Stormbird

9

The road led up a small rise, cresting through a copse of gnarled oaks. From his poacher’s spot, halfway up a nearby hill in the bracken, Thomas Woodchurch could see where the trees cast a shadow on the grey stones running through them. It was a perfect place for an ambush, the result of telling sullen English soldiers to cut turf and lay dressed stones from one town to another. Local roads were formed naturally, over centuries. They meandered past obstacles, detouring around old hills and ancient oaks. Not the English ones. Like the Romans before them, those forgotten teams of labourers had cut their routes in a straight line and dug up or burned anything in the way.

Thomas settled deeper into his crouch, knowing he was close to invisible on the hillside in his dark brown wool and hunter’s leathers, while commanding a good view of the valley for miles around. The road crest could well be empty, but he’d spotted fresh hoof prints by a gate that morning and followed them for half a day. The marks of iron horseshoes suggested the riders were not local men, few of whom owned even a small pony.

Thomas had his suspicions about the group crossing his land. He also had a longbow at his side, wrapped in oiled leather. He had no idea if the baron’s men knew he’d been a soldier before he became a wool merchant. Either way, if they showed themselves, someone was going to die. At the thought, he dropped his hand to the length of his bow and patted it. From a young age, he’d been told there were only three kinds of people in the world. There were those who fought: the earls themselves and their knights and armies. There were those who prayed: a group Thomas didn’t know well, but who seemed to be the younger brothers of powerful houses on the whole. Finally, there were those who worked. He smiled at the thought. He’d already been two of the three estates of men. He’d fought and he’d worked. If he surprised half a dozen horsemen come to raid his flocks, he might find himself trying a desperate prayer or two as well, to complete the set.

Lying utterly still in the bracken, Thomas was alert for any movement. When he saw it, he didn’t turn his head sharply. That kind of rashness could get a man killed. As something shifted on his right, he eased his gaze over. His heart sank and his eyes flickered back to the crest of the hill and the dark passage under the oaks, which had taken on an ominous look to his eye.

His son Rowan was on foot, dogtrotting, with his head turning back and forth as he looked for his father. The man in question groaned softly to himself, seeing his lad was blindly following the road towards the copse.

Thomas stood up sharply, raising the covered bow above his head to show himself. Down below, Rowan spotted him and even at a distance Thomas could see him grin and change direction to come up the hill.

Thomas saw shadows move in the copse. His stomach clenched in fear as a rider came hard out of the gloom. Two more followed on his tail and Thomas spent a sick moment trying to judge the distances.

‘Run!’ he yelled to his son, pointing back up the hill.

To his horror, the boy stopped and stared at the horsemen barrelling down from the trees. They had drawn swords, Thomas saw, holding them low and straight over their horses’ ears and pointing at his son. To his relief, Rowan broke into a sprint, seeming almost to fly over the rough ground. Thomas found himself breathing hard. The boy could run, at least. Rowan had grown up half-wild on the estate and spent more time in the hills than even his father.

‘Jesus keep him safe,’ Thomas muttered.

As he spoke, he slid the length of heartwood and sapwood yew out of the leather wrappings and fitted cow-horn tips to each end. The movements were second nature to him and as he worked he watched Rowan climb the steepening hill and the horsemen accelerating to full gallop.

Six riders had come out of the stand of trees. Thomas knew all the baron’s soldiers and he could probably have named each man. In silent concentration, he fitted the linen string and tested the draw, then unrolled the soft leather tube, revealing a quiver full of shafts. He had fletched each one himself in the evenings at home, cutting the feathers before gluing and tying them. The arrowheads had come from his own smithy in the village, sharp as knives and containing the iron barb that made them impossible to pull out of flesh without ripping a man open.

Below him, the riders slowed to cut across the bracken. They’d seen the lone man standing high on the hillside, but they were confident in their numbers and their armour and focused only on the climbing boy. Thomas showed his teeth, though it was not a pleasant expression. He’d shot arrows for two hours or more every Sunday after church since the age of seven. His local football team had been banned so the village boys would not neglect their bow work. Thomas’s shoulders were a mass of ridged muscle and if the baron’s men thought of him as a wool merchant, that was fine with him. He’d been an English archer first. He dropped the long strap over one shoulder, so that the quiver sat low, almost at the level of his knee. The arrows leaned out to one side so he could grasp them with just a small movement. Two colours of thread told him which type he would find. He had broadheads for deer, but half his stock was bodkin-head shafts, with square-sided points as long as his thumb. Thomas knew very well what they could do with the power of a yew bow behind them. He selected a bodkin arrow and placed it on the string.

‘Dropping ground,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Gusting wind from the east.’

The draw was so natural that he did not need to look down the shaft. Instead he watched the targets, the horsemen plunging up the hill and trying to catch his son.

The first arrow passed over Rowan’s head, snapping through the air. It struck the lead rider neatly in the chest and Thomas already had another on the string. As a much younger man, he’d stood in ranks of archers and poured thousands of shafts into a French advance until it collapsed. Today he was alone, but the body still remembered. He sent shaft after shaft with pitiless accuracy, punching them out into the air.

The horsemen behind may have thought the first man had simply fallen as his mount stumbled, Thomas didn’t know. They kept coming. Rowan finally had the sense to jink out of his aiming path and Thomas let the riders close on him. His next shot thumped high into a horse’s neck, making it rear and whinny in pain.

He could hear Rowan panting as he reached his father and stood with his hands on his knees, watching the riders coming. The young man’s eyes were wide. He had seen Thomas take deer before, but those had been measured shots in the stillness of a hunt. He had never seen his father stroke out arrow after arrow, as if the massive draw was nothing to him.

The shafts plunged into men with a sound like a thick carpet being beaten. Two of them had fallen. The riders were choking and yelling and Thomas began to breathe hard as he felt the old burn across his back. It had been a good few years since he’d last shot in anger, but the rhythms were still there to be called upon. He fitted and drew in just a few heartbeats, implacable and without mercy. Four riders were down, with two of the horses stumbling with loose reins, having lost their riders. The final two men had realized the folly of going on and they were shouting in panic to those dying on the ground.

Thomas ran forward suddenly. Twenty quick paces brought him to a range where he could not possibly miss. His grasping fingers found three arrows still in the quiver. A glance at the threads showed him two bodkins and a broadhead remaining. He shot two and held the final piercer ready on the string.

All six of the baron’s men had been unhorsed. Four of them lay still and unblinking, with stiff feathers standing out on their chests. The last two were groaning in agony and trying to rise. Thomas had shot eleven goose-feathered shafts in all. He felt a touch of pride as he looked over the crumpled mass of men and armour he’d created, even as he began to consider the consequences.

‘Look away now, Rowan,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘This is ugly work.’

He turned to make sure his son was staring out over the valley.

‘Keep your eyes on the hills, lad, all right?’

Rowan nodded, though he watched as soon as his father walked in among the men. At sixteen, Rowan was fascinated by the power he had seen. For the first time, he understood why his father made him practise until his fingers swelled purple and the muscles of his back and shoulders were like bands of hot rope. Rowan shuddered as his father drew a heavy seax knife and walked warily to the pair still alive. They had both been struck by broadhead arrows. One had pulled his helmet away to reveal a copper-coloured beard made wet with blood from his open mouth.

‘You’ll hang for this,’ the man wheezed.

Thomas glared down at him.

‘You’re on my land, Edwin Bennett. And that was my son you were chasing like a deer.’

The man tried to reply, but Thomas reached down and gripped his long, greasy hair. He ignored the mailed hand clutching at him and cut the man’s throat, pushing the body away before turning to the last.

Of all of them, the remaining horseman was the least wounded. He had one of Thomas’s arrows standing proud from his armour, but high, passing through a point that ruined his right shoulder.

‘Truce, Woodchurch! Have mercy, man. Truce!’

‘You’ll get no truce,’ Thomas said grimly as he approached.

The man stumbled to his feet and raised a knife in his left hand, slicing the air in loops as he tried to stagger clear.

Thomas stalked after him, following closely as the man fell and rose again, trying to put distance between them. Blood was running out of his armour at the waist and his face was white and desperate. Fear lent him speed and Thomas was weary. With a soft curse, he reached for the last shaft. The man saw the action and turned to run.

The shaft struck below the flailing arm, the needle bodkin punching through the segments of mail as if they were soft wool at such close range. The man collapsed and Thomas watched until he lay still.

He heard the crunching of bracken behind him as his son came up to stand at his shoulder.

‘What will you do now?’ Rowan asked.

For all his life, he’d known his father as an amiable man, a patient and honest merchant who bought and sold bales of wool in the town and had made a fortune doing it. In the brown cloth, with his left wrist bound in leather and a longbow in his hand, his father was a frightening figure. As Rowan watched, the breeze increased and Thomas closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath of it. When he opened them, the anger had almost gone.

‘I’ll cut my shafts out, for a start, if I can. And I’ll bury the bodies. You run back to the house for me and fetch Jamison and Wilbur … and Christian as well. Tell them to bring shovels.’

Thomas looked thoughtfully at the horses. He’d hit one of them and it made him wince to see the animal standing and cropping at the grass with a shaft high in its neck. The whites of its eyes were showing. The horse knew it had been hurt and the great flanks shuddered in pain, rippling along the brown flesh. Thomas shook his head. He could hide the bodies of men, but horses were a different matter entirely. For a moment, he was tempted to fetch a butcher to the spot, but it would take half a dozen boys and two or three carts to carry away the meat. The baron would be bound to hear of it eventually. Horses were valuable and Thomas doubted there was a market in France that could take six trained mounts without news getting back to unwelcome ears.

‘God, I don’t know what to do, Rowan. I can hide them in the stables, but if the baron comes searching, it’ll look like guilt. He’ll have me up before the magistrate, and that man is too close a friend of his to listen to a word I have to say.’

Thomas stood and thought for what seemed an age as the breeze grew stronger and grey clouds swelled over their heads. Rain began to fall in heavy drops and the wounded horse shuddered and trotted some way off down the hill.

‘Catch that one for me, would you, lad? I don’t want it wandering back to its stable, looking to be fed. Go gentle and you won’t spook it. We’ll put them in the old barn tonight. I know one man who might find a way out of this, if I can reach him. Derry Brewer might just keep my neck out of a noose.’

He watched relief come into Rowan’s face before the boy went jogging down the hill, calling softly to the wandering horse. It raised its head and looked at him with ears pricked, then went right back to cropping the turf, unconcerned. The boy had a way with horses that made Thomas proud.

‘How did I get myself into this?’ Thomas murmured.

He suspected Baron Strange wasn’t even a real noble, at least that was the rumour. There was something about a title fallen into disuse and a distaff branch of the family, but Thomas had never been able to pin down the details of the claim. Either way, Strange was not going to ignore the wilful murder of six of his soldiers, no matter whose land they’d been on or what mischief they’d been up to. The dispute between the adjacent landholdings had been simmering for months, ever since the baron’s men had fenced off a pasture rightfully belonging to Thomas. That was how he saw it, at least. The baron’s men told a different tale.

It had been small beer at first, with his servants and those of the baron coming to blows whenever they met in town. A month before, it had taken a bad turn when one of Thomas’s men had been blinded in one eye. Some of the man’s friends had gone out for revenge that night and burned one of the baron’s barns, as well as killing some Welsh sheep in the fields. Thomas had raised welts on their backs for that, but it had grown into undeclared war from that night. He’d told his men never to travel alone — and then he’d spotted tracks leading through his land and done exactly what he’d warned them against. He cursed himself for a fool.

Rowan came back leading two of the horses and patting their necks.

‘These are big, strong boys,’ Rowan said. ‘Could we keep one, maybe?’

‘Not a chance. I can’t be found with them. A night or two is risk enough as it is. I’ll wait for you to come back with the lads. We might get done before dark, if the rain doesn’t get much worse.’

A thought struck him and he looked up.

‘Why were you coming out anyway? You knew I’d be away till dusk.’

‘Oh! There’s a meeting in the town tonight. Something about the French. Mum sent me to let you know, so you don’t miss it. She said it was important.’

‘Christ!’ Thomas said bitterly. ‘How am I supposed to get back for that and clear this carrion at the same time? God, some days, I swear …’

‘You could hobble the horses or tie their reins together. I can fetch Jamison and Wilbur and Christian. I can bury the bodies with them as well, while you go to the meeting.’

Thomas looked at his son, seeing how much a man he’d become in the last year. He smiled despite his irritation, feeling pride enough to banish the black clouds overhead.

‘Right, you do that. If you see anyone else on horseback, run like the devil is after you, all right? If the baron’s men come looking for their lost mates, I don’t want you caught. Is that clear?’

‘’Course it is.’ Rowan still looked a little pale after what he had witnessed, but he was determined not to wilt in front of his father. He watched while Thomas gathered the leather wrap for his bow and loped off along the road to the town.

The rain fell harder, battering down as Rowan stood there on the exposed hill. The droplets seemed to roar across the open land and he looked around unhappily, realizing he was alone with half a dozen dead men. He began to gather in the horses, trying not to look at the pale, staring faces slowly sinking into the bracken as it bent under their weight.

The hall smelled of damp wool, the air thick with it. In more normal times, it was the trading place for dozens of landowners. There, they brought sacks of oily fleeces to be judged and teased apart by experts from London and Paris before prices were set each shearing season. The bleating sheep were God’s gift to farmers, the wool they produced as valuable as meat, and there was even cheese from ewe’s milk, though that last was only popular in parts of the French south. The last flurry of orders had been completed a month before, at the beginning of summer. Perhaps because they had gold in their pockets, the men who had come were in bullish mood, their anger and dismay clear. In the twilight, they had dragged wooden benches into place that usually had their purpose making enclosures for the sales. The discussion was already loud when Thomas entered quietly at the back, a fresh shirt feeling stiff and itchy over the day’s sweat.

He knew every man there, though some better than others. The one who called himself Baron Strange was addressing the rest as Thomas murmured a greeting to a neighbour and accepted a seat near the front. He felt the baron’s gaze on him as he settled himself, but Thomas merely sat and listened for a time, gauging the temper of the room. He could feel fresh sweat starting on his skin at the growing heat in the wool hall. There were as many bodies packed in there as on a market day and he shifted uncomfortably. He hated the press of men and always had. It was one of the joys of his life that he could walk free and alone in the hills of his own land.

‘If anyone has better information, let them come forward with it,’ the baron was saying.

Thomas raised his head, feeling the man’s gaze leave him. Baron Strange had oiled his hair again, he noted, making a black slick of shining curls to frame a face weathered by sun and wind. The baron looked the part, at least, whether his claim to nobility was real or not. Thomas could see the hump of muscle on the man’s neck and right shoulder shift as he gestured, the legacy of decades wielding a heavy sword. Baron Strange was not weak of body and his arrogance was clear enough. Even so, Thomas had always sensed the man was a cracked bell, ringing a note that felt false. If they lived through the crisis, he vowed to pay for a search of the archives in London. He’d heard there was talk of founding a college of arms there, with all the family records brought to one place from around the entire country. It would be costly, but Thomas wanted to know if Strange was bluffing better men or really had a claim to his title. It gave Strange influence in their gathering of expatriates and explained why the baron stood to address the group, and why they listened to him.

‘In normal times,’ Strange went on, ‘I employ a few men to pass information to me in exchange for a little coin. They’ve all fallen silent in Anjou. The last I heard was that the French king himself was riding through the Loire valley. We’ve all seen the evicted families come through Maine! Now these black-coat English clerks are in every town hereabouts, telling us to pack up and move. I tell you, we’ve been bought and sold by our own lords.’

A ripple of unrest went around the hall and the baron held up his palms to quell it.

‘I do not suggest King Henry has knowledge of this. There are men high in his court who could broker a deal, who could arrange treason without the king’s knowledge.’ The noise grew to a clamour and the baron raised his voice over them. ‘Well, what else would you call it but treason, when English landowners have their property stolen out from under them? I bought the rights to my holding in good faith, gentlemen. I pay my tithe to the king’s men each year. Half of you here were soldiers with the good sense to use your bounties to buy land and sheep. Our land, gentlemen! Will you meekly hand your deeds to some poxed French soldier? Land and property you have sweated and bled for a hundred times over?’

A roar of anger was the response and Thomas looked thoughtfully around him. Strange knew the right strings to pull, but the truth was a little more complex. It was King Henry who truly owned the land, from the smallest hamlet in England and Wales, to half of France. His earls and barons administered vast reaches, collecting tithes and taxes in return for providing the king with soldiers. The truth might sit like a stone in the throats of all the men there, but when the bluster was stripped away, they were all tenants of the king.

Thomas rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling weary. He played no part in the politics of Maine, preferring to spend his time on his holding and returning to town only for the markets and supplies. He’d heard about the clerks infesting every market town with their warnings and threats of eviction. Like the others, Thomas felt a slow-burning anger at lords who had apparently betrayed him while he worked for his family. He’d heard the rumours from Anjou weeks before, but it seemed they’d all been confirmed.

‘They could be here by Christmas, gentlemen,’ Baron Strange said as the noise began to ease. ‘If it’s true that the price of this truce was Anjou and Maine, we’ll be joining the evicted families on the road by the end of the year.’ He cracked his knuckles viciously, as if he wished for a throat to hold and crush between his hands. ‘Either we walk away from everything we have built here, or we defend it. I will tell you all, in this place, I will defend my land. I have …’

He had to stop as a bellow of agreement came from the farmers and landowners on the benches.

‘I have sixty-eight family men working my fields: old soldiers who will stand with me. I can add another two dozen horsemen and I have the coin to send for more from English Normandy. If you pool your gold with mine, it may be we can hire men-at-arms to come south and stand with us.’

That idea brought a hush to the crowd, as they considered giving up their hard-earned gold for a cause that might already be lost.

Thomas rose to his feet and Baron Strange frowned at him.

‘You’ll speak, Woodchurch? I thought you held yourself apart from the rest of us?’

‘I have a holding, baron, same as you. It’s my right to speak.’

He wondered how the baron would react when he discovered he had six fewer men-at-arms than he thought. Not for the first time, Thomas regretted his action earlier that day.

With ill grace, Strange gestured stiffly and Thomas stepped forward and turned to face them. For all his love of solitude, he had come to know the English, Welsh and Scots in that hall and more than a few called a greeting or a welcome.

‘Thank you,’ Thomas said. ‘Now then. I’ve heard more rumours in the last week than in the year before it and I need to know the solid truth of them. If the French are pushing north this year, where is our army to smack their heads and send them home? This talk of a truce is just wind. Why isn’t York here, or Somerset, or Suffolk? We have three high-ranking nobles in France who can send men into a battle line and I don’t see hide nor hair of any of them. Have we sent messengers into Normandy? Anyone?’

‘I have,’ Strange replied for them. His mouth twisted in irritation at the memory. ‘I’ve heard nothing from the Duke of York, no word at all. They’ve abandoned us to fend for ourselves.’

He would have gone on, but Thomas spoke again, his deep, slow voice rolling over the group. He’d already made his decision. It galled him to support the baron, but there was no choice, not for him. Everything he had was in his land. If he abandoned his holding, he and his family would be reduced to begging on the streets of Portsmouth or London.

‘I’ll send my girls back to England, while we take a measure of the trouble to come. I suggest you all do the same, if you have family there still. Even if you don’t, you have funds enough to put them up in inns, in Normandy or England. We can’t stay clear-headed with women to protect.’

‘You’ll join me then?’ Baron Strange asked. ‘You’ll put aside our differences and stand with me?’

‘Jesus, baron, I was going to ask you to stand with me,’ Thomas replied, a smile quirking the corners of his mouth. The men in the room laughed and the baron flushed. ‘Either way, I won’t give up my farm, I’ll tell you that much. I’ll add my gold to yours to hire soldiers, but we’ll need a veteran officer or two as well. Better still would be to get a battle-seasoned lord to lend his name to our little rebellion.’

The word stole away some of the humour in the room. Thomas looked around at them all, seeing solid farmers with rough, red hands from work.

‘That’s all it will be, if the French army comes hammering on our doors. Oh, I’ve seen Englishmen rout larger French forces. I’ve seen the backs of a few French soldiers running away from me in my time.’ He paused for a ripple of laughter to die down. ‘But we can’t hold the land with what we have. All we can do is make them pay a price for it.’

‘What?’ Baron Strange demanded incredulously. ‘You’d talk defeat before the fighting’s even begun?’

‘I talk as I see it,’ Thomas said with a shrug. ‘It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’ll still stand and send my arrows into them when they come. I’ll fight, even if I’m on my own. I don’t have any choices left but one, not the way I see it. But you know, I was an archer before I was a farmer — and an English archer at that. We don’t run just because the odds are against us.’ He paused in thought. ‘It might be that if we hold them, if we knock them back, the English lords will have to support us. I know one man who’ll tell me straight if we have a chance, if there’ll be help from the north. He has the ear of the king himself and he’ll tell us what we need to know.’

‘Who is it?’ Strange asked. He was accustomed to being the one with connections, or at least the claim of them. To hear Thomas Woodchurch talk of friends in high places was strangely unsettling to him.

‘You won’t know the name, baron, and he wouldn’t like me to use it. He and I fought side by side years ago. He’ll tell me true, for the debt he owes me.’

‘Keep your secrets then, Woodchurch. You’ll bring me news if you hear from him?’

‘I will. Give me a month at most. If I can’t reach him by then, it’s because he doesn’t want to be reached and we’re on our own.’

Baron Strange chewed at his lower lip while he listened. He didn’t like Thomas Woodchurch, not even a little. There was something in the way the man smiled whenever he heard his title that irked the baron like a cold key down his back. Yet he knew the man’s word was good.

‘I’ll send letters to those I know as well,’ the baron replied. ‘Any of you with friends in the army should do the same. We’ll come back here one month from today and we’ll know by then where we stand.’

Thomas felt a hand clap him on the shoulder and he looked round into the face of old Bernard, one of the few men there that he’d have called a friend.

‘Will you join us in a drop, lad? I’m awful dry after all the talking and it weren’t even me doing it.’

Thomas smiled wryly. He liked the old archer, though there was a good chance a few pints of ale would mean sitting through the Agincourt story once again. Thomas would have preferred to walk the eight miles to his home, but he paused before refusing. Most of the men would be wetting their throats before heading out. Thomas knew he might be asking them to fight for him before the end of the year or the following spring. It wouldn’t hurt to hear what they had to say.

‘I’ll come, Bern,’ he said.

The old man’s pleasure at his response went some way to ease the darkness plaguing Thomas’s spirits.

‘I should hope so, lad. You need to let them see you now. These boys need a leader and that Strange is not the man for it, not as I see it. A title don’t give him the right, though there’s some as think it does. No, lad. They need an archer, with a sense of the land. Share a pint or three with me and I’ll tell thee what I have in mind.’

Thomas let himself be carried along in the group heading to the inn. He sent a silent prayer that Derry Brewer could be found quickly — and that he would answer an old friend.