Gate of the Dead

by David Gilman

  ‘Close enough, Sir Thomas.’

  Blackstone pulled up. Behind him Killbere had readied the men. Will Longdon’s archers waited, war bows braced, arrows rammed in the dirt at their feet. Meulon and Gaillard held either flank, with Killbere in front, ready to order the assault.

  Chastelleyn came forward. ‘He has sought sanctuary under the King’s protection.’

  ‘Do you know what he has done?’ said Blackstone.

  ‘I do not. Only that he says that you wish him harm.’

  ‘I am going to kill him slowly, my lord. He has murdered my wife and daughter in a brutal manner and slain a Knight of the Tau, a good man of God, who tried to protect them.’

  Chastelleyn’s expression changed. The doubt creased his face. He crossed himself. ‘There’s evidence of this?’ he said, gathering his composure.

  ‘The blood on him is theirs.’

  Chastelleyn said nothing, but turned in his saddle so he could look at the monk. Blackstone watched Bertrand’s face. It was different than he had seen before. There was no longer the idiot smile. His eyes were alert, startling in their glare. It was the face of a man who had shed the subservient role of a lascivious underling, a man who would take a kick and a taunt as part of his service so that he could slither into their midst and strike when none suspected.

  He sat confidently in the saddle, upright. A different man. Untouchable.

  Chastelleyn’s shoulder arched with indecision. But then he shook his head. ‘Sir Thomas. I cannot give him to you,’ he said. ‘You know I cannot. He professes to be of holy orders. He claims Benefit of Clergy.’

  Blackstone searched for the violent fury that would hurl him through the English ranks and beat the murderer to death with his bare hands. But it would not appear. A winter god clutched his heart.

  ‘He’s an assassin,’ repeated Blackstone with a chilling calmness. ‘I will have him.’

  Chastelleyn looked past Blackstone at the gathered men. Blackstone could raise a hand and his archers would loose their arrows with enough skill to miss their sworn lord and cut down his men. ‘It must be proved otherwise,’ he insisted. ‘I am the King’s knight, and he must be taken to the bishop to be tried by the Church. We have no jurisdiction other than to grant him that.’

  Bertrand had not turned his face away. It was the final taunt that he wanted to see Blackstone humiliated or killed by the King’s men. How far had Blackstone been broken?

  Blackstone lowered his eyes and nodded his acceptance.

  Bertrand smiled. Completely broken.

  Chastelleyn had faced men’s savage faces in battle but he felt discomfort under Blackstone’s gaze. Whatever lay behind those eyes, Chastelleyn could not fathom, but he felt a ripple of ice water through his chest. Merciful Christ, Blackstone was intent on slaughter.

  ‘God bless my King,’ said Blackstone quietly, and turned his horse away, letting it amble back to his men.

  Killbere waited for Blackstone’s orders, sword in hand, ready like the other men to discard the King of England’s goodwill and pardon.

  Blackstone dismounted. ‘Gilbert,’ he said, ‘we must not raise our hand against the King or his men. That’s a promise I made a long time ago.’

  Killbere said nothing as he watched the men-at-arms turn away to make their slow withdrawal. Bertrand was surrounded by Chastelleyn and a half-dozen knights in a protective shield.

  Across the undulating plain, the heavy black cloud on the horizon speared the sky with a ragged lightning. Blackstone wished he could rage against the storm that threatened, but he could not: there was no rage in him; it was a steel-cold grief that caged his chest. He handed the reins to an uncertain Will Longdon, and took the bow from his hand. He chose a bodkin-tipped arrow whose goose-feather fletching offered the best flight, then walked forward a half-dozen paces. It was not impossible for a bent arm to hold a war bow; it could ease the immense pressure from the draw weight, but to use it was to tolerate the pain that came with it. His muscles had changed, bunched and knotted for sword and shield, but strength had never deserted him. Nor had the archer’s instinctive skill of finding his target.

  For the first time since he was brought down on the battlefield at Crécy, he nocked a yard-long arrow, felt the tension and pain in his left arm as he arched his back and drew the cord to him. His arm protested, but he held his curled fist vice-like, instinctively adjusting his body to compensate. A hundred and forty-seven paces from him, Chastelleyn eased his men aside, leaving the unsuspecting Bertrand exposed. The King’s knight must have said something, perhaps a vitriolic curse, because Bertrand suddenly faltered, turned the horse and faced the distant Englishman who stood to the front of his men. Blackstone loosed the arrow, heard its whisper, felt the bow cord vibrate against his unbraced arm and watched as it arced and fell. Bertrand raised a hand, shielding his eyes, trying to see its fall. It pierced his thigh, pinning him to his saddle.

  The monk screamed as his body contorted, eyes glaring in unbelieving horror at what had happened, mouth gaping in a desperate attempt to draw air into the pain that savaged him. The arrow shaft snapped in his thigh as the horse bolted and Bertrand crashed to the ground. The unassailable assassin had become a feeble puppet whose strings had been cut. He lay twisted, one arm thrown above his head, legs contorted unnaturally beneath him, his eyes blinking as life clung on within him. He made a feeble plea for help from Chastelleyn, who stared down at him, watched the twitching fingers of the crippled man a moment longer and then, with a final glance towards Blackstone, led his men away.

  Blackstone handed back the bow to Longdon and remounted. No words passed between them. Thomas Blackstone was still an archer despite what had happened to him all those years before at Crécy. He rode slowly forward and halted as he reached the stricken assassin. His eyes sought Blackstone’s.

  ‘Sweet Mother of God, Sir Thomas... I... swear I killed them quickly... The child... she knew nothing...’ Bertrand squirmed, trying to put distance between him and the man who gazed down at him. Blood oozed, soaking his habit, which rode up exposing the wound and the shattered bone. Its ugly rent was still pierced with the broken arrow shaft, the goose feathers a dark, soaking mass. Bertrand begged for a knife across the throat to defeat the pain.

  ‘There is more agony yet to be inflicted,’ said Blackstone. ‘Your journey to hell will take a thousand deaths. You will scream and vomit because of it – but I will break every part of you and your slime will be sucked into the underworld.’

  Blackstone let the bastard horse nudge Bertrand’s broken thigh bone with the edge of its hoof.

  Bertrand screamed, stomach muscles crunching him into a protective ball, but the shattered leg resisted and he flailed, tears and spittle mingling in his mouth, which made an incoherent choking sound.

  He sucked in air, shook his head, perhaps realizing what Blackstone intended. ‘No... I beg you... let... it end... now.’

  Blackstone nudged the great war horse slowly over his body, breaking his bones, starting at his ankles, hearing them crack, then moving upward to his shins. Bertrand’s screams went beyond human agony as his body splintered beneath the iron-shod hooves. Blackstone never took his eyes from the tortured man, drinking in his terror, feeling nothing other than the cold satisfaction of the brutality he inflicted.

  Bertrand’s life lingered in a hell imposed by vengeance as Blackstone kept the horse’s weight bearing down on pelvis and spine. His mouth gaped, spluttering blood as his ribs cracked. He could no longer squirm. His mind was beyond prayer.

  When all that was left was the gasping, smashed body, Blackstone dismounted and knelt with one knee on the dying man’s chest. Dark matter bubbled between Bertrand’s teeth as his eyes held his tormentor’s unrelenting gaze.

  A desperate, whispered plea escaped from his lips. ‘I... beg you... mercy... Finish me...’

  Blackstone waited a moment, then stood and gazed down at the killer. ‘No,’ he said, and led the war horse’s weight across him.

&
nbsp; And so did every man and his horse who followed.

  The storm rolled its grey veil of rain ever closer, pushed by an angry wind that carried Bertrand’s final, pitiful cries across the bleak land. As death dragged the Viper’s child to its lair the sky broke to soak the hard earth and wash away what torn and crushed flesh remained.

  52

  Blackstone bathed Christiana and Agnes, then packed their bodies with salt and swaddled them in linen. Killbere kept Henry away from the ritual and his father’s wrenching sobs. Neither would be appropriate for the boy to witness. The sombre mood held the men and they kept their silence while their sworn lord stayed locked in the castle’s rooms. Meulon and Gaillard did as Killbere instructed and prepared the slain Caprini for burial. He would be honoured as Blackstone had insisted.

  When seven days had passed and a priest was found to offer prayers, Blackstone took Christiana and Agnes to the place that was once their home in Normandy and buried them there, as he did the good knight, Fra Caprini, who had tried to save them.

  ‘I should have stayed with them, Father,’ Henry eventually said, breaking a long-held silence.

  ‘Their murder was not your doing, Henry, no fault lies at your door. How could it?’ Blackstone answered, wishing only to reach for the boy and hold him, but there was a distance between them, a place he could not breach – the boy’s will denied him that comfort.

  ‘Father, I cannot kill like you. I have no wish to do so. I killed a woman to save Mother, and I would have fought to keep Bertrand from her and Agnes had I been there. But now...’ He fearlessly raised his eyes to Blackstone. ‘Now, I wish to do what Mother always wanted for me. I will study and become a learned man, and forsake this way of life.’

  The boy turned away.

  Killbere, who waited close by, shook his head. ‘He’s Christiana’s child, Thomas. As stubborn as you and determined as her. Give him time. Let his blood settle. He’ll find a place of learning brings no joy to a lad who’s fought for life.’

  Blackstone pressed a hand to the mound of dirt that now held the woman he had loved since first seeing her those dozen years before. She had shared danger with him and dared to marry an Englishman. An English archer.

  ‘God turned his back on her, Gilbert. He has punished her instead of me.’

  Killbere looked away, raising his eyes to an uncertain sky that threatened rain. ‘I find no sense in it, Thomas. There is none. Your pagan goddess protects you better than a shield wall. Christiana and Agnes had their own angels at their shoulders. Who’s to say when heaven needs them?’ He waited a moment longer, leaving Blackstone to feel the dirt beneath his palm. ‘There are no words,’ said Sir Gilbert. ‘But your son is alive. That counts for something. More than something. Let the grief settle, Thomas. And whatever anger lies buried let it find its way into your sword.’

  Killbere turned away to where the men waited.

  ‘Gilbert,’ Blackstone said.

  Killbere looked back.

  ‘See to it that the boy does as his heart wishes. I’ll not challenge or force him otherwise. Do that. For me.’

  Killbere was uncertain what was meant, but he nodded anyway. ‘I will.’

  *

  Blackstone kept his promise to Christiana. He and Henry sought out the bastard child. It was barely a year old, with a shock of black hair and dark eyes. It could easily have been his own infant. But he knew it was not. He paid the convent to raise and name him and then made his desolate way back to England.

  Blackstone dwelt in a fog as dense as that which smothered the boat on its way home. A slow, nudging journey broken only by the creak and splash of the oars as the small craft was pulled through the glassy sea. A sailor stood watch holding a lantern, calling the depth, subduing his fear at the fog’s sudden onset. Hours later, when others slept and the welcome sound of a church bell guided them onshore, Blackstone laid Wolf Sword, its scabbard wrapped in its belt, next to his sleeping son. Christiana’s half of the silver penny now nestled below Blackstone’s on the sword’s pommel; the coin’s ragged seam joined the two halves.

  And then he slipped silently over the side.

  *

  There was no sign of his body and those who knew him swore he had swum ashore. Killbere and John Jacob searched fishing villages and towns trying to find their friend on the King’s command while Meulon and Gaillard held the men together outside Calais, paid from the King’s purse, waiting for news of him being found – but as months passed they feared for his life. Thomas Blackstone had disappeared as if embraced by that spectral mist.

  Will Longdon searched the taverns, high and low, in riverside inns and city whorehouses, while Killbere and John Jacob scoured the countryside among the monasteries and religious houses where a man might disappear with his misery and search for the remnants of a lost God and son.

  Queen Isabella the Fair enquired about her defiant knight before she took the heavy draught of medicine from which she never awoke. Blackstone never heard the pealing bells that signalled the death of the extraordinary Queen, or witnessed the solemn funeral cortège that carried her body from Hertford, dressed in the simple garments of the Poor Clares, to the Franciscans in London, where it was clothed for her funeral in the tunic and mantle of red silk in which she had been married fifty years before. When this era ended Blackstone lay, unkempt, in a dank, rat-infested room, unknown to those about him.

  Winter came and went; no ransom for the French King was paid after Edward and King John signed the peace treaty. The Dauphin had inflicted his revenge on the leaders in Paris who had supported the uprising and had reclaimed the city, forcing Charles of Navarre to retreat and change sides yet again. The Dauphin granted remissions to others for their part in the terror and proved remarkably resistant to handing over vast swathes of France to Edward, as agreed by his father in the Treaty of London. When Isabella died Edward knew that her influence with the French had died with her.

  He grieved and planned.

  Clerks travelled around the ports commandeering merchant ships; fletchers and bowmakers had their stocks stripped and stored in the Tower of London, hauled there by carts and wagons seized from monasteries. Edward’s commissioners of array ordered the recruitment of archers from all the southern counties and knights from their manors. The great lords of England gathered and the Church and Parliament came to an understanding that it was a just cause for Edward to pursue his right to the French crown by force.

  Word reached those who searched for Blackstone that there was a mason who worked on a great bridge, cutting stone from a quarry, and that this mason kept to himself, labouring long hours until darkness and drink claimed him each night. No one would approach the scar-faced man and risk his sudden, unpredictable acts of violence. By the time Will Longdon and the others reached the quarry one cold dawn the man had left and made his way to London.

  The crowded streets groaned from the passage of heavy carts, laden with supplies, as their iron-rimmed wheels gouged the dirt lanes and soldiers’ tramping feet muffled the clanking harness of wagons carrying forges and bundles of white-painted war bows in their thousands. They jostled past cursing pikemen as hobelars forced aside the street sellers, and beggars and mendicant monks rattled their bowls and called on God and his angels to punish their King’s transgressors.

  Jack Halfpenny and Robert Thurgood shouldered their way through the crowds with an urgency that earned curses from those pushed aside, curses that soon died when it was realized that they were archers and the badge on their jupons identified whom they served. The Fletcher’s Inn was down a narrow alley into which daylight barely reached, a rat-hole of a kind common enough in London. The leaning façade was close to the butcher’s yard, rank with offal and loud with the groaning of beasts as they sensed the violence about to be inflicted upon them.

  Halfpenny lifted the wooden latch and stepped into the gloom. A tallow lamp threw its dull yellow glow across the room. The stench of barley ale and stale cooked food mingled with that of dog e
xcrement and men’s rancid sweat. The inn’s cur dog whimpered and ducked away as Thurgood kicked aside a stool, ignoring the alehouse woman’s admonitions. Rumour had reached them of a man who paid good money to hide. Outlaw or fugitive, there was always someone ready to betray a secret when a reward was offered. Up the stairs Halfpenny pushed open the door of a back room and saw a bearded, crumpled figure, soaked in ale and wine, who knew not what day it was, nor cared if the sky was light or dark. Tattered clothes exposed scarred, lean muscles wrought from hard work and battle and a silver necklace of a pagan goddess. Money had bought him secrecy for a time in this room above the foul streets of the city. Halfpenny kept guard on the door until Thurgood found Will Longdon, and he in turn sent them to find Killbere and John Jacob. Longdon waited outside the dank room’s door like a mother waiting for a sick child to heal. He muttered a prayer or two and cursed the devil for snatching his friend’s heart, and then cursed God for allowing it.

  Killbere grunted with effort as he mounted the stairs. Will Longdon was grateful to see the flint-hearted knight, as pleased as a man could be who had stood at his side in the great conflicts.

  Killbere pushed into the room and stood for a moment over Blackstone’s slumped figure. ‘Thomas?’ he said gruffly. ‘Enough of this.’

  He hesitated, wondering if his words had been heard. Blackstone sat propped against the wall, remnants of food and drink around him, oblivious to the scuttling vermin that snatched at crusts.

  ‘Your friends are here,’ said Killbere more kindly and leaned towards Blackstone. A sudden lunge with a knife made him quickly step back. Drunk he might have been, but an animal instinct still lurked within Blackstone. Killbere bent forward again and waited for another knife thrust. It came quickly and between them Killbere and John Jacob disarmed Blackstone. He offered little resistance, his eyes glaring at the men who pressed close to him in a mirror of time. Killbere laughed and seized his face, turning it towards his own as John Jacob bent to help lift his great frame.