Longsword

by David Pilling

  Esther smiled and moved on, stopping to make a fuss over a palfrey with a bandaged foreleg.

  The next morning, in common with most mornings in the fens, was foggy, raw, and freezing. Thick mist descended like a soaking carpet over the heads of the huntsmen as they rode out of the gates. It did little to dampen their enthusiasm, or that of the dogs bounding in the wake of the horses.

  Sir Robert d'Eyvill had ordered a deer hunt, so the dogs were wolfhounds. Hugh trembled just to look at them as they bounded through the mire and strained at the leashes of their handlers. They reminded him of the beasts that had chased him through Sherwood.

  The huntsmen rode two by two, keeping to the narrow winding paths that were the safest route through the fens to the south-west.

  Robert and Esther rode at the front. Hugh made sure he was in the second rank, just behind her. He was impressed by how well she rode: not side-saddle, like most women, but straddling the horse’s back. She wore a tight leather tunic, hose, and knee-high boots under her thick cloak, an outfit that had caused many a man to stare when the hunting party gathered in the bailey. Hugh was one of them, and experienced an irrational stab of jealousy as his leering companions stripped her with their eyes.

  Soon the paths widened out and the land grew less treacherous, until they rode across a stretch of flat, dry plain, criss-crossed with little streams and studded with little clumps of trees, mostly oak and fir. The sky had lightened somewhat, though the fens were still dank. Ragged bands of cloud swept like silent ghosts over the mere.

  Robert called a halt and moved away to confer with a long-faced man in a soiled brown smock, belted at the waist with a bit of string. His skinny legs were bare, and the only weapon he carried was a slender javelin slung across his back.

  Hugh turned to one of his fellow huntsmen. “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Some local peasant,” replied the other, another meatless specimen, with greasy auburn hair and a crooked smile Hugh didn’t trust above half. “Born and raised in these demon-haunted bogs. Sir Robert hired him to show us the best hunting.”

  The party soon moved off again. Robert ordered his men to split into two groups, one under him, the other led by the peasant. Hugh volunteered to stay in Robert’s group, along with Esther and the redhead with the crooked smile.

  Robert took his nine riders north. The other group was soon lost to sight, swallowed up in the mist. Hugh’s heart started to beat faster as he exchanged meaningful glances with Esther. Now was their chance.

  Hugh supposed Robert had been advised to split the party. The hunters converged on their game, somewhere up ahead. Hugh was vaguely aware that hunting as noblemen understood it was hedged about with a bewildering array of rules. None seemed to apply here. They were out for food, not sport.

  The hounds kept up their barking and howling as they raced along on the flanks of the horsemen. He broke into a sweat as the fearful din echoed across the moors. His leg throbbed with the memory of vicious yellow teeth.

  Somewhere to the south a horn blew a deep, ascending note. Robert rose in his stirrups.

  “There!” he yelled, pointing with his spear, his face flushed with excitement. Hugh glimpsed a herd of roe deer grazing in a meadow, not forty yards ahead. The deer pricked up their heads and scattered, panicked by the horns and the baying of hounds.

  Esther was just ahead and to the right of Hugh. She was bent low in the saddle and apparently intent on the deer. Robert had supplied her with a brown courser almost as fine as Hugh’s grey.

  A splendid hart suddenly broke from the herd and galloped away to the north, followed by most of the does. Robert gave a blast on the horn slung around his neck. His riders spread out in a long line either side of him. The dogs and their handlers moved out onto the flanks.

  Hugh looked south. A few of the deer were fleeing in that direction, where the other hunting party would soon intercept them.

  He slowed his horse to a trot and allowed his companions to race ahead. The sound of the hunt gradually receded as dogs and huntsmen vanished in the mist. He was drenched in sweat, and he had to take deep breaths until his pulse had returned to something like normal. The air was muggy and unpleasantly warm.

  Where was Esther? Hugh was alone in the fen. He had last seen her tearing off in pursuit of the hart.

  Hoofbeats sounded ahead of him. They grew louder until Esther emerged from the mists.

  “I left them to their bloodletting,” she said breathlessly. “Robert will soon notice I’m missing. We have to go.”

  Her pale face was taut with anxiety. Hugh judged her to be on the verge of panic. He gulped down his own fears and tried to sound confident.

  “Let’s head back the way we came,” he said. “If we can find the paths, we should be able to get out of the fens.”

  Unless we get lost, he added silently, or one of our horses stumbles, or turns a shoe, or Robert looses his dogs after us…

  He quelled these dreadful thoughts and turned his horse south-east. The ground they covered was firm enough, bar a few shallow bogs and streams. Hugh racked his brains to recall what he had learned from studying maps of the fenlands.

  Ely and the rebel camp lay roughly to the south-west. He guessed the huntsmen had ridden some eight miles to find game. From Ely it was another ten miles or so south to the town of Cambridge. The fens proper lay to the north, around Peterborough, King’s Lynn, and Lindsey. With this in mind, he led the way south for a couple of miles, and then turned his courser sharply west. There was no sight or sound of any pursuit.

  “Where are you going?” demanded Esther, keeping pace with him. “The paths lie further south.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he replied. “Even if we found them, they are the main route to the camp, and we run the risk of being seen. Ramsey lies about ten miles to the west. We can take refuge there.”

  He had witnessed Ramsey being ravaged by John d'Eyvill’s men. The town was undefended, but the abbey had high walls. If they were pursued, Hugh hoped they could beg the monks for sanctuary.

  Esther didn’t argue. “They blindfolded me when I was brought here,” she said. “I’m in your hands.”

  Hugh keenly felt the responsibility of that trust. If they were caught, the fault would lie with him.

  The route became more difficult. Soon they were picking their way across a landscape of braided rivers and waterlogged islands. At times they were obliged to dismount and lead their horses, rather than risk the animals coming to grief in the treacherous shallows. Sweat rolled freely down Hugh’s back as he waded through a bog that almost came up to his knees. He swore as one of his shoes came off and vanished into the thick, cloying silt.

  He reckoned they had made about four miles, but patches of dry land were becoming increasingly rare. The fen slowed them down. Mercifully, there was still no sound of pursuit. arely any sound at all, save his muttered curses and the occasional cry of a marsh warbler. The air was stale, rank with the smell of rotting vegetation. At one point an otter shot out of a mud-bank and slid into a stream, vanishing like an arrow under the inky black surface. Hugh envied its ease of movement.

  “If only we could swim to safety,” he gasped. He was soaked and spattered in river mud up to his knees. His courser wasn’t much better off. He brushed away the swarms of flies that irritated her, clustering around her eyes and muzzle.

  “We may have to,” said Esther, who had clambered onto the lip of a ridge and shaded her eyes to peer west. Leaving his horse to rest, Hugh laboured his way up the slope.

  What he saw drove his already flagging spirits into the depths. Immediately below them the land fell away steeply, and then ran out. Beyond was a broad tidal creek, a muddy wash of brown water stretching away north and south with no visible limits. Hugh groaned as he estimated the width of the creek to the opposite shore to be about two furlongs, or quarter of a mile. He didn’t care to guess at the depth of the murky waters.

  “The horses could swim across,” Esther suggested. H
ugh snorted and shook his head.

  “Not in that,” he said, pointing at the slow-moving ooze. “They would be sucked under, and us with them. We’ll have to look for a place to cross. Maybe the channel narrows upstream.”

  He avoided looking at Esther as they trudged up the bank. The burden of responsibility weighed heavier on him, combining with his fear to make him short-tempered. He was ready for an argument if she wanted one, but she said nothing.

  Her quiet forbearance only made Hugh feel worse. There was no sign of the creek narrowing. A sense of despair started to crawl over him.

  God intervened. Hugh spotted a hut, a crude-looking place of wattle and daub, with a roof made from woven reeds. It was built on a timber platform raised on stilts next to the banks of the creek. There was a coracle and a raft tied to a little jetty beside the hut.

  He and Esther stumbled towards it, dragging their horses after them. A man ducked out from the low doorway and watched them approach.

  He was a fisherman, skinny and shabby and of indeterminate age, and reminded Hugh of the peasant who had shown Robert d'Eyvill where to find the deer. He gave his name as Haget, and seemed a cheerful, welcoming sort, who showed no fear or surprise at strangers turning up at his door.

  “You’re not the first to get lost in the fens,” he said as he ushered them into his damp little home, “and won’t be the last. Some are too proud to ask for my help. Old Green Fingers has most of them for supper.”

  Hugh struggled to understand his thick accent, but guessed that Old Green Fingers was some malevolent marsh spirit.

  “Can you ferry us across the creek?” he asked, eager to be gone. The smoke from the sputtering fire in the middle of the hut made him cough and his eyes stream. There was no chimney, only a little hole hacked into the thatch to let out the smoke. The rank odour of smoked eels, fish, and Haget’s unwashed body made him gag.

  “I can,” said Haget, squatting on his naked haunches to poke at the fire, “but only one at a time. My little raft can’t take much weight.”

  He leered at them, displaying black and rotted teeth. “I’m thinking you two don’t have that much time. You’re on the run, yes? I can smell the fear on you.”

  Hugh was amazed Haget could smell anything save rotting fish skins and his own gruesome stench. “We’re fugitives, yes,” he replied impatiently, “does it matter?”

  Haget shrugged his bony shoulders. “Not to me. Lots of soldiers have been coming into the fens recently. I reckon you’re running from them. Don’t blame you. I seen them at work in the villages, torching anything that’s not wet, stealing anything not nailed down.”

  Esther was the first to be poled across the creek on Haget’s raft. The raft was made of willow branches laced together in a skeletal frame and covered with a piece of bull hide. Once she was safely across, he came back for her horse. The beast had to be coaxed aboard. She stood stock-still, legs trembling and eyes rolling in fear, as the fragile vessel carried her across the waters.

  Hugh watched nervously. At any moment he expected the branches to collapse under her weight, or the sound of hunting horns to reach his ears, with him stranded on the near bank and nowhere to run.

  Haget got Esther’s horse across safely. It was Hugh’s turn next. He stepped carefully aboard the gently swaying raft.

  They were halfway across when he heard the dogs.

  At first he thought his fearful imagination was getting the better of him. He strained to listen. There was it again. Dogs barking. The dread noise was carried on the gentle wind blowing from the north-west.

  “I hear it too,” said Haget. “Wolfhounds. Someone must want you two very badly.”

  “We were part of a hunting party,” Hugh replied absently. “Pole faster, for God’s sake! They can’t be far away.”

  “About three miles, if I’m any judge.” Haget dipped his long pole into the brown waters of the creek with slightly more urgency than before, but still far too slow for Hugh’s liking. He jumped into the shallows and waded the last few feet to the shore.

  “Fetch my horse, and be quick about it!” he yelled at Haget. Esther helped him to his feet.

  More distant barks and howls reached him, along with the faint cry of a horn. “They aren’t getting any closer,” Hugh said hopefully. “The marsh will slow them down, as it did us. They can’t get across the creek.”

  He cursed as he remembered something. “Sir Robert has that guide with him. He’ll know a way to cross. Hurry, can’t you!”

  This was aimed at Haget, who was having the devil’s own job persuading Hugh’s rouncey to get on the raft. At last he got her aboard and sculled back at his usual languid pace.

  Hugh wrung his hands and willed them to cross faster. He glimpsed movement on the opposite bank, and felt Esther’s hand clutch at his arm as she spotted it too. Men, horses, and hounds, floundering through the reeds about a mile downriver.

  He slid down the bank, ignoring the shock of the cold water as he waded in to his waist. “Throw me the reins!” he shouted at Haget, who obliged.

  Between them they got his horse off the raft and into the shallows, where Hugh scrambled into the saddle and urged her up onto dry land.

  “Here,” he cried, fishing a handful of coins from his purse and hurling them at Haget. A few plopped into the water and vanished without trace. The fisherman caught one and greedily clutched it to his thin chest.

  Hugh spared not a backward glance as he and Esther heeled their coursers into a full-blooded gallop.

  There were a few miles of fenland to cover yet, but they seemed to have come through the worst of it. Hugh thanked God for that mercy, and for guiding them to a narrow strip of dry causeway that wound through the reed beds and little patches of woodland. The sound of the hunt quickly faded behind them. Hope surged inside him as he spied the distant towers of Ramsey Abbey.

  *

  They reached the town, to find it still recovering from John d'Eyvill’s recent raid. The townspeople were busy mourning their dead and rebuilding their charred houses, and the monks of the abbey flatly refused to open their gates.

  “The rebels gave us too much of a scare,” Hugh was informed by the town bailiff. “God has abandoned us. The King has abandoned us.”

  Hugh had no time to sympathise. After a hurried bite to eat and a swallow of watered wine from a cook-shop, he and Esther resumed their flight.

  At least they were on the road instead of blundering their way through trackless fens. Hugh estimated it had been roughly two hours since they fled. It was now midmorning. From the hurried questions he had asked the bailiff, he knew that the town of Huntingdon lay a few miles to the west, on the north bank of the River Ouse.

  Some twenty miles beyond Huntingdon was the walled town of Northampton. If they could reach Northampton before nightfall, they would be safe. Robert d’Eyvill would dare not try and assault the place with so few men, and his hounds could bark outside the walls until they choked.

  Esther had no objection. “Let it be twenty miles or a hundred,” she said grimly. “I would stab myself rather than fall into their hands again.”

  To Hugh’s relief, their horses showed no signs of tiring. Once he stopped to look back for their pursuers, and glimpsed a faint cloud of dust on the horizon.

  “Sir Robert and his men are miles away,” he said. “Why is he so damned persistent?”

  Esther looked away. “I did nothing to encourage him,” she muttered, giving her reins a shake. “He is mad, like his brother. Like all of them.”

  They rode on, keeping the horses at a brisk but not wearying gallop, and reached Huntingdon. Hugh was tempted to hole up in some inn inside the town and hope the outlaws passed them by, but thought better of it. He wouldn’t feel safe until he had left the accursed fen country behind altogether.

  Once past Huntingdon they followed the Great North Road over the River Ouse. The road led south and through the town of Bedford. Hugh shivered as they rode past the bleak, ivy-grown ruin of Bedford Ca
stle, victim of some ancient war. They turned north-west, onto the final stretch of road that led to Northampton. So far their luck had held. Hugh prayed ceaselessly for God to continue smiling on them.

  His prayers were in vain. About six miles out of Bedford, Esther’s horse turned a shoe. She was almost thrown from the saddle, but managed to keep her seat as the animal whinnied and lurched to a halt in a spray of pebbles and dust.

  “Curse these roads!” she cried, climbing down to inspect the horse’s damaged foreleg.

  “It’s twisted, not broken,” she said after a tense moment, “but she won’t be able to bear my weight. We’ll have to leave her.”

  Hugh glanced back the way they had come. “There’s a few miles yet to Northampton. You take my horse, and I’ll run. If it comes to a chase, she’ll just have to carry both of us.”