The Ransomed Crown

by Wayne Grant

  “It has set me to wonderin’ though. Ye told me about the clerk and his love ballads. I’m thinkin’ the man may be in love.

  “In love? With who, Finch?”

  Finch shrugged.

  “One of the girls at the White Mare, my lady. He wouldn’t be the first man to fall in love with a whore.”

  ***

  The next day, Millicent dropped a coin in the beggar’s hat and this time it was Mary Cullen who met her at the shabby house on Wood Street. She was glad it was the young woman and not the churchman. She poured out her frustrations.

  “Nothing seems amiss, Mary. I’ve been watching them all discreetly for two months now. Marshall’s guards seem ill-suited to treachery. There is a clerk with slightly odd habits but nothing that comes close to proof of treason.”

  Mary patted her hand.

  “You are right to move slowly and get to know these people, my lady. Whoever is false among them must get no notion that you are watching.”

  “I’m careful, Mary, but I don’t feel as though I’m making progress.”

  “Tell me more about this clerk.”

  “There isn’t much to tell. One time I surprised him in the Earl’s office late at night and he seemed to hide some papers. He goes in there on some nights when the Earl is away. On other nights, it appears he patronizes a brothel. I had Jamie Finch follow him two nights ago. He went to the White Mare.”

  Mary Cullen did not seem shocked in the least.

  “I’ve seen the place, my lady. There are a dozen more like it within a mile and they do a good business. I suppose men will be men—your clerk included. From your description, he would not seem to have the nerves required of a spy. I would advise you to not overlook Sir Nevil. Marshall may trust him, but I’ve met the man. He has nerves aplenty! He seems the more likely culprit.”

  Millicent sighed. Mary was encouraging, but it all seemed so fruitless. She rose.

  “I’m so glad you came this time, Mary. The Archbishop can be a bit…”

  “Frightening?”

  Millicent laughed,

  “Yes, a bit.”

  Mary surprised her with a quick hug.

  “I’ll do my best to come next time you call, my lady. I find the man a little frightening myself.”

  Firestorm

  A rough hand shook Roland awake an hour past midnight. He gave quiet instructions to the man who had roused him, dressed quickly and headed up toward the Northgate. As he emerged onto the roof of the gatehouse, he found Declan there, an eager look on his face. Without a word, the Irishman pointed out toward the enemy positions.

  On most nights the campfires of the enemy were plainly visible in the distance and on a clear, moonlit night a watcher on the gatehouse roof could see the enemy sentries, keeping their own lonely watch on the city. They had waited through ten nights for the fog to return. Now there was nothing to see but a wall of grey.

  “Started coming in an hour ago,” Declan whispered, “thick and grey as gruel. I sent for ye when I was sure it was settlin’ in for a spell.” Roland nodded. Behind him on Barn Lane, he could hear the faint sounds of men quietly assembling, greeting each other in hushed voices.

  The days and nights since the last fog blanketed Chester had been marked by feverish planning and careful preparation. He had gathered Patch, Declan, Sir Edgar, Thorkell and Sir James to help plan a daring attack on the trebuchets under the cover of the next fog. There had been questions and heated arguments over how the thing was to be done. In the end, all agreed that sallying out of the city, even under the cover of fog, was risky, but it had to be tried. When the debate was done and the particulars agreed upon, they presented the plan to Earl Ranulf.

  “It’s risky,” was the Earl’s first opinion.

  “Aye, my lord, it is that,” Roland said, “but we will have surprise on our side. They will not expect this and will be slow to react.”

  Ranulf pursed his lips.

  “And if they are quick to react, they will slaughter my Danish archers!”

  Roland had to suppress a smile. Ever since the Earl had seen the field beyond the River Weaver littered with dead mercenaries killed by the Danes, he had shown a marked regard for his new force of bowmen.

  “My lord,” Thorkell said stepping forward. “It should take only two minutes from the time we light the fire pots until we have finished our task. When the last arrow flies, we will turn and run. The Northgate is only three hundred yards away. I do not think they will move that fast.”

  The Earl nodded.

  “I hope you are right, Master Thorkell, and I note that this plan has Sir Declan and the Invalid Company at the Northgate, ready to ride out should you be pursued.”

  “Aye, my lord. We’ve already been saved once by the Invalids. I trust they will not fail us.”

  Ranulf rose.

  “If they do, it will not be from lack of courage.” The Earl turned toward Declan. “Sir Declan, I will ride with you—if our services are required.”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  As Roland listened to Ranulf, he thought back to the first time he’d seen the young Earl of Chester. It had been on the great procession to London to attend the coronation of King Richard. Then, Ranulf had been surrounded by toadies and opportunists and had seemed to be a boy playacting at being an Earl. No longer. Adversity had turned the callow nobleman into a true Marcher Lord—a man worth following.

  The faint noise from Barn Lane had died down as men awaited the word to march. Roland looked once more to the north. Fifty paces beyond the Northgate, the swirling grey turned to black. He whispered a command to the man beside him, who went to the trap and called quietly to the men on the floor below.

  Carefully they began to crank the windlass that raised the portcullis. The thick ropes had been newly covered in a thin layer of grease and the pulley newly oiled. Only a slight groaning issued from the wooden windlass as it took the weight of the heavy iron barrier. As they worked, Roland climbed down through the hatch, exited onto the north wall and hurried down to the arch beneath the gatehouse. He would lead the archers.

  When he reached the street below, Svein handed him his longbow and a bundle of arrows bound together with twine. He made a quick check and counted four fire arrows and ten bodkin-tipped shafts. The small cages behind the head of the fire arrows were already stuffed with woollen cloth and smelled strongly of resin. He nodded to Svein and moved to the front of the column.

  No command was needed as he stepped out of the shelter of the gatehouse and headed north into the swirling fog. As the grey mist closed in, he kept his eyes riveted on the roadway ahead. Thirty yards from the gate, he saw the first stone, carefully placed by the side of the road.

  Three nights before, in a driving rain, two farmers, Cheshire men who had worked the land where the mercenary siege engines now stood, had been lowered over the east wall. They followed the ditch at the base of the wall until they reached the Northgate, then crawled out on their bellies toward the enemy lines.

  Each man carried a leather bag filled with fist-sized white stones. These they placed at intervals as they slid through the mud toward the siege engines. It took hours to lay out the stones, but before the wet dawn arrived, they had left behind markers to guide the way for the archers, even in a thick fog. The rain was finally ending as the two farmers were hauled back over the east wall.

  Roland followed the trail of stones for another two hundred paces until he reached a spot where three stones formed a rough vee, pointing west. This was the sign to move off the road. He raised his head and looked to the north. For the first time, he could see a faint glow through the fog—the campfires of the enemy.

  Roland slowed his steps. If the farmers had estimated properly, he was only a hundred yards from the enemy machines and the sentries guarding them. They could not risk the noise from a stumble now. He looked behind him and saw the dark shape of Svein. He had made the turn at the three stones as well.

  For days they had drilled fo
r this moment. The one hundred Danish archers selected for the attack on the siege engines would turn west off the road at the three stones and move across the enemy front until their line was opposite the siege engines at a distance of one hundred paces. They had spent hours practicing with the new arrows, getting used to the heavier shaft and adjusting their draw and elevation to strike at targets exactly one hundred paces away. Each day there were fewer misses.

  Every third man carried a clay pot bound up with cord and filled with tinder and pitch. In a small pouch, each had a fire steel and flint. Slowly and carefully they picked their way over the rough ground, following the man in front of them, until Roland reached a final grouping of three white stones that marked the westernmost firing position. He stopped and turned to his right. Svein copied his movement and it rippled down the line all the way back to the road.

  Across the way, Roland could hear men talking. There was no way to tell what they said at this distance, but a round of laughter assured him they were not discussing a surprise attack. He turned to his right and gave a hand signal that was passed on down the line and out of sight in the darkness.

  The man next to Svein knelt down beside the fire pot. He struck a spark and it didn’t catch. Three sparks later a tiny flame emerged. Dimly, Roland could see fire pots igniting one after another down the line. There was still no sign that the enemy knew they were there.

  ***

  A hundred paces north, Jan Claes stamped his feet and pulled his cape closer around him. It wasn’t nearly the coldest night he’d spent on this campaign, but the damned fog brought a dampness with it that seemed to seep into his bones. He looked off to the south toward Chester and saw nothing. Even on a clear night, there was rarely anything to see in that direction and in this fog, he could barely see twenty feet in front of him.

  Sentry duty in these conditions seemed pointless, but he knew better than to object. Complaints to his sergeant usually meant double the duty! Behind him he heard some of the men laughing. They’d been casting dice and gambling away their pay. That was not for Jan.

  He paced back and forth and tried to think of pleasant thoughts to pass the final hour of his watch. There was a tavern girl back home in Flanders who had never given him a second look. He liked to dream of what she would think when he came home, his pockets full of silver from this campaign. She’d look then, he would wager!

  He kept his eyes to the south and did not look back at the fire that burned brightly behind him. It would ruin his night vision and, while he might be bored with this duty, he was no green recruit. He knew his job and would do it like the veteran he had become. He was turning his thoughts back to the tavern girl when he saw something odd in the distance.

  There were lights. He knew in this fog, no light from the city could reach him—so what could this be? There was nothing to his front but open fields. At first he saw three, then three more, then—dozens! He did not know what to make of these lights, but it could only be trouble. Jan Claes called for the sergeant of the watch.

  ***

  All along the line, the fire pots began to blaze and men crowded around to feed the resin-soaked rags of the fire arrows. Roland heard a shout in the distance. Some alert guard had seen the yellow glow rising to the south. There was no great alarm in the man’s voice, only the sound of a watchful sentry who had seen something strange.

  The flames from the fire pots illuminated a dozen ghostly archers off to Roland’s right. He watched them light their arrows in the pot and carefully elevate their bows before loosing their shafts into the dark sky. He lit his first arrow, brought his bow to the proper elevation and added his shaft to the hail of fire flying through the fog at the hated trebuchets.

  ***

  The sergeant of the watch had been tossing dice when Jan Claes shouted his first warning, but the man was winning and did not want to ruin his streak of good luck. It was probably nothing anyway. At his guard post, Claes watched as the yellow light to the south seemed to grow and spread. Then, to his horror, it rose into the sky and headed toward him! He shouted another warning, then began to run. This second call forced the sergeant to put down his dice and look up. He saw flames dropping from the sky.

  It froze him in place as the first volley hit. One of the men in the dice game took a blazing arrow in the chest and fell over backwards. The man next to him knelt down and beat out the flames that were igniting his comrade’s clothes, but the arrow had already done its damage and the man was dead.

  No one else had been hit, but the siege engines had not been so lucky. All save one had been struck by multiple arrows. The sergeant screamed at his men to pull out the arrows before the flames caught, but the barbed heads did not come out easily. As they worked frantically to tear the burning arrows from the heavy oak, a second volley fell out of the sky and began striking men and machines. The guards began to run. The sergeant pulled a horn from his waist band and blew three times, a signal that would alert the entire camp of danger.

  All along the line of siege engines, the fires began to take hold as the shouts from the mercenary lines took on a new urgency. The Danes paid no mind. They lit their arrows and loosed them, trusting that their hours of practice would send the shafts true. It took less than a minute to send four hundred flaming arrows into the midst of the enemy.

  By the time help arrived from the main camp, three machines were engulfed in flames and eight more were catching quickly. Men ran forward with blankets to beat at the flames. The engineers who manned the trebuchets tried frantically to save what they could, but the damage was not over.

  Their fire arrows gone, the Danes began shooting bodkin tipped shafts at the mercenary lines, lowering the angle of flight to account for the lighter arrows. Soon screams began to mingle with the shouts of alarm in the murky distance, telling the Danes that they were striking flesh and blood.

  Roland strained his eyes into the darkness, and saw that the glow to the north was growing rapidly. It was impossible to tell how many, if any, of the four hundred fire arrows had hit their mark, but something was ablaze in the enemy camp. He was tempted to stay and keep sending waves of arrows into the enemy ranks, but they had come to destroy the trebuchets and only morning would tell if they had succeeded. He would not risk the lives of his men just to draw more blood from the Flemings and Irish across the way.

  He started to raise his arm to signal withdrawal when a dark shape hurtled out of the blanket of fog and slammed into him. The man let out a guttural cry of rage and drove his dagger down at his neck. It missed his jugular by a hair as Roland twisted frantically to his left and managed to get one arm free. The man drew back his knife hand for another thrust but Roland wrenched his body upwards and slammed an open palm into the side of the man’s head, bursting an eardrum.

  The man was stunned for a moment but recovered. He reached for Roland’s free arm, his weight still pinning his foe to the ground. Then the horn tip of a longbow came out of the darkness and took the man in the temple. He collapsed in a heap. Strong hands rolled him off of Roland. It was Svein.

  “I’m obliged, sir.” Roland managed.

  “We are even now, I believe,” said Svein, as Roland struggled to his feet. “I did not like being in your debt.”

  “Consider it discharged.”

  A horn sounded from the north and Roland heard a horse squeal.

  “I think it’s time to run,” he said.

  He did not need to give the signal. All along the line, the Danes turned and ran for the Northgate. Roland was the furthest and had just reached the north road when he heard the rumble of hooves behind him. Some part of the enemy cavalry was reacting more quickly than he had hoped. He ran faster.

  A hundred yards from the gate he heard a warning shout and leapt off the road as the Earl of Chester thundered by on his charger, followed closely by the Invalid Company. Roland stood and watched them pass. He caught a quick glimpse of Sir Edgar as he flashed by, one hand holding his reins and the other his long battleaxe. Wit
hin seconds, a fearsome din arose as the Invalids smashed into the mercenary cavalry.

  He reached the gatehouse and clambered up to the roof. Off to the north, where there had been only thick grey mist fading into blackness, there was a growing light. It throbbed and swayed sending red and yellow reflections off the banks of fog. It was the line of siege engines—and some of them, at least, were burning. Below, on the north road, the clash of swords had faded and the riders had begun to return to the Northgate. Roland ran down to the street where the Danes had gathered and found Thorkell.

  “Losses?” he asked.

  Thorkell laid a gnarled hand on his shoulder.

  “One man, Roland.”

  “Dead?”

  “Broke his ankle stepping in a hole as we ran back,” Thorkell said with a grin. “I think his pride was the principal casualty.”

  Roland shook his head. They had been lucky. He had expected to pay a price for striking at the enemy siege engines. Now they would have to wait for the light to see the results of their night’s work.

  He climbed back to the top of the Northgate and watched the glow from the north as the night wore on. He was not the only one who could not sleep. The top of the gatehouse was crowded with Danes and a goodly number of the Invalids waiting anxiously for the dawn.

  First light arrived, but the fog did not lift. Another hour passed and finally the sun began to burn away the mists. A collective gasp escaped from the watchers on the gatehouse roof as the morning light revealed the blackened ruins of ten trebuchet’s completely destroyed by fire, two badly damaged and one machine apparently unscathed. Men could be seen in the distance milling about the scene of destruction.

  A murmur ran through the watchers. Roland turned to see the crowd parting as Earl Ranulf approached. The Earl nodded to him and peered out at the enemy lines. The lone unburnt trebuchet lifted a solitary stone toward the walls. It fell into the ditch. The people on the roof hooted and sent catcalls at the enemy. Ranulf threw an arm around Roland’s shoulder and beamed.