That made Baldwin’s grim temper fall away. He grinned, then laughed aloud, and sprang forward, his sword making a bright blue arc. The leader of the Bretons pulled back, his face registering alarm. He had a slight cast in one eye, which Baldwin thought made him look more vulnerable. It was as though the man had defective vision. He might miss Baldwin’s more elaborate attacks. It was worth noting.
Baldwin stamped his foot, then made an elementary lunge. The pirate’s eyes narrowed slightly and he slipped to the side. Baldwin stamped again, stabbed again, and the pirate slipped to the other side. So be it, Baldwin thought to himself, and stamped his foot once more, but this time the ship rolled, and as he made his move, instead of running the man through the breast, his blade merely caught the Breton a glancing blow over the chest.
The man looked down at the blood staining the long slash. When he looked up at Baldwin again, the glittering in his eyes told of no fear, only rage. He stood easily on the balls of his feet, waiting, and Baldwin made as though to attack – but before he could strike, the Breton moved.
His axe rose high over his head before he swung it directly at Baldwin’s head. Baldwin had thought that it was a feint, had kept his attention on the dagger as well, but when he lifted his blade to block the axe, he was beaten back by the power of the blow. It was a heavy weapon, and its mass was bearing down upon him with the full intensity of the pirate’s hatred behind it. Baldwin had only time to slip his sword away and bring it down, striking away the dagger as it aimed for his lower belly. Immediately the axe swung down and to Baldwin’s right. It was an error, for it left him an opening, and he used his blade to knock the arm up and away, then turned it to stab at the man’s breast.
It would have been perfect, but at that moment the ship lurched, and Baldwin’s foot slipped away from under him. He felt his head hit the deck, and a dull ache smothered his conscious thoughts.
Is this how I am to die? he wondered dumbly as he saw the axe lift and begin to plunge towards him. He rolled away, heard the axe strike the deck a short distance from his neck, and then lunged upwards.
He missed his mark. Aimed below the ribcage to tear into the man’s viscera and heart, the blade caught on a bone, skittered across, and dived in under the man’s armpit, slicing through the soft flesh. A minor wound, but painful.
The Breton reached down and pulled his axe free as Baldwin lifted his foot; he was about to dash out the knight’s brains, when the ship moved once more. This time it was the weakened Breton who was unbalanced, and Baldwin’s booted foot caught him as he was leaning too far backwards. One hard shove, and the man was sent hurtling across the deck. Even as Baldwin rose to a crouch and took stock, he saw the man hit the side of the ship. Immediately Gervase, who was fighting with another sailor, punched him viciously in the belly and pushed his head back. The pirate balanced a moment with eyes and mouth wide in astonished horror, and then he fell overboard.
Baldwin climbed to his feet, taking in the scene, and saw that the Bretons were falling back. Sir Charles was wielding his sword like a berserker, while Simon stood before two bodies, his sword dancing in the greyness like a sliver of glass. The helmsman was bellowing, but even as Baldwin began to move towards him, a great gout of blood shot from his lips, and he fell, coughing, almost crushing the cabin-boy, Hamo. A man had crept behind him and stabbed him between the shoulder-blades with a short, wide blade. Now the reddened blade was turned towards the boy. Hamo stared up at the pirate with wide, agonised eyes, his hands held tightly over his ears, as though by blocking the noise he could protect himself.
His terror was the spur. Baldwin rushed at the man and beat at him, the blood-rage settling on him. It was like a veil of crimson: he saw no one except the man before him, and he advanced steadily, his peacock-blue blade flashing and glittering, darting from one side to another, sweeping in a great arc, and then slipping quickly upwards, taking the man across the neck and all but removing his head.
The boat rolled again as the man fell, and now there was a shout and all the Bretons retreated, piling back over the side of the Anne. Baldwin stood gripping the sword, his hands turned red with the blood of his attackers. He looked down at them and sighed as the fighting spirit left his soul. He felt utterly drained. At least Hamo was alive. The boy was pale and shivering, but unwounded, clinging to a rope at the mast, staring at the captain, Gervase, who was sitting holding a large cut in his belly from which the blood seeped. That, Baldwin told himself, was a deadly wound.
‘What now?’ he said to himself.
‘God’s ballocks! Don’t ask me,’ Simon snapped. ‘We’ve no helmsman and the master’s wounded! Even if St Nicholas himself knew where we were going, I doubt whether he’d be able to tell us how to guide this old tub on our own!’
Chapter Three
There was nothing but emptiness in his heart as Isok reached the cottage north-east of his own. He threw open the door and pulled it to behind him quickly, keeping the weather out so far as he could.
‘So you’ve decided, have you?’ a voice asked quietly.
He looked into the shadows. There was a dog curled by the fire, a goat tethered at the far side of the room, and he could see his wife’s aunt as a bundle of old clothes on a bench near the wall.
‘Mariota, she’s—’
‘I know, you great lummock! Come in and sit by the fire. I’ll fetch you some ale. Did you hit her?’
‘How could I?’ he demanded bitterly. ‘She’s made it plain enough she wants me. She’s tried to make me stiff for her, but nothing works. I can’t blame her, can I?’
‘Many men would, though,’ Mariota observed. She had brought him a jug of warmed ale, and now she pushed him down on the floor near the fire, and stood over him to watch while he drank off a great gulp. She was much older than this man, and tonight she felt all her years. It was during a storm like this that she had lost her own man. Now poor Tedia was going to give up hers, but in a more painful manner. Mariota knew perfectly well how much her niece had loved Isok and wanted him – and yet he couldn’t service her. Both were humiliated and shamed.
Well, there was nothing so certain as suffering in this world, she reflected. ‘How is she?’
‘How do I know? I left her ages ago.’
‘Don’t sulk with me, Isok, or I’ll let you feel my fist!’
‘I had to go and see to the boat after I left her. Once it was safe, I came up here. I can’t live with her any longer, Mariota. She’s already selected a lover, someone to service her,’ he said, his voice breaking.
‘I can’t stay there while she does that, can I? I can’t welcome another man into my home to take my own wife!’
‘Are you sure she’s sought a lover?’
‘She didn’t deny it.’
‘That’s not the same thing,’ Mariota said.
‘She’s already chosen her way. It doesn’t include me.’
Making a quick decision, Mariota pulled a heavy rug from her bed and tugged it over her shoulders. ‘Well, if you’re so stupid, at least I can go and make sure that your wife is safe this night. Stay here and look after the goat while I’m gone. I don’t want to come back and find her dead of fright because you left her in the middle of a storm!’
Isok said nothing. He was staring at the heart of the fire. But as the woman left, he felt a slight lightening of his spirits. At least now the future was decided. The knuckles had been thrown, and he could see how they had fallen.
He knew what the future held for him.
Thomas, the Sergeant of Ennor Castle, strode along swiftly as night fell. The rain was sheeting down as he hurried towards the castle and warmth, a huddled figure in his sodden cloak.
He hadn’t realised how bad the weather would be. The squall had been a black slanting smudge on the horizon when he first glanced up, but it appeared to be about to pass to the north of the island. He hadn’t expected it to move over and envelop him on his way back to the castle.
This place! It was as wet as Ireland
. As wet and as miserable. There was no reason for him to be here, other than the obvious ones. He hated the place, and the people. They were nothing more than cattle.
No. Not cattle. Here the peasants were more likely to grab a knife and try to avenge an insult immediately, rather than behaving like proper serfs. It was the atmosphere of this curious little place. Five islands men could live on more or less comfortably, but without much in the way of pasture or decent farming land. It was all hills. Even when the farming brought in a return, what little the peasants had was always likely to be broken up and stolen or burned by pirates. The island of Ennor was the first place that many ships would see when they set sail for England, if they were blown from their course and approached from the west. That meant that hungry and thirsty sailors would arrive with pennies in their pockets, happy to pay any price for a good pot of ale – but it also meant that pirates and murderers from Brittany would sometimes arrive here instead of Cornwall or Devon, and denude the islands of all their stores, killing where they could. It was some years since the pirates had last come here, but that meant nothing.
It certainly led to a particular … spirit of independence among the islanders. When they heard the warning bells from St Mary’s on Ennor, or from St Nicholas on the island named after the Priory, they would grab their tools and go to protect their land and families.
The trouble with such independence, as Thomas knew only too well, was that it could sometimes lead to peasants getting above themselves. They grew to desire control over their own lives – and that was never a good idea. They were not powerful like him; he was free, and he had his own wealth as a result of his speculations.
A drip ran from the back of his thick felt hat; he felt it trickle down his neck, and beneath his outer tunic to his shirt. It itched like a devil, and he had to set his teeth. Damn this place! Full of ignorant peasants and mud. That was it. Mud and peasants.
Ennor, they called it. Imaginative arses! The old folks who could still speak the ancient tongue reckoned that it meant simply ‘The Land’. Ingenious, these peasants, he sneered to himself. Look at the ruddy place! He stopped and glared about him. The trees were rattling as the raindrops struck them, and all about him was the noise of water. Here, in the middle of the area called Hal La Val, the ‘low, marshy ground’ near La Val, all was soaked already. These wetlands sometimes made Thomas anxious. He had odd dreams, in which the sea rose here, in the middle of the island, and suddenly overwhelmed and consumed the population. It had happened in The Flood that all men were drowned, so the priests said, apart from the especially righteous one, whatever his name was.
It had happened before here on the islands, too. Men spoke of a legend that all the islands were once one. They had been broken up by a terrible storm and now the sea was biding its time, ready to smother them entirely. Even since Thomas had arrived here, seven years ago, there had been one exceptionally bad storm during which the sea battered almost over the sands at Porth Mellon. It had been a terrifying sight. The waves pounding at the shore, white spume jetting up fifty feet and more, and then the thunderous crashing as the water hurtled down once more.
This one could be as bad, he reckoned. The way that the sky had become suddenly black and the clouds had rushed over the sea as though to engulf Ennor and its neighbouring island St Nicholas, and then this heavy rain: it seemed more alarming than a normal storm.
For him, a storm at this moment would be disastrous. His investments were heavy, and the cargo expensive. There was no point in smuggling small amounts when a large consignment was possible, and when his ship landed in Cornwall – if it did so, safely – Thomas would make a lot of money.
The Sergeant to Ranulph de Blancminster was taking advantage of the confusion created by the sudden changes in the earldom. A short while ago, the earldom had been the possession of Earl Edmund, but since his death twenty-two or -three years ago, the earldom had been given to Piers Gaveston, just before he was exiled and then captured and executed, and more recently Queen Isabella had been granted it. There were new officials with each change in control, new men to bribe and flatter, but for all that Thomas reckoned he had some years of profit-making left to him. It would take an age for the earldom to realise that he was sending a ship of smuggled goods to Cornwall once a year and meantime profiting by the customs.
It was easy. All ships which landed in the Earl’s lands had to pay customs for their cargoes. The money collected was for the Earl, of course, but Thomas had soon realised that since his own master, Ranulph de Blancminster, couldn’t read, the only reports that would be seen by the Earl’s officers were the ones Thomas bothered to send in. Since the Earldom was in a constant state of flux, it was easy to falsify his reports. Thus, since Gaveston’s death, the Sergeant had been creaming off large amounts of the customs, which helped subsidise his investments in smuggling. Now he was independently wealthy, and he rarely sent in any customs reports at all.
His ship was the reason why he had been out tonight. He had been hoping to see a sign of it coming towards land, but the horizon was devoid of hope, offering only an evil darkness that foretold of the storm. This meant that his ship was either in the middle of the storm, or had already foundered. Neither option was attractive. Thomas had invested heavily in this shipment. Over fifty tuns of wine, all paid for by himself. If that lot was at the bottom of the sea, he would be severely out of pocket. It was enough to make him scowl as he marched back towards the castle.
There was a figure walking towards him in the gloom, and he slowed his steps. Living in the castle of Ranulph de Blancminster, one took no chances, for it contained the most unpleasant group of felons, thieves and outlaws Thomas had known. If one of them was out in this weather, he could only be enormously drunk, and in that state was more likely to pull out a sword and run him through than ask him to move aside. The locals were just as likely to try to kill Thomas if they could do so with any chance of escaping afterwards. No one liked the Lord of the Manor’s Sergeant.
In the past, Thomas had relied on the fearsome reputation of his men to keep order. The peasants were a quarrelsome group at the best of times, but now they were furious because their taxes had risen sharply. Thomas had taken to spreading word of how he had found Robert, his gather-reeve, just to ensure that people were too scared to harm the fellow. But a drunk might forget his fears, and Thomas was the Lord’s administrative officer, detested even more than the man who collected the taxes.
The shape hesitated, almost seemed about to turn away and hide among the trees, but then came on, and Thomas felt his hand make its way towards his sword almost as though it went of its own will and without his compliance.
‘Thank God!’ he muttered when he recognised the man. ‘What are you doing out here, Brother Luke?’
‘Coming to see you!’ Luke said, and his face held an unpleasant, set smile.
There was no sleep for Jean de Conket and his Breton crew, that terrible night.
It had looked so easy, nom de Dieu! The great lumbering cog, obviously overloaded with tuns of good Guyennois wine, hides and skins, maybe even a little gold, and yet the master had managed to evade him, Jean de Conket, with his ponderous vessel. It was galling to think that he had been beaten by superior seamanship, but Jean was nothing if not a realist. He had been outmanoeuvred by the master of the cog. Perhaps the wind and rain had played their part, but that meant nothing to Jean. He took it as a personal affront that another seaman had beaten him. Then there was that knight …
Yes, that bastard who had marked him. Jean flexed his arm, grimacing at the pain. Surely it wasn’t so bad; his dip in the sea must have washed it clean. Jean had faith in the cleansing properties of seawater. It was pure good luck that his plight had been witnessed by two of his comrades, who had immediately taken steps to save his life. If they had stayed on the cog, they might have won her and slaughtered the knight and the master, but that would have been little satisfaction to a corpse. Jean was glad they’d come to his rescue. The
alternative was a hideous death. Some weeks hence, his corpse would have washed up on a shore somewhere, the eyes empty sockets, his clothing shredded, bite marks all over him, like any number of bodies spat out on coastlines after every storm. All sailors had seen them, and all felt the horror of suffering the same fate. The thought made him long for home and safety.
There was no possibility of turning into the wind to try to make their way home now. All the crew knew that. They sat huddled on the thwarts, their oars lashed to the deck as the winds grew in force, while their master bound himself to the mast, his eyes searching for that damned ship all the while, his senses alert to the sounds of straining rigging, tortured wood, and, most important, the thunderous roar of waves crashing on the rocks which he knew lay about the west of England. If they were thrown onto those rocks, their ship would shatter in a moment, and he and all his men must die. In the dark of night like this, Jean feared those rocks more than anything. This ship was a good size, about five and twenty yards long, and with a keel of beech, while the framing, stem and planking were of good Breton oak, but if flung onto rocks by this sea, she would last no longer than a coracle.
Where had the cog gone? It had disappeared as the rain started lashing down again, concealed behind a wall of water. At first, Jean and his men hoped that they might be able to regain her after their abortive withdrawal; Jean in particular had prayed for this. He wanted that tall, dark-haired knight to eat his steel. No man had ever wounded Jean de Conket so cruelly before! The murderous, white-livered Englishman would pay for that!
He hoped that the Englishman was dead, that the cog had hit a rock and sunk. No, he didn’t wish that, he told himself with a grin. He wanted that knight to feel Jean’s blade in his ribs. Also, he wanted that cargo. Better by far that the Anne had lost her mast, that she had wallowed like a hog in a pond for ages, so that all her crew were unwell. Jean and his men would find her later, when the rains had stopped and the wind died down, and the seas grown calmer.
The Outlaws of Ennor: (Knights Templar 16) Page 5
