Blood of the Innocents

by Michael Jecks

  There came a shout, then a series of cries that seemed to be getting closer, with a crashing of twigs and little branches. Gaillarde looked up in time to see a nun hurtling through the undergrowth. She had a wimple trailing, leaving her hair enclosed within a coif, while the skirts of her robe were held up in her hands to allow her to run as best she could, but her clothing was snagging on twigs and brambles, and her shins were bloody from scratches and cuts. Her eyes were wide with terror and she was running as though the hounds of Hell were on her scent.

  She did not see the clearing and the women until the last moment. Suddenly she burst through the surrounding undergrowth and found herself in their midst, staring about her wildly. One of the guards tried to reach for her, but she darted to one side with a squeak like a hunted rabbit; but that put her in reach of the second guard. He swung his polearm and the pole hit her at the back of the head. Her skull was thrown forward with the strength of the blow, and she fell to her knees.

  When he grabbed her arm, pulling her to him, two more men arrived. These were the ones who had chased her from the convent beyond the woods.

  ‘Leave her alone! She was ours!’

  The guard watching laughed. ‘Go find another!’

  ‘She was ours, though.’

  ‘You make good beaters. You drove the game to us, and for that we’re grateful! Get on! You’re getting all the fun already!’ the guard standing said, still watching his colleague. The two men stood muttering as though to dispute the two guards’ right to take their prize, but then they heard more screams. Cursing, they turned and hurried back the way they had come.

  Gaillarde put her hands to the ground and found herself touching a great wooden branch that had fallen from the tree above. Without thinking, she grasped it and stood.

  She was almost in a dream, or so it felt. There was nothing in her mind: no emotion, no concern, no fear. She stepped quietly to the nearer guard, who was watching his companion trying to kiss the captive nun. Perhaps he heard her steps, or saw a shadow. Whatever the reason, he began to turn to face her just as she swung her branch.

  The wood crashed into his face, mashing lips and teeth into a bloody froth. He grunted and thrust out with his polearm, but she was already swinging back, and his pole was out of the way when the branch crashed into the side of his head. His temple was crushed like an egg shell, with a sound like a wet cabbage hit with a bar. The man fell without a word, without a cry.

  She hefted her branch. The other guard saw her approach, but he seemed incapable of comprehending his danger. Her branch fell on him and he fell back, letting the nun free. Gaillarde struck him again, once, twice, thrice, and his eyes rolled up into his head as he fell, blood blackening his hair like tar.

  Gaillarde pulled the nun away. The young woman was still only partially aware as Gaillarde led her away, in a daze herself.

  Picking up the stick had been an automatic reaction. As soon as her fingers met the branch, they enfolded it as though acting on their own volition without any need for her to instruct them. Standing and swinging it at the guards was the inevitable consequence of her picking it up. There was nothing that required thought or planning. Each stage of her attack flowed on as a natural consequence of the stage before. And now two men lay dead.

  The nun stared about her with petrified eyes, her hands clutching at her robes as though fearing a fresh attack at any moment. But, for now at least, she was safe. Gaillarde patted the nun’s head, hugged her, kissed her gently, and pushed her away, up the road in the direction that the mercenaries had come, back to safety.

  Then Gaillarde returned to the other women. They looked up at her dully. None made a comment. They were all too weary and emotionally drained. None had the strength to rise or run; none of them cared.

  She should have run. She knew that. But she couldn’t. She was so very tired.

  She sat back at her tree and closed her eyes.

  Berenger and Grandarse had left before the second hour of the day, their men clattering along behind them.

  Now, with some seventy-five men, supplies for two days and a bag of oats tied to the saddle, Berenger was leading the way deep into the French countryside and for the first time in days he wasn’t upset. His hands weren’t shaking, his head felt good. The thought of a cup of wine now, even this early in the day, was enough to make his heart beat a little faster, but it was not an all-encompassing passion.

  Just now, though, there was more to his life than mere drink. He was more keen on the idea of finding Will.

  In short, he felt elated.

  ‘So why are we being sent out, Frip?’ Clip asked in his customary whine. ‘Why’s it us?’

  ‘We’re going to find the men who destroyed the convent, the other men from the routiers you discovered, Clip. I have a friend who is following them. They took his wife, and it is our task to find them and rescue her and the other prisoners they took.’

  Imbert scowled at that. ‘I thought Sir John told us to go and find the French scouts who were . . .’

  ‘Don’t listen to conversations that weren’t meant for you,’ Grandarse snapped. ‘We will look for them, too. We have more than one mission, man.’

  ‘The scouts should be easy to find, Grandarse,’ Berenger said. ‘They will be searching for any stragglers themselves. If we continue on the road to St Jacques, we may well find them.’

  ‘If I was their commander, I’d sit on my arse towards the middle of our army, and I’d have my riders sent out to the flanks of the English army to see how broad a swathe of devastation we were determined to make.’

  ‘They won’t need to,’ Robin said. ‘They’ll see the smoke.’

  ‘Yes, you may be right. But they’ll know we’ve seen them, so they’ll expect a welcoming party trying to catch them. They may be feeling secure just now, mind. They may think the English won’t care to catch them.’

  ‘So we shall have to be greyhounds.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Gilles asked. He was sitting on a short pony that suited his diminutive size. At his side his friend, the taller Nick, snorted derisively. ‘Have you never set a hound loose at a hare?’

  ‘I’ve seen it done.’

  Berenger said, ‘The hound will always be swifter, over any distance. But oftentimes it will miss its quarry because the hare is smaller and can turn faster. As the hare jinks and twists, the hound overshoots, if it is unused to the quarry. A young greyhound will be a great deal faster than the hare, but it will miss every time, because it is untrained and unused to the hunt. But get an older, slower hound, and he may well take the hare because he runs behind the younger, faster hound, and can anticipate the hare when the youngster misses.’

  ‘What has that got to do with us?’ Nick asked after absorbing this for a few minutes.

  ‘You’ll be the young greyhound, while we’re the older, cleverer ones, aren’t we, Frip?’ Clip said, adding self-consciously, ‘When you’ve been on as many campaigns as us, you’ll see.’

  Grandarse hawked and spat, pulling up his belt again. ‘They are few and fleet. We are the greyhounds, more likely to catch them over time if we get into a chase, but it won’t be easy. So we will use guile and try to catch them that way.’

  ‘I hope we are the greyhound,’ Berenger said. ‘I hope we are not the hare. But the scouts for the French know their land, and they could easily trap us like conies in a net if we are careless, so be vigilant.’

  Imbert gave a snigger. ‘You think some French monkeys will catch us? We’re English!’

  ‘English we may be, but if you enter a fight, it is safer to consider the enemy to be more powerful than you. Assume they are more powerful and more clever, more devious, more dangerous than you.’

  ‘Pshaw!’ Nick exclaimed. ‘Why? We know that Englishmen always win in a fight even when we’re outnumbered.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve been told?’ Berenger said. ‘That is good. But Englishmen who believe that often die because their arrogance makes them forget that
their enemy is intelligent too. Think on this: if we all die this morning, but Prince Edward goes on to win a great victory, all will say that the English are invincible. They will remember the Prince’s name over the centuries as a great warrior, they will remember the names of all the knights who fight at his side. But us? We who die here today? We will be forgotten in a week. No one will want to remember the little force that was wiped out to a man by a cleverer French captain. So keep your eyes open and be as vigilant as a cat hunting a mouse. For that is the only way you will survive.’

  The rest of that day was a blur. Gaillarde was unsure whether she had truly killed those two guards, but the bodies were there as proof.

  When the two men were discovered, Will came to view them and soon came to the conclusion that someone had heard the attack on the convent and thought to come and save the nun before she could be injured or killed. That was the thought of the mercenaries, anyway. Gaillarde took little interest in the proceedings. She was so weary.

  The convent had been a small commune of thirty nuns and some associated workers. The nuns had been captured, all bar the last, and raped before being put to the sword. Soon after the women were taken to the place, past the bodies and into the cloister where other men were grabbing all the silver and valuables. Books were thrown to the floor and trampled, until a routier collected them for the fire later. There were barrels of wine in an undercroft, and the men became very merry as they drank their way through as much of it as they could.

  But not Bernard. He had come through a little while after the nun had disappeared. He glared at the women waiting there in the clearing, and Gaillarde thought he was staring particularly at her. She refused to meet his eyes, but remained with her gaze fixed on a tree at the other side of the clearing, until he strode to her and squatted before her.

  ‘Where did she go?’ he asked.

  She focused on his shoulder. That way she could almost ignore his fierce eyes. He slapped her hard on the cheek, and her face was turned.

  ‘Where, bitch?’

  She heard his knife scrape as it was pulled free of its rough scabbard, and involuntarily her eyes flitted right even as he touched the point to her throat. It wasn’t her fault, she couldn’t help herself. Her eyes moved without her meaning to. Later she would tell herself that it wasn’t her fault, that he would have found her without Gaillarde’s help, that her own eyes hadn’t betrayed the nun, but all the while she knew the truth. It was her fault.

  He made an incomprehensible snarling sound, rose, and was away, running in pursuit of the nun.

  Not long afterwards they all heard the horrible scream of a woman in terror.

  Ethor and Denisot had followed after the men for two days, and after the constant marching had been exhausted when they reached another village and found more bodies. It was somehow even worse than discovering their own village. These were innocents. They had no money to steal, no gold, no valuables, only their lives. The company had treated them like animals, slaughtering them all.

  Denisot found himself weeping as he passed in among the bodies. He was looking for Gaillarde, but there was no sign of her. He just hoped and prayed that she was still alive and had not been slain on the march. But even through his tears, he felt his anger increasing. It was a rage that demanded satisfaction. He would find the men responsible for this violation of his land and make them pay, he swore.

  He was hungry. Starving. It was more than a day since he had last eaten anything, but the urgent need to follow the company and try to rescue his wife overruled all else. He peered into a couple of the houses that were not too badly burned, but at a brief glance there was nothing inside that they could eat. He was reluctant to enter any of the buildings. It would have made him feel like a despoiler himself, as though he was joining in the plunder of the village.

  ‘Denisot, we have to find some water,’ Ethor said.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a well, and when they drew the bucket, both drank their fill. It was cool and refreshing, and both felt better for it. Ethor had a wineskin, which they filled, and then they set off again in pursuit of the men who had killed all the folk in the village.

  They had been walking for the whole day and Denisot was blundering along, already half-asleep. A yard or two behind him, Ethor was little better. After covering so much ground, both of them were plodding mechanically, barely aware of their surroundings. Denisot was remembering an Easter feast day with his children and wife back in those happy days when Gaillarde still loved him and he her. It had been a lovely, bright but cold day, and the children had been happy, running about as they made their way to the church to celebrate the feast day, when Denisot heard the squeak of leather and jingle of harnesses and instantly thought to himself that this was wrong: there had been no noise of horses on the day he was remembering.

  And then his eyes opened and he saw the company in front of him. They had waited and waylaid him, he thought as he saw the leader canter towards him, drawing his sword.

  ‘No!’

  Denisot heard Ethor’s roar and a moment later he was thrown to the ground as Ethor rammed him aside. There was a shock as he was flung to the ground, then a jarring as his neck was ricked back, and he tried to clamber to his feet, but a hideous blow slammed into his head and he fell forward, his brow striking a rock as he went. He felt his neck explode into white-hot agony as something made it bend too far sideways, and suddenly there was nothing but anguish, and he was riding high over the ground on waves of pain that rolled and crashed like surf over his head, and he drowned in it and mercifully knew no more.

  Friday 19 August

  Grandarse and Berenger agreed on a camp not far from St Jacques, and the next morning it took them little time to reach the place where they had kept watch over the routiers that night.

  Now it was a desolate spot, with the mess of the ruined village. At one side of the square a series of men’s bodies had been piled; the rest of the place was deserted. There was no living thing that they could find, only the reek of burning and the sight of broken spars and beams sticking into the air like the broken ribs of a gigantic animal.

  Berenger saw Gilles and Nick blench at the sight and smells. Behind them, Felix was already puking while his father stood with a white face, shocked, his hand patting his son’s back like a man calming a horse. A short distance away Baz stood gazing on as if in a trance.

  ‘Look on, men. This is what war is like,’ Berenger said. He indicated the bodies. ‘You must get used to this. You will see many more men and women like this. Gutted, beheaded, tortured, raped: this is dampnum, a war of terror. The French King cannot protect them. All he can do is mouth pointless platitudes.’

  ‘Who did this?’ Pierre asked, his voice quiet.

  ‘It was the men who tried to kill Fripper,’ Grandarse said. ‘That’s why we’re aiming to catch them. So, back on your horses, and let’s get moving!’

  The party remounted, for once without the usual complaints. Berenger took a good look at the men and was reassured to see that even Clip and Dogbreath were grim-faced as they rode past the pile of dead men. They had both seen enough horrors in their time as soldiers, but there was always something particularly hideous for a new recruit about the sight of a fresh pile of corpses. Especially when they were not even soldiers.

  ‘These were English, Frip?’ Robin said. He had joined Berenger unnoticed while Berenger was looking at the other members of the vintaine.

  ‘Yes. Most of them. They are the same as any other company. Some are Guyennois, some Navarrese, some Saxons – men from everywhere. There is nothing that distinguishes one killer from another, in my experience. A man who is prepared to slay another can be from any background.’

  ‘I hope we find them soon.’

  ‘Aye. And then we can copy them and kill all of them, just as they killed the men in the village,’ Nick said dully.

  They found a clearing at the edge of a river, and as the sun was fading, Grandarse gave the order to
dismount and make camp. It was a relief for all the men. Even those who were more experienced were relieved to be able to climb from their saddles and rest sore thighs. Even releasing the grip on the reins was consoling. Berenger felt as though his hands were formed into claws. After so many days of resting in the Abbey, the ride had been an unaccustomed effort for him. The others were little better.

  Berenger walked about the camp as the men set about seeing to their beasts, collecting firewood, pulling tinder from beneath their shirts where it had been stored to keep dry, striking steel with flint, mixing oats to make cakes. Soon there was the soothing odour of wood-smoke mingled with boiling peas and beans in pots. Clip disappeared for a while, and when he returned he carried a pair of chickens.

  ‘Where did you find them?’ Grandarse asked.

  ‘There was a peasant’s cottage up there,’ Clip said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder as he plucked the bird on his lap. ‘No one in, but these two were scrabbling about, so I caught them.’

  ‘How does he do it?’ Grandarse demanded of the world in general.

  ‘It’s a skill,’ Berenger said, grinning. It was good to see that Clip had not lost his talent. He had been known as the most skilled forager in the vintaine when he had been fighting with Berenger during the last campaigns.

  The men were so tired after their long ride that they mostly collapsed where they sat, rolling themselves in their blankets and sleeping where they were.

  Berenger refused to sit. He knew that to sit would mean to sleep and he dare not sleep yet. He must set sentries and watch for danger first. The sight of the people in the village earlier should have warned all the men of the dangers of this area. He walked to the perimeter of the camp, and stood staring out as the night drew in. As the veil was pulled over the countryside, he felt a strong sense of loss. He was relieved to find that he had no desire for wine. Once, by this time of day, he would have had to have become drunk before he could sleep. And then, as his eyes closed, he would see those faces again . . . not tonight, though, he promised himself. Tonight he would be free from them.