скачать книгу бесплатно
‘So where do you look?’
Thomas wanted to say nowhere, that the nonsense was not worth a moment of their time, but the Abbé Planchard, the best man he had ever known, a Christian who was truly Christ-like and also a descendant of one of the Dark Lords, had an elder brother. ‘There’s a place called Mouthoumet,’ Thomas said, ‘in Armagnac. I can think of nowhere else to look.’
‘“Do not fail us in this,”’ Genevieve read the letter’s last line aloud.
‘Billy’s caught the madness,’ Thomas said, amused.
‘But we go to Armagnac?’
‘Once we’re finished here,’ Thomas said.
Because before the treasure could be sought the Count of Labrouillade must be taught that greed has a price.
So le Bâtard set up the ambush.
It was raining in Paris. A steady rain that diluted the filth in the gutters and spread its stink through the narrow streets. Beggars crouched under the overhanging houses, holding out skinny hands to the horsemen who threaded through the city gate. There were two hundred men-at-arms, all big men on big horses, and the riders were shrouded in woollen cloaks with their heads protected from the rain by steel helmets. They looked about them as they rode through the rain, plainly astonished by such a great city, and the Parisians sheltering beneath the jutting storeys noted that these men looked wild and strange, like warriors from a nightmare. Many were bearded and all had faces roughened by weather and scarred by war. Real soldiers, these, not the followers of a great lord who spent half their time quarrelling in castle precincts, but men who carried their weapons through snow and wind and sun, and men who rode battle-scarred horses and carried battered shields. Men who would kill for the price of a button. A standard bearer rode with the men-at-arms and his rain-soaked flag showed a great red heart.
Behind the two hundred men-at-arms came packhorses, over three hundred of them, loaded with bags, lances and armour. The squires and servants who led the packhorses wore blankets, or so it seemed to the onlookers. The garments, little more than matted and grubby rags, were thrown over a shoulder then wrapped and belted at the waist, and the servants wore no breeches, though no one laughed at them because their belts carried weapons, either crude long swords with plain hilts, or chipped axes, or skinning knives. They were country weapons, but weapons that looked as though they had received much use. There were women with the servants and they were dressed in the same barbaric manner, with their bare legs muddied and red. They wore their hair loose, but no Parisian would dare mock them, for these ragged women were armed like their men and looked just as dangerous.
The horsemen and their servants stopped beside the river at the city’s centre and there they divided into small groups, each going to find their own lodgings, but one group of half a dozen men, attended by servants better dressed than the others, crossed the bridge to an island in the Seine. They twisted down narrow alleys until they came to a gilded gatehouse where liveried spearmen stood guard. Inside was a courtyard, stables, a chapel and stairways leading into the royal palace, and the half-dozen horsemen were greeted with bows, their horses were taken away and they were led up stairs and down corridors to their quarters.
William, Lord of Douglas and leader of the two hundred men-at-arms, was given a chamber facing the river. Sheets of horn covered the windows, but he knocked them out to let the damp air into the room, where a great fire burned in a hearth carved with the French royal coat of arms. The Lord of Douglas stood by the fire as servants brought in bedding, wine, food and three women. ‘You may take your choice, my lord,’ the steward said.
‘I’ll take all three,’ Douglas said.
‘A wise choice, my lord,’ the steward replied, bowing, ‘and is there anything else your lordship desires?’
‘Is my nephew here?’
‘He is, my lord.’
‘Then I want him.’
‘He shall be sent,’ the steward said, ‘and His Majesty will receive you for supper.’
‘Tell him I am filled with happiness at the prospect,’ Douglas said flatly. William, Lord of Douglas, was twenty-eight years old and looked forty. He had a clipped brown beard, a face scarred from a dozen skirmishes, and eyes as cold as the winter sky. He spoke perfect French because he had spent much of his boyhood in France, learning the ways of French knights and perfecting his skills with sword and lance, but for ten years now he had been home in Scotland where he had become the leader of the Douglas clan and a magnate in the Scottish council. He had opposed the truce with England, but the rest of the council had insisted, and so the Lord of Douglas had brought his fiercest warriors to France. If they could not fight the English at home then he would unleash them on the old enemy in France.
‘Take off your clothes,’ he told the three girls. For a heartbeat they looked astonished, but the expression on Douglas’s grim face persuaded them to obey. A good-looking man, all three thought, tall and well muscled, but he had a warrior’s face, hard as a blade and with no pity. It promised to be a long night. The three were naked by the time Douglas’s nephew arrived. He was not much younger than his uncle, had a broad, cheerful face, and was wearing a velvet jerkin trimmed with gold embroidery above sky-blue skin-tight leggings that were tucked into soft leather boots tasselled with gold thread. ‘What the hell are you wearing?’ Douglas asked.
The young man plucked the embroidered hem of the jerkin. ‘It’s what everyone wears in Paris.’
‘Good Christ, Robbie, you look like an Edinburgh whore. What do you think of those three?’
Sir Robert Douglas turned and inspected the three girls. ‘I like the one in the middle,’ he said.
‘Jesus Christ, she’s so skinny you could use her as a needle. I like girls with meat on the bone. So what has the king decided?’
‘To wait on events.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Douglas said again, and went to the window where he stared at the river, which was being dappled by rain. The stench of sewage seeped from the slow swirling water. ‘Does he know what’s looming?’
‘I have told him,’ Robbie said. He had been sent to Paris to negotiate terms with King Jean, and he had arranged for his uncle’s men to be paid and armoured by the French king, and now the men had come and the Lord of Douglas was eager for them to be unleashed. There were English forces in Flanders, in Brittany and in Gascony, and the Prince of Wales was raping southern France, and Douglas wanted a chance to kill some of the bastards. He hated the English.
‘He knows the boy Edward will likely strike north next year?’ Douglas asked. The boy Edward was the Prince of Wales.
‘I have told him.’
‘And he’s havering?’
‘He’s havering,’ Robbie confirmed. ‘He likes feasts and music and entertainment. He’s not fond of soldiering.’
‘Then we’ll have to put some backbone into the bloody man, won’t we?’
Scotland had known little but disaster in the last few years. The pestilence had come and emptied the valleys of souls, but almost ten years before, at Durham, a Scottish army had been defeated and the King of Scotland had been taken prisoner by the hated English. King David was now a prisoner in London’s Tower, and the Scots, to get him back, were expected to pay a ransom so vast that it would impoverish the kingdom for years.
But the Lord of Douglas reckoned the king could be restored in a different way, a soldier’s way, and that was the main reason he had brought his men to France. In the spring the Prince of Wales would probably lead another army out of Gascony, and that army would do what English armies always did, rape and burn and pillage and destroy, and the purpose of that chevauchée was to force the French to bring an army against them, and then the dreaded English archers would go to work and France would suffer another defeat. Its great men would be taken prisoner and England would get even wealthier on their ransoms.
But the Lord of Douglas knew how to defeat archers, and that was the gift he brought to France, and if he could persuade the French king to oppose the boy Edward then he saw the chance of a great victory, and in that victory he planned to capture the prince. He would hold the prince to ransom, a ransom equal to that of the King of Scotland. It could be done, he thought, if only the King of France would fight.
‘And you, Robbie? You’ll fight?’
Robbie coloured. ‘I took an oath.’
‘Damn your bloody oath!’
‘I took an oath,’ Robbie persisted. He had been a prisoner of the English, but he had been released and his ransom paid on a promise not to fight the English ever again. The promise had been extracted and the ransom had been paid by his friend, Thomas of Hookton, and for eight years Robbie had kept the promise, but now his uncle was pushing him to break the oath.
‘What money do you have, boy?’
‘Your money, uncle.’
‘And do you have any left?’ Douglas waited, saw his nephew’s sheepishness. ‘So you’ve gambled it away?’
‘Yes.’
‘In debt?’
Robbie nodded.
‘If you want more, boy, you fight. You strip off that whore’s jacket and put on mail. For Christ’s sake, Robbie, you’re a good fighter! I want you! Have you no pride?’
‘I took an oath,’ Robbie repeated stubbornly.
‘Then you can untake the bloody thing. Or become a pauper. See if I care. Now take that skinny bitch and prove you’re a man, and I’ll see you at supper.’
When the Lord of Douglas would try to make the King of France into a man.
The archers lined the woods. Their horses were picketed a hundred yards away, guarded by two men, but the bowmen hurried to the edge of the trees and, when the leading horsemen of the Count of Labrouillade’s straggling column were less than one hundred yards away, they loosed their arrows.
The Hellequin had become rich on two things. The first was their leader, Thomas of Hookton, who was a good soldier, a supple thinker, and clever in battle, but there were plenty of men in southern France who could match le Bâtard’s cleverness. What they could not do was deploy the Hellequin’s second advantage, the English war bow, and it was that which had made Thomas and his men wealthy.
It was a simple thing. A stave of yew, a little longer than the height of a man and preferably cut from one of the lands close to the Mediterranean. The bowyer would take the stave and shape it, keeping the dense heartwood on one side and the springy sapwood on the other, and he would paint it to keep the moisture trapped in the stave, then nock it with two tips of horn that held the cord, which was woven from fibres of hemp. Some archers liked to add strands of their woman’s hair to the cord, claiming that it stopped the strings from breaking, but Thomas, in twelve years of fighting, had found no difference. The cord was whipped where the arrow rested on the string, and that was the war bow. A peasant’s weapon of yew, hemp and horn, shooting an arrow made from ash, hornbeam or birch, tipped with a steel point and fledged with feathers taken from the wing of a goose, and always taken from the same wing so that the feathers curved in the same direction.
The war bow was cheap and it was lethal. Brother Michael was not a weak man, but he could not draw a bow’s cord more than a hand’s breadth, but Thomas’s archers hauled the string back to their ears and did it sixteen or seventeen times a minute. They had muscles like steel, humps of muscle on their backs, broad chests, thick arms, and the bow was useless without the muscles. Any man could shoot a crossbow, and a good crossbow outranged the yew bow, but it cost a hundred times as much to manufacture and it took five times longer to reload, and, while the crossbowman was winding the ratchet to haul back his cord, the English archer would close the range and shoot a half-dozen points. It was the English and the Welsh archers who had the muscle, and they began training as children, just as Hugh, Thomas’s son, was training now. He had a small bow and his father expected him to shoot three hundred arrows a day. He must shoot and shoot and shoot until he no longer had to think about where the arrow would go, but would simply loose in the knowledge that the arrow would speed where he intended, and every day the muscle grew until, in ten years’ time, Hugh would be ready to stand in the archers’ line and loose goose-feathered death from a great war bow.
Thomas had thirty archers at the edge of the wood and in the first half-minute they launched more than one hundred and fifty arrows, and it was not war, but massacre. An arrow could pierce chain mail at two hundred paces, but none of the Count of Labrouillade’s men were wearing armour or carrying shields, all of which they had loaded onto packhorses. Some of the men had leather coats, but all had taken off their heavy plate or mail, and so the arrows slashed into them, wounding men and horses, driving them to instant chaos. The crossbowmen were on foot and a long way behind the count’s horsemen, and anyway they were cumbered with their sacks of plunder. It would take minutes for them to ready for battle, and Thomas did not give them the minutes. Instead, as the arrows plunged into the screaming horses and fallen riders, Thomas led his twenty-two men-at-arms out of the woods onto the count’s flank.
Thomas’s men were mounted on destriers, the great stallions that could carry the weight of man, armour and weapons. They had not brought lances, for those weapons were heavy and would have slowed their march; instead they drew their swords or wielded axes and maces. Many carried a shield on which the black-barred badge of le Bâtard was painted, and Thomas, once they were out of the trees, turned the line to face the enemy and swung his sword blade down as a signal to advance.
They trotted forward, knee to knee. Rocks studded the high grassland and the line would divide around them, then rejoin. The men were in mail. Some had added pieces of plate armour, a breastplate or perhaps an espalier to protect the shoulders, and all wore bascinets, the simple open-faced helmet that let a man see in battle. The arrows continued to fall. Some of the count’s horsemen were trying to escape, wrenching their reins to ride back northwards, but the thrashing of the wounded horses obstructed them and they could see the black line of Hellequin men-at-arms coming from the side, and some, in desperation, hauled out their swords. A handful broke clear and raced back towards the northern woods where the crossbowmen might be found, while another handful gathered around their lord, the count, who had one arrow in his thigh despite Thomas’s orders that the count was not to be killed. ‘A dead man can’t pay his debts,’ Thomas had said, ‘so shoot anyone else, but make certain Labrouillade lives.’ Now the count was trying to turn his horse, but his weight was too great and the horse was wounded, and he could not turn, and then the Hellequin spurred into the canter, the swords were lowered to the lunge position, and the arrows stopped.
The archers stopped for fear of hitting their own horsemen, then discarded their bows and pulled out swords and ran to join the killing as the men-at-arms struck.
The sound of the charge striking home was like butchers’ cleavers hitting carcasses. Men screamed. Some threw down swords and held their hands out in mute surrender. Thomas, not as comfortable on horseback as he was with a bow, had his lunge deflected by a sword. He crashed past the man, backswung his blade that hammered harmlessly against leather, then swept it forward into a man’s red hair. That man went down, spilling from his saddle, and the Hellequin were turning, coming back to finish the enemy. A rider wearing a black hat plumed with long white feathers lunged a sword at Thomas’s belly. The blade slid off his mail, and Thomas brought his sword back in a wild swing that sliced into the man’s face just as Arnaldus, one of the Gascons in the Hellequin, speared the man’s spine with another sword. The count’s rider was making a high-pitched keening sound, shaking uncontrollably, blood pouring from his shattered face. He let his sword drop, and Arnaldus speared him again. He fell slowly sideways. An archer seized the reins of the man’s horse. The dying man was the last to offer any resistance. The count’s men had been taken by surprise, they had fought an unequal skirmish against men in armour whose lives were spent fighting, and the struggle was over in seconds. A dozen of the count’s men escaped, the rest were dead or prisoners, and the count himself was captured. ‘Archers!’ Thomas shouted. ‘Bows!’ Their job would be to watch the northern woods in case the crossbowmen had fight in them, though Thomas doubted any would want to fight after their lord was captured. A dozen archers collected arrows, cutting them out of dead and wounded horses, picking them from the ground and filling their arrow bags. The prisoners were herded to one side and made to yield their weapons as Thomas walked his horse to where the wounded count lay on the turf. ‘My lord,’ he greeted him, ‘you owe me money.’
‘You were paid!’ the count blustered.
‘Sam,’ Thomas called to the archer, ‘if his lordship argues with me you can fill him with arrows.’ He spoke in French, which Sam understood, and the bowman put an arrow on his string and offered the count a happy grin.
‘My lord,’ Thomas said again, ‘you owe me money.’
‘You could have pleaded your case,’ Labrouillade said.
‘Pleaded? Argued? Wrangled? Delayed? Why should I let your lawyers weave spells?’ Thomas shook his head. ‘Where are the genoins you took from Paville?’
The count thought of claiming that the coins were still at Villon’s castle, but the archer had his string half drawn and le Bâtard’s face was implacable, and so the count reluctantly told the truth. ‘They are in Labrouillade.’
‘Then you will send one of your men-at-arms to Labrouillade,’ Thomas said courteously, ‘with orders that the money is to be brought here. And when it is, my lord, we shall let you go.’
‘Let me go?’ The count was surprised.
‘What use are you to me?’ Thomas asked. ‘It would take months to raise your ransom, my lord, and in those years you’d consume a greater value than the ransom in food. No, I shall let you go. And now, my lord, when you have sent for the coins you might permit my men to take that arrow from your thigh?’
A man-at-arms was summoned from the prisoners, given a captured horse and sent south with his message. Thomas then called Brother Michael. ‘You know how to take arrows out of flesh?’
The young monk looked alarmed. ‘No, sir.’
‘Then watch as Sam does it. You can learn.’
‘I don’t want to learn,’ Brother Michael blurted out, then looked abashed.
‘You don’t want to learn?’
‘I don’t like medicine,’ the monk confessed, ‘but my abbot insisted.’
‘What do you want?’ Thomas asked.
Michael looked confused. ‘To serve God?’ he suggested.
‘Then serve him by learning how to extract arrows,’ Thomas said.
‘You’d better hope it’s a bodkin,’ Sam told the count cheerfully. ‘It’s going to hurt either way, but I can get a bodkin out in an eyeblink. If it’s a flesh arrow I’ll have to cut the bastard out. Are you ready?’
‘Bodkin?’ the count asked faintly. Sam had spoken in English, but the count had half understood.
Sam produced two arrows from his bag. One had a long slender head without barbs. ‘A bodkin, my lord, made for slipping through armour.’ He tapped it with the second arrow that had a barbed triangular head. ‘A flesh arrow,’ he said. He drew a short knife from his belt. ‘Won’t take a moment. Are you ready?’
‘My own physician will treat me!’ the count shouted at Thomas.
‘If you wish, my lord,’ Thomas said. ‘Sam? Cut the shaft off, bind him up.’
The count yelped as the arrow was cut. Thomas rode away, going to where the Lord of Villon lay in his cart. The man was curled up, naked and bloody. Thomas dismounted, tied his horse to the shafts and called Villon’s name. The count did not move and Thomas clambered into the wagon, turned the man over, and saw he had died. There was enough congealed blood in the cart to fill a pair of buckets, and Thomas grimaced as he jumped down, then wiped his boots on the pale grass before going to the caged cart where the Countess Bertille watched him with wide eyes. ‘The Lord of Villon is dead,’ Thomas said.
‘Why didn’t you kill the Lord of Labrouillade?’ she asked, jerking her head towards her husband.
‘I don’t kill a man for owing me money,’ Thomas said, ‘but only for refusing to pay it.’ He drew his sword and used it to snap the feeble lock of the cage door, then held out his hand to help the countess down to the grass. ‘Your husband,’ he said, ‘will be free to go soon. You also, my lady.’
‘I’m not going with him!’ she said defiantly. She stalked to where the count lay on the grass. ‘He can sleep with the pigs,’ she said, pointing to the two carcasses on top of the cage, ‘he won’t know the difference.’
The count tried to get to his feet to slap his wife, but Sam was binding his wound with a strip of linen torn from a corpse’s shirt and he yanked the linen tightly so that the count yelped with pain again. ‘Sorry, my lord,’ Sam said. ‘Just stay still, sire, won’t be but a moment.’
The countess spat at him and walked away.
‘Bring the bitch here!’ the count shouted.
The countess kept walking, clutching her torn dress to her breasts. Genevieve touched her shoulder, said something, then approached Thomas. ‘What will you do with her?’
‘She’s not mine to do anything with,’ Thomas said, ‘but she can’t come with us.’
‘Why not?’ Genevieve asked.
‘When we leave here,’ Thomas said, ‘we have to go to Mouthoumet. We might have to fight our way there. We can’t take useless mouths that will slow us down.’
Genevieve smiled briefly, then gazed at the crossbowmen who were sitting at the edge of the northern woods. None of them had a weapon, instead they just watched their lord’s humiliation. ‘Your soul has hardened, Thomas,’ she said softly.
‘I’m a soldier.’
‘You were a soldier when I met you,’ Genevieve said, ‘and I was a prisoner, accused of heresy, excommunicated, condemned to death, but you took me away. What was I but a useless mouth?’
‘She’s trouble,’ Thomas said irritably.
‘And I wasn’t?’
‘But what will we do with her?’ he asked.
‘Take her away.’
‘From what?’
