Читать книгу Harlequin - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 10

It was winter. A cold morning wind blew from the sea bringing a sour salt smell and a spitting rain that would inevitably sap the power of the bowstrings if it did not let up.

‘What it is,’ Jake said, ‘is a waste of goddamn time.’

No one took any notice of him.

‘Could have stayed in Brest,’ Jake grumbled, ‘been sitting by a fire. Drinking ale.’

Again he was ignored.

‘Funny name for a town,’ Sam said after a long while. ‘Brest. I like it, though.’ He looked at the archers. ‘Maybe we’ll see the Blackbird again?’ he suggested.

‘Maybe she’ll put a bolt through your tongue,’ Will Skeat growled, ‘and do us all a favour.’

The Blackbird was a woman who fought from the town walls every time the army made an assault. She was young, had black hair, wore a black cloak and shot a crossbow. In the first assault, when Will Skeat’s archers had been in the vanguard of the attack and had lost four men, they had been close enough to see the Blackbird clearly and they had all thought her beautiful, though after a winter campaign of failure, cold, mud and hunger, almost any woman looked beautiful. Still, there was something special about the Blackbird.

‘She doesn’t load that crossbow herself,’ Sam said, unmoved by Skeat’s surliness.

‘Of course she bloody doesn’t,’ Jake said. ‘There ain’t a woman born that can crank a crossbow.’

‘Dozy Mary could,’ another man said. ‘Got muscles like a bullock, she has.’

‘And she closes her eyes when she shoots,’ Sam said, still talking of the Blackbird. ‘I noticed.’

‘That’s because you weren’t doing your goddamn job,’ Will Skeat snarled, ‘so shut your mouth, Sam.’

Sam was the youngest of Skeat’s men. He claimed to be eighteen, though he was really not sure because he had lost count. He was a draper’s son, had a cherubic face, brown curls and a heart as dark as sin. He was a good archer though; no one could serve Will Skeat without being good.

‘Right, lads,’ Skeat said, ‘make ready.’

He had seen the stir in the encampment behind them. The enemy would notice it soon and the church bells would ring the alarm and the town walls would fill with defenders armed with crossbows. The crossbows would rip their bolts into the attackers and Skeat’s job today was to try to clear those crossbowmen off the wall with his arrows. Some chance, he thought sourly. The defenders would crouch behind their crenellations and so deny his men an opportunity to aim, and doubtless this assault would end as the five other attacks had finished, in failure.

It had been a whole campaign of failure. William Bohun, the Earl of Northampton, who led this small English army, had launched the winter expedition in hope of capturing a stronghold in northern Brittany, but the assault on Carhaix had been a humiliating failure, the defenders of Guingamp had laughed at the English, and the walls of Lannion had repulsed every attack. They had captured Tréguier, but as that town had no walls it was not much of an achievement and no place to make a fortress. Now, at the bitter end of the year, with nothing better to do, the Earl’s army had fetched up outside this small town, which was scarcely more than a walled village, but even this miserable place had defied the army. The Earl had launched attack after attack and all had been beaten back. The English had been met by a storm of crossbow bolts, the scaling ladders had been thrust from the ramparts and the defenders had exulted in each failure.

‘What is this goddamn place called?’ Skeat asked.

‘La Roche-Derrien,’ a tall archer answered.

‘You would know, Tom,’ Skeat said, ‘you know everything.’

‘That is true, Will,’ Thomas said gravely, ‘quite literally true.’ The other archers laughed.

‘So if you know so bloody much,’ Skeat said, ‘tell me what this goddamn town is called again.’

‘La Roche-Derrien.’

‘Daft bloody name,’ Skeat said. He was grey-haired, thin-faced and had known nearly thirty years of fighting. He came from Yorkshire and had begun his career as an archer fighting against the Scots. He had been as lucky as he was skilled, and so he had taken plunder, survived battles and risen in the ranks until he was wealthy enough to raise his own band of soldiers. He now led seventy men-at-arms and as many archers, whom he had contracted to the Earl of Northampton’s service which was why he was crouching behind a wet hedge a hundred and fifty paces from the walls of a town whose name he still could not remember. His men-at-arms were in the camp, given a day’s rest after leading the last failed assault. Will Skeat hated failure.

‘La Roche what?’ he asked Thomas.

‘Derrien.’

‘What does that goddamn mean?’

‘That, I confess, I do not know.’

‘Sweet Christ,’ Skeat said in mock wonder, ‘he doesn’t know everything.’

‘It is, however, close to derrière, which means arse,’ Thomas added. ‘The rock of the arse is my best translation.’

Skeat opened his mouth to say something, but just then the first of La Roche-Derrien’s church bells sounded the alarm. It was the cracked bell, the one that sounded so harsh, and within seconds the other churches added their tolling so that the wet wind was filled with their clangour. The noise was greeted by a subdued English cheer as the assault troops came from the camp and pounded up the road towards the town’s southern gate. The leading men carried ladders, the rest had swords and axes. The Earl of Northampton led the assault, as he had led all the others, conspicuous in his plate armour half covered by a surcoat showing his badge of the lions and stars.

‘You know what to do!’ Skeat bellowed.

The archers stood, drew their bows and loosed. There were no targets on the walls, for the defenders were staying low, but the rattle of the steel-tipped arrows on the stones should keep them crouching. The white-feathered arrows hissed as they flew. Two other archer bands were adding their own shafts, many of them firing high into the sky so that their missiles dropped vertically onto the wall’s top, and to Skeat it seemed impossible that anyone could live under that hail of feather-tipped steel, yet as soon as the Earl’s attacking column came within a hundred paces the crossbow bolts began to spit from the walls.

There was a breach close to the gate. It had been made by a catapult, the only siege machine left in decent repair, and it was a poor breach, for only the top third of the wall had been dismantled by the big stones and the townsfolk had crammed timber and bundles of cloth into the gap, but it was still a weakness in the wall and the ladder men ran towards it, shouting, as the crossbow bolts whipped into them. Men stumbled, fell, crawled and died, but enough lived to throw two ladders against the breach and the first men-at-arms began to climb. The archers were loosing as fast as they could, overwhelming the top of the breach with arrows, but then a shield appeared there, a shield that was immediately stuck by a score of shafts, and from behind the shield a crossbowman shot straight down one of the ladders, killing the leading man. Another shield appeared, another crossbow was loosed. A pot was shoved onto the breach’s top, then toppled over, and a gush of steaming liquid spilled down to make a man scream in agony. Defenders were hurling boulders over the breach and their crossbows were snapping.

‘Closer!’ Skeat shouted, and his archers pushed through the hedge and ran to within a hundred paces of the town ditch, where they again loosed their long war bows and slashed their arrows into the embrasures. Some defenders were dying now, for they had to show themselves to shoot their crossbows down into the crowd of men who jostled at the foot of the four ladders that had been laid against the breach or walls. Men-at-arms climbed, a forked pole shoved one ladder back and Thomas twitched his left hand to change his aim and released his fingers to drive an arrow into the breast of a man pushing on the pole. The man had been covered by a shield held by a companion, but the shield shifted for an instant and Thomas’s arrow was the first through the small gap, though two more followed before the dying man’s last heartbeat ended. Other men succeeded in toppling the ladder. ‘St George!’ the English shouted, but the saint must have been sleeping for he gave the attackers no help.

More stones were hurled from the ramparts, then a great mass of flaming straw was heaved into the crowded attackers. A man succeeded in reaching the top of the breach, but was immediately killed by an axe that split his helmet and skull in two. He slumped on the rungs, blocking the ascent, and the Earl tried to haul him free, but was struck on the head by one of the boulders and collapsed at the ladder’s foot. Two of his men-at-arms carried the stunned Earl back to the camp and his departure took the spirit from the attackers. They no longer shouted. The arrows still flew, and men still tried to climb the wall, but the defenders sensed they had repelled this sixth attack and their crossbow bolts spat relentlessly. It was then Thomas saw the Blackbird on the tower above the gate. He laid the steel arrow tip on her breast, raised the bow a fraction and then jerked his bow hand so that the arrow flew wild. Too pretty to kill, he told himself and knew he was a fool for thinking it. She shot her bolt and vanished. A half-dozen arrows clattered onto the tower where she had been standing, but Thomas reckoned all six archers had let her shoot before they loosed.

‘Jesus wept,’ Skeat said. The attack had failed and the men-at-arms were running from the crossbow bolts. One ladder still rested against the breach with the dead man entangled in its upper rungs. ‘Back,’ Skeat shouted, ‘back.’

The archers ran, pursued by quarrels, until they could push through the hedge and drop into the ditch. The defenders were cheering and two men bared their backsides on the gate tower and briefly shoved their arses towards the defeated English.

‘Bastards,’ Skeat said, ‘bastards.’ He was not used to failure. ‘There has to be a bloody way in,’ he growled.

Thomas unlooped the string from his bow and placed it under his helmet. ‘I told you how to get in,’ he told Skeat, ‘told you at dawn.’

Skeat looked at Thomas for a long time. ‘We tried it, lad.’

‘I got to the stakes, Will. I promise I did. I got through them.’

‘So tell me again,’ Skeat said, and Thomas did. He crouched in the ditch under the jeers of La Roche-Derrien’s defenders and he told Will Skeat how to unlock the town, and Skeat listened because the Yorkshireman had learned to trust Thomas of Hookton.

Thomas had been in Brittany for three years now, and though Brittany was not France its usurping Duke brought a constant succession of Frenchman to be killed and Thomas had discovered he had a skill for killing. It was not just that he was a good archer–the army was full of men who were as good as he and there was a handful who were better–but he had discovered he could sense what the enemy was doing. He would watch them, watch their eyes, see where they were looking, and as often as not he anticipated an enemy move and was ready to greet it with an arrow. It was like a game, but one where he knew the rules and they did not.

It helped that William Skeat trusted him. Skeat had been unwilling to recruit Thomas when they first met by the gaol in Dorchester where Skeat was testing a score of thieves and murderers to see how well they could shoot a bow. He needed recruits and the King needed archers, so men who would otherwise have faced the gallows were being pardoned if they would serve abroad, and fully half of Skeat’s men were such felons. Thomas, Skeat had reckoned, would never fit in with such rogues. He had taken Thomas’s right hand, seen the callouses on the two bow fingers which said he was an archer, but then had tapped the boy’s soft palm.

‘What have you been doing?’ Skeat had asked.

‘My father wanted me to be a priest.’

‘A priest, eh?’ Skeat had been scornful. ‘Well, you can pray for us, I suppose.’

‘I can kill for you too.’

Skeat had eventually let Thomas join the band, not least because the boy brought his own horse. At first Skeat thought Thomas of Hookton was little more than another wild fool looking for adventure–a clever fool, to be sure–but Thomas had taken to the life of an archer in Brittany with alacrity. The real business of the civil war was plunder and, day after day, Skeat’s men rode into land that gave fealty to the supporters of Duke Charles and they burned the farms, stole the harvest and took the livestock. A lord whose peasants cannot pay rent is a lord who cannot afford to hire soldiers, so Skeat’s men-at-arms and mounted archers were loosed on the enemy’s land like a plague, and Thomas loved the life. He was young and his task was not just to fight the enemy, but to ruin him. He burned farms, poisoned wells, stole seed-grain, broke ploughs, fired the mills, ring-barked the orchards and lived off his plunder. Skeat’s men were the lords of Brittany, a scourge from hell, and the French-speaking villagers in the east of the Duchy called them the hellequin, which meant the devil’s horsemen. Once in a while an enemy war band would seek to trap them and Thomas had learned that the English archer, with his great long war bow, was the king of those skirmishes. The enemy hated the archers. If they captured an English bowman they killed him. A man-at-arms might be imprisoned, a lord would be ransomed, but an archer was always murdered. Tortured first, then murdered.

Thomas thrived on the life, and Skeat had learned the lad was clever, certainly clever enough to know better than to fall asleep one night when he should have been standing guard and, for that offence Skeat had thumped the daylights out of him. ‘You were goddamn drunk!’ he had accused Thomas, then beat him thoroughly, using his fists like blacksmith’s hammers. He had broken Thomas’s nose, cracked a rib and called him a stinking piece of Satan’s shit, but at the end of it Will Skeat saw that the boy was still grinning, and six months later he made Thomas into a vintenar, which meant he was in charge of twenty other archers.

Those twenty were nearly all older than Thomas, but none seemed to mind his promotion for they reckoned he was different. Most archers wore their hair cropped short, but Thomas’s hair was flamboyantly long and wrapped with bowcords so it fell in a long black plait to his waist. He was clean-shaven and dressed only in black. Such affectations could have made him unpopular, but he worked hard, had a quick wit and was generous. He was still odd, though. All archers wore talismans, maybe a cheap metal pendant showing a saint, or a dried hare’s foot, but Thomas had a desiccated dog’s paw hanging round his neck which he claimed was the hand of St Guinefort, and no one dared dispute him because he was the most learned man in Skeat’s band. He spoke French like a nobleman and Latin like a priest, and Skeat’s archers were perversely proud of him because of those accomplishments. Now, three years after joining Will Skeat’s band, Thomas was one of his chief archers. Skeat even asked his advice sometimes; he rarely took it, but he asked, and Thomas still had the dog’s paw, a crooked nose and an impudent grin.

And now he had an idea how to get into La Roche-Derrien.

That afternoon, when the dead man-at-arms with the split skull was still tangled in the abandoned ladder, Sir Simon Jekyll rode towards the town and there trotted his horse back and forth beside the small, dark-feathered crossbow bolts that marked the furthest range of the defenders’ weapons. His squire, a daft boy with a slack jaw and puzzled eyes, watched from a distance. The squire held Sir Simon’s lance, and should any warrior in the town accept the implicit challenge of Sir Simon’s mocking presence, the squire would give his master the lance and the two horsemen would fight on the pasture until one or the other yielded. And it would not be Sir Simon for he was as skilled a knight as any in the Earl of Northampton’s army.

And the poorest.

His destrier was ten years old, hard-mouthed and sway-backed. His saddle, which was high in pommel and cantle so that it held him firm in its grip, had belonged to his father, while his hauberk, a tunic of mail that covered him from neck to knees, had belonged to his grandfather. His sword was over a hundred years old, heavy, and would not keep its edge. His lance had warped in the wet winter weather, while his helmet, which hung from his pommel, was an old steel pot with a worn leather lining. His shield, with its escutcheon of a mailed fist clutching a war-hammer, was battered and faded. His mail gauntlets, like the rest of his armour, were rusting, which was why his squire had a thick, reddened ear and a frightened face, though the real reason for the rust was not that the squire did not try to clean the mail, but that Sir Simon could not afford the vinegar and fine sand that was used to scour the steel. He was poor.

Poor and bitter and ambitious.

And good.

No one denied he was good. He had won the tournament at Tewkesbury and received a purse of forty pounds. At Gloucester his victory had been rewarded by a fine suit of armour. At Chelmsford it had been fifteen pounds and a fine saddle, and at Canterbury he had half hacked a Frenchman to death before being given a gilded cup filled with coins, and where were all those trophies now? In the hands of the bankers and lawyers and merchants who had a lien on the Berkshire estate that Sir Simon had inherited two years before, though in truth his inheritance had been nothing but debt, and the moment his father was buried the moneylenders had closed on Sir Simon like hounds on a wounded deer.

‘Marry an heiress,’ his mother had advised, and she had paraded a dozen women for her son’s inspection, but Sir Simon was determined his wife should be as beautiful as he was handsome. And he was handsome. He knew that. He would stare into his mother’s mirror and admire his reflection. He had thick fair hair, a broad face and a short beard. At Chester, where he had unhorsed three knights inside four minutes, men had mistaken him for the King, who was reputed to fight anonymously in tournaments, and Sir Simon was not going to throw away his good royal looks on some wrinkled hag just because she had money. He would marry a woman worthy of himself, but that ambition would not pay the estate’s debts and so Sir Simon, to defend himself against his creditors, had sought a letter of protection from King Edward III. That letter shielded Sir Simon from all legal proceedings so long as he served the King in a foreign war, and when Sir Simon had crossed the Channel, taking six men-at-arms, a dozen archers and a slack-jawed squire from his encumbered estate, he had left his creditors helpless in England. Sir Simon had also brought with him a certainty that he would soon capture some French or Breton nobleman whose ransom would be sufficient to pay all he owed, but so far the winter campaign had not yielded a single prisoner of rank and so little plunder that the army was now on half rations. And how many well-born prisoners could he expect to take in a miserable town like La Roche-Derrien? It was a shit hole.

Yet he rode up and down beneath its walls, hoping some knight would take the challenge and ride from the town’s southern gate that had so far resisted six English assaults, but instead the defenders jeered him and called him a coward for staying out of their crossbows’ range and the insults piqued Sir Simon’s pride so that he rode closer to the walls, his horse’s hoofs sometimes clattering on one of the fallen quarrels. Men shot at him, but the bolts fell well short and it was Sir Simon’s turn to jeer.

‘He’s just a bloody fool,’ Jake said, watching from the English camp. Jake was one of William Skeat’s felons, a murderer who had been saved from the gallows at Exeter. He was cross-eyed, yet still managed to shoot straighter than most men. ‘Now what’s he doing?’

Sir Simon had stopped his horse and was facing the gate so that the men who watched thought that perhaps a Frenchman was coming to challenge the English knight who taunted them. Instead they saw that a lone crossbowman was standing on the gate turret and beckoning Sir Simon forward, daring him to come within range.

Only a fool would respond to such a dare, and Sir Simon dutifully responded. He was twenty-five years old, bitter and brave, and he reckoned a display of careless arrogance would dishearten the besieged garrison and encourage the dispirited English and so he spurred the destrier deep into the killing ground where the French bolts had torn the heart out of the English attacks. No crossbowman fired now; there was just the lone figure standing on the gate tower, and Sir Simon, riding to within a hundred yards, saw it was the Blackbird.

This was the first time Sir Simon had seen the woman every archer called the Blackbird and he was close enough to perceive that she was indeed a beauty. She stood straight, slender and tall, cloaked against the winter wind, but with her long black hair loose like a young girl’s. She offered him a mocking bow and Sir Simon responded, bending awkwardly in the tight saddle, then he watched as she picked up her crossbow and put it to her shoulder.

And when we’re inside the town, Sir Simon thought, I’ll make you pay for this. You’ll be flat on your arse, Blackbird, and I’ll be on top. He stood his horse quite still, a lone horseman in the French slaughter ground, daring her to aim straight and knowing she would not. And when she missed he would give her a mocking salute and the French would take it as a bad omen.

But what if she did aim straight?

Sir Simon was tempted to lift the awkward helmet from his saddle’s pommel, but resisted the impulse. He had dared the Blackbird to do her worst and he could show no nerves in front of a woman and so he waited as she levelled the bow. The town’s defenders were watching her and doubtless praying. Or perhaps making wagers.

Come on, you bitch, he said under his breath. It was cold, but there was sweat on his forehead.

She paused, pushed the black hair from her face, then rested the bow on a crenellation and aimed again. Sir Simon kept his head up and his gaze straight. Just a woman, he told himself. Probably could not hit a wagon at five paces. His horse shivered and he reached out to pat its neck. ‘Be going soon, boy,’ he told it.

The Blackbird, watched by a score of defenders, closed her eyes and shot.

Sir Simon saw the quarrel as a small black blur against the grey sky and the grey stones of the church towers showing above La Roche-Derrien’s walls.

He knew the quarrel would go wide. Knew it with an absolute certainty. She was a woman, for God’s sake! And that was why he did not move as he saw the blur coming straight for him. He could not believe it. He was waiting for the quarrel to slide to left or right, or to plough into the frost-hardened ground, but instead it was coming unerringly towards his breast and, at the very last instant, he jerked up the heavy shield and ducked his head and felt a huge thump on his left arm as the bolt slammed home to throw him hard against the saddle’s cantle. The bolt hit the shield so hard that it split through the willow boards and its point gouged a deep cut through the mail sleeve and into his forearm. The French were cheering and Sir Simon, knowing that other crossbowmen might now try to finish what the Blackbird had begun, pressed his knee into his destrier’s flank and the beast obediently turned and then responded to the spurs.

‘I’m alive,’ he said aloud, as if that would silence the French jubilation. Goddamn bitch, he thought. He would pay her right enough, pay her till she squealed, and he curbed his horse, not wanting to look as though he fled.

An hour later, after his squire had put a bandage over the slashed forearm, Sir Simon had convinced himself that he had scored a victory. He had dared, he had survived. It had been a demonstration of courage, and he lived, and for that he reckoned he was a hero and he expected a hero’s welcome as he walked toward the tent that housed the army’s commander, the Earl of Northampton. The tent was made from two sails, their linen yellow and patched and threadbare after years of service at sea. They made a shabby shelter, but that was typical of William Bohun, Earl of Northampton who, though cousin to the King and as rich a man as any in England, despised gaudiness.

The Earl, indeed, looked as patched and threadbare as the sails that made his tent. He was a short and squat man with a face, men said, like the backside of a bull, but the face mirrored the Earl’s soul, which was blunt, brave and straightforward. The army liked William Bohun, Earl of Northampton, because he was as tough as they were themselves. Now, as Sir Simon ducked into the tent, the Earl’s curly brown hair was half covered with a bandage where the boulder thrown from La Roche-Derrien’s wall had split his helmet and driven a ragged edge of steel into his scalp. He greeted Sir Simon sourly. ‘Tired of life?’

‘The silly bitch shut her eyes when she pulled the trigger!’ Sir Simon said, oblivious to the Earl’s tone.

‘She still aimed well,’ the Earl said angrily, ‘and that will put heart into the bastards. God knows, they need no encouragement.’

‘I’m alive, my lord,’ Sir Simon said cheerfully. ‘She wanted to kill me. She failed. The bear lives and the dogs go hungry.’ He waited for the Earl’s companions to congratulate him, but they avoided his eyes and he interpreted their sullen silence as jealousy.

Sir Simon was a bloody fool, the Earl thought, and shivered. He might not have minded the cold so much had the army been enjoying success, but for two months the English and their Breton allies had stumbled from failure to farce, and the six assaults on La Roche-Derrien had plumbed the depths of misery. So now the Earl had called a council of war to suggest one final assault, this one to be made that same evening. Every other attack had been in the forenoon, but perhaps a surprise escalade in the dying winter light would take the defenders by surprise. Only what small advantages that surprise might bring had been spoiled because Sir Simon’s foolhardiness must have given the townsfolk a new confidence and there was little confidence among the Earl’s war captains who had gathered under the yellow sailcloth.

Four of those captains were knights who, like Sir Simon, led their own men to war, but the others were mercenary soldiers who had contracted their men to the Earl’s service. Three were Bretons who wore the white ermine badge of the Duke of Brittany and led men loyal to the de Montfort Duke, while the others were English captains, all of them commoners who had grown hard in war. William Skeat was there, and next to him was Richard Totesham, who had begun his service as a man-at-arms and now led a hundred and forty knights and ninety archers in the Earl’s service. Neither man had ever fought in a tournament, nor would they ever be invited, yet both were wealthier than Sir Simon, and that rankled. My hounds of war, the Earl of Northampton called the independent captains, and the Earl liked them, but then the Earl had a curious taste for vulgar company. He might be cousin to England’s King, but William Bohun happily drank with men like Skeat and Totesham, ate with them, spoke English with them, hunted with them and trusted them, and Sir Simon felt excluded from that friendship. If any man in this army should have been an intimate of the Earl it was Sir Simon, a noted champion of tournaments, but Northampton would rather roll in the gutter with men like Skeat.

‘How’s the rain?’ the Earl asked.

‘Starting again,’ Sir Simon answered, jerking his head at the tent’s roof, against which the rain pattered fitfully.

‘It’ll clear,’ Skeat said dourly. He rarely called the Earl ‘my lord’, addressing him instead as an equal which, to Sir Simon’s amazement, the Earl seemed to like.

‘And it’s only spitting,’ the Earl said, peering out from the tent and letting in a swirl of damp, cold air. ‘Bowstrings will pluck in this.’

‘So will crossbow cords,’ Richard Totesham interjected. ‘Bastards,’ he added. What made the English failure so galling was that La Roche-Derrien’s defenders were not soldiers but townsfolk: fishermen and boatbuilders, carpenters and masons, and even the Blackbird, a woman! ‘And the rain might stop,’ Totesham went on, ‘but the ground will be slick. It’ll be bad footing under the walls.’

‘Don’t go tonight,’ Will Skeat advised. ‘Let my boys go in by the river tomorrow morning.’

The Earl rubbed the wound on his scalp. For a week now he had assaulted La Roche-Derrien’s southern wall and he still believed his men could take those ramparts, yet he also sensed the pessimism among his hounds of war. One more repulse with another twenty or thirty dead would leave his army dispirited and with the prospect of trailing back to Finisterre with nothing accomplished. ‘Tell me again,’ he said.

Skeat wiped his nose on his leather sleeve. ‘At low tide,’ he said, ‘there’s a way round the north wall. One of my lads was down there last night.’

‘We tried it three days ago,’ one of the knights objected.

‘You tried the down-river side,’ Skeat said. ‘I want to go up-river.’

‘That side has stakes just like the other,’ the Earl said.

‘Loose,’ Skeat responded. One of the Breton captains translated the exchange for his companions. ‘My boy pulled a stake clean out,’ Skeat went on, ‘and he reckons half a dozen others will lift or break. They’re old oak trunks, he says, instead of elm, and they’re rotted through.’

‘How deep is the mud?’ the Earl asked.

‘Up to his knees.’

La Roche-Derrien’s wall encompassed the west, south and east of the town, while the northern side was defended by the River Jaudy, and where the semicircular wall met the river the townsfolk had planted huge stakes in the mud to block access at low tide. Skeat was now suggesting there was a way through those rotted stakes, but when the Earl’s men had tried to do the same thing at the eastern side of the town the attackers had got bogged down in the mud and the townsfolk had picked them off with bolts. It had been a worse slaughter than the repulses in front of the southern gate.

‘But there’s still a wall on the riverbank,’ the Earl pointed out.

‘Aye,’ Skeat allowed, ‘but the silly bastards have broken it down in places. They’ve built quays there, and there’s one right close to the loose stakes.’

‘So your men will have to remove the stakes and climb the quays, all under the gaze of men on the wall?’ the Earl asked sceptically.

‘They can do it,’ Skeat said firmly.

The Earl still reckoned his best chance of success was to close his archers on the south gate and pray that their arrows would keep the defenders cowering while his men-at-arms assaulted the breach, yet that, he conceded, was the plan that had failed earlier in the day and on the day before that. And he had, he knew, only a day or two left. He possessed fewer than three thousand men, and a third of those were sick, and if he could not find them shelter he would have to march back west with his tail between his legs. He needed a town, any town, even La Roche-Derrien.

Will Skeat saw the worries on the Earl’s broad face. ‘My lad was within fifteen paces of the quay last night,’ he asserted. ‘He could have been inside the town and opened the gate.’

‘So why didn’t he?’ Sir Simon could not resist asking. ‘Christ’s bones!’ he went on. ‘But I’d have been inside!’

‘You’re not an archer,’ Skeat said sourly, then made the sign of the cross. At Guingamp one of Skeat’s archers had been captured by the defenders, who had stripped the hated bowman naked then cut him to pieces on the rampart where the besiegers could see his long death. His two bow fingers had been severed first, then his manhood, and the man had screamed like a pig being gelded as he bled to death on the battlements.

The Earl gestured for a servant to replenish the cups of mulled wine. ‘Would you lead this attack, Will?’ he asked.

‘Not me,’ Skeat said. ‘I’m too old to wade through boggy mud. I’ll let the lad who went past the stakes last night lead them in. He’s a good boy, so he is. He’s a clever bastard, but an odd one. He was going to be a priest, he was, only he met me and came to his senses.’

The Earl was plainly tempted by the idea. He toyed with the hilt of his sword, then nodded. ‘I think we should meet your clever bastard. Is he near?’

‘Left him outside,’ Skeat said, then twisted on his stool. ‘Tom, you savage! Come in here!’

Thomas stooped into the Earl’s tent, where the gathered captains saw a tall, long-legged young man dressed entirely in black, all but for his mail coat and the red cross sewn onto his tunic. All the English troops wore that cross of St George so that in a mêlée they would know who was a friend and who an enemy. The young man bowed to the Earl, who realized he had noticed this archer before, which was hardly surprising for Thomas was a striking-looking man. He wore his black hair in a pigtail, tied with bowcord, he had a long bony nose that was crooked, a clean-shaven chin and watchful, clever eyes, though perhaps the most noticeable thing about him was that he was clean. That and, on his shoulder, the great bow that was one of the longest the Earl had seen, and not only long, but painted black, while mounted on the outer belly of the bow was a curious silver plate which seemed to have a coat of arms engraved on it. There was vanity here, the Earl thought, vanity and pride, and he approved of both things.

‘For a man who was up to his knees in river mud last night,’ the Earl said with a smile, ‘you’re remarkably clean.’

‘I washed, my lord.’

‘You’ll catch cold!’ the Earl warned him. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Thomas of Hookton, my lord.’

‘So tell me what you found last night, Thomas of Hookton.’

Thomas told the same tale as Will Skeat. How, after dark, and as the tide fell, he had waded out into the Jaudy’s mud. He had found the fence of stakes ill-maintained, rotting and loose, and he had lifted one out of its socket, wriggled through the gap and gone a few paces towards the nearest quay. ‘I was close enough, my lord, to hear a woman singing,’ he said. The woman had been singing a song that his own mother had crooned to him when he was small and he had been struck by that oddity.

The Earl frowned when Thomas finished, not because he disapproved of anything the archer had said, but because the scalp wound that had left him unconscious for an hour was throbbing. ‘What were you doing at the river last night?’ he asked, mainly to give himself more time to think about the idea.

Thomas said nothing.

‘Another man’s woman,’ Skeat eventually answered for Thomas, ‘that’s what he was doing, my lord, another man’s woman.’

The assembled men laughed, all but Sir Simon Jekyll, who looked sourly at the blushing Thomas. The bastard was a mere archer yet he was wearing a better coat of mail than Sir Simon could afford! And he had a confidence that stank of impudence. Sir Simon shuddered. There was an unfairness to life which he did not understand. Archers from the shires were capturing horses and weapons and armour while he, a champion of tournaments, had not managed anything more valuable than a pair of goddamned boots. He felt an irresistible urge to deflate this tall, composed archer.

‘One alert sentinel, my lord,’ Sir Simon spoke to the Earl in Norman French so that only the handful of wellborn men in the tent would understand him, ‘and this boy will be dead and our attack will be floundering in river mud.’

Thomas gave Sir Simon a very level look, insolent in its lack of expression, then answered in fluent French. ‘We should attack in the dark,’ he said, then turned back to the Earl. ‘The tide will be low just before dawn tomorrow, my lord.’

The Earl looked at him with surprise. ‘How did you learn French?’

‘From my father, my lord.’

‘Do we know him?’

‘I doubt it, my lord.’

The Earl did not pursue the subject. He bit his lip and rubbed the pommel of his sword, a habit when he was thinking.

‘All well and good if you get inside,’ Richard Tote-sham, seated on a milking stool next to Will Skeat, growled at Thomas. Totesham led the largest of the independent bands and had, on that account, a greater authority than the rest of the captains. ‘But what do you do when you’re inside?’

Thomas nodded, as though he had expected the question. ‘I doubt we can reach a gate,’ he said, ‘but if I can put a score of archers onto the wall beside the river then they can protect it while ladders are placed.’

‘And I’ve got two ladders,’ Skeat added. ‘They’ll do.’

The Earl still rubbed the pommel of his sword. ‘When we tried to attack by the river before,’ he said, ‘we got trapped in the mud. It’ll be just as deep where you want to go.’

‘Hurdles, my lord,’ Thomas said. ‘I found some in a farm.’ Hurdles were fence sections made of woven willow that could make a quick pen for sheep or could be laid flat on mud to provide men with footing.

‘I told you he was clever,’ Will Skeat said proudly. ‘Went to Oxford, didn’t you, Tom?’

‘When I was too young to know better,’ Thomas said drily.

The Earl laughed. He liked this boy and he could see why Skeat had such faith in him. ‘Tomorrow morning, Thomas?’ he asked.

‘Better than dusk tonight, my lord. They’ll still be lively at dusk.’ Thomas gave Sir Simon an expressionless glance, intimating that the knight’s display of stupid bravery would have quickened the defenders’ spirits.

‘Then tomorrow morning it is,’ the Earl said. He turned to Totesham. ‘But keep your boys closed on the south gate today. I want them to think we’re coming there again.’ He looked back to Thomas. ‘What’s the badge on your bow, boy?’

‘Just something I found, my lord,’ Thomas lied, handing the bow to the Earl, who had held out his hand. In truth he had cut the silver badge out of the crushed chalice that he had found under his father’s robes, then pinned the metal to the front of the bow where his left hand had worn the silver almost smooth.

The Earl peered at the device. ‘A yale?’

‘I think that’s what the beast is called, my lord,’ Thomas said, pretending ignorance.

‘Not the badge of anyone I know,’ the Earl said, then tried to flex the bow and raised his eyebrows in surprise at its strength. He gave the black shaft back to Thomas then dismissed him. ‘I wish you Godspeed in the morning, Thomas of Hookton.’

‘My lord,’ Thomas said, and bowed.

‘I’ll go with him, with your permission,’ Skeat said, and the Earl nodded, then watched the two men leave. ‘If we do get inside,’ he told his remaining captains, ‘then for God’s sake don’t let your men cry havoc. Hold their leashes tight. I intend to keep this town and I don’t want the townsfolk hating us. Kill when you must, but I don’t want an orgy of blood.’ He looked at their sceptical faces. ‘I’ll be putting one of you in charge of the garrison here, so make it easy for yourselves. Hold them tight.’

The captains grunted, knowing how hard it would be to keep their men from a full sack of the town, but before any of them could respond to the Earl’s hopeful wishes, Sir Simon stood.

‘My lord? A request?’

The Earl shrugged. ‘Try me.’

‘Would you let me and my men lead the ladder party?’

The Earl seemed surprised at the request. ‘You think Skeat cannot manage on his own?’

‘I am sure he can, my lord,’ Sir Simon said humbly, ‘but I still beg the honour.’

Better Sir Simon Jekyll dead than Will Skeat, the Earl thought. He nodded. ‘Of course, of course.’

The captains said nothing. What honour was there in being first onto a wall that another man had captured? No, the bastard did not want honour, he wanted to be well placed to find the richest plunder in town, but none of them voiced his thought. They were captains, but Sir Simon was a knight, even if a penniless one.

The Earl’s army threatened an attack for the rest of that short winter’s day, but it never came and the citizens of La Roche-Derrien dared to hope that the worst of their ordeal was over, but made preparations in case the English did try again the next day. They counted their crossbow bolts, stacked more boulders on the ramparts and fed the fires which boiled the pots of water that were poured onto the English. Heat the wretches up, the town’s priests had said, and the townsfolk liked that jest. They were winning, they knew, and they reckoned their ordeal must finish soon, for the English would surely be running out of food. All La Roche-Derrien had to do was endure and then receive the praise and thanks of Duke Charles.

The small rain stopped at nightfall. The townsfolk went to their beds, but kept their weapons ready. The sentries lit watch fires behind the walls and gazed into the dark.

It was night, it was winter, it was cold and the besiegers had one last chance.

The Blackbird had been christened Jeanette Marie Halevy, and when she was fifteen her parents had taken her to Guingamp for the annual tournament of the apples. Her father was not an aristocrat so the family could not sit in the enclosure beneath St Laurent’s tower, but they found a place nearby, and Louis Halevy made certain his daughter was visible by placing their chairs on the farm wagon which had carried them from La Roche-Derrien. Jeanette’s father was a prosperous shipmaster and wine merchant, though his fortune in business had not been mirrored in life. One son had died when a cut finger turned septic and his second son had drowned on a voyage to Corunna. Jeanette was now his only child.

There was calculation in the visit to Guingamp. The nobility of Brittany, at least those who favoured an alliance with France, assembled at the tournament where, for four days, in front of a crowd that came as much for the fair as for the fighting, they displayed their talents with sword and lance. Jeanette found much of it tedious, for the preambles to each fight were long and often out of earshot. Knights paraded endlessly, their extravagant plumes nodding, but after a while there would be a brief thunder of hoofs, a clash of metal, a cheer, and one knight would be tumbled in the grass. It was customary for every victorious knight to prick an apple with his lance and present it to whichever woman in the crowd attracted him, and that was why her father had taken the farm wagon to Guingamp. After four days Jeanette had eighteen apples and the enmity of a score of better-born girls.

Her parents took her back to La Roche-Derrien and waited. They had displayed their wares and now the buyers could find their way to the lavish house beside the River Jaudy. From the front the house seemed small, but go through the archway and a visitor found himself in a wide courtyard reaching down to a stone quay where Monsieur Halevy’s smaller boats could be moored at the top of the tide. The courtyard shared a wall with the church of St Renan and, because Monsieur Halevy had donated the tower to the church, he had been permitted to drive an archway through the wall so that his family did not need to step into the street when they went to Mass. The house told any suitor that this was a wealthy family, and the presence of the parish priest at the supper table told him it was a devout family. Jeanette was to be no aristocrat’s plaything, she was to be a wife.

A dozen men condescended to visit the Halevy house, but it was Henri Chenier, Comte d’Armorique, who won the apple. He was a prime catch, for he was nephew to Charles of Blois, who was himself a nephew to King Philip of France, and it was Charles whom the French recognized as Duke and ruler of Brittany. The Duke allowed Henri Chenier to present his fiancée, but afterwards advised his nephew to discard her. The girl was a merchant’s daughter, scarce more than a peasant, though even the Duke admitted she was a beauty. Her hair was shining black, her face was unflawed by the pox and she had all her teeth. She was graceful, so that a Dominican friar in the Duke’s court clasped his hands and exclaimed that Jeanette was the living image of the Madonna. The Duke agreed she was beautiful, but so what? Many women were beautiful. Any tavern in Guingamp, he said, could throw up a two-livre whore who could make most wives look like hogs. It was not the job of a wife to be beautiful, but to be rich. ‘Make the girl your mistress,’ he advised his nephew, and virtually ordered Henri to marry an heiress from Picardy, but the heiress was a pox-faced slattern and the Count of Armorica was besotted by Jeanette’s beauty and so he defied his uncle.

He married the merchant’s daughter in the chapel of his castle at Plabennec, which lay in Finisterre, the world’s end. The Duke reckoned his nephew had listened to too many troubadours, but the Count and his new wife were happy and a year after their wedding, when Jeanette was sixteen, their son was born. They named him Charles, after the Duke, but if the Duke was complimented, he said nothing. He refused to receive Jeanette again and treated his nephew coldly.

Later that same year the English came in force to support Jean de Montfort, whom they recognized as the Duke of Brittany, and the King of France sent reinforcements to his nephew Charles, whom he recognized as the real Duke, and so the civil war began in earnest. The Count of Armorica insisted that his wife and baby son went back to her father’s house in La Roche-Derrien because the castle at Plabennec was small, in ill repair and too close to the invader’s forces.

That summer the castle fell to the English just as Jeanette’s husband had feared, and the following year the King of England spent the campaigning season in Brittany, and his army pushed back the forces of Charles, Duke of Brittany. There was no one great battle, but a series of bloody skirmishes, and in one of them, a ragged affair fought between the hedgerows of a steep valley, Jeanette’s husband was wounded. He had lifted the face-piece of his helmet to shout encouragement to his men and an arrow had gone clean through his mouth. His servants brought the Count to the house beside the River Jaudy where he took five days to die; five days of constant pain during which he was unable to eat and scarce able to breathe as the wound festered and the blood congealed in his gullet. He was twenty-eight years old, a champion of tournaments, and he wept like a child at the end. He choked to death and Jeanette screamed in frustrated anger and grief.

Then began Jeanette’s time of sorrow. She was a widow, la veuve Chenier, and not six months after her husband’s death she became an orphan when both her parents died of the bloody flux. She was just eighteen and her son, the Count of Armorica, was two, but Jeanette had inherited her father’s wealth and she determined to use it to strike back at the hated English who had killed her husband, and so she began outfitting two ships that could prey on English shipping.

Monsieur Belas, who had been her father’s lawyer, advised against spending money on the ships. Jeanette’s fortune would not last for ever, the lawyer said, and nothing soaked up cash like outfitting warships that rarely made money, unless by luck. Better, he said, to use the ships for trade. ‘The merchants in Lannion are making a fine profit on Spanish wine,’ he suggested. He had a cold, for it was winter, and he sneezed. ‘A very fine profit,’ he said wistfully. He spoke in Breton, though both he and Jeanette could, if needs be, speak French.

‘I do not want Spanish wine,’ Jeanette said coldly, ‘but English souls.’

‘No profit in those, my lady,’ Belas said. He found it strange to call Jeanette ‘my lady’. He had known her since she was a child, and she had always been little Jeanette to him, but she had married and become an aristocratic widow, and a widow, moreover, with a temper. ‘You cannot sell English souls,’ Belas pointed out mildly.

‘Except to the devil,’ Jeanette said, crossing herself. ‘But I don’t need Spanish wine, Belas. We have the rents.’

‘The rents!’ Belas said mockingly. He was tall, thin, scanty-haired and clever. He had served Jeanette’s father well and long, and was resentful that the merchant had left him nothing in his will. Everything had gone to Jeanette except for a small bequest to the monks at Pontrieux so they would say Masses for the dead man’s soul. Belas hid his resentment. ‘Nothing comes from Plabennec,’ he told Jeanette. ‘The English are there, and how long do you think the rents will come from your father’s farms? The English will take them soon.’ An English army had occupied unwalled Tréguier, which was only an hour’s walk northwards, and they had pulled down the cathedral tower there because some crossbowmen had shot at them from its summit. Belas hoped the English would retreat soon, for it was deep in the winter and their supplies must be running low, but he feared they might ravage the countryside about La Roche-Derrien before they left. And if they did, Jeanette’s farms would be left worthless. ‘How much rent can you get from a burned farm?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t care!’ she snapped. ‘I shall sell everything if I have to, everything!’ Except for her husband’s armour and weapons. They were precious and would go to her son one day.

Belas sighed for her foolishness, then huddled in his black cloak and leaned close to the small fire which spat in the hearth. A cold wind came from the nearby sea, making the chimney smoke. ‘You will permit me, madame, to offer you advice? First, the business.’ Belas paused to wipe his nose on his long black sleeve. ‘It ails, but I can find you a good man to run it as your father did, and I would draw up a contract which would ensure the man would pay you well from the profits. Second, madame, you should think of marriage.’ He paused, half expecting a protest, but Jeanette said nothing. Belas sighed. She was so lovely! There were a dozen men in town who would marry her, but marriage to an aristocrat had turned her head and she would settle for nothing less than another titled man. ‘You are, madame,’ the lawyer continued carefully, ‘a widow who possesses, at the moment, a considerable fortune, but I have seen such fortunes drain away like snow in April. Find a man who can look after you, your possessions and your son.’

Jeanette turned and stared at him. ‘I married the finest man in Christendom,’ she said, ‘and where do you think I will find another like him?’

Men like the Count of Armorica, the lawyer thought, were found everywhere, more was the pity, for what were they but brute fools in armour who believed war was a sport? Jeanette, he thought, should marry a prudent merchant, perhaps a widower who had a fortune, but he suspected such advice would be wasted. ‘Remember the old saying, my lady,’ he said slyly. ‘Put a cat to watch a flock and the wolves eat well.’

Jeanette shuddered with anger at the words. ‘You go beyond yourself, Monsieur Belas.’ She spoke icily, then dismissed him, and the next day the English came to La Roche-Derrien and Jeanette took her dead husband’s crossbow from the place where she hid her wealth and she joined the defenders on the walls. Damn Belas’s advice! She would fight like a man and Duke Charles, who despised her, would learn to admire her, to support her and restore her dead husband’s estates to her son.

So Jeanette had become the Blackbird and the English had died in front of her walls and Belas’s advice was forgotten, and now, Jeanette reckoned, the town’s defenders had so rattled the English that the siege would surely be lifted. All would be well, in which belief, for the first time in a week, the Blackbird slept well.