Crown in Candlelight (21 page)

Owen drew the fletch back to his ear and loosed an arrow. He saw one of the Harfleur archers in the act of pulling a shortbow to his chest drop his weapon and, falling, clap a hand to his throat where Owen’s barb now protruded. I killed him, he thought. How easy it is. A crossbow quarrel thudded through the planking on his left, impaling his neighbour to the screen like a writhing insect tortured by a child. The next moment John Page had come to replace him, inserting an arrow through the squint. His face was dirty with sweat; he smiled grimly.

‘You’ve done a long stint,’ he called.

‘Sixteen hours today. Ten yesterday,’ said Owen.

The siege guns seemed to have been roaring for ever. His back was on fire from the sun and the tension. His bowarm felt as if it would never again be straight. His clothes were sodden and filthy, and the stinking marsh seemed to have worked down into his lungs. If he thought about it, it made him retch.

‘How’s your belly?’ asked Page.

‘Still calm and whole.
Diolch i Duw
.’

Page aimed at a flicker of activity from the barbican. The French were coming out again on another lunatic foray that could sometimes prove spectacularly successful. Last time they had captured two apprentice gunners and a knight, dragging them back behind the town walls.

‘Don’t drink the wine,’ said Page, like a litany. ‘The shellfish are poisonous. Leave the green fruit alone. I’ve just been round to the surgeons’ tents. It’s a filthy way to die. Worse than
that
, almost …’

A black veil of flies was settling on the corpse of the recently impaled archer.

‘You have marshes in Wales, don’t you?’

‘Yes. But they’re clean!’

The fretful polluted sun fringed Owen’s tawny head and face with gold. The barrier shook as a volley of arrows landed just above his head. He and Page and the hundred or so other archers were loosing shot after shot as the French ran out, their assault covered from the walls by a profusion of gun-stones and arrows. They carried burning brands and small kegs of gunpowder which they lobbed at the protective screens and into the compound housing the provision wagons. There were a stutter of explosions; black smoke drifted along the line. Wagons and tents erupted; men running to douse the fires became targets for the French archers. The attackers ran back behind the barbican, leaping over bodies. Owen shot at the last fleeing figure but smoke from part of the blazing palisade spoiled his aim. The
King’s Daughter
spoke shatteringly, her force throwing two of the gunners backwards into the trench. The vast ball whistled high over the defences of Harfleur and buried itself with a cataclysmic roar in the structure of the south-west gate. It collapsed, bringing down with it two of the golden towers with the painted swans and snails. A score of French were killed by their fall. Through the gap the town could be seen: more towers, dwellings, people running. A holy nun no longer, thought Owen. More like an antheap breached by a giant’s foot. All down the line came weary cheering.

‘What machines!’ he said to Page in awe.

‘Ay. But the
Messenger
at the other gate is out of commission. They’re having to use the arblasts and mangonels. But it was a fair shot, I grant you.’

Owen wedged himself against the screen and felt for a fresh arrow. His neck muscles screamed with stress. Sweat dripped from his face. A bluebottle ventured on to his eyelid to drink, and he shivered. The stench of urine and ordure rose from the line where archers had relieved themselves during the long hours at the palisade. He tried to spit, and failed.

‘Your flask’s empty,’ said Page, and passed a little leather bottle.

‘Drink only sparingly. I don’t even trust the water. But that wine is death, like the fish and the fruit. I’ve never seen such sickness. Now, St Barbara, improve my aim!’

Evening was descending. The sky over the swamp was green and in the west like watery blood. Insects whined about the men’s heads in a gluttonous cloud. A boy came to stand behind the line with a cask of tow-wrapped arrows, dipping them in pitch and fire and passing them to the archers, who discharged them, flaming, through the slit. Smoke scorched eyes, seared throats and stomachs. Harfleur had lighted missiles too; the dimming sky was crossed by parabolas of fire. In the flame-lit dusk the French were already shoring up the broken gate efficiently with bricks and mortar and sandbags. On top of the walls men lay with vats of sulphur and lime and hot fat. The River Lézarde which flowed through the town between the Leure and Montivilliers gates and was swelled by the tidal estuary had been fortified with chains and tree-trunks and iron stakes; the English fleet lay in constant danger, like the messengers sent by small craft to make contact with the captains beyond the marsh and the valley which had been flooded earlier by the French. While in camp the sickness grew; the awful bowel-rot that could bring death in a matter of hours. The only cheering rumour was that Harfleur was also plagued by this.

All night the great guns went on, as on every night, spewing out fiery millstones. The
Messenger
was repaired, and the
London
broke down. The heat changed to a clammy, noxious chill. Down the line men squatted groaning and passed blood. Complete exhaustion, filled with unreality, suddenly caught at Owen. He stared drunkenly at the whirling, arching fires. The palisade shook as flaming steel bit into it. A boy in charge of the pitch barrels rushed to fight the fire and was impaled as he worked. Owen’s hand fumbled for a fresh arrow. His quiver was empty. He turned and spoke, insane with fatigue, to a burning bush nearby, then plunged face down through the smoke to the reeking earth, awakening to find himself in Hell.

All round where he lay were the sounds of men in torment, the whispering cries of the dying, the mumble of priests mingling with the occasional sharp rattle of death. The foetid air was like a heavy stone on his chest. On the torch-lit tent walls the shadows of the doctors moving ceaselessly about their business were huge, grotesquely surging monsters. Beneath his hands the straw was slimed with blood; with trembling fingers he explored his own body, relieved to find it whole. But someone had lately died miserably here, leaving the legacy of his pain, a soaking corruption. The weary surgeons grumbled and cursed as they worked. Owen raised his spinning head and watched as they cut out arrow-heads and tried to succour a man with half his shoulder blown away by cannon-shot. They plugged gashes with powdered herbs and bound them with whatever linen was available. Yet such casualties were in the minority; death’s real dominion bore a breath so foul it was almost unbearable. The wounded died cleanly compared with the hundreds taken by the dysentery; their end was horror and shame, their vitals dissolved in blood and filth.

Big John Fletcher was carried in, so pale as to be almost unrecognizable. He should by rights have died days ago; even now his breath stank of the unclean shellfish and the bad wine. But so far his strength had saved him, and its decline was dramatic. He was dying even as his friends lugged him into the sight of the overworked doctors. Crying for a priest, he lay in his own ordure, beginning to babble his confession almost before the chaplain had found a clean spot in which to kneel. Fletcher’s rolling eyes found Owen; he paused in his catalogue of sins to cry despairingly: ‘Your witchwoman warned me … she cursed me … Oh, Mary, mercy! I don’t want to die!’

Owen thought: neither do I. Hywelis! And the answer came clear, a tiny forgotten voice:
you will be safe
, even while Fletcher died and Owen struggled to his knees, swaying. Hands gripped and drew him up, and, staring blearily into the one bright eye of Davy Gam, he heard his native tongue.

‘
Diawl
! Boy, they said you were in here. Is it the belly-rot?’

Owen said stupidly: ‘I don’t know … would I be able to tell?’ and Gam began to laugh. Mixed with the groans in the tent, it sounded like demons’ laughter.

‘
Duw
! Owen, you’d know, you’d know! Wounded then? No, I see you’re not. What fool put you in here among the contagion? You’re filthy,
bach
. Come to my pavilion.’

He supported Owen outside. Fainted, did you? no shame in that. Men were fainting every minute. There was not enough food, and too few to defend the gunners. It was quiet outside now, and the pre-dawn air smelled almost sweet after the surgeon’s tent. Frogs sang from the marsh, and the birds were awakening. They walked up a little boggy rise towards the encampment. The officers’ tents with their scalloped canopies looked like some weird mushroom growth coloured pale from the candlelight within. Near the glow Gam stopped and smiled at Owen’s smoke-blackened face. Like a Moor you are, kinsman, a heathen.

‘You’re sure you’ve no flux, pain?’

‘Only deathly tired,’ Owen sighed deeply.

‘We’re both lucky. This pestilence spares none. The Duke of Clarence has taken to his bed. Morestede, the King’s surgeon, is with him; it’s grave.’

The King’s brother ill. It was as if gods and saints were toppling. Unthinkable, to associate these with pain and stench and humiliation.

‘Likewise,’ said Davy, watching him, ‘the Earls of March and Arundel. Did you think them immune, by birthright? Flesh, man! Flesh!’

The dawn was chill with the green death-smell from the marsh. Owen half-stumbled over a figure in the lee of a tent, a soldier collapsed in exhaustion or in the longest sleep of all.

‘This is not how I dreamed of our enterprise,’ he said with a tight throat.

‘Nor any of us. If we could only get inland where the ground is pure. The King swore he would have Harfleur in eight days. Their resistance is magnificent. They are so clever. Nightly their spies slip through, God knows how … they’ve even reached the Dauphin at Vernon to apprise him of how matters go.’

‘But their supplies must soon end,’ said Owen. ‘They can’t last for ever.’

Watching the ground for further hazards he did not see that Gam had stopped and was down on one knee. Only when a slight shadow, flanked by two heavier guarding figures fell across him was he aware, and hurriedly knelt. Those feet he had studied aboard
La Trinité Royale
, when he had served the wine. Now warily he looked up. The King’s face, its ruddiness tempered by dawnlight, looked drawn, the skin tight over the cheeks and the sharp nose. But the eyes were unwearied, the voice calm.

‘How goes it, then?’ he asked Davydd Gam.

‘Sire, the same. I have just come from my lord of Suffolk’s camp. His illness worsens. And the tower we breached yesterday has been shored up. Is your Grace in health?’

‘Perfectly.’ But Owen, lowering his eyes again, saw the tiniest betrayal of fatigue or uncertainty. The King’s calf-muscles were swollen taut with fitness, an athlete’s legs, yet they shuddered almost imperceptibly.

‘We will smoke out these rats,’ the King was saying. ‘We’ll have them on their knees, obeisant, with ropes round their gizzards just as the great Edward the Third did when he took Calais …’

Faintly from the pavilion where the Duke of Clarence lay sick filtered a plangent thread of tune. Like a hound scenting sport, the King’s head turned.

‘The Irish minstrel,’ he said absently. ‘He plays well.’ Words burst incontinently from Owen.

He said, excited, despite his tiredness: ‘No, Sire. It’s a Welsh harp. Good sycamore, strung more sturdily than the Irish, better proportioned. I play one at home.’

He bit his lip; once more he had broken protocol. Yet his glance flicked up once more to the King’s face. It was unoffended.

‘I, too,’ said Henry’s rather flat voice. ‘I learned, between skirmishes, in Wales. I found it somewhat difficult. But how sweet a sound!’ Then he gazed in belated recognition at Owen. ‘My cup-bearer aboard ship! A minstrel too? As David soothed Saul, you shall play for me, once Harfleur is taken.’

‘Jesu grant this soon,’ said Gam.

Henry continued to survey Owen. He saw the crusted blood on his clothes.

‘You’re wounded. And hungry too, no doubt. The new victuals have come from Bordeaux. I would not have kept him kneeling here,’ he said to Gam, and Owen, ashamed of his filthy appearance, cried: ‘No, Sire! I lay where a man had died …’

‘Too many die,’ said Henry shortly. He swung round as two men with lanterns hastened up behind him. A greybearded chaplain and a surgeon, his apron bloody black.

‘Sire,’ said the doctor. ‘I must report the sickness. It’s worse. Beyond control. Two thousand deathly ill, and fifteen hundred dead. It spreads faster than the black plague from which Christ preserve us.’

‘Great God!’ said Henry, almost to himself. ‘Was it for this I pawned my lands, broke up my stepmother’s jewels?’

‘Sire,’ said the chaplain. ‘I must beg you come swiftly. His Grace the Bishop of Norwich asks for you. He is, I fear,
in extremis
.’

Music, ambition, regret, all fled Harry’s mind. His dismay was apparent; his face grew old and stark.

‘Courtenay sick? But he … he was so careful. He never touched the wine. My own butlers prepared his table …’

The good new bread and beef and salt, the fresh fish, brought from Bordeaux by wagons axle-deep in marsh, horses lashed over roads dirty with ambush. Yet Courtenay sick! Unbearable. Did God’s cause demand other sacrifices, as dear as this? He drew sour air into his chest, and said:

‘Why was I not earlier informed?’

‘It took the Lord Bishop in a matter of hours.’

‘But he was careful!’ he repeated in disbelief. Abstemious, determined… my friend and ghostly comforter …
Discipline
. Be apart from emotion. Even this most terrible news must not undermine him. He loved the Bishop far better than his own brothers. And Courtenay’s sickness served to epitomize the malady afflicting this enterprise. The abortive siege. The assured impertinence of Harfleur’s garrison commander, the Sire d’Estouteville. A nightmare disillusion. Build the walls of Jerusalem, indeed! He could not even force the wicket gate of France! He thought: I shall never be able to return home if I fail. I shall go East, with the handful of sick men left to me, wandering the world till eternity, a lion no longer but a wounded jackal. Owen’s face came into focus. These young men, so keen, as I was at Shrewsbury. Wasted now, as I was not. Are my fighting hopes so short lived? Am I visited with the sins of my father? Am I judged?