Bruce Holsinger - The Invention of Fire

Crack.

Crack.

I had lost sight of Jack. Then I saw him, darting between the wheels of two carts on Cheap. The mayor’s guards had fled in the opposite direction. I was alone.

Crack.

Crack.

Now the screams. As hundreds of Londoners fell to the ground Iseult’s story of the massacre at Desurennes flashed through my mind. Ripped chests, shattered skulls, torn necks.

Crack.

I had a vision of the men in the St. Bartholomew’s grave, children bleeding and ravaged on the ground. Around me others were scattering or ducking behind and beneath whatever they could find. Even Woodstock himself cowered between the wheels of a water wagon, his shoulders hunched against the violence from above.

Crack.

Crack.

More screams, a panic of men and women fleeing from the center of the square.

Crack.

“Aieee!!!”

A howl of pain, distant not near. I risked a look out toward the gate. All was turmoil, the mayor’s Riding dissolved into a chaotic melee of humans and horses, hands and feet. Yet despite the shots and screams I saw no dead in the gateyard, no spills of blood and brains as I had expected.

Crack.

“My eyes! Douse my eyes!” someone shouted high above.

“Leave off! Leave off!” ordered another.

“Down the guns! Down the guns!”

Crack.

“Jesu’s blood. Put it out!”

“M’shirt’s aflame!”

“Down the guns!”

Crack.

“Douse my eyes, for Christ’s mercy!”

I looked up cautiously, still half cowering beneath the baker’s awning. A group of men, yelling back and forth along the walls. Yet these particular screams, I soon realized, had come not from the scattered crowd of lords and citizens in the gateyard. The screams of anguish were sounding from overhead.

Crack.

“AAARRR!”

A flash of powder over the gate parapet.

Crack.

Another, and a gun exploded in a soldier’s hands. The flame leapt at his face. He slapped at his singed brow.

Crack.

This one to the left of him, the tower parapet above. Another misfire. The soldier threw the gun away from himself, shaking his burned hands and clapping them against his hauberk. The weapon spun in the air, hit the awning, then clattered to the street not ten feet from where I crouched. Looking left and right, I crawled out through the fleeing crowd, seized the gun, and returned to my position.

A barrel, a stock, a snake. The gun, I saw, was identical in all respects to the one Simon had given me in Calais.

The shots ceased. By this time a number of the lords’ guards had recovered their wits. Arrows were flying up to the ramparts, shot by a cluster of archers, several of whom held shields overhead to guard their fellow bowmen. I heard shouts from the direction of St. Paul’s. Soon the archers were joined by the mayor’s own swordsmen, a large company from the city guard. Blades were drawn, and other guards were now sprinting for the gate stairs to ascend the walls.

Brembre’s men had arrived too late. If the guns had fired successfully, the cream of English chivalry would have lain slaughtered in the yard. Yet the weapons had misfired-all of them. Could it be-

“Drop it, on your life.”

A sword at my neck. I swallowed slowly.

In the examining then of your counselor be not blind. Slowly I looked up into the cruel glare of Edmund Rune.

"Rise.”

I looked down at the familiar gun in my hands, no help against the sharp sword in Rune’s. I dropped the useless weapon on the stones as I stood.

“Through there.” He pointed to a passage between the baker’s and a vintner’s shop next door. The gateyard was still a melee. The clatter and whistle of arrows and bolts, shouts and threats flying up and down from the walls. One man holding a blade to the chest of another would hardly be noticed in the chaos.

“ Now! ” Rune commanded.

I obeyed, backing down the passage with his sword still at my chest. With my final glimpse of Cheap I saw a pale face and earless head against the scattering crowd. Jack Norris, staring after me. Then he was gone.

Rune backed me through the alley to a darkened and empty seld, roughly roofed and open at four sides. Through the narrow gap at the opposite end I could see the rush of citizens along Thames Street, hear their distant shouts as news spread of the incident at the gate.

Rune dropped his sword to his side, though I had no doubt it would pierce my heart should I seek to escape or scream for help. My feeling as I stood there was something like the sensation I had experienced in the surgeon’s chair, donning spectacles for the first time, the blurred made clear, the dulled edges of things newly sharp and precise, as everything I had seen in those weeks assembled itself with a startling clarity.

“Why, Rune?” I asked him as I waited bleakly to die. “All of this, merely to incriminate Woodstock?” Still a guess, but one that had been creeping up on me over the last two days. The one answer that made sense of it all.

“It was the only way,” said Rune, his jaw tensed in fury. “Gloucester is the leader of the appellant lords, and they do his bidding in all things. They must be turned against him.”

“The gunpowder,” I said. Ships unloading at Dunkirk, a bend conveniently lost in a fight on the quay. “Convince the Lords and Commons that Gloucester is dealing arms to Burgundy and France. That he is a traitor, and therefore unfit to lead an appeal against the king.”

“Treason comes in many forms,” said Rune. “Gloucester is a traitor of the worst kind, disguising his betrayals under a cloak of devotion to the realm. Think of how he must appear to King Richard and his fellow lords about now! Murdering the king’s prisoners, without the process of law, and casting the bodies in the mayor’s own sewers. Massacring townspeople in the Pale, without leave of the captain of Calais. Worst of all, peddling guns and gunpowder to our enemy. A duke acting rashly on his own, without consulting the lords or his sovereign, risking the safety of the realm.”

Rune’s plan had a sickening brilliance.

“You sought to isolate Gloucester,” I said. “Leave the duke weakened and alone, a cowering traitor exposed even as he preens over his parliamentary move against His Royal Highness-and your lord the earl.”

He beamed. “And secure a useful alliance in the event of a French conquest of our fair isle. A likely conquest, the admirals are telling us.”

“You forged the duke’s badge.”

“Many times over. A few embroideresses, a few baubles as reward, a few dozen badges to sew into bends. The simplest part of the entire enterprise.”

Simple, perhaps, yet audacious in its violation of the mores of heraldry. Dozens of false bends and badges, circling the arms of Rune’s men as they did their foul work in Kent, in London, in the Pale.

I asked him, “How did you connive Snell into your plan? He is the king’s own armorer, appointed from Gloucester’s own household.”

“Snell is a craftsman in body, and a visionary in soul. His ambitions defeat his loyalty, and he bears none toward Gloucester. We both needed a particularly malleable assortment of men and material to do what needed to be done. I provided prisoners to him, he provided guns to me.”

“What about the soldiers?”

“Snell hired men willing to be employed in the ways we both required.”

“They were not Tower men?”

“Mercenaries,” said Rune. “Englishmen all, but hired from a foreign source.” His head tilted to the side as he regarded me in my new bewilderment.