The Grail Quest 2 - Vagabond tgq-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  Some of the lords looked disgruntled, for there was little glory in fighting behind earth walls and damp ditches when a man could be galloping on a destrier, but Charles of Blois was firm and even the richest of his lords feared his threat that any man who disobeyed him would not share in the distribution of land and wealth that would follow the conquest of Brittany.

  Charles picked up a piece of parchment. 'Our scouts have ridden close to Sir Thomas Dagworth's column,' he said in his precise voice, 'and we now have an accurate estimate of their numbers.' Knowing that every man in the tent wanted to hear the enemy's strength, he paused, because he wanted to invest this announce-ment with drama, but he could not help smiling as he revealed the figures. 'Our enemies,' he said, 'threaten us with three hundred men-at-arms and four hundred archers.'

  There was a pause as the numbers were understood, then came an explosion of laughter. Even Charles, usually so pallid, unbending and stern, joined in. It was risible! It was actually impertinent! Brave, perhaps, but utterly foolhardy. Charles of Blois had four thousand men and hundreds of peasant volunteers who, though not actually encamped inside his earthworks, could be relied on to help massacre an enemy. He had two thousand of the finest crossbowmen in Europe, he had a thousand armoured knights, many of them champions of great tournaments, and Sir Thomas Dagworth was coming with seven hundred men? The town might contribute another hundred or two hundred, but even at their most hopeful the English could not muster more than a thousand men and Charles had four times that number. 'They will come, gentlemen,' he told his excited lords, 'and they will die here.'

  There were two roads on which they might approach. One came from the west and it was the most direct route, but it led to the far side of the River Jaudy and Charles did not think Dagworth would use that road. The other curled about the besieged town to approach from the south-east and that road led straight towards the largest of Charles's four encampments, the eastern encampment where he was in personal command and where the largest trebuchets pounded La Roche-Derrien's walls.

  'Let me tell you, gentlemen' – Charles stilled the amusement of his commanders –

  'what I believe Sir Thomas will do. What I would do if I were so unfortunate as to be in his shoes. I believe he will send a small but noisy force of men to approach us on the Lannion road' – that was the road that came from the west, the direct route – 'and he will send them during the night to tempt us into believing that he will attack our encampment across the river. He will expect us to reinforce that encampment and then, in the dawn, his real attack will come from the east. He hopes that most of our army will be stranded across the river and that he can come in the dawn and destroy the three encampments on this bank. That, gentlemen, is what he will probably attempt and it will fail. It will fail because we have one clear, hard rule and it will not be broken! No one leaves an encampment! No one! Stay behind your walls! We fight on foot, we make our battle lines and we let them come to us. Our crossbowmen will cut down their archers, then we, gentlemen, shall destroy their men-at-arms. But no one leaves the encampments! No one! We do not make ourselves targets for their bows. Do you understand?'

  The Lord of Chåteaubriant wanted to know what he was supposed to do if he was in his southern encamp-ment and there was a fight going on in another of the forts. 'Do I just stand and watch?' he asked, incredulous.

  'You stand and watch,' Duke Charles said in a steely voice. 'You do not leave your encampment. You under-stand? Archers cannot kill what they cannot see! Stav hidden!'

  The Lord of Roncelets pointed out that the skies were clear and the moon nearly full.

  'Dagworth is no fool,' he went on, 'and he'll know we've made these fortresses and cleared the land to deny them cover. So why won't he attack at night?'

  'At night?' Charles asked.

  'That way our crossbowmen can't see their targets, but the English will have enough moonlight to see their way across our entrenchments.'

  It was a good point that Charles acknowledged by nodding brusquely. 'Fires,' he said.

  'Fires?' a man asked.

  'Build fires now! Big fires! When they come, light the fires. Turn night into day!'

  His men laughed, liking the idea. Fighting on foot was not how lords and knights made their reputations, but they all understood that Charles had been think-ing how to defeat the dreaded English archers and his ideas made sense even if they offered little chance for glory, but then Charles offered them a consolation. 'They will break, gentlemen,' he said, 'and when they do I shall have my trumpeter give seven blasts. Seven! And when you hear the trumpet, you may leave your encampments and pursue them.' There were growls of approval, for the seven trumpet blasts would release the armoured men on their huge horses to slaughter the remnants of Dagworth's force.

  'Remember!' Charles pounded the table once more to get his men's attention. 'Remember! You do not leave your encampment until the trumpet sounds! Stay behind the trenches, stay behind the walls, let the enemy come to you and we shall win.' He nodded to show he was finished. 'And now, gentlemen, our priests will hear confessions. Let us cleanse our souls so that God can reward us with victory.'

  Fifteen miles away, in the roofless refectory of a plundered and abandoned monastery, a much smaller group of men gathered. Their commander was a grey-haired man from Suffolk, stocky and gruff, who knew he faced a formidable challenge if he was to relieve La Roche-Derrien. Sir Thomas Dagworth listened to a Breton knight tell what his scouts had discovered: that Charles of Blois's men were still in the four encampments placed opposite the town's four gates. The largest encampment,

  where Charles's great banner of a white ermine flew, was to the east. 'It is built around the windmill,' the knight reported.

  'I remember that mill,' Sir Thomas said. He ran his fingers through his short grey beard, a habit when he was thinking. 'That's where we must attack,' he said, so softly that he could have been talking to himself.

  'It's where they're strongest,' a man warned him.

  'So we shall distract them.' Sir Thomas stirred himself from his reverie. 'John' – he turned to a man in a tat-tered mail coat – 'take all the camp servants. Take the cooks, clerks, grooms, anyone who isn't a fighter. Then take all the carts and all the draught horses and make an approach on the Lannion road. You know it?'

  'I can find it.'

  'Leave before midnight. Lots of noise, John! You can take my trumpeter and a couple of drummers. Make 'em think the whole army's coming from the west. I want them sending men to the western encampment well before dawn.'

  'And the rest of us?' the Breton knight asked.

  'We'll march at midnight,' Sir Thomas said, 'and go east till we reach the Guingamp road.' That road approached La Roche-Derrien from the south-east. Since Sir Thomas's small force had marched from the west he hoped that the Guingamp road was the very last one Charles would expect him to use. 'It'll be a silent march,' he ordered, 'and we go on foot, all of us! Archers in front, men-at-arms behind, and we'll attack their eastern fort in the darkness.' By attacking in the dark Sir Thomas hoped he could cheat the crossbowmen of their targets and, better still, catch the enemy asleep. So his plans were made: he would make a feint in the west and attack from the east. And that was exactly what Charles of Blois expected him to do. Night fell. The English marched, Charles's men armed themselves and the town waited.

  Thomas could hear the armourers in Charles's camp. He could hear their hammers closing the rivets of the plate armour and hear the scrape of stones on blades. The campfires in the four fortresses did not die down as they usually did, but were fed to keep them bright and high so that their light glinted off the iron straps that fastened the frames of the big trebuchets outlined against the fires' glow. From the ramparts Thomas could see men moving about in the nearest enemy encamp-ment. Every few minutes a fire would glow even brighter as the armourers used bellows to fan the flames. A child cried in a nearby house. A dog whined. Most of Totesham's small garrison was on the ramparts and a good many of th
e townspeople were there too. No one was quite sure why they had gone to the walls for the relief army had to be a long way off still, yet few people wanted to go to bed. They expected something to happen and so they waited for it. The day of judgement, Thomas thought, would feel like this, as men and women waited for the heavens to break and the angels to descend and for the graves to open so that the virtuous dead could rise into the sky. His father, he re-membered, had always wanted to be buried facing the west, but on the eastern edge of the graveyard, so that when he rose from the dead he would be looking at his parishioners as they came from the earth. 'They will need my guidance,' Father Ralph had said, and Thomas had made sure it had been done as he wished. Hook-ton's parishioners, buried so that if they sat up they would look eastwards towards the glory of Christ's second coming, would find their priest in front of them, offering them reassurance. Thomas could have done with some reassurance this night. He was with Sir Guillaume and his two men-at-arms and they watched the enemy's preparations from a bastion on the town's south-east corner, close to where the tower of St Barnabe's church offered a van-tage point. The remnants of Totesham's giant springald had been used to make a rickety bridge from the bastion to a window in the church tower and once through the window there was a ladder that climbed past a gaping hole torn by one of the Widowmaker's stones to the tower parapet. Thomas must have made the journey a halfdozen times before midnight because, from the parapet, it was just possible to see over the palisade into the largest of Charles's camps. It was while he was on the tower that Robbie came to the rampart beneath. 'I want you to look at this,' Robbie called up to him, and flourished a newly painted shield. 'You like it?'

  Thomas peered down and, in the moonlight, saw something red. 'What is it?' he asked.

  'A blood smear?'

  'You blind English bastard,' Robbie said, 'it's the red heart of Douglas!'

  'Ah. From up here it looks like something died on the shield.'

  But Robbie was proud of his shield. He admired it in the moonlight. 'There was a fellow painting a new devil on the wall in St Goran's church,' he said, 'and I paid him to do this.'

  'I hope you didn't pay him too much,' Thomas said.

  'You're just envious.' Robbie propped the shield against the parapet before edging over the makeshift bridge to the tower. He vanished through the window then reappeared at Thomas's side. 'What are they doing?' he asked, gazing eastwards.

  'Jesus.' Thomas blasphemed, because something was at last happening. He was staring past the great black shapes of Hellgiver and Widowmaker into the eastern encampment where men, hundreds of men, were form-ing a battle line. Thomas had assumed that any fight would not start until dawn, vet now it looked as though Charles of Blois was readying to fight in the night's black heart.

  'Sweet Jesus,' Sir Guillaume, summoned to the tower's top, echoed Thomas's surprise.

  'The bastards are expecting a fight,' Robbie said, for Charles's men were lining shoulder to shoulder. They had their backs to the town and the moon glinted off the espaliers that covered the knights' shoulders and touched the blades of spears and axes white.

  'Dagworth must be coming.' Sir Guillaume said.

  'At night?' Robbie asked.

  'Why not?' Sir Guillaume retorted, then shouted down to one of his men-at-arms to go and tell Totesham what was happening. 'Wake him up,' he snarled when the man wanted to know what he should do if the garrison commander was asleep. 'Of course he's not asleep,' he added to Thomas. 'Totesham might be a bloody Englishman, but he's a good soldier.'

  Totesham was not asleep, but nor had he been aware that the enemy was formed for battle and, after he had negotiated the precarious bridge to St Barnabe's tower, he gazed at Charles's troops with his customary sour expression. 'Reckon we'll have to lend a hand,' he said.

  'I thought you didn't approve of sorties beyond the wall?' Sir Guillaume, who had chafed under that restriction, observed.

  'This is the battle that saves us,' Totesham said. 'If we lose this fight then the town falls, so we must do what we can to win it.' He sounded bleak, then he shrugged and turned back to the tower's ladder. 'God help us,' he said softly as he climbed down into the shadows. He knew Sir Thomas Dagworth's relieving army would be small and he feared it would be much smaller than he dared imagine, but when it attacked the enemy encampment the garrison had to be ready to help. He did not want to alert the enemy to the likelihood of a sortie from the battered gates and so he did not sound the church bells to gather his troops, but rather sent men through all the streets to summon the archers and men-at-arms to the market square outside St Brieuc's church. Thomas went back to Jeanette's house and pulled on his mail haubergeon, which Robbie had brought back from the Roncelets raid, then he strapped his sword belt in place, fumbling with the buckle because his fingers were still clumsy at such finicky things. He hung the arrow bag on his left shoulder, slid the black bow out of its linen cover, put a spare bowcord in his sallet, then pulled the sallet onto his head. He was ready. And so, he saw, was Jeanette. She had her own haubergeon and helmet and Thomas gaped at her. 'You can't join the sortie!' he said.

  'Join the sortie?' She sounded surprised. 'When you all leave the town, Thomas, who will guard the walls?' 'Oh.' He felt foolish.

  She smiled, stepped to him and gave him a kiss. 'Now go,' she said, 'and God go with you.'

  Thomas went to the marketplace. The garrison was gathering there, but they were desperately few in number. A tavern-keeper rolled a barrel of ale into the square, tapped it and let men help themselves. A smith was sharpening swords and axes in the light of a cresseted torch that burned outside the porch of St Brieuc's and his stone rang on long steel blades, the sound strangely mournful in the night. It was warm. Bats flickered about the church and dipped into the tangled moon-cast shadows of a house ruined by a trebuchet's direct hit. Women were bringing food to the soldiers and Thomas remembered how, just the year before, these same women had screamed as the English scrambled into the town. It had been a night of rape, robbery and murder, vet now the townsfolk did not want their occupiers to leave and the market square was becoming ever more crowded as men from the town brought makeshift weapons to help the foray. Most were armed with the axes they used to chop their firewood, though a few had swords or spears, and some townsmen even possessed leather or mail armour. They far outnumbered the garrison and would at least make the sally seem formidable.

  'Christ Jesus.' A sour voice spoke behind Thomas. 'What in Christ's name is that?'

  Thomas turned and saw the lanky figure of Sir Geoffrey Carr staring at Robbie's shield, which was propped against the steps of a stone cross in the market's centre. Robbie also turned to look at the Scarecrow who was leading his six men.

  'Looks like a squashed turd,' the Scarecrow said. His voice was slurred and it was evident he had spent the evening in one of the town's many taverns.

  'It's mine,' Robbie said.

  Sir Geoffrey kicked the shield. 'Is that the bloody heart of Douglas, boy?'

  'It's my badge,' Robbie said, exaggerating his Scottish accent, 'if that's what you mean.' Men all about had stopped to listen.

  'I knew you were a Scot,' the Scarecrow said, sound-ing even more drunk, 'but I didn't know you were a damned Douglas. And what the hell is a Douglas doing here?' The Scarecrow raised his voice to appeal to the assembled men. 'Whose side is bloody Scotland on, eh? Whose side? And the goddamn Douglases have been fighting us since they were spawned from the devil's own arsehole!' The Scarecrow staggered, then pulled the whip from his belt and let its coils ripple down. 'Sweet Jesus,' he shouted, 'but his goddamn family has impoverished good Englishmen. They're goddamn thieves! Spies!'

  Robbie dragged his sword free and the whip lashed up, but Sir Guillaume shoved Robbie out of the way before the clawed tip could slash his face, then Sir Guillaume's sword was drawn and he and Thomas were standing beside Robbie on the steps of the cross. 'Robbie Douglas,' Sir Guillaume shouted, 'is my friend.'

  'And mine,' Thomas said
.

  'Enough!' A furious Richard Totesham pushed through the crowd. 'Enough!'

  The Scarecrow appealed to Totesham. 'He's a damned Scot!'

  'Good God, man,' Totesham snarled, 'we've got French-men, Welshmen, Flemings, Irishmen and Bretons in this garrison. What the hell difference does it make?'

  'He's a Douglas!' the Scarecrow insisted drunkenly. 'He's an enemy!'

  'He's my friend!' Thomas bellowed, inviting to fight anyone who wished to side with Sir Geoffrey.

  'Enough!' Totesham's anger was big enough to fill the whole marketplace. 'We have fight enough on our hands without behaving like children! Do you vouch for him?' he demanded of Thomas.

  'I vouch for him.' It was Will Skeat who answered. He pushed through the crowd and put an arm about Robbie's shoulders. 'I vouch for him, Dick.'

  'Then Douglas or not,' Totesham said, 'he's no enemy of mine.' He turned and walked away.

  'Sweet Jesus!' The Scarecrow was still angry. He had been impoverished by the house of Douglas and he was still poor – the risk he had taken in pursuing Thomas had not paid off because he had found no treasure – and now all his enemies seemed united in Thomas and Robbie. He staggered again, then spat at Robbie. 'I burn men who wear the heart of Douglas,' he said, 'I burn them!'

  'He does too,' Thomas said softly.

  'Burns them?' Robbie asked.

  'At Durham,' Thomas said, his gaze on Sir Geoffrey's eyes, 'he burned three prisoners.'

  'You did what?' Robbie demanded.

  The Scarecrow, drunk as he was, was suddenly aware of the intensity of Robbie's anger, and aware too that he had not gained the sympathy of the men in the marketplace, who preferred Will Skeat's opinion to his. He coiled the whip, spat at Robbie, and stalked uncertainly away.

  Now it was Robbie who wanted a fight. 'Hey, you!' he shouted.

  'Leave it be,' Thomas said. 'Not tonight, Robbie.' 'He burned three men?' Robbie demanded.