The Scourge (Kindle Serial) (19 page)

The old man draws a rusty old blade
and salutes me with it, then he and Joseph lead the other servants away. Matilda
stays behind and Sir Morgan helps her into his saddle. I open my mouth to tell
her to leave with the others, but Morgan’s eyes make a silent plea to let her
stay. The way he looks at her reminds me of what I feel for Elizabeth, and I
find I cannot deny him.

We ride in a great half-circle
around the hill as Robert Bailey and his men hurry from the dead oxen. I look
back and watch a swarm of locusts descend upon our altar of grass and heather.

God accepts our sacrifice. Or
perhaps the devil accepts his payment. One of the two is happy with the dead
oxen, for a great bulk of the plaguers lurches away from the willow.

It takes a long time for the ranks
of the dead to clear the hillcrest. Morgan crosses his arms and sighs as the
slow, graceless plaguers trudge toward the dead beasts. I catch a glimpse of
something large fluttering through the air.

“It can’t be!” Morgan watches the
bird. “It can’t!”

It can. And it is. The falcon makes
no attempt to glide down to us. It merely circles erratically above us in the
afternoon sky.

I turn my attention back to the
plaguers. Not all of them leave. A few remain at the willow, climbing and
falling, over and again, like witless children. We charge toward them. I draw
the Sword of St. Giles and send them to their death. To God or to Satan or to
an eternity of nothingness. I put them down.

We help Tristan out of the tree,
then Matilda’s sister, Cecilia, and her child. The two women embrace and Cecilia
sobs.

The last person out of the tree is
a lovely woman, perhaps eighteen years old, wearing one of those fitted French
dresses that cling to the body and leave the shoulders and collar exposed. She
is a pretty thing with blonde hair, but she lacks the grace of my Elizabeth. I
feel a knife thrust of panic as I think of my Elizabeth. Is she safe? I have fought
for these women, these strangers. Who fights for Elizabeth?

Tristan helps the blonde woman down
from the tree and her grin promises him more than gratitude. He allows the
woman to lean on him, as if she is injured, and turns to me. “Who led that gun
crew? Was he a lunatic or just blind?”

Morgan shakes his head and smiles.
“Tristan, show some respect. The man who led that gun crew fought at Calais.”

“That he did,” I say. “Launched quite
a few shots at the city walls. How many was it again, Sir Morgan?”

“I think it was twenty-two, Sir
Edward.”

“Yes, that’s right, twenty-two.”

Morgan and I chuckle and pump our
fists and say “Boom!” again and again as the seven of us make our way toward
Danbury.

We sit on gilded wooden chairs in a
garden that has been meticulously groomed. Orchids and magnolias and thick
hedges of rose line the paths around the stone manor house. Two women dressed
in white robes play gentle music, one with a flute, the other a harp. Four
other women sit across from us, with their backs to the manor house. They sit embroidering
and blushing and trying to not look at the three of us.

I wipe something that looks like
brains from the shoulder of my breastplate. The arms of my tunic are red to the
elbows and smeared with a gore that I cannot identify. Morgan’s tunic looks
like a butcher’s block. His forehead bears a long smudge of blood where he
wiped with his hand. Tristan’s hair sticks up in wild tufts and is tangled with
dry leaves. Blood covers much of him too.

I can only imagine how I must look.
How the three of us must look to these people.

A portly woman approaches warily.
She wears servant’s clothing and holds a tray bearing two dozen tiny pastries
shaped like swans. The scent of minced beef and pepper makes my stomach growl. Morgan
and I each take one. Tristan scoops out the rest, nearly knocking the tray from
the woman’s hands. We haven’t eaten in more than a day. I try to eat the pastry
slowly but I can’t. It is gone before I can savor it. Morgan’s disappears in an
instant, too, so we both look at Tristan and pilfer from his hoard.

“Bgr uff,” Tristan says, his mouth
crammed with pastries. He tries to keep them from us and we try to get them and
it becomes a sort of game. We laugh and stuff pastries into our mouths and
cough dry flakes of bread until Morgan falls back onto his chair, laughing, and
shatters it.

The musicians stop playing. Morgan bounces
to his feet and tries to put the two broken legs back in place. I try as well
but I can see no way to mend the high-backed chair. The embroidering women
steal glances our way and whisper.

Morgan and I kneel before the
chair, each of us holding a leg, and we argue about how best to affix them.
Tristan laughs and stuffs more pastries into his overflowing mouth. The rear
door of the manor house opens and a man who I assume is Sir Thomas steps out,
flanked by three men, including a now-unarmored Robert Bailey.

“These are the men who saved your
son, m’lord.” Robert gestures grandly toward us. I get up off my knees, nod
toward Sir Thomas and raise the chair leg as if toasting him. Morgan rises too,
letting the broken chair tumble backward. Tristan stands and sets the remaining
pastries on his seat.

Sir Thomas is a tall man, nearly my
height, and has the posture and gait of a warrior. He clears his throat and
smiles at us. His gaze shifts to the broken chair and then to our blood-soaked
clothing.

“This is Sir Edmund,” Robert Bailey
says.

“Edward,” I say, shaking Sir Thomas’s
hand.

Robert leans close to me and
whispers, “Thomas. He’s Sir Thomas.”

I stare at him, confused.

“I cannot express sufficient
gratitude for all you have done, Sir Edward,” Sir Thomas says.

Morgan offers Thomas his hand. “I
am Sir Morgan of Hastings.”

I introduce Tristan, and Sir Thomas
introduces the other two men with him. One of them is a burgher from Chelmsford
named Ralf. The other is a young Moor, who Thomas introduces as Zhuri. The
young man, no more than nineteen or twenty, wears a waist-length tunic, tall
boots, and bears a meticulously trimmed beard.

Morgan nudges me with an elbow and
gestures toward the Moor as subtly as he is capable of. But not subtly enough.

“Zhuri is from Spain,” Sir Thomas
says. “From a place called Granada.” He smiles at the Moor, then clasps his
hands together and addresses us again. “You will dine with us tonight?”

He opens the door to the manor
house before we can reply and motions for us to enter.

It is a sprawling
home, two stories high, and larger than my home in Bodiam. Sir Thomas takes us
to a room with an iron-studded oak door, which is locked, then excuses himself
so that he can fetch the key. He leaves us with Zhuri, Robert, and the burgher.
We wait silently in a hallway with carved ceilings.

Robert sees me looking upward and
he studies the ceiling, too. After a moment he leans toward Zhuri and speaks
slowly and loudly: “I’ll wager they ain’t got these sorts of ceilings in
Arabia, young master.”

“He’s from Spain, Robert,” Ralf
says. “Remember? Spain.”

The burgher addresses us. “Robert
is a tad forgetful, but you’ll not meet a better man. He fought in France. At
Calais.”

“Did he?” I say.

Morgan stifles a chuckle.

Sir Thomas returns with the key and
unlocks the door. “I apologize for my discourtesy. The food is being prepared, but
I would like to show you something while we wait. It is something I must admit
I am immodestly pleased with.” He gestures toward the door with his chin. “I
have spent a long time collecting what lies behind this door. Robert, my
steward, tells me you have an interest in such things.” He nods toward Robert
Bailey, then swings the door open.

I half expect to see plaguers
chained to the wall, but what I see in that massive chamber is perhaps more
shocking than that.

I see guns. Crammed into every corner
of the room and on every wall. Not the guns I am familiar with — massive iron
cylinders bound together with bands of steel, like the one Robert Bailey fired
today. These are small guns. Some of them look as if they could be transported
by a single horse. Some of them could be hoisted by a small crew of men. And
some look like they could be carried and fired by a single soldier.

“Are these all weapons?” Tristan asks.
“Do they work?” His expression is the same as the one Morgan wore when the
peddler brought out his wares. Broad smile, wide eyes, gaze darting from one to
the other. He looks like a child that has found a box of puppies.

“Most of them fire,” Sir Thomas
says. He picks up a long metal pipe from a display stand. The pipe is carved
with Moorish patterns and has been set into a thick oaken shaft that is just
longer than my arm. “My guest, Zhuri, brought me this one from Spain. He heard
about my love of such things.”

Morgan turns to Zhuri and speaks
slowly, pointing and making gestures so the Moor might understand. “Sir Tristan
and myself have never been to Spain. Have they many guns there?” The Moor looks
at Morgan quizzically, so Morgan starts again, more slowly. “Sir Tristan…and
myself…have never been…to — ”

“I…” Zhuri says. He hesitates, and
Morgan encourages him with a nod and smile. “I,” Zhuri says again. “Sir Tristan
and I.”

Morgan tilts his head like a dog
trying to understand juggling.

Tristan laughs. “I think a Moor
just corrected your English, Sir Morgan. And I have been to Spain. Fought a
battle there.”

“You speak English?” Morgan points
to Robert Bailey. “But he…I merely assumed that…”

Zhuri laughs. “You merely assumed
that the savage Moor would not speak your civilized tongue? I speak it quite
well, I believe. I also speak Spanish and French. And no, we do not have many
guns in Spain.” He cracks an infectious smile. “You bloody Christians will not
let us have them.”

The room smells
of oil and metal and wood ash. Sir Thomas leads us to the wall on our right and
unseats an ancient weapon from its display hooks. He calls the gun a fire lance
and tells us it was brought to England from lands farther east than Jerusalem.
The gun is little more than a hollowed-out staff of segmented, pale wood that
can be stuffed with saltpeter, sulfur, and rocks. “The mixture is lit from the
rear,” Sir Thomas says, “and the stones burst forth from the front, along with
a tongue of flame the length of a man.”

There are small cannons at each of
the room’s corners, but Thomas leads us to one on display by the fireplace. The
weapon consists of twelve iron cylinders mounted on a wheeled, wooden frame. It
is a ribauldequin, and I have seen its like before. We had one in France for a
short time when I marched with Robert Knolles. The gun was made to fire twelve
blasts at once, but the thing was so heavy and failed to fire so often that we destroyed
it. I’m sure the pieces of it still litter the forest near Toulouse. But this
one looks to be of much better quality. Thomas explains how it works, and while
the others study it and take turns pretending to fire, he speaks to me.

“Those people you saved today…they
are a part of my family.”

I nod. “I’m sorry that we couldn’t
bring them all back.”

He sighs and his gaze drops. “My
own family. They fled from here. They never said a word. They just left.”

I’m not sure how to respond, so I
nod again and give him a sympathetic look.

Sir Thomas shows us the other four cannons,
the ones in the corners. Most of the barrels are as long as a small wagon, but that
is still far shorter than the ones I am familiar with. I glance at Sir Thomas
and he smiles at me. I know that type of smile. I gave Robert Bailey that same
smile when I needed his help.

We tap upon the steel cannons and
stare into the barrels and debate the penetration power of these weapons for a time.
And when the conversation lulls, Sir Thomas walks to a wide shelf that runs the
length of one wall. Four smaller guns, all roughly the length of a dining
table, are displayed upon this shelf. Their barrels vary in thickness — the
largest is thicker than a tankard, the smallest is thinner than a cucumber. All
of them are mounted upon metal legs at the front and rear. I gaze at them, and Sir
Thomas must see something in my expression because he chuckles. “Culverins, Sir
Edward. They are called culverins.”

“They look heavy,” I say.

“Try one.”

I pick up the thinnest. It is cold and
heavy, but not as heavy as I imagined. One man might carry it, with difficulty,
but there would be no way of firing the weapon without resting it upon the
metal legs. Even so, I imagine a dozen of these weapons mounted on the walls of
the castle I am building at Bodiam. I don’t know how much damage they can do,
but I can imagine the terror they would create.

Sir Thomas walks to the far wall,
where the last of the weapons hang. Tristan’s smile can’t possibly get bigger.
Nine guns have been mounted here, and they are smaller than the culverins. They
are little more than cylinders of metal mounted on short wooden poles. They
look similar to the one Zhuri brought from Spain. I am certain that one man
could carry and fire one of these. Sir Thomas smiles proudly at the weapons.
“Hand bombards.”