The Grail Quest 2 - Vagabond tgq-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  Thomas relaxed the string.

  ' Chien batard,' the man said to Robbie. He was much older than the Scotsman and must have taken Robbie for a mere boy for he half smiled as he came fast forward to lunge his sword and Robbie stepped back, parried, and the blades rang like bells in the clear air. ' Batard!' the man spat and attacked again. Robbie stepped back once more, yielding ground until he had almost reached the stone ring, and his retreat worried Thomas who had stretched his string again, but then Robbie parried so fast and riposted so quickly that the Frenchman was going backwards in a sudden and desperate hurry. 'You English bastard,' Robbie said. He swung his blade low and the man dropped his own blade to parry and Robbie just kicked it aside and lunged so that his uncle's blade sank into the man's neck. 'Bastard English bastard,' Robbie snarled, ripping the blade free in a spray of bright blood. 'Bloody English pig!' He freed the sword and swung it back to bury its edge in what was left of the man's neck. Thomas watched the man fall. Blood was bright on the grass. 'He wasn't English,'

  Thomas said.

  'It's just a habit when I fight,' Robbie said. 'It's the way my uncle trained me.' He stepped towards his victim. 'Is he dead?'

  'You half cut off his head,' Thomas said, 'what do you think?'

  'I think I'll take his money,' Robbie said and knelt beside the dead man. One of the first two men to be struck by Thomas's arrows was still alive. The breath bubbled in his throat and showed pink and frothy at his lips. He was the man lolling in his saddle and he moaned as Thomas spilled him down to the ground.

  'Is he going to live?' Robbie had crossed to see what Thomas was doing.

  'Christ, no,' Thomas said and took out his knife.

  'Jesus!' Robbie stepped back as the man's throat was cut. 'Did you have to?'

  'I don't want the Count of Coutances to know there are only two of us,' Thomas said. 'I want the Count of Coutances to be as scared as hell of us. I want him to think the devil's own horsemen are hunting his men.'

  They searched the four corpses and, after a lumbering chase, managed to collect the four horses. From the bodies and the saddlebags they took close to eighteen pounds of had French silver coinage, two rings, three good daggers, four swords, a fine mail coat that Robbie claimed to replace his own, and a gold chain that they hacked in half with one of the captured swords. Then Thomas used the two worst swords to picket a pair of the horses beside the road and on the horses' backs he tied two of the corpses so that they hung in the saddle, bending sideways with vacant eyes and white skin laced with blood. The other two corpses, stripped of their mail, were placed on the road and in each of their dead mouths Thomas put sprigs of gorse. That gesture meant nothing, but to whoever found the bodies it would suggest something strange, even Satanic. 'It'll worry the bastards,' Thomas explained.

  'Four dead men should give them a twitch,' Robbie said.

  'They'll be scared to hell if they think the devil's loose,' Thomas said. The Count of Coutances would scoff if he knew there were only two young men come as reinforcements for Sir Guillaume d'Eyecque, but he could not ignore four corpses and hints of weird ritual. And he could not ignore death.

  To which end, when the corpses were arranged, Thomas took the big black cloak, the money and the weapons, the best of the stallions and the pale horse. For the pale horse belonged to Death.

  And with it Thomas could make nightmares.

  A single short burst of thunder sounded as Thomas and Robbie neared Evecque. They did not know how close they were, but they were riding through country where all the farms and cottages had been destroyed which told Thomas that they must be within the manor's boundaries. Robbie, on hearing the rumble, looked puzzled for the sky immediately above them was clear, although there were dark clouds to the south. 'It's too cold for thunder,' he said.

  'Maybe it's different in France?'

  They left the road and followed a farm track that twisted through woods and petered out beside a burned building that still smoked gently. It made little sense to burn such steadings and Thomas doubted that the Count of Coutances had initially ordered the destruction, but Sir Guillaume's long defiance and the bloody-mindedness of most soldiers would ensure that the pillage and burning would happen anyway. Thomas had done the same in Brittany. He had listened to the screams and protests of families who had to watch their home being burned and then he had touched the fire to the thatch. It was war. The Scots did it to the English, the English to the Scots, and here the Count of Coutances was doing it to his own tenant.

  A second clap of thunder sounded and just after its echo had died Thomas saw a great veil of smoke in the eastern sky. He pointed to it and Robbie, recognizing the smear of campfires and realizing the need for silence, just nodded. They left their horses in a thicket of hazel saplings and then climbed a long wooded hill. The setting sun was behind them, throwing their shadows long on the dead leaves. A woodpecker, redheaded and wings barred white, whirred loud and low above their heads as they crossed the ridge line to see the village and manor of Evecque beneath them. Thomas had never seen Sir Guillaume's manor before. He had imagined it would be like Sir Giles Marriott's hall with one great barn-like room and a few thatched outbuildings, but Evecque was much more like a small castle. At the corner closest to Thomas it even had a tower: a square and not very tall tower, but properly crenellated and flying its banner of three stooping hawks to show that Sir Guillaume was not yet beaten. The manor's saving feature, though, was its moat, which was wide and thickly covered with a vivid green scum. The manor's high walls rose sheer from the water and had few windows, and those were nothing but arrow slits. The roof was thatched and sloped inwards to a small courtyard. The besiegers, whose tents and shelters lay in the village to the north of the manor, had succeeded in setting fire to the roof at some point, but Sir Guillaume's few defenders must have managed to extinguish the flames for only one small portion of the thatch was missing or blackened. None of those defenders was visible now, though some of them must have been peering though the arrow slits that showed as small black specks against the grey stone. The only visible damage to the manor was some broken stones at one corner of the tower where it looked as though a giant beast had nibbled at the masonry, and that was probably the work of the springald that Father Pascal had mentioned, but the oversized crossbow had obviously broken again and irremediably for Thomas could see it lying in two gigantic pieces in the field beside the tiny stone village church. It had done very little damage before its main beam broke and Tho-mas wondered if the eastern, hidden, side of the building had been hurt more. The manor's entrance must be on that far side and Thomas suspected the main siege works would also be there.

  Only a score of besiegers were in sight, most doing nothing more threatening than sitting outside the vil-lage houses, though a half-dozen men were gathered around what looked like a small table in the church-yard. None of the Count's men was closer to the manor than a hundred and fifty paces, which suggested that the defenders had succeeded in killing some of their enemies with crossbows and the rest had learned to give the garrison a wide berth. The village itself was small, not much bigger than Down Mapperley, and, like the Dorset village, had a watermill. There were a dozen tents to the south of the houses and twice as many little turf shelters and Thomas tried to work out how many men could be sheltered in the village, tents and turf huts and decided the Count must now have about 120 men.

  'What do we do?' Robbie asked.

  'Nothing for now. Just watch.'

  It was a tedious vigil for there was little activity beneath them. Some women carried pails of water from the watermill's race, others were cooking on open fires or collecting clothes that had been spread out to dry over some bushes at the edge of the fields. The Count of Coutances's banner, showing the black boar on a white field spangled with blue flowers, flew on a make-shift staff outside the largest house in the village. Six other banners hung above the thatched rooftops, show-ing that other lords had come to share the plunder. A half-dozen squires or pa
ges exercised some warhorses in the meadow behind the encampment, but otherwise Evecque's attackers were doing little except wait. Siege work was boring work. Thomas remembered the idle days outside La Roche-Derrien, though those long hours had been broken by the terror and excitement of the occasional assault. These men, unable to assault Evecque's walls because of the moat, could only wait and hope to starve the garrison into surrender or else tempt it into a sally by burning farms. Or perhaps they were waiting for a long piece of seasoned wood to repair the broken arm of the abandoned springald. Then, just as Thomas was deciding that he had seen enough, the group of men who had been gathered about what he had thought was a low table beside the churchyard hedge suddenly ran back towards the church.

  'What in God's name is that?' Robbie asked, and Thomas saw that it had not been a table they were crowding round, but a vast pot cradled in a heavy wooden frame.

  'It's a cannon,' Thomas said, unable to hide his awe, and just then the gun fired and the great metal pot and its huge wooden cradle both vanished inside a swelling burst of dirty smoke and, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a piece of stone fly away from the damaged corner of the manor. A thousand birds flew up from hedgerows, thatch and trees as the gun's booming thunder rolled up the hill and washed past him. That vast clap of sound was the thunder they had heard earlier in the afternoon. The Count of Coutances had managed to find a gun and was using it to nibble away at the manor. The English had used guns at Caen last summer, though not all the guns in their army, nor all the best efforts of the Italian gunners, had hurt Caen's castle. Indeed, as the smoke slowly cleared from the encampment, Thomas saw that this shot had made little impact on the manor. The noise seemed more violent than the missile itself, yet he supposed that if the Count's gunners could fire enough stones then eventually the masonry must give way and the tower collapse into the moat to make a rubble causeway across the water. Stone by stone, fragment by fragment, maybe three or four shots a day, and thus the besiegers would undermine the tower and make their rough path into Evecque.

  A man rolled a small barrel out of the church, but another man waved him back and the barrel was taken back inside. The church had to be their powder store, Thomas thought, and the man had been sent back because the gunners had shot their last missile for the day and would not reload until morning. And that suggested an idea, but he pushed it away as impractical and stupid.

  'Have you seen enough?' he asked Robbie.

  'I've never seen a gun before,' Robbie said, staring down at the distant pot as if hoping that it would be fired again, but Thomas knew it was unlikely that the gunners would discharge it again this evening. It took a long time to charge a cannon and, once the black powder was packed into its belly and the missile put into the neck, the gun had to be sealed with damp loam. The loam would confine the explosion that propelled the missile and it needed time to dry before the gun was fired, so it was unlikely that there would be another shot before morning. 'It sounds more trouble than it's worth,' Robbie said sourly when Thomas had explained it. 'So you reckon they'll not fire again?'

  'They'll wait till morning.'

  'I've seen enough then,' Robbie said and they crawled back through the beeches until they were over the ridge, then went down to their picketed horses and rode into the falling night. There was a half-moon, cold and high, and the night was bitter, so bitter they decided they must risk a fire, though they did their best to hide it by taking refuge in a deep gully with rock walls where they made a crude roof of boughs covered in hastily cut turfs. The fire flickered through the holes in the roof to light the rock walls red, but Thomas doubted that any of the besiegers would patrol the woods in the dark. No one willingly went into deep trees at night for all kinds of beasts and monsters and ghosts stalked the wood-lands, and that thought reminded Thomas of the sum-mer journey he had made with Jeanette when they had slept night after night in the woods. It had been a happy time and the remembrance of it made him feel sorry for himself and then, as ever, guilty for Eleanor's sake and he held his hands to the small fire. 'Are there green men in Scotland?' he asked Robbie.

  'In the woods, you mean? There are goblins. Evil little bastards, they are.' Robbie made the sign of the cross and, in case that was not sufficient, leaned over and touched the iron hilt of his uncle's sword.

  Thomas was thinking of goblins and other creatures, things that waited in the night woods. Did he really want to go back to Evecque tonight? 'Did you notice,' he said to Robbie, that no one in Coutances's camp seemed very disturbed that four of their horsemen hadn't returned? We didn't see anyone going looking for them, did we?'

  Robbie thought about it, then shrugged. 'Maybe the horsemen didn't come from the camp?'

  'They did,' Thomas said with a confidence he did not entirely feel and for a moment he guiltily wondered if the four horsemen had nothing to do with Evecque, then reminded himself that the riders had initiated the fight. 'They must have come from Evecque,' he said, 'and they'll be worried there by now.'

  'So?'

  'So will they have put more sentries on their camp tonight?'

  Robbie shrugged. 'Does it matter?'

  'I'm thinking,' Thomas said, 'that I have to tell Sir Guillaume that we're here, and I don't know how to do that except by making a big noise.'

  'You could write a message,' Robbie suggested, 'and put it round an arrow?'

  Thomas stared at him. 'I don't have parchment,' he said patiently, 'and I don't have ink, and have you ever tried shooting an arrow wrapped up in parchment? It would probably fly like a dead bird. I'd have to stand by the moat and it would be easier to throw the arrow from there.'

  Robbie shrugged. 'So what do we do?'

  'Make a noise. Announce ourselves.' Thomas paused. 'And I'm thinking that the cannon will break the tower down eventually if we don't do something.'

  'The cannon?' Robbie asked, then stared at Thomas. 'Sweet Jesus,' he said after a while as he thought of the difficulties. 'Tonight?'

  'Once Coutances and his men know we're here,' Thomas said, 'they'll double their sentries, but I'll bet the bastards are half asleep tonight.'

  'Aye, and wrapped up warm if they've any damn sense,' Robbie said. He frowned. 'But that gun looked like a rare great pot. How the hell do you break it?'

  'I was thinking of the black powder in the church,' Thomas said.

  'Set fire to it?'

  'There're plenty of campfires in the village,' Thomas said and he wondered what would happen if they_ were captured in the enemy encampment, but it was point-less to worry about that. If the gun was to be made useless then it was best to strike before the Count of Coutances knew an enemy had come to harass him, and that made this night the ideal opportunity. 'You don't have to come,' Thomas told Robbie. 'It's not as if your friends are inside the manor.'

  'Hold your breath,' Robbie said scornfully. He frowned again. 'What's going to happen afterwards?'

  'Afterwards?' Thomas thought. 'It depends on Sir Guillaume. If he gets no answer from the King then he'll want to break out. So he has to know we're here.'

  'Why?'

  'In case he needs our help. He did send for us, didn't he? Sent for me, anyway. So we go on making a noise.

  We make ourselves a nuisance. We give the Count of Coutances some nightmares.'

  'The two of us?'

  'You and me,' Thomas said, and the saying of it made him realize that Robbie had become a friend. 'I think you and I can make trouble,' he added with a smile. And they would begin this night. In this bitter and cold night, beneath a hard-edged moon, they would conjure the first of their nightmares.