The Half-Hanged Man

by David Pilling

  I also noticed the leather patch covering the man’s right eye, and the long sword and dagger at his belt. He may have looked a fop, but was clearly a fighting man as well.

  “Be calm,” he said as I struggled to my knees and clutched at my throat, still gasping and choking for breath, “relax, and your muscles will relax as well. You will be sore for some time yet, and I fear the scar on your neck will never heal.”

  “What…” I managed to croak, and tried to do as the man suggested, forcing myself to be calm and draw in long, slow lungfuls of precious air.

  “Has happened to you? A just question. Firstly, you are not dead, but I have an offer to equal anything in Heaven. How would you like to be rich, young man?”

  The stranger smiled thinly, and smoothed his moustaches with his index finger. “I should introduce myself. I am William Calveley, an esquire of Cheshire, and you and your friends owe your life to me. However, I fear I arrived late. You were already dangling in the wind when I rode into the market place, straight from negotiating the price of your skin with the Earl. My most sincere apologies.”

  “Regarding my offer,” he went on, “the riches I offer can be counted in terms of high wages, better than anything you might earn as a common labourer or wasting away in some provincial garrison, and as much booty as you have the strength and wit to take. In short, I offer you the chance to be a soldier, and win fame, glory and wealth in foreign lands.”

  He smirked and dug out a bundle of folded sheets of parchment from his belt. “Of course, it is not really an offer. I have your indenture here, signed by the good Beauchamp. He agreed to hand you over in return for rather too much of my gold. So you are mine to command, Thomas Page, though I would rather you came willingly. Reluctant soldiers tend to be short-lived soldiers, I fear.”

  I was still baffled by this strange, one-eyed fellow, and the sequence of events that had brought me from the scaffold to the glade. “Why do you want me?” I rasped, playing for time.

  “Because I need good fighting men to take across the sea, and I heard of your exploits at Somerton Hall. The tale has spread across the county, and grows with the telling. I was inspired to compose a few verses in celebration of it. I have already paid for you and your friends, and you are mine for the time stipulated in the indenture. Here is a copy of yours. Keep it safe.”

  Calveley tossed one of the leaves at me, and his face sagged into a frown as he watched me laboriously reading the contents. “An educated peasant,” he said, smoothing his moustaches again, “how charming. I fear I shall have to watch you, Thomas Page.”

  His mood seemed to have turned sour, and he abruptly sprang to his feet. “Up,” he said impatiently, though he did not offer his hand. “We will have no use in France for soldiers who can’t get off their backsides.”

  Mention of my friends distracted me from absorbing the contents of the indenture. I read but slowly anyway, and would have been lost without the use of my index finger to pick through the words. Stuffing it into my belt for another time, I struggled to my feet and looked around.

  We were in some unfamiliar winter forest, the trees stark and stripped of their leaves. There was a sharp bite in the air, and a pungent tang of wood smoke drifting from the trees a little way to the east.

  “Our camp is over yonder,” said Sir William, nodding in the direction of the smoke, “I had you carried to this quiet spot, for I feared you might be alarmed otherwise. I am a considerate man, you see.”

  Calveley professed his fears rather too often for my liking, and I already found his insouciant manner grating. I was grateful that he had saved me from the gallows, but the idea that I had been bought, like a cow at market, angered me.

  “I am free-born,” I said hoarsely, forcing the words out, “no man has the right to buy or sell me.”

  “You are wrong, I fear. Dead men have no rights.”

  He said no more, but led me towards the smell of smoke and the sound of men’s voices drifting through the spindly trees.

  The trees opened onto a larger clearing, with half a dozen tents pitched around the edges in a neat circle. A fire was crackling inside a ring of stones in the centre, and a large black iron pot suspended over the fire. A few men in aketons and half-armour were gathered around it, ladling hot steaming stew into wooden bowls. Other men were lounging around the tents and talking in low voices as they ate their supper. They had a taut, ready look about them, and kept their swords, helmets and bucklers within easy reach.

  My brother and the giant figure of Richard Kelleshull were sitting together before one of the tents, wolfing stew. Ralph laid aside his bowl and ran to embrace me.

  “Alive!” he shouted as he clasped me in a fierce embrace and thumped me on the back, “you’re alive! Thank God!”

  “Gently,” I whispered, “gently, Ralph, I can hardly breathe.”

  He let me go and held my shoulders at arm’s length, his ugly face full of concern as he studied me. “Christ, look at the state of your neck,” he said, his eyes widening, “it is a miracle you can still speak. They cut you down just in time.”

  I gingerly touched the source of my pain, wincing at the tenderness of the bruised flesh. “Does it look bad?”

  “You look like what you are,” said Calveley, interrupting us, “a man who was half-strangled. Let the scar be a reminder of the debt you owe me.”

  Ralph turned to face him. “We do owe you,” he said awkwardly, for he hated being in anyone’s debt, “but I don’t like these bloody indentures. We didn’t sign them. What if we don’t want to go to France?”

  “In that case I fear I must return you to the tender custody of the Earl of Warwick. He agreed to let me buy you on the strict understanding that I took you out of the country. There is your choice. Come with me to France, or hang.”

  He laid a hand gently on the hilt of his sword. “Do not mistake my easy manner for weakness. I am something of a poet, yes, but a soldier by profession. My patience has limits.”

  Ralph started to bristle, and Richard lumbered to his side, his huge fists clenching and unclenching. They looked ready to make a fight of it, even though Calveley had over a score of soldiers to call on, and for a moment I thought I was going to die all over again.

  “Don’t be so bloody stupid, boys,” said someone in a thick Irish accent.

  The speaker was sitting cross-legged by the fire, watching us argue with mild interest while he picked bits of mutton from his teeth with a twig. He was lean and active-looking, his bare upper arms corded with sinewy muscle.

  “Do you want to live, and maybe make your fortunes?” he said, “or do you want to fill a pit? Have a bit of sense.”

  The tension in the air, which had been as taut as a bow-string, seemed to slacken, and I took the opportunity to clap a hand over my brother’s mouth.

  “We will go to France,” I said.

  5.

  The Irishman’s name was Niall O Neill, and he was a refugee from the more or less constant wars that raged in Ireland between the native Gaels and the descendants of the Anglo-Norman conquerors. He claimed to have a foot in both camps, and to have fled his native isle after changing sides once too often. That was all he cared to say about his history, and I didn’t care to ask for more.

  For some reason he made a point of befriending me during the long march south-east from Warwickshire to Southampton. I had never left my home county before, rarely venturing a few miles beyond Deep Walden, and was grateful for the worldly Irishman’s company as we slogged across winter-bound England.

  He was full of talk about Calveley, and I soon learned that the languid one-eyed man was far less noble than he tried to appear.

  “His distinction, if you can call it that, is his kinship to Hugh Calveley,” O Neill told me, “you will have heard of him, of course?”

  I told him I had not, and he snorted. “Not heard of Captain-General Sir Hugh Calveley? Why, he is one of the greatest soldiers of our age, and a mean and vicious bastard to boot. William Ca
lveley is his cousin, and seeks a reputation to rival Hugh’s. More to the point, he seeks money. He needs money. I have heard that he holds but a few poor and unprofitable manors, he is in debt to the church, his wife is a shrew and his only child, a girl, is rumoured to be a halfwit. So he has resorted to soldiering. It is his only chance of winning the fortune he sorely needs.”

  I don’t know where O Neill got his information, but it had a ring of truth about it, and he continued to confide in me.

  “He longs to be a landed knight,” he said, “to feel the touch of steel on his shoulders, and hear the words, arise, Sir William. Then he might be free of his envy. But he is just an esquire, a no-mark, condemned to a life of obscurity unless he can win another with his sword. Our swords.”

  “Some men might be content with a quiet life,” I said, staring into the fire. Much as I had hated Deep Walden, I was missing the place, the familiar sights and faces of home. The world seemed too big for me in those early days, like a giant hungry beast, and in my frequent nightmares I was swallowed up in its maw.

  The other men in Calveley’s company were mostly veterans he had scraped together from various garrisons and pot-houses in Cheshire and Warwickshire. All of them had seen hard service, mostly in Scotland or France, though one or two leathery-skinned characters claimed to have crossed swords with the Moors.

  Of the situation in France, I knew little, save the vague stories that had reached our grubby ears in Deep Walden. England and France were at war, everyone knew that, and had been for decades. Being at war with the French was simply the natural state of Englishmen, though there had been an uneasy truce recently.

  “Still a land of opportunities, for the likes of us,” said Edmund Cheyne, an archer from the borders of Cheshire, “the truce will not hold, and might have been broken already. No peace can last in a country that has the Free Companies swarming all over it.”

  O Neill nodded in agreement. “Calveley will want to find his cousin, no doubt, and try and persuade him to take us into his service. We could do a lot worse. Hugh Calveley knows where the profits are.”

  Rather than ask lots of foolish questions, I was careful to keep my mouth shut and listen carefully to the older men talk. In that way I learned of the Free or Great Companies, bands of mercenary soldiers that were running amok in France and Italy, independent of any king or lord, though sometimes hiring out their services to them.

  The Companies were a law unto themselves, a terrible threat to the law and order of the realms they infested, burning, looting and killing more or less as they pleased. Old King Edward had made good use of them in his wars with France, and some of the greatest Company captains were Englishmen, such as the aforementioned Hugh Calveley, Robert Knolles, whom they called the Old Brigand, Robert Birkhead, John Cresswell, and others.

  The most famous was John Hawkwood, an Essex man and now a great captain-general in Italy, where he hired his White Company out to the constantly warring city-states. A little of his fame had filtered through to our village, and to me and my brother he was a fantastical, half-legendary figure, like Arthur or Charlemagne.

  Some of the tales I heard of these captains were absurd, and intended to frighten us raw recruits. For instance, O Neill claimed to have once served under Hugh Calveley in Brittany, and to have cheated him at dice.

  “The folly of youth,” he said, “for no man with any wit cheats the Black Captain. For he is black, you see, covered from head to toe in black armour, and wears a mighty black helm in the shape of a calf’s head. He is a giant, too, with flaming red hair and sharpened teeth. In battle he wields a glaive that no other man can lift, and for my deceit he gave me this.”

  The Irishman shifted closer to the fire and hitched up his jerkin, exposing a sliver of pale belly. His flesh was marked by an ugly scar, a thick slash of puckered, reddish tissue that looked like it had been infected before healing.

  “He sliced me open, and left me to die by the road,” he said with relish, “but God was smiling on me, for it was the depths of winter. I swooned with the pain, and when I woke up the frost had sealed the wound.”

  His story was enough to impress us green Warwickshire boys, but Cheyne and his mates merely laughed.

  “I’ve heard you tell at least five different stories of where you got that scar,” cried Cheyne, “never trust an Irishman. Like as not, you probably got it from some whore you tried to bilk out of her money. Was it the Raven, perhaps?”

  O Neill flew into a rage. He drew his dirk, offering to mark any man who called him a liar, and the Welshman, Captain Uriens, had to intervene before he and Cheyne lunged for each other’s throats.

  “You know our rules,” Uriens warned them, “if any one of you draws blood from a comrade, the guilty party shall suffer ten strokes of the whip and be docked a month’s wages. It’s all there in your indentures.”

  Cheyne and O Neill put their blades away, grumbling and eyeballing each other, and conversation around the fire quickly switched to other subjects, as if the brief row had never happened.

  Our commander took little interest in the affair. He kept aloof from his men, and in the evenings sat cross-legged in front of his tent, coaxing noises from that damned harp. I suspect he regarded going to war as a romantic venture, and fancied himself as some sort of knight-errant. He left the daily running of his fledgling Company to Uriens. Uriens also carried his banner, a black calf’s head against a yellow field; hence we were the Company of the Black Calf. The banner drooped on its pole, miserable sodden thing, as we plodded on through the grim weather.

  Uriens was my first mentor, a bundle of crackling, inexhaustible energy, bow-legged, round-headed and pot-bellied, living on his nerves and his passions. Chief among the latter were genealogy and history. He was fiercely proud of his ancestry, as most Welshmen are, and boasted that he could trace his family tree back to some ancient mythical hero named Bran the Blessed.

  His name in full, as he recited it, named his ancestors to the nth generation: Uriens ap Meurig ap Rhys ap Huw ap Llew ap Uriens ap Griffith ap Meurig ap Rhys ap…etcetera, stretching into the mists of Celtic antiquity. He also claimed kinship with Owain Lawgoch, the half-mad Welsh routier who, you may recall, declared himself the High King of Wales and had to be quietly assassinated before he did any real damage.

  Excitable, boastful little windbag he may have been, but Uriens was a career soldier and put his knowledge to practical use.

  “The art of war is constantly evolving,” he told me, “but there is much to be learned from dipping into the chronicles. Take a look at this.”

  He rummaged among the gear piled onto the back of our wagon and handed me a bulky length of wood.

  “What do you make of that?”

  I turned it over in my hands. It seemed to be a club, about five feet long and thickened at one end. The thick end was topped by an iron spike, fixed in place with a pin.

  “It’s a big stick with a nail in it,” I replied, “crude and cheaply made. Useful in a street brawl, maybe.”

  Uriens shook his head at my ignorance. “That crude thing, as you call it, is a Goedendag,” he said, “and was invented in Flanders. Some sixty years ago, the weavers and dyers of that country rose in revolt against their French overlords, and so the King of France sent a mighty host of knights and men-at-arms to deal with them. At a place called Courtrai, in Flanders, the rebels crushed the might of France. What do you think they were armed with?”

  He didn’t wait for my answer. “They had no heavy horse, for they were just a rabble of tradesmen. All they had were long spears, like the Scots at Bannockburn, and their Goedendags. Crude, as you say, and cheaply made. They had to be. The men with the Goedendags stood behind the spears and clubbed the French horsemen when they charged. It’s a club and a spear, you see? You knock a man down with the thick end, and then stab him with the spike. The French were slaughtered almost to a man at Courtrai. They didn’t like that at all, and thought twice before invading Flanders again.”


  I was quite taken with the tale, and liked the weight and simplicity of the Goedendag. “Can I keep it?” I asked.

  “Certainly, so long as you tell the quartermaster. That’s the weapon for you, fachgen, just the thing for a big lump of Saxon beef who can’t wield a sword. Swordsmanship is akin to dancing, Page, and you have two left feet.”

  So I kept the Goedendag, which can be translated in English as Good-Dagger. I came to prefer my Good-Dagger to the English bill, and rode or marched with it slung over my back.

  6.

  All of English life can be encountered on the highways, even in the winter: fat-bottomed merchants followed by trains of wagons laden with goods, clouds of beggars holding out their filthy hands for money, humble friars on palfreys, retinues of proud Cistercians in their black and white robes, knights, lords and barons, glittering in steel and brightly coloured mantles, jogging along on their monstrous war-chargers.

  It was all new to me, and exciting. I wanted to see London, as all young men do, and walk its bustling streets, see the White Tower and worship in St Paul’s. But Calveley was for pushing on to the coast, not wanting to lose his men to brothels and ale-houses and all the other dangerous temptations of the city. I could smell it, even from a distance of several miles, and fancied I could see the tops of towers and roofs peering over the trees to the south as we slogged along the muddy road. I was not destined to visit London, or even set foot in my native land, for almost twenty years.

  We were headed for Southampton, where Calveley hoped to hire a cog to take us across the Channel. He rode in front on his pale destrier, singing and plucking his harp. The rest of us were mounted on the smaller horses known as rounceys, and I, who had never ridden before, did so with all the grace of a sack of spuds. Ralph and Richard suffered with me, and we ended every day stiff and aching and comparing saddle-sores.

  At last the Company came within sight of the coast. For the first time in my life I smelled the salt tang of the ocean, saw gulls gliding overhead and in the distance, the sea itself, a darker wash of grey underlining the October skies. It made me giddy, and my spirits rose with every step we took closer to Southampton.