The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic (91 page)

The description of Charles of Blois's army was real enough. Spies in English pay sent the news which, in truth, Charles was eager for his enemies to learn for the more La Roche-Derrien's garrison was out-numbered the lower its hopes would be. Charles already had close to four thousand men, more were coming every week, and his engineers had hired nine great siege engines to hurl boulders at the walls of the English towns and fortresses in his duchy. La Roche-Derrien would be attacked first and few men gave it a hope of lasting longer than a month.

'It is not true, I trust,' Totesham said sourly to Thomas when the letter was written, 'that you have designs on Roncelets?'

'On Roncelets?' Thomas pretended not to have heard of the place. 'Not Roncelets, sir, but Rostrenen.'

Totesham gazed at Thomas with dislike. 'There's nothing at Rostrenen,' the garrison commander said icily.

'I hear there's food there, sir,' Thomas said.

'Whereas' – Totesham continued as if Thomas had not spoken – 'the Countess of Armorica's son is said to be held at Roncelets.'

'Is he, sir?' Thomas asked disingenuously.

'And if it's a swiving you want,' – Totesham ignored Thomas's lies – 'then I can recommend the brothel behind St Brieuc's chantry.'

'We're riding to Rostrenen,' Thomas insisted.

'And none of my men will ride with you,' Totesham said, meaning none that took his wages, though that still left the mercenaries.

Sir Guillaume had agreed to ride with Thomas, though he was uncomfortable about the prospects for success. He had bought horses for himself and his two men but he reckoned they were of poor quality. 'If it comes to a chase out of Roncelets.' he said, 'we'll be trounced. So take a lot of men to put up a decent fight.'

Thomas's first instinct had been to ride with just a handful of others, but a few men on bad horses would be easy bait. More men made the expedition safer.

'And why are you going anyway?' Sir Guillaume demanded. 'Just to get into the widow's skirts?'

'Because I made a promise to her,' Thomas said, and it was true, though Sir Guillaume's reason had the more truth. 'And because,' Thomas went on, 'I need to let our enemies know that I'm here.'

'You mean de Taillebourg?' Sir Guillaume asked. 'He knows already.'

'You think so?'

'Brother Germain will have told him,' Sir Guillaume said confidently, 'in which case I reckon your Dominican is already in Rennes. He'll come for you in good time.'

'If I raid Roncelets,' Thomas said, 'they'll hear of me. Then, I can be sure they'll come.'

By Candlemas he knew he could rely on Robbie, on Sir Guillaume and his two men-at-arms and he had found seven other men who had been lured by the rumours of Roncelets' wealth or by the prospect of Jeanette's good opinion. Robbie wanted to leave straightaway, but Will Skeat, like Sir Guillaume, advised Thomas to take a larger party. 'This ain't like northern England,' Skeat said, 'you can't run for the border. You get caught. Tom, and you'll need a dozen good men to lock shields and break heads. Reckon I ought to come with you.'

'No,' Thomas said hastily. Skeat had his lucid moments, but too often was vague and forgetful, though now he tried to help Thomas by recommending other men to go on the raid. Most turned the invitation down: the Tower of Roncelets was too far off, they claimed, or the Lord of Roncelets was too powerful and the odds against the raiders too great. Some were frightened of offending Iotesham who, fearing to lose any of his garrison, had decreed that no raids should go farther than a day's ride from the town. His caution meant there was little plunder to be had and it was only the poorest mercenaries who, desperate for anything they could turn into cash, offered to ride with Thomas.

'Twelve men is enough,' Robbie insisted. 'Sweet Christ, but I've been on enough raids into England. My brother and I once took a herd of cattle from Lord Percy with just three other men and Percy had half the county searching for us. Go in fast and come out quicker. Twelve men is enough.'

Thomas was almost convinced by Robbie's fervent words, but he worried that the odds were still too uneven and the horses too badly conditioned to allow them to go swiftly in and come out quicker. 'I want more men,' he told Robbie.

'If you go on dithering,' Robbie told him, 'the enemy will hear about you. They'll be waiting for us.'

'They won't know where to wait,' Thomas said, 'or what to think.' He had spread a score of rumours about the raid's purpose and hoped that the enemy would be thoroughly confused. 'But we'll go soon,' he promised Robbie.

'Sweet God, but who's left to ask?' Robbie demanded. 'Let's ride now!'

But that same day a ship came to Treguier and three more Flemish men-at-arms rode into the garrison. Thomas found them that night in a tavern by the river's edge. The three complained how they had been in the English lines at Calais, but there was too little fighting there and thus few prospects of wealthy prisoners. They wanted to try their luck in Brittany and so they_ had come to La Roche-Derrien. Thomas spoke to their leader, a gaunt man with a twisted mouth and with two fingers missing from his right hand, who listened, grunted an acknowledgement and said he would think about it. Next morning all three Flemings came to the Two Foxes tavern and said they were willing to ride. 'We came here to fight,' their leader, who was called Lodewijk, said, 'so we go.'

'So let's leave!' Robbie urged Thomas.

Thomas would have liked to recruit still more men, but he knew he had waited long enough. 'We'll go,' he told Robbie, then he went to find Will Skeat and made the older man promise to keep an eye on Jeanette. She liked and trusted Skeat and Thomas was confident enough to leave his father's notebook in her keeping. 'We shall be back,' he told her, 'in six or seven days.'

'God be with you,' Jeanette said. She clung to Thomas for an instant. 'God be with you,' she said again, 'and bring me my son.'

And next dawn, in a mist that pearled their long mail coats, the fifteen horsemen rode.

Lodewijk – he insisted it was Sir Lodewijk though his two companions sniggered whenever he did – refused to speak French, claiming that the language made his tongue sour. 'It is a people of filth,' Lodewijk maintained, 'the French. Filth. The word is good, ja? Filth?'

'The word is good,' Thomas agreed.

Jan and Pieter, Sir Lodewijk's companions, spoke only in guttural Flemish spiced with a handful of English curses they must have learned near Calais.

'What's happening in Calais?' Thomas asked Sir Lodewijk as they rode south.

'Nothing. The town is . . . what you say?' Sir Lodewijk made a circling motion with his hand.

'Surrounded.'

'Ja, the town is goddamn surrounded. By the English, ja? And by ...' He paused, uncertain of the word he wanted, then pointed to a stretch of waterlogged ground that lay east of the road. 'By that.'

'Marshes.'

'Ja! By bloody marshes. And the goddamn bloody French, they are on . . .' Again he was lost for words, so jabbed his mailed finger at the lowering sky.

'Higher ground?' Thomas guessed.

'Ja! Bloody high ground. Not so bloody high, I think, but higher. And they . . .' He put a hand over his eyes, as if shading them.

'Stare?'

'Ja! They stare at each other. So nothing is happens but they and we gets bloody wet. Pissing wet, ja?'

They got wet later that morning when the rains swept in from the ocean. Great curtains of grey lashed the deserted farmlands and upland heaths where the trees were permanently bent towards the east. When Thomas had first come to Brittany this had been a productive land of farms, orchards, mills and grazing, but now it was blasted naked. The fruit trees, untended, were thick with bullfinches, the fields were choked with weeds and the pastures tangled with couch grass. Here and there a few folk still tried to scratch a living, but they were constantly being forced to La Roche-Derrien to work on the ramparts and their harvests and livestock were forever being stolen by English patrols. If any such Bretons were aware of the fifteen horsemen they took care to hide themselves and so it seemed as though Thomas and his companions rode through a deserted country.

They rode with one spare horse. They should have had more because only the three Flemings were mounted on good stallions. Sea voyages usually had a bad effect on horses, but Sir Lodewijk made it plain their journey had been unusually quick. 'Bloody winds, is?' He whirled his hand and made a whooshing noise to suggest the strength of the winds which had brought the destriers through in such fine fettle. 'Quick! Bloody quick!'

The Flemings were not only well mounted, but well equipped. Jan and Pieter had fine mail hauberks while Sir Lodewijk had his chest, both thighs and one arm protected by good plate that was strapped over a leather-backed mail haubergeon. The three wore black surcoats with a broad white stripe running down front and back, and all had undecorated shields, though Sir Lodewijk's horse's trapper displayed a badge showing a knife dripping blood. He tried to explain the device, but his English could not cope and Thomas was left with the vague impression that it was the mark of a trading guild in Bruges. 'The butchers?' he suggested to Robbie. 'Is that what he said? Butchers?'

'Bloody butchers don't make war. Except on pigs,' Robbie said. He was in a fine mood. Raiding was in his blood and he had heard stories in La Roche-Derrien's taverns of the plunder that could be stolen if a man was willing to break Richard Totesham's rule and ride further than a day's journey from the town. 'The trouble in the north of England,' he told Thomas, 'is that if it's worth stealing then it's behind big bloody walls. We scratch up some cattle now and then, and a year ago I stole a fine horse off my Lord Percy, but there's not any gold and silver to be had. Nothing that you'd call real plunder. The Mass vessels are all wood or pewter or clay, and the poor boxes are poorer than the poor. And ride too far south and the bastards will be waiting for you on the way home. I hate bloody English archers.'

'I'm a bloody English archer.'

'You're different,' Robbie said, and he meant it for he was puzzled by Thomas. Most archers were country born, the sons of yeomen or smiths or bailiffs, while a few were the sons of labourers, but none in Robbie's experience was well born, which Thomas plainly was for he spoke French and Latin, he was confident in the company of lords and other archers deferred to him. Robbie might look like a wild Scottish fighter, but he was the son of a gentleman and nephew to the Knight of Liddesdale, and thus he regarded archers as inferior beings who, in a properly arranged universe, could be ridden down and slaughtered like game, but he liked Thomas. 'You're just bloody different,' he said. 'Mind you, when my ransom's paid and I'm safe home, I'll come back and kill you.'

Thomas laughed, but it was forced laughter. He was nervous. He put the nervousness down to being in the unfamiliar position of leading a raid. This was his idea, and it had been his promises that brought most of these men on the long ride. He had claimed that Roncelets, being so far from any English stronghold, lay in unplundered country. Snatch the child, he had promised them, and they could then pillage as much as they wished or at least until the enemy woke up and organized a pur-suit, and that promise had persuaded men to follow him and the responsibility of it weighed on Thomas. He also resented worrying. His ambition, after all, was to be the leader of a war band like Will Skeat had been before his injury, and what hope did he have of being a good leader if he fretted over a little raid like this? Yet fret he did, and he worried most of all that he might not have anticipated everything that could go wrong; and the men who had joined him gave him small consolation for, except for his friends and the newly arrived Flemings, they were the poorest and least well equipped of all the adventurers who had come to La Roche-Derrien in search of wealth. One of them, a quarrelsome man-at-arms from western Brittany, became drunk on the first day and Thomas discovered he had two water skins filled with a fierce apple spirit. He broke both skins, whereupon the enraged Breton drew his sword and attacked Thomas, but he was too drunk to see properly and a knee to his groin and a thump over the head put him down hard. Thomas took the man's horse and left him groaning in the mud, which meant he was down to fourteen men. 'That will have helped,' Sir Guillaume said cheerfully.

Thomas said nothing. He deserved to be mocked, he thought.

'No, I mean it! You knock a man down one day and you might do it again. You know why some men are bad leaders?'

'Why?'

'They want to be liked.'

'That's bad?' Thomas asked.

'Men want to admire their leaders, they want to fear them, and above all they want them to be successful. What does being liked have to do with any of that? If the leader is a good man he will be liked and if he's not, he won't, and if he is a good man and a bad leader then he is better off dead. You see? I am full of wisdom.' Sir Guillaume laughed. He might be down on his luck, his manor lost and fortune gone, but he was riding to a fight and that cheered him. 'The good thing about this rain,' he said, 'is that the enemy won't expect you to be riding in it. It's stay-at-home weather.'

'They'll know we've left La Roche-Derrien,' Thomas said. He was certain that Charles of Blois had as many spies in the town as the English had in Rennes.

'He won't know yet,' Sir Guillaume said. 'We're travelling faster than any message can go. Anyway, while they know we've left La Roche-Derrien, they don't know where we're going.'