Berenger, still clutching his sword, saw a man stumble from the room, his hands to his face.
‘I’m blind! The bitch blinded me!’ he cried.
Ed was sitting back, feeling sick to his core, while Archibald ministered to him, when she returned.
‘Béatrice? Are you all right?’ Archibald asked. Each syllable threatened to shatter his own bruised skull.
She said nothing, merely squatted on her haunches at the fireside, staring at the flames. Then she pulled out the flask and placed it on the ground near Archibald, away from the fire.
‘They took me into their room and left me tied up. They said I was to satisfy all of them. But my hands were in front of me. I poured powder into a drinking horn, and put stones and sand on top. I wanted to kill them. When the vintener came, a man was sent to hold me still and quiet. I sat down and shivered, and asked him to stir the flames and make the fire warmer. When he did, I threw the horn into the fire. It exploded, right beneath his face.’
‘You did well, maid,’ Archibald said, but he thought something had broken. Something deep inside her that had been fine and strong was rent apart and would never be mended.
He stood, fetched a thick blanket and, barely touching the woman, draped it over her shoulders. He poured water into a pot and set it on the fire to boil. Tipping some strong wine into a large cup, he topped it up with the steaming water, stirred in a dollop of honey and passed it to her. She took it without looking up, but at least she sipped it.
Something about its warmth or taste communicated with her. She looked about her as if startled, wondering where she was, but then stared at the ground, and Archibald was saddened to see her misery. It made his own eyes well up.
‘Maid, you’re safe now,’ he said gruffly.
‘No. I will never be safe,’ she said, and began to weep.
‘You know what she is?’ Erbin said. He stood at Berenger’s shoulder now. ‘She has already killed one of mine, at Caen, when she called you to aid your bratchet. Now she has blinded another of my men. She will bring bad luck to us all. You understand me? She is evil, man. A witch. You saw her cursing us. We have to destroy her.’
The man in the room was being tended to at the fire. His face was a mass of blood where the flesh had been burned, and his eyes were mere bloody caverns. He sobbed and moaned as the men tried to comfort him.
‘She had something, and it exploded in my face! It all blew up! I can’t see anything!’
Erbin spat. ‘Someone shut him up.’
‘This is your fault. You took her,’ Berenger said, although he felt his flesh creep at the inhuman sounds coming from her victim. ‘Leave her alone. If you do anything more, if you look at her, let alone touch her, I will command her to curse you with all the fervour at her command.’
‘It is not just us,’ Erbin called as Berenger rejoined Grandarse and Geoff and set off for their camp. ‘It’s the whole army. You think a bitch like her will comfort you in your beds? While you’re swyving her, you’ll be seeing to the end of all of us! We’ll all die here!’
Berenger continued on his way as the Welshman shouted after them, his words growing more overwrought as the English left the Welsh camp behind.
‘You hear me? You will see to the ruin of the whole army if you keep her! She’s evil! She’s a witch!’
Grandarse stopped and looked back at Erbin through the trees. ‘You hear that? Daft bugger has had his pate beaten once too often, hasn’t he? He’s brain-dead. Witch, my arse! What, does he think a witch would come here just to annoy him?’ His tone was light, but there was a frown on his face. His superstitious soul rebelled at the thought of harbouring a witch. ‘Eh? Berenger?’
‘Yeah, what do you think, Frip?’ Geoff asked.
Berenger looked at them both. ‘She feared – rightly – that she was to be raped, by the whole lot of them, so she defended herself as best she might. That’s all. They captured her and imprisoned her in that little chamber. We all heard her being taken.’
‘Aye, but if she is a witch . . .’ Grandarse growled.
‘If she is, she’ll likely strengthen us. We haven’t done anything but try to help her, so the wench would have no cause to want to harm us,’ Berenger said with finality.
They entered the edge of their camp and Grandarse and Geoff strode to the fire, squatting near the heat.
Berenger found his own attention moving to Archibald and the wagon. There was a small fire, and Berenger could see Ed sitting there beside Béatrice. The sight of her reminded him of Erbin’s hissed words: ‘She is evil, man. A witch.’
‘Ballocks to the lot of it,’ he sighed tiredly, and stepped around the men in the camp, over to his own belongings, and there he lay down.
At a sudden snapping of twigs, he looked up again and felt a shiver of unease when he saw that Béatrice was staring straight at him, as though she could read his every thought.
8 August
Berenger slept uneasily that night. When the vintaine was called to stand-to the next morning, he could not help but look to where he had last seen Béatrice and the Donkey, but they were not there. Of course they weren’t. They had their own duties to attend to. Archibald, however, was there and he waved amiably.
As Grandarse wandered up and down the line counting the men, Berenger saw a movement over his shoulder. It was the Donkey, with Béatrice. She moved so elegantly, it was like watching a woman skating on a frozen lake, but he felt a flicker of alarm at the sight of her. He could see again the face of Erbin, flames lighting his features with an unwholesome orange glow as he made his stark accusation: ‘She is evil, man: a witch.’
There was something unsettling about her; something otherworldly, he thought. But it was time to put such ideas away and concentrate on the job in hand.
Overnight, fires had raged through many farmsteads, almost up to the walls of Rouen itself. The land was scorched. Only the skeletons of trees stood in copses and woods, stark and bare, all the undergrowth gone. Such wanton damage must be evil in the eyes of God, but to Berenger it was the way of war, and he could no more change how warriors fought than turn back the tide.
Sir John called him to join a scouting party. The bridge at Rouen, they found, was completely demolished. At the farther side of the river a group of men stood guard, and the French herald trotted to the riverbank, from where he could shout across to them to convey his King’s message.
‘This is a pretty nonsense,’ Sir John muttered.
‘Sir?’ Berenger said.
‘The King asks if the French will join in battle, but look about you: is there any point? The French have surrendered the western bank of the Seine, and now wait over there to contest any attempt to cross.’
‘Are you sure?’ Berenger said doubtfully, thinking of the army King Philippe had at his disposal.
‘He wants to ensure that we are utterly crushed when he fights us,’ Sir John said. ‘He will wait until he has all his might here, and he can close his fist around all of us.’
‘Then what can we do?’
‘Torment him to the extent that he finally agrees to fight us here, or find another bridge before he has his camp struck. We could make our way to the next bridge and take it, then cross the river and find a suitable field to fight him.’
‘And if we don’t?’
Sir John looked at him. ‘Pray that we do,’ he said curtly.
‘When we were here before . . .’ Berenger began.
‘Eh?’
Berenger looked at the knight. Sir John was shrewd, and his memory was undimmed. ‘Sir, when we were here with William of Wales sixteen years ago or more, we saw many lands over here.’
Sir John said nothing, but looked about him carefully. ‘You should forget William le Walleys,’ he said quietly.
They both knew why. Their charge, ‘William’, was in fact the man they had sworn to serve all his life: King Edward II. But he had been declared dead in Berkeley Castle, and his son had taken the throne thinking, in his grief,
that he was come into his inheritance. No King would wish to be reminded that he took his crown while his father was yet breathing. That was an offence against God.
‘I know, Sir John,’ Berenger said. ‘But I recall good flat plains and fields to the north, when we crossed the water to come here.’
Sir John nodded. ‘I too recall those plains. There were some that would serve us well today, but,’ he sighed, ‘they are all too far away. We need a good field here to bring the French to battle. We have to force them to fight.’
They stood with the herald waiting for the answer until the sun was grinding its way to its meridian. When it came, Sir John gritted his teeth.
‘So, it is as I thought. He waits for the rest of his men. Only when he outnumbers us by tens of thousands will he risk trial by battle. We shall be hard-pressed when he finally agrees to wage war against us.’
Berenger returned to the camp that night to find the men in a wary mood, on the alert for any new threat from the Welsh.
For her part, Béatrice worked on, fetching fodder and drink for the horse, helping Archibald move his gear and make some supper. Keeping busy was key, she thought.
‘Careful with that,’ Archibald said at one point.
She looked down. A man had given them a pair of coneys, and she had skinned them with a knife Archibald had lent her. Now she saw that she had been about to set the blade to rest on top of a barrel. Archibald nodded as she took the knife and set it aside.
‘Don’t want to risk any sparks with that barrel,’ he said. ‘You know better than that.’
She nodded, and shortly afterwards, he lumbered off.
It was a little later that Berenger appeared. He stood anxiously for a few moments, and then cleared his throat. ‘Maid?’
Her thoughts had been far away. Now she looked up with the alarm of a hart hearing a hunter. ‘Yes?’
‘I have not spoken to you since . . .’ he wanted to say, ‘since we came to the Welsh camp’, but couldn’t. He felt the need to prove that Geoff was entirely wrong about her, but looking down into her anxious eyes, he found himself wondering how anyone could think evil of her. She looked so innocent.
‘You need fear nothing from me,’ he said.
‘I know. You came to save me.’
‘Ed cried out and alerted us. I was worried about you. Did they say why they had taken you?’
‘At first I thought it was because they wanted to offend you. But then I heard the man they called Erbin tell another to “find the boy and kill him”, but they could not find him as I had hidden him under Archibald’s cart, so they took me instead.’
Berenger considered that. The Donkey had been struck down. ‘If the Welsh had wanted to kill him, he was easy prey. Who knocked him down?’
She looked at him very straight. ‘I did. I knew they would kill him.’ There was a fresh tear glistening in the corner of her eye.
‘You knocked him down to protect him. That was kind of you,’ Berenger said more gently, but he was still unsure whether he could trust her. Her coolness, her distance, all spoke of her strangeness. He wasn’t used to women like this.
He jerked his head in the direction of the Welsh. ‘Did you hear what Erbin said to me? He said you were a witch.’
‘What of you, vintener? What do you think?’ she said, her voice lowered.
She looked so young, but so full of knowledge and despair, that any idea of her being a witch was simply preposterous. Yet if she were a witch, surely she would be able to appear in any guise she wished – including that of a young woman. Every year Berenger watched the Passion plays, and he knew that some witches had the skill of dissimulation. Perhaps that was her magic: an ability to change her appearance at will, to confuse and frustrate men?
‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said truthfully. ‘But I do know you’d be safer away from us. If Erbin and his men want you, they will know where to find you if you stay with us.’
‘You are telling me to leave the army?’ she asked, and for the first time he saw a hint of vulnerability. There was a tiny flaring of her nostrils, a tremor at her eyelid, that betrayed her inner fears.
‘No. But we must see if there’s a place in the army where you’ll be safer,’ he said.
‘I feel safe here,’ she said.
‘With the Serpentine?’ Berenger said, glancing down at Archibald who was snoring, his back against a cart’s wheel. ‘Sweet Jesus, even Erbin would be safer than him!’
9 August
The English struck camp in the pre-dawn light of the Wednesday, and Berenger and his men were told to scout the lands to south and east.
There was a sense of urgency in the camp as he took up his bow and set off. Men were scurrying about, gathering their belongings and packing. Berenger saw Erbin at the copse as he threw his pack into the back of the cart. Béatrice was there already, stroking the long nose of their old nag and murmuring softly, so that the brute nuzzled at her throat. She met Berenger’s gaze with a calm nod, but when she saw Erbin, her eyes hardened.
They were off before full dawn. The land about the Seine was dark and misty, but as they started their journey, the sun broke through and filled all the river’s plain with a pale golden glow, as if the ground itself was lighted by an inner fire.
Berenger and the men made good progress. They hurried forward, for once without complaints. Grandarse had made it plain that the first man to grumble aloud would be flogged, and there was something in his manner that convinced the men to pay heed.
It was perhaps six leagues to Pont-de-l’Arche, and Berenger and the others covered much of the distance at a trot, closely followed by the main bulk of the army.
The land here was flat, and Berenger, sweating in the heat and parched as the dust rose on all sides, kept a wary eye over the river. Sir John de Sully’s words came back to him, and the thought that they might be prevented from crossing was always present in his mind.
The town came into view, and his heart quailed. A strong fortress had sprung up on this side of the river to protect the bridge that brought so much trade and wealth to the citizens. It had a good wall, and towers rose to a great height. It would not be easy to storm this quickly, but storm it they must, if they were to take the bridge.
Sir John de Sully met Berenger as they approached.
‘A strong fortress, Master,’ the knight called.
‘Aye, Sir John.’ Berenger squinted at the walls against the bright sunshine. ‘It’d take a good week to conquer, even if the French King had not massed an army nearby.’
‘And they can use the bridge to reinforce the place,’ Sir John noted. ‘Yes. This will not be easy.’
Berenger was surprised to see that for once the knight appeared concerned. ‘We shall cross, though, even if not here.’
‘When, though – and where?’
Ed the Donkey trailed behind the men. He was happier walking alongside the cart with Béatrice, and even when the men began to halt, staring at their latest target, the walled town of Pont-de-L’Arche, he continued to trudge along beside her. In his mind, he was back at home in England, sitting in a tavern with a mug of ale in his hand, singing and hiccoughing along with the tunes as men sang of the sea and of fishing. Those had been happy days, despite the loneliness of being an orphan.
It was with surprise that he heard the sudden blaring of the horns, the call to arms. The archers stopped to string their bows, and gathered at the side of the cart to grab spare strings, bracers, tabs and arrows, and he hastened to assist them, startled out of his lethargy.
A shout from the men-at-arms, and soldiers rushed back to the wagons, collecting ladders of all sizes. There was little chatter and no laughter now. No one was happy at the thought of trying to clamber up a ladder thrown against a high wall while defenders aimed missiles from above, or poured burning oil upon them all. Men’s faces were drawn and their hands twitched, Ed noticed. Little nervous tuggings at belts or buckles, a hand sometimes rising to a cheek or an eye, sometimes pul
ling at a bottom lip or an earlobe as if to aid concentration.
There came the dull pounding of drums, and as trumpets blew, the first men began to run for the walls.
Archers were already positioned in their order of a staggered harrow, with wedges of men rather than straight lines, in order that each man in the fore should have the maximum field of fire. On command they could direct their aim from left to right without impeding each other’s shooting. Already now the archers were bending their bows, drawing and loosing a deadly storm upon the walls. As they drew and released, the arrows rose thick in the sky.
It was beautiful – and horrifying, Ed thought.
‘Daft beggars!’
He turned to see Archibald sitting on the bench of his wagon a few feet away, his thumbs tucked into his apron, thoughtfully studying the walls.
‘Sorry, Master?’
‘We can’t capture that place. It’s too massive for us to scale the walls quickly, and if we don’t, there’s no possibility of taking it before the French army arrives.’ Archibald set his head to one side. ‘If only I had time, maybe a barrel or two to spare, and a few engineers to dig beneath that wall there, I could set it and tamp it, and make such a blast as would be spoken of for a hundred years!’ He grinned happily at the thought.
Ed shivered. He remembered the snaking, hissing line of burning powder. ‘You think you could?’
‘Given the powder, I could raze the whole town to the ground,’ Archibald said, and then winked. ‘But I would need a lot of powder, you understand!’
Ed nodded without comprehending. ‘I hate it,’ he said.
‘What, my powder?’
‘I saw it kill my father,’ Ed said quietly.
Before Archibald could reply, they both heard the bellowing from Grandarse to ‘Get your skinny little backside moving, you son of a Winchester strumpet!’ and Ed sprang to the cart and the sheaves of arrows.
The men were sending prodigious numbers of arrows at the town. Ed hurried, planting arrows before Clip and scarcely keeping up with his rate of fire, while other men were glad just to have a sheaf dropped into the wicker baskets standing before them.
Fields of Glory Page 20
