The black prince, p.17
The Black Prince, page 17
It was mid-morning now and the sun and its brute châleur had transformed the land. It was a forbidding place, really: brassy and dusty, the rocks like curls of old leather, the greenery a less lush, more pinched dark-verdance than was found in England, intermittent amongst the white and yellow dirt. Cicadas sawed the air raspingly in every direction.
They passed down the main street of the little village, dragging the corpse behind. No longer black, now a freakish white spectre. The dead boar looked as though it had been dusted with chalk. Several villagers stared sourly at the Englishmen, but Ned’s gaze was up, at the battlements, and his colours flying. Mind you, though he was looking upward, he did not miss the oldest of the villagers spitting into the road behind his horse. Ned stopped, stood up in his stirrups and turned, but the men were already scampering away with the graceless lope of the old in a hurry. The one who had spat, he saw, was a lean old fellow with a bald red head. He vanished round the corner. If he hadn’t had the boar tied to his saddle, Ned might have pursued – finish the hunt, he thought, with a flush of excitement, with a real quarry this time. But if he stopped to untie the dead weight, and then remount, he would never catch the man. He would, he thought, recognise the rooster-hue of his bald head, though he’d only seen it from behind, when he met with it again.
A lizard pulsed across the bright face of a nearby wall: fluid bursts of speed intermitted with cautious pauses.
Gone, into a crack.
—Highness? Sir Hugh asked.
—In, Edward nodded up the path to the castle gate. And so they dragged their prize in, and servants ran over with buckets in which they washed their heads of the dust, and the castle butchers, sour-faced Frenchmen, dragged the carcass to the kitchens, and Ned drank a draught of water to take the dust from his gullet, and then a goblet of wine. This latter was brought to him by Denis de Morbecque, his chamberlain in this small citadel.
—What more do the dogs want? he wanted to know, handing the empty cup and striding away. Little ghosts of white dust struggled from his footsteps. Denis followed.
—Highness?
—They are unburdened by excessive taxes. Our courts of law deal justly with them. One master surely is as good as another—
Up the stone stairs, three at a time. Into his chamber, pulling off the dusty clothes. Denis stood, his head deferentially angled. Edward was pulling on clean, or at least undusty, clothes.
Newsreel (14)
on on on account on on account on account of the lack of productive land around the city, it being mostly marsh. Yet yet yet the king holds that Calais remains a cannon aimed at the heart of France and must be maintained, such that ships travel from the coastlines of Kent and Sussex and over to Calais bringing all the necessaries: 350 ships crewed by nearly 12,000 men. The cost the cost the cost of this constant traffic is in excess of £14,000 per annum, and almost all must be met from the English exchequer. More than eight of every ten Calaismen belong to the garrison and they must be fed.
Mid the war’s great coise
Stands the great red croise
That shows England’s the boise
fed
REVOLUTION IN PARIS
Citadels of Villepreux and Trappes occupied by English
Nuns of Poissy, Longchamp and Melun abandon their buildings
fed
between 40,000 and 50,000 moutons had been disbursed on the Dauphin’s personal instructions
Camera Eye
He is hound. His master is the Lord, Auberie of Montdidier, though he does not know him by this name scent of leader and feeds him lifemorsels from his own hand he follows his master on the hunt, sniffing in at the slots the deer’s sharp hoofs have left as traces in the ground; and growling at the fumes of the excremental pellets, and running, and shouting loud with dogshout and loud again and waiting, where his master is, the Lord, Auberie of Montdidier lays a hand against the smooth pelt of his neck.
The Lord is on the back of a greathound, bigger than true hounds and much dumber, but not prey and therefore hounds. He is with another lord, also on a greathound’s back the two human men together, and they growl and whimper at one another after their fashion. They are friends, from the same pack. He is hound, and can smell the deer reeking off all the trees brushed again. He runs ahead shouting. He runs ahead, and hears his name called back.
He doubles back
His master is the Lord, Auberie of Montdidier, but the other human is behind him, and bites him with his bitingsword, from behind bites at his neck. The other human, who smells of oldsweat and the decay of his stool, still inside him, makes the little mouth at his belt swallow the whole sword and gets off the greathound.
He is stripping the pelt off His master is the Lord, Auberie of Montdidier, and
in fury at his master being killed, and he runs at the other human shouting, shouting, shouting, and the human stands, unafraid which is a fearful thing to see and draws a stick and beats hound with it. The pain bites in at his back and bites all about and he whimpers and puts his tail down and shrinks away. When the other man has finished his master is naked, and the other man has taken his pelt and stuffed in one of the mouths at his saddle, and lifted himself high off the ground on the spine of the greathound. He calls to the other hounds, and they cluster around him, and do what he does, of course, and the pain of his beating still bites him, so he slinks after the one human and back to the big house.
Here he skulks. He is kicked out of the foodcave, though there is plenty of food. He sleeps outside where it is cold. Many humans come and go. New humans. He snatches a scrap and when the female human shouts at him he runs off. He dreams of his master the Lord, Auberie of Montdidier, and the dream saddens him.
One day he is called out and must trot alongside the greathound of a new human, all along a long road. He trots up the road, with his tongue hanging out. This new human acts like the Big Dog, and the hound follows him as such, although he knows the Big Dog is still his master the Lord, Auberie of Montdidier. They sleep when the sky sleeps, and run along the road together, these three, when the sky wakes. They come to Paris, although the hound does not know this is its name the biggest house he has ever seen, with the most rooms, and many many humans houndsmell and rich odours and intricate patterns of fantastical scent.
here the human who pretended to be Big Dog gives him over to another, who spends a long time patting him and pulling wide his jaws to look at him. The men whimper and growl at one another, and then the first man goes away and the new man takes him. He is led into a vast room, clogged with grey and blue clothhangings and many men standing in their bluegrey greyblue clothes, but complexly woven of a hundred scents, including some scents the hound knows knows in the centre the Man Big Dog of Men sits in his hard chair, with his grey crown and bluegrey clothing, and hound knows him, and
Kneeling before is the other human, who used his hard sword to bite at his master the Lord, Auberie of Montdidier. Hound knows him. Hound runs, and leaps, and bites the other human, who rolls over yelping and shows himself to be no Big Dog at all by rolling and whimpering. Men are barking and shouting all around, and the Man Big Dog of Men is standing and pointing, and some have seized the other human, who used his hard sword to bite at his master the Lord, Auberie of Montdidier, and have pulled him away.
the Man Big Dog of Men slaps and strokes and tickles hound. He is good hound. He is good hound. Later they feed him fresh meat, and he drinks much water from the trough.
BLACK GEORGE
So it was peace, and Black George rode the unsteady sea back to England, and you’ll let me off at fucking Dover captain my captain I’ll walk to London if I have to, I thank you, no need to sail me all round the Kent coast and in at the Estuary in this shipwreck waiting to happen thank you very much. Glad to have feet on ground again, and a mule loaded with French wealth. Treaty of Brétigny signed and sealed and King Edward and French John brothers again, and the Frenchers have already paid hundreds of thousands of golden pounds of ransom, and now the news is they’ve fallen behind paying the new instalment of hundreds of thousands, the bâtards. And King Edward has thrown the whole mass of coins at these gigantic building projects. A new Castle at Windsor. A Fortress in the Thames Estuary. A Silver Ladder to the Moon for all Black George knew. He cared not at all. He had his haul, and some of it he deposited with a man called Gareth, notionally a trader in fine cloth but actually a kind of unofficial banker for the more ordinary sort of man. Some of it George kept to himself, to have ready, and he spent a chunk of that buying a house near Cripplegate, and putting a wife inside it – his actual wife, his own actual wife, of good family and good looks – and making sure she had the finest dresses plundered French money could buy. Six happy months. Well, two happy months, then four unhappy ones when he became certain his wife was cheating on him with a lithe young apprentice boy who would walk past their house every day on his way to the glovers’ shop and leer in at their windows. She denied it of course, and the one time George discovered the lad inside the house she swore she was only giving him a drink of water on a hot day. But it chewed his guts, it really did. He knew he wasn’t the handsomest dog in the kennel: old, his skin scraggy, scarred from years in the wars, his manners rough. But he was paying for everything, wasn’t he? His wife, Kate, lived in a fine house and her two older sisters lived with her for company, both widows from the plague, both too old for childbearing and neither wealthy – but happy to live on his charity whilst criticising him for pissing in the corner, or spitting on the table. His money. They all spent it like it was nothing. Like it was nothing.
Anyway it was all one, in the end. The plague was back in town in full force, and Kate fell sick one morning, and by the evening was clearly set to die. In the end she lasted a full week, and he nursed her, and tears fell down his scarred old face, for he loved her after all. Her two sisters – both almost two decades older than she, and in truth only half-sisters, stayed away. He didn’t have to ask why they did so. He’d seen the plague up close the first time it had been doing the rounds, when he’d been in France-land, and so he had a superstitious terror of proximity to the victims. But he couldn’t leave her. He loved her, and prayed loudly, and embraced her, and would have fucked her, tenderly – as tenderly as he was capable – if she hadn’t pushed him back with trembling arms. She didn’t want him to get the death, too, she whispered. He loved her, she was beautiful, or she had been beautiful and was no longer, but he still loved her. Towards the end it got bad: her fingers got black and her neck swelled so she could hardly swallow, and then something inside her was overwhelmed by the sickness and she vomited painfully and bloody, and shat herself, and wept and moaned with the pain. He tried her on water, and tried her on expensive wine, but she could barely swallow either. During the last day and night she begged him to make it stop, and he wept to think that he knew two dozen ways to kill a person but all of them would leave evidence of the act behind and that would surely hang him. He wept that he could not abate her suffering. He thought, finally, of a pillow, recalling that one of the Roman Emperors had been slain by one. But George and his wife slept with bolsters of wool and he thought these not soft enough to go in her mouth and stop her breathing. Then she vomited more blood, and then she cried aloud very pitiably for a full hour in terrible pain, whilst George chewed his own knuckles and wept, and then she stopped breathing.
He expected to develop the plague himself, but he did not. A boy wanted two full shillings – twenty-four whole pennies! – for cleaning and washing the house, and his neighbours agreed it was a scandal, people would take tuppence for such a job not five years before and be glad to have it, but nobody offered to do the work for any less, and so George paid. He paid to have her wrapped in a brand new sheet and buried in the Cripplegate Church and he paid for all the necessary rituals. His sisters-in-law came back then, and wept, and begged him to allow them to carry on living in the house, but he told them both he was selling the house and they would have to shift for themselves, and they wept louder.
He went to confession, and told the priest he had thought of murdering his own wife, in that last day, had even started to plan how he might do it. The priest told him this was a grave sin, and laid a heavy penance upon him, but also said that God knew the love he had in his heart for his wife, and God judged on the strength of that. So when he came out of church, George felt a little better about things.
One of the clerics at the Cripplegate church was prepared to act as mediator for the house sale – he often performed the act, he said, for people who did not know the town well enough to deal direct with purchasers. A lean, tall junior priest with a scar down his cheek like he had once cried a single tear of molten lead. The man’s fee was small. George bought him a drink in a tavern, and asked after the scar on his face. Before coming here, the cleric said, he had been on the staff of a Great Company in the Limousin, in France. The administration and much of the organisation of these Companies was done by clerics, he said, and sometimes such men got mixed up in the fighting. George didn’t press him on this latter detail. The captains-general, and constables, and marshals, and sub-marshals and corporals were all brave men, but the specifics of money accounts, supplies, ransoms, selling on prisoners and so on was not their strong point. George asked: whose Company? and the cleric said John Hawkwood. I know him, said George. I fought with him at Calais. A good man. A good fighting man, the cleric agreed, or perhaps, corrected.
How might a man such as I, decades in France, experienced in war, fought at Cressy and Calais and a hundred other battles – how might such a man take service in Hawkwood’s company?
The cleric sucked his lips against his gums. The scar writhed on his cheek. You served with the King? With the Prince of Wales? Understand, these new Companies are not encompassed by the King. They are, rather—
I know all about the Companies, said George sharply. But how may I join?
What is your battle expertise?
I organised sieges, the smaller towns and citadels. I’m good at that. But I’ll fight any old how. I can fire a bow. I’m happier with a sword in my hand than I am with … but here, at a loss for a comparator, he stopped.
And it is that you speak French?
I do.
Italian?
Why would I need Italian in France?
Yes or no, the cleric pressed, impatiently.
It’s like unto Spanish I think, and that I can speak a little.
I will write a letter, said the cleric, for three pounds, and you will take it to a man in Southampton. You’ll buy your own kit and weaponry of course. You’ll organise your own travel and feed yourself until you join the Company, of course.
Good, said George. Good.
The following day he approached his sisters-in-law in more emollient mood, and promised them thirty pounds between them, half the sum he expected from the sale of the house. They thanked him, but soon began weeping again. Why must he sell the house? Why couldn’t he stay, and they keep house for him. He rebuked them, told them to be grateful for the large sum he had promised them – a fortune, really – but then he caught the image of his wife’s face in one of the sister’s imploring eyes, and couldn’t be angry any more.
I’m going to fight in France, he told them.
There is no more war in France, one of the sisters – Anna – said. In his last sermon Father Balliol said the war is over and we must give thanks to the King and to God that the scourge of war has been lifted from our fellow Christians.
War is never over, said Black George.
You will not be the man to call our priest a liar, said Anna, her temper rising. Joan, the other sister, tried to hush her, for she could see her fifteen pounds evaporating like a puddle in the sun of George’s anger. But Anna wouldn’t be shushed. Father Balliol said it in church. There is no more war.
There’s no war in England, George said, and you two crones should be grateful of that fact, for you would last no time in France, no time at all. But there is still war in France, and there a great company of soldiers is fighting under Sir John Hawkwood, and I am a soldier and will go.
Stay in England where it is peaceful, urged Joan. Why risk your life?
Stay and do what? I am a soldier. When Anna rolled her eyes at this, he roared at them both: what would you have me do? God made me a soldier! I must go where there is work for soldiers!
God made you a man, was Anna’s retort. The devil made you a soldier.
At this George walked away, for he could feel a killing rage come up at her words, and he didn’t want his wife’s sisters’ blood on his conscience. Instead he spent the day in a tavern and drank down a vast sum.
In the event he did not sell the house, for the cleric fellow came back with an offer from a silversmith of only forty-four pounds, forty in coin and the rest in comestibles, plus two chairs for which George had no use. Forty-pound, he complained? I bought it not one year ago for sixty!
Back then London was full of soldiers newly returned from France, and every one had a sack of booty, said the cleric. Naturally prices went up. But now, with the plague back, and people leaving the city, few are looking to buy a house, and prices have come down. You should be happy to get so generous an offer. Happy to get any kind of offer at all.
