Harlequin

‘What it is,’ Jake said, ‘is a waste of goddamn time.’

No one took any notice of him.

‘Could have stayed in Brest,’ Jake grumbled, ‘been sitting by a fire. Drinking ale.’

Again he was ignored.

‘Funny name for a town,’ Sam said after a long while. ‘Brest. I like it, though.’ He looked at the archers. ‘Maybe we’ll see the Blackbird again?’ he suggested.

‘Maybe she’ll put a bolt through your tongue,’ Will Skeat growled, ‘and do us all a favour.’

The Blackbird was a woman who fought from the town walls every time the army made an assault. She was young, had black hair, wore a black cloak and shot a crossbow. In the first assault, when Will Skeat’s archers had been in the vanguard of the attack and had lost four men, they had been close enough to see the Blackbird clearly and they had all thought her beautiful, though after a winter campaign of failure, cold, mud and hunger, almost any woman looked beautiful. Still, there was something special about the Blackbird.

‘She doesn’t load that crossbow herself,’ Sam said, unmoved by Skeat’s surliness.

‘Of course she bloody doesn’t,’ Jake said. ‘There ain’t a woman born that can crank a crossbow.’

‘Dozy Mary could,’ another man said. ‘Got muscles like a bullock, she has.’

‘And she closes her eyes when she shoots,’ Sam said, still talking of the Blackbird. ‘I noticed.’

‘That’s because you weren’t doing your goddamn job,’ Will Skeat snarled, ‘so shut your mouth, Sam.’

Sam was the youngest of Skeat’s men. He claimed to be eighteen, though he was really not sure because he had lost count. He was a draper’s son, had a cherubic face, brown curls and a heart as dark as sin. He was a good archer though; no one could serve Will Skeat without being good.

‘Right, lads,’ Skeat said, ‘make ready.’

He had seen the stir in the encampment behind them. The enemy would notice it soon and the church bells would ring the alarm and the town walls would fill with defenders armed with crossbows. The crossbows would rip their bolts into the attackers and Skeat’s job today was to try to clear those crossbowmen off the wall with his arrows. Some chance, he thought sourly. The defenders would crouch behind their crenellations and so deny his men an opportunity to aim, and doubtless this assault would end as the five other attacks had finished, in failure.

It had been a whole campaign of failure. William Bohun, the Earl of Northampton, who led this small English army, had launched the winter expedition in hope of capturing a stronghold in northern Brittany, but the assault on Carhaix had been a humiliating failure, the defenders of Guingamp had laughed at the English, and the walls of Lannion had repulsed every attack. They had captured Tréguier, but as that town had no walls it was not much of an achievement and no place to make a fortress. Now, at the bitter end of the year, with nothing better to do, the Earl’s army had fetched up outside this small town, which was scarcely more than a walled village, but even this miserable place had defied the army. The Earl had launched attack after attack and all had been beaten back. The English had been met by a storm of crossbow bolts, the scaling ladders had been thrust from the ramparts and the defenders had exulted in each failure.

‘What is this goddamn place called?’ Skeat asked.

‘La Roche-Derrien,’ a tall archer answered.

‘You would know, Tom,’ Skeat said, ‘you know everything.’

‘That is true, Will,’ Thomas said gravely, ‘quite literally true.’ The other archers laughed.

‘So if you know so bloody much,’ Skeat said, ‘tell me what this goddamn town is called again.’

‘La Roche-Derrien.’

‘Daft bloody name,’ Skeat said. He was grey-haired, thin-faced and had known nearly thirty years of fighting. He came from Yorkshire and had begun his career as an archer fighting against the Scots. He had been as lucky as he was skilled, and so he had taken plunder, survived battles and risen in the ranks until he was wealthy enough to raise his own band of soldiers. He now led seventy men-at-arms and as many archers, whom he had contracted to the Earl of Northampton’s service which was why he was crouching behind a wet hedge a hundred and fifty paces from the walls of a town whose name he still could not remember. His men-at-arms were in the camp, given a day’s rest after leading the last failed assault. Will Skeat hated failure.

‘La Roche what?’ he asked Thomas.

‘Derrien.’

‘What does that goddamn mean?’

‘That, I confess, I do not know.’

‘Sweet Christ,’ Skeat said in mock wonder, ‘he doesn’t know everything.’

‘It is, however, close to derrière, which means arse,’ Thomas added. ‘The rock of the arse is my best translation.’

Skeat opened his mouth to say something, but just then the first of La Roche-Derrien’s church bells sounded the alarm. It was the cracked bell, the one that sounded so harsh, and within seconds the other churches added their tolling so that the wet wind was filled with their clangour. The noise was greeted by a subdued English cheer as the assault troops came from the camp and pounded up the road towards the town’s southern gate. The leading men carried ladders, the rest had swords and axes. The Earl of Northampton led the assault, as he had led all the others, conspicuous in his plate armour half covered by a surcoat showing his badge of the lions and stars.

‘You know what to do!’ Skeat bellowed.

The archers stood, drew their bows and loosed. There were no targets on the walls, for the defenders were staying low, but the rattle of the steel-tipped arrows on the stones should keep them crouching. The white-feathered arrows hissed as they flew. Two other archer bands were adding their own shafts, many of them firing high into the sky so that their missiles dropped vertically onto the wall’s top, and to Skeat it seemed impossible that anyone could live under that hail of feather-tipped steel, yet as soon as the Earl’s attacking column came within a hundred paces the crossbow bolts began to spit from the walls.

There was a breach close to the gate. It had been made by a catapult, the only siege machine left in decent repair, and it was a poor breach, for only the top third of the wall had been dismantled by the big stones and the townsfolk had crammed timber and bundles of cloth into the gap, but it was still a weakness in the wall and the ladder men ran towards it, shouting, as the crossbow bolts whipped into them. Men stumbled, fell, crawled and died, but enough lived to throw two ladders against the breach and the first men-at-arms began to climb. The archers were loosing as fast as they could, overwhelming the top of the breach with arrows, but then a shield appeared there, a shield that was immediately stuck by a score of shafts, and from behind the shield a crossbowman shot straight down one of the ladders, killing the leading man. Another shield appeared, another crossbow was loosed. A pot was shoved onto the breach’s top, then toppled over, and a gush of steaming liquid spilled down to make a man scream in agony. Defenders were hurling boulders over the breach and their crossbows were snapping.

‘Closer!’ Skeat shouted, and his archers pushed through the hedge and ran to within a hundred paces of the town ditch, where they again loosed their long war bows and slashed their arrows into the embrasures. Some defenders were dying now, for they had to show themselves to shoot their crossbows down into the crowd of men who jostled at the foot of the four ladders that had been laid against the breach or walls. Men-at-arms climbed, a forked pole shoved one ladder back and Thomas twitched his left hand to change his aim and released his fingers to drive an arrow into the breast of a man pushing on the pole. The man had been covered by a shield held by a companion, but the shield shifted for an instant and Thomas’s arrow was the first through the small gap, though two more followed before the dying man’s last heartbeat ended. Other men succeeded in toppling the ladder. ‘St George!’ the English shouted, but the saint must have been sleeping for he gave the attackers no help.

More stones were hurled from the ramparts, then a great mass of flaming straw was heaved into the crowded attackers. A man succeeded in reaching the top of the breach, but was immediately killed by an axe that split his helmet and skull in two. He slumped on the rungs, blocking the ascent, and the Earl tried to haul him free, but was struck on the head by one of the boulders and collapsed at the ladder’s foot. Two of his men-at-arms carried the stunned Earl back to the camp and his departure took the spirit from the attackers. They no longer shouted. The arrows still flew, and men still tried to climb the wall, but the defenders sensed they had repelled this sixth attack and their crossbow bolts spat relentlessly. It was then Thomas saw the Blackbird on the tower above the gate. He laid the steel arrow tip on her breast, raised the bow a fraction and then jerked his bow hand so that the arrow flew wild. Too pretty to kill, he told himself and knew he was a fool for thinking it. She shot her bolt and vanished. A half-dozen arrows clattered onto the tower where she had been standing, but Thomas reckoned all six archers had let her shoot before they loosed.

‘Jesus wept,’ Skeat said. The attack had failed and the men-at-arms were running from the crossbow bolts. One ladder still rested against the breach with the dead man entangled in its upper rungs. ‘Back,’ Skeat shouted, ‘back.’

The archers ran, pursued by quarrels, until they could push through the hedge and drop into the ditch. The defenders were cheering and two men bared their backsides on the gate tower and briefly shoved their arses towards the defeated English.

‘Bastards,’ Skeat said, ‘bastards.’ He was not used to failure. ‘There has to be a bloody way in,’ he growled.

Thomas unlooped the string from his bow and placed it under his helmet. ‘I told you how to get in,’ he told Skeat, ‘told you at dawn.’

Skeat looked at Thomas for a long time. ‘We tried it, lad.’

‘I got to the stakes, Will. I promise I did. I got through them.’

‘So tell me again,’ Skeat said, and Thomas did. He crouched in the ditch under the jeers of La Roche-Derrien’s defenders and he told Will Skeat how to unlock the town, and Skeat listened because the Yorkshireman had learned to trust Thomas of Hookton.

Thomas had been in Brittany for three years now, and though Brittany was not France its usurping Duke brought a constant succession of Frenchman to be killed and Thomas had discovered he had a skill for killing. It was not just that he was a good archer–the army was full of men who were as good as he and there was a handful who were better–but he had discovered he could sense what the enemy was doing. He would watch them, watch their eyes, see where they were looking, and as often as not he anticipated an enemy move and was ready to greet it with an arrow. It was like a game, but one where he knew the rules and they did not.

It helped that William Skeat trusted him. Skeat had been unwilling to recruit Thomas when they first met by the gaol in Dorchester where Skeat was testing a score of thieves and murderers to see how well they could shoot a bow. He needed recruits and the King needed archers, so men who would otherwise have faced the gallows were being pardoned if they would serve abroad, and fully half of Skeat’s men were such felons. Thomas, Skeat had reckoned, would never fit in with such rogues. He had taken Thomas’s right hand, seen the callouses on the two bow fingers which said he was an archer, but then had tapped the boy’s soft palm.

‘What have you been doing?’ Skeat had asked.

‘My father wanted me to be a priest.’

‘A priest, eh?’ Skeat had been scornful. ‘Well, you can pray for us, I suppose.’

‘I can kill for you too.’

Skeat had eventually let Thomas join the band, not least because the boy brought his own horse. At first Skeat thought Thomas of Hookton was little more than another wild fool looking for adventure–a clever fool, to be sure–but Thomas had taken to the life of an archer in Brittany with alacrity. The real business of the civil war was plunder and, day after day, Skeat’s men rode into land that gave fealty to the supporters of Duke Charles and they burned the farms, stole the harvest and took the livestock. A lord whose peasants cannot pay rent is a lord who cannot afford to hire soldiers, so Skeat’s men-at-arms and mounted archers were loosed on the enemy’s land like a plague, and Thomas loved the life. He was young and his task was not just to fight the enemy, but to ruin him. He burned farms, poisoned wells, stole seed-grain, broke ploughs, fired the mills, ring-barked the orchards and lived off his plunder. Skeat’s men were the lords of Brittany, a scourge from hell, and the French-speaking villagers in the east of the Duchy called them the hellequin, which meant the devil’s horsemen. Once in a while an enemy war band would seek to trap them and Thomas had learned that the English archer, with his great long war bow, was the king of those skirmishes. The enemy hated the archers. If they captured an English bowman they killed him. A man-at-arms might be imprisoned, a lord would be ransomed, but an archer was always murdered. Tortured first, then murdered.

Thomas thrived on the life, and Skeat had learned the lad was clever, certainly clever enough to know better than to fall asleep one night when he should have been standing guard and, for that offence Skeat had thumped the daylights out of him. ‘You were goddamn drunk!’ he had accused Thomas, then beat him thoroughly, using his fists like blacksmith’s hammers. He had broken Thomas’s nose, cracked a rib and called him a stinking piece of Satan’s shit, but at the end of it Will Skeat saw that the boy was still grinning, and six months later he made Thomas into a vintenar, which meant he was in charge of twenty other archers.