The Half-Hanged Man

by David Pilling

  I looked for Du Guesclin, the enemy I feared most, and saw him at hand-strokes with Chandos. That was a fight worth watching. To this day I’m not sure who I would have wagered on. Sadly, the random tides of battle separated them, and moments later Du Guesclin’s trumpeters sounded the retreat. His battalion was getting the worst of it, and too many of his knights and marshals were stretched out on the bloody grass. His men withdrew, shuffling back across the plain like a pack of beaten dogs, sullen and defiant, but Chandos did not pursue. Instead he allowed Du Guesclin to retire and then led his men against the exposed flank of Auxerre’s battalion, still heavily engaged with Clisson.

  Now, if ever, was the time for Page and his Company of Wolves to enter the fray, but they didn’t move. That damned wolf’s-head banner remained on the ridge, taunting me.

  “Withdraw, Sir Hugh,” panted Montfort, sweat streaming down his badly bruised face, one eye closed and swelling, “we will deal with those whoresons.”

  He pointed his axe at Charles de Blois’s battalion, who were showing little sign of wishing to renew acquaintance with us. I couldn’t see their lord, which might explain their reluctance, though his banners still flew.

  I shrugged him off and angrily gave the order for my men to fall back. Every step I took up the slope was taking me further away from Thomas Page, and he wasn’t going to come to me.

  My temper wasn’t improved when I discovered Ram lying on her flank, trembling violently and foaming at the mouth. She was dying, blood and entrails seeping from the hole in her belly. The esquire was kneeling beside her head, his hands clasped in prayer, as if that would do the poor beast any good. I fetched the boy a clout that nigh-on tore his ear off.

  “God doesn’t succour horses, you little fool,” I shouted, and put Ram out of her misery with a sword-thrust. Her loss poured hot coals onto the seething rage in my breast, and it was with little joy that I turned to watch Chandos deliver the coup de grace to Auxerre’s battalion, caving in their flank and throwing the Franco-Bretons into disorder. Chandos himself was everywhere, fighting with his usual matchless courage and leaping about like an enraged panther.

  Some of the Franco-Breton captains fought on stubbornly, but panic seized the men-at-arms. Seeing their banners and pennons torn down, they cast away their weapons and fled, brave men reduced to terrified sheep. They were pursued mercilessly across the plain, cut down or captured for ransom, and with the collapse of Auxerre’s battalion the advantage lay firmly with us.

  Thomas Page had clearly come to the same conclusion. At last the wolf’s-head banner started to move, but away from the battlefield rather than towards it. Before my disbelieving eyes, his esquires brought forward the horses, and his knights and men-at-arms started to mount.

  “They haven’t struck a blow!” I shouted at no-one in particular, “come down and fight, you cravens! Do you not see your comrades dying?”

  They saw, only too well, and Page was not one to stick with a losing side. I can’t blame him. There is no sense in lingering on a stricken field when one’s allies have been routed, and you stand to lose all in a hopeless fight against overwhelming odds.

  Cowardice, you might say, but war is a business. The likes of Page and I were professionals, not gentlemen raised on profitless and self-destructive notions of honour.

  Not that I appreciated this reasoning at the time. I raged and cursed at Page, attaining new heights of blasphemous eloquence as I watched his Wolves depart from the field in good order, back towards Vannes.

  Honour is lethal, and I have often thanked God for my lack of it. Had the Franco-Bretons possessed any sense, they would have quit the field then and left us in possession of it. But too many of their captains were gentlemen of honour. These well-bred fools insisted on fighting a series of doomed rearguard actions until the sun had sunk low over the horizon, bathing piles of human wreckage in an eerie red glow.

  I had no wish to dirty my sword or venture my person any further that day, and retired to drink and mourn the loss of my destrier. Over £300 of best Flemish horseflesh, wasted. Ever mindful of profit, I dispatched one my captains, Adam Maker – the mute who now serves as my steward – with a hundred horsemen to pick out some decent ransoms from the ruin of the Franco-Breton army.

  Night fell, cloaking the ghastly field of Auray in merciful darkness. Our returning soldiers started to light cooking-fires, break out barrels of ale and wine, and tell each other extravagant lies of their deeds. They were the lucky ones, whom God had seen fit to preserve. The screams of the unlucky, maimed and dying on the battlefield or in our field hospitals, could be heard all night long, piercing through the sound of revelry and laughter.

  Sir Richard Burley found me hiding in my tent, and insisted that I join him in a flagon of wine while he boasted drunkenly of how many Frenchmen he had laid to earth that day. A good man, Burley, but he possessed no more tact than a pig, and couldn’t see that I wished to be let alone.

  “They found Charles de Blois, you know,” he told me, “Knolles and Chandos found his body under a hedge, leaking blood from a mass of wounds.”

  “So Charles is dead,” I mused, “it scarcely seems possible.” The war of succession in Brittany had threatened to last forever, and now the death of one man had ended it. That was good for John de Montfort and the people of Brittany, but bad for poor soldiers like me, who needed to earn a living.

  “Worrying about your prospects, Hugh?” laughed Burley, and slapped me on the knee, “never fear. There are always wars somewhere. The truce between England and France will never hold, and there is a hell-storm brewing in Spain between King Pedro and his brothers. Or perhaps Italy. The city-states are always at each other’s throats.”

  I nodded absently, my mind full of the image of the accursed wolf’s-head banner, moving away from me, out of my reach, and dwindling in the distance.

  “Now he is Duke, Montfort will release us from his service,” I said, thinking aloud. “He won’t want bands of unemployed soldiers lingering in his duchy, causing trouble.”

  Burley nodded. “The little shit will try and get us out as soon as possible, though he will have to loosen his purse-strings. He owes my men several weeks’ wages.”

  “Listen to that,” he said, cocking his head and grinning at the sound of drunken singing from outside, “you would think they had conquered Jerusalem.”

  We drank and ate in silence for a while, until the singing abruptly stopped and a man staggered into my tent. This was Richard Fyling, a captain of archers in my Company. He stood mute and trembling, nervously twisting his hands together.

  Fyling was one of the more brutish characters in my employ, and had once burned some Breton peasants alive in their village chapel for neglecting to bow when he rode past. He was the sort of man who would spit in the Devil’s eye for looking at him twice. I had never known him to look so frightened.

  “Well?” I demanded when he failed to find his voice, “out with it, man. What’s wrong?”

  “Captain-General,” he began, licking his dry lips, “Captain Maker sent me to tell you because…because…”

  “Because the Bretons cut out his tongue and he can’t speak for himself,” I said impatiently, “yes, and?”

  “He’s shivering like a nun after seeing a man naked for the first time,” observed Burley, “something terrible must have happened.”

  “Captain-General,” Fyling repeated, and then the words came out in a rush, “Captain-General, I regret to inform you that our Company is shamed before the whole army. Your banner has been stolen.”

  It took a long moment for his words to sink in, and then the angry blood in my veins, which had been somewhat soothed by the wine, started to bubble again. I slowly rose from my chair and loomed over the quaking archer like some Old Testament prophet.

  “Stolen?” I hissed. “How?”

  “Captain Maker led us against the remnants of Du Guesclin’s battalion,” he stammered, “but it was almost dark by then, and the fighting got conf
used. Our standard bearer was killed, and when we discovered his body your banner was missing, ripped away from the pole. Du Guesclin and his remaining captains had surrendered by then, but they swore on oath that none of their men had taken it. They would never, they claimed, tolerate such a dishonourable act.”

  I clenched my fists, aware of Burley failing to stifle a smirk. The loss of my banner was a stain on my reputation. I would be a laughing-stock among my peers until it was regained.

  Later that evening, after I had pushed Burley and Fyling out of my tent and punished several more flagons of wine, a message was brought to me by a shivering esquire, the same one who had prayed over my dying horse.

  “This was delivered to the camp by a French priest, Captain-General,” he stammered. “He claimed that a black-haired woman paid him to ensure it was given to you.”

  I snatched it and growled at the boy to make himself scarce unless he wanted to lose his other ear. When he was gone I unfolded the parchment.

  It read: The Bull may hold the field, but the Raven has snatched away his pride.

  3.

  As Burley had predicted, the new Duke of Brittany was eager to evacuate the thousands of suddenly unnecessary soldiers occupying his duchy, and in recognition of my long service to his cause he provided me with a generous lump sum and a life annuity. Some of that money went on rebuilding the hall of the manor-house we are sitting in now, which was in a shamefully decayed state when I purchased it. Rather more went on providing pensions for the men in my Company who had suffered crippling injuries during the Auray campaign. Unlike some captains, I have always tried to take care of my veterans, rather than turning them loose to beg.

  I was glad to leave Brittany for other reasons, principally the shocking and profitless state that so many years of warfare had reduced it to, and because it was the scene of the humiliating loss of my banner. I took my Company into France, where we fell to plundering and living off the land, in disregard of the fragile truce that existed between England and France. Many of my fellow captains did the same. Soldiering was all we knew. What did the princes of Europe expect - that when the wars were over we would stand down and beat our swords into ploughshares? They soon learned otherwise, and from sea to sea the Kingdom of France was once again lit by the fires of burning towns and castles.

  All the while I employed spies – steady, reliable men who had spent years in my service, rather than the likes of James Hook – to stalk the Company of Wolves and keep me informed of their movements. Within a few weeks of Auray I learned that Page had taken his men south, over the Pyrenees, and had passed into Aragon. There he had offered his services to King Peter, the great enemy of Pedro the Cruel. No doubt this was due to the influence of the Raven, who seemed to have a controlling influence over her lover’s decisions. God alone knows how she snatched away my banner in the dying stages of the Battle of Auray. She may have lurking on the battlefield, disguised as a soldier. Such a trick would have been typical of her.

  My agents also informed me that Page had the insolence to parade my banner at the head of his troops, as a captured trophy of war. Sometimes the Raven herself carried it, her slender figure garbed in plate and mail like any man-at-arms, much to the admiration and amusement of the troops. When I heard of this, I kindled with a fiercer anger than I had ever known, and resolved to follow the Wolves into Castile and exterminate them.

  All roads were leading to Spain in 1365, for in the autumn of that year I received another royal order from King Edward, instructing me to cease making war in France on my own account and come to heel. He was sending a flurry of similar orders to all the great mercenary captains, as were the Kings of France and Navarre. Together with the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, they had hatched a plan to rid France of the Companies before that realm was utterly destroyed.

  Their plan was first confided to me by Charles of Navarre, who after many years of murderous struggle and intrigue had finally abandoned his attempt to carve out a sizeable fiefdom for himself in France. A few months prior to Auray, his army had taken a beating at Cocherel by a French army, and in May the following year he signed a treaty at Pamplona agreeing to give up most of his conquests in Burgundy and other territories.

  While my Company was marching south through Aquitaine, I received an invitation from Charles requesting me to visit him. Knowing him for a gimlet-eyed snake, I should have stayed away, but his invitation assured me that he had some mutually profitable enterprise in mind. If Charles the Bad had one talent, it lay in identifying profit, so I crossed the Pyrenees into Navarre. I had also heard that the Raven had once shared his bed, and was keen to know what that shrewd, heartless man made of her.

  Thus I was present at that notorious dinner where Charles so ruthlessly disposed of the French Captain-General, Seguin de Badefol, who had done most of his fighting for him in Burgundy.

  Seguin arrived uninvited at Charles’ grand palace at Olite, where I was also staying, to claim the massive sums of money owed him for his services.

  “I’ll not pay that black-avised French bastard a single penny,” Charles told me one warm, dusky evening while he and I sat on a veranda overlooking the exotic palace gardens, “true, I offered him a great deal of money if he would conquer Burgundy for me, but what has he done? Nothing. The French have whipped him from one end of the duchy to the other, and now he comes crawling to Navarre, begging for his wages.”

  He drank down the last of his sherbet and called for more. A smooth-skinned Moorish boy, his slender body draped in white and gold silks, stepped forward with a jug and refilled his master’s goblet.

  I took a careful sip of the syrupy liquid, flavoured with spices and mixed with cold water. Seguin was elsewhere, enjoying the favours of a trio of Greek courtesans Charles had given him as a distraction, but even so I thought carefully before replying. The palace, like all royal residences, was rotten with spies.

  “I have known Seguin for many years,” I said, “and he is a capable and distinguished soldier. What happened in Burgundy was not his fault.”

  Charles waved that away. He was a bright, brutal little man, utterly ruthless and devoid of human feeling, with a cold grey eye perpetually fixed on his own advantage. I sat patiently waiting for him to tell me more about his grand scheme, but all his talk so far had been of the failures of Seguin and his brother Louis in France, and the vast concessions he had been obliged to make to the new King of France, Charles V.

  King John had recently died a prisoner in England. His successor, though a physically feeble and repellent creature, afflicted by gout and an abscess in his arm, was said to be a far more capable man. He had already paid the ransom for the release of Bertrand de Guesclin, captured at Auray, and recruited that great soldier to his cause.

  “None of that, Calveley,” Charles snapped, “I know Seguin is an old crony of yours, but I am most displeased with his conduct. Most displeased.”

  “Even so, I advise you to pay him what is owed,” I said, “otherwise he will lay waste to Navarre. I know him, Majesty. He is stark and unforgiving, and not a man to cross.”

  Charles rubbed his pointed, hairless little chin, and gave one of his quick smiles. “Well, I will talk with him, certainly. But not here, where there are so many prying eyes. We shall take a little trip into the country.”

  I immediately smelled trouble, and if I was Seguin I wouldn’t have gone into the country with Charles for a pension. I briefly considered warning him against it, but rejected the idea. Charles might have found out. I didn’t care to make an enemy of such a lethal man, especially when I was a guest in his house.

  Charles could be charming when he wanted to be, and was all smiles and trivial pleasantries on the way to his comfortable little castle at Falces, a short ride from the palace. There he invited us to supper in his private apartments.

  The meal was a civilised affair at first, and Seguin and Charles treated each other with perfect, if somewhat stiff, courtesy. I took the opportunity to extract some ans
wers from them before the courteous masks slipped and they started quarrelling over money.

  “What can either of you tell me of Eleanor de Menezes?” I asked. “That famous whore they call the Raven. You have both lain with her, I believe.”

  I looked at them both expectantly. Seguin looked grim, but Charles laughed. “A typical blunt Englishman!” he exclaimed, “no tact or delicacy, just straight to the heart of the matter, like a lance to the chest.”

  He sucked pear juice from his fingers and stared out of the window, thinking. “She was with me, oh, over ten years ago,” he murmured, “and was just a girl then, slender as a needle, shy and pretty, though the shyness was an act. I thought she was just another prostitute, and only realised my mistake after she absconded and took some of my jewellery with her. I had probably taken my strap to her once too often. I made no attempt to pursue her, or get my jewels back.”

  “Strange,” he said, spearing another pear with his eating knife, “I am not usually so forgiving. Perhaps she affected me a little, or I didn’t consider it worth the effort. Fortunate for you, eh, Seguin? Otherwise you might never have enjoyed her.”

  The French mercenary’s ugly, black-whiskered face creased into a scowl. “I came here to discuss business, not whores,” he growled.

  “I heard she left you for that enterprising young Englishman,” Charles went on merrily, “Thomas Page, the Wolf of Burgundy. The Wolf and the Raven, what a pair! I understand they have also made an enemy of you, Sir Hugh, is that correct?”

  I nodded curtly to indicate this was so – as if he didn’t know every detail of my grievances against Page – and changed the subject.

  “I also came here to discuss business,” I said, “what is this mutually profitable venture you mentioned in your letters?”