The Archer's Apprentice

My dear wife believes in the next life, to the comfort of her heart and mind; for me, I mean to dish out purgatory in this world, as I have no confidence that just desserts will follow in some unknown paradise or hell that is promised by blind faith to come.

I see a series of oak execution blocks set out in the road, complete with an executioner, replete with leathern helm and huge broadsword, far too cumbersome to take into modern battle, except lighter wooden copies in the plays that travelling players put on for children's amusement from village green to castle bailey up and down the land. No doubt they want to put on a show to terrify me and spread fear amongst those of the common folk who will bear witness, and pass on the detail in amplified terms around the countryside, of the terror inflicted by this motley bunch of traitors, who are fuelled only by greed like common outlaws.

Now I see a man dressed in lordly finery, of ermine fur and fine broadcloth cloak interwoven with threads of gold. He has just walked out from the shelter of the Inn's cool main hall, into the brightest glittering sunshine that the spring so far this season can boast.

No doubt this is the mysterious Count, that his temporary soldier spoke of, some friend or possible cousin of the Lord Wellock who, even with a cursory glance around the assemblage, reveals to me he is conspicuous by his absence.

Perhaps I was mistaken in my opinion of that Lord, that he is not one of the traitors but one who has been taken in, duped, and has given shelter and armed with his own spare soldiers, by way of common curtesy to an honoured and hard done by guest.

A long way behind this Count De La Warre I see six helmed Black Knights arrive quietly and ride two abreast over the bridge from the west and spread themselves out across the road and halt there.

These Black Knights are as far behind the Count they no doubt support, as I am in front of the Count. They wait like reserve cavalry in battle, for the foot soldiers to wear down the attack, and ready to charge in to save the day should they be required, or chase down those fleeing their lost cause, to be cut down like sheaves of humanity and their bones winnowed from their flesh by the heavy hooves of their black mounts.

If there is one colour that shows the spillage of blood much less readily than any other in battle, by choice it is black.

My dear Alwen, and her steward Stephen, a capable and likeable young man, his head wrapped in bandages which weep blood and clearly unaware of where he is and what is happening to him, are dragged around the far end of the Inn. No doubt they have been kept in the brew house, being the only building in the village under lock and key.

Our villagers are friends and fellow contributors to this wonderful life we are harmoniously carving out for ourselves. They are normally honest to a man or woman, but leaving many gallons of some of the finest ales ever brewed in this fair land, open to indulgence, is a temptation too far for any mortal man to endure. So the brew house has always by local custom been under lock and key, and therefore ideal as a temporary prison in desperate circumstances.

I stop walking, with my shuffling gait, and push back my cowl to reveal my reddened face, covered as it is in the ugliest of red spots, raised and angry, like the very essence of a Pestilence from Hell.

"Plague!" cry a few of the more excitable in the crowd.

There is general panic! Some break ranks and plunge for haven into the sanctuary of the Inn, others cross themselves as if this gesture had any restorative qualities in the face of plague, while one or two even drop to their knees, deep in prayer.

Before I can even move a muscle, I can see the whole thing replayed in my mind. While I was partly diverted by looking at this Count manhandling my wife by pulling her up off the ground, my peripheral vision sees the glint of flashing sunlight as the executioner's broadsword is raised and dropped. The head of poor Stephen loped off cleanly like the stalk end of a ripe pear, and rolls along the ground in front of Alwen. Her face is ashen, she has no muscle control over her jaw, which flaps open like the parody of a troubador's comic pissflap.

"Hold there!" says the Count, who recovers from the shock first, dragging Alwen to a block of wood in the street outside the inn. He flings my dear, heavily pregnant Alwen to the block, and that same hooded executioner chains her to it.

The executioner steps back, lifts his great blade about his head in readiness to strike her sweet head from her shoulders, but then staggers for a moment.

A white rose appears at the front of the executioner's throat, or at least that is what it looks like.

A white rose, with a hint of pink at the base of the petals, a pink that takes on a redder hue. A blush which gradually, fascinatingly, spreads to the tip of each rose petal. A clever trick, all who observe may think; magic, others might say, but the redness keeps on coming and now red is spraying down the executioner's chest.

A splatter at first and then another. Further rhythmic spurts and splutters turn into a stream, a torrent flowing down his chest and belly.

His arms relax and he drops the great sword behind his back, too heavy for weakening limbs and nerveless fingers to hold any longer. At the same time, his shoulders release his arms which drop down to his side. His knees buckle and his eyes, that were once wide open in surprise, relax as if he is preparing his readiness for a long, dreamless sleep.

As his knees crumple beneath him, he half turns, revealing that, protruding from the back of his neck, is a long thin rod, about 30 or more inches in length, with a glistening iron barbed point on the end.

Then it become obvious that the 'white rose' petals at his throat were in fact goose feathers, now stained bright red with the executioner's final heartbeats. He crumples in a heap on the floor without even a twitch, as the lifeless nerve endings give up the battle to maintain the executioner's life force, as a lost cause.

The Count is the first of the stunned onlookers to recover from his shock. He sees me reloading my longbow in readiness to send him next in line after his executioner in Hell.

He drops to his knees cowering behind Alwen, and holds a double-sided dagger to her throat. I have already nocked another arrow to my longbow and drawn back the string and set ready to release, but he is well hid behind the solid oak block and my beloved wife.

Strips of cloth still hang from the bow, but I had managed to remove the windings from top and bottom as I strung the bow, casting my cloak aside to reveal the two belt quivers, each containing thirty-inch-long arrows fit to penetrate breastplate armour at 50 paces, and could be fired at the rate of between six and eight per minute. I could keep up that rate for up to ten minutes with the supply about my person, plenty enough to discourage and rout this small army.

Behind me I hear many riders come thundering up the hill, though I cannot see them, and do not wish to take my eyes off my target, where the Count is holding the life of my dear wife in his hands.

I assess the newcomers could be as many as thirty riders, from the hoof steps, but who they are I know not. I am aware that they are not my men, as I can now see my guard with my periphery vision as they emerge from the tree line behind the leet, where they had moved to shortly after dawn, waiting for me to come along the road.

My archers, mostly men at arms from the Castle, and trained regularly by me, plus a few of the able bodied townsfolk. They were frustrated by being necessarily locked up behind the gates for a week and glad to join me in this action.

All my men wear protective face masks, except me, as I wanted my painted face of malted oats stuck by honey and grossly enhanced by harlots' lip paint, to have maximum impact upon my audience.

From the back of the Inn comes a group of archers, led I see by the familiar pinched features of John of Wakefield, an archer I have crossed arrow shafts with in competitions up and down the kingdom for nearly twenty years. He is one of those that wish to ferment treason!

"So, Wakefield, you have thrown your weight behind these traitors, have you?" I call.

"Aye, an' thee would too, if'n thee had sense. They're going to be the champions in this campaign, and when they win, I'll win. We, t'first of the supporters of 'King' William, will all be knights and lords and, as their Captain of the archers, I have been promised a manor of me own in t'new Kingdom."

"You are deluding yourself, John Wakefield, the old Normans hate the Saxons, but at least they have learned to live with us, while these New Normans never will."

"We Men of Shire York are as much kindred Norsemen as the Normans. And I have proved mesen, as a leader of these archers what I have gathered to the cause. Also, I were the one who told the Count where your son Robin hails from. It looks like the uppity little tyke had pissed them off and they don't like that."

"They better get used to it, Wakefield, because I am only just getting started pissing them off!" I yell from the side of my mouth while maintaining my attention on the single enemy in front of me.

I learned in my very first pitched battle, while all around me the other pressed archers feared the Knights galloping towards them.

They complained that there were too many, too strong, too fast, too anything that simply put the fear into them.

I remember calling out to my colleagues back then, "I see only one man not many, and the one living man I see is a soon-to-be-dead man. There! One released shaft and he's dead. Now I see one more man, there, he's dead, too. I see another. I can only kill one at a time, so I only see one at a time. At eight arrows a minute I will kill eight men of the enemy in as long as it takes to count them. If you each can kill eight a minute, then we can kill them all. One at a time, aye, one at a time, my friends, we can kill an army.

"There are not too many Frenchmen lined up in front of us, my friends," I used to rally my men with, "there simply are not enough Frenchmen! How many now do you see?"

And the shout went up from the English ranks, "now I see one, now I don't, now I see another one, now I don't!" as the arrows flew crisp and true.

And soon we were all singing.

"Send us more French Knights! Send us more! Can we fight you every battle? Can we? Can we? Can we fight you Frenchmen every time?"

And the French Knights did stop coming. Those that lay not in the mud and blood, and they would run away as fast as their mounts would take them.

But only Pegasus can outfly an arrow. Every battle with English archers, whether they be the French, the Burgundians, the Moors, the Neapolitans, whoever they were, they trembled just as much as we laughed at them. For the rest of that campaign, we told them, we shouted at them, that we didn't want to frighten them away, we wanted them to come.

"The sooner you charge, the sooner you drop," we cried over and over again, "and the sooner your wives grow an English crop!"

It is a while since I killed anyone, a year ago, four men here who attacked me.

I did not seek this battle, they brought me to this battle to see my wife and unborn child killed in front of my eyes. I will kill who I have to today and, if I have to, I will kill them all, and if my family is saved I will sleep easy without a blood spot on my conscience.

The Count, still with his knife at Alwen's throat, boasts. "You English archers—"

"I am no Englishman, Count, I am Welsh. And I stand before you proud to serve my family, my adopted country, and my King, while you grovel behind a scrap of English oak like a boar too full of English acorns to stand up on your own two feet!"

"Pah! You Welsh have no backbone, and your King, who stole the throne from his brother yet cannot impregnate his queen, so he has no Prince to pass on his crown to. His daughter is sterile, with no prince of Germany to show after six years abed. Henry's time on the throne is at an end. Now, it is the time of William of Normandy, the true Duke of Normandy and heir to his father Robert. The older brother of Henry should have had the crown by right when William the Rufus died, but that will be remedied when his sole and rightful heir will be crowned King of England. What do you say to that, Welshman?"

28.

Together

(Robin of Oaklea narrates)

Just before noon on a warm sunny spring afternoon, we merry men and one woman remount on fresh horses that are waiting for us on the side of the road, about ten miles from Oaklea, where we join the road between Bartown and Oaklea at a crossroad from the south. There another armed monk, among a group waiting to join us, hands a message to Canon Ranulf. He turns to me.

"Robin, a message from your mother, she fears the village of Oaklea is in the hands of marauders, her brewery draymen gone missing. She makes no mention of your mother, though, Lady Elinor."

"No matter," I say, "we must go on with all haste."

"This is a remarkably good road," comments Brother Canon Friar Ranulf as soon as we turn onto the road heading west. "It is better than any other I have seen in England, it reminds me of some of the wonderful roads I have seen leading to Rome."

"It was built by my sister, Alwen," I say proudly, not wishing to add to the detail, I am uncertain how a friar pledged to celibacy will understand the simple logic of my half sister also being my mother by marriage. It is a complication too far for some.

"Alwen is a remarkable woman, Canon Ranulf. She first had the road engineers dig up a cross section of the old road to find exactly out how it was built and made them adhere to a copy of the foundations and various layers. In fact all that summer she travelled to the site in a covered cart, inspecting every yard of road. I know, because I learned how to ride a horse at that time, taking her lunch and the figures from the Inn and the brew house, to keep everything ticking over. Until this ride, I had forgotten that ten years ago as a small boy, I rode so much."

"Now it looks like you were born to ride a horse," he smiles. It is a rare thing, a smile from Canon Ranulf, he is normally all business and has been driving us on like he owns us, with the minimum of rest since landing at London Port.

Now we are becoming quite a force on the road as more cloaked and armed monks join us at every crossroad. Before we remount, I string my bow and sling it over my back. I fit both my quivers of arrows to my belt.

Seeing me getting ready for ... well, I knew not quite what, makes Hugh do the same, although he only has a single quiver. He complains bitterly that he is a much better swordsman than a bowman, so Lady Elinor says she would like to use his bow if he was so unhappy with it.

"Have you ever used a bow before, my Lady?" Hugh asks.

She replies, "My father was a soldier, who practiced all manner of weapons, so I have had some little instruction from him and my mother in the martial arts."

The Friar Knights too, now thirteen strong, openly strap their swords to their hips, ready to draw and fight on horseback if needed.

One of the Friars, a huge red-haired man called Brother Cleric Michael, also has a fierce and ornately engraved and enamelled double headed axe, which "belonged tae ma fartha", he grins, as he slung the fearsome weapon over his back.

This Brother Cleric Michael is asked by Hugh if he was going to use his sword in whatever was coming, to which the Brother laughes, saying he had never drawn it in "God's Work, as I always have both hands full!" and thus happily gives it up in temporary charge to Hugh, who in turn passes his own bow and quiver to Lady Elinor.

"We should leave you here with a Friar for your protection, Lady Elinor," I sanction, "and send for you once we have secured the safety of your mother, and ascertained why these abductors and rescuers are gathering in the village in which I was born and raised."

"You are not leaving me out of this, Master Robin. Remember, I am a Countess and will remain so until I can arrange an annulment on grounds of non-consummation. Thus I outrank you, in fact, I outrank you all. Be certain that I will accompany you in whatever we are to face, and be extremely grateful if you all would make every effort to save my mother.

"As for my own safety, I trust that to fate. So let us ride to your village, a place I am intrigued to see, and we will have no more of this nonsense that I am a weak woman always in need of a knight to keep me away from harm's portal."

"Well, my Lady," grins Canon Ranulf, "you are presently in a party without even one single knight in it, so rest assured we will occupy ourselves completely with our mission and we will leave you to your fate ... but as you are a full and equal partner in this venture, in spite of the elevation position of your rank, we will treat your defence just as diligently as we would any one of our own, and we count Robin and Hugh among our own, do we not, Brothers?"

"Amen!" cry the other armed Friars, all with crazy grins, to which Hugh and I, with Lady Alwen following a fraction of a second later, raise clenched fists to the sky.

In a instant there are seventeen clenched fists in the air before we gallop towards whatever fate awaits us in Oaklea.

29.

Fly arrow, fly!

(Lord William Archer narrates)

"You talk of rightful Kings," I say to the Count, as he holds his bodkin to the windpipe of my Lady Alwen, "but the tradesmen and farmers know little of who is on the throne or not, only that transition from one to the other should be as smooth and unsettling as the outward tide. A King should bring stability and fairness to his court, and protection from both within and without, and in these regards I am happy that he has the present responsibility to rule. If King Henry or his daughter cannot in time bring about an heir to his reign, then let him serve the full term of his life and then let your good Duke accept the crown from him as heir, if that is the wish of them both. Let such changeover of sovereign not cause ripples that upset the King's subjects, and we will all be happy and loyal to each King in their turn."

"Ha!" comes a voice of derision from behind me, "so, Reeve Archer, you support your Monarch, though he has ravaged your own Welch country not five or six years ago? Do you not ache to avenge your countrymen by replacing him?"

I recognise the voice, Lord Gerald of Wellock. From the tone of his voice it does not sound like he is here to support a Welshman to support his King even though the King was a Norman.

"I had wondered when you would put in an appearance, Wellock, with another rag tag army at your back. Are you here to back up your treasonous brother or cousin here, or to serve your King, who you have foresworn before witnesses and God so to do?"

"Bah! Your King is nothing to me, he would have me ruined sooner than consider the wellbeing of one of his former supporters. How can we have Welchmen like you and your Saxon wife as Knights and Ladies? And yes, I know all about your whore, and how she had her child conceived out of wedlock. A child that mercifully died of shame, as she was abandoned by you her father by marriage so shortly after the conception. Even now we have Welch scum ravaging the Marches, no better are they than you, who only returned to your marital responsibilities when you had something to gain, in this case the favour of a King who is old and in desperate need of replacement."

"So where do we go from here, Wellock?" I ask, without turning my head, "as I have a bead on your accomplice, and I know you have no love of archers."