by Terry Jones
But as it turned out, he didn’t have to wait that long nor ride that far before he caught them up . . . or at least before he caught up with one of Peter de Bury’s party. It was the Frenchman in the mail coat.
The man had dismounted on a small promontory, surmounted by a ruin, which looked across to the sudden rocks that rise up where the river Allier joins the Alagnon – a place known as Le Saut du Loup, or Wolf’s Leap. The Frenchman was staring down at the confluence of the rivers when Tom drew up alongside him.
He glanced at Tom for the briefest of moments and then returned to scrutinising the riverbanks beneath them.
Following his gaze, Tom saw some tiny figures down below, whom he took to be Peter de Bury’s men. They had stopped by some cottages, huddled up under the cliffs, and he could see figures running this way and that, with the soldiers giving chase on horseback. Smoke was rising from the thatch, and as Tom and the Frenchman watched, one of the cottages suddenly burst into flames.
‘He is a cruel man, Peter de Bury.’ It was the Frenchman who spoke, but he was voicing exactly what Tom was thinking.
‘Why do you follow him?’ asked Tom.
‘He is no worse than most.’ The Frenchman shrugged. ‘And I have to live. Father Michael always said God would provide for us. But he did not. My wife died. My child died. I could stay in Compertrix and starve and join the already dead – or else join one of the companies. It is eat or be eaten in this world.’
His eyes returned to the scene of distant carnage below them. Were those the screams of crows or humans? It was hard to tell from up here.
Tom stared down and as he did a subtle horror began to circulate around his veins. Was that Ann he could see – that slight figure in a blue jerkin and brown hose running after the villagers? Of course not! That was impossible. Ann could not have changed that much! Even her infatuation for Peter de Bury could not have turned her into a marauder . . . surely? Tom’s head seemed to explode with the impossibility of it all.
But if that was Ann, Tom decided, it was even more urgent that he save her – he had to save her from herself.
And that was the moment he remembered his sword. Or rather he remembered he’d forgotten it. It was somewhere in the brambles down by the river. As he remembered the circumstances of its loss, how the man in the turban had taken it from him and tossed it into the brambles, Tom turned bright red. No wonder he had blotted the memory out – nobody wants to remember moments of humiliation.
‘I have to rescue my friends,’ said Tom. ‘Will you help me?’
The Frenchman turned and looked at him.
‘I have helped you once,’ he said, ‘so that you can return to my village and tell them the Pope’s message. Why should I do more?’
‘There is no Pope’s message,’ said Tom.
The Frenchman stiffened. ‘You did not deliver our message?’
‘I delivered it to him in person,’ said Tom. ‘But the Pope did not want to listen to it. His only care is himself.’
‘Then he is no different from anyone else in this terrible world.’
‘But that’s not so! The Pope may not care, but there are people who do!’
‘Who? Who cares about anyone but themselves?’
‘Well . . .’ Tom thought for a moment. ‘You do! You care about your village, what is it? Compertrix . . . up in Champagne! That’s why you helped me escape and stole a horse for me! And I care about people too – I cared about the people of your village, even though I had never met them before! I was prepared to carry Father Michael’s message to the Pope on their behalf.
‘And I care about my friends,’ Tom went on. ‘There are many, many of us who care about other people . . . and I don’t believe we’re the small minority of mankind! I bet we’re the majority! There are some people who want to make us believe that all men are selfish and greedy, and that there is no other way, and that man has always lived through violence and conquest. Well, I don’t. And I suppose it’s up to those of us who don’t believe that to oppose – with every breath in our body – those who do.’
The Frenchman screwed up his eyes and sucked his cheeks in, as if he were tasting a sour plum.
‘What can we do?’ he said. ‘Take the present situation – let’s talk about the here and now. There are a dozen of them and only two of us.’
‘You will help me then?’
‘Like you said, we have to stand up against those who believe that greed and violence are the only human currency,’ said the Frenchman.
Tom stared at this man who had helped him once before and was now prepared to put his life on the line to help him again, and yet whose name he did not even know.
‘My name is Tom,’ Tom extended his hand. The Frenchman took it.
‘Jean,’ he said. ‘My name is Jean.’
‘But first, Jean, I must go and fetch my sword – I left it at the encampment.’
The Frenchman smiled. ‘It didn’t seem to be much use to you when you had it,’ he said gently. And once again Tom blushed. ‘Besides, who knows what will have happened to your friends before you get back?’
Tom looked down at the mayhem going on below. He could see his point.
‘In any case, one sword or two swords – it won’t make much difference against a dozen. We shall have to rescue your friends by other means.’
There was enough noise coming out of one of the unburned cottages to wake the dead. And there were certainly plenty of dead to wake. The bodies had been thrown in a heap round the back of the barn.
In the meantime, Peter de Bury and his men had obviously found a heartwarming supply of food and wine, and since early afternoon they had been busy warming their hearts, which, it must be admitted, needed quite a bit of warming.
Now a raucous conviviality made the humble dwellings shake, and the thatch was rustling with disturbed creatures, as drunken voices rang out threateningly about their undying love for a girl with golden hair.
Darkness had fallen over the confluence of the rivers Alagnon and Allier, and Tom and his new friend, the Frenchman Jean, had found it easy enough to approach what remained of the hamlet unobserved. The routiers seemed to have become uncharacteristically nonchalant in their safety precautions, for no one appeared to be on guard, and Tom was able to creep right up to the shutters of the nearest cottage and peer through a crack.
The merrymaking had reached that stage when it is compulsory for at least one member of the group to be lying on the floor at any given moment. To achieve this they either fell off their stools of their own accord or tripped over a dog that seemed to have happily shifted its loyalties to its new masters, and was now defiantly curled up in their midst pretending to be asleep.
‘I can’t see Ann or Emily,’ Tom whispered.
The Frenchman nodded towards the other cottage, which stood in darkness.
‘Perhaps they’re in there,’ he said.
Tom hoped Jean was right. He couldn’t imagine how either Emily or Ann could fit into these drunken celebrations . . . and if he could imagine it, he didn’t want to.
And then he came up against the same thought: why was Ann going along with all this? Peter de Bury might be handsome, he might be extremely dashing for all Tom cared, but surely whatever fantasies she’d been entertaining about him all this time, she could now see him for what he was?
Or was the new Ann blind to all that? Did that shining that Tom had seen in her eyes when she looked at Peter de Bury blot out everything else? Is that what ‘love’ did to people? Could it reduce the most rational, most independent, most resourceful person Tom had ever known to this? What was it? Thraldom? A kind of enchanted slavery?
And as he thought about all this, Tom discovered something strange. No matter how much he tried to focus on the idea of rescuing Emily, he found it was Ann for whom he was really risking his life.
‘All right!’ Tom whispered to Jean. ‘Let’s do it!’
*
The two of them silently slipped away from the cott
ages and approached the barn, where the horses had been tethered. There was something sinister about it now they knew about the corpses piled behind it, but neither of them said a word to the other.
Jean threw a stone across the path, and it skittered across the rough ground, hitting the door with a dull thunk. Tom shrank himself back into the shadow of a bush. Jean stood behind a water butt. The barn door remained shut. No one came to see what the noise was.
The pair crept up and opened the door a crack. They could hear the horses stirring within. Again, Jean tossed a stone across the barn floor, letting it rattle across the earth until it hit a wooden post. Still no one moved.
‘They haven’t even posted a guard for the horses!’ He sounded rather shocked.
‘Lucky for us!’ said Tom.
The drunken singing was now ringing across the farmyard to reveal that the girl’s hair was in fact real gold and that the singers were going to sell it in the market next day, and by the time the singers had got round to enumerating the things they were going to buy with the money, Tom and Jean had the horses untied and stampeding out of the barn and across the yard.
Tom and Jean ran as fast as they could into the darkness that huddled up close to the buildings. There they crouched behind a bush to watch what happened next.
As luck would have it, one of the routiers, whose name happened to be Martin, had wandered out to relieve himself. For a few befuddled moments, the sound of yelling coming from the barn didn’t strike him as at all odd, but then his brain suggested that since all the companions were inside yelling about all the ways a girl’s hair was going to make them rich, there shouldn’t be anyone else in the barn to be yelling about anything else.
At this point a couple of brain cells that had not received the battering that Martin had intended for them, suggested that something might be amiss with the horses. But by the time the surrounding brain cells had pulled themselves together enough to respond to this outstanding suggestion, the sound of thundering hooves threw them back into confusion.
Martin turned to see a dozen horses stampeding across the yard towards him. For a second he thought that he too would enjoy joining in the stampede with the horses.
‘I am a horse too!’ he found himself thinking. But then the two still-active brain cells managed to impress on the others that this might not be a good idea. Furthermore these still-active brain cells succeeded in suggesting that their owner – as a non-horse – really ought to try and stop the real horses before they disappeared into the night.
Martin tried to grab the reins of the first horse, only to find that the majority of his brain cells had now totally abandoned their normal duties and had either retired for a well-earned rest or were asleep on the job. With only two active brain cells to guide his limbs, he misjudged his grab at the reins, fell forward into the horse’s flank, tripped and found himself rolling on the ground, trampled under the hooves of the following horses. His yells of pain and panic called his plight to the attention of the Big Spenders indoors (who had by this time sold all the girl’s hair).
Several figures staggered to the door and proceeded to cheer the horses on. However, one of the more perspicacious of the brigands pointed out that the horses were theirs, but if the creatures continued on their present course they soon wouldn’t be.
This remarkable insight had an equally remarkable effect upon the men. With the kind of enthusiasm that can only come from total inebriation, they gave chase – falling over each other and bumping into posts and pigsties as they did so. The man from Cheshire fell over a leather bucket and lay on the floor giggling hysterically, before he managed to stagger to his feet and blindly follow the rest.
Tom and Jean watched until all the men had vanished into the darkness, and their yells and laughter had become a distant disturbance along with the cicadas and bullfrogs. The two rescuers then raced across to the darkened cottage, where an unsteady glow of candlelight was now leaking through the shutters. Tom put his eye to a crack and saw the beautiful Emily coming downstairs with a candle in her hand.
He ran round to the front and reached the door of the cottage at the same time as Emily.
‘Emily!’ he whispered. ‘Quick! Now’s our chance! They’re all chasing their horses!’
‘Tom!’ said Emily.
‘Where’s Ann?’ and he pushed past Emily and ran to the stairs and shouted up: ‘Ann! Quick! We’ve come to get you!’
‘Ann isn’t here,’ said Emily.
‘She’s with Peter!’ exclaimed Tom.
‘No she isn’t!’ said Emily.
‘Well, where is she then?’ Tom felt surprisingly cross that Ann wasn’t where he thought she’d be. Then he added: ‘Peter de Bury was going to kill me!’
‘I don’t know where she is,’ replied Emily. A coolness seemed to have crept into her voice.
‘She’s not upstairs?’
‘No.’
‘Then she must be in the other house!’ Tom hurried back to the doorway. Jean was already running across to the other building. ‘Come on!’ Tom yelled to Emily.
But Emily didn’t move.
‘They’ll be back soon!’ called Tom. But Emily still did not move. ‘Emily?’ Tom stopped and turned.
‘I’m not coming,’ said Emily.
‘What?!’ exclaimed Tom.
‘I’m staying here,’ said the beautiful and imperious Emily.
‘What are you talking about?’ Tom raced back to her. ‘What do you mean “you’re staying here”?’
‘Exactly that,’ replied Emily, and Tom could now hear the same coldness in her voice that she used when addressing doorkeepers and servants.
‘But this morning you were desperate to get away from these bandits!’ exclaimed Tom. ‘Are you crazy or something?’
‘I don’t think the lady wants to go,’ said another voice. Tom turned and by the flicker of Emily’s candle he could just make out a dim figure descending the rickety stairs. It was Peter de Bury.
‘Where’s Ann?’ shouted Tom.
‘How should I know?’ retorted Peter.
‘She’s with you!’ exclaimed Tom.
‘No she isn’t,’ came the cool reply. It matched his cool blue eyes and the coolness of Emily’s voice.
Tom turned to Emily in frustration.
‘What’s happened to Ann?’ he demanded. ‘And what about your brother? Have you forgotten we’re going to rescue him?’
‘Of course I haven’t forgotten,’ replied Emily. ‘Peter is going to help me find him. I’ve got a real knight now, Tom. I shan’t be needing you any more.’
In the confusion of feelings that overwhelmed Tom at that moment, perhaps the one that overrode all the rest was an indignation on the part of Ann. Peter de Bury – worthless though he might be – was Ann’s lover. Undeserving and ungrateful as he was, Peter had been the focus of Ann’s thoughts and hopes for the last two or three years. How could he betray her like this? Come to that – how could Emily just take him over like this? But above all – where was Ann? What on earth had happened to her?
And then a sudden terrible thought entered Tom’s mind, and the moment it did, it became a certainty. He saw it all in a flash of insight. This Peter de Bury had realised just who Emily was . . . and that the Lady Emilia de Valois was not only a rich prize as a hostage . . . she was an even richer prize as a wife . . .
Tom stared from one to the other. It was so obvious. Instead of slaughtering these poor villagers for their sides of pork and their casks of wine, Peter de Bury could escort the Lady Emily to England, and if he could engineer her brother Guillaume’s escape from his English prison, he would be richly rewarded. And if, in the meantime, he could make the lovely Lady Emily want him for her husband, he could become wealthy beyond his wildest dreams and become a fine French lord into the bargain.
Tom suddenly remembered with a painful clarity the look that he had seen in Ann’s face when she gazed at Peter de Bury. What was the trust he saw in that look worth now? He suddenly
realised how inconvenient her love must have appeared to Peter de Bury. Instead of being a wonderful gift, it was the only thing standing between him and the rich pickings to be made out of the Lady Emilia de Valois!
Tom’s stomach, which was already inside out, now turned itself upside down, back-to-front, topsy-turvy and vice versa all in one spasm. He knew what had happened to Ann.
Chapter 32
Milan 1385
‘Ah! Il Medecina!’ said the Lady Donnina de’ Porri, favourite mistress of Bernabò Visconti, the Lord of Milan.
A man in his forties, with a grizzled beard, strode into the room followed by two burly men who held between them the emaciated figure of John, Sir Thomas English’s squire.
‘My lady,’ said Il Medecina. ‘We shall soon get to the truth of this.’ And the two burly men threw Squire John onto the floor, where he lay motionless.
The Lady Donnina turned to Sir Thomas and smiled:
‘Surely you don’t imagine I would believe your uncorroborated word, Sir Thomas? You want your squire back alive? You’ll have to sing for him, minstrel!’
‘Give us a full and truthful account of what you really saw in Gian Galeazzo’s court at Pavia,’ said Il Medecina, and one of the burly men quickly and precisely snapped a length of cord around Squire John’s neck as if he did it many times a day – which may well have been the case. He then began to twist it with a piece of wood. Squire John gasped as the garrotte began to choke him, but he didn’t cry out. The fact was he couldn’t.
‘I have told you everything exactly as I saw and heard it,’ said Sir Thomas English. ‘No amount of torture you can inflict on my wretched squire can change that.’
‘He has forty seconds more breath in his body,’ said Il Medecina quietly. ‘It would be best if you told us the truth.’
