Harlequin. Part 19

'Et confortabitur rex austri et de principibus eius praevalebit super eum,' Brother Germain said softly. Brother Germain said softly.

Sir Guillaume looked quizzically at Thomas. 'And the King from the south will be mighty,' Thomas reluctantly translated, 'but one of his princes will be stronger than him.'

'The Cathars are of the south,' Brother Germain said, 'and the prophet Daniel foresaw it all.' He raised his pigment-stained hands. 'The fight will be terrible, for the soul of the world is at stake, and they will use any weapon, even a woman. Filiaque regis austri veniet ad regem aquilonis facere amicitiam.' Filiaque regis austri veniet ad regem aquilonis facere amicitiam.'

'The daughter of the King of the south,' Thomas said, 'shall come to the King of the north and make a treaty.'

Brother Germain heard the distaste in Thomas's voice. 'You don't believe it?' he hissed. 'Why do you think we keep the scriptures from the ignorant? They contain all sorts of prophecies, young man, and each of them given direct to us by G.o.d, but such knowledge is confusing to the unlearned. Men go mad when they know too much.' He made the sign of the cross. 'I thank G.o.d I shall be dead soon and taken to the bliss above while you must struggle with this darkness.'

Thomas walked to the window and watched two wagons of grain being unloaded by novices. Sir Guillaume's men-at-arms were playing dice in the cloister. That was real, he thought, not some babbling prophet. His father had ever warned him against prophecy. It drives men's minds awry, he had said, and was that why his own mind had gone astray?

'The lance,' Thomas said, trying to cling to fact instead of fancy, 'was taken to England by the Vexille family. My father was one of them, but he fell out with the family and he stole the lance and hid it in his church. He was killed there, and at his death he told me it was his brother's son who did it. I think it is that man, my cousin, who called himself the Harlequin.' He turned to look at Brother Germain. 'My father was a Vexille, but he was no heretic. He was a sinner, yes, but he struggled against his sin, he hated his own father, and he was a loyal son of the Church.'

'He was a priest,' Sir Guillaume explained to the monk.

'And you are his son?' Brother Germain asked in a disapproving tone. The other monks had abandoned their tidying and were listening avidly.

'I am a priest's son,' Thomas said, 'and a good Christian.'

'So the family discovered where the lance was hidden,' Sir Guillaume took up the story, 'and hired me to retrieve it. But forgot to pay me.'

Brother Germain appeared not to have heard. He was staring at Thomas. 'You are English?'

'The bow is mine,' Thomas acknowledged.

'So you are a Vexille?'

Thomas shrugged. 'It would seem so.'

'Then you are one of the dark lords,' Brother Germain said.

Thomas shook his head. 'I am a Christian,' he said firmly.

'Then you have a G.o.d-given duty,' the small man said with surprising force, 'which is to finish the work that was left undone a hundred years ago. Kill them all! Kill them! And kill the woman. You hear me, boy? Kill the daughter of the King of the south before she seduces France to heresy and wickedness.'

'If we can even find the Vexilles,' Sir Guillaume said dubiously, and Thomas noted the word 'we'. 'They don't display their badge. I doubt they use the name Vexille. They hide.'

'But they have the lance now,' Brother Germain said, 'and they will use it for the first of their vengeances. They will destroy France, and in the chaos that ensues, they will attack the Church.' He moaned, as if he was in physical pain. 'You must take away their power, and their power is the Grail.'

So it was not just the lance that Thomas must save. To Father Hobbe's charge had been added all of Christendom. He wanted to laugh. Catharism had died a hundred years before, scourged and burned and dug out of the land like couch gra.s.s grubbed from a field! Dark lords, daughters of kings and princes of darkness were figments of the troubadours, not the business of archers. Except that when he looked at Sir Guillaume he saw that the Frenchman was not mocking the task. He was staring at a crucifix hanging on the scriptorium wall and mouthing a silent prayer. G.o.d help me, Thomas thought, G.o.d help me, but I am being asked to do what all the great knights of Arthur's round table failed to do: to find the Grail.

Philip of Valois, King of France, ordered every Frenchman of military age to gather at Rouen. Demands went to his va.s.sals and appeals were carried to his allies. He had expected the walls of Caen to hold the English for weeks, but the city had fallen in a day and the panicked survivors were spreading across northern France with terrible stories of devils unleashed.

Rouen, nestled in a great loop of the Seine, filled with warriors. Thousands of Genoese crossbowmen came by galley, beaching their ships on the river's bank and thronging the city's taverns, while knights and men-at-arms arrived from Anjou and Picardy, from Alencon and Champagne, from Maine, Touraine and Berry. Every blacksmith's shop became an armoury, every house a barracks and every tavern a brothel. More men arrived, until the city could scarce contain them, and tents had to be set up in the fields south of the city. Wagons crossed the bridge, loaded with hay and newly harvested grain from the rich farmlands north of the river, while from the Seine's southern bank came rumours. The English had taken Evreux, or perhaps it was Bernay? Smoke had been seen at Lisieux, and archers were swarming through the forest of Brotonne. A nun in Louviers had a dream in which the dragon killed St George. King Philip ordered the woman brought to Rouen, but she had a harelip, a hunchback and a stammer, and when she was presented to the King she proved unable to recount the dream, let alone confide G.o.d's strategy to His Majesty. She just shuddered and wept and the King dismissed her angrily, but took consolation from the bishop's astrologer who said Mars was in the ascendant and that meant victory was certain.

Rumour said the English were marching on Paris, then another rumour claimed they were going south to protect their territories in Gascony. It was said that every person in Caen had died, that the castle was rubble; then a story went about that the English themselves were dying of a sickness. King Philip, ever a nervous man, became petulant, demanding news, but his advisers persuaded their irritable master that wherever the English were they must eventually starve if they were kept south of the great River Seine that twisted like a snake from Paris to the sea. Edward's men were wasting the land, so needed to keep moving if they were to find food, and if the Seine was blocked then they could not go north towards the harbours on the Channel coast where they might expect supplies from England.

'They use arrows like a woman uses money,' Charles, the Count of Alencon and the King's younger brother, advised Philip, 'but they cannot fetch their arrows from France. They are brought to them by sea, and the further they go from the sea, the greater their problems.' So if the English were kept south of the Seine then they must eventually fight or make an ignominious retreat to Normandy.

'What of Paris? Paris? What of Paris?' the King demanded.

'Paris will not fall,' the Count a.s.sured his brother. The city lay north of the Seine, so the English would need to cross the river and a.s.sault the largest ramparts in Christendom, and all the while the garrison would be showering them with crossbow bolts and the missiles from the hundreds of small iron guns that had been mounted on the city walls.

'Maybe they will go south?' Philip worried. 'To Gascony?'

'If they march to Gascony,' the Count said, 'then they will have no boots by the time they arrive, and their arrow store will be gone. Let us pray they do go to Gascony, but above all things pray they do not reach the Seine's northern bank.' For if the English crossed the Seine they would go to the nearest Channel port to receive reinforcements and supplies and, by now, the Count knew, the English would be needing supplies. A marching army tired itself, its men became sick and its horses lame. An army that marched too long would eventually wear out like a tired crossbow.

So the French reinforced the great fortresses that guarded the Seine's crossings and where a bridge could not be guarded, such as the sixteen-arched bridge at Poissy, it was demolished. A hundred men with sledgehammers broke down the parapets and hammered the stonework of the arches into the river to leave the fifteen stumps of the broken piers studding the Seine like the stepping stones of a giant, while Poissy itself, which lay south of the Seine and was reckoned indefensible, was abandoned and its people evacuated to Paris. The wide river was being turned into an impa.s.sable barrier to trap the English in an area where their food must eventually run short. Then, when the devils were weakened, the French would punish them for the terrible damage they had wrought on France. The English were still burning towns and destroying farms so that, in those long summer days, the western and southern horizons were so smeared by smoke plumes that it seemed as if there were permanent clouds on the skylines. At night the world's edge glowed and folk fleeing the fires came to Rouen where, because so many could not be housed or fed, they were ordered across the river and away to wherever they might find shelter.

Sir Simon Jekyll, and Henry Colley, his man-at-arms, were among the fugitives, and they were not refused admittance, for they both rode destriers and were in mail. Colley wore his own mail and rode his own horse, but Sir Simon's mount and gear had been stolen from one of his other men-at-arms before he fled from Caen. Both men carried shields, but they had stripped the leather covers from the willow boards so that the shields bore no device, thus declaring themselves to be masterless men for hire. Scores like them came to the city, seeking a lord who could offer food and pay, but none arrived with the anger that filled Sir Simon.

It was the injustice that galled him. It burned his soul, giving him a l.u.s.t for revenge. He had come so close to paying all his debts - indeed, when the money from the sale of Jeanette's ships was paid from England he had expected to be free of all enc.u.mbrances - but now he was a fugitive. He knew he could have slunk back to England, but any man out of favour with the King or the King's eldest son could expect to be treated as a rebel, and he would be fortunate if he kept an acre of land, let alone his freedom. So he had preferred flight, trusting that his sword would win back the privileges he had lost to the Breton b.i.t.c.h and her puppy lover, and Henry Colley had ridden with him in the belief that any man as skilled in arms as Sir Simon could not fail.

No one questioned their presence in Rouen. Sir Simon's French was tinged with the accent of England's gentry, but so was the French of a score of other men from Normandy. What Sir Simon needed now was a patron, a man who would feed him and give him the chance to fight back against his persecutors, and there were plenty of great men looking for followers. In the fields south of Rouen, where the looping river narrowed the land, a pasture had been set aside as a tourney ground where, in front of a knowing crowd of men-at-arms, anyone could enter the lists to show their prowess. This was not a serious tournament - the swords were blunt and lances were tipped with wooden blocks - but rather it was a chance for masterless men to show their prowess with weapons, and a score of knights, the champions of dukes, counts, viscounts and mere lords, were the judges. Dozens of hopeful men were entering the lists, and any horseman who could last more than a few minutes against the well-mounted and superbly armed champions was sure to find a place in the entourage of a great n.o.bleman.

Sir Simon, on his stolen horse and with his ancient battered sword, was one of the least impressive men to ride into the pasture. He had no lance, so one of the champions drew a sword and rode to finish him off. At first no one took particular notice of the two men for other combats were taking place, but when the champion was sprawling on the gra.s.s and Sir Simon, untouched, rode on, the crowd took notice.

A second champion challenged Sir Simon and was startled by the fury which confronted him. He called out that the combat was not to the death, but merely a demonstration of swordplay, but Sir Simon gritted his teeth and hacked with the sword so savagely that the champion spurred and wheeled his horse away rather than risk injury. Sir Simon turned his horse in the pasture's centre, daring another man to face him, but instead a squire trotted a mare to the field's centre and wordlessly offered the Englishman a lance.

'Who sent it?' Sir Simon demanded.

'My lord.'

'Who is?'

'There,' the squire said, pointing to the pasture's end where a tall man in black armour and riding a black horse waited with his lance.

Sir Simon sheathed his sword and took the lance. It was heavy and not well balanced, and he had no lance rest in his armour that would cradle the long b.u.t.t to help keep the point raised, but he was a strong man and an angry one, and he reckoned he could manage the c.u.mbersome weapon long enough to break the stranger's confidence.

No other men fought on the field now. They just watched. Wagers were being made and all of them favoured the man in black. Most of the onlookers had seen him fight before, and his horse, his armour and his weapons were all plainly superior. He wore plate mail and his horse stood at least a hand's breadth taller than Sir Simon's sorry mount. His visor was down, so Sir Simon could not see the man's face, while Sir Simon himself had no faceplate, merely an old, cheap helmet like those worn by England's archers. Only Henry Colley laid a bet on Sir Simon, though he had difficulty in doing it for his French was rudimentary, but the money was at last taken.

The stranger's shield was black and decorated with a simple white cross, a device unknown to Sir Simon, while his horse had a black trapper that swept the pasture as the beast began to walk. That was the only signal the stranger gave and Sir Simon responded by lowering the lance and kicking his own horse forward. They were a hundred paces apart and both men moved swiftly into the canter. Sir Simon watched his opponent's lance, judging how firmly it was held. The man was good, for the lance tip scarcely wavered despite the horse's uneven motion. The shield was covering his trunk, as it should be.

If this had been a battle, if the man with the strange shield had not offered Sir Simon a chance of advancement, he might have lowered his own lance to strike his opponent's horse. Or, a more difficult strike, thrust the weapon's tip into the high pommel of his saddle. Sir Simon had seen a lance go clean through the wood and leather of a saddle to gouge into a man's groin, and it was ever a killing blow. But today he was required to show the skill of a knight, to strike clean and hard, and at the same time defend himself from the oncoming lance. The skill of that was to deflect the thrust which, having the weight of a horse behind it, could break a man's back by throwing him against the high cantle. The shock of two heavy hors.e.m.e.n meeting, and with all their weight concentrated into lance points, was like being hit by a cannon's stone.

Sir Simon was not thinking about any of this. He was watching the oncoming lance, glancing at the white cross on the shield where his own lance was aimed, and guiding his horse with pressure from his knees. He had trained to this from the time he could first sit on a pony. He had spent hours tilting at a quintain in his father's yard, and more hours schooling stallions to endure the noise and chaos of battle. He moved his horse slightly to the left like a man wanting to widen the angle at which the lances would strike and so deflect some of their force, and he noted that the stranger did not follow the move to straighten the line, but seemed happy to accept the lesser risk. Then both men rowelled back their spurs and the destriers went into the gallop. Sir Simon touched the horse's right side and straightened the line himself, driving hard at the stranger now, and leaning slightly forward to ready himself for the blow. His opponent was trying to swing towards him, but it was too late. Sir Simon's lance cracked against the black and white shield with a thump that hurled Sir Simon back, but the stranger's lance was not centred and banged against Sir Simon's plain shield and glanced off.

Sir Simon's lance broke into three pieces and he let it fall as he pressed his knee to turn the horse. His opponent's lance was across his body now and was enc.u.mbering the black-armoured knight. Sir Simon drew his sword and, while the other man was still trying to rid himself of the lance, gave a backswing that struck his opponent like a hammer blow.

The field was still. Henry Colley held out a hand for his winnings. The man pretended not to understand his crude French, but he understood the knife that the yellow-eyed Englishman suddenly produced and the coins, just as suddenly, appeared.

The knight in the black armour did not continue the fight, but instead curbed his horse and pushed up his visor. 'Who are you?'

'My name is Sir Simon Jekyll.'

'English?'

'I was.'

The two horses stood beside each other. The stranger threw down his lance and hung the shield from his pommel. He had a sallow face with a thin black moustache, clever eyes and a broken nose. He was a young man, not a boy, but a year or two older than Sir Simon.

'What do you want?' he asked Sir Simon.

'A chance to kill the Prince of Wales.'

The man smiled. 'Is that all?'

'Money, food, land, women,' Sir Simon said.

The man gestured to the side of the pasture. 'There are great lords here, Sir Simon, who will offer you pay, food and girls. I can pay you too, but not so well; I can feed you, though it will be common stuff; and the girls you must find for yourself. What I will promise you is that I shall equip you with a better horse, armour and weapons. I lead the best knights in this army and we are sworn to take captives who will make us rich. And none, I think, so rich as the King of England and his whelp. Not kill, mark you, but capture.'

Sir Simon shrugged. 'I'll settle for capturing the b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' he said.

'And his father,' the man said, 'I want his father too.'

There was something vengeful in the man's voice that intrigued Sir Simon. 'Why?' he asked.

'My family lived in England,' the man said, 'but when this king took power we supported his mother.'

'So you lost your land?' Sir Simon asked. He was too young to remember the turmoil of those times - when the King's mother had tried to keep power for herself and for her lover and the young Edward had struggled to break free. Young Edward had won and some of his old enemies had not forgotten.

'We lost everything,' the man said, 'but we shall get it back. Will you help?'

Sir Simon hesitated, wondering whether he would not do better with a wealthier lord, but he was intrigued by the man's calmness and by his determination to tear the heart out of England. 'Who are you?' he asked.

'I am sometimes called the Harlequin,' the man said.

The name meant nothing to Sir Simon. 'And you employ only the best?' he asked.

'I told you so.'

'Then you had best employ me,' Sir Simon said, 'with my man.' He nodded towards Henry Colley.

'Good,' the Harlequin said.

So Sir Simon had a new master and the King of France had gathered an army. The great lords: Alencon, John of Hainault, Aumale, the Count of Blois, who was brother to the aspiring Duke of Brittany, the Duke of Lorraine, the Count of Sancerre - all were in Rouen with their vast retinues of heavily armoured men. The army's numbers became so large that men could not count the ranks, but clerks reckoned there were at least eight thousand men-at-arms and five thousand cross-bowmen in Rouen, and that meant that Philip of Valois's army already outnumbered Edward of England's forces, and still more men were coming. John, Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia, a friend of Philip of France, was bringing his formidable knights. The King of Majorca came with his famed lances, and the Duke of Normandy was ordered to abandon the siege of an English fortress in the south and bring his army north. The priests blessed the soldiers and promised them that G.o.d would recognize the virtue of France's cause and crush the English mercilessly.

The army could not be fed in Rouen, so at last it crossed the bridge to the north bank of the Seine, leaving a formidable garrison behind to guard the river crossing. Once out of the city and on the long roads stretching through the newly harvested fields, men could dimly comprehend just how vast their army was. It stretched for miles in long columns of armed men, troops of hors.e.m.e.n, battalions of crossbowmen and, trailing behind, the innumerable host of infantry armed with axes, billhooks and spears. This was the might of France, and France's friends had rallied to the cause. There was a troop of knights from Scotland - big, savage-looking men who nourished a rare hatred of the English. There were mercenaries from Germany and Italy, and there were knights whose names had become famous in Christendom's tournaments, the elegant killers who had become rich in the sport of war. The French knights spoke not just of defeating Edward of England, but of carrying the war to his kingdom, foreseeing earldoms in Ess.e.x and dukedoms in Devonshire. The Bishop of Meaux encouraged his cook to think of a recipe for archers' fingers, a daube daube perhaps, seasoned with thyme? He would, the bishop insisted, force the dish down Edward of England's throat. perhaps, seasoned with thyme? He would, the bishop insisted, force the dish down Edward of England's throat.

Sir Simon rode a seven-year-old destrier now, a fine grey that must have cost the Harlequin close to a hundred pounds. He wore a hauberk of close-ringed mail covered with a surcoat that bore the white cross. His horse had a chanfron of boiled leather and a black trapper, while at Sir Simon's waist hung a sword made in Poitiers. Henry Colley was almost as well equipped, though in place of a sword he carried a four-foot-long shaft of oak topped with a spiked metal ball.

'They're a solemn bunch,' he complained to Sir Simon about the other men who followed the Harlequin. 'Like b.l.o.o.d.y monks.'

'They can fight,' Sir Simon said, though he himself was also daunted by the grim dedication of the Harlequin's men.

The men were all confident, but none took the English as lightly as the rest of the army, which had convinced itself that any battle would be won by numbers alone. The Harlequin quizzed Sir Simon and Henry Colley about the English way of fighting, and his questions were shrewd enough to force both men to drop their bombast and think.

'They'll fight on foot,' Sir Simon concluded. He, like all knights, dreamed of a battle conducted on horseback, of swirling men and couched lances, but the English had learned their business in the wars against the Scots and knew that men on foot defended territory much more effectively than hors.e.m.e.n. 'Even the knights will fight on foot,' Sir Simon forecast, 'and for every man-at-arms they'll have two or three archers. Those are the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to watch.'

The Harlequin nodded. 'But how do we defeat the archers?'

'Let them run out of arrows,' Sir Simon said. 'They must, eventually. So let every hothead in the army attack, then wait till the arrow bags are empty. Then you'll get your revenge.'

'It is more than revenge I want,' the Harlequin said quietly.

'What?'

The Harlequin, a handsome man, smiled at Sir Simon, though there was no warmth in the smile. 'Power,' he answered very calmly. 'With power, Sir Simon, comes privilege and with privilege, wealth. What are kings,' he asked, 'but men who have risen high? So we shall rise too, and use the defeat of kings as the rungs of our ladder.'

Such talk impressed Sir Simon, though he did not wholly understand it. It seemed to him that the Harlequin was a man of high fancies, but that did not matter because he was also unswervingly dedicated to the defeat of men who were Sir Simon's enemies. Sir Simon daydreamed of the battle; he saw the English prince's frightened face, heard his scream and revelled in the thought of taking the insolent whelp prisoner. Jeanette too. The Harlequin could be as secretive and subtle as he wished so long as he led Sir Simon to those simple desires.

And so the French army marched, and still it grew as men came from the outlying parts of the kingdom and from the va.s.sal states beyond France's frontiers. It marched to seal off the Seine and so trap the English, and its confidence soared when it was learned that the King had made his pilgrimage to the Abbey of St Denis to fetch the oriflamme. It was France's most sacred symbol, a scarlet banner kept by the Benedictines in the abbey where the Kings of France lay entombed, and every man knew that when the oriflamme was unfurled no quarter would be given. It was said to have been carried by Charlemagne himself, and its silk was red as blood, promising carnage to the enemies of France. The English had come to fight, the oriflamme had been released and the dance of the armies had begun.

Sir Guillaume gave Thomas a linen shirt, a good mail coat, a leather-lined helmet and a sword. 'It's old, but good,' he said of the sword, 'a cutter rather than a piercer.' He provided Thomas with a horse, a saddle, a bridle and gave him money. Thomas tried to refuse the last gift, but Sir Guillaume brushed his protest aside. 'You've taken what you wanted from me, I might as well give you the rest.'

'Taken?' Thomas was puzzled, even hurt, by the accusation.

'Eleanor.'

'I've not taken her,' Thomas protested.

Sir Guillaume's ravaged face broke into a grin. 'You will, boy,' he said, 'you will.'

They rode next day, going eastwards in the wake of the English army that was now far off. News had come to Caen of burned towns, but no one knew where the enemy had gone and so Sir Guillaume planned to lead his twelve men-at-arms, his squire and his servant to Paris. 'Someone will know where the King is,' he said. 'And you, Thomas, what will you do?'

Thomas had been wondering the same ever since he woke to the light in Sir Guillaume's house, but now he must make the decision and, to his surprise, there was no conflict at all. 'I shall go to my king,' he said.

'And what of this Sir Simon? What if he hangs you again?'

'I have the Earl of Northampton's protection,' Thomas said, though he reflected it had not worked before.

'And what of Eleanor?' Sir Guillaume turned to look at his daughter who, to Thomas's surprise, had accompanied them. Her father had given her a small palfrey and, unused to riding, she sat its saddle awkwardly, clutching the high pommel. She did not know why her father had let her come, suggesting to Thomas that perhaps he wanted her to be his cook.

The question made Thomas blush. He knew he could not fight against his own friends, but nor did he want to leave Eleanor. 'I shall come looking for her,' he told Sir Guillaume.

'If you still live,' the Frenchman growled. 'Why don't you fight for me?'

'Because I'm English.'

Sir Guillaume sneered. 'You're Cathar, you're French, you're from Languedoc, who knows what you are? You're a priest's son, a mongrel b.a.s.t.a.r.d of heretic stock.'

'I'm English,' Thomas said.

'You're a Christian,' Sir Guillaume retorted, 'and G.o.d has given you and me a duty. How are you to fulfil that duty by joining Edward's army?'