Bernard Cornwell - 1356 (Special Edition)

He watched Robbie walk away. ‘So,’ he said to Father Marchant, ‘that’s the first of your knights. Tomorrow you will endeavour to find Roland de Verrec. But for the moment,’ he pointed to Sculley, ‘fetch me that animal.’

And so the Order of the Fisherman was born.

Brother Michael was miserable. ‘I don’t want to be a hospitaller,’ he told Thomas. ‘I get dizzy when I see blood. It makes me feel sick.’

‘You have a calling,’ Thomas said.

‘To be an archer?’ Brother Michael suggested.

Thomas laughed. ‘Tell me that in ten years, brother. It takes that long to learn the bow.’

It was midday and they were resting the horses. Thomas had taken twenty men, all men-at-arms, their job merely to provide protection from the coredors who haunted the roads. He dared not take archers. His longbows rode with the Hellequin, but when he travelled in a small group the sight of the dreaded English bows stirred up enemies, so all the men with him spoke French. Most were Gascons, but there were two Germans, Karyl and Wulf, who had ridden to Castillon d’Arbizon to offer their allegiance. ‘Why do you want to serve me?’ Thomas had asked them.

‘Because you win,’ Karyl had answered simply. The German was a thin, quick fighter, whose right cheek was scarred by two parallel furrows. ‘The claws of a fighting bear,’ he had explained. ‘I was trying to save a dog. I liked the dog, but the bear didn’t.’

‘Did the dog die?’ Genevieve had asked.

‘It did,’ Karyl said, ‘but so did the bear.’

Genevieve was with Thomas. She would not leave Thomas’s side, fearing that if she was alone the church would find her again and try to burn her, and so she had insisted on accompanying him. Besides, she had told him, there was no danger. Thomas only planned to spend a day or two in Montpellier in search of a scholar who could explain a monk kneeling amidst snow, then they would all hurry back to Castillon d’Arbizon where the rest of his men waited.

‘If I can’t be an archer,’ Brother Michael said, ‘then let me be your physician.’

‘You haven’t finished your training, brother, that’s why we’re going to Montpellier. So you can be educated.’

‘I don’t want to be educated,’ Brother Michael grumbled. ‘I’ve had enough education.’

Thomas laughed. He liked the young monk and knew well enough that Michael was desperate to escape the cage of his calling, a despair Thomas knew himself. Thomas was the illegitimate son of a priest, and he had obediently gone to Oxford to learn theology so that he could become a priest himself, but he had already found another love, the yew bow. The great yew bow. And no books, no sacrament, no lecture on the indivisible substance of the triple-natured God could compete with the bow, and so Thomas had become a soldier. Brother Michael, he thought, was following the same course, though in Michael’s case it was the Countess Bertille who was the lodestar. She was still at Castillon d’Arbizon where she accepted Brother Michael’s worship as her due and was kind to him in return, but seemed oblivious to his yearning. She treated him like an indulged puppy and that made the young monk yearn even more.

Galdric, Thomas’s servant, and more than able to look after himself in a fight, brought Thomas’s horse back from the stream. ‘Those folk stopped,’ he said.

‘Close?’

‘A long way back. But I think they’re following us.’

Thomas climbed the bank from the stream to the road. A mile away, perhaps more, a small band of men were watering horses. ‘It’s a busy road,’ Thomas said. The men, he thought they were all men, had been behind them for two days now, but they were making no attempt to catch up.

‘They’re the Count of Armagnac’s troops,’ Karyl said confidently.

‘Armagnac?’

‘This is all the Count’s territory,’ the German said, waving an arm to encompass the whole landscape. ‘His men patrol the roads to keep the bandits away. He can’t tax merchants if they’ve nothing to tax, eh?’

The road became even busier as they neared Montpellier. Thomas had no wish to draw attention to himself by entering the city with a large band of armed men so, next afternoon, he looked for a place where most of his men could wait while he entered the city. They found a burned mill on a hilltop to the west of the road. The nearest village was a mile away and the valley beneath the mill was secluded. ‘If we’re not back in two days,’ he told Karyl, ‘send someone to discover what’s happened and send to Castillon for help. And keep quiet here. We don’t want the city consuls sending men to investigate you.’ He could tell the city was close by the smear of smoke in the southern sky.

‘If people ask us what we do here?’

‘You can’t afford city prices so you’re waiting here to meet the Count of Armagnac’s men.’ The count was the greatest lord in all southern France and no one would dare interfere with men who served him.

‘There’ll be no trouble,’ Karyl said grimly. ‘I promise.’

Thomas, Genevieve, Hugh and Brother Michael rode on. They were accompanied by just two men-at-arms and by Galdric, and they reached Montpellier that evening. The two hills of the city, the towers of its churches and its tile-roofed bastions cast long shadows. The city was surrounded by a high, pale wall from which hung banners showing the Virgin and her child. Others showed a circle, red as the setting sun, against a white field. Outside the wall was a weed-strewn wasteland, and beneath the weeds were ashes, while in a few places there were stone hearths showing where there had once been houses. A woman, stooped and ancient with a black scarf over her hair, grubbed close to one of the hearths. ‘You lived here?’ Thomas asked.

She answered in Occitan, a language Thomas scarcely knew, but Galdric translated. ‘She lived here till the English came.’

‘The English were here?’ Thomas sounded surprised.

It seemed that during the previous year the Prince of Wales had come close to Montpellier, very close, but at the last moment his destroying army had sheered away, but not before the city had burned every building outside the walls to deny the English any hiding places for archers or siege engines. ‘Ask what she’s searching for,’ Thomas ordered.

‘Anything,’ was the answer, ‘because she lost everything.’

Genevieve tossed the woman a coin. A bell was tolling inside the city and Thomas feared it was the signal to close the gates, so he spurred his men forward. A line of wagons laden with timber, fleeces, and barrels waited at the gate, but Thomas passed them. He was in mail, carrying a sword, and that marked him as a man of privilege. Galdric, riding close behind, unfurled a banner showing a hawk carrying a sheaf of rye. The badge was the old banner of Castillon d’Arbizon, and a useful device when Thomas did not want to advertise his loyalty to the Earl of Northampton or his command of the feared Hellequin.

‘Your business, sire?’ a guard at the gate demanded.

‘We are on a pilgrimage,’ Thomas said, ‘so want to pray.’

‘Swords must remain sheathed inside the city, sire,’ the guard said respectfully.

‘We’re not here to fight,’ Thomas said, ‘just to pray. Where do we find lodgings?’

‘There’s plenty straight ahead, close to Saint Pierre’s church. The one showing the sign of Saint Lucia is the best.’

‘Because it belongs to your brother?’ Thomas guessed.

‘I wish it did, sire, but it’s owned by my cousin.’

Thomas laughed, threw the man a coin, and rode under the high arch. The sound of his horse’s hooves echoed from the buildings, the bell tolled steadily and Thomas rode towards the church of Saint Peter, besieged suddenly by the fecal stench of a city. A man in a red and blue tunic and carrying a trumpet with the banner of the Virgin dangling from its pipes ran past the horses. ‘I’m late!’ he called to Thomas.