Stormbird wotr-1

by Conn Iggulden

  With a sick sense of inevitability, Derry saw where the man was prodding him. He spoke quickly to head him off.

  ‘The marriage in France was at the king’s own request, the terms agreed by His Royal Highness to the last drop of ink. The royal seal sits secure upon it all, Sir William. Will you be the man to lay your accusations at the king’s feet? I wish you luck. Royal approval is immunity enough, I think, for the disasters you mention. I do not deny the lost territories and I regret the loss of every farm and holding there, but this scrabbling-around for a culprit, a scapegoat, is beneath the dignity of Parliament or its Speaker. Sir William, there are times when England triumphs, and others when … she fails. We endure and we go on. It behoves us ill to look back and point fingers, saying “Ah, that should not have happened. That should not have been allowed.” Such a perspective is granted only to men staring backwards, Sir William. For those of us with the will to go forward, it is as if we walk blindfolded into a dark room. Not every false step or stumble can be judged after the moment has passed, nor should it be.’

  Sir William Tresham looked amused as Derry spoke. The old lawyer brought his gaze down from on high and Derry felt pierced by eyes that saw and understood too much.

  ‘By your reasoning, Master Brewer, there would never be punishment for any misdeeds! You would have us shrug our shoulders and put all failures down to luck or fate. It is an intriguing vision and, I must say, an interesting insight into your mind. I almost wish the world could work like that, Master Brewer. Sadly, it does not. Those who have brought about the ruination and deaths of thousands must in turn be brought to justice! There must be justice and it must be seen to be done!’

  Derry found himself breathing heavily, his fists curling and uncurling in frustration at his sides.

  ‘And the king’s protection?’ he demanded.

  ‘Why, it extends only so far, Master Brewer! When riots and vile murders spread across the country, I suspect even the king’s protection has its limits. Would you have those responsible for such destruction go unpunished? The loss of Crown lands in France? The butchery of men of high estate? If so, you and I must differ.’

  Derry narrowed his eyes, wondering again at the peculiar timing of the summons that had snatched him up and borne him across London to Westminster.

  ‘If my name is nowhere mentioned, why am I here?’ he demanded.

  To his irritation, Tresham chuckled in what looked like genuine pleasure.

  ‘I am surprised you did not ask that question at the start, Master Brewer. A suspicious man might find fault in you taking so long to reach this point.’

  Tresham stood up and looked out of the window himself. Close by the river, the great bell chimed at that moment, struck twice within to let all men know that it was two hours past noon. Tresham clasped his hands behind his back as if he lectured students of the law and Derry’s heart sank at the man’s unnerving confidence.

  ‘You are an intriguing fellow, Master Brewer. You fought as a king’s man in France, some sixteen years ago, with some distinction I am told. You found service as a runner and an informant for old Saul Bertleman after that. Risky occupations both, Master Brewer! I have even heard talk of you fighting in the rookeries, as if both violence and peril are things you crave. I knew Saul Bertleman for many years, are you aware? I would not say we were friends, exactly, just that I learned to admire the quality of information he could provide. Yet the aspect of him that remains in my mind was perhaps his greatest virtue: caution. Your predecessor was a cautious man, Master Brewer. Why such a man would choose you to follow him is beyond me.’

  Tresham paused to observe the effect of his words. His delight at having a captive audience was vastly irritating, but there was nothing Derry could do but endure it.

  ‘I expect he saw things you don’t,’ Derry replied. ‘Or perhaps you didn’t know him as well as you thought.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that is possible,’ Tresham said, his doubts clear. ‘From the first moment I began looking into this farrago, this unspeakable mess of vanity and truces and arrogance, your name has been whispered to me. Honest men will breathe it from behind their hands, Master Brewer, as if they fear you would learn they have spoken to me, or to my men. Whatever the truth of your own involvement, it seems but the merest common sense to keep you under my eye while I send men to arrest a friend of yours.’

  Derry felt a cold hand clutch his innards. His mouth worked but no words came. Tresham could hardly contain his satisfaction as he smiled in the direction of the clock tower.

  ‘Lord Suffolk should be arriving at Portsmouth today, Master Brewer, while the ragged survivors of his army lick their wounds in Calais. The reports are not good, though I dare say I do not have to tell you that.’

  Tresham gestured to the papers on the desk, the corners of his mouth turning down in something like regret.

  ‘Your name may not be mentioned here, Master Brewer, but that of William de la Pole, Lord Suffolk, is on almost every one. You ask why you are here? It was the message of those whispering voices, Master Brewer. They warned me that if I were to set out nets, I should first be sure you were not there to cut them. I believe that task has been accomplished by now. You may leave, unless of course you have any further questions. No? Then speak the word “Fisherman” to the guards below.’ Tresham chuckled. ‘A foolish conceit, I know, but if you give them the word, they will let you pass.’

  He spoke the last words to empty air as Derry clattered down the steps. He’d lost the best part of a day being held at Tresham’s pleasure. His thoughts were wild as he ran across the road and hard along the outer edge of the palace, heading down to the ferry boats on the river. The Tower of London was three miles off, right round the bend of the Thames. He had men there who could be sent to the coast on fast horses. As he ran, he laughed nervously to himself, his eyes bright. Sir William bloody Tresham was a dangerous enemy to have, there was no doubt about it. Yet, for all his cleverness, Tresham had been wrong in just one thing. William de la Pole wasn’t coming to Portsmouth, two days’ ride and south-west of the city of London. He was coming to Folkestone in Kent, and Derry was the only one who knew it.

  He was out of breath by the time he reached the landing stage, where ferries for members of Parliament waited at all times of the day and night. Derry pushed past an elderly gentleman as he was being helped down, leaping aboard the narrow scull and making its owner curse as the vessel lurched and almost went over.

  ‘Take me to the Tower,’ he said over the ferryman’s protest. ‘A gold noble if you row like your house is on fire.’

  The man’s mouth shut fast then. He abandoned the old man he’d been helping and touched his forehead briefly before jumping down and sweeping them out on to the dark waters.

  ‘I bloody hate fighting in mist and rain,’ Jack Cade said as he walked. ‘Your hands slip, your feet slip, bowstrings rot and you can’t see the enemy worth a damn before he’s on you.’

  Paddy grunted at his shoulder, hunched and shivering as they walked in line. Despite Jack’s irritation at the downpour, he supposed it was some sort of a blessing. He doubted the sheriff of Kent had many archers at his disposal. It was a valuable talent and those who had it were all in France for better pay, getting themselves slaughtered. If the king’s officers in Kent had even a dozen crossbows between them, they’d be lucky, but in heavy rain the strings stretched and the range was reduced. If Jack hadn’t been miserable, sodden and frozen, he might have thanked God for the rain. He didn’t, though.

  Paddy’s outlook was, if anything, slightly worse. He had always been suspicious of good luck in any form. It didn’t seem to be the natural order of things and he was usually happier when his fortunes were bad. Yet they’d marched through Kent almost without incident, from Maidstone on. The king’s sheriff hadn’t been in the county seat when they came looking for him. Cade’s army had caught a few of his bailiffs around the jail and amused themselves hanging them before freeing the prisoners and burning the
place down. Since then, they’d walked like children in the Garden of Eden, with neither sight nor sound of the king’s soldiers. With every day of peace, Paddy’s mood sank further into his boots. It was all very well spending the daylight practising with farm tools in place of weapons, but there would come a reckoning and a retribution, he was certain. The king and his fine lords couldn’t allow them to roam the countryside at will, taking and burning whatever they wanted. Only the thought that they were not alone kept Paddy’s spirits up. They’d heard reports of riots in London and the shires, all sparked off by the righteous grievances of families coming home from France. Paddy prayed each night that the king’s soldiers would be kept busy somewhere else, but in his heart of hearts, he knew they were coming. He’d had a grand few weeks in the Kentish Freemen, but he expected tears and the weather suited his gloom.

  The rain had lessened to a constant drizzle, but there was mist thick around them when they heard a high voice shouting nearby. Jack had insisted on scouts, though they had only stolen plough horses for them to ride. One of the volunteers was a short, wiry Scot by the name of James Tanter. The sight of the little man perched on the enormous great horse had reduced Paddy almost to tears of laughter when he’d seen it. They all recognized Tanter’s thick brogue yelling a warning through the rain.

  Jack roared orders on the instant to ready weapons. Tanter may have been a bitter little haggis-sucker, as Jack called him, but he wasn’t a man to waste breath on nothing either.

  They marched on, holding pruning hooks and scythes, shovels and even old swords if they’d come across them or taken them from unfortunate bailiffs. Every man there stared through the grey, looking for shapes that could be an enemy. All noises were muffled, but they heard Tanter shout a curse and his horse whinny somewhere up ahead. Paddy turned back and forth as he walked, straining to hear. He made out small sounds and swallowed nervously.

  ‘Christ save us, there they are!’ Jack said, raising his voice to a bellow. ‘You see them? Now kill them. Pay a little back of what you’re owed. Attack!’

  The lines of men broke into a lurching run through the thick mud, the ones at the rear watching their mates disappear into the swirling mist. They could see no further than thirty paces, but for Jack Cade and Paddy, that small space was filling with soldiers with good swords and chain mail. They too had been warned by Tanter’s desperate shouts, but there was still confusion in the sheriff’s ranks. Some of them stopped dead on seeing Cade’s men drift like ghosts out of the land in front of them.

  With a roar, Cade charged, raising a woodcutter’s axe above his head as he went. He was among the first to reach the sheriff’s soldiers and he buried the wide blade in the neck of the first man he faced. The blow cut deep through mail links and wedged, so that he had to wrench it back and forth to free the blade, spattering himself with gore. Around him, his men were surging forward. Rob Ecclestone wore no armour and held only his razor, but he did bloody work with it, stepping past armoured men with a quick flick that left them gasping and holding their throats. Paddy had a pruning hook with a crescent blade that he held out flat. He hooked men’s heads with it, pulling them in as the blade bit. The rest were Kentish men for the most part and they’d been angry ever since the French had evicted them. They were angrier still at the English lords who’d connived in it. In that boggy field near Sevenoaks, there was a chance for them to act at last and all Jack’s speeches were as nothing next to that. They were furious men holding sharp iron and they poured forward into the soldiers.

  Jack staggered, swearing at a dull pain from his leg. He didn’t dare look down and risk getting his head split at the wrong moment. He wasn’t even sure he’d been cut and had no memory of a wound, but the damned thing buckled under him and he limped and hopped with the line, swinging his axe as he went. He fell behind despite his best efforts, staggering on while the noises of battle receded away from him.

  He stepped over dead men and took a careful route around the screaming wounded. It seemed an age of limping along, lost in hissing rain that made the blood on his axe run down his arm and chest. In the mists, it took him a little time to understand no one else was coming against him. The sheriff had sent four hundred men-at-arms, a veritable army in the circumstances. It was easily enough men to quell a rebellion of farmers — unless there were five thousand of them, armed and raging. The soldiers had made bloody slaughter on some of Cade’s Freemen, but in the drizzle and fog, neither side had seen the numbers they faced until there were no more soldiers left to kill.

  Jack stood with his boots so clogged he thought it made him a foot taller. He was panting and sweat poured off him, adding to his stink. Still no one came. Slowly, a smile spread across Jack’s face.

  ‘Is that it?’ he shouted. ‘Can anyone see any more of them? Jesus, they can’t all be dead already? Rob?’

  ‘No one alive here,’ his friend shouted from over on his right.

  Jack turned to the voice and through the mist he saw Ecclestone standing alone, with even the Kentish Freemen shying away from him. He was covered in other men’s blood, a red figure in the swirling vapour. Jack shuddered, feeling cold hands run down his back at the sight.

  ‘Didn’t the sheriff have a white horse on his shield?’ Paddy called from somewhere on Jack’s left.

  ‘He’d no right to it, but I heard that.’

  ‘He’s here then.’

  ‘Alive?’ Jack demanded hopefully.

  ‘He’d be screaming if he was, with a wound like this one. He’s gone, Jack.’

  ‘Take his head. We’ll put it on a pole.’

  ‘I’m not cutting his head off, Jack!’ Paddy replied. ‘Take his shield for your bloody pole. It’s the horse of Kent, isn’t it? It’ll do just as well.’

  Jack sighed, reminded once again that the Irishman had some odd qualms for a man with his history.

  ‘A head sends a better message, Paddy. I’ll do it. You fetch a good pole and sharpen the end. We’ll take his shield as well, mind.’

  The lack of an enemy was slowly being understood by his ragged army, so that cheering erupted in patches from them, echoing oddly across the fields and sounding thin and exhausted, despite their numbers. Jack stepped over dozens of bodies to reach Paddy. He looked down on to the white face of a man he’d never met and raised his axe with satisfaction, bringing it down hard.

  ‘Where next, Jack?’ Paddy said in wonder, looking at the corpses all around. Blood squelched around his boots, mingling with the rainwater and mud.

  ‘I’m thinking we have a proper army here,’ Jack said thoughtfully. ‘One that’s been blooded and come through. There’s swords for the taking, as well as mail and shields.’

  Paddy looked up from the headless figure that had been the sheriff of Kent. Just the day before, the sheriff had been a man to be feared across the county. The Irishman looked at Jack in dawning astonishment, his eyes widening.

  ‘You aren’t thinking o’ London? I thought that was just fighting talk before. It’s one thing to take down a few hundred sheriff’s men, Jack!’

  ‘Well, we did it, didn’t we? Why not London, Paddy? We’re thirty or forty miles away, with an army. We’ll send a few lads to get the lay of the land, to see how many brave soldiers they have to man the barricades. I tell you we’ll never have a chance like this again. We can make them clean out the courts, maybe, or give us the judges to hang, like they hung my son. My boy, Paddy! You think I’m done yet? With an axe at their throats, we can force them to change the laws that took him from me. I’ll make you free, Paddy Moran. No, sod that. I’ll make you a bleedin’ earl.’

  William de la Pole stepped gingerly on to the docks, feeling his bruises and his years. Everything ached, though he had taken no wound. He still remembered a time when he could fight all day and then sleep like the dead, just to rise and fight again. There hadn’t been the pains in his joints then, or a right arm that felt as if he had something sharp digging into the shoulder, so that every movement sent shudders th
rough him. He remembered too that a victory washed it all away. Somehow, seeing your enemies dead or fleeing made the body heal faster, the pain less vicious. He shook his head as he stood on the dock and looked out over the fishing town of Folkestone, grey and cold in the wind off the sea. It was harder when you lost. Everything was.

  The arrival of his ship had not gone unnoticed or unremarked by the fishing crews of the town. They’d gathered in their dozens on the muddy streets and it wasn’t long before his name was being shouted among them. William saw their anger and he understood it. They held him responsible for the disasters across the narrow Channel. He didn’t blame them; he felt the same way.

  There was mist on the sea in the cold morning light. He couldn’t see France, though he felt Calais looming at his back as if the fortress town was just a step away across the brine. It was all that remained, the last English possession in France beyond some scrubland in Gascony that wouldn’t survive a year. He’d come home to arrange ships to take his wounded, as well as for the miserable task of reporting a French victory to his king. William rubbed his face hard at the thought, feeling the bristles and the cold. Gulls dipped and wheeled in the air all around and the wind bit through him as he stood there. He could see fishermen pointing in his direction and he turned to the small group of six guards he’d brought home, all as battered and tired as he was.

  ‘Three of you bring the horses out of the hold. The rest of you keep your hands on your swords. I’m in no mood to talk to angry men, not today.’

  Even as he spoke, the small crowds of locals were growing as others came out of the inns and chandlery shops along the seafront, responding to the news that Lord Suffolk himself was there in the town. There were more than a few present who had come home from France in the previous few months, then stayed on the coast with no coin to take them further. They looked like the beggars they’d become, ragged and filthy. Their thin arms jabbed the air and the mood was growing uglier by the minute. William’s guards shifted uneasily, glancing at each other. One of them shouted to the others to look brisk in the hold, while the other two gripped their sword hilts and hoped to God that they wouldn’t be rushed in an English port after surviving war in France.