The Last Conquest (49 page)

He hoped it would not be necessary, but, if it were, would Fitzosbern do it? Would the Duke back him when it really came to it? Or would the old ideas of Giffard prevail? But – if they
tried, and succeeded, what a vindication!

Ivo had always said that Geoffrey’s father was a greater warrior than his son, but to be proved the greater tactician was a worthy consolation.

Geoffrey sighed. If only Ivo were alive to see. Dear Ivo – that gruff, thick-handed barrel of a man who had been his guardian and friend while Father was away; who had set him on his first
destrier; who had taught him the profession of knightly arms; who had been at his side through a score of battles and sieges and a hundred skirmishes and a thousand rides; who, alone of the
household, still called him, though admittedly only under great stress, ‘Master Geoffrey’.

Would Ivo be proud of his work tomorrow? Geoffrey grimaced. Not if it was a Saxon hand that pulled back his tent-flap in the evening.

‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned . . .’

‘I am sorry to hear about Berry,’ said the King.

Edwin grimaced. Harold put an arm round his shoulders.

‘There will be others to love. You have my word. We shall have good times again, eh?’

‘Yes, sir. I shall get the swine, sir.’

Harold smiled. ‘Do not try too hard. We shall win this fight by staying put, not by rushing about to settle personal scores.’

Edwin looked unconvinced.

Harold finished his meal and stood up.

‘You are not fighting for revenge.’

‘It was not your dog, sir.’

‘No, but it is my kingdom, and I know best how to save it. You will do as I say.’

‘What about my honour?’

‘To Hell with your honour. If you wish to serve me in this battle, any “honour” you have will be to stand in my line with my housecarls and my fyrdmen. Think yourself lucky to
be there tomorrow morning. Think yourself even luckier to be there tomorrow evening. In between, you obey my orders. Do I have your word?’

Edwin gulped. ‘Yes, sir. You have my word.’

‘Good.’ Harold fastened a big cloak round his shoulders. ‘I think you had better come with me. I shall show you many men of “honour” who do not wear their private
misery like a beggar’s sores. Follow.’

Waving to a few housecarls to accompany him, Harold strode off without glancing back. Edwin, after a moment of hesitation, hurried unwillingly after him.

What he saw in the next hour or so drove all grief and injured pride from his mind. He had seen Harold charm men before, but never had he witnessed such miracles as his king performed that
evening.

Whenever Harold reached a group round a fire – proud housecarls, lofty thegns, dour fyrdmen, grumbling ploughmen – he had the trick of becoming one of them without diminishing his
royalty in any way. An uncanny instinct told him exactly what action to perform. Edwin was never conscious of Harold working his way in from the outside. He picked a piece of meat off a spit, or
peered at the sharpness of a spearhead, or simply squatted and warmed his hands at the blaze, and instantly he was a full member of the group. He did not make speeches to them; he gossiped with
them, asked about their families, moaned about blisters. They accepted him at once and spoke without fear or affectation.

Edwin observed, however, that Harold usually managed to slide the occasional piece of military intelligence or general encouragement into the conversation without anyone noticing. It was as if
he were an ordinary soldier discussing the King’s plans.

‘The top of a hill is as good a spot as any . . . there are earth spirits up there, you know, round the only tree. Very bare hilltop. Especially unkind to outsiders or intruders. Very
strong local tradition. Of course, I know you lads are not superstitious and neither am I. All the same, I do not think I should like to be in the Normans’ shoes – if only to be on the
safe side, eh? . . . high ground – they will have to come to us, and we can watch them struggling in the mud . . . a Viking bandit or a Norman bandit – what is the difference? The owner
always fights better than the thief . . . William is unfit and overweight; needs a big box, I hear, to help him mount a horse. God help the horse, eh? . . . he knows he has bitten off more than he
can chew this time . . . we have a victory under our belts. What do they have? Seasickness . . . we have done it once; we can do it again – stands to reason . . . he has mercenaries,
foreigners, all sorts of riff-raff. How well do such men fight in a bad cause? Can they stand with the men of Anglia, or the lions of Wessex, or the heroes of Stamford, in defence of their own
land? . . . horses will not jump at spears; it is a well-known fact . . . you will have an easy time tomorrow; you can fight all day sitting on your arse. It is up to the Bastard to get us off it.
Those of you with fat arses are laughing . . . we are up here; he is down there. It is as simple as that. And that is how we keep it. And we keep it by doing nothing . . . how much easier can you
have it? Stay put all day and win a great victory . . . if you think you will bore your children with talk of Stamford and the bridge, just wait till they hear about the Bastard and Caldbec Hill .
. . William is the gambler; we are on to a sure thing . . . the son of the tanner’s daughter? Bah! We shall skin him alive!’

Time and again great gales of laughter rose into the night air. When Harold arrived, men could hardly wait for sleep; when he left, they could not wait for the dawn.

Edwin knew, with every sense, brain, and instinct at his command, and beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he was close to a man who could make history. What did Berry matter? What did revenge
matter? Aud and her clawing desire? Gorm, Godric, the mill, even a lost love in Normandy? Destiny dawned on the morrow, and Edwin was conscious of a fullness of existence that he had never known
before. It came with the knowledge that he was going to be part of that destiny. He knew in his bones that tomorrow, Saturday, the fourteenth of October, in the year of Our Lord one thousand and
sixty-six, would be a day like no other. He knew that it would be the longest day – and the greatest day – of his entire existence. He knew that, if he survived, and whatever the
outcome of the battle, he would look back on that day as a turning-point in his life.

Long after stand-down, the candles continued to burn in Baldwin’s tent.

He sipped some hot broth; beer at this hour of the night only made him colder than he already was. He hitched a blanket tighter round his shoulders. It would get colder still before the
dawn.

However, he was ready. The wagons had been checked and double-checked. He had inspected the guards on them nearly every hour. If the Flemings were to steal from them tonight they would have to
be invisible. Spare wheels and axles, extra draught animals, drivers, baggage guards, miles of rope, great buckets of grease – he did not see how he could have forgotten anything. Food,
drink, rough bandages, leather for emergency tack – the baggage train was bursting with readiness, almost literally. It was ready to move at an hour’s notice.

Baldwin sniffed like Crispin. If something were to go wrong from now on, he did not see how the blame for it could be laid at his door.

The Duke had kept them at stand-to since clear sightings of the English arrival had been confirmed. As long as an evening or even a night assault had seemed remotely possible, he had maintained
full readiness. Now the latest relays of scouts had brought detailed reports of a definite slowing down of the English army, and, later, of hosts of campfires over seven miles away.

Surely there was no danger now, not tonight. Harold had marched his men from Yorkshire. Yorkshire! That had to be over two hundred miles. If they were sighted only today and were out of normal
scouting range yesterday, that meant they must have covered well over twenty miles since dawn. They could not possibly manage another seven miles on top of that in order to fling themselves, in the
dark, on a heavily fortified position that had not been reconnoitred. Not even an army of Nordic gods would contemplate such a manoeuvre.

Nevertheless, William had waited until he was quite sure, until his best scouts told him that the campfires were genuine. There were old stories of clever generals who had fooled their enemies
as to their whereabouts by getting their men to light hundreds of bare fires while the army left the camp empty. One was forced to admire William’s thoroughness, but his refusal to take the
slightest avoidable risk could be tiresome.

So William at last gave the word, and everyone had a few hours to himself. For what? For sleep? Baldwin grunted and shivered. Hardly.

For confession? He had done that.

For talk? Crispin was not there. Baldwin had never thought he would miss Crispin’s hatchet fact and his disdainful sniff. The other commanders – Giffard, Montgomery, Alan of Brittany
and the rest – had their own worries and their own preoccupations. Fitzosbern was still closeted with William, but the time would come when even Fitz would be sent away. Their threefold bond
of mutual loyalty was no whit less valid now than it had ever been, but at a moment like this, only William carried the ultimate burden, and, without Matilda, the only company he could tolerate
would be his own.

Baldwin wound his blanket closer and wandered to the door of his tent. His fire was blazing well – of course. Yet, from force of habit, he stooped and picked up another log to toss into
the flames. There was still a big pile. And why not? He was the quartermaster; if he could not have a good supply, he would like to know who could.

For once, he did not wave away the young soldiers who sat around.

He looked up at the night sky. Plenty of stars were coming out.

It was going to get colder before the morning. No wind. Probably sunny tomorrow. Good for moving an army – the less mud the better.

Someone had dragged a plank from the Duke’s kitchen and propped it across two water barrels. Baldwin came and sat on one end. Without saying a word, the young man next to him edged up to
give him more room.

He was peeling a carrot.

He glanced up at Baldwin, recognised his rank, and kept silent. He had been brought up by a stern father to speak to his betters only when he was spoken to, and the faraway expression on this
officer’s face warned him against interrupting a private line of thought.

Baldwin sighed. It was a funny thing in life, he had noticed, that a man never really knew himself. If anyone had told him a week ago that he would feel easy with a woman, he would have laughed,
albeit somewhat bitterly, and no doubt only inwardly. If they had told him that the woman would be English, he would probably have struck them.

For the life of him, he could not understand what had made him do what he had done for Aud. Aud . . . thank God it was a Danish name; getting his tongue round some of the Saxon ones would have
been the very Devil. Thank God too for Crispin. He could be trusted to care for her. Trusted too not to blurt the name of Sir Baldwin de Clair all over Sussex.

He did not relish the idea of the story being passed round the camp. With Crispin and Aud out of the way, it would not be. He flushed at the thought of the insolence he had already been forced
to tolerate from William Capra and Ralph Pomeroy. Well, he had seen to them; their sore backs would make them think twice before they did it again. They had disobeyed orders by not reporting to him
that morning, but he would catch up with them after the battle – assuming that some Saxon housecarl had not obliged in the meantime by cutting them in half.

Baldwin raised his head suddenly.

Fulk!

Bloodeye! That monster.
He
knew. He knew about Aud. He had seen them together. That was why he had done it.

Baldwin knew he often became annoyed. He shouted and he swore at men. He had been furious with Capra and Pomeroy. Fulk Bloodeye he now hated. Not only for his outrage on Aud, but for his taunts
about it beforehand. Yet more, because Baldwin suspected that Fulk enjoyed the taunting more than he had enjoyed the outrage; that he enjoyed creating badness for its own sake. With Baldwin’s
hatred was mingled revulsion and fear.

He, Sir Baldwin de Clair, was no saint, God knew! He was an ordinary, human, fallible man, no better and no worse than most others of his class. He looked after himself and his own. Naturally.
Why else would God have placed him here? What else would God expect him to do with the resources with which He had endowed him? What self-respecting Norman knight would not avail himself of every
chance that presented itself? How else had they survived and prospered since the days of Rollo and his band of adventurers? How else were the Hautevilles surviving in Italy and Sicily? Why else was
he here now, shivering by a camp-fire in a foreign land, committed – to the death – to a gamble so colossal that Robert Guiscard himself might have thought twice?

He, Baldwin de Clair, had made a good marriage, fathered sons, guaranteed his line. If Albreda’s tongue was the price, so be it. There were higher prices; look at Mabel of Montgomery. He
respected the proprieties – the Truce of God, the knightly code, the concept of honour. He was not a blasphemer, aside from normal campfire swearing; he heard Mass; he went to confession; he
gave alms; he endowed, and was proud of, his local monastery. Perfunctory, maybe, but he could never imagine himself
not
doing any of those things. They were all part of life, like camping
or riding a horse.

There must be a worthwhile reason for it all; there must be something pushing him to do it. For want of a better word, you could call it goodness.

Certainly, the recent impact of Fulk Bloodeye on his life was causing him to suspect the existence of the presence and power of evil. He was enough of a philosopher to see that if you believed
in the one you had to believe in the other.

It was not Fulk’s size or appearance; he had seen big and ugly men before. It was not Fulk’s profession; Baldwin understood the mercenary mentality. Nor was it the misshapen little
Turk who fawned and purred at his elbow – though, God’s Teeth, there was something unnatural in that too. It was not the violence, the insolence, the cruelty. One saw only too much of
that in life.