Heretic (15 page)

His uncle, the Count, frowned. “There is no need to beat the wood, Joscelyn,” he said placidly. “There is no woodworm in the table. At least I hope not. They treat it with turpentine as a preventative.”

“My father swore by a mix of lye and urine,” Father Roubert said, “and an occasional scorching.” He was sitting opposite the Count, sifting through the moldering old parchments that had lain undisturbed since they had been removed from Astarac a century before. Some were charred at the edges, evidence of the fire that had been set in the fallen castle.

“Lye and urine? I should try that.” The Count scratched beneath his woolen hat, then peered up at his angry nephew. “You do know Father Roubert, Joscelyn? Of course you do.” He peered at another document, saw it was a request that two more watchmen be appointed to the Astarac town guard, and sighed. “If you could read, Joscelyn, you could help us.”

“I’ll help you, uncle,” Joscelyn said savagely. “Just let me off the leash!”

“That can go to Brother Jerome.” The Count put the request for extra watchmen in the big basket which would be carried down to the room where the young monk from Paris read the parchments. “And mix in some other documents,” he told Father Roubert, “just to confuse him. Those old tax rolls from Lemierre should keep him busy for a month!”

“Thirty men, uncle,” Joscelyn insisted, “that’s all I ask! You have eighty-seven men-at-arms! Just give me thirty!”

Joscelyn, Lord of Béziers, was an impressive figure. He was hugely tall, broad in the chest and long-limbed, but his appearance was spoiled by a round face of such vacancy that his uncle sometimes wondered whether there was any brain at all behind his nephew’s protuberant eyes. He had straw-colored hair that was almost always marked by the pressure caused by a helmet’s leather liner and he had been blessed with strong arms and sturdy legs, and yet, though Joscelyn was all bone and muscle, and possessed scarcely a single idea to disturb either, he was not without his virtues. He was diligent, even if his diligence was directed solely towards the tournament yard where he was one of the most celebrated fighters in Europe. He had won the Paris tourney twice, humiliated the best English knights at the big Tewkesbury gathering, and even in the German states, where men believed no one was better than they, Joscelyn had brought off a dozen top prizes. He had famously put Walther of Siegenthaler on his broad rump twice in one bout, and the only knight who had consistently defeated Joscelyn was the black-armored man called the Harlequin who had ridden grim and relentlessly about the tournament circuit to raise money. But the Harlequin had not been seen for three or four years now and Joscelyn suspected that his absence meant Joscelyn could make himself the champion of Europe.

He had been raised near Paris by the Count’s younger brother who had died of the flux seventeen years before. There had been little money in Joscelyn’s house and the Count, notoriously mean, had sent the widow hardly an ecu to save her distress, yet Joscelyn had made money with his lance and sword, and that, the Count reckoned, was to his credit. And he had brought two men-at-arms with him, both of them hardened warriors, whom Joscelyn paid from his own money and that, the Count thought, showed that he was able to lead men. “But you really should learn to read,” he finished his thought aloud. “The mastery of letters civilizes a man, Joscelyn.”

“Shit on civilization,” Joscelyn said, “there are English bandits in Castillon d’Arbizon and we’re doing nothing! Nothing!”

“We’re hardly doing nothing,” the Count demurred, scratching again under his woolen cap. He had an itch there, and he wondered if it presaged some worse ailment. He made a mental note to consult his copies of Galen, Pliny and Hippocrates. “We’ve sent word to Toulouse and to Paris,” he explained to Joscelyn, “and I shall protest to the seneschal in Bordeaux. I shall protest very firmly!” The seneschal was the English King’s regent in Gascony and the Count was not sure he
would
send the man a message, for such a protest might well provoke more English adventures to seek land in Berat.

“Damn protests,” Joscelyn said, “just kill the bastards. They’re breaking the truce!”

“They’re English,” the Count said, “they always break truces. Trust the devil before an Englishman.”

“So kill them,” Joscelyn persisted.

“I’ve no doubt we shall,” the Count replied. He was deciphering the terrible handwriting of a long-dead clerk who had written a contract with a man called Sestier to line As-tarac’s castle’s drains with elmwood. “In time,” he added absently.

“Give me thirty men, uncle, and I’ll scour them out in a week!”

The Count discarded the document and picked up another. The ink had turned brown and was badly faded, but he could just make out that it was a contract with a stonemason. “Joscelyn,” he asked, still peering at the contract, “how will you scour them out in a week?”

Joscelyn stared at his uncle as though the old man was mad. “Go to Castillon d’Arbizon, of course,” he said, “and kill them.”

“I see, I see,” the Count said, as though grateful for the explanation. “But the last time I was in Castillon d’Arbizon, and that was many years ago, just after the English left, but when I was there, Joscelyn, the castle was made of stone. How will you defeat that with sword and lance?” He smiled up at his nephew.

“For God’s sake! They’ll fight.”

“Oh, I am sure they will. The English like their pleasures, as do you. But these Englishmen have archers, Joscelyn, archers. Have you ever encountered an English archer on the tournament field?”

Joscelyn ignored the question. “Only twenty archers,” he complained instead.

“The garrison tell us twenty-four,” the Count said pedantically. The survivors of Castillon d’Arbizon’s garrison had been released by the English and had fled to Berat where the Count had hanged two as an example and then questioned the others. Those others were now all imprisoned, waiting to be taken south and sold as galley slaves. The Count anticipated that source of income with a smile, then was about to put the stonemason’s contract in the basket when a word caught his eye and some instinct made him hold on to the document as he turned back to his nephew. “Let me tell you about the English war bow, Joscelyn,” he said patiently. “It is a simple thing, made of yew, a peasant’s tool, really. My huntsman can use one, but he is the only man in Berat who has ever mastered the weapon. Why do you think that is?” He waited, but his nephew made no answer. “I’ll tell you anyway,” the Count went on. “It takes years, Joscelyn, many years to master the yew bow. Ten years? Probably that long, and after ten years a man can send an arrow clean through armor at two hundred paces.” He smiled. “Splat! A thousand ecus of man, armor and weaponry fallen to a peasant’s bow. And it isn’t luck, Joscelyn. My huntsman can put an arrow through a bracelet at a hundred paces. He can pierce mail coat at two hundred. I’ve seen him put an arrow through an oak door at a hundred and fifty, and the door was three inches thick!”

“I have plate armor,” Joscelyn said sullenly.

“So you do. And at fifty paces the English will pick out the eye slits in your visor and send arrows into your brain. You, of course, might survive that.”

Joscelyn did not recognize the insult. “Crossbows,” he said.

“We have thirty crossbowmen,” the Count said, “and none are as young as they were, and some are ill, and I wouldn’t really think they can survive against this young man, what is his name?”

“Thomas of Hookton,” Father Roubert interjected.

“Strange name,” the Count said, “but he seems to know his business. A man to be treated with care, I’d say.”

“Guns!” Joscelyn suggested.

“Ah! Guns,” the Count exclaimed as though he had not thought of that himself. “We could certainly take cannon to Castillon d’Arbizon, and I daresay the machines will tear down the castle gate and generally make a regrettable mess, but where are we to find the things? There is one in Toulouse, I’m told, but it needs eighteen horses to move it. We could send to Italy, of course, but they are very expensive things to hire and their expert mechanics are even more expensive, and I very much doubt that they will fetch the things here before the spring. God preserve us till then.”

“We can’t do nothing!” Joscelyn protested again.

“True, Joscelyn, true,” the Count agreed genially. Rain hammered at the horn panels that covered the windows. It was falling in grey swathes all across the town. It cascaded down the gutters, flooded the latrine pits, dripped through thatch and swept like a shallow stream through the town’s lower gates. No weather for fighting, the Count thought, but if he did not allow his nephew some freedom then he suspected the young fool would ride off and get himself killed in an ill-considered skirmish. “We could bribe them, of course,” he suggested.

“Bribe them?” Joscelyn was outraged by the suggestion.

“It’s quite normal, Joscelyn. They’re nothing but bandits and they only want money, so I offer them coins to yield the castle. It works often enough.”

Joscelyn spat. “They’ll take the money then stay where they are and demand more.”

“That’s very good!” The Count of Berat smiled approvingly at his nephew. “That’s precisely what I had concluded. Well done, Joscelyn! So I won’t try to bribe them. I have written to Toulouse, though, and requested the service of their gun. No doubt it will be disgustingly expensive, but if it’s necessary, we shall unleash it on the English. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Have you spoken with Sir Henri?” he asked.

Sir Henri Courtois was the Count’s garrison commander and a soldier of experience. Joscelyn had indeed talked with him and been given the same answer that his uncle had just delivered: beware of English archers. “Sir Henri’s an old woman,” Joscelyn complained.

“With that beard? I doubt it,” the Count said, “though I did once see a bearded woman. It was in Tarbes, at the Easter fair. I was very young then, but I distinctly remember her. A great long beard, she had. We paid a couple of coins to see her, of course, and if you paid more you were allowed to tug the beard, which I did, and it was the true thing, and if you paid more still they revealed her breasts which destroyed any suspicion that she was really a man. They were very nice breasts, as I recall.” He looked at the stonemason’s contract again and at the Latin word that had caught his eye.
Calix.
A memory from his childhood stirred, but would not come.

“Thirty men!” Joscelyn pleaded.

The Count let the document rest. “What we will do, Joscelyn, is what Sir Henri suggests. We shall hope to catch the Englishmen when they are away from their lair. We shall negotiate for the gun at Toulouse. We are already offering a bounty for every English archer captured alive. A generous bounty, so I have no doubt every routier and
coredor
in Gascony will join the hunt and the English will find themselves surrounded by enemies. It won’t be a pleasant life for them.”

“Why alive?” Joscelyn wanted to know. “Why not dead English archers?”

The Count sighed. “Because then, my dear Joscelyn, the
coredors
will bring in a dozen corpses a day and claim they are Englishmen. We need to talk to the archer before we kill him to make sure he is the real thing. We must, so to speak, inspect the breasts to ensure the beard is real.” He stared at the word,
calix,
willing the memory to surface. “I doubt we’ll capture many archers,” he went on, “they hunt in packs and are dangerous, so we shall also do what we always do when the
coredors
become too impudent. Wait patiently and ambush them when they make a mistake. And they will, but they think we shall make the mistake first. They want you to attack them, Joscelyn, so they can riddle you with arrows, but we have to fight them when they are not expecting a fight. So ride with Sir Henri’s men and make sure the beacons are laid and, when the time comes, I will release you. That is a promise.”

The beacons were being laid in every village and town of the county. They were great heaps of wood which, when fired, would send a signal of smoke to say that the English raiders were in the vicinity. The beacons warned other nearby communities and also told the watchmen on the tower of Berat’s castle where the English were riding. One day, the Count believed, they would come too close to Berat, or be in a place where his men could ambush them, and so he was content to wait until they made that mistake. And they would make it,
coredors
always did, and these English, though they flew the badge of Northampton’s Earl, were no better than common bandits. “So go and practice your weapons, Joscelyn,” he told his nephew, “because you will use them soon enough. And take that breastplate with you.”

Joscelyn left. The Count watched as Father Roubert fed the fire with new logs, then he looked again at the document. The Count of Astarac had hired a stonemason to carve
“Calix Meus Inebrians”
above the gate of Astarac’s castle and specified that the date on the contract was to be added to the legend. Why? Why would any man want the words “My Cup Makes Me Drunk” decorating his castle? “Father?” he said.

“Your nephew will get himself killed,” the Dominican grumbled.

“I have other nephews,” the Count said.

“But Joscelyn is right,” Father Roubert said. “They have to be fought, and fought soon. There is a beghard to be burned.” Father Roubert’s anger kept him awake at night. How dare they spare a heretic? He lay in his narrow bed, imagining the girl’s screams as the flames consumed her dress. She would be naked when the cloth had burned and Father Roubert remembered her pale body tied to his table. He had understood temptation then, understood it and hated it and there had been such pleasure in drawing the hot iron up the tender skin of her thighs.

“Father! You’re half-asleep,” the Count remonstrated. “Look at this.” He pushed the stonemason’s contract across the table.

The Dominican frowned as he tried to make out the faded handwriting, then nodded as he recognized the phrase. “From the psalms of David,” he said.

“Of course! How stupid of me. But why would a man carve ’
Calix Meus Inebrians’
over his gateway?”