by Dan Davis
Walt jumped to help me to my feet. “Sir, I must say your wounds are grievous. Sit here and I shall fetch a surgeon to bind you up.”
“No surgeon. Help me to the house. I will recover there.”
“As you command, Sir Richard. But should we not wait for the bailiffs? This bastard done killed the stew’s porters down at the door. I cannot flee from the body or else they shall say I am guilty of murder myself.”
He was quite right. But I knew that I needed blood or else I would not be long for the world and I had no wish to be caught up in an inquest. It would be possible to bribe the right men to keep my name from public mention but only if I was not seen with the body by too many people, and already I could hear folk gathering from elsewhere in the stew.
“We shall do what is right and no harm shall come to you, Walt,” I said, hurting quite badly, “as long as you help me to dress and get me out of here.”
“Right you are, sir,” Walt said, then immediately shaking out my shirt.
“Leave my purse for the ladies.”
“Ladies?” He looked around, confused. “The whores? How much?”
“Leave the purse,” I hissed. They would know what I wanted in return. “And for the love of God, remove your blade from the man’s head.”
***
“You must have some idea who he was,” Stephen said, pacing back and forth across the width of his solar on the second floor of his house.
It was our house, in fact, belonging to the Order of the White Dagger. We had taken turns to reside there over the decades, though I had used it the least because the decadence and stench of London made my skin crawl. But Stephen lived there publicly and had spent most of the previous century living there, on and off, and as such it was imbued with his personal taste. Having said that, Stephen would rather have by his bedside twenty books, bound in black or red, of Aristotle and his philosophy than rich robes or costly fiddles or gay harps. What décor I could see was far too modern for me to feel comfortable at the best of times and I was already feeling unnerved by my recent close brush with death.
I lay back on a day-bed with a cup of tepid blood in my hand, generously donated by three of Stephen’s servants. We always employed servants, in the London house, and also in our smaller residence in Bristol where Eva preferred to live, who agreed to be bled every few days so that someone provided blood once every other day. That volume and at that frequency was enough to keep Stephen or Eva in fine fettle. We explained to the servants when we employed them that bloodletting was necessary for maintaining the good health and proper behaviour and always they had accepted it, for it was a common practice.
“I have no idea who he was, Stephen. How many more times would you like me to say so?”
“And you are certain he was one of us?” He strode away across the chamber as he spoke.
“He was one of William’s creations, yes.”
Stephen turned on his heel. “Could it be that one of William’s men created another? One of the revenants, as the Assassins made in Alamut?”
“I suppose it is possible. The revenants were quite raving mad but they were also burned quite rapidly by sunlight, far more even than you and Eva are. Our fellow today wore no hat or hood and his face was quite unburned.”
“Not much daylight in the stews, though, I take it?” he said it lightly, not looking at me.
“Do not pretend you are ignorant on the matter, Stephen. But he must have arrived in the stews through the streets in sunlight.”
“We do not truly know where he came from, do we. Perhaps he was lying in wait for you.”
“I thought you were the master of reason and I was the dullard soldier? If you recall, the porters were slain when he forced his way into the building. He came from outside. Hence, he came through the streets and was not burned by the sun. Therefore, he was not a second-generation revenant but a direct spawn of William.”
Stephen inclined his head for a moment. “And where did he come from before he walked the streets of London, I wonder? Was he English?”
“I told you. He did not speak a word.”
“Did he look like an Englishman?”
“An English hermit, perhaps. The brute was in dire need of a barber’s services.”
“And yet he had the build and the skill of a man-at-arms.”
“I would not necessarily say so. We did not engage in much swordplay. His build would have made him suitable as the bailiff of a hundred in the northern Marches. A brute, as I say, not necessarily a warrior.”
Stephen nodded and continued his pacing. “I shall ask the city watchmen which gate he entered through. Perhaps that will give us a clue about where he came from. Assuming one of the oafs recalls our Assassin.”
“Unless he came by ship,” I muttered.
Stephen stopped and turned to me. “How did he smell?”
“How did he smell?” I sighed. “Stephen, I do wonder about you.”
“Think, Richard,” he said, approaching and speaking earnestly. “Did he smell of the road? When he grasped you, did he smell like horses? Or did he smell like the sea?”
I laughed. “You have not been on a long voyage for so long. You have forgotten that you would step ashore reeking of stale sweat, vomit, and piss.”
“And is that how he smelled?”
I scoffed. “I really do not recall, Stephen, but why do you not pay a visit to the coroner and ask if you can smell the corpse.”
He grinned. “What a wonderful idea.” Tapping his fingers on his chin, he turned and wandered away.
“Oh, Stephen. Our money can only turn so many heads and close so many mouths. If you go around sniffing corpses then you shall arouse more suspicion than we can cope with.”
“Is finding the origin of our assassin not of the utmost importance? Surely, he was sent by the very man we are pursuing? If we can track the path of the assassin back to its source, will it not lead us to the knight we seek in France?” He came close again, dropping to a knee next to me. “What if we cannot find our quarry in France or further afield because he somehow got by us and came to England? The black knight could be in London, Richard.”
I nodded, galled that I had not come to the same conclusions myself. “Very well. Do whatever you have to. But, for God’s sake, go nowhere without protection, Stephen.”
He airily wafted my concerns away. “Oh, I shall be fine.”
I shot my hand out and grasped his wrist. “I am returning to the siege, Stephen and shall not be here to keep you safe. That brute would have killed me if Walt had not hewed his skull in half at the very last moment. What if the assassin had come for you first? You have been living comfortably for so long that you have forgotten what it is to be afraid. It is time you remembered.”
Stephen was nothing if he was not a survivor at heart and so he listened to me and swore he would arm his porters and servants, hire soldiers to guard the house and to guard his person when he went about on business.
I hoped that the black knight was not in England, as Stephen feared. My duty to the King, and to the men of my company, required me to return to the siege of Calais.
My oath to find the immortal spawn of my brother William would have to continue in France.
8. The Siege of Calais
A warm summer came and inside Calais the townsfolk starved. Like all who suffer in a besieged town, they ate all the horses, then the dogs, the cats and finally the rats and mice. After that, in their desperation they began to boil up and chew on anything leather. I have been that hungry myself many times down the centuries and it is a kind of madness that grips you and convinces you that you may draw sustenance from gnawing on your own shoes.
Then their wells inside the city began to dry up. Disease broke out within the walls.
We knew how bad it was inside because we intercepted a letter from the commander of Calais to King Philip. A brave Genoese rowed out of the harbour one morning in late June but he was caught and his letter brought to King Edward who r
ead it aloud to us right away.
“We can now find no more food in the town unless we eat men’s flesh,” Edward read from the letter. “None of the officers have forgotten your entreaties to hold out until we may fight no more and that day is almost upon us. Yet we shall not surrender. Every man here has sworn to rush from the gates to fight our way through the English lines until each one of us lies dead.”
As he read this, I turned to Thomas behind me. “Take some men and keep watch on the gates until you are relieved.” When I straightened again, I caught Northampton’s eye and he nodded once at me.
“Unless you can find some other solution, this is the last letter that you will receive from me, for your loyal town shall be lost and all of us that are within it,” Edward said. He finished reading it but spoke no more of the content. Then he called his servants. “I shall seal this with my personal seal and then we shall forward it to my cousin Philip.”
A few of the lords laughed at the thought of the King of France receiving such a dire letter with Edward’s seal on it but most of us, I am sure, felt sickened by the plight of our enemies within the town.
In response, Philip organised and launched a great relief convoy of eight armed barges that he hoped could sneak into the harbour without us noticing. I have no idea what the French were thinking because we easily captured the supplies ourselves, which was a boon to us and served to utterly break the will of the leaders within the walls.
The leaders of Calais rounded up all their wives, daughters and mothers. They gathered their young sons and their aged fathers. They collected their injured and sick brothers.
And they threw them out of the gates.
It was not an unknown tactic, of course, but it was no less sickening to see for all that. For the sort of men who become the leaders of a town, their primary duty is their duty to their lord. To their king. That duty was greater than the one they felt to their own families.
When I saw the huddled, shuffling, gaunt women with their children clinging to their knees creeping out of the gates, I wondered if Englishmen would have acted in the same way. Our people have always been more independently minded than those from other nations. Not as independent as the Welsh, Scots or Irish, thank God, but certainly more so than the French. The English have always had the best possible balance between civic duty, royal loyalty, and individual freedom. The French, on the other hand, were always more collectivist or, as one might say, subservient.
But we were not going to take on responsibility for the families of the men who had defied us for months. King Edward was under no legal or moral duty to accept those useless mouths expelled by the fathers of Calais. What was worse, though, was that he refused to allow them through our lines and inland to where Philip could care for them.
And so those poor women, those weeping children and weak old men, huddled in the ditches between our lines and the town’s defences, starved.
“Let them burden King Philip, Your Grace,” I pleaded to Edward one night after I could take their wailing no longer.
“My lords have always whispered in my ear that you are too cruel and unchivalrous to keep at my side,” the King said in response. “But they do not know you like I do. You have always had this absurd weakness. A hidden softness. And because of your weakness, you would have me show weakness when Christendom is watching. No, Richard. They had their chance to surrender months ago. Now they must suffer the consequences.”
I wanted to argue. Protest that compassion was not weakness but a virtue and it would be a most Christian and decent thing to let the women and children through our lines.
But just as he knew me, I knew him. I had known him since before he was twenty years old. And I knew that when he had that dark look in his eye, nothing could divert him from his royal cruelty.
I rode away with my men to raid the country for as many days as it took for the last of the refugees to perish.
It did not take long.
By this point, we had been outside Calais for ten months and our army had been growing since spring. The town that we had created to contain them all also grew beyond our defensive lines and so we had to extend them further. By July, we had over five thousand men-at-arms with their horses and servants, along with seven thousand infantry made up from levied townsfolk and Welsh spearmen, plus what I was told was twenty thousand archers. In all my years fighting, I had never known an English army the size of it. Indeed, we would not raise such a force and send it to France for another two hundred years or so.
And what were we going to do with all those men?
The French were coming for us again. King Philip had raised a massive force and he meant to drive us into the sea and so wipe away all we had accomplished since that morning near Crecy almost a year before. He marched it right up to our camp at the end of July and we all knew we would have another fine battle to decide the fate of France. Philip was said to have eleven thousand men-at-arms, more than twice as many as we had. We all wondered if our archers would be able to cut them down as they had at Crecy.
“What is he waiting for?” Walt asked me as we looked up at the distant escarpment miles to the south where thousands of Frenchmen stood, silhouetted against the bright blue skies beyond. Their banners and pennants fluttered and whipped in the steady wind.
“Would you attack us?” Thomas asked. “If you were Philip?”
“I wouldn’t attack us,” Rob said, “if I was Charlemagne himself, sir.”
“Philip is no Charlemagne,” I said. “But we must do our duty and provoke them into attack.”
My company and many others skirmished with groups of Frenchmen who strayed from their lines. We shot a great many arrows but they were fearful of us. And rightly so.
Our defences were simply too strong and the French took less than a day to decide they would not attack us after all. In fact, they sent word to Edward that it was not a battle they wanted, but peace. And so a truce was declared and my company fell back from the French. My archers were disappointed, for their favourite sport was shooting the horses of French cavalry.
The two sides negotiated for days. Thomas and I got close enough to watch the French delegation closely but we saw no one who might be the knight of the black banner.
“Look,” Thomas said, nudging me with his elbow. “It is Sir Geoffrey.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Geoffrey de Charny,” he said, pointing at a well-built lord in a very fine red coat. He was fine-featured, with a square jaw and piercing eyes. “Do you see? Standing between the Duke of Bourbon and the Duke of Athens.”
“Hmm,” I said. “The man does not seem to be particularly impressive.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Thomas turn and stare at me.
“Perhaps you should introduce yourself,” Thomas said. “If we are considering one day inviting him to join the Order of the White Dagger.”
“Look at him, Thomas,” I said. “Why would he ever give away his fortunate life in order to take up a future with us? When Dukes wish to consult an expert on chivalry, they send for that man there. He has founded more than one monastery. He keeps company with the great lords of his kingdom.”
“So do you, Richard.”
I snorted. Yes, I thought yet did not speak aloud, yes but Charny’s lords respect him.
“I think we must aim a little lower than the living embodiment of chivalry, Thomas.”
He laughed a little and nodded. “Very well. Let us look elsewhere.”
The negotiations dragged on. The French proposed that we march from our camp and fight an open battle. Of course, Edward could never have given up our impregnable position but the ploy was a clever one because it made the King of England appear to contradict his chivalrous reputation as a man of honour. We wondered how our king would handle the matter but in the end he was saved from having to make a decision.
For the commanders of Calais, the men who had thrown their wives and children out to starve to miserable deaths within sight and
earshot of their precious town, declared at sundown on the first day of August, that they were surrendering.
In the dark of the night, the French army under Philip set fire to their tents, spoiled their food and water, and marched away before sunrise. The King of France abandoned his most loyal subjects to their fate.
The lords of Calais requested a negotiation of terms but Edward’s message to them was quite clear. There will be no terms. Their surrender would be complete, and England would take everything they had and would kill every man they wished to.
“You cannot mean to put all these knights and squires to the sword, Your Grace?” Northampton said to the King that day.
“I would prefer their heads,” Edward said. “But I will be content with hanging.”
“They simply did their duty to their king,” the capable knight Walter Mauny said. “Just as any of your loyal captains would have done in their place.”
“Ransom them, Your Grace,” Suffolk said. My lord the Earl of Suffolk had once been a prisoner of King Philip a few years before and had ultimately been ransomed.
I said nothing. It was not as though Edward did not know that the chivalrous thing to do would be to ransom them but he was resolute and I knew from the set of his arms and the look in his eyes that nothing his lifelong companions could say would move him.
William Bohun the Earl of Northampton came around the backs of the men surrounding the King and approached me. He reached out and grasped my upper arm, attempting to drag me away from the rest. When he found that he could not budge me so much as an inch, he lowered his head and muttered. “I would speak with you, sir.” I followed him a few paces away. “You must add your voice to ours, Richard. Make him see reason.”
I shrugged. “Why should I care what happens to those men? They defied us. They must now die.”
He peered up at me, squinting. When he spoke, he did so slowly, as one might explain the operation of a watermill to a simpleton. “It is not the men but the convention we must protect, Richard. It is clear that this war will drag on further, perhaps for years. What if you yourself are captured one day? You scoff but you are often deep within enemy territory with no support and it is highly likely you will be taken. Do you wish to be ransomed or murdered outright in revenge for this atrocity which we are about to commit?”