Defiant Unto Death

by David Gilman

  The wave that took Guillaume tumbled him away along the deck. A pitch and a roll and he would be lost. Blackstone could do nothing; his hand already bled from the coarse rope, and as he swung like a flailing pulley-block in a tempest, making a final, desperate effort to grab him, he saw a dark shape separate itself from the huddled mass. The burly figure, his eyes barely visible, his black beard matted with salt, threw the weight of his body onto the helpless man, wresting Guillaume from the roiling water. It was Meulon who pulled the smaller man to him like a shield, and he in turn was grabbed and held by Gaillard. They had enough muscle between them to force half a dozen men to the ground with ferocious ease. The sea god’s anger was denied its sacrifice – and, like a burrowing animal, Guillaume disappeared beneath the shield wall.

  Blackstone took a tighter grip on the rope, lost his footing, and was slammed into the ship’s side. Pain burst through him, but gave him a surge of anger that doubled his strength. And then the boat shuddered, the ominous sound of wood scraping across the sand bar. The clinker-built cog was like a fat-bellied sow; its bowed ribs made it wallow, but its flat-bottomed hull allowed it to enter shallow waters, and with a following tide the ship lurched across the gravelled mouth of the estuary. There was an immediate halt to the violence as the ship found calmer water in the broad reach of the river. For two hundred paces each side of the ship, the mudflats rose into a stubbled landscape of rotted tree-stumps that caught the wind and howled dismally.

  Blackstone swung himself around to face the huddled men. ‘On your feet! Up! Now!’

  The men staggered uncertainly, found what balance they could, locking arms, bracing legs, weapons in one hand, comrades held fast in the other. There had been enough vomit spewed that day to empty men’s stomachs and Blackstone saw the gaunt look of illness on every man’s face. As the ship steadied, Master Jennah ordered the sail lowered and secured.

  ‘Wind’s against us good and proper now, but this tide will carry us upstream,’ he shouted to Blackstone. ‘Get the water out!’

  The ship was heavy with seawater trapped knee-deep with nowhere to go. Blackstone grabbed a bucket and followed the mariners’ example, scooping water and passing it to the next man. Without needing to be told his men slung their shields and, ignoring the cramped deckspace, bent to the task. The boat would settle if they did not empty it of the shipped water. Jennah watched the veering wind scatter spray and foam and shouted his helmsmen to keep their course. The command was merely a ritual in these shallow rivers, but the men who steered the ship had been pressed into service most of their lives and had taken trading vessels like the Saint Margaret Boat up many inlets.

  Master Jennah had told Blackstone of the river’s long, twisting curves, of the mudbanks that broke the shallow surface and the wasteland that stretched into the distant forests. If they reached the river mouth by the time the sun was above their heads, he had told Blackstone with a look of misgiving, then when they heard a distant church bell ring for prayers they had less than half the daylight remaining. That was when they would turn the final bend in the river. Blackstone looked at the riverbank and guessed they were moving as quickly as a horse trotted. If Master Jennah was correct, then by the time they reached the garrison there would be only a short time before darkness fell. That was the better choice. It was what he had hoped for: a few short hours to get close to the walls, then fight and secure. They would attack and hold until the next morning. De Grailly would not bring his troops up in darkness. With luck the Gascon commander would be waiting a few miles away, hidden in the forest so that at first light he could secure the road. A soldier needed good fortune on his side, a calming hand from the angels that allowed him to survive; looking at the state of his men, shivering and hunched, limbs aching and bellies empty, he reckoned he needed the earth spirits’ blessing as well.

  It was not given.

  Blackstone threw the bucketful of water over the side. It was whipped away by the wind, half of it stinging his face. The wind had turned.

  He looked to where Jennah stood with his helmsmen and the ship’s master nodded in silent acknowledgement. The wind was now behind them and, with the flowing tide pushed them ever faster towards the enemy, they would reach the castle with more daylight than he had wished.

  There had been no appetite for the ship’s rations of salted fish, so once the water had been cleared he gave each man a generous ration of brandywine. It would settle the effects of the voyage and put strength back into their limbs, and Blackstone knew its effect would calm the uncertainty that sat in every man’s mind. There were only twenty of them – two more counting Blackstone and Guillaume – and there could be no expectation that the mariners would join in the assault. There was likely to be at least twice the number behind the castle walls to hold a stronghold such as this, but Blackstone prayed that their meandering approach through the mudflats would go unnoticed. The French nobleman who commanded the garrison would expect any challenge to be made from beneath the castle walls. Men of honour did not slip quietly behind the enemy like assassins in the night.

  Honour, Blackstone told himself, meant different things to different men.

  There was no church bell ringing as the Saint Margaret Boat eased around the headland of the river’s final bend. His men crouched below the ship’s sides as Blackstone stood with Jennah and watched the stronghold ease into view. What he saw was a poor defensive structure that depended on the natural lie of the land. A timbered wall faced the river and Blackstone guessed that the wet ground had been too yielding to secure a stone fortification, which he could see extended beyond the rear wall of the castle where the ground must have been firmer. Drainage ditches had been dug and abandoned over time. There had been little need to expend further effort on a defensive wall where the quagmire and tide formed seemingly impregnable defences. The timber would be chestnut or oak, strong as iron, but with its feet in the soft ground. The castle rose fifteen feet above the river and he could see that what was once a broad reach of water narrowed into smaller channels, finally disappearing into little more than fingers of water that seeped into a distant water meadow. No wonder the castle held the road; there was little chance of an assault by land.

  ‘Not too close, Master Jennah,’ Blackstone told him. Wild grassland and reeds smothered what remained of stunted trees, sodden with brackish water, which obscured the small ship. Bulrushes bent in the wind, scattering their fine down.

  ‘I can run aground on that mudbank there, Sir Thomas,’ he said, holding the boat pressed against the riverbank, ‘and I’ll float free when the tide turns. You and your men will have to go through the reeds, and it’ll be hard going, particularly if you have to carry them rundlets.’ He nodded towards the lashed casks, half the size of a wine barrel, but which would still weigh a hundred pounds or more. Master Jennah grimaced – more, was his guess. Blackstone had loaded a dozen of the tar-filled half-barrels with the intention of burning down the main gate, but he now saw that was impossible, since the river did not allow access to the front of the stronghold. It swirled away beneath the road bridge, its strength diminished as it spread out into the shallow tributaries of the water meadows beyond. It was obvious that the only place Blackstone could place them was beneath the timber wall. Wading through marshland carrying the barrels under cover of bulrushes was a task he did not envy his poor seasick men. The reeds might obscure their approach but only so far. A narrow tributary flowed beneath the walls, thick with the stinking black slime of rotted vegetation, and then rejoined the river. It was better than a defensive ditch. If that approach was Blackstone’s only means of attack, Jennah realized, it meant those walls would take a long time to burn, which would give sufficient warning for the garrison to summon reinforcements. Ten years before, he had anchored his boat beyond the great city of Caen and watched its destruction from upriver. In those days the King’s army had brought up barges loaded with archers and their firepower had bought time for the soldiers. This place was no Caen, but with only tw
enty men, no archers or floating platforms, it might as well have been.

  ‘Can you get your ship down that ditch?’ Blackstone asked, pointing to the water that ran below the walls.

  ‘I’d get her down but I won’t be able to get her back. She’ll be held fast.’

  Blackstone kept his steady gaze on Jennah’s face. It took only a moment for the ship’s master to grasp what Blackstone meant.

  ‘No! I’ll not make this a fire ship!’

  Blackstone’s legs were still unsteady from the tormented voyage, so the stocky man had strength enough to push him aside. Jennah snarled at the helmsman: ‘Hold her fast! Keep her bow there!’ he said, cutting the air with the flat of his hand in the direction of the riverbank. The following tide still kept his ship pressed snugly out of sight from the French. He glowered at Blackstone. ‘A master of his ship swears an oath to save his cargo and the lives of his men. And a ship is never lost unless master and crew are dead, that’s the law! The law, Sir Thomas! And I’ll not sacrifice my ship or my men for you. I owe you my life, but nothing more.’

  ‘You’ll earn the Prince’s blessing,’ Blackstone told him, in the hope of stinging the man’s loyalty.

  ‘Ay! The Prince! God bless him! He’d take the shirt off a man’s back if it meant he could freeze the poor bastard to death. The Prince has no need of my ship to go up in flames though!’

  The scarred knight had him outnumbered. Jennah spat and rubbed his cropped head, scattering flakes of scurf into the wind. His salt- and wind-cracked hands had healed too many times to remember, but they had strength enough to grasp a knife and a knotted rope to fight the man who wanted to burn his ship.

  Blackstone knew the threat was a brave man’s stand. Jennah was three strides away but Meulon and the men drew their swords. Blackstone raised an arm and halted any violence against the sailors, whose death would have been slaughter, for they could have made only token resistance.

  ‘You’ll not have my boat, by Christ’s tears you will not, Sir Thomas,’ said Jennah, readying himself. ‘A knight would fight for his pennon or banner; he’d have to be dead before he let his sword fall from his fist. It’s no different for a mariner. We swore an oath. The Saint Margaret Boat is my vessel. Heart and soul.’

  It would have been an easy task to disarm the angry man but killing him would serve no purpose. Blackstone did not have the skill to use the tide and nudge the ship beneath the walls, and to blackmail the old man with the killing of one of his innocent crew was not an option that Blackstone would consider – it could only ever be a bluff. Besides, Master Jennah had kept his part of the bargain and brought the fighting men to the shore.

  Blackstone said: ‘How long before the tide turns?’

  ‘Three hours at most,’ answered Jennah, still holding the knife warily.

  Blackstone nodded and turned to the waiting men. ‘Meulon. Send Gaillard ashore with a cask.’ Blackstone turned back to Jennah. ‘Lower your blade, Master Jennah. You’ll take no harm from me. Your ship is yours. Men need no better reason to defend that which they love.’

  Jennah hesitated, but when Blackstone went down onto the deck he slid the blade back into its sheath. He watched as one of Blackstone’s soldiers, as big a man as Blackstone himself, but with a heavier build to his shoulders, clambered over the side of the ship carrying a tar barrel. There was no doubting the man’s strength or determination as he attempted to make headway through the soggy ground that sucked his legs down to the knee. With the rundlet on his shoulder he tried to keep his balance, but within ten paces he fell. He staggered to his feet, hefted his burden back onto his shoulder again but made no more than three or four paces before he squelched down again.

  Meulon took the signal from Blackstone and gently whistled a single note, then beckoned Gaillard back to the ship. Every fighting man knew that if Gaillard’s strength could not even reach twenty paces, then none would ever reach the base of the wall, more than three hundred cloth yards away, and then negotiate the quagmire and stream.

  Blackstone weighed their chances. Attack too soon and the garrison would send a messenger for reinforcements. Then, no matter how strong de Grailly’s force might appear, they could be ambushed on the narrow road and the English would suffer a defeat that could have a devastating effect on the Prince of Wales’s war of attrition. Attack too late and Blackstone and his men could be cornered like rats behind the walls. His successful raid, which had occupied the past several weeks, meant that his men were ready for the comfort of their women and a good fire in a grate rather than wet ground and bitter fighting. Now they could end with their heads on poles. He cursed himself for being too ambitious.

  He should have been halfway home by now. He had promised Christiana that, once he had resupplied the towns he held and paid the men who followed him, there would be time for them both before his son’s birthday. There were few raids undertaken over the winter months so he had scraped out the foundations of a new wall, embedding stone so that the winter rains would sluice through them and not damage his planned construction. They had carted rock from the fields and quarry and he had spent two cold months in his barn cutting and shaping the stone to his liking. When they had first taken over the old Norman manor house after they were married, he’d discovered signs of an ancient settlement. In their time the Romans had laid cut-stone pathways and built shelters for the animals with defensive walls, but like many old French towns they had tumbled and lain shrouded by undergrowth. Ancient warriors had encamped in these parts until wars of conquest had dragged them away. The place gave Blackstone a sense of belonging, somewhere he would live in relative peace with Christiana and the children. And they had desperately wanted another child. That was all part of his promise to her. Six months before this raid for food and supplies she had lost the child from her womb. The women who attended her had wrapped the infant and hid it from him, but Blackstone had unfolded the bloodied linen and gazed at the small creature that lay curled in sleep-like death and who would have been his second son.

  A friend, Joanne de Ruymont, who had never shared her husband’s friendship with the Englishman, had comforted her. She was a woman constrained by the manners dictated by her high-born family, a woman who held a deep-rooted resentment against Thomas Blackstone, an archer who had slain members of her family at Crécy. It was her husband, Guy, who served as peacemaker between the two families, given his close friendship with Blackstone’s mentor, the Norman lord Jean de Harcourt, but it had been Christiana that Joanna visited when the men were away fighting. It had been she who had held Christiana through the torturous time of her miscarriage.

  And now all Blackstone wanted was to go home, comfort his wife, and build his wall.

  ‘Sir Thomas?’

  Meulon’s voice broke into Blackstone’s thoughts.

  ‘What are your orders?’

  Blackstone looked at the men who awaited his command.

  ‘Can any of your men swim, Master Jennah?’

  ‘Swim? Other than me – no. I’m the only man aboard with a chance to reach the shore if we were ever wrecked. There’s no swimming to be had here, Sir Thomas. Not with this current.’ It made no sense to the sailor. ‘Swim where?’

  ‘Rope each barrel of oil with another of tar. Someone has to take them beneath the bridges and into the water meadows. And then light them. Send flames across the sky and draw out those inside. But it will take at least two men.’

  ‘Well, I’m too old to be doing that. The water is cold and a man can be snared by what lies beneath. And to keep tinder dry to fire the barrels will be the devil’s job.’

  Blackstone looked to his men. Guillaume stepped forward. ‘I’ll go, lord. But I’ll need time to float them into position.’

  He had no wish to see his squire go into the water. Whoever lit the barrels might easily be seen by crossbowmen on the walls. Enough quarrels could be loosed to cut through reed beds without even aiming.

  ‘Meulon, you lead the assault. I’ll go into the water
with Master Guillaume.’ There was no choice. Blackstone had swum in the river that flowed by his village since he could walk.

  ‘My lord,’ Meulon said quickly. ‘Taking the walls can be done, but it needs you to lead us. We could flounder inside the stronghold as badly as a drowning man in the water.’ There was a murmur of agreement from the men. A wiry man, muscular despite his slight build, stepped forward. It was Perinne, one of the men who had fought with Blackstone these past ten years. A wall-builder like the man who led him.

  ‘I thrashed across a pond once, Sir Thomas. Give me a shaft of wood to cling to and I’ll get myself out there with a bit of help from the current. We can’t have Meulon here taking all the glory for seizing the place. Besides, it’s safer in the water than having Gaillard sticking his spear up my arse every time a shadow moves.’

  The men laughed and muttered their agreement; the tension of uncertainty was broken.

  ‘Right enough,’ Guillaume said, ‘but when you fire the tar barrels make sure you’re upwind or you’ll have less hair than you have now.’

  Perinne’s thinning, close-cropped hair showed bird’s-feet scars across his scalp. ‘I might not have the locks of a girl, Master Guillaume, but I’ll wager my old head has snuggled between more tits than your own.’

  Guillaume Bourdin wore his hair to his shoulders and, with his fine features, could easily be mistaken for a young woman – a mistake soon corrected when the fighting started – but it was seldom they had seen the young squire take a whore. The young man’s pride was easily hurt when it came to such matters, but to fight with men like these meant pride had best learn to suffer its own wounds; by now Guillaume’s carried as many nicks and cuts as Perinne’s scalp.

  Master Jennah said: ‘Merciful Christ, Sir Thomas. A lad and a man who can barely float on the tide like a turd? Is that your plan?’