The Last Conquest

by Berwick Coates

  He knew that, and he knew that Fitz knew. So did the Duke. But they had long become so accustomed to the rarity of the Duke’s praise that they had got out of the habit of bestowing it upon each other.

  With the bond they all three shared, few words were necessary. Baldwin and Fitzosbern had each lost a father who had given his life as guardian to the young bastard Duke William. Bad times. Three thirteen-year-old orphans had sworn a tremulous oath of mutual loyalty. After so many years of survival, they understood each other perfectly.

  ‘How is the lady Emma?’ asked Baldwin.

  Fitzosbern did not look at him. ‘Mother is recovering. And the lady Sybil.’

  ‘Good.’

  Baldwin blinked and grimaced.

  Why should it have been Agnes? Why take his sister and leave Fitz’s mother and Geoffrey’s old paramour? God’s Teeth! They all lived in the same convent.

  Fitzosbern continued to avoid his gaze. ‘It was Geoffrey’s man who brought the news.’

  ‘Thierry?’

  Fitzosbern shrugged. ‘You know what I am like with names. He is the one who eats all the time.’

  Baldwin pulled himself together. He indicated the ship – barely more than a barge – that Fitzosbern had just left. Some of the new arrivals were climbing out of it with great care.

  ‘Great God!’ said Baldwin. ‘They look as if they are balancing eggs on their heads. Where did Thierry dig those up?’

  ‘God knows. Vermin. William is scraping the barrel now.’

  ‘If that is what we are reduced to,’ said Baldwin, ‘we are better off without them.’

  ‘Expendable,’ said Fitzosbern, ‘I agree. But employable. Not like that total waste over there.’ He waved towards the last ship in the small flotilla of new arrivals. ‘Half full of hounds and personal tenting. Enough canvas to set up a fair.’

  Baldwin growled. ‘Only one young man would have the cheek for that. Treats an invasion as a glorified hunting trip.’

  ‘Just so,’ said Fitzosbern. ‘His father ought to know better. When every inch of deck space is vital.’ He pointed, again, at the new men. ‘At least we can use this lot for wasting parties and any other dirty work. It saves the real troops.’

  Baldwin growled once more, unconvinced. He gestured towards the horses, now being coaxed across the shingle by swearing owners. Behind them came small squads of grooms and servants lugging armfuls of equipment.

  ‘You call them knights?’

  ‘They have all the gear.’

  ‘Geoffrey will not touch them with a scaling ladder. All those weeks he has spent with his training schedules and his trumpets and his straight lines? Half a dozen of these in a charge would reduce it to a rabble.’

  Fitzosbern refused as usual to be drawn into argument. ‘If Geoffrey can not use them, I can. In any case, the horses will still be valuable. You can never have too many mounts.’

  ‘Wait till Geoffrey sees them,’ said Baldwin. ‘Just wait.’

  Again, Fitzosbern declined the challenge. ‘I shall accept Geoffrey’s word on tactics, just as I shall accept Walter’s word on the standard of the horses. Just as I accept your word on anything to do with stores and equipment.’ He paused. ‘Just as I expect my word to be followed on the overall allocation of our resources.’

  Baldwin laughed. ‘Why is it, Fitz, that nobody can ever have a row with you?’

  ‘Takes two.’

  ‘True, I tell you. I had it from my brother, and he had it from his best friend.’

  ‘What does he know?’

  ‘Courier. He rode a thousand miles in two days.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘A mighty host – ten thousand ships. More numerous than the pebbles on the shore, so they say.’

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘Something else too. He was seen.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The man himself. Seven feet tall. Now do you believe me?’

  Gilbert munched at his pork and cheese, leaned on an elbow, and looked about him. Where on earth were the enemy? Over a week had passed since the landing at – where was it? – Pev – Pevoncy – something like that. And nobody had seen a single Saxon soldier.

  It did not make sense. The English had known they were coming for months. Harold’s fleet had been patrolling the Channel coast since May. Great Jesus! He had seen their sails for himself. The Duke had sent them on endless foraging expeditions – as far afield as Ponthieu and Flanders in the north, the Vexin in the south, and the Bessin and Cotentin towards the west. While they were doing that, he gathered an army and built a transport fleet.

  Everybody snatched time, when they could, to make rushed visits to family whenever they came nearby. Fitzosbern would go to see his mother at the convent of St Amand. Geoffrey would go with him to see the lady Sybil. Baldwin would visit his sister’s grave. Gilbert himself would rush to his father’s tiny holding near Avranches. At first it was hugs and backslappings. His sister Mahaut would cry, but Mahaut always cried. His brother Robert said little. In the morning he would carry some buckets of water for his mother. But he was relieved when Ralph came to fetch him.

  Off they would go again to locate supplies of fodder, requisition corn, arrange for round-ups of sheep and cattle; commission consignments of sacks, hides, ropes, casks, arrows, spearheads; conscript smiths, carpenters, fletchers, coopers, wheelwrights.

  Now and then they would stop at Rouen, and the Duke would be visited by the lady Matilda. Gilbert would slip away to see Adele and the baby. After the first urgent passion of reunion was spent, he found that the unresolved shame of his knowledge lay like a great cold stone in the bed between them. What made it worse was that he really loved the boy. When he had first held him in his arms, he had loved with all the pride of a first-born’s father. His heart had been given to Hugh, along with the dearest name he could think of bestowing upon him, and no amount of knowledge, guilt, or shame could get it back.

  Back on patrol with Ralph and Bruno, he would gaze towards England and think of his quest. There! Somewhere over there lay Adele’s ravisher. There too lay excitement, honour, fortune – and peace of some kind.

  Gilbert of Avranches had never killed anyone in his life.

  Well, now he was here . . .

  He sat up with a start, threw away the apple core, and brushed the crumbs from his chest. What would Ralph say to see him daydreaming like this?

  He packed and mounted, and gave a final look about him.

  Ralph was right: there was nothing here. But the sun was not down yet. Suppose there was something further west. Suppose he found it. Suppose it was he, Gilbert of Avranches, who was the first scout to bring news of the approach of the Saxon army. Ralph would surely be impressed with that, and it would be one in the eye for Bruno. Ralph would tell Sir Baldwin, and Baldwin would tell Fitzosbern, and Fitzosbern . . .

  Robert of Beaumont swore at his sweating grooms.

  ‘Tighter than that, you idiots. I do not want to be drowned in canvas with the first good blow.’

  ‘But, sir—’

  ‘Just do as you are told, and you may get paid. Then you can go and feed the hounds.’

  ‘What with, sir?’

  ‘Find something, damn you. The Flemings always do. Are you even more stupid than the Flemings?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘And I want my dinner within the hour.’

  The buzzard showed itself again. Gilbert watched it float towards the summit of a bare, scrub-covered hill.

  His scouting training, sharp though not yet refined into instinct, told him to view the countryside from any available high ground. It was up there that he would have to go.

  On a ridge near the summit stood a solitary, and very old, apple tree. Grey lichen stippled its bark. Sickly patches of livid green showed. The foliage was thin, the fruit wrinkled and sparse. Even worse than the bitter fruit he had recently eaten. And that was not sitting comfortably on his stomach.

  The ground sloped away steadily towards his right,
to the south, and levelled out round a small swampy brook. Clumps of rushes grew out of pale sandy soil. Beyond that the ground rose again, to the woods of Telham Hill. Gilbert knew the name because he had already reconnoitred it with Ralph and Bruno. It was barely more than an hour’s brisk ride from the Duke’s new castle at Hastings.

  To the west lay a maze of grassy humps and gorse-grown gullies.

  Gilbert stood in the stirrups to get a better view, then settled back again.

  ‘If I were Harold,’ he thought, ‘marching south, I should not like to have to cross that low ground, slosh through a sandy brook, and fight my way up Telham Hill. And if I were the Duke –’ he happily identified himself for the moment with his commander ‘– I should fortify Telham, and clear some of the timber on the lower slopes. Use the wood for stakes and a palisade.’

  A twinge in his stomach brought him back to reality, and jerked him from command strategy to humble scouting. His Grace the Duke, when he made his report to him, would not listen to immature judgements on fortification engineering; he would prefer a sensible report on the ground about him – all of it. That meant going to have a look at the northern and eastern sides of the hill as well.

  The Duke’s eyes scanned the neatly ordered piles of supplies, which his quartermaster had proudly persuaded him to come to see.

  ‘Yes.’

  Baldwin sighed. He should have known better.

  William’s restless pupils darted to left and right, as if he expected outlaws to spring out.

  ‘This will do then – yes?’

  Baldwin glanced towards the man at his side.

  Ranulf of Dreux made a long face, which both Baldwin and the Duke ignored. Ranulf was always making long faces, but he was a good engineer.

  ‘Hard to tell at this stage, my lord. Sir Baldwin keeps me short of labour, and Sir William Fitzosbern is not generous with funds.’

  William made a sweeping gesture. ‘Splendour of God, man. How much more do you want? As for labour, go and tell Fitz to get that riff-raff from the ships and put them to work. And you are not here to buy things; you take them.’

  Ranulf made another face. ‘I can do no more than my best, my lord.’

  ‘You have enough flooring here for two castles. And I want no broken legs from flimsy steps and rungs. We leave nothing to chance. Nothing.’

  Geoffrey de Montbrai, Bishop of Coutances, was in a foul mood.

  The training had gone badly all day. There was still no room to deploy large numbers. The shingle beach was out of the question. The land between the beach and the new castle was a boiling sea of wagons, oxen, fatigue parties, ruts and holes. Despite the fiercest of orders from Baldwin and Fitzosbern, shanties and bivouacs continually sprang up in the most impossible places and clogged the channels of movement. If any area was levelled to make a space, more shanties sprang up like mushrooms in the night. Inland, around the castle, the trees had been cleared to provide timber for the rougher needs of exterior building and to remove all cover; but the stumps were still there – deathtraps for any detachment of knights over twenty or so in number.

  The further Geoffrey went in search of suitable open ground, the more the knights distanced themselves from the security of the castle and the main camp, and the more they tired the horses.

  There was a little scope for practice in small groups – reminding them of the standard rates of advance that Geoffrey had tried to instil into them; repeating the trumpet call codes, until even the stupidest could remember the full sequence; getting them to wheel and turn about in a limited space (the tree stumps were quite useful for that).

  But there was no substitute for a full rehearsal – moving mounted knights in blocks of two hundred, three hundred. It mattered little; whatever Geoffrey organised, the men loathed it. They loathed all forms of joint practice. That was for common infantry or peasant archers, not for those who were knightly born. Were they not professionals? Did they not understand their business? If they did not know how to handle horse, shield, spear, sword and mace, they would not have disgraced their honour by being there.

  In all his years of training fighting men, Geoffrey had found that the biggest obstacle to achieving his dream was not lack of strength, lack of talent, lack of experience, or lack of money; it was lack of will. They simply did not believe that what he was demanding of them was either possible or desirable.

  But he hung on to his dream: a combined charge of heavy cavalry, by the hundred, which would keep the same pace and line, and which, if need be, could be recalled.

  Nine knights out of ten thought he was crying for the moon. God’s Bones – they had toiled under a summer sun in Normandy, and now this dreamer Coutances expected them to do it all over again in Sussex, when the weather was uncertain, when the castle was not finished, and when nobody knew where the enemy were. And look at the ground. Besides, they were as good as they were ever going to be. It was common knowledge that, man for man, the mounted Norman knight had no superior on any battlefield in Christendom.

  That was the view of the core of the Norman knights. The attitude of the soldiers of fortune who had just arrived for the adventure bordered on the mutinous. They had been prepared for hardship, danger, boredom; that was the price one paid for glory, women, and loot. What they were not prepared for was the endless practice, practice, practice.

  Not even the abuse of the Duke himself converted them. ‘You ravening saddle-scum! What do you think this is – a Viking raid? Do you take me for a church looter? Do I look like some coast-crawling scavenger?’

  He waved his arm about him. ‘Have you the faintest idea of what we are up against? The full might of a kingdom. A kingdom! This is no summer-sun siege to pass the time of day. I offer you the greatest prize of your stupid lives, and all you can think about is your precious honour. Only an army will take England, and you will be no army until Lord Geoffrey tells me that you obey, and obey with your foul mouths shut.’

  He paused, his eyes darting to right and left with their customary restlessness.

  ‘I know what you say: “It is all very well for him; he gets a crown.” True. A mighty prize. But I offer you shares in that crown beyond a man’s wildest dreams of avarice. Think on it. And think on this: I lead no rabble to win my crown. If you covet your share of that prize, then by the Splendour of God you labour for it.’

  They laboured, but with a bad grace. When Thierry arrived, Geoffrey was as relieved as they were to stop. They dismounted, flung helmets and spurs at wincing grooms, and stumped off. Sir Walter Giffard and Sir Roger of Montgomery, the two senior squadron commanders, sent servants scuttling for refreshment.

  Geoffrey slid off his mail coif, and beckoned. Thierry hustled forward as quickly as his girth would permit, anxious to give the impression of haste and breathlessness. Geoffrey held out his hand.

  Thierry kneeled and kissed the ring. ‘My lord.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I came as soon as I could, my lord,’ said Thierry, with enough hint of puffing to suggest urgency. ‘His Grace the Duke questioned me in great detail.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Geoffrey drily. ‘And his Grace’s cook then fed you in great detail.’

  Giffard and Montgomery looked at each other and grinned. Thierry’s reputation was well known. Glutton he might be, but there was no better gleaner of news.

  ‘Of course, my lords,’ he would say. ‘If you want to know what is happening, ask the table servants or the grooms or the squires or the valets. Is it my fault that they sit in the kitchen?’

  Thierry furtively wiped the last grease off his fingers on the backs of his leggings.

  ‘Twelve hours at sea, Lord Geoffrey. And not a morsel. Stretched over the rail in agony.’

  Geoffrey waved aside his familiar excuses.

  ‘News, news!’

  Thierry gulped in his eagerness to turn Geoffrey’s mind away from his recent gorging.

  ‘Excellent, my lord. The lady Sybil has made a complete recovery. She acted as reve
rend mother while the lady Emma regained her strength. Indeed, they say in the kitchens –’ he checked himself ‘– it is said that she has proved to be as good a mother abbess as the lady Emma in her prime.’

  Geoffrey could feel the eyes of both Giffard and Montgomery on the back of his neck. The Devil. What if they were looking? And listening? They knew all about him and Sybil. She was well again; that was what mattered. Thierry could tell him the rest later in private.

  Thierry would also tell him about the building at Coutances. Goscelin should have most of the roof timbers up over the nave by this time. That would be one in the eye for Odo; the last he had heard of Odo’s cathedral at Bayeux, Odo had been forced to disgorge half-a-dozen carpenters for the construction of his brother’s invasion fleet. That could push him behind by several months by the time the campaign was over. It almost put Geoffrey in a good mood just to think of it.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Thierry understood. Move on to military intelligence. He cleared his throat importantly.

  ‘Brittany is quiet, lord; no forays over the Couesnon. Ponthieu, in the north, behaves itself. No raids from Champagne in the south-east. And the King has not moved from Paris.’

  The whole of France, it seemed, was still, rapt, hypnotised by the possible outcome of the great gamble of Normandy’s Duke.

  Sir Walter Giffard grunted. ‘Waiting to see which way the cat will jump.’

  ‘No news is good news,’ said Montgomery.

  ‘Maybe in France,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But not here. Holy Virgin! Where are the English?’

  Thierry hovered respectfully, his ears ready to pick up any titbits that he could trade round hearth and campfire. Geoffrey dismissed him.