Harlequin. Bernard Cornwell

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       Chapter 2

      Thomas crouched beside the river. He had broken through a stand of alders to reach the bank where he now pulled off his boots and hose. Best to go barelegged, he reckoned, so the boots did not get stuck in the river mud. It was going to be cold, freezing cold, but he could not remember a time when he had been happier. He liked this life, and his memories of Hookton, Oxford and his father had almost faded.

      ‘Take your boots off,’ he told the twenty archers who would accompany him, ‘and hang your arrow bags round your necks.’

      ‘Why?’ someone challenged him from the dark.

      ‘So it bloody throttles you,’ Thomas growled.

      ‘So your arrows don’t get wet,’ another man explained helpfully.

      Thomas tied his own bag round his neck. Archers did not carry the quivers that hunters used, for quivers were open at the top and their arrows could fall out when a man ran or stumbled or clambered through a hedge. Arrows in quivers got wet when it rained, and wet feathers made arrows fly crooked, so real archers used linen bags that were water-proofed with wax and sealed by laces. The bags were bolstered by withy frames that spread the linen so the feathers were not crushed.

      Will Skeat edged down the bank where a dozen men were stacking the hurdles. He shivered in the cold wind that came from the water. The sky to the east was still dark, but some light came from the watch fires that burned within La Roche-Derrien.

      ‘They’re nice and quiet in there,’ Skeat said, nodding towards the town.

      ‘Pray they’re sleeping,’ Thomas said.

      ‘In beds too. I’ve forgotten what a bed’s like,’ Skeat said, then edged aside to let another man through to the riverbank. Thomas was surprised to see it was Sir Simon Jekyll, who had been so scornful of him in the Earl’s tent. ‘Sir Simon,’ Will Skeat said, barely bothering to disguise his own scorn, ‘wants a word with thee.’

      Sir Simon wrinkled his nose at the stench of the river mud. Much of it, he supposed, was the town’s sewage and he was glad he was not wading barelegged through the muck.

      ‘You are confident of passing the stakes?’ he asked Thomas.

      ‘I wouldn’t be going otherwise,’ Thomas said, not bothering to sound respectful.

      Thomas’s tone made Sir Simon bridle, but he controlled his temper. ‘The Earl,’ he said distantly, ‘has given me the honour of leading the attack on the walls.’ He stopped abruptly and Thomas waited, expecting more, but Sir Simon merely looked at him with an irritated face.

      ‘So Thomas takes the walls,’ Skeat finally spoke, ‘to make it safe for your ladders?’

      ‘What I do not want,’ Sir Simon ignored Skeat and spoke to Thomas, ‘is for you to take your men ahead of mine into the town itself. We see armed men, we’re likely to kill them, you understand?’

      Thomas almost spat in derision. His men would be armed with bows and no enemy carried a long-stave bow like the English so there was hardly any chance of being mistaken for the town’s defenders, but he held his tongue. He just nodded.

      ‘You and your archers can join our attack,’ Sir Simon went on, ‘but you will be under my command.’

      Thomas nodded again and Sir Simon, irritated by the implied insolence, turned on his heel and walked away.

      ‘Goddamn bastard,’ Thomas said.

      ‘He just wants to get his nose into the trough ahead of the rest of us,’ Skeat said.

      ‘You’re letting the bastard use our ladders?’ Thomas asked.

      ‘If he wants to be first up, let him. Ladders are green wood, Tom, and if they break I’d rather it was him tumbling than me. Besides, I reckon we’ll be better off following you through the river, but I ain’t telling Sir Simon that.’ Skeat grinned, then swore as a crash sounded from the darkness south of the river. ‘Those bloody white rats,’ Skeat said, and vanished into the shadows.

      The white rats were the Bretons loyal to Duke John, men who wore his badge of a white ermine, and some sixty Breton crossbowmen had been attached to Skeat’s soldiers, their job to rattle the walls with their bolts as the ladders were placed against the ramparts. It was those men who had startled the night with their noise and now the noise grew even louder. Some fool had tripped in the dark and thumped a crossbowman with a pavise, the huge shield behind which the crossbows were laboriously reloaded, and the crossbowman struck back, and suddenly the white rats were having a brawl in the dark. The defenders, naturally, heard them and started to hurl burning bales of straw over the ramparts and then a church bell began to toll, then another, and all this long before Thomas had even started across the mud.

      Sir Simon Jekyll, alarmed by the bells and the burning straw, shouted that the attack must go in now. ‘Carry the ladders forward!’ he bellowed. Defenders were running onto La Roche-Derrien’s walls and the first crossbow bolts were spitting off the ramparts that were lit bright by the burning bales.

      ‘Hold those goddamn ladders!’ Will Skeat snarled at his men, then looked at Thomas. ‘What do you reckon?’

      ‘I think the bastards are distracted,’ Thomas said.

      ‘So you’ll go?’

      ‘Got nothing better to do, Will.’