Harlequin. Bernard Cornwell
silence the French jubilation. Goddamn bitch, he thought. He would pay her right enough, pay her till she squealed, and he curbed his horse, not wanting to look as though he fled.
An hour later, after his squire had put a bandage over the slashed forearm, Sir Simon had convinced himself that he had scored a victory. He had dared, he had survived. It had been a demonstration of courage, and he lived, and for that he reckoned he was a hero and he expected a hero’s welcome as he walked toward the tent that housed the army’s commander, the Earl of Northampton. The tent was made from two sails, their linen yellow and patched and threadbare after years of service at sea. They made a shabby shelter, but that was typical of William Bohun, Earl of Northampton who, though cousin to the King and as rich a man as any in England, despised gaudiness.
The Earl, indeed, looked as patched and threadbare as the sails that made his tent. He was a short and squat man with a face, men said, like the backside of a bull, but the face mirrored the Earl’s soul, which was blunt, brave and straightforward. The army liked William Bohun, Earl of Northampton, because he was as tough as they were themselves. Now, as Sir Simon ducked into the tent, the Earl’s curly brown hair was half covered with a bandage where the boulder thrown from La Roche-Derrien’s wall had split his helmet and driven a ragged edge of steel into his scalp. He greeted Sir Simon sourly. ‘Tired of life?’
‘The silly bitch shut her eyes when she pulled the trigger!’ Sir Simon said, oblivious to the Earl’s tone.
‘She still aimed well,’ the Earl said angrily, ‘and that will put heart into the bastards. God knows, they need no encouragement.’
‘I’m alive, my lord,’ Sir Simon said cheerfully. ‘She wanted to kill me. She failed. The bear lives and the dogs go hungry.’ He waited for the Earl’s companions to congratulate him, but they avoided his eyes and he interpreted their sullen silence as jealousy.
Sir Simon was a bloody fool, the Earl thought, and shivered. He might not have minded the cold so much had the army been enjoying success, but for two months the English and their Breton allies had stumbled from failure to farce, and the six assaults on La Roche-Derrien had plumbed the depths of misery. So now the Earl had called a council of war to suggest one final assault, this one to be made that same evening. Every other attack had been in the forenoon, but perhaps a surprise escalade in the dying winter light would take the defenders by surprise. Only what small advantages that surprise might bring had been spoiled because Sir Simon’s foolhardiness must have given the townsfolk a new confidence and there was little confidence among the Earl’s war captains who had gathered under the yellow sailcloth.
Four of those captains were knights who, like Sir Simon, led their own men to war, but the others were mercenary soldiers who had contracted their men to the Earl’s service. Three were Bretons who wore the white ermine badge of the Duke of Brittany and led men loyal to the de Montfort Duke, while the others were English captains, all of them commoners who had grown hard in war. William Skeat was there, and next to him was Richard Totesham, who had begun his service as a man-at-arms and now led a hundred and forty knights and ninety archers in the Earl’s service. Neither man had ever fought in a tournament, nor would they ever be invited, yet both were wealthier than Sir Simon, and that rankled. My hounds of war, the Earl of Northampton called the independent captains, and the Earl liked them, but then the Earl had a curious taste for vulgar company. He might be cousin to England’s King, but William Bohun happily drank with men like Skeat and Totesham, ate with them, spoke English with them, hunted with them and trusted them, and Sir Simon felt excluded from that friendship. If any man in this army should have been an intimate of the Earl it was Sir Simon, a noted champion of tournaments, but Northampton would rather roll in the gutter with men like Skeat.
‘How’s the rain?’ the Earl asked.
‘Starting again,’ Sir Simon answered, jerking his head at the tent’s roof, against which the rain pattered fitfully.
‘It’ll clear,’ Skeat said dourly. He rarely called the Earl ‘my lord’, addressing him instead as an equal which, to Sir Simon’s amazement, the Earl seemed to like.
‘And it’s only spitting,’ the Earl said, peering out from the tent and letting in a swirl of damp, cold air. ‘Bowstrings will pluck in this.’
‘So will crossbow cords,’ Richard Totesham interjected. ‘Bastards,’ he added. What made the English failure so galling was that La Roche-Derrien’s defenders were not soldiers but townsfolk: fishermen and boatbuilders, carpenters and masons, and even the Blackbird, a woman! ‘And the rain might stop,’ Totesham went on, ‘but the ground will be slick. It’ll be bad footing under the walls.’
‘Don’t go tonight,’ Will Skeat advised. ‘Let my boys go in by the river tomorrow morning.’
The Earl rubbed the wound on his scalp. For a week now he had assaulted La Roche-Derrien’s southern wall and he still believed his men could take those ramparts, yet he also sensed the pessimism among his hounds of war. One more repulse with another twenty or thirty dead would leave his army dispirited and with the prospect of trailing back to Finisterre with nothing accomplished. ‘Tell me again,’ he said.
Skeat wiped his nose on his leather sleeve. ‘At low tide,’ he said, ‘there’s a way round the north wall. One of my lads was down there last night.’
‘We tried it three days ago,’ one of the knights objected.
‘You tried the down-river side,’ Skeat said. ‘I want to go up-river.’
‘That side has stakes just like the other,’ the Earl said.
‘Loose,’ Skeat responded. One of the Breton captains translated the exchange for his companions. ‘My boy pulled a stake clean out,’ Skeat went on, ‘and he reckons half a dozen others will lift or break. They’re old oak trunks, he says, instead of elm, and they’re rotted through.’
‘How deep is the mud?’ the Earl asked.
‘Up to his knees.’
La Roche-Derrien’s wall encompassed the west, south and east of the town, while the northern side was defended by the River Jaudy, and where the semicircular wall met the river the townsfolk had planted huge stakes in the mud to block access at low tide. Skeat was now suggesting there was a way through those rotted stakes, but when the Earl’s men had tried to do the same thing at the eastern side of the town the attackers had got bogged down in the mud and the townsfolk had picked them off with bolts. It had been a worse slaughter than the repulses in front of the southern gate.
‘But there’s still a wall on the riverbank,’ the Earl pointed out.
‘Aye,’ Skeat allowed, ‘but the silly bastards have broken it down in places. They’ve built quays there, and there’s one right close to the loose stakes.’
‘So your men will have to remove the stakes and climb the quays, all under the gaze of men on the wall?’ the Earl asked sceptically.
‘They can do it,’ Skeat said firmly.
The Earl still reckoned his best chance of success was to close his archers on the south gate and pray that their arrows would keep the defenders cowering while his men-at-arms assaulted the breach, yet that, he conceded, was the plan that had failed earlier in the day and on the day before that. And he had, he knew, only a day or two left. He possessed fewer than three thousand men, and a third of those were sick, and if he could not find them shelter he would have to march back west with his tail between his legs. He needed a town, any town, even La Roche-Derrien.
Will Skeat saw the worries on the Earl’s broad face. ‘My lad was within fifteen paces of the quay last night,’ he asserted. ‘He could have been inside the town and opened the gate.’
‘So why didn’t he?’ Sir Simon could not resist asking. ‘Christ’s bones!’ he went on. ‘But I’d have been inside!’
‘You’re not an archer,’ Skeat said sourly, then made the sign of the cross. At Guingamp one of Skeat’s archers had been captured by the defenders, who had stripped the hated bowman