Jake sneezed hard into her hand: blood mixed with snot on her palm. At one point, the heavy rain washed him away.
‘You are dogs and demons,’ yelled the old woman pulling her left stirrup. He yelled a few other words in a harsh, raw voice, and shook his fist at Jake. Rainwater ran down the ravines on her face like a waterfall of tears.
“I don’t speak your stupid French,” she yelled at him in English. His horse fidgeted beneath him and tugged on his kidneys to stop him. The old woman pulled at his left leg.
Get off, old lady! Jake yelled.
Burnell, the tall man-at-arms, dismounted and walked toward her. With his studded leather gloves, he smashed her hard in the face, drawing blood, causing her last teeth to be ripped out and sprawled in the mud. Burnell sat on his stomach, drew a dagger, and brought it to the old woman’s throat.
“Well, old hag,” Burnell said, “tell us where they hid the food or I’ll kill you right now.”
Jake spun around when Burnell hit the woman again. He heard the pig screech of his last breath escaping as he slit her throat. Jake clenched his jaw; hated this war.
Jake sneezed over and over. He clapped his nose with one hand, but lost control of the reins as his horse snorted and kicked in annoyance, and another sneeze erupted from his aching nostrils. Damn you, old brat, Jake thought, I know you’re hungry too; be patient. He hadn’t given the horse a name; I hadn’t thought it was worth it since they died so quickly from lack of fodder.
Jake managed to control his sneezing. The other men in Sir Robert’s small foraging party hunted through houses, sheds, and barns. Sir Robert had taken what was left of his small retinue, three men-at-arms and six archers, including Jake, and left the main army two days ago under cover of night. He had said that the hilltop villages might have food and perhaps some manor house that offered the possibility of looting. But every village they found had been like this one: empty of people and devoid of provisions. The old woman who now lay dead in the mud was the only living person they had found so far.
Jake! Go down. We have work to do, ‘Burnell said.
As he dismounted, thunder echoed like a hellish cannon, and lightning flashed on a brilliant blade across the narrow skies between the forested hills. Both Burnell and Jake were surprised. Burnell cursed. He and Jake grabbed the halters of their horses and ran with them to the nearest stable. The rain was pounding and the road quickly turned into a muddy torrent. The others also found refuge there. They also said little to each other, each man lost in his own thoughts.
When the rain subsided to a lesser torrent, Sir Robert rose from a bundle of soaked straw and pointed with a pole-ax toward the slope. I think the villagers are up there in that manor house on the hill. Their lord is undoubtedly protecting them and their supplies.
The men looked up the hillside, where the dark walls and great drum tower of a fortified manor house could be glimpsed out of the thick forest lit by lightning through the gloom of the storm.
“It looks more like a castle to me than a house,” said Thomas Wheeler, one of the archers.
It’s not as great as it sounds. If there are more than one or two combatants in the residence, I would be very surprised. The nobility around here are poor at best. Come on, stragglers, get to your horses. Tonight we will eat around the fire of the lord of the mansion.
The small group of English soldiers made their way up the track that wound around the wooded slope, their stomachs dreaming of food. Jake’s thoughts were blunted with hunger, cold, and fatigue, but inside him an unpleasant emotion gnawed at his heart: a blaze of resentment against his comrades. Rape and robbery were not what he expected from war, but day after day he had seen little else. There had been no real fights to speak of, none of the excitement and heroism he had dreamed of when he signed his contract with Sir Robert’s company in May. Back then life in the army had been a way of escaping the disappointments of life at home, but now those troubles were insignificant compared to the dance of evil that had taken hold of him, the English and French armies, and the thousands of inhabitants of France who had taken possession of it. He had the misfortune to live in his way.
The band stopped at a signal from Sir Robert. They were halfway up the slope when Sir Robert, at the head of the column, saw a widening in the path where the path came to a bridge over a steep ravine that cut the slope like a deep and terminal wound. Sir Robert had learned the hard way to be cautious and considered this to be a good place for a French ambush. No words were spoken, but with a series of hand gestures, the six archers quickly dismounted and strung their bows. Two of the men-at-arms, Clifford and Burnell, raised their great shields and advanced with the archers hunched behind them, looking at the forest on either side for any movement. Sir Robert and his lieutenant Richard waited with the horses and watched the others advance. Stay out of harm’s way, Jake thought, as he watched Sir Robert move toward the rear of the group.
Nothing was moving on this side of the thickly vegetated ravine, but they could see a strange sight on the other side. Less than twenty paces away, across the narrow wooden bridge, was a colorful pavilion of wide stripes of alternating blue and red silk, wet from the rain, but still good-looking. Under the canopy at the entrance of the pavilion sat a lady, also dressed in silks, with a conical headdress and a veil of fine gauze that covered her dark hair that fell from her neck to her shoulders. She was preoccupied with some kind of detail work on her hands, maybe embroidery.
But in front of her, blocking the far exit from the bridge, and clad in opaque black plate armor, stood a tall man-at-arms, full jousting helmet. He froze with his arms crossed in front of him. Behind him was a tethered warhorse, also black, and a rack of weapons: spears, swords, polearms, maces, and axes. Neither the knight nor the lady gave any indication of having seen the English soldiers.
