THE EARL (A HAMMER FOR PRINCES)

by Cecelia Holland

  “Morgan. Find me a piece of sheepskin. Not too large.”

  Roger was coming back. Two teams of oxen, dragging their traces, trudged up to the first of the wagons. Fulk had always admired their way of going, never fast but never really slow, their short thick legs stamping down firmly in the dust, decisive. He rode up to watch the carters hitch them to the wagon.

  “We’ll make no pace with those,” a knight said, and snorted.

  Fulk did not reply. Prince Henry would move relatively slowly and Fulk had no wish to outride him. He was pleased that he had been commanded to ride flank. Farther to the east the forage was not so wasted, and everything he did relied on him alone. Morgan came back with a flap of sheepskin.

  “My lord,’ Roger called. He trotted his horse up to Fulk’s; the gray’s neck was blue-black with sweat. “We should be ready to leave at noon.”

  Morgan had climbed up onto the nearest wagon, and Fulk rode closer to him. “I wanted to leave this morning.”

  Morgan was rolling the hide into a fat bundle; he thrust it into Fulk’s armpit to cushion the weight of the splints.

  “If we leave at noon we should reach a good campground before dark.” Roger slapped a mosquito on his neck. “I know we left this camp in good order.”

  “Thank you, Morgan. I should have left you commanding them,” Fulk said to Roger. “They obey you, and they don’t obey de Brise.”

  “Sieges are bad for discipline.”

  Fulk nodded. “Let de Brise and his men ride forward, when we march. Who can ride rearguard?”

  “The men of Bruyère in Normandy, they’re the most orderly.”

  Rannulf rode up, with Simon d’Ivry behind him. “Father, when are you going?”

  “By noon, I think. Good morning, Sir Simon.”

  Simon bowed. “My lord.” He was all Norman, red-faced and red-headed, already massive in the chest and shoulders; Rannulf looked like a reed beside him, although they were the same age. “My lord,” Simon said, “we have a request of you—Sir Thierry Ironhand and I and my men and Sir William and Sir Rabel wish to be vanguard.”

  Fulk glanced at Roger. “We were just discussing that, and we had decided to put the lord of Brise in front.”

  “My lord, we request this honor especially.”

  Fulk sat still a moment, thinking of Thierry, of his yearning for glory. “Guy de Brise is a soldier of long experience. Let him ride forward for the while. We can rearrange the order of march at any time, and we doubtless will.” Thierry apparently had only two of his own men with him, silent, weatherbeaten knights whose names Fulk did not know. “If you wish, Sir Simon, you may ride rearguard.”

  “The rearguard!” Simon flushed; his broad shoulders hunched. “My lord, if it should—”

  “If you decline it, Sir Simon, at least don’t’ expand on the topic.”

  “As you wish, my lord.” Simon’s voice was clipped. “I take my leave.” He jerked his horse around and spurred away.

  “Simon is very blunt,” Rannulf said. “You always know what he thinks.”

  “He’s been listening to Thierry. Here comes de Brise. Are we ready? No. God’s blood. We were gone less than ten days. Rannulf, do you have wine with you?”

  “No. I thought you’d bring some.”

  “Here.” Roger held out a wineskin, and Fulk pulled the stopper and drank. Even the wine was hot from the sun; it tasted leathery. De Brise rode up and reached for the wine.

  “Excellent weather,” de Brise said. “are we taking all these wagons with us?”

  Fulk nodded. “I hope you’re ready to beat off outlaws. You don’t know how ruined the kingdom is until you try to go anywhere on the roads. You know Rannulf, of course.”

  “I met him first in his cradle.” De Brise shook Rannulf’s hand. “Coming with us? It should be an interesting campaign.”

  “No, I’m going with the prince.” Rannulf smiled. Something in the cast of his face suddenly reminded Fulk of Margaret, but when he tried to define it, he could not.

  “Good luck,” de Brise said. “And keep your own counsel, my lord.”

  Fulk said, “He’ll learn to, soon enough.”

  “He’ll be more comfortable than we will be, I expect. I came to find out the order or march, my lord. Although I see we have the rest of the morning to while away before we leave.”

  “You’ll ride vanguard. How many knights do you have?”

  “Twelve. How far ahead do you wish me?”

  “Within hearing if either of us uses a horn. Use your judgment. Around dusk find us a suitable campsite. No need to keep running back and forth to tell me what’s ahead, short of an ambush. You know the road to Bruyère-le-Forêt?”

  De Brise nodded; he smiled, and crow’s-feet spread and deepened around his eyes. “Do you ever change the words?” To Rannulf: “Fifteen years, squire and knight, I have followed him, and ever he says the same thing.” He clapped Fulk gently on the good shoulder. “Ride soft, my lord. Ride soft.” He backed his horse away and rode to rejoin his men.

  “I never knew you were such good friends,” Rannulf said, surprised.

  “He’s a good man, for all he cannot command a camp.” A column of knights was forming behind the wagons. “Mark what he said—these men you’ll ride with are older and subtler than you.”

  “Yes. Is there anything I should manage for you, with the prince?”

  Fulk laughed. “No. Not really. You are going with them to watch and listen, not to manage affairs. I promise you, he has given me everything I wanted of him, or I would not be here now. I want him to grow used to thinking of you as my heir. Listen.”

  From the castle, standing above them on its red rock, horns blasted. All the warhorses swung their heads up, ears pricked, and their wide nostrils distended. Fulk said, “You should go back, something is happening. Or someone might simply be going out and wanting a great display for it. Goodbye, Rannulf.”

  “Goodbye, my lord.” Rannulf took Fulk’s left hand and kissed it. “I shall do my best.”

  “God be with you. Remember to pray for your mother.”

  Rannulf went off toward the road up to the castle. Roger said, “We should be ready soon.”

  Fulk nodded. He was watching Rannulf ride up the narrow street, into the huts that grew up the steep side of the hill below the castle. For as long as he had ruled the Honor of Bruyère, Roger had served him nine months of the year, leaving his wife and children in his brother’s care. In the way that he knew the heat of the sun Fulk knew that Roger would not follow Rannulf, not as Rannulf was now.

  Prince Henry was scarcely older than Rannulf, yet the great lords of England followed him without question.

  “This should be good for him,” he said, too loudly. “For Rannulf.”

  Roger was watching the men hitch another team to the wagon beside them. “By your leave, my lord, he’s been too away from the world.”

  Margaret, longing always for the cloister. Rannulf had disappeared among the thatched roofs of the town. Fulk turned straight again and drew a deep breath.

  “Let’s start, move them down to the edge of the camp.”

  They left Tutbury just before noon and rode through a stretch of Needwood Forest toward the road south. In the mid-afternoon they marched out of the trees onto wasted land; once men had tilled this ground and lived on it, but now the forest was creeping out to reclaim it. Sinks of wild fen covered the lower ground. Purple vetch and speedwell and yellow charlock blossomed in the fields they rode through, patches of white yarrow, all the boisterous colors under the sun.

  “We should be in the forest again by nightfall,” Roger said. “Tomorrow we won’t have this heat.”

  “Sooner than that.”

  The sun drenched them. On the shoulders of Fulk’s horse crusty patches of dried sweat showed. He mopped his face and neck again and thrust the filthy cloth into his sling. “Look over there.”

  Roger stood in his stirrups. Behind them, the men-at-arms were singing a loud and baw
dy song.

  “It’s a wall, isn’t it?” Roger said.

  Fulk nodded. “There must have been a castle here once. Look.”

  Across the top of the wall, crumbling and half-buried in weeds, a vixen and two little foxes ran; their bushy tails swished, and they vanished over the side.

  “How can they wear fur in this heat?” Roger said.

  “They don’t have laces to take it off with.”

  Roger threw his head back and laughed, startled. Ahead, Fulk could see Thierry in the center of a band of young knights, talking and gesturing. What is he telling them? Stories of chivalrous doings and glory. Since Simon d’Ivry had mentioned riding vanguard a thought had simmered in his mind, and he considered it—Thierry surely knew little of actual war, he was a tournament knight, not a true fighting man. The scent of the wildflowers reached him. A yellow butterfly flew past his face, circled back, and settled tentatively on the horse’s poll, between its ears.

  “Roger. Send to Thierry and ask him to attend me.”

  Roger gave him a quick hard look and called back to Morgan.

  Fulk looked off across the wasted fields. They rose steadily to a ling of hills against the sky, covered with flowers in twenty different shades of yellow and blue; the mark of the plow still lay subtly on the fields, the even rippling of furrows. Once they entered the forest, the horizon would close down around them, and they would have to ride closer together, but out here they could see any enemy long before he struck. The thought of fighting stirred him, a little thrill of excitement running through him. Fighting was easy; there was no time to think. Thierry was riding toward him, bear-sized in his hauberk, his fine russet hair trailing out on the wind.

  “My lord,” Thierry said, cautiously, and turned to ride beside Fulk. “What is it, nephew?”

  “As long as we’re marching we ought to keep the peace between us, don’t you think? For the sake of our purpose.”

  “Fulk,” Thierry said, “I have never wanted anything but peace between us.”

  “I won’t argue it.”

  There wasn’t enough room for three horses abreast, and Roger had fallen behind. Fulk’s bay snapped at Thierry’s gray horse and laid its ears back. Fulk jerked on his reins.

  Something to say.

  “Where have you been, all this while? Before you came back to England?”

  “In Spain, for a year. Before that, I rode to the tournaments in France.” Thierry’s yellow eyes looked earnestly into Fulk’s. “You should go there. To France. There is such excitement and glory in the tournaments, I cannot tell you.”

  “We have tournaments here. Not as often. Did you do well?”

  “Well enough. A good knight can make his way very well from ransoms won in tournaments.”

  Where is it all, then? Fulk thought, and didn’t bother to ask. “I sent Lays back to her husband.”

  Thierry’s eyes looked somewhere else. “So. Good. She was tiring of it, I think.”

  “Or you of her?”

  “Well—” He smiled, the cheerful smile Fulk remembered from childhood. “That, too. She’s a difficult thing, she always wants something, she was always after me to work some wonder for her, to win a fief and be a lord, like everyone else.”

  “Don’t you want to be like everyone else?”

  Thierry shook his head. “Of course not. Do you?”

  “What do you want?”

  The horses paced on, shoulder to shoulder; Fulk jiggled his near rein to keep the bay from nipping Thierry’s gray horse. Thierry wet his lips.

  “You know. I want Stafford and my English lands. You know they should be mine. It is Norman custom to give the younger son the English lands and the elder the Norman.”

  Fulk said, “Your father himself signed the testament giving them to my care. You know that. And I’ve held them now for seventeen years, Thierry. I won’t give them up.”

  “I know. You are not to blame. I will not try to take them back. I can live with wanting and not having. But there is Beck. I know that Prince Henry has promised it to you, he told me he had, but it was mine, my father’s legacy to me.

  "Serve Prince Henry and he’ll give you a fief. With an heiress, there are many about.”

  “Beck is mine.”

  “You forfeited it when you were outlawed. I spent twelve years working to get it back. I won it.”

  “I won’t fight with you.”

  Fulk could feel the sweat rolling down his cheek. Ahead, the trees grew thicker, pine and birch, and the road disappeared into them.

  “Do you trust me, Fulk?” Thierry said, in a despairing voice.

  “No.”

  In the field beside them, a cloud of butterflies, bright orange, rose out of the grass and circled into the air, higher than the horses, circling upward, the air vivid with their bright, quick wings.

  Thierry said softly, “Nothing has changed. I have always hated you, sniveling brat you were, drippy-nosed, fawning on my father—Stafford is mine, I’ll have it back, and everything else if I can, and you shall have Beck. I hate you as much as I ever did, you narrow, cold-minded little man.”

  Fulk smiled, his eyes between his horse’s ears. “Thierry. I didn’t think you’d keep it up so long, all this softness.”

  “I thought, for Rannulf’s sake—”

  “Keep Rannulf out of this.” He met Thierry’s eyes; the stir of excitement came back, and he leaned forward, staring into Thierry’s eyes. “For hating you, God knows, I have good reason. Don’t give me more.”

  Thierry yanked his horse around and started up toward the head of the line. Fulk swore. He booted his horse after Thierry’s; they both swung out of the column into the ditch, and Thierry’s gray slipped and slid on the uneven footing.

  Fulk pulled his horse up onto the flat ground and galloped down on Thierry. The column buckled, veering away from them. Roger shouted something. Thierry heard Fulk coming and wheeled his horse around, and Fulk clamped his broken arm to his chest, thrust his legs down into the stirrups, and ran his big bay into Thierry’s standing horse. The gray stumbled and went to its knees. Fulk’s bay rammed its shoulder into the gray’s barrel and toppled it into the ditch.

  Thierry rolled free. He came up running, his sword half out of the scabbard, and Fulk sawed on the reins to back his horse out of the way of Thierry’s rush.

  “I give you leave to go,” Fulk shouted. “You don’t go without my word, you do nothing without my word, Thierry, remember that.” He kicked the horse at Thierry; with his arm broken he could not use a sword, but he might make the horse trample him. Thierry dodged. His hand was on his sword, but he had not drawn it—the men around them were Fulk’s men. Fulk hauled his horse around and charged him again.

  “My lord,” a young voice cried, and Roger bellowed something. Thierry’s horse had lurched to its feet, and Thierry was trying to grab its reins. Fulk ran his bay between them; the gray horse snorted, spun, and bolted out into the fields, and Thierry scrambled up out of the ditch onto the road.

  The column had broken in half, and the road was clear. Fulk jumped the bay over the ditch. Thierry finally drew his sword. Fulk charged the bay at him.

  “Tell me about the tournaments in France, Thierry!”

  Thierry dodged, and Fulk sat back in his saddle; the bay skidded on the hard road, forelegs braced. His sword raised, Thierry darted in from the side. Fulk laid his rein against the bay’s neck, and the big horse wheeled, hoofs flailing, and Thierry jumped back. They stared at each other across the blade glistening in the sun.

  “Get back into the column,” Fulk said. He let his reins loose.

  “Do you believe—”

  Roger rode up beside Fulk and handed him a clean napkin; while Fulk wiped the sweat and dirt from his face, Roger looked down over his shoulder at Thierry. Fulk’s arm was hurting him. He could see no way to kill Thierry, here, without losing half his men.

  “You’re mad,” Thierry said. He sheathed his sword with a clash of metal. Simon d’Ivry had
caught his horse and brought it to him, and all the young men were clustering around him.

  “Get them moving,” Fulk said to Roger. He pulled off to the other side of the road. Morgan trotted up to him on his brown palfrey.

  “Here. You dropped this.” He held out the piece of sheepskin. While he put it back under Fulk’s arm, he said, “My lord, you should not exercise your arm so much. It could mend crooked.”

  “Ah, you’re like a mother to me.”

  Morgan sat back in his saddle, solemn-faced. “He might have killed you. You didn’t even draw your sword.”

  “I couldn’t. This arm—” He looked back at the column.

  Thierry was among his young friends, who bent toward him, solicitous. Roger had gotten them all moving again. Fulk saw the looks on the faces of the men in the line—startled, unsure. Yes. Half of them thought Thierry was in the right.

  A man must look after his kindred. I’ll look after him, later.

  “Let’s go.”

  They rode at a jog through the fields toward their place in line; thick as snowflakes, the orange butterflies danced in the air.

  "My Lord,” Roger said. “I’ve found something you should see.”

  Fulk looked back. “Why, what?”

  Roger shook his head. “I don’t know. Come and see.”

  Morgan came in the doorway behind Roger, with a bucket of water in each hand; he had already laid out their camp in the rock shell of the roofless hut and piled firewood against the wall. Fulk stood up and adjusted his arm in its sling. “Show me.”

  Roger started out the doorway. The sun had set while they were still making camp, and in the deepening twilight, the dozen ruined huts stood like strange animal burrows in the upper end of the meadow. Fires were already burning inside some of them, glowing on the broken walls. Under the trees that surrounded them it was already deep dark.

  Fireflies sparked among the trees. Fulk thought of asking if this could not wait until the morning, but Roger would have thought of that, and when he looked at Roger’s face he decided that it must be serious. Whatever it was. They passed Thierry and his band of young men, camped in the rubble of a large hut, and Thierry quickly turned his back.