'I can't,' Thomas said in panic, holding up his crooked hands again.
'What are you?' Mordecai asked.
'What am I?'
'Ignore the specious answers. I know you're an
Englishman and I assume you're a Christian, but what are you?'
'I was an archer,' Thomas said bitterly.
'And you still are,' Mordecai said harshly, 'and if you are not an archer then you are nothing. So pluck that cord! And keep on plucking it until your fingers can close on it. Practise. Practise. What else do you have to do with your time?'
So Thomas practised and after a week he could tighten two fingers opposite the thumb and make the cord reverberate like a harp string, and after another week he could bend the fingers of both hands about the cord and he plucked it so vigorously that it finally broke under the strain. His strength was coming back and the burns had healed to leave puckered welts where the poker had scored his skin, but the wounds in his memory did not heal. He would not talk of what had been done to him for he did not want to remember it, instead he practised plucking the cord until it snapped and then he learned to grip a quarterstaff and fought mock battles in the house yard with Robbie. And, as the days had lengthened out of winter, he went for walks beyond the town. There was a windmill on a slight hill that lay not far from the town's eastern gate and at first he could hardly manage the climb because his toes had been broken in the vice and his feet felt like unyielding lumps, but by the time April had filled the meadows with cowslips he was walking confidently. Will Skeat often went with him and though the older man never said much his company was easy. If he did talk it was to grumble about the weather or complain because the food was strange or, more likely, because he had heard nothing from the Earl of Northampton.
'You think we should write to his lordship again, Tom?'
'Maybe the first letter didn't reach him?'
'I never did like things written down,' Skeat said, 'it ain't natural. Can you write to him?'
'I can try,' Thomas said, but though he could pluck a bowcord and hold a quarterstaff or even a sword he could not manage the quill. He tried but his letters were scratchy and uncontrolled and in the end one of Tote-sham's clerks wrote the letter, though Totesham himself did not think the message would do any good.
'Charles of Blois will be here before we get any reinforcements,' he said. Totesham was awkward with Thomas, who had disobeyed him by riding to Roncelets, but Thomas's punishment had been far more than Tote-sham would have wanted and so he felt sorry for the archer. 'You want to carry_ the letter to the Earl?' he asked Thomas. Thomas knew he was being offered an escape, but he shook his head. 'I'll stay,' he said, and the letter was entrusted to a shipmaster who was sailing the next day. The letter was a futile gesture and Totesham knew it for his garrison was almost certainly doomed. Each day brought news of the reinforcements reaching Charles of Blois, and the enemy's raiding parties were now coming within sight of La Roche-Derrien's walls and harassing the forage parties that searched the countryside for any cattle, goats and sheep that could be driven back to the town to be slaughtered and salted down. Sir Guillaume enjoyed such foraging raids. Since losing Evecque he had become fatalistic and so savage that already the enemy had learned to be wary of the blue jupon with its three yellow hawks. Yet one evening, coming home from a long day that had yielded only two goats, he was grinning when he came to see Thomas. 'My enemy has joined Charles,' he said, 'the Count of Coutances, God damn his rotten soul. I killed one of his men this morning and I only wish it had been the Count himself.'
'Why's he here?' Thomas asked. 'He's not a Breton.'
'Philip of France is sending men to help his nephew,' Sir Guillaume said, 'so why won't the King of England send men to oppose him? He thinks Calais is more important?'
'Yes.'
'Calais,' Sir Guillaume said in disgust, 'is the arsehole of France.' He picked a shred of meat from between his teeth. 'And your friends were out riding today,' he went on.
'My friends?'
'The wasps.'
'Roncelets,' Thomas said.
'We fought half a dozen of the bastards in some benighted village,' Sir Guillaume said,
'and I put a lance clean through a black and yellow belly. He was cough-ing afterwards.'
'Coughing?'
'It's the wet weather, Thomas,' Sir Guillaume explained, 'it gives men a cough. So I left him alone, killed another of the bastards, then event back and cured his cough. I cut his head off.'
Robbie rode with Sir Guillaume and, like him, amassed coins taken from dead enemy patrols. though Robbie also rode in hope of meeting Guy Vexille. He knew that name now because Thomas had told him that it was Guy Vexille who had killed his brother just before the battle outside Durham and Robbie had gone to St Renan's church, put his hand on the altar's cross and sworn revenge. 'I shall kill Guy Vexille and de Taillebourg,' he vowed.
'They're mine,' Thomas insisted.
'Not if I get to them first,' Robbie promised.
Robbie had found himself a brown-eyed Breton girl called Oana who hated to leave his side and she came with him whenever he walked with Thomas. One day, as they set out for the windmill, she appeared with Thomas's big black bow.
'I can't use that!' Thomas said, frightened of it.
'Then what bloody use are you?' Robbie asked and he patiently encouraged Thomas to draw the bow and praised him as his strength returned. The three of them would take the bow to the windmill and Thomas would drive arrows into the wooden tower. The shots were feeble at first for he could scarcely pull the cord halfway and the more power he exerted the more treacherous his fingers seemed to be and the more wayward his aim, but by the time the swallows and swifts had magically reappeared above the town's roofs he could pull the cord all the way back to his ear and put an arrow through one of Oana's wooden bracelets at a hundred paces.
'You're cured,' Mordecai told him when Thomas told him that news.
'Thanks to you,' Thomas said, though he knew it was not only Mordecai, any more than it was the friendship of Will Skeat or of Sir Guillaume or of Robbie Douglas that had helped him recover. Bernard de Taillebourg had wounded Thomas, but those bloodless wounds of God had not just been to his body, but to his soul, and it was on a dark spring night when the lightning was flickering in the east that Jeanette had climbed to her attic. She had not left Thomas until the town's cockerels greeted the new dawn and if Mordecai understood why Thomas was smiling the next day he said nothing, but he noted that from that moment on Thomas's recovery was swift.
Thereafter Thomas and Jeanette talked every night. He told her of Charles and of the look on the boy's face when Thomas had mentioned his mother; Jeanette wanted to know everything about that look and she worried that it meant nothing and that her son had forgotten her, but eventually she believed Thomas when he said the boy had almost wept when he heard news of her. 'You told him I loved him?' she asked.
'Yes,' Thomas said, and Jeanette lay silent, tears in her eyes, and Thomas tried to reassure her, but she shook her head as if there was nothing Thomas could say that would console her. 'I'm sorry,' he said.
'You tried,' Jeanette said.
They wondered how the enemy had known Thomas was coming and Jeanette said that she was sure that Belas the lawyer had had a hand in it. 'I know he writes to Charles of Blois,' she said, 'and that horrid man, what did you call him? Epolurantail?'
'The Scarecrow.'
'Him,' Jeanette confirmed, 'l'zpoourantail. He talks to Belas.'
'The Scarecrow talks to Belas?' Thomas asked, surprised.
'He lives there now. He and his men live in the store-houses.' She paused. 'Why does he even stay in the town?' Others of the mercenaries had slipped away to find employment where there was some hope of victory rather than stay and endure the defeat that Charles of Blois threatened.
'He can't go home,' Thomas said, 'because he has too many debts. He's protected from his creditors so long as he's here.'
'But why La Roc
he-Derrien?'
'Because I'm here,' Thomas said. 'He thinks I can lead him to treasure.'
'The Grail?'
'He doesn't know that,' Thomas said, but he was wrong because the next day, while he was alone at the windmill and shooting arrows at a wand he had planted a hundred and fifty paces away, the Scarecrow and his six men-at-arms came riding out of the town's eastern gate. They turned off the Pontrieux road, filed through a gap in the hedge and spurred up the shallow slope towards the mill. They were all in mail and all with swords except for Beggar who, dwarfing his horse, carried a morningstar. Sir Geoffrey reined in close to Thomas, who ignored him to shoot an arrow that just brushed the wand. The Scarecrow let the coils of his whip ripple to the ground. 'Look at me,' he ordered Thomas.
Thomas still ignored him. He took an arrow from his belt and put it on the string, then jerked his head aside as he saw the whip snake towards him. The metal tip touched his hair, but did no damage. 'I said look at me,' Sir Geoffrey snarled.
'You want an arrow in your face?' Thomas asked him.
Sir Geoffrey leaned forward on his saddle's pommel, his raw red face twisted with a spasm of anger. 'You are an archer' – he pointed his whip handle at Thomas – 'and I am a knight. If I chop you down there's not a judge alive who would condemn me.'
'And if I put an arrow through your eye,' Thomas said, 'the devil will thank me for sending him company.'
Beggar growled and spurred his horse forward, but the Scarecrow waved the big man back. 'I know what you want,' he said to Thomas.
Thomas hauled the string back, instinctively corrected for the small wind rippling the meadow's grass, and released. The arrow made the wand quiver. 'You have no idea what I want,' he told Sir Geoffrey.
'I thought it was gold,' the Scarecrow said, 'and then I thought it was land, but I never understood why gold or land would take you to Durham.' He paused as Thomas shot another arrow that hissed a hand's breadth past the distant wand. 'But now I know,' he finished, 'now at last I know.'
'What do you know?' Thomas asked derisively.
'I know you went to Durham to talk with the church-men because you're seeking the greatest treasure of the Church. You're looking for the Grail.'
Thomas let the bowcord slacken, then looked up at Sir Geoffrey. 'We're all looking for the Grail,' Thomas said, still derisive.
'Where is it?' Sir Geoffrey growled.
Thomas laughed. He was surprised the Scarecrow knew about the Grail, but he supposed that gossip in the garrison had probably let everyone in La Roche-Derrien know.
'The best questioners of the Church asked me that,' he said, holding up one crooked hand,
'and I didn't tell them. You think I'll tell you?'
'I think,' the Scarecrow said, 'that a man searching for the Grail doesn't lock himself into a garrison that only has a month or two to live.'
'Then maybe I'm not looking for the Grail,' Thomas said and shot another arrow at the wand, but this shaft was warped and the arrow wobbled in flight and went wide. Above him the great sails of the mill, furled about their spars and tethered by ropes, creaked as a wind gust tried to turn them.
Sir Geoffrey coiled the whip. 'You failed the last time you rode out. What happens if you ride again? What happens if you ride after the Grail? And you must be going soon, before Charles of Blois gets here. So when you ride you're going to need help.' Thomas, incredulous, realized that the Scarecrow had come to offer him help, or perhaps Sir Geoffrey was asking for help. He was in La Roche-Derrien for only one reason, treasure, and he was no nearer to it now than he had been when he first accosted Thomas outside Durham. 'You daren't fail again.' the Scarecrow went on, 'so next time take some real fighters with you.'
'You think I'd take you?' Thomas asked, astonished.
'I'm an Englishman,' the Scarecrow said indignantly, 'and if the Grail exists I want it in England. Not in some scab of a foreign place.'
The sound of a sword scraping from its scabbard made the Scarecrow and his men turn in their saddles. Jeanette and Robbie had come to the meadow with Oana at Robbie's side; Jeanette had her crossbow cocked and Robbie, as though he did not have a care in the world, was now slashing the tops from thistles with his uncle's sword. Sir Geoffrey turned back to Thomas. 'What you don't need is a damned Scotchrnan,' he said angrily.
'nor a damned French bitch. If you look for the Grail, archer, look for it with loyal Englishmen! It's what the King would want, isn't it?'
Again Thomas did not answer. Sir Geoffrey hung the whip on a hook attached to his belt, then jerked his reins. The seven men cantered down the hill, going close to Robbie as if tempting him to attack them, but Robbie ignored them. 'What did that bastard want?'
Thomas shot at the wand, brushing it with the arrow's feathers. 'I think,' he said, 'that he wanted to help me find the Grail.'
'Help you!' Robbie exclaimed. 'Help you find the Grail? Like hell. He wants to steal it. That bastard would steal the milk from the Virgin Mary's tits.'
'Robbie!' Jeanette said, shocked, then aimed her crossbow at the wand.
'Watch her,' Thomas said to Robbie. 'She'll close her eyes when she shoots. She always does.'
'Damn you,' Jeanette said, then, unable to help it, closed her eyes as she pulled the trigger. The bolt slapped out of the groove and miraculously clipped the top six inches from the wand. Jeanette looked at Thomas triumphantly. 'I can shoot better than you with my eyes closed,' she said.
Robbie had been on the town's walls and had seen the Scarecrow accost Thomas and so he had come to help, but now, with Sir Geoffrey gone, they sat in the sun with their backs against the mill's wooden skirt. Jeanette was staring at the town's wall which still showed the scars where the English-made breach had been repaired with a lightercoloured stone. 'Are you really nobly born?' she asked Thomas.
'Bastard born,' Thomas said.
'But to a nobleman?'
'He was the Count of Astarac,' Thomas said, then laughed because it was strange to think that Father Ralph, mad Father Ralph who had preached to the gulls on Hookton's beach, had been a count.
'So what's the badge of Astarac?' Jeanette asked.
'A yale,' Thomas told her, 'holding a cup,' and he showed her the faded silver patch on his black bowstave that was engraved with the strange creature that had horns, cloven hooves, claws, tusks and a lion's tail. 'I'll have a banner made for you,' Jeanette said.
'A banner? Why?'
'A man should display his badge,' Jeanette said.
'And you should leave La Roche-Derrien,' Thomas retorted. He kept trying to persuade her to leave the town, but she insisted she would stay. She doubted now she would ever get her son back and so she was determined to kill Charles of Blois with one of her cross-bow's bolts, which were made of dense yew heartwood tipped with iron heads and fledged, not with feathers, but with stiff pieces of leather inserted into slits cut crosswise into the yew and then bound up with cord and glue. That was why she practised so assiduously, for the chance to cut down the man who had raped her and taken her child. Easter came before the enemy arrived. The weather was warm now. The hedgerows were full of nestlings and the meadows echoed with the shriek of partridges and on the day after Easter, when folk ate up the remnants of the feast that had broken their Lenten fast, the dreaded news at last arrived from Rennes.
That Charles of Blois had marched.
More than four thousand men left Rennes under the white ermine banner of the Duke of Brittany. Two thou-sand of them were crossbowmen, most wearing the green and red livery of Genoa and bearing the city's badge of the Holy Grail on their right arms. They were mercenaries, hired and prized for their skill. A thousand infantrymen marched with them, the men who would dig the trenches and assault the broken walls of the English fortresses, and then there were over a thousand knights or men-at-arms, most of them French, who formed the hard armoured heart of Duke Charles's army. They marched towards La Roche-Derrien, but the real aim of the campaign was not to capture the town, which was of negligi
ble value, but rather to draw Sir Thomas Dagworth and his small army into a pitched battle in which the knights and men-at-arms, mounted on their big armoured horses, would be released to smash their way through the English ranks. A convoy of heavy carts carried nine siege machines, which needed the attentions of over a hundred engineers who understood how to assemble and work the giant devices that could hurl boulders the size of beer barrels further than a how could drive an arrow. A Florentine gunner had offered six of his strange machines to Charles, but the Duke had turned them down. Guns were rare, expensive and, he believed, temperamental, while the old mechanical devices worked well enough if they were properly greased with tallow and Charles saw no reason to abandon them. Over four thousand men left Rennes, but far more arrived in the fields outside La Roche-Derrien. Country folk who hated the English joined the army to gain revenge for all the cattle, harvests, property and virginity their families had lost to the foreigners. Some were armed with nothing more than mattocks or axes, but when the time came to assault the town such angry men would be useful.
The army came to La Roche-Derrien and Charles of Blois heard the last of the town's gates slam shut. He sent a messenger to demand the garrison's surrender, knowing the request was futile, and while his tents were pitched he ordered other horsemen to patrol westwards on the roads leading to Finisterre, the world's end. They were there to warn him when Sir Thomas Dagworth's army marched to relieve the town, if indeed it did march. His spies had told Charles that Dagworth could not even raise a thousand men.
'And how many of those will be archers?' he asked.
'At most, your grace, five hundred.' The man who answered was a priest, one of the many who served in Charles's retinue. The Duke was known as a pious man and liked to employ priests as advisers, secretaries and, in this case, as a spymaster. 'At most five hundred,' the priest repeated, 'but in truth, your grace, far fewer.'
'Fewer? How so?'
'Fever in Finisterre,' the priest answered, then smiled thinly. 'God is good to us.'
The Grail Quest 2 - Vagabond tgq-2 Page 34
