The Last Conquest

by Berwick Coates

  Twenty thousand Frenchmen place their trust.

  Twenty thousand voices shout as one,

  Prepared to fight a million if they come . . .

  ‘Cheer up, my lords,’ shouts Roland to them all.

  “The Holy Banner flutters out before.

  A place in Heaven for you if you fall;

  For those who live, the booty is the more.

  Fat lands, rich gold, fine treasures are in store.

  Such wealth, my dears, adorns your bloody swords.’

  Gilbert’s mouth went dry with excitement.

  Taillefer’s voice grew stronger.

  We meet them, lads, we fight them face to face;

  We strike them down, those cushion-couching knaves.

  Our spears strike home, our arrows find their places.

  Our swords hack holes in massy Moorish mail.

  The voice swelled and rose.

  Their heads shall fall, their bodies fold and break.

  We shall kill all, for are we not the greatest?

  ‘Yes!’ came back the answering roar.

  Each time one of Roland’s peerless warriors killed an infidel in single combat, there were outbursts of aggressive approval.

  Every champion had spurs of gold, a noble steed, a gilded shield.

  Still the Moors came on. Roland, with the flower of French knighthood dropping dead about him, at last sounded his horn to recall Emperor Charlemagne and the main army. Putting his famous Oliphant to his lips, and gathering all his strength, he took a mighty breath, and blew. The deep tone boomed and echoed through Spanish canyon and Frankish vale for thirty great leagues. On and on it went till the hillsides rang, till the blood ran from Roland’s mouth and the veins burst in his temples. It reached at last the aged Charlemagne. Even then Ganelon tried to pretend that the Emperor’s old ears were playing him tricks.

  But Charlemagne understood the message, and, pausing only to decree the arrest of Ganelon, gave the order for the army to turn about. They spurred and galloped like madmen to the rescue, hoping against hope that they would not be too late.

  They were.

  The hall fell silent as the ranks of champions thinned. First Oliver, then, Archbishop Turpin and finally, Roland himself died, after his despairing and unavailing effort to destroy Durendal.

  Taillefer paused and looked about the hall. The flames burned silently. Red tears gleamed on stubbled cheeks.

  Judging the moment to a nicety, Taillefer raised his hands high.

  ‘What do we desire, my children?’

  A great shout made the new beams shiver.

  ‘Revenge!’

  Revenge was what Taillefer gave them in full measure. As the grim-faced host of the Emperor bore down in righteous fury on the fleeing Muslims, some of the younger men cheered. There were grisly details of separate acts of vengeance, as angry Franks paid out the enemy for their dead friends in Roncesvalles. No Saracen, no Moor, no infidel escaped the wrath of God and His servant Charles; they died with cowards’ wounds on their backs, or they drowned in their armour trying to swim the swollen River Ebro.

  The world of Christendom was made safe again, as Charlemagne himself bestirred his aged bones to split the skull of the Great Emir, and the remaining captive paynims were baptised at point of sword. The wicked Ganelon had his arms and legs tied to four high-mettled stallions, and four lusty sergeants urged them at full stretch towards distant running mares.

  Taillefer lowered his voice to match the spent silence in the hall.

  And oh, my dears, the victor Charles is sad.

  Roland is gone. No glory brings him back.

  And yet – and yet – his spirit lives perhaps,

  And courage brings, to each and every man.

  When battle comes, he strengthens honest hands.

  Look hard, my sons, and there, before the van,

  You shall behold the gleam of Durendal.

  And hearken always, those of you who can –

  The horn of Roland sounds in Roncesvalles.

  The fire was almost dead. A dog whimpered in its sleep.

  Gilbert blinked. Taillefer was gone.

  The hall emptied itself in utter silence.

  When Gilbert found Sandor, the little Magyar was putting Taillefer to rest as if he were a baby.

  ‘Sandor – he was magnificent!’

  Sandor put a finger to his lips.

  Gilbert caught sight of a dark stain on a cloth that Sandor hurriedly stuffed under a saddle.

  Sandor changed the subject.

  ‘I have taken food to your Saxons,’ he said.

  ‘They are not my Saxons,’ protested Gilbert. Sandor brushed it aside.

  ‘I have taken food also to their guards. Drink too. I take drink to these two bad men. I help them to guard when we take prisoners to the privy pit. I tell them you are no friend of the Saxons – just a foolish boy who has a fancy for the fair-skinned one. A long time in camp, away from women – you understand.’

  ‘Sandor!’

  Gilbert was spluttering in rage. Sandor was unmoved.

  ‘They think it very funny. Already they make jokes about you.’

  Gilbert felt himself blushing in the cold darkness.

  Sandor patted him on the arm. ‘Now they think you weak. That is good. Now we can surprise them. I told you I was a good liar.’

  ‘But Sandor, how could you?’

  ‘To be a good liar, you must choose your lie. All men will not believe all things. With dirty minds, you choose a dirty lie. Now, they believe me. Tomorrow they will trust me.’ He grinned. ‘You see? A smile and a pot of beer and a good story – together they make a good trap.’

  Gilbert spat. ‘Animals!’

  ‘Patience, my friend. Patience, and no pride. If you want to catch your fly, you use not vinegar, but honey.’

  Gilbert was far from convinced.

  ‘What is the rest of this . . . plan of yours?’

  Sandor glanced down at Taillefer. ‘For that we need a minstrel, a teller of stories. Tomorrow maybe, after a good rest.’ He pulled the blanket tenderly up under Taillefer’s chin.

  Gilbert sighed and stretched out near him. Sandor wriggled in between them.

  Gilbert turned up his nose and rolled over. If only Sandor would wash just now and then. It was not merely the smell of horses either.

  Gilbert hunched his shoulders against the cold.

  Why was Sandor so kind to Taillefer? There was another story somewhere. One day he would find it out.

  Sandor was already snoring.

  As Gilbert closed his eyes, he thought of Adele and her unborn son. At least that was his. It had to be. The thought of Adele being unfaithful again was impossible, intolerable. Besides, having scoured England for one ravisher, he could hardly go back and scour Normandy for another.

  Great Jesus! – and they said it was a man’s world.

  Ralph sighed, shivered, and wriggled deeper into his blanket. They dared not light a fire, for fear of Saxon patrols. The cold, the lack of cheer from a fire, the absence of any chink of uncertainty in Bruno’s armour – all added to Ralph’s gloom.

  ‘You miss him, then?’ The question came out of the blue.

  Ralph was stunned. He had forgotten how good Bruno was at reading his thoughts. He was also angry that his thoughts showed.

  He had tried to hide them – God’s Breath, he really had tried. Just as he had tried with Michael. For months after Michael had died, he had put his heart and soul into his father’s holding. If anything, he had tried too hard; the effort sapped his patience, and left him with no reserve of control. His elder brother, Aubrey, was a fault-finder, a tale-bearer, a goad, a tease, a bully. Sooner or later, Ralph was forced to tell his father, they would come to blows. He had too much love for his family to burden them with the pain and shame of such an encounter.

  His father listened in sad silence, and agreed. He knew, without Ralph telling him, that the ache of Michael’s death could be assuaged only by doing som
ething that freed the spirit. Aubrey was a cage. Ralph would have to go.

  He had taken service first with Fulk the Angevin, of all people. A much younger Fulk, unscarred either outwardly or inwardly, but possessed even then of the capacity to inspire fear, and of the curious detachment that looked so much like boredom. A born leader of men, but without scruple or conscience. When they had taken the contract to ambush a party of travellers, it was Fulk who had pushed the knife into Ralph’s hand and told him to show his commitment by killing the chief captive.

  He had found himself looking into the face of Geoffrey de Montbrai, Bishop of Coutances – the man who had given the last rites to his dying brother, Michael, who had sat with him and helped him out of his agony and into Paradise.

  Ralph could not do it. It cost him his employment, almost his life. Geoffrey had saved himself in the end. Fulk laughed at the irony, and, almost as an afterthought, had stabbed Ralph in the stomach by way of payment for his disloyalty. Had it not been for Bishop Geoffrey, he would have died.

  So he took service with a bishop, and soon found a partner in one of Fulk’s ex-soldiers, the portly and talkative Aimery. Aimery made no demands, he spoke enough for both of them, and he was totally loyal. Then Aimery died after a skirmish on a lonely road in Burgundy, and the agony for Ralph began again. Its only cure, as before, was in flight. Lord Geoffrey was sad, but he understood.

  Ralph went on his travels again. He took his ghosts with him – two of them this time – and spent the next few years seeking a way of burying them.

  Then Bruno had appeared. He helped towards the burying. The ghosts haunted only on bad days. And this was one of them. He shivered again.

  ‘You miss him then?’

  And now Gilbert. It was Michael all over again – and curiously without the pain. Of course he missed him. It was because of Bruno’s relentless common sense that he was now deprived of him.

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  Bruno continued collecting dry ferns and packed them down beside his saddle.

  ‘I leave you to your misery. But reflect now and then. Are you the only person in the world to lose anybody? Must you wear your grief like a leper’s sores?’

  Ralph almost jumped with the shock. It was the nearest he had ever come to Bruno’s feelings. But he continued to look bad-temperedly up at him.

  ‘Does nothing bother you? Does nothing agitate you?’

  ‘Many things distress me. But I can do little about them. If I could, they would not distress me.’

  Ralph shifted his attack.

  ‘Does it not bother you that we can not find the English?’

  ‘Not much. Harold will come. We all know he is coming. He will take little caution. And he will use one of the main roads out of London.’

  ‘Do you not want us to be the ones who find him?’

  Bruno patted the final ferns into place.

  ‘Yes. But I shall not feel bitter if we do not. Get some sleep. I shall watch first.’

  Ralph gave up. But Bruno was right, damn him. They might find the English; they might not.

  11 October

  ‘This foreign camp’

  Bishop Odo of Bayeux said early Mass. Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances assisted. On the express orders of the Duke. Nothing else would have made him do it.

  The attendance was poor. Odo was scathing.

  ‘Clods! Idiots! They decide that the enemy will never come. Can they not see beyond their own noses?’

  ‘They can see at present only one monster stalking them,’ said Geoffrey. ‘It is not death; it is boredom. But like death, boredom can also look eternal. A man can be equally afraid of both. But he does not fight boredom with the sacrament.’

  ‘Ever the student of the human spirit, my lord?’ said Odo with heavy irony.

  Geoffrey, although badly in need of breakfast, kept his temper.

  Odo levered off his bulky episcopal robes, and dumped them casually into the arms of a servile attendant.

  ‘May I offer you something? I should like to show you a most handsome reliquary that has come into my possession. It will look well in my cathedral.’

  If he had not been so hungry and cross, Geoffrey might have smiled at Odo’s lack of subtlety. There was one thing about Odo you could always rely upon – he was never rude to you by accident.

  The reliquary had turned up in some looting around Hastings. It was handsome work, in the finest Saxon tradition. Geoffrey had tried to secure it, but, by bribes and intrigue, Odo had beaten him to it, and now wanted to gloat.

  If Geoffrey accepted the invitation and exchanged barbed remarks over a cup of tepid broth, he knew it would be only a matter of time before Odo raised the stakes and began talking about his son, John, knowing full well that Geoffrey still grieved for his own son, Raoul.

  Geoffrey excused himself, and walked towards his own tent. There was a heavy dew. Tent ropes quivered and showered him as he brushed against them. From inside came the usual mindless swearing as late risers bestirred themselves. Outside, in the avenues between bivouacs and half-dead fires, men stretched and scratched themselves, shivered and cursed, blinked and looked vacantly about them.

  Geoffrey glowered as he picked his way between half-hidden tent pegs.

  How long had Raoul been dead now? Fourteen years? And it still hurt. Worse, it showed, as Odo had proved. Whenever he visited Sybil, neither of them talked about it, even after all this time.

  They were still good friends. No passion any more.

  He had had other women since. Sybil had foreseen that. But he had not talked to them as he talked to Sybil. They were now totally at ease with each other; they liked, respected, understood, and admired each other. Neither feared that any untoward demands would be made beyond the limits of the relationship that each of them, and circumstances, had helped to forge over the years . . .

  They had found it hard at first, especially Geoffrey. As he struggled with the unwelcome vocation that had been forced upon him, he hammered away at Sybil’s decision to take the veil. What did she expect? How many bishops these days lived like monks? Or were expected to live like monks?

  ‘More and more. Listen to the instructions of the Holy Father. Listen to Lanfranc. Listen to the Duke. It is the way the world is going, Geoffrey, like it or not.’

  ‘Look at Odo. He has fathered a brat.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Sybil. ‘A brat. Is that what you would have wanted for—’ She grimaced to hold back the tears.

  Geoffrey felt tears too. For the son he had barely seen.

  ‘Then marry me.’

  Sybil shook her head, still in pain. ‘You know we can not outface the whole world.’

  As the years passed, Geoffrey slowly came to realise why, as God and the Duke held his nose against the grindstone of the vocation he had not sought and did not want. Every time he sat at the bedside of a man in fever or a woman in blood after childbirth; every time he raised his crozier over a huddled little flock in a chilly, dark castle chapel; every time he kneeled beside a broken body on a battlefield and looked into terrified eyes – he crept snail-like towards understanding.

  And she would have been the perfect companion, passion or no passion.

  Now it had to be company only when his duties and his travels permitted. A healing balm of rest and ease at random intervals in his life of ceaseless travel, duty and danger. With each year, further cares clamoured for his attention – the episcopal estates, the never-ending building and furnishing of the cathedral at Coutances (please God it would be finished before Odo’s at Bayeux), the ceaseless search for relics and books and fine works of art with which to embellish it, the rebuilding of the town and – who knows, one day – the aqueduct. Visits to councils, meetings with Lanfranc and the other bishops, longer journeys to Rome and to the south to seek more funds from his most famous and most wealthy parishioner – the Guiscard. More recently, as his reputation for training soldiers spread and grew, increasing demands from the Duke.

  Work had show
n him, over the years, the truth of Sybil’s words. Work was now the only remedy. If God sent the Holy Spirit to him in the shape of sweat and blisters and a busy brain, who was he to question the method? What right had he to expect visions and revelations and miracles?

  As he looked about the camp, and saw men purposeless and bad-tempered, he became more convinced than ever that God was making a valid point.

  When Gilbert waylaid him just after breakfast and begged to be taken back into his service, he sent him packing.

  ‘I have failed, my lord. I am no longer trusted. Bruno thinks I am a liability. Ralph agrees with him. What future is there for me?’

  ‘If you knew what was waiting for you further along the road, there would be no point in travelling it. Right now you have your duty. You tried hard enough to get yourself into this position. Do you think Ralph was born an expert? Be about your business and do not trouble me with trivialities.’

  Gilbert’s face puckered in anguish. He thumped a fist into his other palm.

  ‘You are like Ralph, sir. Why is he so sure? Why are you always so sure? Why can I not be sure?’

  ‘Be off with you. You are a soldier, not a philosopher.’

  As Gilbert stumped miserably away, Geoffrey shook his head.

  Sure!

  Later that morning, Roger of Montgomery complained again about his relentless pursuit of perfection. Geoffrey had his answer ready.

  ‘Are you never satisfied?’ said Roger. ‘Are they not good enough?’

  ‘Yes. But not occupied enough. Never mind your knife edge, Roger. If we do not work them, there will be no knife.’

  Armourers lost their tempers more often than ever. Noisy rows erupted from trivial accidents like tripping over tent ropes. Knives came out between Germans and Hainaulters over an armful of kindling. The fatigue parties had stopped grumbling; sergeants muttered over their mid-morning pots of beer.

  Fulk Bloodeye left Florens to do the swearing and the nagging – the dirty work. God’s Face – war was a tedious business at the best of times, but now!

  Fully recovered, he roamed listlessly, struggling to recall the images that were last in his mind before his attack of the day before. With nothing else to devote his wits to, this problem loomed suddenly large and important. It was also an exercise in self-reassurance. There was nothing wrong with his memory – not really. Nothing that could not be put right by some concentration and some self-discipline. Nobody had laughed at him for it – not yet. Certainly not to his face. There was nothing wrong with his capacity to strike fear; he could see that every day on the faces of his younger soldiers. Some of the newer ones, like young Dietrich, took obvious steps to avoid him.