Honour and the Sword Page 3

  Then he was scrambling to his feet, grasping that ridiculous great sword, and I realized with horror what he was going to do.

  ‘You’ll be killed,’ I said.

  He looked at me, and I saw he was every bit as scared as I was, his eyes looked huge and his breathing was ragged. But he looked back at the Manor and said quietly ‘I must,’ and I understood he had to, though of course I didn’t know why, not back then. He hefted his sword in his hand, glanced back at me and said ‘Coming?’

  There was only one possible answer to that, which was ‘no’. It was completely mad, a kid with a sword, and me with a gun which would maybe get one Spaniard before the other fifty pounced on us while I was reloading. I gaped in shock, but he only nodded like I’d said yes, took three quick breaths, stepped out of the bushes into the open and started to run towards the Manor.

  I had to stop him, I’d got no choice, he was bloody twelve years old. I was up and pelting after him, swinging the gun as I went. I caught up with him at the terrace, clonked the barrel down hard on the back of his neck, and brought him sprawling down flat on the stones.

  I thought I’d overdone it, or maybe he hit the front of his head when he fell, because when I dragged him back into the bushes I saw he was quite unconscious. I tried not to think about the penalties for knocking out the son of your Seigneur, but at least he was breathing, his chest was moving up and down. It felt strange being able to look at him with no one to yell at me to keep my head down, but I did now, and thought he looked a mess. He was pale, with a tangle of long black hair like mine, and one side of his face was bruised and badly scored. He was just wearing nightshirt and breeches, his boots weren’t done up right, he was grubby with earth and scratched and grazed all over. The only pretty thing about him was those long dark eyelashes, which made him look sort of young and innocent.

  Which just goes to show how wrong you can be. When I put his wrist down my hand felt sticky, and I saw red traces in the creases of my palm. I uncurled his hand and saw that some time that night it must have been soaked in blood. It was over his sleeve too, and not all the patches on his front were mud like I’d thought. I wondered just what had happened in the Manor before he’d climbed out of it.

  But I couldn’t worry about that, not right then. Our only chance of escape was the horses, which meant getting to the stables before the Spaniards did. There was no sign of the boy coming round, but I couldn’t carry him up the bank, not with ten pounds of gun already round my neck, so I stuck his sword under my arm, climbed up half backwards, and actually dragged him. I felt bad because we were going through nettles and brambles and stuff, but it was the only way.

  He started stirring before I got to the top, so I whizzed him up the last bit, then laid him down gently on the path and sat back warily because I didn’t want him biting me again. He lay a second, sort of twitching, then his eyes opened and at least he knew it was me. There was this awful moment when I saw him remembering his parents had been murdered, but he didn’t cry or anything, he just looked away a moment then asked what had happened.

  I said ‘You got jumped,’ which was true enough.

  ‘How?’

  ‘There was another soldier on the terrace.’ That was a bit less true, but I had to say something. ‘It’s all right, I dealt with it.’

  He didn’t say anything, he just reached out his hand and got hold of mine, and then I really felt like shit. I had a horrible fear he might go and kiss me, because they do that kind of stuff, nobility, but just at that second I heard hoofbeats below us down to our right, there was cavalry coming up the drive to the Manor. I don’t think the boy heard it, he was still gazing at me sort of moistly, so I slammed his head down quick and said ‘Horses!’

  ‘Is it the militia?’ he asked.

  It wasn’t. It was more bloody Spaniards, sweeping up towards the Manor like it was their home and we were the bandits hiding outside. They drew up before the courtyard gate, and this young officer stood upright in his stirrups and raised the arm nearest us with a sword in it. He waved it about like a baton, directing little parcels of men off round the estate to surround the Manor and check the outbuildings. I didn’t know it then, and it wouldn’t have meant much if I had, but that was my first sight of d’Estrada, the Capitán Don Miguel d’Estrada himself. There was something odd about what I was seeing too, something not quite right, but of course I missed it, like everything else that was really going on round me back then, or at least everything important.

  ‘They’re coming up here,’ said the boy.

  There was a bunch of them trotting gently round towards the apron at the back, they were bound to see the carriageway and if they followed it they’d come right to the stables and us.

  ‘Horses!’ I said again, and turned and ran for the stables. The boy was hard behind me as I belted inside.

  It was warm after the night air, and smelt like home. I threw open the stalls and urged the horses out, then grabbed Tonnerre, because he was the most valuable, a great black Mecklenburg stallion and the Seigneur’s own warhorse. I got a halter on him, but didn’t waste time with a saddle, I just threw his blanket over his back and led him straight out, looped the halter round a post, and ran back for Duchesse.

  There was the boy trying to put a halter on Tempête. I should have bloody known it, he loved that horse, but the gelding was too temperamental, I’d have trusted him less than any stallion I ever knew.

  I said ‘No, take Duchesse, she’s safer,’ and quickly threw a halter on Perle. She was mild enough to let me lead her, and even if she wasn’t the best of the mares her foal would follow her anywhere, and the foal was Tonnerre’s.

  When I turned round, the boy was still standing by Tempête.

  He said ‘What did you say to me?’ There was moonlight coming in through the open door, and his face looked different, sort of harder. His eyes had narrowed, they looked like the slits in the donjon at Lucheux.

  I said ‘You can’t ride Tempête, take Duchesse.’

  ‘You don’t tell me what I can do with my own horses.’

  It was unbelievable. The Spaniards were two minutes away, there wasn’t time for one of his tempers now. I nearly told him so, but then suddenly what he’d said sunk in with a thud. ‘My own horses’ he’d said, and he was right. His father was dead and he wasn’t the Seigneur’s son any more. He was the Seigneur.

  I said quickly ‘All right, do what you like, but I couldn’t ride him myself, not bareback, I’m not up to it.’

  I turned away to grab my blanket, and make a bundle of it for the gun and some oats for the horses. I had a bit of bread and cheese up there too, so I took that along with a bottle of apple brandy which Father used to hide under the rafters and didn’t know I knew about. I ran out into the yard, and there was the boy standing by Duchesse. He looked mutinous and thoroughly pissed off, but he was standing by Duchesse like I told him.

  I gave him a leg-up, hurled myself on Tonnerre, took Perle’s halter, and signalled the boy to follow. The loose horses were blundering about in confusion, bumping into each other and half bolting, but we weaved our way through towards the fork in the path. The right was the carriageway down to the Manor and about a million Spaniards, the left was where the bridle path wound on up to the north of Ancre and the Forest of Dax. I reached the fork and saw horsemen starting up the carriageway towards us.

  Duchesse whinnied behind me, and I turned to see the boy half sliding off her back. The stupid little bugger, he was still clutching that sword in one hand, and actually trying to lead Tempête with the other, he’d got nothing to hold on with and was slipping off towards the ground. I fought back to him through the milling horses, but I’d only got one hand to support him, I was holding Perle with the other, while crushing the gun and my bundle against Tonnerre’s neck to keep it on.

  ‘Let go of him!’ I shouted, struggling to drag him back up. ‘They’re coming, let go of the halter!’

  He turned his face to me, pale and desperate and s
heened with rain. Down the carriageway I heard someone shouting.

  ‘Then the sword, drop the sword!’ I said.

  He shook his head furiously. ‘It’s my father’s.’

  There was a flash below us, then the sharp crack of a musket. I hauled him back high against Duchesse’s neck, screamed ‘Come on!’ then tried to turn Tonnerre, but we were blocked in by the loose horses, I couldn’t get through, Mai was in front of us, rearing and rolling her eyes white in panic, and the poor old Général was backing into me, trying to turn towards the guns, desperate to get back to his old place in the cavalry lines.

  Another horse loomed beside me. I swore at it, then realized with shock it was grey and black, a horse I didn’t know, and when my eyes went up there was a man on him, black and red, and his arm high in the air. Something white was striping down towards me with a sound like whipping air, I tried to jerk back, but another blade whistled in between us, there was the sharp ring of steel as swords clashed just inches from my nose. I dug in my heels, driving Tonnerre back, and there was the boy on Duchesse, one hand screwed in her mane, the other slicing down with his sword, the rush of it changing to a hard squelch as it bit into the Spaniard’s neck. The man was screaming in my face, he was veering back, his arm coming up, an open white palm with fingers splayed in panic, he was falling away, he was gone.

  I closed my eyes, yelled again ‘Come on!’, got my head down, urged Tonnerre to the gallop and rode like mad down the other fork. There was no time to look back, but the sound of hooves told me the boy was following, and at least I knew he’d let go of Tempête.

  There was more shouting below us, and the neighing and stamping of horses, but no more shots, and I couldn’t hear anyone else coming after us. I suppose they were too busy trying to round up the loose horses, which were a lot more valuable than we were, after all. Perle was still up with me, and the foal tangling its long thin legs as it skittered desperately after her. I risked a glance behind and saw the boy was keeping up too. He was twisting his head to look back for Tempête, but he still had that sword in his hand, and the blade was dark with what I knew was blood.

  We kept going. We followed the bridle track where it circled the rear gardens below us, and went on to the northernmost part of the estate and the back meadow. There was rougher land there, where trees had been cut down for building, and it was fringed directly by the main Forest of Dax. As we finally reached the tree line it was just starting to get light.

  I slowed down Tonnerre, and let the foal catch up to Perle, which was a mistake, because he was under her belly and suckling in a minute. The boy came up more slowly, and stopped to watch us. He looked even more bedraggled now it was lighter.

  ‘We’ll need to lie up in here for a while,’ I told him. ‘Let things die down. We’ll go back down when it’s dark, and find out what’s happening.’

  He nodded like it didn’t matter much, looked vaguely about him, then stiffened suddenly and stared towards the estate below. The rain was making a kind of gentle mist, but through it I could see a plume of dark smoke sort of rolling and coiling into the air in thick purple waves. I followed it down to the dark shape below, where I saw more smoke and little flashes of bright orange flame.

  They were burning his home.

  He didn’t say anything. He just looked at the fire for a long while, and his face had no expression at all. He didn’t get angry, he still didn’t cry, he just watched. The air round us was shimmering in a strange way, making little shadows pass over his face, like something was on fire behind that too.That was fair enough. It was his whole world going up in smoke down there.

  What I didn’t realize at the time was that it was mine too.

  Two

  Stefan Ravel

  From his interviews with the Abbé Fleuriot, 1669

  I don’t know what you’re talking to me for. Oh, don’t give me that balls about the pursuit of truth, you’ll be after canonization before you’re done. All you want to hear is how perfect he was, and I’m afraid, M. l’Abbé, he fell a little short of that.

  Not that I knew him back then, the night the dons came to Picardie. I’d somehow survived to the age of nineteen without having set eyes on André de Roland, and can’t say I was breaking my heart over it. I didn’t much care for nobility, not what I’d seen of them. I’d joined my brother in the army at fifteen, and come across enough officers who treated men worse than horses to last my humble lifetime. My brother died in the army, as it happened, Abbé. He died there.

  So when the old man dropped dead in ’35 there was no one but me to go home and take over the tannery. Verdâme wasn’t the nicest place to live back then. The whole village had been sold with the title to this du Pré bastard, who upped all the rents he could, and charged everyone the earth for using the mill, the wine-press, the bake-house or just about everything except breathing. But I wasn’t a peasant, Abbé, I was safe from the worst of it. I was a skilled artisan, and I was getting by.

  And then the dons came. Christ, yes, of course I remember, there’d been a bunch of us at the Lucheux Market, and there we were sweeping home through the Dax Gate only to find ourselves in the middle of a battle. Not a real one, no officers, no order, nothing but a bunch of civilians weeping and wailing and running out the Gate with their little handcarts, and a few stouter folk desperately flinging up a barricade across the Ancre Road. Well, what’s a man to do? I wasn’t going to save my home by running away from it, so I went with the others to the barricade.

  It was all very amateur. We had civilians with scythes and reaping hooks, and behind us a priest trying to ward off the danger by saying prayers. At least we had a militia sergeant, and when he heard I’d been in the army he gave me a wheel-lock musket, and stuck me in the front by a young Verdâmer in the uniform of the Baron’s Guard. That’s right, Abbé, Marcel. He seemed a nice, well-brought-up lad, but there wasn’t much time for conversation right then, I was busy checking my musket action and getting the damn thing loaded. I’d only just got it comfortably on the rest when there was movement in the dark and the sound of pounding hooves, and there they were, cuirassiers charging us down the Ancre Road.

  The press of men behind me slackened a little, and I had a nasty suspicion some of our civilians were trying to back away. Our sergeant kept his head. He watched the bastards thundering closer, he knew as well as I did those breastplates can resist a ball at anything other than close range, and only when they were nearly on top of us did he give the order to fire. It was a good, tight volley, a great crash of sound, and through the smoke we heard the screaming of horses, the shouting of men, and the thud of bodies hitting the ground.

  It was over a year since I’d stood in the line, but the drill comes back pretty quickly in that situation, and I was legging it to the back before the echo even died. I’d forgotten the rest of it, though, the bitter smell of smoke, the roar in your ears, the instinct that reaches for your powder the second your hand’s off the trigger, I was only just in with the ramrod when the second rank fired. There was still a third, but the sergeant called them to hold, he knew once they discharged we were stuffed, we weren’t up with the reload. The cavalry saw us waiting, thought better of it, and backed off to regroup. Some of the civilians cheered, but not me, Abbé, I’d seen it all before. I knew what they’d do next.

  And they did. They’d mustered more men for their next assault, so they halted just out of range, then sent up the first group with levelled pistols. It was only the bloody caracole, and us a sitting target with three thin ranks to beat it. On they came, blasted their pistols at us and skipped back out of range while the next lot took their place.

  The sergeant divided our ranks into two, so we could raise six rounds to cover the reload, but it couldn’t last, men were dropping all round. Next time I reached the front there was only Marcel and one other man beside me, a hard-faced bugger in a fancy coat who was Steward of Ancre itself. He wasn’t even that for much longer, the bastards fired the same time we did, and blew
a hole in his chest I could have stuck two fists in. I was over his body and off for the back, Marcel limping beside me. His hand was clutching his thigh, while between his fingers pumped out thick, red blood.

  I grabbed Giles Leroux from the second rank to take his place and yelled at Marcel to leave the line, but he only grinned and shook his head. Smoke-blackened face, wide smile and eyes as bright as hope, poor lad, just burning to be a hero. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘They’ll give up soon.’

  Did they buggery. A murmur ran along the ranks in front of us and I saw something nastily familiar rumbling down the Ancre Road towards us. Field guns, Abbé. Artillery. We were fucked.

  Père Gérard Benoît

  Our sergeant saw that all was lost, and ordered the civilians to flee while he took upon himself the business of military surrender. I was rejoiced to see the young Marcel Dubois escaping into the woods with a companion, for his gallantry deserved a better reward than to be made prisoner of the enemy.

  Many of our folk had already quit the village with such goods as they could carry, but others had nothing in their lives but the homes and businesses they were now required to leave. Some ran for Verdâme, in the hope the assault might have spent itself there; some concealed themselves in the Dax-Verdâme woods which divide our two villages; others barricaded themselves in the illusory safety of their homes. Many sought sanctuary in our own church of St Sebastian, crowding the building to the extent I found it hard to re-enter, the more as some had brought their livestock, and the aisles were filled with pigs and chickens. I nevertheless sought to comfort the people with the saying of Mass, but was scarce halfway through the service when a loud crash announced the opening of the west door, and in the next moment a great body of soldiery came thrusting into the church with levelled firearms and drawn swords.