The Powder of Death

by Julian Stockwin

  He pointed to the scattered bodies – a hundred or more, but coming at such a price … It could only be concluded that the main work would as before have to be done in a traditional brutal hand-to-hand melee. As to the shock value of the gunnes firing, in due course soldiers would overcome their fear as they had for every other ghastly battlefield horror.

  Still, the count allowed, the gunnes had shown promise.

  Jared had his own concerns. In addition to their problems in wet weather, if moved forward to fire, their exposure to counter-attack was a serious flaw, as was the relatively low number of casualties they could inflict. There was no denying that to this point they were unlikely to change the way battles were fought.

  This only strengthened his conviction that the future of gunnes was not on the field of battle but in the developing of castle levellers, which in one world-shaking move would turn everything on its head.

  CHAPTER 91

  First things first: a bronze gunne of the size of any he’d seen was expensive enough but he was going for one very much bigger and that would take a great deal of money.

  Rosamunde heard him out. ‘It is a risk, this I know – but the prize is great. And if any are to seize it, this must be you, dear Jared. Make your plans.’

  ‘My heart, I shall not cease to bless you!’

  Jared lost no time in contacting Farnese.

  ‘Bartolomeo, so good of you to come,’ he warmly greeted the man who had shown him the way to break through the limitations of iron forging.

  ‘I’ve a mind to construct a gunne bigger than any, as will turn a castle’s walls to ruin. Do you desire to help me?’

  ‘I do, Grand Master, and that right willingly.’

  The challenges, however, were great.

  Farnese’s earlier cannone had been adapted to fire a hen’s-egg-sized ball but had been the size of a small pig and many times heavier and he’d put it aside while involved with the ribaudequins. If this new gunne was to throw a ‘pea’ the span of, say, a turnip then it would have to be not twice but many times the size.

  The cost in bronze would be fearful. Just the tin, rare and only found in far places, to blend with eight times its weight in pure copper to give a total probably several times that of a man, was going to amount to a grave sum. Added to this were the expenses of the foundry, which even with Farnese’s guidance would have to find considerable outlay for non-standard tools and workshop gear.

  The bell-founders, who had done well out of Peter van Vullaere’s ribaudequin gunne casting, were hesitant: this would be the biggest job they’d ever done.

  Jared saw their problem. Bell moulds of various shapes and sizes lined the walls of the dusty foundry, none of which was larger than a boy. And everything was established and fitted for the making of bells – inner and outer moulds, mantles and so forth all for the same purpose. To set up for a single special was going to take some persuading.

  However, the prospect of a future leading position in the craft of gunne-making decided it – even to the extent of paying half of the costs of a new melting furnace, made necessary by the much greater volume of metal needed. A single pour was critical to ensure a sound casting and this required multiplying the capacity by several times.

  Heady with excitement, Jared tried to maintain a serious composure when the gunne was ready to be brought into existence.

  The furnace was roaring at full capacity with three sweating men on the bellows. Jared looked down into the casting pit. There was nothing much to see; the gunne mould was set vertically in the ground and the filling orifice was offset to the central bore mould with sand and dust piled around.

  ‘Stand back for your life!’ roared the master bell-founder, pointing to the base of the furnace. A foundry hand worked free a tiny door and suddenly a luminous orange-white glow began streaming out and into brick-lined channels that led to the casting pit, pouring into the mould with a passing blast of heat.

  It died away to a trickle and then stopped.

  Jared waited expectantly. Did fresh-cast bronze gleam forth its newness?

  But nothing happened. The workmen left, and the master folded his arms and looked at him with heavy patience.

  ‘Is that all?’ Jared said.

  ‘We go now,’ Farnese told him, pulling at his arm. ‘They can’t touch it, it’ll take a week or over to cool.’

  When the gunne finally emerged it glimmered with a fine sand-rough red-bronze finish and looked as deadly as Jared had hoped. Yet it proved a brute to handle and even with the waterway close by it took all of two days to get it aboard the barge for the island.

  Jared approached the testing cautiously. This was passing into the unknown and nothing could be taken for granted.

  The size of bore meant that lead balls were not practical; he’d had to find a mason and have spheres of stone laboriously chiselled to the right diameter.

  The gunne was mounted on massive timber blocks, sinking them slowly into the soggy ground under its ponderous weight.

  Conveniently, at one end of the island was a long deserted monk’s retreat, a substantial structure of stone that could stand in for a castle’s walls.

  A proving shot would be fired first.

  Suspecting the effect of the much heavier charge of powder and shot, Jared wound cloth over his ears and sent all his attendants away.

  Hesitating only for a moment he touched it off.

  The gunne bellowed its rage, rearing off the blocks and toppling down, a great volume of smoke taking minutes to clear. It had been a rounder, deeper sound but on a giant scale, the blast briefly enclosing him and sucking the air from his lungs.

  Ears still ringing he went to see the effect.

  To his immense satisfaction he saw that he was right – at a flat and direct trajectory the force of the missile was completely expended on the upright wall.

  Here the ancient moss-covered grey stones had taken the full force of his turnip-sized ‘pea’ and a jagged wound with tumbled stone was the result. While a stone ball might be a clumsy thing in itself, he saw that on impact with the wall it had shattered into countless shards. These were wickedly sharp and would shred defenders unfortunate enough to be on the battlements when a ball hit nearby.

  It was true that a castle’s walls were immensely thicker but he could now show what even a small ball could do when fired from a gunne – what could not be achieved with a great ball?

  On the way back his mind bounded with ideas and he was unprepared for the grave and solemn mood about the House of Barnwell.

  Rosamunde took him aside. She heard him out then said quietly, ‘There is a great matter that has come to pass that bears on your endeavours.’

  Jared was chilled at what he heard, not so much that a serious difficulty of some kind had arisen but that she’d used the word ‘your’ and not ‘our’ in its connection.

  ‘You must know of it this day and be guided by your conscience.’

  Her gaze was direct and grave, with none of the intimacy that had matured between them.

  ‘Then tell me of it, my sweetling,’ he said as lightly as he could manage.

  It could hardly have been worse. The action at Diksmuide had brought consequences that were catastrophic. The French King had been indignant at the humiliation of Baron de Courcy and had intrigued at Avignon with the Pope, a Frenchman.

  In due course a thundering papal denunciation was issued. The Devildriven evil of gunnes was to be entirely cast out of Christian lands. Any who at the peril of their soul conjured with powder and shot or who employed them as weapons of war faced the wrath of the Church and excommunication – as from this moment they all suffered the same condemnation as sorcerers and magicians.

  ‘We’re confounded, Rosamunde. No one will talk to us, take up our gunnes at that risk!’

  ‘I asked you to be guided by your conscience, Jared. Tell me truly if you will be bound by this proclaiming or no.’

  ‘My conscience is clear. I know that gunnes are not the
work of the Devil, and so His Holiness must have been given false counsel. I can tell you I will not be so bound.’

  She touched his arm. ‘That is what I wanted to hear, my dear husband. That you’re still staunch in your vision.’

  She had given him liberty of conscience and then rejoiced at his decision – she shared his vision!

  ‘Ah, yes. But if we can’t go any further without—’

  ‘We go on,’ she said flatly. ‘With changes. The guild continues, but keeps out of the sight of man. A secret company, but everywhere, closing together for our own surviving in the face of persecution.’

  ‘There are so many who would see us cast into Hell for the menace we show to their ways. How can we—?’

  ‘Not so difficult. The Holy Father in all his wisdom has granted us a boon for which we should be duly grateful.’

  Jared blinked in perplexity. ‘Boon?’

  ‘Yes. The papal bull has gone out into all the world and any that have not heard of the gunne have now, and are curious at why it is so strongly condemned. They will discover its potency and will desire to have this for themselves.’

  ‘At the cost of their excommunication?’

  ‘Dear Jared, there is still much for you to learn of the ways of commerce. Where there is a desire that can be met, there is a market for the enterprising. This is our opportunity – we offer them a form of owning and possessing that does not offend the scrupulous wording of the bull. Shall we say, for example, that their gunnes remain our property, even though stored within their grounds. Should they be required for a rightful defence against another with gunnes then our agreement shows that we promptly provide powder, ball and gunners as needful.’

  ‘Ha! And who can say in this world that they’ll never be assailed by another with gunnes? They’ll be under necessity to take precautions … but who will speak with us under such penalty?’

  ‘They will. Provided it is done privily, as they can deny it later.’

  ‘Beloved, you are wise and beautiful and I lay my heart before you.’

  With the ghost of a smile she went on briskly. ‘The ribaudequin is one thing,’ she said. ‘We need another. Pray, how is your wall-smasher proceeding?’

  CHAPTER 92

  After the exhilaration of success and the satisfaction of having been proved right, reality set in.

  The gunne worked – a larger, monster-sized wall-smasher would bring down the stoutest defences, that much was now proved, and Jared could hold it to his heart that he had succeeded in his vision.

  Yet the final step, to set it before a real castle and bring about his worldchanging upheaval was throwing up awkward challenges.

  He believed Rosamunde when she said that those who wanted gunnes would find a way around the papal bull, this was the least of his worries. In his feverish rush to bring his castle-slayer to life he’d ignored everything except the mechanical.

  The most serious of these concerns was cost.

  The amount necessary to see his wall-smasher cast had been staggering. To throw a ball the same size as ones shot from a mangonel would need a gunne say, three or four times the size – tons weight of bronze, a frightful expense. And this for only the one!

  And to fire one of such gigantic dimensions would take a formidable powder charge, one to be measured in pounds. The final price of devil dust had made Rosamunde frown and in such quantities would be a shocking cost in working the gunne. But then what was this, set against the value of a surrendered castle?

  Then a final problem began to loom, one that was truly dismaying and one that he should have seen from the first.

  Swelling the size of the gunne was all very well, but its weight increased with it. At something like the bulk of a horse it would be nearly impossible to move; no wagon could take its weight, and even on sledges with oxen it would grind along infinitely slowly over tracks and hillsides and likely be heavily mired in any soft ground. To bring a gunne of this kind to the site of a siege would take far too long.

  In despair he remembered the many sieges that he’d seen; the first thing attackers did after isolating their objective was to start offensive operations against it. The alternative was to starve them out, and the burden of maintaining an army in idleness for months on end was dire. A siege gunne should be capable of being brought up quickly to begin its work or it was worthless, and plainly this was not the case with his design.

  This was unanswerable and a cruel blow. Having triumphantly established that his vision was attainable, now to have it snatched away …

  Jared held his head in his hands but a tiny voice within tried to console him – the leap forward to this point from his early fumblings had come out of the blue – who was to say that another twist of man’s inventing was not around the corner that would see it overcome?

  CHAPTER 93

  ‘So you’re telling me you can’t go any further with your gunne?’

  Rosamunde was looking at him with an infinite sadness, which he knew was not simply sympathy, and he tensed.

  ‘It’s too heavy. Until I can find a way to reduce its weight …’ It sounded weak, even to himself.

  She got up slowly without catching his eye and moved over to the fire, staring into it for long moments.

  Jared went to stand beside her, reaching for her, playfully tugging her close. ‘What’s troubling you? Tell me, my best beloved,’ he asked softly.

  At first she would not answer, then pulled away and returned to the table where she’d been working with the accounts.

  She looked up at him. ‘Jared. There’s something you should know. I’d my hopes that your gunne would save it.’

  ‘Save it?’

  ‘The guild. I was praying your wall-breaker would be something that all the world would shout for, that would set us on the road to profit and security but …’

  ‘You’re saying you can’t go on with the investment.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’ Her eyes were filling, causing a numbness within him.

  ‘Your gunnes are growing better all the time, you’ve achieved a miracle – but if we haven’t a market, then there’s no money coming in and … and …’

  ‘My sweetling,’ he said gently, stroking her hair, ‘Know that you’ve done more for me than I ever hoped, and you must never chide yourself. It’s myself who—’

  ‘I’m hearing the same thing from everybody. No one knows what a gunne is and doesn’t want to spend good coin to see. And when you sum the expenses you can understand this. The best price I can let gunne-powder go for is not less than thirty-five silver pence the pound. When they know a first-class archer can be bought for just three pennies the day it makes no sense to talk florins and ducats for a novelty.

  ‘Dear one, the Ghent traders are smelling difficulties and my credit with them is weakening. I cannot help it – the funding of the guild must cease and all my efforts go into restoring our substance. You do understand, don’t you?’

  She had kept her worries over the endless drain on the Barnwell fortune from him so he might devote his mind to bringing his wall-smashing gunne into the world.

  The Guild of St Barbara. Now it was to be abandoned to its own resources, and in the face of the market difficulties these would be slender.

  Jared thought frantically. ‘There’s one thing we haven’t tried,’ he said as brightly as he could.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘England. Go there, where gunnes and devil dust are not known, the market untried.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Sweet love, haven’t you heard? England is gone to war with France. This second King Edward is no warrior like his father and I’ve a notion would hear any who would give him an advantage.’

  ‘Jared, the kingdom is in upset, the people and barons do resent his rule. It is not the England you will remember.’

  ‘Even so, I crave to go and try. We have the ribaudequin and a workable larger gunne – they’re sure to impress!’

  ‘And where would I find the funds f
or this, pray?’

  ‘Melt down my wall-smasher for the metal.’

  ‘You’re determined on this, aren’t you, my love.’

  ‘Yes.’ He could not give up his hopes and dreams without one last try.

  ‘Then you shall go to England.’

  CHAPTER 94

  Coventry, England, AD 1325

  Rosamunde had agreed they would to return to Coventry together. ‘It will not be easy,’ she murmured. ‘Even to get audience at this time of strife and discord will be a hard thing.’

  ‘But we will surely try.’

  ‘Yes, however word from our agent is that the King is distracted, sore set to raise an army for this French war and, dare I say it, the Queen Isabella does not aid him in this, spending as she does. We provide the royal court with damask and fine stuff so we should not complain, but to persuade him to part with any part of his treasure at this time will be a toilsome matter.’

  ‘Must I … do you say I will speak to His Majesty directly, that is to say myself?’ This realisation was a terrifying prospect.

  ‘Who else, beloved?’ she answered briskly, then softened. ‘You will fare very well, I know it. Hold always to your heart that it is written in the Book of Proverbs: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business: he shall stand before kings”.’

  Jared nodded gravely.

  ‘And remember that when in parliament or council he wears a kingly face but even a prince must talk with those who supply him with what he desires. Never fear, I will instruct you on how to conduct yourself.’

  The politeness and graces were one thing – no one would trouble themselves about a mere merchant’s airs – it was the deadly maze of rivalries, jealousies and hidden allegiances that he was hearing about that were his greatest despair.

  Surrounding the King at court were his favourites but so also were those plotting against him. Many would say the chief of which was his wife and queen – Isabella herself. On the one hand were the powerful and loathed Despensers, and on the other, most of the rest of the realm who were infuriated by the King’s incompetence and indecisive ways, the careless indulging of his followers. It was a poisonous and treacherous court Jared was headed into.