Master of War

by David Gilman

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. She stayed frozen in fear. Blackstone reached for his brother’s belt on the floor and opened the pouch. ‘I have money,’ he said, ‘I have money,’ he repeated, letting his voice soothe her. His fingers searched for the silver penny, as his voice and eyes kept trying to calm the terrified woman. He held the coin between finger and thumb and offered it to her. She shook her head. Perhaps she thought that despite the rape he was trying to pay for more sex. He placed it next to her on a stool and stepped back. There was nothing more he could do.

  He turned to his brother, who was now dressed, and threw him his belt. As he buckled it around his jacket and gathered his weapons Blackstone saw a looped cord with a small drawstring leather pouch on the floor. He must have snatched it from beneath his brother’s shirt in the struggle. He picked it up. He had seen it before. His fingers trembled. He knew this purse. He knew what he would find inside. If there was a God he had to perform a miracle now. He had to make Blackstone be wrong. He had to make the two beads and the three periwinkle shells in the purse disappear. The drawstring purse would never have been parted with freely. It held small treasures given to a village girl by her runaway brother. Gifts that smelled of the sea and beads from a lady’s broken bracelet. The promise of another life across a different horizon from her own. A more distant horizon than the corn and rye fields where she lay with men and dreamed of buying her freedom from servitude as a bondswoman.

  Blackstone had touched that purse when he lay across her milk-white breasts and caressed their aroused nipples. Sarah Flaxley had been a young man’s joy, a girl of easy virtue who cared only that she was loved with a passion that helped ease her loveless life. Drayman had been hanged for the girl’s murder. His approval against Richard Blackstone had been thought an act of revenge. He had pleaded innocence of the girl’s murder, but had attempted to indict the killer.

  Shadows flickered as the tallow lamp burned low. Blackstone looked to his unmoving brother who gazed at the purse with a silent, sickening guilt. He touched his heart, pointed lamely at the purse and touched his lips. He loved her, he said.

  Blackstone let the pouch fall to the floor and the shells cracked under his feet as he walked into the night. God had not heard his prayer.

  Thousands of other souls needed Him that night.

  6

  The mist was rising slowly from the river when Blackstone found Sir Gilbert sitting beneath the low branches of a tree on the river­bank. The morning light reflected dully on his chain mail draped across a fallen tree trunk, next to his washed undershirt drying on a branch. His sword lay on the ground within arm’s reach. Using a piece of linen he swabbed his arms and shoulder, marked by welts and bruises from battle. A slash across the back of his left shoulder and ribs was held by a dozen crude stitches, smeared with a greasy-looking salve. Blackstone held back; he had approached quietly and stood for a moment staring at the man’s wounds. Sir Gilbert wrung the linen and spoke without turning.

  ‘You stink like a hog’s groin, Blackstone. Either move down­wind or wash yourself.’

  Blackstone stepped forward but kept his distance. He squatted at the water’s edge, staying silent, embarrassed by his clumsiness at being seen.

  ‘I’m not a goddamn magician. I saw you climb the town walls. If I was a French bowman I could have had a crossbow bolt between your eyes. What do you want? I’m tired.’

  ‘You’re wounded,’ said Blackstone lamely.

  ‘It barely cut the skin. There’s a monastery on the other side of the forest. I had the monks use their dark arts. They have herbs and potions. I don’t want any of our bloodletters near me.’

  ‘Elfred told me you were here,’ Blackstone said, and scooped water onto his face. He looked across at the ships being loaded with the wealth from Caen. ‘We lost a lot of men.’

  ‘You’re still alive, that’s all you have to be concerned about. Your brother?’

  Blackstone nodded.

  ‘He fought well. I saw him. Did you find plunder? There was plenty of gold coin in those houses.’

  Blackstone shook his head.

  ‘How do you expect to raise your status if you don’t loot? Take what you can and increase your wealth. One day, if you survive the fighting, and when you’re older and rheumatism seizes your bow arm, you buy your own men. Then you contract them to the King. His servants have stripped the merchants’ houses. What do you think is being loaded onto those ships? How do you think the King makes money?’

  ‘You don’t take part in the looting, Sir Gilbert.’

  ‘I don’t care for it. Besides, I have a prisoner.’

  Blackstone nodded. ‘I’ll take what I can find.’

  Sir Gilbert laughed. ‘There’s nothing left. The ships will sail back to England, we’ll bury the dead and then we’ll march on to Paris. We haven’t yet fought the battle to win this war.’ He wiped his sword’s blade, waiting for Blackstone to tell him whatever it was that was clearly bothering him. ‘Where’s your sword?’

  ‘I gave it to a wounded archer, Alan of Marsh. He needed a weapon. I went back for him but he was dead. They took his bow and the sword.’

  ‘It was yours to give, but a man-at-arms would never gift a sword won in battle – though he might sell it.’

  Sir Gilbert’s mild chastisement evaporated like the river mist. ‘Richard Whet’s dead, Torpoleye, Skinner, Pedloe…’ said Black­stone quickly, recounting the losses, creeping closer to confession.

  ‘Archers always pay a heavy price when they fight an armoured enemy. We won because we were reckless, stupid bastards who clawed our enemy to death. The King knows that. That’s why he loves us. It’s why we fight for him.’

  ‘I killed Skinner,’ Blackstone said quickly.

  Sir Gilbert barely hesitated as he cleaned the blade. ‘That must have been some fight. He was a vicious bastard who’d have killed his own mother if there was a coin to be had.’

  ‘He raped a woman,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘It’s what soldiers do. Was she a whore?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you saved him from the rope,’ Sir Gilbert told him. ‘Did you kill Pedloe as well?’ he asked. ‘Nothing kept those two apart.’

  Blackstone shook his head.

  ‘Why are you telling me this? What do you expect me to do? Flog you? Have you hanged? Dear Christ, Blackstone, it’s goddamn war. Some men deserve to die more than others. I don’t give a dog’s turd for the likes of Skinner and Pedloe. The army’s got plenty of their kind. Go away. I’m not your Father Confessor and I don’t want you snivelling about a tavern fight.’

  Blackstone tried to keep the secret bottled. ‘Sir Gilbert, would you have my brother serve with the baggage train? He’ll be safe there.’

  ‘Lose an archer like him? No. And he fights like a lion with a spear up its arse. He stays with the company.’

  ‘I don’t want him near me!’ Blackstone shouted, and then fell silent, sickened by his outburst.

  Sir Gilbert forced the blade into the ground. It stood like a cross. For a few moments he said nothing and then he began to dress, easing the mail onto his battered body over the linen shirt.

  ‘War is a trade, and trade feeds war. Blame the damned sheep if you like,’ he said. ‘Jesus, Thomas, take that stupid look off your face. Wool from a sheep’s back pays for war. We guarantee it to the Flemish for their weavers and they give us loyalty and troops to keep Philip contained in the north. We guarantee it to the Italians who lend your King the money he needs to wage war. We pay for the privilege of fighting. They are agreements.’

  ‘I don’t understand what any of that has to do with me or my brother,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Loyalty binds men, Thomas, and Lord Marldon’s loyalty to your father ensnares me as well. His lordship promised his friend, your father, that you and your brother would be protected for as long as Lord Marldon lived.’

  ‘By sending us to war?’

  ‘By saving your brother’s life. There was
a witness.’

  Sir Gilbert’s words froze the moment. The overhanging branches framed a tapestry of ships’ sails unfurling to catch the rising breeze, and a moorhen dipping its head for insects as it padded through shallow reed beds.

  ‘So now you know what he did,’ said Sir Gilbert.

  ‘A witness?’ The question was unnecessary, but it escaped Black­stone’s lips. He shook his head, not comprehending that others knew what had happened. ‘Chandler. Lord Marldon’s reeve. He saw your brother that day. You worked at the manor, Richard was at the quarry, but not all day. He went to Sarah Flaxley, saw Drayman leave her. He killed her, whether he intended to or not, and Chandler traded his silence for your land. Lord Marldon would have slain him, but he’s his reeve and is as sly as a stoat. Who was to say he had not secured that information elsewhere? In time Lord Marldon will discover whether he did or not, and Chandler will be found with his throat slit outside an alehouse.’

  Sir Gilbert buckled his sword and picked up his bascinet. ‘A man’s loyalty and honour determine who he is in this godforsaken world. And your lord honoured his promise to your father. It was a trade. A piss-poor one in my opinion, but a trade it was.’

  He stepped away from Blackstone.

  ‘Your brother stays in the company of archers. And Thomas, never relinquish a sword if it’s won in battle.’

  It seemed to Blackstone that his father’s action all those years ago in saving Lord Marldon’s life had bound them all together. He was obliged to care for his brother and had he not also given his word to Lord Marldon? For Blackstone to break that chain of promise and honour would mean the end of – what? He didn’t know and it was something that gnawed away at him. Honour had become too tenuous, an ideal that had seemed binding, but was lost when the slaughter began. Was not the honour broken when his brother strangled Sarah Flaxley? The image of it still sickened him. His mind imagined the scene, and despite the carnage of the battle at Caen, his brother’s act of violent passion was the one that haunted his dreams. He banished Richard to walk as far behind him as possible. No longer did he want him at his shoulder. A part of him wished his brother had perished in the battle, then Blackstone would not have known of his crime and he would have died innocent.

  The army lingered five days in Caen. A vast communal grave was dug in the churchyard of Ile St-Jean, and they buried five hundred Frenchmen, but there were so many bodies in the city they could not be counted – some said it was as many as five thousand. For days the rivers carried bodies out to sea on the tide. Of the English knights or men-at-arms only one had died, but the infantry and the archers who led the assault, and whose courage won the day, lost many of their number. The King sent orders to England to raise another twelve hundred archers and supply six thousand sheaves of arrows. The fortress, as Blackstone had predicted, proved impregnable and a contingent of men was left to contain Sir Godfrey’s old enemy, Bertrand, and the few hundred who remained behind its walls. Time, and the French force from the south, was closing in on the English King. If the spies’ reports were to be believed, King Philip rallied his army in Rouen. The English were being squeezed between river and coast. If this war was to be won Edward had to outrun the French and choose his ground. When the King attended to his prayers before each daybreak he, like his common archer Thomas Blackstone, needed a simple miracle – a bridge left intact across the Seine.

  And once again God had other prayers to answer.

  The army moved eastwards, scorching the land as it went. Towns­folk, villagers and villeins, knowing that the great city of Caen had fallen, fled before it. They took their livestock and food, leaving nothing for the English army. Skirmishes along the way slowed the army’s advance, but the vanguard division pushed on relentlessly, desperate to find a way of crossing the Seine. King Edward’s small army had been depleted by death and injury, disease and desertion; he now had fewer than thirteen thousand men to fight the French army, which had at least twice as many. Slowed by the baggage wagons, the English made only thirty miles in three days. Keeping the carts and wagons moving across the marshland and difficult, undulating terrain made huge demands on muscle and stamina. The commanders knew that they could not increase the pace with­out diminishing the army’s fighting capabilities. Horses and men were tiring. A knight’s mount carried its rider, his armour and weapons – up to three hundred pounds of weight – day in and day out. Fodder and water were crucial. The troops scavenged what little remained from the countryside, but the bread was exhausted and foraged mutton gave insufficient strength to a fighting man. Soldiers needed that and their diet of pease, grain porridge and bread to give them the stamina for battle.

  The great looping bends of the lower Seine curled across a broad valley, but no crossing had been found. Paris taunted the English King. He was within twenty miles of the capital, and from the high ground Edward could look across the five bends of the Seine and see the city’s towers. The French King had bottled up his enemy on the opposite bank. Outnumbered and outflanked, Edward’s army could soon die with their backs to the sea and leave the gates of England open for the invasion the French had always desired and planned.

  Now not only the King’s survival but also that of his nation were at stake.

  Godfrey de Harcourt rode south with archers and men-at-arms, following the course of the Seine. This was countryside familiar to de Harcourt, since the territory belonged to his brother, the count, and their ancestral home, the Castle de Harcourt, lay a few miles to the south-east. No bridge across the river remained intact and by now his scouting party was close to the great city of Rouen where, if the rumours were to be believed, the King of France had gathered his army in readiness to stop Edward’s advance. Marshals of the English army had been charged with finding either a bridge that could be attacked and taken, or a crossing that the French had left intact. No crossing had yet been found. Those bridges that remained were heavily defended from towers on the enemy’s side of the river. Skirmishes against them ended in failure. The French King had anticipated Edward’s advance and, by denying him access across the Seine, also denied him the chance to attack Paris. The French would drive the English northwards and trap them between river and coast.

  As the sun climbed higher the tireless de Harcourt drove the men onward through wooded valleys and over gentle hills until they reached a wide track cut through the forest. It led to a clearing and a stone-built castle, whose rounded towers and battlements occupied a dominant position. Its wide, deep outer moat would make a direct attack difficult and its second one, crescent shaped that hugged the inner walls, would probably drown any attackers who survived the other defences. However, to attack was not the purpose for which Godfrey de Harcourt had swung away from the Seine. Sir Gilbert and his men waited in the trees for orders. The Norman rode with half a dozen of his knights around the perimeter. There were no defenders on the walls and the narrow wooden bridge across its fosse, broad enough for a wagon to pass through the wall’s iron-studded gates, was intact.

  ‘Thing is, with a place like this, it can be very tricky to get inside, if that’s what Sir Godfrey’s planning,’ muttered John Weston, examining dust-clogged snot on the end of his finger. ‘No scaling ladders, no siege engines. Just thee and me and a few cracked-arsed hobelars. And if he’s a mind to ride across yonder bridge and knock on the door he’ll either get a cauldron of boiling oil or a piss pot tipped on his noble head. So if anyone asks for volunteers I’ll be taking a shit behind that tree.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Sir Gilbert told him. ‘And you’ll take a shit when I tell you, you goddamned boil on the backside of humanity.’

  Elfred and the others smiled at Weston who, by way of revenge, shifted in his saddle and farted. ‘That could crumble some of them fine stone walls,’ he muttered. ‘Oh, hello, he’s sent a poor sod to knock on the door.’

  The men watched as a squire rode forward from the gathered knights. The hollow thud of hooves on wood echoed up to the men waiting in the coolness of the trees
.

  Weston kept a murmured commentary going. ‘Anyone home? We were just passing and wondered if you had any virgins who might need some attention. Not that anyone has the energy right now, not after grinding our arses on swayback nags for thirty miles.’

  The herald called for the gates to be opened, citing de Harcourt’s name. There was silence. Even from where they sat in the trees Black­stone could see de Harcourt’s irritation, which was not contained for long. He bellowed, ‘In the name of Christ! Open the gates or I will burn them through.’

  ‘Those are iron-clad gates. We’ll be here for some time,’ Black­stone said quietly. ‘Whoever built that castle knew what they were doing. Conical towers each side of the entrance. Half a dozen side towers on the outer wall. Good field of fire from those loopholes. See how the cut stone supports the archway? The iron hinges are concealed. Windows to the side are a weak spot, but you’d need to get across the fosse. Good builders.’

  ‘They should surrender,’ Elfred agreed.

  ‘They must know the rules of war,’ Will Longdon said.

  ‘Cling-shit peasants,’ John Weston said, spitting in disgust.

  ‘Do I have to sit and listen to your babble?’ Sir Gilbert said, turning in the saddle. ‘You damned washerwomen could wear a threshing stone down with your talk.’ He spurred his horse forward. ‘With me!’

  The four men followed Sir Gilbert down to where de Harcourt waited for a response from those inside the castle.

  ‘My lord, there’s an old boat tied at the bank. We could put three or four men across and let them try that lower window.’

  Longdon and Weston looked sourly at Blackstone.

  ‘There’s no defence. Whoever’s inside has no stomach for a fight,’ Sir Gilbert said finally.

  De Harcourt nodded. ‘Choose your men. Make it plain; no harm to those inside. My nephew’s wife is in there. Perhaps with some of his men. Kill only in self-defence.’ He turned his horse away and rode to the sheltering trees.