The Young Lion

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Xena guessed they had travelled five hours by the time a black shape loomed in the darkness and she realised they had reached the back of the castle. The cart rumbled across a bridge. Heavy iron gates swung open and suddenly, in the torchlight, she saw the fighters, hundreds of them. The drawbridge shut behind them with a screech that sounded deafening in the surrounding silence. The iron doors cranked together and ten infantrymen dropped a wooden bar across them.

  The family crossed themselves and mumbled, ‘Thanks be to God.’ Xena copied them, as she had learned to. They dismounted, handed their horses to grooms and followed Guillaume into the enormous building. To Xena it appeared bigger than the castle in Paris. It seemed to have hundreds of stairs, for they climbed flight after flight inside one of the turrets. Torches set in the walls showed them where to place their feet. They arrived at last at what Xena thought must be the top, and entered a long, dimly lit chamber. The squires and servants, who had taken a different set of stairs, were rolling out their bedding at the far end, where humped shapes suggested other people were already sleeping. In the poor light Xena could not make them out.

  Tall pottery jugs, loaves of bread and cheese, wooden platters and drinking bowls were on a table. The gilded Madonna, almost life-sized, was standing against a wall, looking across the chamber and out the windows.

  ‘The water is from the western well. It’s safe to drink,’ Guillaume said. He showed them the door to the privy and left. Xena calculated it was now three in the morning. She and the others were asleep in minutes.

  She dreamed she heard a baby cry but was so exhausted the sound only brushed across her and vanished back into the night.

  When she woke most of the others were already up. Someone lifted the shutters from the windows, allowing tender spring sunshine into the chamber. They yawned and stretched, and as each woman rose she made her way to the privy. It was constructed to accommodate three bottoms in a row, and was not as horrible as Xena had anticipated. An ingenious system of pulleys allowed a bucket of water from the river to be raised without much effort. There were even a half-dozen pieces of soap and some cloths.

  Back in the chamber she now saw the others who had slept there: three flaxen-haired young women, two of whom appeared to be sisters. One had an infant only a few months old wrapped in a sheepskin rug, the other was attached to the hand of a sturdy little boy. The third carried a bare-bottomed baby on her hip. Isabella began playing a clapping game with the little boy, whose head was a mass of dark curls.

  When Xena looked at the other babies her heart lurched. They were both fairish or red-haired and blue-eyed. Isabella introduced her to the mothers, but their names did not register with her.

  ‘What are your babies called?’ she asked

  ‘Henry,’ two chorused.

  ‘And this is Guillaume,’ Isabella said proudly.

  ‘Who are you?’ little Guillaume’s mother asked.

  ‘She’s from my country. She’s my niece.’ Isabella’s tone said: no more questions. The flaxen-haired ones gave Xena uncertain smiles and returned their attention to their offspring. The one who rode on his mother’s hip had eyes as dark blue as his father’s and seemed fascinated by Xena. His head swivelled to look at her, one small, strong arm stretched out to her, his chubby face alight with a dribbly smile.

  ‘Henry likes you, lady,’ his mother said. Xena felt a fox bite her heart.

  They ate breakfast and afterwards Isabella took Xena by the arm and led her through another door, onto the walkway behind a parapet. From there they could walk along the top of the castle, which was configured to the peak of the hill on which, and into which, it was built. It had six turrets set at different angles from each other. They walked through the turrets, looking out on the countryside as it slowly revealed itself in a panorama of three hundred and sixty degrees. Rouen was virtually the same size as Paris. The whole town, the main river and the docks were visible. ‘Look at that!’ Isabella said. ‘Not a single ship at the wharves. The merchants must know what’s coming.’

  ‘Where do the Jews live?’ Xena asked.

  ‘Above their warehouses. They’ll be sacked first, because they have gold. Mine will be next, because it’s the biggest house in Rouen and they know Geoffrey gave it to me.’

  ‘It must irritate Matilda to look out the window and see your house,’ Xena said.

  ‘I have to look at her castle,’ Isabella replied tartly.

  For the hundredth time she wondered who Xena really was. She had never met a Greek before but she knew they were reputed to be clever. ‘Just look at the crowds!’

  On the roads below, a throng of peasants and townspeople on foot and mounted knights and ladies made their way through the town towards the castle’s main gates. Isabella pointed to a forest beyond the settled areas. ‘The French bivouacked there last night. Guillaume told me they have a siege engine and catapults.’

  ‘How does he know?’

  She shrugged. ‘We have spies. They have spies.’

  They continued their stroll arm in arm until they returned to their starting point nearest the river. Below, infantrymen were dismantling the bridge across it. Beyond the river were fields, some already ploughed and ready for sowing, and further back, a hill. ‘They must be expecting an attack from that direction too,’ Isabella said. ‘There’ll be French behind the hill.’ On this side of the castle, away from the festive throng, hundreds of soldiers, horses and stacks of weapons were assembled. Isabella lifted one side of the silk girdle she wore around her waist. Sewn to its underside was a short, very sharp blade.

  ‘If Louis takes the castle, Xena,’ she said, ‘you have a choice. It’s not big, but it’s enough.’ She touched the girl under the ear and on her arms, making a slashing movement from inside her wrist to her elbow. ‘Don’t cut across your wrist. It takes too long for the blood to flow. Slit straight up. But you must do it immediately. Men in battle are very fast and very strong. They don’t hesitate – they just act.’

  Xena nodded. I still have Cupid’s Arrow in my boot, she thought.

  ‘All of us will have a blade,’ Isabella added.

  ‘What about the babies?’

  ‘Little Guillaume presents no threat to France, so he may be spared. Henry’s boys won’t be, even though they’re bastards. I’ve promised him that if their mothers refuse … There, there. Drink some water.’ She turned to the Madonna. The icon’s grave eyes brimmed with an inner fire of rebellious love. Her small lips smiled. ‘She’ll protect us.’

  An idol will protect us? Xena thought.

  ‘We humans are not wise, and not very often kind,’ Isabella said. ‘All that you see is because Louis is frightened of Henry. I know it’s different in Outremer, where men fight for ideals, and for God. But here, war is entirely personal. As men, Henry and Louis are horribly mismatched.’

  They knew without needing to be told that none of them could attend the feast for Henry and that the Empress would be unaware they were inside the castle. Servants panted up the stairs with plates of meat, various pies, vegetables and jugs of wine. They sat on their bedding to eat and Isabella, as the matriarch, made a toast to ‘Our New Duke’, to which the flaxen-haired girls chorused, ‘God bless him!’ Then they all crossed themselves. ‘Feels like we’re in gaol,’ one said.

  As night came on, Guillaume arrived in the chamber. ‘Go to sleep as soon as you can,’ he said to the women. ‘The French are already on the move. Our archers will occupy the turrets before the attack begins.’ He embraced his mother, his sisters, the mother of his son, kissed all the children, hugged Xena and ran down the stairs.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ one woman after another complained, but they were exhausted from the tension of the past day and by the time the sky turned black and filled with stars again the chamber was deep in slumber.

  Xena dreamed she was riding the Arab mare when the King’s stallion, Jason, leaped a fence in pursuit of her. His massive body began to crush Xena to death, jerking her convulsively bac
k and forth as he covered the mare. She woke with a gasp, staring into the face of a man shaking her by the shoulder. ‘Wake up, lady,’ he said.

  More men entered. They wore leather armour and carried crossbows. The sky was still as dark as the inside of a wolf’s mouth. On the walkway outside, charcoal braziers were alight. Beside them were cauldrons and scores of pails of water. Bowmen mounted the stairs into the turrets. Then archers, accompanied by fletchers carrying armfuls of arrows. A man barking orders arranged them in groups. The largest group was directly above and facing the town. He stationed a second group above the river. He called two crossbowmen down from a turret to make them stand in an unlikely spot where the castle wall dropped sheer for more than two hundred feet. ‘You’re to shoot the spiders,’ he barked.

  He allowed the women and children outside to admire his work. When they looked down they could see shapes moving on the earth ramparts. The castle had five rows of ramparts, stepped back in tiers. In the light of the torches directly below they could just make out the glint of armour. There were the sounds of restive horses. Their blowing and squealing and the shuffle of their hooves floated up on the night air. Metallic groaning and screeching announced the drawbridge was being lowered – and then, birds began to sing. The forest became a thousand-throated chorus. Suddenly the sky looked grey. ‘You can stay here until we start shooting,’ the commander said.

  He poked the tip of his boot into the calf of one of the bowmen. ‘You see that?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Blind! Look: outskirts of the town, direction of the forest.’

  Xena stared at where she knew Rouen was, but it was without a light. It was another few minutes before she glimpsed what the bow commander had seen and by then a hint of pink light showed in the east. Without haste, step by step, the sun rose above soft reefs of pink and gold cloud. At last she could see what the shooters watched: an enormous machine slowly moving towards them, and on either side hundreds upon hundreds of infantrymen and archers, tramping, tramping, tramping forward. On either side of them rode knights with standard-bearers waving coloured flags. The morning light struck the knights’ iron heads in brilliant shafts of gold.

  The French knew they had been seen, because suddenly pipers and drummers began to play, and a chorus of hundreds of male voices swelled into song. The watchers behind the parapet were too distant to hear their words, but they could make out after each verse a mighty, victorious shout. All Xena could think was how beautiful it looked, how glorious and calm the dawn, and with what innocence the birds sang to the new day.

  ‘Guillaume told me we’re outnumbered,’ Isabella said, ‘five to one.’

  ‘Henry says Louis is a nun,’ one of the mothers declared.

  ‘The Seneschal is not a nun,’ Isabella muttered.

  Below them the Duke of Normandy, seated on his warhorse, addressed his army: ‘Men of Normandy! Men of Anjou! Men of Maine! The French attack us without provocation. As our overlords they have broken our sacred trust in them. We owe them nothing but iron and fire! Prince Eustace of England fights with France. He is a man infamous for cruelty. He’ll slaughter our women and children. Fight for each other! Fight for your women and children. Fight the tyrannous King of France!’

  He gave a simple battle order: Do not attack King Louis. Do not kill his horse. Take the Seneschal of France alive.

  ‘How do we know the Seneschal?’ a mercenary commander shouted.

  ‘He’s the tallest of their knights. His standard is a moon on a black ground above a white river. He’s a great warrior, so don’t underestimate him.’

  ‘Lord Duke,’ the commander shouted again, ‘we’re to kill them all, except the King and the Seneschal.’

  ‘Correct.’

  One mercenary muttered in Flemish to another, ‘That’ll be as easy as drinking ale. Five of them, to one of us.’

  ‘I wager we’ll have them on the run by dusk,’ his comrade replied with a sour grin.

  The other gave a sardonic laugh. ‘I’ll wager noon.’

  Henry and Guillaume, followed by Geoffrey, trotted across the drawbridge. The knights came next, each group in the command of a baron or an earl. They too had brightly coloured standards.

  The French archers were drawn up in a long double row beyond the lowest rampart. Their cavalry and the rest of their infantry were not yet in formation, but the commander of the Norman archers shouted, ‘Fire!’ A storm of arrows arced into the air. Many fell short. ‘Fire!’ the commander shouted again, and as he did Henry charged down the narrow alleyway between the ramparts, followed by Guillaume, Geoffrey and the rest of the Norman cavalry. The horses thundered forward, screaming, their voices mingled in a hellish din with the shouts of the men. Then came the crash of iron on iron. Isabella put her arms around her daughters, her fingertips touching Xena.

  ‘I hate this moment,’ she said. ‘The archers sometimes shoot our own knights when they ride through the ramparts.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Let’s pray together for them.’

  The bow commander said, ‘Ladies, please pray inside. We’ll start shooting soon.’ His archers had laid down small leather cushions to kneel on while beside them their fletchers flexed arrow shafts, checked with their thumbs the feathers and the iron tips, and occasionally tossed an arrow aside.

  Xena took a quick last look. The terrible machine was halfway through town now but had stopped moving and lurched to one side. It looked as if it could topple over and demolish several nearby houses. A team of twenty oxen was straining to drag it upright. ‘Henry got the mercenaries to dig a trap last night,’ Isabella said. ‘He wants all the French to see their trebuchet is useless.’ She stroked Xena’s hand. ‘Our Henry spends a fortune on mercenaries.’

  She wondered if she should tell the girl, in whose open features converged fear, hope, love and other emotions she couldn’t read, that only a very rich wife would be able to give Henry the war chest he needed to become King of England. She wondered, Do you love him enough to live as his concubine – until he tires of you? If he’s King he’ll make you a duchess. He’ll marry you off to some magnate with whom he’s come to an understanding … Do you want that life? You’re educated. You’re from the trading class. You could become a business woman, and rich, and lead any life you choose.

  Guillaume’s sister, Maria, was closest to Xena in age and already intensely fond of her. Together they went through the chamber and crept along behind the parapet, below which a branch of the river flowed. Riding over the hill was a large body of French cavalry. French infantry was already at the river, constructing a bridge to replace the one that had been dismantled. The commander of the archers said, ‘We wait till they’ve got it finished. Build up the fire.’ Fletchers were busy tying rags around the arrowheads which they dipped in liquid tallow melted in a cauldron. The smell of the black smoke was disgusting. Every so often a man darted a ragged arrow into the flames under a cauldron causing a burst of fire on the rag before he stamped it out. When the commander saw the women he said, ‘Hey, boys! We’ve got a couple of beautiful ladies watching us. You shoot straight and you might get a kiss.’ Looking up and seeing Xena and Maria the men laughed heartily: they had as much chance of a kiss from women such as these as they had of becoming magnates.

  ‘I’ll kiss the man who burns the bridge,’ Xena said.

  The commander slapped his thigh. ‘There you go!’

  ‘And I’ll kiss the fletcher who prepares his arrow,’ Maria said.

  ‘That bridge is gone!’ they yelled.

  It took the French two hours to build it. During this time Xena and Maria retreated from the nauseating smoke to return to the spot that overlooked the main armies. Norman archers on the ramparts and behind the parapet had stopped shooting but the women could make no sense of what was happening on the narrow battlefield below them where infantry and cavalry of both sides were now fighting hand to hand. Who was winning was impossible to say. The Norman archers lay on the ground, watching the battle as if it were a
tournament. They seemed to have some agreement with their French counterparts because they, too, sat idly, watching. The trebuchet was still stuck and the effort of freeing it seemed to have been abandoned. A young fletcher came dashing to Xena and Maria to invite them to watch the burning of the bridge.

  About fifty French infantrymen walked gingerly across the new bridge. ‘They suspect we’re here, but they can’t see us,’ the arrow commander said. His archers, both hands gloved for protection, were poised. ‘Fire!’ the commander shouted. In unison each archer grabbed from his fletcher a flaming arrow and shot it at the bridge. They reloaded as soon as one flame had left their bow. And reloaded, and reloaded. Xena and Maria watched in fascination at their speed. Someone shouted, ‘It’s alight!’ ‘Shoot the horses!’ the commander yelled. The archers stood and fired at the caparisoned mounts on the opposite bank. Horses screamed and reared, several of them on fire. Xena covered her eyes. Knights scrambled to the ground and tried to drag their animals to the river to extinguish the fire, but they were mad with fear, and uncontrollable. Several went galloping away, engulfed in flames. French infantrymen floundered in the water. Some had jumped from the bridge to avoid the fire, others had fallen as it collapsed. Men on the bank tried to help ashore those they could reach, but many of them were already drowned. Only a half-dozen could swim. The cavalry whose horses were still under their command wheeled and galloped off, not towards the main army in front of the town, but back to the hill over which they had come. After a while the infantrymen stood up and trudged after them, carrying their wounded. It was only an hour past breakfast time.