1356

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘To receive the Holy Father’s blessing, Your Eminence.’

  Cardinal Bessières frowned. He was plainly suspicious of the name Thomas had given, but the existence of the old painting seemed to trouble him even more. ‘Just cover it!’ he ordered Giacomo again, then looked back to Thomas. ‘Where do you lodge?’ he asked.

  ‘By Saint Bénézet’s church, Your Eminence,’ Thomas lied. In truth he had left Genevieve, Hugh and a score of his men in a tavern beyond the great bridge, far from Saint Bénézet’s church. He lied because the last thing he wanted was Cardinal Bessières to take a sudden interest in Guillaume d’Evecque. Thomas had killed the cardinal’s brother, and if Bessières knew who Thomas really was then the fires of heresy would be lit in the great square beneath the Papal palace.

  ‘I am curious,’ the cardinal said, ‘about the state of affairs in Normandy. I shall send for you after the None prayers. Father Marchant will fetch you.’

  ‘I shall indeed,’ the priest said, and made the words sound like a threat.

  ‘I shall be most honoured to assist Your Eminence,’ Thomas said, keeping his head bowed.

  ‘Get rid of that painting,’ the cardinal said to Giacomo and then led his green-eyed companion from the room.

  The Italian, still on his knees, let out a long breath. ‘He didn’t like you.’

  ‘Does he like anyone?’ Thomas asked.

  Giacomo stood and screamed at his assistants. ‘The plaster will set hard if they don’t stir it!’ he explained his anger to Thomas. ‘They have porridge for brains. They are Milanese, yes? So they are fools. But Cardinal Bessières is no fool, he would be a dangerous enemy, my friend.’ Giacomo did not know it, but the cardinal was already Thomas’s enemy, though fortunately Bessières had never met Thomas and had no idea that the Englishman was even in Avignon. Giacomo went to the table where his pigments were in small clay pots. ‘And Cardinal Bessières,’ he went on, ‘has hopes of being the next Pope. Innocent is frail, Bessières is not. We may have another Holy Father soon.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he like this painting?’ Thomas asked, pointing to the end wall.

  ‘Perhaps he has good taste? Or perhaps because it looks as if it was painted by a dog holding a brush stuck up its arsehole?’

  Thomas stared at the old picture. The cardinal had wanted to know what story it told, and neither Giacomo nor the green-eyed priest could answer him, but plainly he wanted the painting destroyed so no one else could find the answer. And the picture did tell a story. Saint Peter was handing his sword to a monk in the snow, and the monk must have a name, but who was he? ‘You really don’t know what the picture means?’ Thomas asked Giacomo.

  ‘A legend?’ the Italian guessed carelessly.

  ‘But what legend?’

  ‘Saint Peter had a sword,’ Giacomo said, ‘and I suppose he’s handing it to the church? He should have used it to cut off the painter’s hand and saved us from having to look at his horrible daubs.’

  ‘But usually the sword is painted in Gethsemane,’ Thomas said. He had seen many church walls painted with the scene before Christ’s arrest when Peter had drawn a sword and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant, but he had never seen Peter placed in a snowstorm.

  ‘So the fool who painted this didn’t know his stories,’ Giacomo said.

  Yet everything in pictures had a meaning. If a man held a saw then he was Saint Simon, because Simon had been sawn to pieces at his martyrdom. A bunch of grapes reminded folk of the eucharist, King David carried a harp, Saint Thaddeus a club or a carpenter’s rule, Saint George faced a dragon, Saint Denis was always painted holding his own severed head: everything had a meaning, yet Thomas had no idea what this old picture meant. ‘Aren’t you painters supposed to know all these symbols?’

  ‘What symbols?’

  ‘The sword, the keys, the snow, the man in the window!’

  ‘The sword is Peter’s sword, the keys are the keys of heaven! You need teaching how to suck at your mother’s tit?’

  ‘And the snow?’

  Giacomo scowled, plainly uncomfortable with the question.‘The idiot couldn’t paint grass,’ he finally decided, ‘so he slapped on some cheap limewash! It has no meaning! Tomorrow we chip it off and put something pretty there.’

  Yet whoever had painted the scene had taken the trouble to clear that patch of snow from around the kneeling man, and he had painted the grass cleverly enough, scattering it with small yellow and blue flowers. So the cleared snow had a meaning, as did the presence of the second monk looking fearfully from the cottage window. ‘Do you have charcoal?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Of course I have charcoal!’ Giacomo gestured to the table where his pigments stood.

  Thomas went to the door and looked out into the great audience chamber. There was no sign of Cardinal Bessières or of the green-eyed priest, and so he picked up a lump of charcoal and went to the strange painting. He wrote on it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Giacomo asked.

  ‘I want the cardinal to see that,’ Thomas said.

  He had scrawled Calix Meus Inebrians in great black letters across the snow. ‘My cup makes me drunk?’ Giacomo asked, puzzled.

  ‘It’s from a psalm of David,’ Thomas said.

  ‘But what does it mean?’

  ‘The cardinal will know,’ Thomas said.

  Giacomo frowned. ‘Sweet Christ,’ he said, ‘but you play dangerously.’

  ‘Thanks for letting me piss here,’ Thomas said. The painter

  was right, this was dangerous, but if he could not track down Father Calade in this city of his enemies, then he would invite Father Calade to follow him, and Thomas suspected that Father Calade would turn out to be the priest with very green eyes.

  And the priest with the green eyes was interested in an old, badly painted picture of two monks and Saint Peter, but the centre of the painting had not been the kneeling monk, nor even the gowned figure of Saint Peter himself, but the sword.

  And Thomas, though he could not be certain, was suddenly convinced that the sword had a name: la Malice.

  And that day, long before the None prayers, and before anyone could find him and put him to the church’s torture, Thomas and his company left Avignon.

  The warm weather came. It was campaigning weather, and all across France men sharpened weapons, exercised horses and waited for the summons to serve the king. The English were sending reinforcements to Brittany and to Gascony and men thought that surely King Jean would raise a great army to crush them, but instead he took a smaller army to the edges of Navarre, to the castle of Breteuil, and there, facing the stronghold’s gaunt walls, his men constructed a siege tower.

  It was a monstrous thing, taller than a church’s spire, a scaffold of three floors perched on two iron axles joined to four massive wheels of solid elm. The front and sides of the tower were sheathed in oak planks to prevent the castle’s garrison from riddling the platforms with crossbow bolts, and now, in a cold dawn, men were nailing stiff leather hides to that wooden armour. They worked a mere four hundred paces from the castle and once in a while a defender would shoot a crossbow bolt, but the range was too long and the bolts always fell short. Four flags flew from the tower’s summit, two with the French fleur-de-lys and two showing an axe, the symbol of France’s patron saint, the martyred Saint Denis. The flags stretched and twisted in the wind. There had been a gale in the night and the wind still blew strong from the west.

  ‘One shower of rain,’ the Lord of Douglas said, ‘and this damn thing will be useless. They’ll never move it! It’ll bog down in mud.’

  ‘God is on our side,’ his young companion said placidly.

  ‘God,’ the Lord of Douglas said disgustedly.

  ‘Watches over us,’ the young man said. He was tall and slender, scarce more than twenty or twenty-one years old, with a strikingly handsome face. He had fair hair that was brushed back from a high forehead, blue eyes that were calm, and a mouth that seemed constantly hovering on the edge
of a smile. He was from Gascony, where he owned a fief that had been sequestered by the English, leaving him without the income of his lands, which loss should have rendered him poor, but the Sire Roland de Verrec was renowned as the greatest of France’s tournament fighters. Some had claimed that Joscelyn of Berat was the better man, but at Auxerre, Roland had defeated Joscelyn three times, then tormented the brutal champion, Walther of Siegenthaler, with quicksilver swordplay. At Limoges he had been the only man standing at the end of a vicious melee, while in Paris the women had sighed as he destroyed two hardened knights who had twice his years and many times his experience. Roland de Verrec earned the fees of a champion because he was lethal.

  And a virgin.

  His black shield bore the symbol of the white rose, the rose without thorns, the flower of the Virgin Mary and a proud display of his own purity. The men he so constantly defeated in the lists thought he was mad, the women who watched him thought he was wasted, but Roland de Verrec had devoted his life to chivalry, to sanctity and to goodness. He was famous for his virginity; he was also mocked for it, though never to his face and never within reach of his quick sword. He was also admired for his purity, even envied, because it was said that he had been commanded to a life of sanctity by a vision of the Virgin Mary herself. She had appeared to him when he was just fourteen, she had touched him and she had told him he would be blessed above all men if he kept himself chaste as she was chaste. ‘You will marry,’ she had told him, ‘but till then you are mine.’ And so he was.

  Men might mock Roland, but women sighed over him. One woman had been driven to tell Roland de Verrec that he was beautiful. She had reached out and touched his cheek, ‘All that fighting and not one scar!’ she had said, and he had drawn back from her as if her finger burned, then said that all beauty was but a reflection of God’s grace. ‘If I believed otherwise,’ he had told her, ‘I would be tempted to vanity,’ and perhaps he did suffer from that temptation because he dressed with inordinate care and always wore his armour blanched: scrubbed with sand, vinegar and wire until it reflected the sun with dazzling brilliance. Though not on this day because the sky above Breteuil was low, grey and dark.

  ‘It’s going to rain,’ the Lord of Douglas growled, ‘and this damned tower will go nowhere.’

  ‘It will bring us victory,’ Roland de Verrec said, sounding quietly confident. ‘The Bishop of Châlons blessed it last night; it will not fail.’

  ‘It shouldn’t even be here,’ Douglas snarled. The Scottish knights had been summoned by King Jean to join this attack on Breteuil, but the defenders were not Englishmen, they were other Frenchmen. ‘I didn’t come here to kill Frenchmen,’ Douglas said, ‘I came here to kill the English.’

  ‘They’re Navarrese,’ Roland de Verrec said, ‘the enemies of France, and our king wants them defeated.’

  ‘Breteuil is a goddamned pimple!’ the Lord of Douglas protested. ‘For Christ’s sake, what importance does it have? There are no bloody Englishmen inside!’

  Roland smiled. ‘Whoever is inside, my lord,’ he said quietly, ‘I do my king’s bidding.’

  The King of France, ignoring the Englishmen in Calais, in Gascony and in Brittany, had instead chosen to march against the Kingdom of Navarre on the edge of Normandy. The quarrel was obscure and the campaign a waste of scarce resources, for Navarre could not threaten France, yet King Jean had chosen to fight. It was evidently a family quarrel, one the Lord of Douglas did not comprehend. ‘Let them rot here,’ he said, ‘while we march against England. We should be chasing the boy Edward and instead we’re pissing on a spark at the edge of Normandy.’

  ‘The king wants Breteuil,’ Roland said.

  ‘He doesn’t want to face Englishmen,’ the Lord of Douglas said, and he knew he was right. Ever since the Scottish knights had come to France, the king had hesitated. Jean had chosen to go south one day, west the next, and to stay put on the third. Now, finally, he had marched against Navarre. Navarre! And the English had erupted from their strongholds in Gascony and were ravaging inland again. Another army was gathered on England’s south coast, doubtless to be landed in Normandy or Brittany, and King Jean was at Breteuil! The Lord of Douglas could weep at the thought. Go south, he had urged the French king, go south and crush the puppy Edward, capture the bastard, trample his men’s guts into the mud, and then imprison the prince as a bargaining piece for Scotland’s captured king. Instead they were besieging Breteuil.

  The two men were standing on the topmost platform of the tower. Roland de Verrec had volunteered to lead the attack. The siege tower would be trundled forward, pushed by dozens of men, some of whom must fall to crossbow bolts, but others would replace them, and eventually the whole tower would crash against the castle wall and Roland’s men would slash through the ropes holding the drawbridge that protected the front of the upper platform. The drawbridge would fall, making a wide bridge to Breteuil’s battlements, and then the attackers would stream across, screaming their war cry, and those first men, the men most likely to die, must hold the captured battlement long enough to let hundreds of the King of France’s troops climb the tower’s ladders. They had to climb those ladders while cumbered by mail, by plate armour, by shields, and by weapons. It would take time, and the first men across the drawbridge had to buy that time with their lives. There was great honour in being among those first attackers, honour earned by the risk of death, and Roland de Verrec had gone on his knees to the King of France and begged to be granted that privilege.

  ‘Why?’ the king had asked Roland, and Roland had explained that he loved France and would serve his king, and that he had never been in battle, he had only fought in tournaments, and that it was time his talents as a fighter were put to a noble cause, and all that had been true. Yet the real reason Roland de Verrec wished to lead the assault was because he yearned for a great deed, for a quest, for some challenge that would be worthy of his purity. The king had graciously given Roland permission to lead the attack, and then granted the same honour to a second man, the Lord of Douglas’s nephew, Robbie.

  ‘You want to die,’ the Lord of Douglas had grumbled at Robbie the night before.

  ‘I want to feast in that castle’s hall tomorrow night,’ Robbie had answered.

  ‘For what?’ the Lord of Douglas demanded. ‘For what goddamned purpose?’

  ‘Talk to him,’ the Lord of Douglas now appealed to Roland de Verrec. That was why Douglas had come to the tower, to persuade Roland de Verrec, reputed to be the greatest fool and most chivalrous knight in all France, to urge Robbie to his duty. ‘Robbie respects you,’ he told Roland, ‘he admires you, he wants to be like you, so tell him it’s his Christian obligation to fight the English and not die in this miserable place.’

  ‘He took an oath,’ Roland de Verrec said, ‘an oath not to fight against the English, and that oath was taken freely and piously. I cannot advise him to break it, my lord.’

  ‘Damn his oath! Talk to him!’

  ‘A man cannot break an oath and keep his soul,’ Roland said calmly, ‘and your nephew will win great renown by fighting here.’

  ‘Bugger renown,’ the Lord of Douglas said.

  ‘My lord,’ Roland turned to the Scotsman, ‘if I could persuade your nephew to fight the English, I would. I am flattered you think he would listen to me, but in all Christian conscience I cannot advise him to break a solemn oath. It would be unchivalrous.’

  ‘And bugger chivalry too,’ the Lord of Douglas said, ‘and bugger Breteuil and bugger the bloody lot of you.’ He went down the ladders and scowled at Robbie, who waited with the forty other men-at-arms who would lead the assault across the tower’s drawbridge. ‘You’re a damned fool!’ he shouted angrily.

  It was an hour before the hides were finally nailed into place and had been soaked with water, and by then a small cold rain had began to spit from the west. The men-at-arms filed into the tower, the bravest climbing the ladders to the topmost platform so they would be first across the drawbridge. Robbie Dougl
as was one. He had armoured himself in leather and mail, but had decided against wearing any plate except for greaves to cover his shins and a vambrace on his right forearm. His left arm was protected by his shield, which bore the red heart of Douglas.

  His sword was an old one, old but good, with a plain wooden hilt in which was concealed a fingernail of Saint Andrew, Scotland’s patron. The sword had belonged to another uncle, Sir William Douglas, Knight of Liddesdale, but he had been murdered by the Lord of Douglas in a family quarrel. Robbie, afterwards, had been forced to kneel to the Lord of Douglas and swear allegiance. ‘You’re mine now,’ the Lord of Douglas had said, knowing Robbie had been fond of Sir William, ‘and if you’re not mine you’re no man’s, and if you’re no man’s then you’re an outlaw, and if you’re an outlaw I can kill you. So what are you?’

  ‘Yours,’ Robbie had said meekly, and knelt. Now, as he joined Roland de Verrec at the top of the tower, he wondered if he had chosen right. He could have ridden back to Thomas of Hookton’s friendship, but he had made his choice, sworn allegiance to his uncle, and now he would charge across a drawbridge to probable death on the wall of a fortress that meant nothing to him, nothing to Scotland, and little to anyone else. So why join the attack? Because, he thought, it was his gift to his family. A gesture to show the French the quality of Scottish fighting men. This was a battle he could fight with a clean conscience even if it meant his death.

  It was an hour after dawn that the King of France ordered his crossbows forward. There were eight hundred of them, mostly from Genoa, but a few from Germany, and each crossbowman had an attendant carrying a great shield, a pavise, behind which the archer could shelter as he rewound the bow. The crossbowmen and their shield carriers made phalanxes at either side of the tower, which now had long poles thrust through its base so that men could push the vast contraption forward.

  Behind the tower were two lines of men-at-arms, the men who would follow the first attackers up the ladders to flood Breteuil’s ramparts, and they gathered beneath the banners of their lords. The wind was still strong enough to spread the colourful flags; a flaunting of lions and crosses, harts and stars, stripes and gryphons, the barony of France gathered for the attack. Priests walked in front of the men, offering blessings, assuring them that God favoured France, that the Navarrese scum were doomed to hell, and that Christ would aid the assault. Then a new banner appeared, a blue banner blazoned with golden fleurs-de-lys, and the men-at-arms cheered as their king rode between their lines. He wore plate armour that had been polished to brilliance, and around his neck was a cloak of red velvet that lifted in the wind. His helmet glittered, and about it was a gold crown set with diamonds. His horse, a white destrier, lifted its feet high as Jean of France rode between his soldiers, looking neither right nor left, and then he reached the long poles waiting for the peasants who would thrust the tower forward, and there he turned. He curbed the horse and men thought he was about to say something and silence spread across the field, but the king merely raised his left hand as if offering a blessing, and the cheers began again. Some men knelt, others looked in awe at the king’s long, pale face, which was framed by his polished helmet. Jean the Good, he was called, not because he was good, but because he enjoyed the worldly pleasures that were a king’s prerogative. He was not a great warrior, and he had a famous temper, and he was reputed to be indecisive, yet at this moment the chivalry of France was ready to die for him.