THE EARL (A HAMMER FOR PRINCES) (33 page)

When the page had gone, he said, “It is not Chester who is at the root of this. We must win Pembroke.”

“We can win Pembroke by breaking Chester.”

“If Prince Henry wishes it.”

Fulk watched the clerk seal the letter. “Or we can break Chester by winning Pembroke, perhaps.”

“Take the letter when you go. I’ll take a hundred men into Stamford, and if Chester is mistaken for a looter—” He shouted for his squire and went into the back of the tent.

“It would solve many of our problems,” Fulk said.

The looting went on, although much lessened, all the next day, and Prince Henry spoke to the leaders of the Jews and they gave him seven hundred and fifty marks as a present. Henry wanted more, but Leicester convinced him that the Jews of Stamford could give no more. Henry promised the Jews to stop the looting in the Jewry by the next morning and sent them away. He needed the money to pay for supplies, which were coming in every day from the countryside.

After the Jews had left, Rannulf came up to Fulk and drew him to one side of the prince’s tent. Fulk was pleased to find his son so much in the favor of the prince, but he said nothing for fear that Rannulf would be suspicious of his interest. All the prince’s servants were packing to move into a house in the city, and the tent was filled with busy people.

Rannulf said, “My lord, Chester wants to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to see Chester.”

“My lord,” Rannulf said quietly, “the prince asks you to.”

“Oh,” Fulk said. “Did he ask Derby to talk to Hereford, yesterday?”

Rannulf said, “He asks, that’s all. If you don’t wish to, don’t.”

“I’ll talk to him.” Fulk bit the inside of his cheek; a moment before, he remembered, he had been proud of Rannulf. “I’ll see him on the top of that hill, south of the town on the river. The one they call the Queen’s Hill, with all the birches. Tell him to come alone.”

“Why there?” Rannulf gestured around him. “The prince will allow you to talk here, I’m sure.”

“So no one will see us talking,” Fulk said.” Everybody is very suspicious of everybody else. I’m sorry if I insulted either you or the prince.”

He went to the door. Rannulf did not follow. Fulk heard him talking to one of the Angevins, and he stepped outside and sent Morgan for his horse. He did not want to meet Chester, and Rannulf’s new attitude baffled him; he looked up into the clear sky and tried to think himself calm.

From the Queen's Hill, the countryside spread out in tawny colors, the narrow strips of the fields tracing out the curves of the low hills and hollows, the walls of Stamford picked out in rose colors by the failing sun. The wind had lulled. Fulk sat crosslegged on the ground, watching the road from town, which ran around the foot of the hill. Behind him, his horse stamped at flies and ripped up the grass with its teeth.

Fat and red in the unclouded sky, the sun lowered to the rim of the western hills. A soft, cool wind touched Fulk’s cheek. It had been blistering hot all day, and he turned his face into the wind and sighed. Down on the road, a sngle horse was coming. Fulk shut his eyes, and the wind cooled his eyelids.

The sounds of the city and the camp reached him, muffled by distance, enclosed in the silence of the hill and the empty fields. He saw the sun against his eyelids, blood red. The sound of hoofs reached him and grew steadily stronger. Opening his eyes, he looked toward the road, but the curve of the hill hid Chester from him. A cricket was chirruping behind him; all down the slope before him, he saw them leaping, so many that the air low over the grass was filled with their flights. The hoofbeats drummed louder and dropped from a canter to the even beat of a trot, and he looked around and saw Chester riding toward him through the birch trees.

Chester reined in and stared at him, his face all high color. “Well, Fulk.” He dismounted; he rode a black horse with a narrow white blaze and two white stockings behind, and he led it to a tree and knotted the reins around a branch. Crickets sailed away from his feet when he walked toward Fulk.

“It’s peaceful enough here,” he said warily.

“Yes,” Fulk said. “If there were a stream I would be fishing. What do you want, Chester?”

“Not I. What Prince Henry wants.” He swiped at the crickets in the air. “You could use them for bait.” When he sat down, one of his knees cracked, louder than the crickets. “By God, there are ants everywhere.”

“You’re sitting on an anthill. Move over.”

Chester straightened and moved around to Fulk’s other side. The sun was half gone, as if the hills were eating it. From their feet the shadows moved out over the level ground.

“Prince Henry wishes us to talk out our differences,” Chester said. “Shall we?”

The evening star shone in the sky, above the sun. Fulk stared at it, saying, “That night in Stamford you tried to conquer me. Since you didn’t, it’s easily forgotten. But you know how deep this goes, all of it, and how far back in our families.”

“There is a treaty between you and me, remember?”

“You broke it, that night in Stamford. You have broken every bond you ever made with any man.”

“Oooh. But, Fulk, you sound like a monk, or a woman. Treaties have their use, but when the use is past—”

“Then why bring it up?” Fulk said sharply.

“Because—” Chester tore up clumps of grass and threw them down the hill. “If you joined me and Pembroke, all would be mended.”

“You and Pembroke and Thierry?”

“Oh. Something could be done about Thierry.”

“You’re mad.”

“Leicester and Derby and those others could not withstand the three of us, with Hereford and Wiltshire and the prince. What keeps you from joining us? What do you want?”

“I have all I want.”

“Nobody has all he wants. What can you find in those men—Leicester, Derby—”

“They’re my friends.”

“Of them all, only you has the wit and decision to contend with us. They will follow you."

“You misjudge them. Or me.”

“No.” Chester flung a flowering weed down among the crickets. “You misjudge them, and yourself. Some—gaudy idea of loyalty and friendship has blinded you—these men are to be used, like oxen, to draw whatever weight they can bear, in the service of men like us. How many men do you know with the power to make of their lives what they wish?”

“None.”

“I do.” Chester flicked an ant off his shim. “Men like Leicester and Derby are worth only what we make them worth to us.”

“I don’t believe that, Chester.” He wondered if Chester himself believed it and decided that he did.

“Then you don’t understand yourself. You need not answer me now. When you want to join us, let me know of it, and we will discuss the terms of it.” He smiled; his unwinking, bulging eyes were sleek with confidence. “Like kings.”

Fulk looked away, down toward the city; the sun had gone down, and behind him, in the dusk, a nightingale began to sing. Lights showed in the city and the besieged castle. After a moment, Chester got up and went to his horse, mounted, and rode away. Where he had been sitting, the grass sprung up, leaf by leaf, hiding the gaps he had torn out.

All that night, Leicester's men battled the looters, drove them from street to street among the burning houses, the garbage, and the swine; Fulk, sitting in his tent listening to Morgan’s harp. Could hear occasional shouts and screams. He had tried to find Rannulf to tell him what had happened between him and Chester, so that Rannulf could report it to the prince, but Rannulf was not in the camp. Fulk thought he was with the prince.

The problem of supply would lessen when the city was quiet, because the supply masters of each army could buy in the marketplace, but the normal trade of Stamford would hardly be enough. He had not yet gone to Highfield, to ask Rohese to sell the army herds and grain, although he had thought of that, and of Red Alys of Dol, every day since he had heard how close Highfield was. There was no sense doing anything before he understood all the implications.

While Morgan sang of the knight on the road, Fulk wrote out instructions to the supply masters of the army, and read letters from his steward concerning his own demesne. His Norman lands, the seat of his family, seemed as distant and indistinct as a star; he had not been there in over a year, an extraordinary absence. Yet William Malmain his steward reported that the vicomté was quiet and the crops growing to a great harvest. The maturing yellow wine, the kind Fulk liked best, was better than usual, William wrote; since traveling ruined it, he hoped Fulk would come to Bruyère before it was all drunk up.

I’ll go at Christmas. Hugh should be knighted at Bruyère, anyway. He thought, as he had before, of leaving Hugh his Norman lands, and Rannulf only the Honor of Bruyère in England, less certain bequests Fulk intended for the White Monks. No one man could care for all that land anyway. That was probably Thierry’s argument. Fulk made aimless marks with his pen along the margin of the letter he was reading. Most of the great lords of England had lost their Norman lands when Prince Henry’s father had conquered Normandy from Stephen.

Stephen had given some of his barons compensation, of course, which was how Chester had come into his claim of the Honor of Lancaster, and the Honor of Bruyère was one of the smaller important holdings in England, only four hundred and eight knights’ fees. Fulk drew a circle in the margin; his pen was dry, and he dipped it again in the ink.

When he had succeeded his grandfather as lord of Stafford he had come all unprepared into as much as Rannulf would inherit, and he had learned it eventually. If he split up the demesne, Hugh at least would fret for lack of things to do.

He wrote William Malmain a letter, to tell him that he would come to Bruyère in Normandy for Christmas and that Hugh and Morgan would be knighted then. William could also arrange for the commissioning of a statue of the Virgin, for the chapel at Bruyère-le-Forêt, from one of the woodcarvers in Rouen. He paused, trying to remember the name of the man who had done the work in the new church at Bruyère.

Morgan was in the middle of a verse, and Fulk waited until it had ended. Putting down the pen, he called, “Morgan, will you come here?”

The music stopped, and Morgan walked around from the back of the tent to stand before his table. The tent all around them was stacked up with packed baggage, to be moved into the city the next day.

“We are knighting Hugh, this Christmas,” Fulk said. “You should be knighted then, too.”

Morgan put his hands behind his back. “No, my lord.”

“You’re old enough, and you’ve learned enough as a squire to make you a good knight, Morgan—there isn’t much more you can learn as a squire.”

“I hate swords,” Morgan said. “I hate shields, and fighting, and all the worse than fighting, and I will not be a knight, ever, my lord.”

Amazed, Fulk stared at him, his mind empty. What the abbot of Saint Swithin had said of the children of the wars came back to him, that they had learned nothing worthy of them. Arguments boiled up in his mind, and he rejected them all. He knew Morgan would not care what other people thought of him, a man of his blood who did not become a knight.

“Whatever pleases you, Morgan.”

“Thank you, my lord. You need a harp player more than a knight, anyway.”

Morgan went back to his playing. Fulk watched him. He would have to get another squire, because Morgan would soon be too old for a squire. One of the candles was guttering, and he realized that he was sleepy. But he did not rise; he sat drawing in the margin of the letter until Morgan had finished the song of the knight on the road.

He finished the letter the next morning and signed it and put it away until he could unpack his seals to seal it with; somebody shouted outside his tent, and he looked up.

Morgan went outside to see what was happening, and immediately put his head in the door and said, “My lord, come out.”

Fulk got up and went into the sunshine and the bright wind. Everywhere in the camp, men were carrying their goods toward the wagons. Leicester and three other men were leading a packed horse untoward him, and when he saw Fulk Leicester booted his mount forward and dismounted.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and caught Fulk by the arm. “He’s dead, Fulk.”

Fulk brushed past him and went to the side of the burdened horse and pulled back the covering. It was Rannulf, his head turned against the skirt of the saddle, and his hair hanging down. Fulk stood with his arm stiffly outstretched, holding back the flap of the cloak, frozen. “No,” he said. “Oh, no.”

“A man of mine found him in an alley in the city—he was stabbed. Come inside, Fulk.”

Fulk let go of the cloak, and it fell back across Rannulf’s head. “Help me,” he said. He pulled blindly at the ropes that held Rannulf onto the horse, and all those around him moved up and unhitched the ropes and helped him lift the body down.

Leicester said something, but Fulk could not hear it; he was weeping and a rushing sound filled his ears so that he could hear nothing. They carried Rannulf into the tent. Morgan cried out. They laid Rannulf on the ground, and Fulk knelt beside him and pulled off the cloak. Blood covered the boy’s chest, and there were two deep wounds in his right side. He had not even worn mail.