The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic

by Bernard Cornwell

  She watched him from the hearth. 'You won't?'

  'Not today,' he said gently.

  She stood, shaking the dizziness from her head. She pulled her dress close at her neck and tied the torn parts together with loose threads. 'You may not hurt me,' she said, 'but others will.'

  'Not if you stay with me,' Thomas said. 'Here,' he took the big black bow from his shoulder, unstrung it and tossed it to her. 'Carry that,' he said, 'and everyone will know you're an archer's woman. No one will touch you then.'

  She frowned at the weight of the bow. 'No one will hurt me?'

  'Not if you carry that,' Thomas promised her again. 'Is this your house?'

  'I work here,' she said.

  'For Sir Guillaume d'Evecque?' he asked and she nodded. 'Is he here?'

  She shook her head. 'I don't know where he is.'

  Thomas reckoned his enemy was in the castle where he would be trying to extricate an arrow from his thigh. 'Did he keep a lance here?' he asked, 'a great black lance with a silver blade?'

  She shook her head quickly. Thomas frowned. The girl, he could see, was trembling. She had shown bravery, but perhaps the blood seeping from the dead man's neck was unsettling her. He also noted she was a pretty girl despite the bruises on her face and the dirt in her tangle of fair hair. She had a long face made solemn by big eyes. 'Do you have family here?' Thomas asked her.

  'My mother died. I have no one except Sir Guillaume.'

  'And he left you here alone?' Thomas asked scornfully.

  'No!' she protested. 'He thought we'd be safe in the city, but then, when your army came, the men decided to defend the island instead. They left the city! Because all the good houses are here.' She sounded indignant.

  'So what do you do for Sir Guillaume?' Thomas asked her.

  'I clean,' she said, 'and milk the cows on the other side of the river.' She flinched as men shouted angrily from the square outside.

  Thomas smiled. 'It's all right, no one will hurt you. Hold on to the bow. If anyone looks at you, say, "I am an archer's woman."' He repeated it slowly, then made her say the phrase over and over till he was satisfied. 'Good!' He smiled at her. 'What's your name?'

  'Eleanor.'

  He doubted it would serve much purpose to search the house, though he did, but there was no lance of St George hidden in any of the rooms. There was no furniture, no tapestries, nothing of any value except the spits and pots and dishes in the kitchen. Everything precious, Eleanor said, had gone to the castle a week before. Thomas looked at the shattered dishes on the kitchen flagstones.

  'How long have you worked for him?' he asked.

  'All my life,' Eleanor said, then added shyly, 'I'm fifteen.'

  'And you never saw a great lance that he brought back from England?'

  'No,' she said, eyes wide, but something about her expression made Thomas think she was lying, though he did not challenge her. He decided he would question her later, when she had learned to trust him.

  'You'd better stay with me,' he told Eleanor, 'then you won't get hurt. I'll take you to the encampment and when our army moves on you can come back here.' What he really meant was that she could stay with him and become a true archer's woman, but that, like the lance, could wait a day or two.

  She nodded, accepting that fate with equanimity. She must have prayed to be spared the rape that tortured Caen and Thomas was her prayer's answer. He gave her his arrow bag so that she looked even more like an archer's woman. 'We'll have to go through the city,' he told Eleanor as he led her down the staircase, 'so stay close.'

  He went down the house's outer steps. The small square was now crowded with mounted men-at-arms wearing the badge of the bear and ragged staff. They had been sent by the Earl of Warwick to stop the slaughter and robbery, and they stared hard at Thomas, but he lifted his hands to show he was carrying nothing, then threaded between the horses. He had gone perhaps a dozen paces when he realized that Eleanor was not with him. She was terrified of the horsemen in dirty mail, their grim faces framed in steel and so she had hesitated at the house door.

  Thomas opened his mouth to call her and just then a horseman spurred at him from under the branches of the oak. Thomas looked up, then the flat of a sword blade hammered into the side of his head and he was pitched forward, his ear bleeding, onto the cobblestones. The falchion fell from his hand, then the man's horse stepped on his forehead and Thomas's vision was seared with lightning.

  The man climbed from the saddle and stamped his armoured foot on Thomas's head. Thomas felt the pain, heard the protests from the other men-at-arms, then felt nothing as he was kicked a second time. But in the few heartbeats before he lost consciousness he had recognized his assailant.

  Sir Simon Jekyll, despite his agreement with the Earl, wanted revenge.

  Chapter 8

  Perhaps Thomas was lucky. Perhaps his guardian saint, whether dog or man, was looking after him, for if he had been conscious he would have suffered torture. Sir Simon might have put his signature to the agreement with the Earl the previous night, but the sight of Thomas had driven any mercy from his mind. He remembered the humiliation of being hunted naked through the trees and he recalled the pain of the crossbow bolt in his leg, a wound that still made him limp, and those memories provoked nothing except a wish to give Thomas a long, slow hurting that would leave the archer screaming. But Thomas had been stunned by the flat of the sword and by the kicks to his head and he did not know a thing as two men-at-arms dragged him towards the oak. At first the Earl of Warwick's men had tried to protect Thomas from Sir Simon, but when he assured them that the man was a deserter, a thief and a murderer they had changed their minds. They would hang him.

  And Sir Simon would let them. If these men hanged Thomas as a deserter then no one could accuse Sir Simon of executing the archer. He would have kept his word and the Earl of Northampton would still have to forfeit his share of the prize money. Thomas would be dead and Sir Simon would be both richer and happier.

  The men-at-arms were willing enough once they heard Thomas was a murderous thief. They had orders to hang enough rioters, thieves and rapists to cool the army's ardour, but this quarter of the island, being furthest from the old city, had not seen the same atrocities as the northern half and so these men-at-arms had been denied the opportunity to use the ropes which the Earl had issued. Now they had a victim and so one man tossed the rope over an oak branch.

  Thomas was aware of little of it. He felt nothing as Sir Simon searched him and cut away the money pouch from under his tunic; he did not know a thing when the rope was knotted about his neck, but then he was dimly aware of the stench of horse urine and suddenly there was a tightening at his gullet and his slowly recovering sight was sheeted with red. He felt himself hauled into the air, then tried to gasp because of a dreadful gripping pain in his throat, but he could not gasp and he could scarcely breathe; he could only feel a burning and choking as the smoky air scraped in his windpipe. He wanted to scream in terror but his lungs could do nothing except give him agony. He had an instant's lucidity as he realized he was dangling and jerking and twitching, and though he scrabbled at his neck with his hooked fingers he could not loosen the rope's strangling grip. Then, in terror, he pissed himself.

  'Yellow bastard,' Sir Simon sneered, and he struck at Thomas's body with his sword, though the blow did little more than slice the flesh at Thomas's waist and swing his body on the rope.

  'Leave him be,' one of the men-at-arms said. 'He's a dead 'un,' and they watched until Thomas's movements became spasmodic. Then they mounted and rode on. A group of archers also watched from one of the houses in the square, and their presence scared Sir Simon, who feared they might be friends of Thomas and so, when the Earl's men left the square, he rode with them. His own followers were searching the nearby church of St Michael, and Sir Simon had only come to the square because he had seen the tall stone house and wondered if it contained plunder. Instead he had found Thomas and now Thomas was hanged. It was not the revenge Sir
Simon had dreamed of, but there had been pleasure in it and that was a compensation.

  Thomas felt nothing now. It was all darkness and no pain. He was dancing the rope to hell, his head to one side, body still swinging slightly, legs twitching, hands curling and feet dripping.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  The army stayed five days in Caen. Some three hundred Frenchmen of rank, all of whom could yield ransoms, had been taken prisoner, and they were escorted north to where they could take ship for England. The injured English and Welsh soldiers were carried to the Abbaye aux Dames where they lay in the cloisters, their wounds stinking so high that the Prince and his entourage moved to the Abbaye aux Hommes where the King had his quarters. The bodies of the massacred citizens were cleared from the streets. A priest of the King's household tried to bury the dead decently, as befitted Christians, but when a common grave was dug in the churchyard of St Jean it could hold only five hundred bodies, and no one had time or spades enough to bury the rest, so four and a half thousand corpses were tipped into the rivers. The city's survivors, creeping out of their hiding places when the madness of the sack was over, wandered along the riverbanks to search for their relatives among the corpses that were stranded by the falling tide. Their searches disturbed the wild dogs and the screeching flocks of ravens and gulls that squabbled as they feasted on the bloated dead.

  The castle was still in French hands. Its walls were high and thick, and no ladder could scale them. The King sent a herald to demand the garrison's surrender, but the French lords in the great keep politely refused and then invited the English to do their worst, confident that no mangonel or catapult could hurl a stone high enough to breach their lofty walls. The King reckoned they were right, so instead ordered his gunners to break down the castle's stones, and the army's five largest cannon were trundled through the old city on their wagons. Three of the guns were long tubes made from wrought-iron strips bound by steel hoops, while two had been cast in brass by bell-founders and looked like bulbous jars with swollen oval bellies, narrow necks and flaring mouths. All were around five feet long and needed shear-legs to be swung from their wagons onto wooden cradles.

  The cradles were set on planks of wood. The ground under the gun carriages had been graded so that the guns could point up towards the castle's gate. Bring down the gate, the King had ordered, and he could release his archers and men-at-arms in an assault. So the gunners, most of them men from Flanders or Italy who were skilled in this work, mixed their gunpowder. It was made from saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, but the saltpetre was heavier than the other ingredients and always settled to the bottom of the barrels while the charcoal rose to the top so the gunners had to stir the mix thoroughly before they ladled the deadly powder into the bellies of the jars. They placed a shovelful of loam, made from water and clay soil, in the narrow part of each gun's neck before loading the crudely sculpted stone balls that were the missiles. The loam was to seal the firing chamber so that the power of the explosion did not leak away before all the powder had caught the fire. Still more loam was packed about the stone balls to fill the space between the missiles and the barrels, then the gunners had to wait while the loam hardened to make a firmer seal.

  The other three guns were quicker to load. Each iron tube was lashed to a massive wooden cradle that ran the length of the gun, then turned in a right angle so that the gun's breech rested against a baulk of solid oak. That breech, a quarter of the gun's length, was separate from the barrel, and was lifted clean out of the cradle and set upright on the ground where it was filled with the precious black powder. Once the three breech chambers were filled they were sealed by willow plugs to contain the explosion, then slotted back into their cradles. The three tube barrels had already been loaded, two with stone balls and the third with a yard-long garro, a giant arrow made of iron.

  The three breech chambers had to be worked firmly against the barrels so that the force of the explosion did not escape through the joint between the gun's two parts. The gunners used wooden wedges that they hammered between the breech and the oak at the back of the cradle, and every blow of the mauls sealed the joints imperceptibly tighter. Other gunners were ladling powder into the spare breech chambers that would fire the next shots. It all took time — well over an hour for the loam in the two bulbous guns to set firm enough -and the work attracted a huge crowd of curious onlookers who stood a judicious distance away to be safe from fragments should any of the strange machines explode. The French, just as curious, watched from the castle battlements. Once in a while a defender would shoot a crossbow quarrel, but the range was too long. One bolt came within a dozen yards of the guns, but the rest fell well short and each failure provoked a jeer from the watching archers. Finally the French abandoned the provocation and just watched.

  The three tube guns could have been fired first, for they had no loam to set, but the King wanted the first volley to be simultaneous. He envisaged a mighty blow in which the five missiles would shatter the castle gate and, once the gate was down, he would have his gunners gnaw at the gate's arch. The master gunner, a tall and lugubrious Italian, finally declared the weapons ready and so the fuses were fetched. These were short lengths of hollow straw filled with gunpowder, their ends sealed with clay, and the fuses were pushed down through the narrow touchholes. The master gunner pinched the clay seal from each fuse's upper end, then made the sign of the cross. A priest had already blessed the guns, sprinkling them with holy water, and now the master gunner knelt and looked at the King, who was mounted on a tall grey stallion.

  The King, yellow-bearded and blue-eyed, looked up at the castle. A new banner had been hung from the ramparts, showing God holding a hand in blessing over a fleur-de-lis. It was time, he thought, to show the French whose side God was really on. 'You may fire,' he said solemnly.

  Five gunners armed themselves with linstocks — long wands that each held a length of glowing linen. They stood well to the side of the guns and, at a signal from the Italian, they touched the fire to the exposed fuses. There was a brief fizzing, a puff of smoke from the touchholes, then the five mouths vanished in a cloud of grey-white smoke in which five monstrous flames stabbed and writhed as the guns themselves, firm-gripped by their cradles, slammed back along their plank bedding to thud against the mounds of earth piled behind each breech. The noise of the weapons hammered louder than the loudest thunder. It was a noise that physically pounded the eardrums and echoed back from the pale castle walls, and when the sound at last faded the smoke still hung in a shabby screen in front of the guns that now lay askew on their carriages with gently smoking muzzles.

  The noise had startled a thousand nesting birds up from the old city's roofs and the castle's higher turrets, yet the gate appeared undamaged. The stone balls had shattered themselves against the walls, while the garro had done nothing except gouge a furrow in the approach road. The French, who had ducked behind the battlements when the noise and smoke erupted, now stood and called insults as the gunners stoically began to realign their weapons.

  The King, thirty-four years old and not as confident as his bearing suggested, frowned as the smoke cleared. 'Did we use enough powder?' he demanded of the master gunner. The question had to be translated into Italian by a priest.

  'Use more powder, sire,' the Italian said, 'and the guns will shatter.' He spoke regretfully. Men always expected his machines to work miracles and he was tired of explaining that even black powder needed time and patience to do its work.

  'You know best,' the King said dubiously, 'I'm sure you know best.' He was hiding his disappointment for he had half hoped that the whole castle would shatter like glass when the missiles struck. His entourage, most of them older men, were looking contemptuous for they had little faith in guns and even less in Italian gunners.

  'Who,' the King asked a companion, 'is that woman with my son?'

  'The Countess of Armorica, sire. She fled from Brittany.'

  The King shuddered, not because of Jeanette, but becau
se the rotten smell of the powder smoke was pungent. 'He grows up fast,' he said, with just a touch of jealousy in his voice. He was bedding some peasant girl, who was pleasant enough and knew her business, but she was not as beautiful as the black-haired Countess who accompanied his son.

  Jeanette, unaware that the King watched her, gazed at the castle in search of any sign that it had been struck by gunfire. 'So what happened?' she asked the Prince.

  'It takes time,' the Prince said, hiding his surprise that the castle gate had not magically vanished in an eruption of splinters. 'But they do say,' he went on, 'that in the future we shall fight with nothing but guns. Myself, I cannot imagine it.'

  'They are amusing,' Jeanette said as a gunner carried a bucket of puddled loam to the nearest gun. The grass in front of the guns was burning in a score of places and the air was filled with a stench like rotted eggs that was even more repugnant than the smell of the corpses in the river.

  'If it amuses you, my dear, then I am glad we have the machines,' the Prince said, then frowned because a group of his white-and-green-clad archers were jeering the gunners. 'Whatever happened to the man who brought you from Normandy?' he asked. 'I should have thanked him for his services to you.'

  Jeanette feared she was blushing, but made her voice careless. 'I have not seen him since we came here.'

  The Prince twisted in his saddle. 'Bohun!' he called to the Earl of Northampton. 'Didn't my lady's personal archer join your fellows?'

  'He did, sire.'

  'So where is he?'

  The Earl shrugged. 'Vanished. We think he must have died crossing the river.'