Hood

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  “So that was when it began?” mused Mérian.

  “That it was,” Cadwgan confirmed, “and the council twisted and turned like cats on a roasting spit. They refused three times to honour the king’s wishes, and each time he sent them back to think about the cost of their refusal.”

  “What happened?”

  “When it became clear that no one would be allowed to return home until the matter was settled, and that the king was unbending, the council had no choice but to assent to the Conqueror’s wishes.”

  “What a spineless bunch of lickspits,” observed Mérian.

  “Do not judge them too harshly,” her father said. “It was either agree or risk being hung as traitors if they openly rebelled. Meanwhile, they watched their estates and holdings slowly descending into ruin through neglect. So with harvest hard upon them, they granted the king the right to his precious hunting runs and went home to explain the new law to their people.” Cadwgan paused. “Thank God, the Conqueror did not include the lands beyond the Marches.When I think what the Cymry would have done had that been forced on us . . .” He shook his head. “Well, it does not bear thinking about.”

  PART FIVE

  THE

  GRELLON

  CHAPTER 39

  Despite Count Falkes’s repeated offer to accompany him, Abbot Hugo insisted on visiting his new church alone. “But the work is barely begun,” the count pointed out. “Allow me to bring the architect’s drawings so you can see what it will look like when it is finished.”

  “You are too kind,” Hugo had told him. “However, I know your duties weigh heavily enough, and I would not add to them. I am perfectly capable of looking around for myself, and happy to do so. I would not presume to burden you with my whims.”

  He rode out from the caer on his brown palfrey and arrived at Llanelli just as the labourers were starting their work for the day. The old church, with its stone cross beside the door, still stood on one side of the new town square. It was a rude wood-and-wattle structure, little more than a cow byre in Hugo’s opinion; the sooner demolished, the better.

  The abbot turned from the sight and cast his critical gaze across the square at a jumbled heap of timber atop a foundation of rammed earth.What? By the rod of Moses!—was that the new church?

  He strode closer for a better look. A carpenter appeared with a coiled plumb line and a chunk of chalk. “You there!” the abbot shouted. “Come here.”

  The man glanced around, saw the priestly robes, and hurried over, offering a bow of deference. “You wish to speak to me, Your Grace?”

  “What is this?” He flipped a hand at the partially built structure.

  “It is to be a church, father,” replied the carpenter.

  “No,” the abbot told him. “No, I do not think that likely.”

  “Yes,” replied the workman. “I do believe it is.”

  “I am the abbot here,” Hugo informed him, “and I say that”—he flapped a dismissive hand at the roughly framed building—“that is a tithe barn.”

  The carpenter cocked his head to one side and regarded the priest with a quizzical expression. “A tithe barn, Your Grace?”

  “My church will be made of stone,” Abbot Hugo told the carpenter, “and it will be of my design and raised on a site of my choosing. I will not have my church fronting the town square like a butcher’s stall.”

  “But, father, see here—”

  “Do you doubt me?”

  “Not at all. But the count—”

  “This is to be my church, not the count’s. I am in authority here, compris?”

  “Indeed, Your Grace,” answered the confused carpenter.

  “What am I to tell the master?”

  “Tell him I will have the plans ready for him in three days,” declared the abbot, starting away. “Tell him to come to me for his new instructions.”

  With that, the abbot marched to the old chapel, paused outside, and then pushed open the door. He was greeted by two priests; from the look of it, they had slept in the sanctuary amidst their bundled belongings.

  “Who is in authority here?” demanded the abbot.

  “Greetings in Christ, brother abbot,” said the bishop, stepping forward. “I am Asaph, Bishop of Llanelli.We would have made a better welcome, but as you can see, this is all that is left of the monastery, and the monks have all been pressed to labour for the count.”

  “Be that as it may . . . ,” sniffed Hugo, glancing around the darkened chapel. It smelled old and musty and made him sneeze. “I see you are ready to depart. I shall not keep you.”

  “We were waiting to pass the reins to you, as it were,” replied Asaph.

  “That will not be necessary.”

  “No? We thought you might like to know something about your new flock.”

  “Your presumption has led you astray, bishop. It is the flock that must get to know and heed the shepherd.” Hugo sneezed again and turned to leave. “God speed you on your way.”

  “Abbot, see here,” said the bishop, starting after him.

  “There is much we would tell you about Elfael and its people.”

  “You presume to teach me?” Abbot Hugo turned on him.

  “All I need to know, I learned from the saddle of my horse on the way here.” He glanced balefully at the rude structure and the two lorn priests. “Your tenure here is over, bishop.

  God in his wisdom has decreed a new day for this valley. The old must make way for the new. Again, I wish you God’s speed. I do not expect we will meet again.”

  The abbot returned to his horse across the square, passing the carpenter, who was now sitting on a stack of lumber with a saw across his lap. “What about this?” called the carpenter, indicating the unfinished jumble of timber behind him.

  “What am I to do with this?”

  “It is a tithe barn,” replied the abbot. “It will need a wider door.”

  You, Tuck, have the most important duty,” Bran had told him as he boosted the priest into the saddle. “The success of our plan rests on you.”

  “Aye,” he had replied, “you can count on me!” Borne on waves of hope and optimism, he had departed Cél Craidd with cheers and glad farewells still ringing in his ears.

  Oh, but the fiery blush of enthusiasm for his part in Bran’s grand scheme had faded to dull, muddy pessimism by the time Aethelfrith reached his little oratory on the Hereford road. How, by the beards of the apostles, am I to discover the movements of the de Braose treasure train?

  As if that were not difficult enough, he must acquire the knowledge far enough in advance to give Bran and his Grellon enough time to prepare. To that end, he had been given the best of the horses so that he might return with the news at utmost speed.

  “Impossible,” Aethelfrith muttered to himself. With or without a horse. Impossible. “Never should have agreed to such a lack-brain scheme.”

  Then again, the idea had originated with himself, after all. “Tuck, old son,” he murmured, “you’ve gone and put both feet in the brown pie this time.”

  As he approached the oratory, he was relieved to see that no one was waiting for him. People had visited in his absence; small gifts of eggs, lumps of cheese, and beeswax candles had been placed neatly beside his door. After tethering his mount in the long grass around back, he filled a bucket from the well and left it for the animal. He gathered up the offerings from his doorstep and went in to light the fire, eat a bite of supper, and contemplate his precarious future. He fell asleep praying for divine inspiration to attend his dreams.

  As the morning sun rose to dispel the mist along the Wye, so it brought a partial solution to Tuck’s problem. Rising in his undershirt, he went out to the well to wash. Drawing his arms through the sleeves, he pushed the shirt down around his waist and splashed water over himself. The cold stung his senses and made him splutter. He dried himself on a scrap of linen cloth and stood for a moment, savouring the sweet air and calm of the little glade surrounding his cell. He watched the mist c
urling along the river, and it came to him that whatever else they did, the wagons would have to use the bridge at Hereford. It only remained to find out when. He could simply wait until the wagons passed his oratory on their way to Elfael; then he could saddle the horse and race to Bran with the warning and hope it gave him time enough. Bran had said they would need three days at least. “Four would be better,” Bran had told him. “Give us but four days, Tuck, and we have a fighting chance.”

  He hurried back inside to pull on his robe and lace up his shoes. Taking his staff, he walked down to the bridge and into town. It was market day in Hereford, but there seemed to be fewer people around than usual—especially for a clear, fine day in summer. He wondered about this as he watched the farmers and merchants setting out their goods and opening their stalls.

  As he loitered amongst the vendors, idly wandering here and there, he heard a cloth merchant complaining to another about the lack of custom. “Poor dealings today, Michael, m’lad,” he was saying. “Might have stayed home and saved shoe leather.”

  “’Twill be no better next market week,” replied the merchant named Michael, a dealer in knives, pruning hooks, and other bladed utensils.

  “Aye,” agreed the other with a sigh, “too right you are.

  Too right.”

  “Won’t get better till the baron returns.”

  “Good fellows,” said Aethelfrith, speaking up, “forgive me—I heard you speaking just now and would ask a question.”

  “Brother Aethelfrith! Mornin’ to you,” said the one named Michael. “God be good to you.”

  “And to you, my son,” replied the friar. “Can you tell me why there are so few people at market today? Where has everyone gone?”

  “Well,” replied the cloth dealer, “sure as Sunday, it’s the council, ent it?”

  “The council?” wondered Aethelfrith. “I have been away on a little business and only just returned. The king has called a Great Council?”

  “Nay, brother,” replied the clothier, “not a king’s council— only a local one. Neufmarché has convoked an assembly of all his nobles—”

  “And their families,” said Michael the cutler. “Off beyond the Marches somewhere. We’d ha’ done better to follow the lot of them there.”

  “Indeed?” mused the priest. “I have heard nothing about this.”

  The two merchants, with no customers and time on their hands, were only too glad to oblige Aethelfrith of the news he had missed: the fierce battle and resounding defeat of the Welsh King Rhys ap Tewdwr, and the swift conquest of Deheubarth by the baron’s troops. The cutler finished, saying, “Neufmarché called council to square things away, y’see?”

  The squat friar nodded, thanked them, and asked, “When did they leave? Do you know? When did the council begin?”

  The clothier shrugged. “I couldn’t say, brother.”

  “Why, if I be not mistaken,” said Michael, “it ent rightly begun as yet.”

  “No?”

  “Don’t see how it could.” Michael picked up a small kitchen knife and tried its blade with his thumb. “The baron and his people rode out but yesterday—morning, it was, very early. I reckon ’twill take them two days at least to reach the moot—them and the other lords. The council would seem to begin a day or two after that. So make that three days—four, to be safe. Five, maybe six, at most.”

  “Too right,” agreed the clothier. “And all that means we lose custom next week—and maybe the week after as well.”

  “Blessings upon you, friends!” called Aethelfrith, already darting away. He fled back across the bridge, his soft shoes slapping the worn timbers, and steamed up the hill to his oratory. He wasted not a moment, but threw a few provisions into a bag, saddled the horse, and rode out again.

  He knew exactly when Baron de Braose’s money train would roll.

  CHAPTER 40

  As Baron Bernard de Neufmarché gazed out upon the upturned faces of his subject lords gathered at Talgarth in the south of Wales, the treasure train of his rival Baron de Braose was approaching the bridge below his castle back in Hereford: three wagons with an escort of seven knights and fifteen men-at-arms under the command of a marshal and a sergeant. All the soldiers were mounted, and their weapons gleamed hard in the bright summer sun.

  Hidden beneath food supplies and furnishings for Abbot Hugo’s new church were three sealed strongboxes, iron-banded and bolted to the wagon beds. With ranks of soldiers leading the way and more riders guarding the rear, the train passed unhindered through Hereford. If any of Neufmarché’s soldiers saw the train passing beneath the castle walls, they made no move to prevent it.

  Thus, in accordance with Baron de Braose’s plan, the wagon train rumbled across the bridge, through the town, and out into the bright, sunlit meadows of the wide Wye valley. It would take the slow ox train four days to pass through Neufmarché lands and the great forest of the March. But once past Hereford, there would be no stopping the wagons, and the knights could breathe a little easier knowing that nothing stood between them and the completion of their duty.

  The leader of this party was a marshal named Guy, one of Baron de Braose’s youngest commanders, a man whose father stood on the battlefield with the Conqueror and had been rewarded with the lands of a deposed earl in the North Ridings: a sizeable estate that included the old Saxon market town of Ghigesburgh—or Gysburne, as the Normans preferred it.

  Young Guy had grown up in the bleak moorlands of the north, and there he might have stayed, but thinking that life held more for him than overseeing the collection of rents on his father’s estate, he had come south to take service in the court of an ambitious baron who could provide him with the opportunities a young knight needed to secure wealth and fame. Inflamed with dreams of grandeur, he yearned for glory far beyond any that might be acquired grappling with dour English farmwives over rents paid in geese and sheep.

  Guy’s energy and skill at arms had won him a place amongst the teeming swarm of knights employed by William de Braose; his solid, dependable, levelheaded northern practicality raised him above the ranks of the brash and impulsive fortune seekers who thronged the southern courts. Two years in the baron’s service, Guy had waited for a chance to prove himself, and it had finally come. Certainly, marshalling the guard for some money chests was not the same as leading a flying wing of cavalry into pitched battle, but it was a start.

  This was the first significant task the baron had entrusted to him, and though it fell far short of taxing his considerable skills as a warrior, he was determined to acquit himself well.

  Mounted on a fine grey destrier, he remained vigilant and pursued a steady, unhurried pace. To better safeguard the silver, no advance warning had been given; not even Count de Braose knew when the money would arrive.

  Day’s end found them camped beside the road on a bend in the river. High wooded bluffs sheltered them to the east, and the bow of the river formed an effective perimeter barrier on the other three sides. Any would-be thieves thinking to liberate the treasure would have to come at them on the road, and Guy positioned sentries in each direction, changed through the night, to prevent intruders from disturbing their peace.

  They passed an uneventful night and the next morning moved on. Around midday they stopped to eat and to feed and rest the animals before beginning the long, winding ascent up out of the Vale of Wye. The first wagon gained the heights a little before sunset, and Guy ordered camp to be made in a grove of beech trees near an English farming settlement. Other than a herdsman leading a few muddy brown cows home to be milked, no one else was seen on the road, and the second night passed beneath a fair, star-seeded sky with serenity undisturbed.

  The third day passed much the same as the previous day. Before climbing into their saddles on the fourth day, Guy assembled the men and addressed them, saying, “Today we enter the forest of the March. We will be wary. If thieves try to attack us, they will do so here, compris? Everyone is to remain alert for any sign of an ambush.” He g
azed at the ring of faces gathered around him: as solemn, earnest, and determined as he was himself. “If there are no questions, then—”

  “What of the phantom?”

  “Ah,” replied Guy, “yes.” He had anticipated such a question and was ready with an answer. “Many of you will have heard some gossip of this phantom, non?” He paused, trying to appear severe and dauntless for his men. “It is but a tale to frighten infants, nothing more. We are men, not children, so we will give this rumour the contempt it deserves.” He offered a grimace of ridicule to show his scorn, adding, “It would take a whole forest full of phantoms to daunt Baron de Braose’s soldiers, n’est-ce pas?”

  He commanded the treasure train to move out. The soldiers took their mounts and fell into line: a rank of knights, three abreast to lead the train, followed by men-at-arms alongside and between each of the wagons, with four knights serving as outriders patrolling the road ahead and behind on each side. At the head of this impressive procession rode Guy himself on his fine grey stallion; directly behind him rode his sergeant to relay any commands to those behind.

  By morning’s end the money train had reached the forest edge. The road was wide, though rutted, and the wagon drivers were forced to slow their pace to keep from jolting the wheels to pieces. The soldiers clopped along, passing through patches of sunlight and shadow, alert to the smallest movement around them. It was cool in the shade of the trees, and the air was thick with birdsong and the sounds of insects. All remained peaceful and serene, and they met no one else on the road.

  A little past midday, however, they came to a place where the road dipped low into a dell, at the bottom of which trickled a sluggish rill. Despite the fine dry weather, the shallow fording place was a churned mass of mud and muck.

  Apparently, herders using the road had allowed their animals to use it for a watering hole, and the beasts had transformed the road into a wallow.

  Stuck in the middle of the ford was a wagon full of manure sunk up to its axles. A ragged farmer was snapping the reins of his two-ox team, and the creatures were bawling as they strained against the yoke, but to no avail. The farmer’s wife stood off to one side, hands on hips, shouting at the man, who appeared to be taking no heed of her. Both the man and his wife were filthy to their knees.