Elizabeth Chadwick - The Leopard Unleashed

Garden crops were burning, dwellings were on fire. Animals lay where they had been slaughtered. The main street was an avenue of fire, every building alight. The roar of the flames was like the breath of a ragged, mythical beast, stalking and destroying in the wake of the perpetrators. Of them there was not a sign except for one body trapped beneath the bulk of a dead ox.

Gerard de Brionne split away from the main group and took a handful of men round by the fulling mill. That too was on fire, although not yet as wildly ablaze as the houses. Torches still held aloft, three men were backing away from the building, shouting gleefully to each other. Gerard and his companions rode them down, dousing both brands and men in the fast-flowing river beside the mill. Their armour pulled them under. Those who floated were encouraged to sink. Renard’s knights removed their cloaks, saturated them in the river and set about beating out the fire.

Renard came round to the church by way of the village pond where incongruously, amid all the destruction and chaos, a pair of ducks still dabbled with a total lack of concern. The church itself, stone-built by Elene’s father, was untouched by fire, but the doors hung drunkenly wide, and clustered around them were a group of routiers in mail shirts and quilted tunics. From the belfrey, the excommunicat resonated, tolling amid the drifts of windblown smoke. The wind veered and the bells faltered and suddenly died. Within the church a child wailed.

‘Hah!’ Renard cried and spurred Gorvenal. The horse passed the pond at a canter. Renard leaned forward, left fist curved around the hand strap of his shield, right around his sword grip. The child’s wail became a full scream, and above the roar of the flames Renard heard a man’s voice thundering in Latin. John, he thought, recognising it even as it was cut short.

He spurred Gorvenal again, frantically, and they galloped into the churchyard. Without stopping, Renard took the stallion straight up the path to the broken church doors. A routier stared. His mouth widened to yell a warning. Renard stood in the stirrups and clove him like a bacon pig. Gorvenal dealt with a second man, a lashing kick doubling him over, and Renard finished it. Then he was riding into the church, horseshoes clattering on the stone flags of the nave.

Hamo le Grande turned and gaped as a vision from the hell the priest had just promised him bore down the nave. A horseman of the apocalypse, his sword edge dripping blood and his horse wild-eyed with crimson-lined nostrils. At Hamo’s feet, John used his good arm — the one that the mercenary had not slashed to the bone, to grasp Hamo’s ankle and pull hard. The mercenary threw out his arms to save himself, but was too late. The cry of surprise on his lips rose to a scream as he landed without cushioning on the hard flags. They all heard the crack of bone as his spine broke. And yet he was still alive to suffer the agony. Unable to move, he watched Renard slow the horse and pace him up the nave, finally drawing rein before him.

Renard looked down implacably. ‘Take him out,’ he commanded to the men waiting behind. ‘And hang him … slowly.’

Hamo’s screams as he was dragged outside the church faded to background insignificance. Renard dismounted. Owain appeared, to take charge of the horse and lead him outside. Renard knelt beside John who was ashen with pain. His habit sleeve was saturated in blood.

‘Not as bad as it looks,’ he tried to jest. ‘His blade was blunt.’

‘Let me see.’ Renard drew his knife and ripped the material. The wound was deep and sluggishly oozing, but not so deep that it would not mend or damage the arm’s function. ‘It’s nasty,’ he said, ‘but it won’t kill you. Elene will be able to stitch it and pack it with a mouldy bread poultice.’ While he spoke, he worked to temporarily bind the wound with strips from the linen shirt that Master Pieter had obligingly sacrificed.

‘Elene?’ John grimaced. ‘Elene rode back to Woolcot to fetch help from the garrison … She was here in the village showing me the wool sheds and seeing me on my way.’

‘What!’

‘She was gone before they struck.’

Renard sprang to his feet just as the brawny youth came up the nave, Father Edwig’s body borne in his arms. ‘He’s dead,’ the young man said in a wondering voice. ‘Just suddenly dropped at the bell rope, but see, he’s never looked so happy!’

People gathered to marvel or weep over the serenely smiling old priest. Renard left the church at a run, snatched Gorvenal’s bridle from Owain and vaulted into the saddle.

‘There are some men from the keep looking for you,’ the boy said. ‘Sir Oswel and Sir Randal.’ He pointed down the churchyard, his young face frightened.

Renard rode over to the garrison force. A little beyond them several corpses swung on a gibbet. ‘Where is Lady Elene?’ he demanded brusquely.

Sir Oswel looked troubled. He wiped his hand over his beard. ‘I do not know, my lord.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘Her mare came into the bailey all sweated up and riderless about the same time that we heard the bells and saw the smoke. We rode here first, thinking perhaps to find her, but …’ he gestured bleakly at the burning village.

Renard coughed as he inhaled a gust of smoke. He felt as if he had swallowed a lump of ice. ‘Oswel, stay here and organise the villagers into putting out the fires and cleaning up. Randal, take half a dozen men and search the area between village and keep.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Renard wheeled Gorvenal and rode in the direction of the castle. On all sides of him stretched the rough pasture. Grazing sheep raised their heads and stared at him with indifference, jaws circling busily. The wind veered and buffeted, bringing the stink of burning with it, hot and strong. It was difficult to remember a time when that smell had not pervaded his every waking moment and stalked him through his dreams.

Across the moorland he and his men searched without finding a sign of Elene, and with each piece of ground unfruitfully covered Renard’s apprehension grew. What if she had been caught in the fire? What if the horse had bucked her off in the village and run home to her stable riderless all the way? Unknowing, he passed the place where she had first fallen from the mare, and then the place where a second time she had lost her seat in the saddle. Nothing. He halted Gorvenal and stared at the wind-whipped moorland until his eyes stung.

‘Hola!’

Renard turned in the direction of the shout and saw a shepherd and dogs running towards him. The man was waving his arms, and a molten flicker of hope coursed through Renard as he rode to meet him.

‘My lord!’ the shepherd saluted him, then had to stop to gather his breath.

‘Is it about Lady Elene? Is she all right? Tell me, man!’

‘I … I think so, my lord … She was a bit shook up at first, but my wife’s looking after her.’ He gulped and gasped, pressing his hand to the stitch in his side. ‘At first we thought her ankle was broken, but I do believe it is only a nasty sprain.’

‘Where is she?’

‘My hut … over yon.’ He pointed to a small dwelling a few hundred yards away. ‘I carried her like I would a wounded sheep. It weren’t far and my wife had just brought me food.’ He straightened slightly and creased his eyes at Renard. ‘Is it true the village is burned to the ground? I can smell smoke. Dogs are restless.’

‘Yes, it’s true.’ Renard left the shepherd and galloped to the hut, dismounting even as he drew rein. Tethering Gorvenal to a hook protruding from the dung and wattle wall, he ducked inside the hut. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the single, tiny room, but Elene’s glad cry brought his gaze immediately to the place where she lay, tended by the shepherd’s wife who was pressing a cold cloth on to her swollen ankle.