THE EARL (A HAMMER FOR PRINCES)

by Cecelia Holland

  “Yes, he probably would have. I won’t have them making small of my justice. A man is free to commit any crime these days if he can only prove he is a clerk.”

  “We never saw him near a church—he lived by begging and nearly drank the alehouse dry.”

  “I won’t have you making small of my justice, either. You gave him over to the villagers and conspired with them to kill him—you are my bailiff, not the villagers.”

  “My lord, I—”

  “With the next such case, you must not go to the bishop at all. Go on.”

  Robert cleared his throat, glanced at Roger, and said, “Gilbert de Rhys could not pay anything against his relief tax this year, but I excused him because his lands fell in Eustace’s path.”

  “Eustace seems to have seared the earth wherever he stepped.”

  “He is a swine. When the archbishop refused to crown him Stephen’s heir, I had them light bonfires all over the manor. I met him once, a worse man I’ve never encountered.”

  “I’ll tell him so if I see him again. I need fifteen knights after the Assumption for garrison duty at Bryn Crug. Can you do it?”

  “Fifteen?” Robert frowned. “I think so. I can check it tomorrow, I’ll tell you before you go. Are they quiet, the Welsh?”

  “I think they swallowed so much last year they can’t move for the weight of their bellies.” In his mind’s eye, he saw the view from Bryn Crug Castle toward the sea, the empty hills, the mist. “They’re quiet, damn them.”

  “What of this Welsh boy, your squire?”

  “Morgan? He’s been with me since he could walk, he speaks no Welsh, he’s a Norman. When he’s knighted I’ll give him land and make him my vassal. The Welsh won’t have him back.”

  “He’s a good boy, Morgan,” Roger said.

  “Fifteen knights.” Robert frowned, thinking. “I’m trying to remember which of them hasn’t paid his fee yet.”

  “I’ll pay them if I must. See if they will pay scutage.”

  “Send Simon d’Ivry,” Roger said.

  “Ah, no.” Fulk stood up. “Simon’s place, I feel, is with Thierry. If that’s all, I’m going to bed.”

  “That’s all,” Robert said. “Will you be here this summer to hold court?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe in the autumn. I’ll tell you.”

  “What do you plan for Simon?” Roger said.

  Fulk picked up a stump of candle on the table and lit it from a taper on the wall. I’m not sure. God will guide me.” He gave Roger a look mild as a monk's.

  "I shall tell my cousin I believe she misjudged you, my lord,” Rohese was saying. “I am loathe to leave your castle—none between here and my own Highfield will offer such comforts.”

  “Stay as long as you like, then,” Fulk said, smiling.

  “You are generous.” They were standing in the shade of the chapel archway; she started out into the bright morning sun, and Fulk walked along beside her. “I can only trust that you will find yourself near Highfield someday and allow me to be as gracious.”

  “Lady, you have repaid me amply enough with the grace of your company.”

  She laughed; her page ran up to open the door, and she turned toward Fulk, stooping a little. “What a chivalrous gentleman you are. Alys is clearly biased.”

  Fulk followed her out into the main courtyard. Most of the men who had spent the night here were mounted and waiting near the gate, in the shadow of the wall. His horse stood by the gatehouse. Rohese was spending another day; he led her toward the door, talking aimlessly. The hoofs of the horses had stirred up the courtyard dust, and he could smell sweat and horses and warm metal.

  “Your cousin was biased because of him,” he said, seeing Thierry. “You have not met my uncle, have you?”

  "No. I do not wish to, my lord. With your permission.”

  Suddenly all angles, she strode toward the door; Fulk kept up with her, trying not to laugh. Thierry had seen them and was riding over. Fulk opened the door for Rohese, but Thierry reached them before she could go in.

  “Good morning, uncle.”

  “Good morning,” Thierry said. “My lady, good day.” His helmet hung from his saddle bows, and above the massive glittering weight of his hauberk, his great head seemed as strong and fine as armor. Rohese muttered something in an icy voice.

  “You should have stayed after the council for dinner,” Fulk said.

  “Oh.” Thierry smiled; his yellow eyes widened. “I would have, my lord, but I loathe mushrooms.” He reined his horse around and rode back toward the waiting lines of men.

  “I am amazed at you,” Rohese said. “That you allow it.”

  “Lady.” Fulk said mildly, “I do as I wish.”

  She was watching Thierry; after a moment she grunted and went up the stairs into the darkness, her skirts rasping across the stone. He waved to Morgan to bring him his horse. The sun stood almost over the castle wall, and Sulwick was still far away.

  SEVEN

  The road led straight across the low hills and meadows, through ground plowed and planted, in which serfs worked bent double among the thin green stalks. Thierry and his vanguard were riding well ahead of Fulk’s part of the army. Fulk could see where they were by the narrow plume of their dust. He and Roger rode just ahead of the wagons, behind a pack of archers. By mid-morning Fulk was crawling with sweat from the heat of the sun.

  “What are you planning to do about Simon and Thierry?” Roger said.

  “I’m still thinking about it.” But he was not.

  The serfs looked up when the army passed; a group of little boys ran to the side of the road to watch. Dirt covered them. Already they seemed bent and gnarled from working in the fields, their long hair shaggy and their skin seamed and inlaid with dirt. In the fields behind them the older people after a moment of watching bent over growing crops and their fingers dug into the ground, pulling out weeds.

  “Thank God I was not born a serf,” Morgan said, staring at the filthy boys who stared at him.

  Fulk slapped at a fly buzzing around his ear. "They probably thank God they weren’t born the children of knights.”

  Roger made a face, uncertain. “You know, it seems to them that we are better off than they are, I suppose. I’ve never talked to a serf, beyond asking directions.”

  “These aren’t serfs, actually. They are sokemen. Free man.”

  The boys were trailing after them, but slower now, and from their fields their mothers’ voices rose, calling them back. They turned and loped back to work. “They never have to fight,” Fulk said. “If they lose their land or their harvest I have to maintain them.”

  “They can’t get rich, either, if they don’t fight,” Roger said. “I suppose they have what they want.”

  Power, Fulk thought. They have none, except the greatest power; we do all we do for them, without them we are nothing. Ahead, the road wound down a hillside into a strip of marsh. Thierry’s band of men was crossing the hill beyond. This marsh was the edge of his lands, and somewhere in the tumble of hills and marsh and forest ahead of them the lands of Sulwick began. His spine roached up with excitement.

  Thierry was a tournament knight, a festival knight. Fulk thought again of how Thierry had fled Stafford at the news of Fulk’s coming. Cowardice. It didn’t have to be that, ignorance explained it, too—the panic of a man who did not know what to do next. Fulk strained his eyes to see Thierry’s men, but they had crossed the hill ahead of them and were gone, down into the glen.

  Sometime in the next day, the scouts and outriders of the men of Sulwick would find Thierry. Riding in a thin liquid skin of sweat under his hauberk, Fulk patiently thought it all out again and again, hunting down all the possible ways that Thierry might act.

  In the marshes, flies and gnats and stinging insects buzzed in clouds around them. Blood seeped from punctures in the horses’ necks and shoulders. The stench of the damp earth clogged up Fulk’s nose and mouth, palpable as mist, so that he wondered that he could breathe. With
each step his horse dragged its hoofs free of the clinging mud. They rode gratefully up onto the slopes, shrouded with thorny pine, and the insects followed them.

  “Sing, Morgan.”

  “When I open my mouth, I breathe flies,” Morgan said, but he took his harp from its case. Fulk reached out to lead his horse for him.

  Roger said, “Where will we camp tonight? I haven’t seen a good campground since we left Bruyère.”

  “There’s a village ahead,” Fulk said.

  Morgan ran off a series of light notes. “What shall I sing, my lord?”

  “Anything. The Song of the White Ship.”

  The slope turned abruptly sheer, and they lurched and staggered up through the light cover of pines and brush, stumbling over rocks. The drovers with the wagons began to swear in high, pleading voices. An ox lowed. Fulk swung around to watch, and saw that a wagon had jammed between two stubby trees. The oxen flung themselves into their harness, clawing at the ground with their cloven hooves, and the trees swayed and bent. Slowly the wagon tilted upward on one side, and the oxen dragged it forward over the trees. Clouds of flies hung over their muzzles and shoulders, and their great moist noses were clogged with insects. Fulk turned forward again and rode on.

  “Last night, I dreamt a doleful dream,” Morgan sang, “a dream of woe and sore alarm. I dreamt I saw the old moon lying with the new moon all in her arms.”

  Fulk led Morgan’s horse around an impenetrable thicket. Roger had gone to help pull another wagon up the slope. The ground here was covered with pine needles, soft and slippery. Roger trotted up the slope toward them.

  “Is there no better way?”

  “Not for Thierry. It makes no difference, we’re almost to the top.”

  “What is he singing? Why doesn’t he sing in French?”

  “I think he likes the song.”

  Morgan sang softly to himself, while he hands played long phrases like sea waves. They reached the crest of the hill and Fulk reined in, holding his arm in the sling out to stop the men behind him.

  “Now let’s see how we can get through this.”

  “When first he looked upon his ship,” Morgan sang, “a loud laugh laughed he. When last he looked upon his ship, a tear blinded his eye.”

  Ahead of them lay another deep glen of thorny brush and marsh, but beyond it the land seemed to level out. Fulk sighed. “We’ll have to try it. Send a man back to de Brise and tell him to wait until we have crossed, or he’ll run up on us. Let’s go.”

  They plunged down this slope, the horses bracing their forelegs against the steep drop, and the oxen trudged forward. Somewhere ahead of them, Fulk could hear the thin whir of insects’ wings, and the stink of the marsh rose up to his nostrils. Morgan sang of the youth and arrogant display of the White Ship. They staggered halfway down the slope—men called back and forth, the crack of the drovers’ whips resounded. Ahead of Fulk, across the road, lay a rotten log, and he called back to Morgan to watch out.

  “Oh, long, oh, long will the ladies sit, with their eyes turned toward the shore,” Morgan sang, “waiting for their own true-loves, who will never come home any more.

  The log was crawling with fur. Fulk saw it and realized it was a pelt of bees and the log their hive, and opened his mouth to yell warning, but before he could speak the bees rose in a fog and attacked him. He clamped his eyes and mouth shut and spurred his horse.

  Morgan’s voice broke from its song with a yell. The torrential howling of the bees surrounded Fulk; a tree swiped him, and sharp pain stabbed him on the eye, the lip, the ear. His horse swerved suddenly and nearly threw him, and another horse ran into him from behind. Morgan was shouting to him to stop. He hauled on his reins and opened his eyes.

  “Are you all right?”

  “They all followed you,” Morgan said, and smiled. “Listen.”

  Behind them, the bees were attacking everything that moved, and the oxen’s base lowing rose frantically, drowning the curses of the men. Brush cracked and fell rustling to the ground. Two knights galloped down the slope past them, bounding over the rough ground. One ran into a tree and a branch swept him out of the saddle.

  “God’s judgment on us,” Fulk said. “You brought us to this with that song.” His eye, his lip, and his ear hurt in tiny, even pulses.

  Morgan put his harp away and leaned out of his saddle. His fingers tugged at something in Fulk’s earlobe and came away with a bee’s body between them. “They die, when they sting you,” he said absently.

  Roger was shouting orders, above them, and the wagons rumbled down past them, the oxen bellowing and shaking their heads. Fulk bent so that Morgan could reach him; he felt the cold blade of Morgan’s dagger against his skin and the pain of the stingers tearing out of his flesh.

  “You eye is swelling,” Morgan said, sitting up.

  “Ah.” He could hardly open his right eye. His ear and his upper lip were numb and oddly cold. All over his bandaged arm, the bodies of crushed bees clung to the cloth. Some of them still fluttered their torn wings. He brushed them off. “Let’s go. Keep playing.”

  “Do you feel well?” Morgan said kindly.

  They floundered down toward the strip of glassy water at the foot of the slope, and the marsh insects, aroused and ready, rose in a swarm to feast. Morgan sang of the king’s son, standing in the bow of the White Ship, which shone like the sun in its glory.

  A fine black scum covered the water of the creek, and the horses would not drink it. The rocks along the streambed were covered with drinking bees. They struggled up the far slope through the brush.

  “Were you stung?” Roger said.

  “Very Biblically, on my most sinful parts.”

  They climbed painfully up into the dry, sweet air of the hillside.

  On into the afternoon, they rode across the low hills, while before them the dust cloud of Thierry’s passage hung in the air. The swellings on Fulk’s face went down quickly. Just after noon, with the sun filling the sky, they rode through a little village, and they stopped to water their horses. Fulk soaked a cloth in cold well water and held it to his face. The village was tiny, only a dozen huts of splint oak branches covered with turf, and it stank of pigs. A woman there told them that Thierry had passed by before noon. Morgan spoke to her, all friendship, in his musical English, but she jerked her eyes away and ignored him. Fulk said that she probably did not understand him.

  That he did not believe. They were well inside the demesne of Sulwick now, and these people knew their enemies.

  Sulwick, warned of the army approaching, would certainly send out men to scout and harass. In the heat, in the dust, with his bad arm aching and itching, Fulk began to see Thierry as the enemy he pursued, and the men of Sulwick as his allies, the walls against which he drove Thierry. The hard marching of the day had dried him out and made thinking difficult. He felt shrunken in against the bone of his will, all the flesh of reason and excuse eaten up by the sun. Roger said nothing all afternoon, knowing it.

  The pasturage and fields they rode through were returning quickly to the forest. Shrubs and berry bushes sprouted in a mat of tough, furry-leaved weeds. The wells were broken and filled in and there were no villages at all. Fulk could not remember that great battles had been fought here, but this same thing had happened everywhere during the wars, the death of the land. The forest was always waiting to reclaim it, and once the struggle to hold back the forest slackened, its vanguard attacked—these weeds, these woody little shrubs and the thickets of dense brush.

  The sun slide down the western sky; Fulk strained against it, startled to find himself fighting to hold the sun in the sky. If it set they would have to camp. In their broken country he could easily command the three separate parts of the army to camp separately, but that, he knew, would be a victory for Thierry—to have survived one day alone in command would make him immeasurably stronger. He stared at the plume of dust beyond the rowans that crowned the next hill.

  He prayed for help, knew he could not ex
pect God’s help for this, and prayed harder. God would understand. God had swallowed so much in the way of piety in the past twenty years that this must seem almost virtue. He shifted the sheepskin pad under his arm and only managed to jar it, and the aching pain always working in it sharpened to where he could no longer ignore it. He fell to brooding over the chance that the arm would heal crooked.

  “My lord,” Roger said. “Look over there—beyond Thierry’s dust.”

  Fulk blinked. Thierry was almost directly west of them now and he had to look into the sun. The ruddy sky confused him; he could see nothing.

  “Dust,” Roger said.

  “Oh. Yes.” He scrubbed his eyes and looked again. He still could not see it. “Where is it?”

  “Past him,” Morgan said in his light voice. “I see it. It’s more dust than Thierry’s, isn’t it, Sir Roger?”

  “Yes,” Roger said. “Shall we send to Thierry?”

  Fulk nodded. “Tell him not to stop, to go straight on to Sulwick. Does he have the sense to steal a peasant to show him the way? Tell him that, too.”

  Roger turned and bellowed for a knight riding behind them. Fulk’s mouth was dry. He strained to see the dust in the air ahead but the falling sun blotted it out. All along the horizon, the sky turned red and orange. Roger gave orders to the knight and sent him galloping west.

  “Leave the wagons here,” Fulk said. “De Brise can bring them. Tell the drovers that we think the vanguard is being attacked and we’re going to help and they may as well wait for de Brise. Tell de Brise to come as fast as he can.” He stood in his stirrups, looking up and down the line. “We’ll bring the archers, if they can keep up. Roger dropped back to give orders; Fulk rode forward to the head of the band of archers. The sun was turning blood red and its long light turned the faces around him rosy. He talked to Godric, who stood listening and rubbing his hand up and down his cased bow.

  “If we can’t keep up we’ll wait for de Brise,” Godric said. “We can move quicker on foot in this terrain than knights, my lord.”