clair could barely see them and could only guess at their activities. Like the horsemen that afternoon, they claimed but little of his attention, for his focus was concentrated upon the crossbowmen, the sole reason for his unexpected return to Aquitaine in mid-August of the previous year. It was now the middle of June in the year of Our Lord 1190, and ten months had passed him by like a headlong, badly fractured dream.

  The task facing him on his return to Poitiers had been formidable, and he had barely known where to begin. But in the first week after his arrival, he had sent out teams of recruiters from Poitiers to visit every one of Richard’s vassals in Aquitaine, Poitou, and Anjou and to stage demonstrations of their weapons’ potency. These recruiters performed in Tours, Angers, Nantes, Nevers, Bourges, Angoulême, and Limoges, along with another hundred villages and hamlets scattered between and among those, and they announced after every demonstration that Duke Richard was looking for volunteers to fill the ranks of his new, elite artillery corps. More than a thousand men came forward to Poitiers within the first month of that campaign, and Henry set his trained Angevin arbalesters to work immediately, teaching the newcomers. By that time, too, the first new weapons had begun to arrive from the manufactories in Poitiers and Tours, the former supplying arbalests and the latter more simple, light, and versatile crossbows, and once the production had begun, the capacity rose steadily.

  Now, after ten months of hard, grinding work, Henry had twelve hundred new crossbowmen fully trained—three hundred of them on arbalests—and more than two thousand new men under arms in various stages of training. More than four hundred of the latter group had been sent to him by the King of France, Philip Augustus, who requested with great civility that Sir Henry consent to train, on Philip’s behalf, a cadre of men who could, in turn, return to teach more of their own in France.

  All things considered, Henry felt the efforts he had expended had been more than worthwhile. Word had reached him that morning of Richard’s arrival in France the previous week, and the same missive had warned him that the Duke, now crowned King of England, could be expected to arrive in Baudelaire sometime in the afternoon of that same day. That knowledge had prompted Henry to arrange this mass gathering of his new troops.

  It was this magnificent training field, Sir Henry knew, that had prompted the Duke to impose his entire army, a mere two weeks earlier, upon the hospitality and duty of the castle’s owner, Edouard de Balieul, Count of the surrounding lands of Baudelaire. St. Clair, who had delivered the tidings to Balieul, along with the King’s army at the same time, was wryly convinced that the Count must feel that he had little to be thankful for. But there was no place comparable to Baudelaire within a hundred miles and it was perfectly suited to Richard’s needs, lush with sweet drinking water for his troops and ample grazing for all the cattle and horses that the army required. Situated on the banks of the river Loire, close to the small town of Pouilly in Burgundy that supplied Sir Henry annually with his beloved golden wine, it also lay within forty miles—a three-day march—of Vézelay, the mustering point for all the various contingents assembling for the voyage to the Holy Land.

  Satisfied that everything was as it ought to be, Sir Henry nudged his horse forward, starting it down the ramp to field level, then angling it left, to where a small, densely spaced group of grim-faced men were practicing with the heaviest arbalests, concentrating fiercely on the efforts required to arm the cumbersome weapons. They each held the body of the device firmly upright, one foot through the stirrup on the front end while they worked to turn the two-handed winch at the rear that pulled the heavy bowstring, against the enormous pressure of the steel bow, to its full lock. St. Clair sat watching them until the frowning instructor drilling them looked up, saw him sitting there, and slowly made his way to stand beside him.

  “Master-at-Arms,” he said, his voice low, deep, and far different from the abusive howl he used to chivy and upbraid his students. “I hope you are pleased with all you have seen today.”

  Sir Henry nodded back. “Well enough, Roger. What about you? Are your French students making progress?”

  “That all depends on how you would define progress—” He raised a hand to hold Sir Henry’s attention, then raised his voice to its usual hectoring pitch. “You there, Bermond! Put your back into it, man. There’s no time to waste with those things. Too slow and you’ll be dead before you can pick it up again. You’re supposed to fire two shots each minute, not one shot every two!” The man he had shouted at now began working twice as hard, his arms churning at the winch handles. Sir Roger de Bohen turned back to his interrupted conversation. “That’s part of what I have to deal with. They think they’re being demeaned because they’re French, and they’re always muttering that our Angevins have an unfair advantage in having used these things for years, even though these particular fellows are just as raw and new to their weapons as the Frenchmen are.”

  St. Clair smiled. “Come, Roger, that is not quite the whole truth. The Angevins have grown up seeing the weapons used all around them. They have at least a degree of familiarity with them. The French, on the other hand, have never laid eyes on a crossbow, much less the biggest crossbow of them all.”

  Roger de Bohen and Henry St. Clair had known and respected each other for two decades, and spoke as friends. “You’re splitting hairs, Henry, and you’re wrong,” de Bohen said now, keeping his voice low to avoid being overheard. “These Frenchmen are feeling put upon because, even starting from scratch with no advantage on either side, they are nowhere close to being as good as the Angevins are, and at this rate it will take months to whip them into any kind of battle readiness.”

  “But they will learn, will they not?”

  “Aye, they’ll learn … Of course they will.” De Bohen shrugged and swung away, speaking back over his shoulder as he returned to his charges. “The question is, will they learn quickly enough?”

  St. Clair watched him as the other returned to his task, and then he kneed his horse and pulled its head around until he was heading directly towards the far left side of the field, where the block formations of Ric
hard’s English archers were firing massed volleys of arrows that fell on their target area like sheets of windblown rain. But even as he rode towards the English ranks, his mind was still with the crossbowmen behind him, and with the potential they offered of being able to lay down a heavy, defensive screen of missiles against the kind of attack that had destroyed the Christians at Hattin.

  The English longbows could lay down amazing volleys from great distances, shooting in high arcs over hundreds of paces, but what St. Clair needed from his crossbowmen was an intermediate killing power to augment the longbows: shorter, but no less lethal, volleys fired straight out and kept on low trajectories. He had been working for months now on training solid, coordinated formations of short- and intermediaterange crossbows that would work in conjunction with smaller but much harder-hitting teams of arbalesters. These troops would be capable of generating sufficiently lethal interference to discourage any sustained attack by the vaunted Saracen light archers, and would therefore increase the odds in favor of the Christian infantry and knights in any confrontation. That, at least, was his theory, and Henry was well aware that he had pinned his reputation to its success.

  The sound of distant cheering, far off to his left, attracted St. Clair’s attention, and as he turned to look for the cause, he heard one of the nearby English yeomen shouting the King’s name, so he nudged his horse forward to where he could watch Richard approach, and he wondered, as he had many times in recent months, at the sheer confidence and regal ability that radiated from the so-called English monarch who, despite having spent much of his boyhood in the country, had always disdained it, barely spoke the language of the people he now ruled, yet had captivated all the fighting men of that warlike land, inspiring spontaneous cheers whenever he rode by.

  Today, as was his habit when mixing with his own soldiers, the King rode almost alone, refusing a formal escort and accompanied this time only by two knights, one on each side, and two squires riding behind them. One squire carried the royal sword, with its hilt of gold and its scabbard glinting with precious stones, while the other bore the King’s flat steel pot-helmet with the narrow golden coronet worked around its burnished rim. Richard was bare headed, his mailed cowl pushed off his head to hang down his back, leaving his long, red-golden hair to blow free in the breeze of his passage. He wore a magnificent cloak of crimson silk worked with gold thread, its sides thrown back over his shoulders on this occasion to reveal the white surcoat with the red cross of the Holy Warrior and not the standard of Saint George that he normally wore on the breast of his tunic—three elongated golden lions passant on a field of brilliant scarlet. Beneath the surcoat, he was armored in a full suit of gleaming mail, and his battle shield covered his left arm, its single black lion rampant facing left against a bright red field.

  To his men, and to the world at large, Richard Plantagenet was every inch the warrior king, but Henry barely noticed him after the first, analytical look in which he gauged the monarch’s temper and judged it to be pleasant. Thereafter, his eyes remained fastened on the knight who rode at the King’s right shoulder, his own son, Sir André St. Clair. He had expected that André would be returning, as he was now working permanently as an interlocutor of some kind between the Fleet Master de Sablé and the King. It had been many months since Henry had last seen him, and his first thought, even from as far distant as they were from each other, was that the lad looked older—older and more mature, which was as it should be, and happily carefree, which was even better. He noted, too, that his son yet wore his own knightly mantle, bearing the device of St. Clair, which meant that whatever else had been occupying his time, André had not yet joined the ranks of the Temple Knights. For just a moment, St. Clair was overwhelmed with pride in his son, with anticipation of the simple pleasure of sitting with him, hearing his voice, listening to his opinions. He felt a lump swell up in his throat and swallowed it down gratefully. Then, schooling his face to show nothing, he spurred his horse forward.

  Richard saw him coming and greeted him with a shout from a long way off. Although Henry could not make out the King’s words, he inferred from the broadness of Richard’s wave towards André that he was showing Henry his thoughtfulness in having brought his son along. Henry waved back, reined in his horse, and dismounted, acknowledging that he had been recognized and waiting until the King’s party reached him. When they did, he stepped forward and brought his clenched fist to his left breast in salute to his liege lord, but Richard was already staring off, over Henry’s head, his ever-shifting attention captured by something beyond the line of Henry’s vision. Henry stood waiting to be addressed, and for long moments nothing happened, but then Richard looked down and smiled at him.

  “Henry St. Clair, old friend. Forgive my inattention and bad manners in seeming to ignore you, but I thought I saw someone I did not expect to see here.” His eyes flicked away again, then returned to Henry. “But that is neither here nor there. We have been in the saddle all day and stand in need of relaxation … that and stimulation.” He straightened his shield arm and worked with his other hand at freeing the clasp that held his cloak in place. “Tomkin! Take this, quickly.” As one of the young squires moved quickly to take the monarch’s shield and cloak from him, Richard continued speaking. “You look hale and hearty, Henry, and I hear tales from all directions that you have been doing sterling work here. There!” He finally rid himself of cloak and shield and stood up in his stirrups, pushing his elbows back and flexing his back muscles. “I recall I promised to tell about the coronation next time we two met … and no doubt you will be panting to hear all.” He looked about him at the expressions on the faces of the others in his small group and then laughed. “Well, my friend, if that is the case you can put your tongue back into your mouth. You were the fortunate one, to be far gone on that occasion. It was tedious, Henry, tedious. Was it not so, Sir André? Apart from the single instant when I felt that crown come down solidly upon my head, to be sure. That one moment made the entire thing memorable and worthwhile. But the remainder of the event was boring beyond belief, all muttered Latin amid solemn dirges sung in a sea of smelly, swirling incense.” His eyes moved away again, narrowing with interest.

  “Damn me, it is Brian.” He glanced back at Henry, obviously impatient to be gone. “I must have words with my English captain, Brian of York, over yonder, my friend, so I pray you, bide you here with your son while I do so, or come with me if you so wish. This should not take long.” He jabbed his horse with his spurs, and Sir Henry turned his head to look at his son, who was watching him expectantly, flanked by the other knight who had come with him and the King. Henry judged the stranger to be almost his son’s age, perhaps a year or two older. He nodded courteously to the stranger and spoke to his son.

  “Well, what think you? Shall we join the King?”

  Sir André smiled and shrugged. For a moment, Henry thought he detected a tinge of something unexpected, almost a bitterness, in his son’s eyes, but when he looked more closely there was nothing there to be seen, and he thrust the thought aside.

  “If he is going to fight afoot with the English soldiery,” André was saying, “as I suspect he is, we ought not to miss the spectacle, for I am told he does it rather well.” He bent forward in the saddle, reaching out towards Sir Henry, who grasped his hand warmly. “Good day to you, Father. Permit me to introduce Sir Bernard de Tremelay, who has accompanied us from Orléans.”

  Sir Henry again nodded cordially to the newcomer. “De Tremelay, you say, from Orléans? Was there not a Master of the Temple once who had the same name and came from Orléans?”

  “Sir Bernard de Tremelay.” The stranger nodded, smiling. “Your memory is excellent, Sir Henry. That was more than thirty years ago, and he was Master for barely a year. He was elder brother to my grandfather. I heard much about him in my youth, for he was highly regarded, but I never met the man. Shall we join the King?”

  The three men prodded their mounts towards the place where the King and his
two squires had dismounted in front of the small knot of kneeling English yeomen whom Henry had been watching earlier. By the time they arrived Richard was already rousing the kneeling men to their feet, laughing and slapping at the cumbersome padding the men wore.

  “ … on your feet,” he was saying. “A fighting man need kneel to no other. A bending knee may indicate a pledge of fealty from time to time, but a bent knee that stays bent means subjugation, and I’ll have none of that in men who are my friends. Brian!” he called to the instructor, the only man among the English yeomen who was not swaddled in padding. “Pick me your three finest among this crew. No, wait. That would be … injudicious. I’ll pick my own three, and take my chances. You will supervise the fight.” He scanned the twelve astonished men in front of him, then raised a hand. “Now listen, all of you. I pick three of you, and we fight. Three single bouts, to a fall or a solid hit. Brian will judge.” He favored all of them with his dazzling grin, all flashing eyes and gleaming teeth. “But be warned, any man fool enough to hold back to spare my royal kingship and dignity will find himself digging latrines for the next two weeks. Is that clear? It had better be. I want to beat all three of you honestly and fairly because I am the better fighter. And if you can beat me, best me, knock me on my arse in the mire, then you had better do it, for I will not thank you for insulting me by holding back. And besides, I have a golden bezant for any man who knocks me down— three of them, if need be.” He looked from man to man again, meeting each one’s eye, then chose his opponents with three flicks of an index finger. “You, you, and you, let’s fight. Someone among the rest of you lend me a quarterstaff, and we’ll set about it.”

  Word spread quickly, for the King’s behavior around his soldiers was well known, and even before he and his opponent faced each other for the first of the three bouts, a crowd had formed, encircling the fighters tightly so that the remaining nine yeomen of Brian of York’s group had to busy themselves forming a protective cordon, keeping the press back sufficiently far to afford the fighters room to move freely. But the nine of them were not sufficient to control the surging crowd. Those at the back of the throng jostled for a better view, pushing the people in front of them forward, and Sir Henry himself soon had to requisition additional “volunteers” to hold back the crowd.