Harlequin. Bernard Cornwell

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      ‘He only wants the best for you,’ John said. ‘Can’t blame a man for that.’

      Thomas did blame his father. He had always blamed his father. He had fought his father for years, and nothing so raised the anger between them as Thomas’s obsession with bows. His mother’s father had been a bowyer in the Weald, and Thomas had lived with his grandfather until he was nearly ten. Then his father had brought him to Hookton, where he had met Sir Giles Marriott’s huntsman, another man skilled in archery, and the huntsman had become his new tutor. Thomas had made his first bow at eleven, but when his father found the elmwood weapon he had broken it across his knee and used the remnants to thrash his son. ‘You are not a common man,’ his father had shouted, beating the splintered staves on Thomas’s back and head and legs, but neither the words nor the thrashing did any good. And as Thomas’s father was usually preoccupied with other things, Thomas had plenty of time to pursue his obsession.

      By fifteen he was as good a bowyer as his grandfather, knowing instinctively how to shape a stave of yew so that the inner belly came from the dense heartwood while the front was made of the springier sapwood, and when the bow was bent the heartwood was always trying to return to the straight and the sapwood was the muscle that made it possible. To Thomas’s quick mind there was something elegant, simple and beautiful about a good bow. Smooth and strong, a good bow was like a girl’s flat belly, and that night, keeping the Easter vigil in Hookton church, Thomas was reminded of Jane, who served in the village’s small alehouse.

      John, Edward and the other two men had been speaking of village things: the price of lambs at Dorchester fair, the old fox up on Lipp Hill that had taken a whole flock of geese in one night and the angel who had been seen over the rooftops at Lyme.

      ‘I reckon they’s been drinking too much,’ Edward said.

      ‘I sees angels when I drink,’ John said.

      ‘That be Jane,’ Edward said. ‘Looks like an angel, she does.’

      ‘Don’t behave like one,’ John said. ‘Lass is pregnant,’ and all four men looked at Thomas, who stared innocently up at the treasure hanging from the rafters. In truth Thomas was frightened that the child was indeed his and terrified of what his father would say when he found out, but he pretended ignorance of Jane’s pregnancy that night. He just looked at the treasure that was half obscured by a fishing net hung up to dry, while the four older men gradually fell asleep. A cold draught flickered the twin candle flames. A dog howled somewhere in the village, and always, never ending, Thomas could hear the sea’s heartbeat as the waves thumped on the shingle then scraped back, paused and thumped again. He listened to the four men snoring and he prayed that his father would never find out about Jane, though that was unlikely for she was pressing Thomas to marry her and he did not know what to do. Maybe, he thought, he should just run away, take Jane and his bow and run, but he felt no certainty and so he just gazed at the relic in the church roof and prayed to its saint for help.

      The treasure was a lance. It was a huge thing, with a shaft as thick as a man’s forearm and twice the length of a man’s height and probably made of ash though it was so old no one could really say, and age had bent the blackened shaft out of true, though not by much, and its tip was not an iron or steel blade, but a wedge of tarnished silver which tapered to a bodkin’s point. The shaft did not swell to protect the handgrip, but was smooth like a spear or a goad; indeed the relic looked very like an oversized ox-goad, but no farmer would ever tip an ox-goad with silver. This was a weapon, a lance.

      But it was not any old lance. This was the very lance which St George had used to kill the dragon. It was England’s lance, for St George was England’s saint and that made it a very great treasure, even if it did hang in Hookton’s spidery church roof. There were plenty of folk who said it could not have been St George’s lance, but Thomas believed it was and he liked to imagine the dust churned by the hooves of St George’s horse, and the dragon’s breath streaming in hellish flame as the horse reared and the saint drew back the lance. The sunlight, bright as an angel’s wing, would have been flaring about St George’s helmet, and Thomas imagined the dragon’s roar, the thrash of its scale-hooked tail, the horse screaming in terror, and he saw the saint stand in his stirrups before plunging the lance’s silver tip down through the monster’s armoured hide. Straight to the heart the lance went, and the dragon’s squeals would have rung to heaven as it writhed and bled and died. Then the dust would have settled and the dragon’s blood would have crusted on the desert sand, and St George must have hauled the lance free and somehow it ended up in Father Ralph’s possession. But how? The priest would not say. But there it hung, a great dark lance, heavy enough to shatter a dragon’s scales.

      So that night Thomas prayed to St George while Jane, the black-haired beauty whose belly was just rounding with her unborn child, slept in the taproom of the alehouse, and Father Ralph cried aloud in his nightmare for fear of the demons that circled in the dark, and the vixens screamed on the hill as the endless waves clawed and sucked at the shingle on the Hook. It was the night before Easter.

      Thomas woke to the sound of the village cockerels and saw that the expensive candles had burned down almost to their pewter holders. A grey light filled the window above the white-fronted altar. One day, Father Ralph had promised the village, that window would be a blaze of coloured glass showing St George skewering the dragon with the silver-headed lance, but for now the stone frame was filled with horn panes that turned the air within the church as yellow as urine.

      Thomas stood, needing to piss, and the first awful screams sounded from the village.

      For Easter had come, Christ was risen and the French were ashore.

      The raiders came from Normandy in four boats that had sailed the night’s west wind. Their leader, Sir Guillaume d’Evecque, the Sieur d’Evecque, was a seasoned warrior who had fought the English in Gascony and Flanders, and had twice led raids on England’s southern coast. Both times he had brought his boats safe home with cargoes of wool, silver, livestock and women. He lived in a fine stone house on Caen’s Île St Jean, where he was known as the knight of the sea and of the land. He was thirty years old, broad in the chest, wind-burned and fair-haired, a cheerful, unreflective man who made his living by piracy at sea and knight-service on shore, and now he had come to Hookton.

      It was an insignificant place, hardly likely to yield any great reward, but Sir Guillaume had been hired for the task and if he failed at Hookton, if he did not snatch so much as one single poor coin from a villager, he would still make his profit for he had been promised one thousand livres for this expedition. The contract was signed and sealed, and it promised Sir Guillaume the one thousand livres together with any other plunder he could find in Hookton. One hundred livres had already been paid and the rest was in the keeping of Brother Martin in Caen’s Abbaye aux Hommes, and all Sir Guillaume had to do to earn the remaining nine hundred livres was bring his boats to Hookton, take what he wanted, but leave the church’s contents to the man who had offered him such a generous contract. That man now stood beside Sir Guillaume in the leading boat.

      He was a young man, not yet thirty, tall and black-haired, who spoke rarely and smiled less. He wore an expensive coat of mail that fell to his knees and over it a surcoat of deep black linen that bore no badge, though Sir Guillaume guessed the man was nobly born for he had the arrogance of rank and the confidence of privilege. He was certainly not a Norman noble, for Sir Guillaume knew all those men, and Sir Guillaume doubted the young man came from nearby Alençon or Maine, for he had ridden with those forces often enough, but the sallow cast of the stranger’s skin suggested he came from one of the Mediterranean provinces, from Languedoc perhaps, or Dauphine, and they were all mad down there. Mad as dogs. Sir Guillaume did not even know the man’s name.

      ‘Some men call me the Harlequin,’ the stranger had answered when Sir Guillaume had asked.

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