The Half-Hanged Man

by David Pilling

  I almost fell over a rape in progress. One of our fellows, breeches around his ankles, was grunting like a pig as he forced himself on a woman helplessly pinned under his stinking weight. The sheer brazenness of it briefly drove all thought of Ralph from my mind, and I stopped, staring like a halfwit at his pale, surging buttocks.

  “M’aidez!” the woman shrieked, over and over, “m’aidez!”

  I still had a trace of decency in those days, coupled with a steadily diminishing streak of innocence. Rape is part of a soldier’s reward, but I didn’t know that then. Outraged, I bent over the man and smashed the butt of my Good-Dagger against the back of his skull. The blow was hard enough to split the bone and knock him unconscious, if not kill him, and his vigorous thrusting and grunting abruptly ceased.

  His victim fell to weeping, but I ran on, still bleating my brother’s name, like a goat with a sore throat.

  I had thought that the garrison, hopelessly outnumbered, would retreat inside the castle and leave the town to die. They had fallen back, but only to regroup. The castle gates opened and over a hundred French men-at-arms sallied out to confront the invaders, led by the constable of the town. I learned this later, and at the time only heard the distant sound of trumpets adding to the general havoc.

  An uncomfortable voice was worming into my brain, filling me with a sense of shame. This is your doing. You led the wolves to their kill. The slaughter is on your conscience.

  The sound of hoofs clattering on cobbles alerted me, and I looked up to see a knight mounted on a coal-black destrier galloping in my direction. He saw me skulking in the shadows and lowered his lance. I could not hope to outrun him, for the street was long and narrow and there were no alleys to dodge down. For a ghastly couple of seconds all I could do was stand and stare at death as it approached with a lance-head aimed at my liver.

  The war bow has saved my life on many occasions, and this was one. A flurry of cloth-yard shafts whistled out of the darkness above and behind me, slamming into the knight’s big horse and sending her tumbling onto her side, legs flailing as she screamed and spasmed in pain. Men rushed past me, archers in kettle hats, baying for the fallen knight’s blood like a pack of hounds descending on a kill. Two more jumped from the sloping roofs of houses either side of the street.

  A fallen knight is still a knight, and he still had his sword. The blade flickered like a serpent’s tongue and took the closest archer’s leg off below the knee. Two more leaped in to aid their crippled mate, and went down in a storm of blood. Others closed in around the gleaming figure of the knight, hacking and clubbing at him with spear-butts, axes and hammers.

  Someone caught my arm. I twisted away, sword raised to stab, and relaxed. It was Pasmore.

  “Easy, Page,” he said, his leathery face wrinkling into a grin as he released my arm, “we have enough enemies here without turning on each other.”

  “My brother,” I croaked, lowering my sword, “have you seen him?”

  “Last I saw, he was with Cresswell, trying to break into the church,” he said, pointing at the tall steeple of the priory, “the monks were dropping stones on our heads, so I left them to it.”

  I thanked him and ran towards the priory.

  Ralph was lying on his side in the gutter of a side-street. He looked peaceful, as though he was asleep, one arm tucked under his head, the other draped limply across his chest.

  The massive edifice of the priory was not far off. The bells had fallen silent, for Cresswell and his brigands had finally managed to force their way in, and were busy plundering and killing.

  I knelt beside Ralph and searched for any sign of a pulse. Instead my fingers found a deep hole in his neck, stretching from ear to ear, through which the remnant of his life’s blood was slowly pumping. The front of his jerkin was thick with the stuff, and it had splattered onto the cobbles as he lay dying.

  My breath seemed to catch in my windpipe as it dawned on me that Ralph, my only living kin, was gone. A rising sense of horror, the kind of horror that only hits us when a loved one dies, engulfed me, and I could not move or breathe.

  A second longer, and Calveley would have had me. I caught the glint of steel in my eye, and rolled aside just as his sword swept through the air where I had been kneeling.

  “Pig,” he spat, and swung at me again, his thin black-clad figure leaping over Ralph’s corpse. I caught the blow on my buckler, gasped at the jolt of agony that coursed up my arm, and was knocked backwards against a wall. Fresh agony ripped through me as my spine scraped against the crumbling brickwork.

  “You’re going to die, traitor, turncoat, pig.” His voice was mocking, imbued with all the aggression and venom that I thought Ralph had knocked out of it. He was quick, too, his sword dancing in the air before my eyes. I had never seen him fight, or even spar, and never suspected he possessed any skill. But Calveley was a gentleman, of sorts, and had been raised to bear arms.

  The sword leaped for my neck. I parried clumsily and knocked it aside with my Good-Dagger, but didn’t dare attempt a counter-thrust. Instead I retreated, shuffling crablike along the wall as he came on, hacking, slashing and stabbing in a blur of movement and steel.

  His sword snaked past my guard and slashed my shoulder open. I fell back, gritting my teeth against the pain, and he cut me again, his blade scoring a thin line of fire across my chest.

  I was using my Good-Dagger like a stave, parrying and blocking, but making no attacks of my own. I was already wet with sweat and blood, and thought I could hear the voices of my old instructors, Gurney and Uriens.

  “Left, right, parry, stamp, thrust!” the dulcet Welsh tones of Uriens thundered in my head, “my God, Page, have you no rhythm? Have you never danced, you lumbering English slug? Again!”

  “Drop your sword once more, and I’ll beat you even harder,” warned the sadistic sergeant-at-arms, Gurney, in his nasal Warwickshire twang, “and next time I won’t hold back, neither.”

  They were of little help. I could hear the breath rasping in Calveley’s throat as he muttered curses and imprecations, and it struck me that he had lost his wits.

  “My Company, my sweet Company,” were some of the more legible words he uttered, “you took my glory, pig, you stole it from me, you and your brother.”

  He seemed to gain strength from his rage, but I had recovered from the speed and surprise of his attack now. I was younger than Calveley, and the knowledge that he was my brother’s killer poured like ice into my brain, filling me with careless courage.

  I stopped retreating and stood my ground, caught his next thrust on my buckler and attempted to grab his wrist. A desperate ploy, but I luckily caught hold and pulled, and as he stumbled I lashed out with my boot and caught him under the right knee.

  Calveley was tougher than he looked. A sharp hiss of pain escaped from between his clenched teeth, but he didn’t fall. Instead he hesitated, favouring his left leg as he waited for the pain in his right to pass. He called me a pig again, among other things, and I decided to shut him up.

  “Not a pig, but a wolf,” I said, and threw my Good-Dagger at his face. I deliberately threw it at his blind side, which also happened to be his right, and followed up by snatching up a loose rock and hurling it at his head.

  The rock bounced off his skull with a satisfying thump, and this time he fell, half-stunned, blood spurting from a gash on his forehead. I dived at him and grabbed his sword, cutting my fingers on the blade, and wrenched it out of his grip.

  “Kill him, Page!” shouted Hobbes from somewhere to my right. I knelt on Calveley’s thin chest and held the tip of his sword over his eye. He struggled feebly to throw me off, but lacked the strength.

  “For my brother, for Richard Kelleshull, and for all the men you deserted beside the Loire,” I said, and rammed the blade home.

  14.

  Above the South Door of the great priory at La Charité-sur-Loire, framed by a Romanesque arch supported by twin pillars, is a tympanum of the Transfiguration. Christ himse
lf stands on the mountain inside a halo of light in the centre of the tympanum, flanked by two of his apostles.

  This was just one of many elaborate carvings inside the priory, but there was something about the image of the miracle of Christ in radiance that fascinated me. I often resorted to the church in the days following the sack and surrender of La Charité, and studied the tympanum in the south transept.

  Cresswell and his men had wrecked the interior, tearing down the altar and smashing the stained glass windows for the sheer joy of it. Several monks had died trying to stop them, and their brothers spent long hours on their knees praying for the souls of the murdered men as they scrubbed blood from the flagstones. The haunting echo of their plainchant echoed through the cloisters, filling my tarnished soul with a kind of peace.

  One day my peace was broken by a woman’s voice.

  “Are you the man on the mountain, Thomas Page?”

  I turned, and found myself looking at the Raven. She was dressed more formally than the first time I had seen her in Brioude. Her lustrous hair was pinned back into a long braid, she wore a sober grey dress, and there were no gold ornaments glimmering at her wrists and ears. She was scarcely less beautiful, though, her severely scraped-back hair only serving to accentuate the sleek natural lines of her face.

  Once, I would have been hopelessly nervous and tongue-tied in her presence, but Ralph’s death had changed me. We had buried him in a quiet spot in the woods just outside La Charité, with a French padre forced at sword point to mumble the last rites over his grave. I didn’t sleep for three days and nights afterwards, but prostrated myself in a local chantry, weeping and begging for the salvation of his soul. Afterwards I felt cleansed, as if a fire had swept through me, destroying all my fears and doubts.

  “No,” I replied, “I am the man in darkness. I come here because I envy the one who is surrounded by light.”

  The Raven nodded solemnly, and glanced up at the tympanum. “You have not asked my name,” she said. She had a pronounced Spanish accent, complete with a lisp.

  “I’m not interested in your name.”

  “Liar. I remember the way you stared at me in the market-place at Brioude. And now you are the man everyone is talking of.”

  “Me? Why? I’ve done nothing.”

  She folded her arms and slowly looked me up and down, as though studying a painting. “I expected arrogance. All you soldiers for hire are arrogant. Maybe you are different. Interesting.”

  “When word reached Brioude that La Charité had fallen,” she went on, “and that the plan had been conceived by some Englishman no-one had ever heard of, I said to myself, I must meet this man. Seguin didn’t like it, for he had not yet tired of parading me in front of his peers, but I left anyway. I was sick of him. Most soldiers treat death as a business, but to him it is a pleasure.”

  She took a small step closer, and I became aware of her delicate sweet scent, like roses after rain. “As I came north, more stories reached my ears. Of how you rampaged about the town performing mighty deeds, and slew a man named Calveley in single combat, kinsman to the great routier.”

  “If knocking down an old man and a rapist count as mighty deeds, then that is true,” I replied, though secretly I was flushed with pleasure at the thought of men talking of me as some kind of hero.

  “And Calveley?” she asked, smiling an oddly crooked smile. Over her shoulder I could see an old monk watching us with disapproval etched into his raddled face, but I ignored him.

  “True, I killed him.”

  “How?”

  “I threw a rock at his head.”

  She tossed her head back and laughed, exposing perfect white teeth, and the monk’s face twisted in fury at the ungodly sound.

  I shuddered as The Raven touched the livid scar on my neck with the tip of her index finger. “Many call me a whore,” she said, “and it is true that, in the past, I had no other way of surviving and prospering. These days, however, I only take men that interest me. Seguin interested me for a little while, as did the Bastard of Savoy and Charles of Navarre, among others. Now you interest me, Thomas Page.”

  I could feel Christ in his magnificence glaring down at me. Between him and the monk I was caught in a cross-fire of holy disapproval, but found that I cared little.

  She moved in to kiss me, and I responded. My eyes met with the monk’s, who was now a picture of outraged horror, and I winked at him.

  For the remainder of that rain-sodden November and into December, while Burgundy slowly crumbled and Duke Philip raged at his council in Dijon, I was the Raven’s unofficial guest. She had rented a fine suite of rooms at a hotel near the centre of the town, though I saw little of them outside of her bedchamber.

  There, between the sighs and moans, she taught me her true name, and something of her strange history.

  “Well?” demanded Froissart, looking up, weary and red-eyed, from his work. He had been writing for hours, and the grey fingers of dawn were starting to grope through the shutters of the tavern.

  The grey-haired man who claimed to be Thomas Page smiled and rose wearily from his stool. “Enough for now,” he said, massaging his throat, “all the other customers have gone, and we’re keeping the landlord from his bed.”

  “Let him stand a while longer! Your tale is only half-finished. Tell me of the Raven.”

  “Another time, perhaps. My tale is nowhere near half-finished, but I have talked enough for one night. Let me sleep.”

  Froissart moistened his lips with his tongue, and looked anxiously at what he had written so far. “Damn it,” he said, reaching for his cup with a trembling, ink-spotted hand, “go to your bed, then, and meet me here tomorrow.”

  “It is tomorrow.”

  “The next day, then! You will be well paid, I promise.”

  Page straightened, and scratched his bristly chin. “Agreed,” he said reluctantly.

  They shook hands on a bargain, and the Half-Hanged Man went to his rest.

  PART TWO: THE RAVEN OF TOLEDO

  Eastcheap

  Two days later, as agreed, Jean Froissart and the beggar who claimed to be Thomas Page met again in the fetid semi-darkness of the Plough inn. Froissart came with two man-servants this time, competent ruffians with cudgels in their hands and dirks in their belts. He had no intention of falling victim to another street gang.

  He found the beggar waiting for him at the same table as before, nursing a cup of ale and studying a piece of yellowed parchment. More pieces were scattered about the table. Froissart spotted a lock of black hair resting on the parchment the other man was reading.

  The beggar did not look up. “Sit down,” he said curtly, pointing at the bench opposite. Froissart obeyed without thinking.

  Annoyed at being given orders by a man he still suspected to be a fraud, albeit one with a good imagination and knowledge of history, Froissart reached over and tapped the parchment with his forefinger.

  “What’s this?” he said, “learning your lines? Remember, I am still not convinced you are who you claim to be. Tonight’s tale had better be a convincing one.”

  The beggar looked up and fixed him with a bleak stare. His eyes were bloodshot, as if he had been weeping or hadn’t slept, and their cheery sparkle of two days ago had evaporated.

  “These are her letters,” he said in his usual hoarse whisper, “or such as I was able to rescue from the shipwreck. There were many more…all lost now, at the bottom of the sea off the coast of Portugal, where I was shipwrecked four years ago. I brought them to aid my memory, but I find they are dredging up unwanted ghosts. Watch your tongue this evening, Frenchman. I am in no mood for your arrogance.”

  Froissart briefly considered calling in his servants, whom he had left to guard the door, to teach the man a lesson, but thought better of it. He had no wish to start a brawl. Word of it might reach the court. His cheeks burned as he imagined Chaucer hearing of the incident and composing satirical rhymes in which Jean Froissart played a central role.


  He rummaged inside his portfolio for writing materials. He selected a freshly-sharpened quill, dipped it in his inkpot, carefully wiped off the excess and sat poised over a blank sheet of vellum.

  The beggar picked up the lock of black hair between finger and thumb and gazed at it. “I will tell you of the Raven,” he said, “her early years, and how she came to loathe and despise the King of Castile.”

  “King Pedro?” said Froissart. The other man nodded.

  “King Pedro, otherwise known as Pedro the Cruel, and no man deserved such a sobriquet more. His fate became entwined with the Raven’s, and eventually with mine, so it is essential that I tell you this part of her story.”

  Froissart’s pen scratched busily across the vellum as the beggar began to talk of the woman he had loved.

  1.

  Her true name was Eleanor Menezes de Alonchel, and she was born in Western Spain, in Alconchel in the province of Badajoz, part of the Kingdom of Castile. She was the daughter of a minor half-Spanish, half-Portugese Rico Hombre, Don Estaban Menezes, whose ancestors had earned fame but little material reward fighting against the Moorish kingdom of Granada. Thus Eleanor came from old and honourable stock, but impoverished and with little to show for their heroics save one poor manor and an old timber hall.

  They did have one advantage, in their distant kinship to the Portugese grandee, Don Juan Alfonso de Albuquerque. Don Juan was an ambitious and subtle man, destined to rise to power and greatness in the early years of the reign of King Pedro.

  Eleanor was born in the year 1336, when Castile was under the strong but ruthless rule of Pedro’s father Alfonso XI, known by his people as ‘The Avenger’ or ‘The Implacable’. Alfonso had worked hard to deserve these titles, mercilessly putting to the sword any who opposed him, Christian and Moor. He was also shrewd enough not to push his tyrannies too far, and supremely successful in war. In 1340, when Eleanor was still an infant, he won his great victory over the Moorish armies of Granada and Morocco at the Battle of Rio Salado, ending their ambitions to carve out a permanent Muslim realm in the Iberian Peninsula.