Gisburne lied to his father. The nest had fallen, he said. To his surprise, his father took it calmly. Years later, he learned that the old man had seen the arrow embedded in the tree bough – where it remained ever after – and had guessed exactly what had happened. But he was simply glad that it was only the pony, and not his son, that had died.
His father had told him that, most likely, the king of the nest had perished, and, leaderless, they had gone mad. The horror of the destruction that he had unleashed haunted him long after.
Today, it came back to him afresh. He had watched as the mercenary army had been smashed open, its furious survivors dispersed. The images of destruction that followed burned in his brain.
As he attended de Gaillon at that night’s meal, he had been finally moved to ask a question which had long troubled him, but which he had thought too stupid to put into words. “What is the difference between victory and defeat?”
De Gaillon almost laughed – the grim, ironic laugh that emerged when things were so bad they were absurd, and which, bit by bit, was becoming the only laugh he had. “You’re more tired after a defeat,” he said, with no expression in his voice. Then he snapped a morsel of meat from his knife point, chewed on it with little relish, and added: “But both can kill you.” He forced himself to swallow.
Gisburne was surprised by the cynicism. De Gaillon was a realist – sometimes, brutally so – but he was not one for giving up. Not ever. After a time, perhaps aware that his reply was inadequate, he sighed and paused in his eating again. “What a battle really is,” he said, pointing with his knife, “is a world brought to the brink of chaos. The purpose in fighting a battle – and the primary objective of a knight – is to bring it to a conclusion, to restore order, as rapidly and decisively as possible. To establish peace. The ultimate enemy is not the one who stands opposite you on the field. It is in here.” At this, he tapped the side of his head with the blade of the eating knife. “And it is out there.” Here, he gestured all around. “It is the chaos that threatens to overrun us when our guard is down. The enemy of peace. The enemy of happiness.”
De Gaillon had made similar pronouncements before. At the time, Gisburne had not fully understood them. But today, he did.
It was not long before Gisburne realised the ghastly mistake he had made in his choice of bed. The straw that had seemed inviting from a distance revealed itself to be musty and thick with crumbling rat droppings. With the doors closed, and nowhere for it to go, the acrid stench of decay that seemed to seep out of the creaking fabric of the barn concentrated and closed about them with sickening intensity. Something had died in here, and was still here – a mouse, a rat, perhaps something bigger. The boys outside in the ragged tents – or even just sleeping in the open of the cool night air – had by far the better bed.
But none complained or made a move. He certainly would not be the first to crack, the first to admit defeat. He’d had enough of defeat today. And besides, his own flesh was too exhausted to answer his commands. And so he lay, aching, his heart thumping, his brain teeming – almost feverish – until finally he drifted off to the chorus of snorting and shuffling, the reek of sweat and dead rodent in his nostrils.
He could not be sure what woke him. Later, he supposed it must have been the sound of the barn door being opened. It might have been the light itself. In the dark of the night, the cool glow – of a moon almost full – seemed startlingly bright in the part-open doorway. He blinked sticky, blurry eyes, not wanting to stir any more than necessary. The moonlight formed a white halo about something in the doorway – a figure, in silhouette, standing motionless. Even before he could properly focus his eyes, he recognised the shape: a knight. The helm and armour were unmistakable. In the figure’s hand, a sword, unsheathed. Gisburne forced himself up on one elbow, his brain telling him to wake – but something terribly wrong about the scene, something definite but as yet indefinable, made his heart shrink and his limbs weak.
All at once, the knight-figure raised the sword and a wavering voice rose to fill the thick silence within the barn.
“Veni, creator spiritus!”
The whole room seemed to shift as one – bodies jerking into life, unfolding and disentangling from themselves and each other as the reedy, uncertain tones seemed to gather strength. Gisburne had immediately recognised the hymn so beloved of knights and crusaders – the call to the holy spirit to fill the soul, to steel the body for battle. He looked on, baffled, as the figure stepped in amongst them, and one of the older squires nearest to the door – Gisburne recognised him as Jonas – struggled to his knees in gruff indignation. Then the impossible happened. The sword swung and struck the still kneeling squire on the neck. Gisburne heard metal bite into bone, felt something wet strike his face. The squire jolted violently, legs straightening in a ghastly convulsion, and collapsed back onto his fellows with a horrid gurgling sigh, his head – Gisburne could see, even in silhouette – at a disconcerting angle.
All Hell broke loose.
There were shouts of alarm as bodies surged and limbs flailed, each boy trying to clamber over the others, some still bewildered from sleep. Gisburne struggled to gain his feet – was jostled and elbowed in the side of his head – but stood in time to see the sword fall again. And again. There were cries of agony now. The blade swung about, striking flesh and bone and teeth, sweeping closer as the wavering voice was raised in song, struggling to drown out the desperate cries of the boys. Gisburne felt the air move as the sword whooshed past his face. He tried to step back, found he could not. And then he knew. He would die here, in this barn. He would never see his father again. All things not yet done or said were hopeless dreams that he had mere seconds to contemplate.
The blade swung through the air. Something struck his head. He fell, a strange calm descending as he did so. It was inevitable. Unfair – wretched – but inevitable. All was lost. Now he would know if there was a God.
But he did not die.
There was a muffled sound, as if his ears were stuffed with cotton. A singing note in his head. Then a blaze of light. One eye registered nothing – but the other saw clearly.
Gilbert de Gaillon had burst in, half-dressed, sword slung about him, mace in one hand, torch in the other, his face more gaunt and skull-like than ever in its flame. The attacker turned and froze, his voice dying away, the light revealing the full horror of the scene – blood and gore everywhere about the barn’s filthy floor, bodies hacked, some moving, some now no more than meat for the flies, boys of all ages crushed and cowering against the barn’s interior, and in the centre of it all – dressed in his lost knight’s spare armour, the white surcoat spattered head to foot in blood – the wild-eyed, bereft figure of Eadwyn.
Without hesitating, de Gaillon struck him full force across the side of the head.
He spun full-circle and fell dead among the clumps of blood-sodden straw and rat bones, two of his teeth rattling against the far wall.
Gisburne put his hand to his head. The tip of the blade had caught his brow as it flew, and cut a vertical gash that parted his left eyebrow and the flesh beneath, blood blinding that eye. He blinked, sight returning. No more than a yard from him, one of the other squires fell to his knees, laughing. “Thank you!” he cried to the barn’s web-strewn rafters. “Thank you!”
“What are you doing?” barked de Gaillon with unexpected ferocity.
“I am giving thanks to God!” cried the lad. “God protected me. Now I know He loves me!”
With a sudden, gruff sound in his throat, de Gaillon clouted the boy with the back of his hand, sending him sprawling across the bloody floor.
“Imbecile!” he said. “Do you think God loved them any less?” He gestured towards the heaped, bloody bodies of his fallen comrades. “That they deserved this? If God protected the pious, then the world would be replete with good men and we could all lay down our swords. God is not so simple – and He certainly doesn’t waste His energies on the likes of you. Now get out of my s
ight.”
And he kicked the flabbergasted squire out of the door.
The hand that de Gaillon extended to him, that raised him up off the ground, was perhaps the most welcome human contact that Gisburne had ever known.
He knew, that day, that the natural order of the world was chaos, and that overcoming it lay in the hands of men.
XI
Northern France – 23 November, 1191
GISBURNE DIDN’T SEE the rope until it was too late. It was the sound that made his muscles tense, the split second before impact – the crackling of the half frozen hemp cord whipping into the air before him, then the deep thrum as it pulled taut, and a spray of ice crystals on his face. Then came the impact that took the air out of his chest. By the time he knew what was happening, he was already falling.
They were riding fast. That was the bad luck. Gisburne had been pushing hard since Calais. The weather had been cold, even for the heart of winter, and the frozen ground tough going for the horses. But there had, at least, been no more snow. The roads were passable, and the ground just pliable enough to give decent grip. So, he had pushed their advantage. It also meant he didn’t have to suffer Galfrid’s conversation quite so much.
Gisburne had been determined to reach Lucheux before nightfall. The promise of a good inn and sweet hay for the horses – which, in turn, improved the prospect of reaching Amiens the day after – had them racing against the failing light.
The good luck was that it was Gisburne, not Galfrid, who went first into the low ravine. Had the smaller man been riding ahead, the rope would have caught across his throat. At a gallop, that meant a broken neck – or as Gisburne had seen happen once before, decapitation. Instead, it had struck Gisburne across his right arm – which he had raised instinctively – and across his collarbone. That meant, at least, that he was not dead before he hit the ground.
If there was one thing a knight learned, it was how to stay on a horse. How to cling to its back like a limpet, no matter what the terrain; how to face lance and sword and wield weapons in both hands at full gallop. But before Gisburne’s brain could make any decision on the matter, his body had known what to do. It had known that, no matter what, it was going no further, and that the beast upon which it was sat was not going to stop. Instinctively, his legs relinquished their grip. His arm flailed and caught around the rope. Nyght leapt ahead. For a moment he swung in the air, hearing Galfrid’s horse thundering to an abrupt halt behind him. The rope sagged, stopped, then gave completely, and he crashed to the hard ground. A gurgling cry of pain and anger issued from somewhere nearby as he did so – but the moment was too confused for him to tell where.
Gisburne lay still, framed in an icy crust of snow, dazed, struggling to catch his breath. He twisted feet and hands, trying to feel past the numbing cold for wrenched muscles or broken bones. The wind was knocked out of him, but there was no pain. That was not conclusive – pain was not always quick to come with the worst wounds – but it was a start. Had he tried to stay mounted, it would have been far worse. But now, he was down. That was not so good. A mounted knight was a near invincible force. Unmounted, he was still a formidable soldier. Flat on his back, with no weapon, he was as good as dead.
Before he could move, the man was already on him, a sword point at his neck, the other hand curled up in a resentful claw, its fingers bloody and raw, its palm lobster-pink and shiny from a fresh rope burn. His whole being quivered with pain and anger, snotty nostrils flaring as he snorted like an animal. “I got you!” The sound seethed through broken teeth. The man was stocky, dressed in muddy layers that had the stink of months of wear on them. The face atop this mound of rags was round and sweaty, his hair plastered to his head as if slick with pig grease. “I got you!”
Gisburne tried to get himself onto one elbow. The man put a reeking, ragged foot on Gisburne’s chest and pressed him hard against the crunching snow, his eyes wide, his teeth bared.
A smile broke out across the stranger’s face. He began to laugh. It became wild – erratic – bursting out between the words “I got you! I got you!” He spoke with growing intensity, as if each repetition of the weird chant were imbuing him with some magical potency.
Gisburne stared along the sword blade in a strange state of detachment, its cold point resting in the hollow at the base of his throat. Curved. The weapon was badly notched along its edge, but ended in a hilt that glinted gold. Only by degrees – and with some incredulity – did Gisburne realise he was looking at a paramerion, a Byzantine weapon. How such a blade came to be in the hands of this wretch, God alone knew.
Other details impressed themselves upon him. He was still alive. His hands were free. The man’s right foot was on his chest. The man was now one-handed. And he had his right forefinger hooked over the sword’s guard. He almost smiled at that. Somewhere, some part of him was also beginning to wonder where Galfrid was.
“What’re you going to do now, eh?” The pig-grease man leered over him, then winced, as if a pain were suddenly asserting itself. He stared at his own bloody, filthy hand for a moment in appalled fascination – then, in response to some instinct, licked it. Gisburne almost heaved. “I’ll have your bollocks for this, you basta...”
He did not finish the sentence. Gisburne grabbed his foot and pushed it upward. The man flailed backwards, the blade flying away from Gisburne’s throat in a futile attempt to right himself. Gisburne, still clinging to the foot, gave it a sharp quarter turn to the right. There was a crack, and a piercing shriek, and the man completely overbalanced, hopped uselessely, then bowled over onto the ground, somehow avoiding his own blade.
Gisburne was on his feet. Nyght was trained to return to him, and within seconds Gisburne had him by the reins and had pulled the nearest thing to hand – his pilgrim staff – from his pack.
“Stop! Stop!” It was not his attacker. Nor was it Galfrid. The voice was weak, fearful. But the figure behind it, he now saw, had a drawn bow aimed directly at his chest. Gisburne at last understood why Galfrid – whose horse snorted and stamped just behind where he now stood – had made no move.
Pig-Grease heaved himself to his feet, leaning on his ludicrously exotic blade, his eyes blazing like a furnace. He winced as he put weight on his right leg.
“You don’t know what you done,” he growled, pointing his sword. “You got no idea...”
His companion with the bow, meanwhile, had not the means to hide his nerves, and visibly shook. Gisburne even fancied he could hear the shaft of the arrow rattle against the bow. His face was also in stark contrast to the other – as long and thin as a coffin board, with nervous, beady eyes and a mouthful of yellow teeth like carpenter’s chisels. Many times Gisburne had had occasion to compare someone to a rat, but never had the similarity been so literal.
In the tense stillness of that moment, Gisburne sensed movement at the very edge of his vision. Galfrid’s hand was reaching slowly for one of the earthenware vessels on his saddle.
“Not the bottles,” hissed Gisburne.
The bowman switched his aim to Galfrid. The little man froze. Gisburne fancied he saw a scowl on his squire’s face.
They stood like that, a gleaming sword pointed at Gisburne’s chest, an arrow aimed at Galfrid’s heart, waiting for what would happen next.
Pig-Grease took a deep breath, seemed to gather himself. A smile creased his features. “Now... Let’s try that again.”
As he spoke, he eyed up the gear packed about the horses. His gaze settled on something.
“What’s in the box?” he said.
XII
THEIR ARRIVAL AT the port of Calais had sounded a warning.
Gisburne – never the best of sailors – had inwardly rejoiced at setting his feet on dry land again. In Sicily, he had experienced the great tarides – ships built to carry forty horses with their knights, squires and equipment. When he recalled that memory, he could still feel their horrible, long, heaving motions, and the corresponding heaving motions they inspired in his ow
n belly. It was a great relief, therefore, that their vessel on this occasion had been far humbler; a small but serviceable tub – swift and unfussy with only the adaptations necessary to carry a half dozen mounts. A large hatch opened in its port side, with a ramp upon the quay leading directly into the hold. Nyght had not travelled by ship before, and, feeling the queasy rise and fall of the gangplank, balked several times before he would be led into that dark interior. Gisburne coaxed the animal as best he could, given his shared misgivings. Inside were six makeshift but stoutly built stalls, three fore and three aft, each with canvas slings that went under the horses’ bellies to steady them.
The stallion had whinnied and stamped as the ship slipped its moorings and England slid away from them. Gisburne patted the animal on its glossy black neck, then, making his way to the deck, spent the voyage clamped to the ship’s side, staring resolutely out to sea.
Calais itself had the feel of a town unable to cope with the number of people it contained. The whole place was abuzz, thronging with travellers – most of them, it seemed, Englishmen. They treated it as their own, laughing and shouting to each other in their own tongue, making purchases of hot food from the barrows and stalls that clustered about the quay, buying provisions for the journey ahead or striking deals with merchants from France and further afield, the cold air thick with the smell of roasting chestnuts, sour wine and fried fish. Some of the foreign traders bartered and haggled in French, but many also had the good commercial sense to speak in English, and it was this language that dominated. Several of the English, it seemed, had come with the express purpose of buying large quantities of wine to ship immediately back home, and barrels of the stuff were piled high at the quayside. Here and there, individuals had been persuaded to sample the wares, the thought perhaps being that a drunk was more easily separated from his money. Gisburne couldn’t help wondering whether the wine they quaffed on this quayside bore any relation to the wine they found in the barrels when they reached Dover.
Guy of Gisburne- The Omnibus Page 10
