Master of War (6 page)

The sense of achievement lasted less than five minutes. Sir Gilbert strode from the village’s outlying buildings. Blackstone was about to tell him what had happened but never had the chance. Sir Gilbert struck him hard across the head, the blow so heavy it put Blackstone down onto one knee.

‘Stay down! You dog’s turd.’

Richard lunged forward but Sir Gilbert suddenly held a dagger in his hand; its point touched the skin beneath the boy’s neck, stopping him from taking another step. ‘You ever raise a hand to me again, you deformed donkey, and I’ll have you dancing from the end of a rope on that damned tree!’ He kicked Blackstone hard, sending him sprawling. The knife never wavered. ‘Tell him!’ the knight demanded.

Blackstone gestured, small signs that the boy understood. His brother stepped back away from the knife point. ‘Get up,’ Sir Gilbert commanded.

Sir Gilbert sheathed his knife. ‘You think I give you my pro­tection so you can sell yourself like a tavern whore? You waste an arrow on damned carrion? I’ll take it out of your pay.’ Sir Gilbert looked to the other archers. ‘Which one of you made the boy use a good shaft that could kill a Frenchman?’

Blackstone wiped the trickle of blood from his face. ‘It wasn’t them, Sir Gilbert. You were right; I was showing them my father’s bow. The fault is mine.’

Sir Gilbert was no fool and he could read his men. ‘So, was I right? Can anyone draw that bow other than Henry Blackstone’s son?’

Longdon spoke up from the ranks of archers: ‘I doubt they could, Sir Gilbert, if anyone were to try.’

‘Aye, if anyone were to try.’ Sir Gilbert pointed in the direction of the infantrymen beneath the tree. ‘Blackstone, send your brother to retrieve the arrow, then follow me.’

He turned his back and moved towards the village. Blackstone sent Richard to do the knight’s bidding and then picked up their haversacks and arrow bags. Will Longdon had drawn him into making a stupid mistake of vanity, but Blackstone had learnt the lesson and kept the man’s involvement to himself. He was learning. Longdon grinned as Blackstone passed him.

‘You’ll do all right.’

Blackstone hoped that was true.

The brothers trudged uphill in silence towards the village of Quet­tehou, a mile inland from the beachhead. Sir Gilbert spoke only once of the matter as they approached the church of St Vigor.

‘You’re a free man; behave like one. Those scum may be fighters but they stand in your father’s shadow. You’re better than they are. Start thinking and behaving like him.’

Blackstone saw heavily armed knights and their retinues, jost­ling in a flurry of activity. The King had landed at midday, Sir Gilbert told him. And now that they were on Norman soil the royal household and senior commanders gathered to hear him declare his campaign against King Philip VI of France.

‘Is that the King?’ Blackstone asked, as one of the royal party, whose quality of armour was unmistakable, passed by them in the crowd.

Killbere caught a glimpse of the man. ‘Him? That peacock? No, he’s Rodolfo Bardi, the King’s banker. He’s here to make sure the money’s well spent.’

Sir Gilbert led them past the crowd to a small door at the side of the church. ‘Sheath your bow and tell your brother to keep his grunting silent. He’s to stay at this door.’

Blackstone did as he was ordered. Richard sat on the grass, his back against the wall. Blackstone felt a pang of regret at leaving his brother alone, but he had no wish to receive another rebuke from the knight.

Sir Gilbert leaned his shoulder against the heavy oak. It creaked open wide enough for them to ease through. They stood in the cold shadows behind the packed congregation of knights and commanders. Heraldic devices rich in colour, emblazoned on banners, shields, pennons and surcoats, filled the small church. Blackstone had never seen such a gathering, nor even imagined it. The low murmur of voices from the altar could not be heard distinctly, but Blackstone could see the man who stood facing his lords and barons.

‘That’s your sovereign lord,’ Sir Gilbert whispered.

Blackstone felt a surge of excitement – a common man witness to a royal ceremony. The King was in his mid-thirties, about the same age as Sir Gilbert, Blackstone guessed, but he looked magnif­i­cent. He was tall, his stature and bearing made even more impressive by his armour and quartered surcoat of three golden lions on a field of red and the scattering of lilies on a field of blue. This was a King ready for war. Even from the back of the crowded church Blackstone caught the tint of blue in his eyes and the light touched his blond beard. A handsome young man bowed his head to the King, then knelt, yielding a sword before him, held like a cross. Blackstone could not hear what was said, but Sir Gilbert whispered again.

‘Young nobles are to be knighted. It’s good for morale. Makes them slaughter the enemy more.’ He smiled. ‘Chivalry. Good for killing. That’s the King’s son. He’s the same age as you.’

Blackstone stood on tiptoe to try to see the ceremony. The young man wore the same livery as the King, except for the addition of a horizontal line with three short vertical lines below it. King Edward laid his hands on the boy’s head. Chivalry was not dead – it couldn’t be; Blackstone just knew it. The King’s voice carried. He charged his son to behave with honour and stay loyal to his liege lord. Blackstone heard those words and knew Sir Gilbert must surely be an embittered knight not to believe in the glory that the King stood for.

The Prince of Wales, taller than his father, moved to one side. Blackstone could barely believe that a boy so young could lead the vanguard of the English army even if his guardians were to be the marshals of the army. His sense of awe eased when he remembered his own age. Caring for Richard had made him older than his years.

‘Remember these nobles, Blackstone, and their coats of arms. You’ll be fighting alongside them sooner or later and you’d best know who you’re going to die for – other than me and your King.’

As each young man knelt before his sovereign Sir Gilbert whis­pered some of their names:
Mortimer
,
de la Bere
,
Salisbury
,
de la Warre
.
Then a lame middle-aged noble limped forward, his surcoat of red and gold horizontal bars catching the rays of the July sun through the church’s west window. He knelt and did homage to Edward.

‘That’s Godfrey de Harcourt,’ Sir Gilbert said quietly as the Norman baron swore his allegiance and recognized Edward as King of France.

Then lions and lilies unfurled as the King’s standard was raised.

‘Now we’re at war,’ Sir Gilbert said and tugged the reluctant Blackstone to the door.

Sir Gilbert was pursuing his duty to Lord Marldon. He hoped that giving Blackstone his protection and then chastising him harshly would teach the boy quickly and help him find the courage needed for what lay ahead.

He took twenty hobelars – light cavalry who looked as if they could ride down wolves – attended by twenty archers, and rode south to scout the land. Sir Gilbert had chosen veterans and half a dozen of Lord Marldon’s men to ride on the sortie. Nicholas Bray rode at their head. Norman forces loyal to Philip were light on the Cotentin peninsula, but every step towards the River Seine and Paris, the French capital, would take its toll on Edward’s forces. There had already been brief skirmishes with other units and one of the marshals, the Earl of Warwick, had been ambushed, but had fought his way clear. The few hundred retreating French troops would harry and snap at the army’s flanks.

And now Edward had made a proclamation that, out of respect for de Harcourt, and to show that these French were Edward’s vassals, no Norman manor houses or towns were to be looted or burned. That beggared belief as far as Nicholas Bray and the other veterans were concerned. How was the army to feed itself? How could lowly paid men be kept willing to fight if they could not plunder? Scouring the land was accepted practice. Sir Gilbert knew it was a promise that the King could not keep, and told them so. The army was a disciplined fighting force against any enemy, but villages needed to be looted and burned – that was a fair warning to his King’s enemies. This war was not about mercy.

And Blackstone needed to be blooded. For days they rode south, criss-crossing the peninsula. Villages were deserted; some had already been burned by foragers and those that remained Sir Gilbert’s men put to the torch. The message was being sent to the French King that the English army was coming. As each day passed the frustration of not engaging with the enemy made Sir Gilbert more bad-tempered than usual. Like all the nobles and knights he craved the joy of battle and the glory and wealth it could bring. The dragging pace of the baggage train kept Edward’s main division well behind the vanguard. And thank God for it, Sir Gilbert let it be known. They needed to get their arses out of the confines of this suffocating landscape before the French King brought up his army and trapped them with their backs to the sea. If the Prince of Wales’s vanguard of four thousand troops could smash their way through to the cities of St Lô and Caen then they would be on their way to Paris. Sir Gilbert knew the land. He’d irrigated the French soil with his enemies’ blood before. That’s why he was leading a reconnaissance of pox-scarred, drunken, throat-slitting archers across a godforsaken landscape with nothing but the mocking crows to taunt him. And he told the archers so. Every day.

Blackstone had no idea where he was. The names of places meant nothing to him, nor to most of the others. What he did know was that the expectation of the unknown scared him. They had skirted the marshlands, moving down the narrow tracks between high hedgerows. This
bocage
was the most dangerous terrain and the men were forced to ride close together. A couple of miles to their front the ground rose to the west and then spread out into more open meadows. The burning villages were far behind them and the roving Welsh spearmen and English infantry had not yet reached this far south.

It was Richard who raised the alarm. His guttural cry alerted Sir Gilbert, who turned in the saddle prepared to issue a rebuke, but then he saw the boy explaining to Blackstone what he had seen. He halted the horsemen.

‘He saw a man half a mile away push into the hedgerow,’ Black­stone explained.

‘A peasant?’ Sir Gilbert asked.

Blackstone shook his head. ‘He wore mail.’

Sir Gilbert looked at Blackstone’s brother. ‘Tell him if he is wrong I’ll have him whipped. I need to move faster.’

‘With respect, Sir Gilbert, being dead is as slow as you can go,’ Blackstone said. ‘If he says he saw a man wearing mail, then that’s what he saw.’

Within minutes Sir Gilbert had ordered a plan of attack. Black­stone and the archers dismounted, climbed a high bank and pushed through the hedgerow. The track ahead looped to the left and the hedgerow followed the curved route. An ambush by French troops would be on that bend and the archers would be shielded as they approached their firing position, half-concealed by tall meadow grass and a drainage ditch.

‘My life is in your hands,’ Sir Gilbert said to Bray and the archers before they scurried away, their bows already strung.

Elfred led the way, crouching as he ran, seeking out the best position: a place that allowed them to kill the enemy without fear of their arrows striking Sir Gilbert and the horsemen. They heard the men continuing their way down the track as they prepared to draw the ambush.

On Bray’s silent command the dozen archers spread out a yard apart, nocked an arrow each and waited. Stillness gives a hunter the edge over his prey, but the shadows in the hedgerow, now two hundred yards away, shuffled nervously, readying themselves to strike and so revealing their position. The memory of the men working across the valley on Lord Marldon’s estate flashed into Blackstone’s mind. That idle game was now a deadly reality.

Blackstone saw a gauntleted arm raised from the greenery, a command to attack about to be given. He raised his bow and, as one, the others followed his lead. Goose-feather fletchings hissed through the air and the yard-long arrows struck home moments before the ambush. Despite the distance the sound of steel-tipped arrows ripping into flesh could be heard by the archers.

The wounded enemy’s screams were drowned by the attacking cries of Sir Gilbert’s men. Metal clashed, more screams, horses whinnied, half a dozen figures burst from the hedgerow to retreat across the meadows, running for shelter in the woodland five hundred yards away – a distance no retreating man could make when an English archer followed his run. Hemp cords released another flurry of arrows and the helpless men fell, most with two shafts tearing through bone, cartilage and vital organs. Those who did not die instantly would bleed to death within minutes, the shock from the impact of the arrows crippling and fatal. The battle was still being fought on the track. Blackstone broke cover, running instinctively, breathless with excitement mingled with fear, but with a focused certainty that he needed a better firing position. If Sir Gilbert had advanced along the track then he and his men would be in danger from his own archers. Something blurred past his face and one of the Englishmen cried out as a crossbow bolt slammed into his chest. An archer’s padded jacket offered insufficient protection against a direct strike.

‘Kneel!’ yelled Bray. From a dense patch of brambles half a dozen more bolts snapped over their heads; the range was down to a hundred yards. The crossbowmen had placed themselves between brambles and hedgerow, out of sight from an attacking force from the rear. Without conscious thought Blackstone and the others adjusted their bows’ angle and loosed a concentrated hail of arrows into the confines of the bramble patch. The enemy’s cries of pain ended quickly – the hammer-like force of a shaft striking a body stunned most into breathless pain. Except for the agonized moans of the wounded, the fight was over – the killing had taken less than ten minutes.

Blackstone and the others advanced carefully.

‘Bray! Elfred! Blackstone!’ Sir Gilbert’s voice carried from the other side of the hedges.