The King’s Arrow Read online

  “Please give my greetings to your sister,” Simon managed to say.

  Oswulf turned away, too troubled to speak.

  Just before Simon reached home, there was a slight rise in the road, the point where, it was said, a giant had been buried by the legendary hero Tom of Sway. Some said the giant merely enjoyed a slumber long and deep and would awaken, cheerful but famished after his long nap.

  From Giant’s Crest, Simon could see his home. Aldham Manor, the house where he and his mother lived, had been built many years ago by Simon’s grandfather, and it had replaced a centuries-old dwelling. The manor’s lime-washed walls were beautiful in the afternoon sunlight.

  It was unmistakably simply what it was: a thriving but unadorned location surrounded by farm and pasture. It was unpretentious, practical, and all the more lovely, in Simon’s eyes, for all that. Far beyond the rambling manor house, on a hill, was the much newer tower built by Simon’s father.

  The structure was a keep of flint and mortar, a rugged redoubt made to withstand siege. Simon admired the tower, and enjoyed the fresh smell of it, and the practical way the family and servants could pull up the drawbridge and be safe from attack. No enemy had ever clattered up the road, and his mother had never walked the distance up the hill to visit the keep, not in ten years.

  But she made sure, when the account scrolls were studied at the end of every harvest, that silver was set aside for the well rope and new shutter latches, where they were needed, with enough to provide crossbow bolts and slings. When Simon asked her why she bothered to maintain Foldre Castle, she would say that bloody-taloned war could swoop from any sky.

  This was the difficulty, Simon knew, with his mother. She loved laughter, shared the richly flavored Aldham manor ale with the poor, and clapped her hands in time to the minstrel’s capers, but she required more. The daughter of a warrior of noble name, the widow of one of the Conqueror’s favorites, she hungered for a respected station in a kingdom that valued English ladies but little.

  “Do you think Walter Tirel of Poix will turn out to be any better than the others?” Simon was asking now.

  “I’ve heard that Walter Tirel is a man with a sharp sword, my lord,” said Certig. “But a man of grace, I’ve been told.”

  “Who says this?”

  “A plate servant can tell you a man’s character better than his priest, and such word travels across the Channel. We don’t see a man of Walter’s Tirel’s renown,” added Certig, “in our woodland very often.”

  Walter Tirel. The name had a fine sound to it, Simon thought—a definite music.

  An oxcart teetered and swayed its course up the deeply rutted way, conveying a lopsided load of milled oats, piled so high the load was sure to tumble.

  Plegmund had worked the land of Simon’s ancestors, planting grain and breeding goats. He was a peasant of substance, one of Simon’s most prosperous tenants, and he had recently purchased an iron candle-prick—an iron bullock with a spike on its head for a candle—a fine object crafted in Portsmouth and admired by his neighbors. Simon had paid a visit, to admire the handiwork.

  “My lord Simon,” said Plegmund, “there’s no need to worry about old Plegmund. My team will make it over the ridge easy as a song.” He put a hand to his mouth in a caricature of conspiracy. “We must be quick and quiet. I hear the king’s guard are about, making sure all is calm.”

  Calm was meant ironically. The king’s men had a notorious intolerance for boredom, and London and her environs had been set alight in recent years and nearly destroyed by armed men with time on their hands.

  “I do believe, Plegmund,” said Simon, “that you will need our help.”

  The ancient flax-cloth sacks were packed to the point of bursting through their oft-mended seams. Blackfire tossed his head at the smell of so much fresh horse feed seeping through the cloth.

  The recent arrival of the royal court—with its dozens of cupbearers, clerks, and armorers—drove up prices and made such grain all the more scarce. Plegmund had made an enormous purchase and would no doubt resell the oats to the king’s stables, with Simon and his mother keeping a good share of the profits.

  “I might need, perhaps, a small amount of help, my lord,” said Plegmund. “Just this once.”

  The cart’s wheels had never been perfectly round, having been made from the trunk of a great oak cut long ago into slices. Wear had shaped them into obstinate oblongs, and Simon marveled that the team of oxen could travel from ford to farm with such a wobbling, unsteady wagon. It was true that Plegmund’s oxen were the stuff of myth—massive brutes, with dewlaps that hung nearly to the road.

  Simon shoved so hard the yoke shifted forward on the oxen, and the big animals took a few uncharacteristic light steps, nearly trotting, relieved at the quickening of their load. Nonetheless, the rise was too steep for the ambitious burden, and the cart groaned to a stubborn halt.

  They heaved with all their strength against the cart.

  The greeting of a young woman made them interrupt their efforts.

  5

  “I wouldn’t carry such a load for you, Simon,” said the young woman as she hurried up the road.

  “Not for Simon,” said Plegmund, “but maybe for some other lucky man under Heaven.”

  “Oswulf said you stopped by,” said Gilda, “but would not linger to talk with me.”

  “What else did he tell you?” asked Simon.

  “My brother was in a strange temper.” She took Simon by the hand and led him to the tall hedge beside the road.

  “Meet me tonight, Gilda,” said Simon, “under the big chestnut.”

  “Tonight?” asked Gilda coyly. “This very night I believe our cat is due—she’ll have six kittens or I’m a mule.”

  “Please,” said Simon.

  “Whatever is wrong with Oswulf, after all?” she asked, as Simon continued to hold on to both of her hands. “He says he’ll never bear the sight of you again, but he will say nothing of why.”

  Oswulf was given to quickly changing moods, and often made sweeping statements he would later forget. For his part, Simon did not want to put the day’s events into words at all. He found the effort painful as he said, with as much elegant simplicity as he could muster, “The royal marshal has acted, with fatal results.”

  “Roland Montfort?”

  Simon nodded.

  “What has he done?”

  “Roland has killed Edric.”

  Gilda released his hands.

  “Stuck him through with a javelin throw,” added Simon, hating the words as he spoke them. You see, he chided himself, how much better it is to keep quiet?

  “Edric,” she said at last, “was going to bring me a woodcock.”

  “No other man but Roland,” said Simon in a tone of matter-of-fact despair, “could have killed anyone at such a distance.”

  She weighed the implication of this statement.

  “You were there, were you, Simon?”

  Simon’s shame was personal, in that he had not fought for Edric’s life, and made worse by the implication that as a half-Norman scion he might approve of such butchery. Simon was fully aware that he and Gilda were speaking in English, the language of hill and river, but not the language of government.

  Simon kept his answer short. “I was.”

  She made no farewell, no promise to see him that night. She was there one moment, and gone the next.

  Her sudden absence struck Simon as further proof that the day was being warped out of true by some errant star or planet.

  “I’ve penned my goats and placed a double watch all night, both of my sons,” said Plegmund. The robust peasant had the merciful sense to speak softly, of a gently distracting subject.

  “Goats?” Simon asked, only half aware what was being discussed.

  “I’ve penned them up.” Goats were thought to spoil a woodland—deer did not like to browse where goats had been grazing. “Grestain, the marshal’s sergeant, said he’d kill every last kid,” added Pleg
mund, “if I didn’t look to them.”

  Plegmund said this not in a tone of complaint, but as a workingman talking about a force of nature, relentless and age-old. There was, however, a weary, cordial challenge to his remark. Simon was reminded how potentially violent the royal spearmen were, and how powerless a half-bred Norman lord would ever prove to be.

  “How is Caesar?” asked Simon.

  “Oh, old Caesar’s been eating nettles, my lord,” said Plegmund with a laugh, “and kills everything he pisses on.”

  Caesar was the prolific and fierce billy of Plegmund’s herd, gray and powerful, although blind in one eye from chasing a well-armed Norman squire several summers ago.

  “We could use an English king like that,” said Certig.

  It was one of those blunt remarks Certig came out with sometimes—all the more since his injury. And it could be considered treason, punishable by death.

  As though to underscore the danger of such talk, a knot of horsemen appeared, four of them, cantering easily up the road, Grestain the marshal’s sergeant foremost, clad in the blue-and-gold livery of the royal court.

  “Hurry,” urged Simon, “get this cart up and over the hump.”

  It was the way of the marshal’s men to try to join in with such tasks, helping to push carts or rescue cats, so that the local people might feel more friendly and inadvertently blurt a word of disrespect against the king. Such armed men had been known to help themselves to local produce, and even someone of Simon’s good name would be hard-pressed to quell a band of greedy guardsmen.

  They were too late. Grestain called out a greeting, and common good manners required an exchange of pleasantries.

  “You have overloaded your cart,” added the marshal’s man, speaking heavily accented English. The oxen turned their yoked heads toward the snorts and sneezes of the horses. One of the bovine behemoths shook his head, whether in dull fellowship or because a fly teased his eyes, it was hard to tell. The yoke shifted back and forth, and the cart creaked.

  “Oh, yes, indeed I have, my lord sergeant,” agreed Plegmund.

  “I might almost wonder, my lord,” said Grestain, turning his attention to Simon, “if your folk are shipping weapons under their oats.” The sergeant had a broad, weathered face, and a solid-looking body, like a man who had been put together by a saddle maker, and constructed to last a long time.

  Simon knew all the marshal’s men by sight and reputation. For years they had ruined stiles, defiled wells, and set animals alight in the name of amusement. Repairing the damage they had caused over the seasons was a chief burden on the manor’s earnings.

  “Ha-ha,” exclaimed Plegmund, his forced laughter sounding nothing like the real thing.

  Simon said evenly, “My people are loyal subjects, Sergeant.”

  His tone was deliberately and coolly dismissive, and Grestain was quick to say, “Of course, my lord.”

  Grestain was a sandy-haired man, with sun-browned features and yellow eyes. Simon knew him to be Roland’s aide, a West Country man trying to rise in a world of knights who preferred dull imported wine to the local cider.

  “I herded oxen,” the sergeant said, “when I was a boy. I have never been happier.”

  “The ox,” said Simon, judiciously, “is an agreeable beast.”

  When a lawman spoke, he was collecting information. Even the lord of a manor had to speak with care. Oxen certainly seemed like a safe subject, in Simon’s view, and subject to no controversy, but Plegmund’s nearside ox was a brute of spirit, and had once swung its massive head at a traveling flute player.

  Grestain and two of the sergeant’s men dismounted and heaved their weight against the cart, and together with the others they powered the load over what had to be a very large slumbering giant. This, too, was typical of the king’s men, thought Simon. An imperious bunch, they often wanted simply to be liked.

  Only afterward—with farewells given and taken, and best wishes for a pleasant afternoon—did Plegmund confide to Simon in a whisper, “I have an ax under my load, if they’d searched.”

  “One ax is not a rebellion, Plegmund,” said Simon with a smile. He was glad Grestain and his gang had ridden off, and he was eager to be home.

  “And I have that sword I bought from the Bremen town squire,” added Plegmund. “And that spear I found out by the old wellhead and mended myself last winter. And one or two other blades I keep by me, you might say, against danger.”

  “Danger, dear Plegmund,” said Simon uneasily, “is exactly what you will discover.”

  “But I hear of trouble everywhere,” said Plegmund. “Coming trouble, my lord, and all of us unready.”

  6

  Simon was glad to be home again, under the smoke-cured oak timbers of the manor house.

  “I must pay Swein at once, as soon as I give him the tidings,” said Simon. “The horse breeder has a temper, and we don’t want him riding off to try to wrest Bel out of the royal stable.”

  “Ah, Simon, Swein will endure this indignity, and so will you,” said his mother with an air of indisputable judgment. “I shall pay a visit to Edith,” she added, thinking of Edric’s widow, “and her two daughters.”

  Simon stood in the wide, quiet hall of his family home. His sword nick had been bandaged with clean linen, and after a bite of wine-soaked simnel bread, he was not feeling the least fatigue or pain. Or only a very little.

  His mother—Widow Christina, as she was known—was beyond finding any bad news shocking. Her husband, a knight who had, as the story went, once staved off a mad dog from King William’s camp, had died of a fall from his horse in midsummer, ten years before.

  He had been a seasoned campaigner when he took Christina’s hand in marriage. He had brought over a Norman wife and daughter only to lose them to black fever, and Simon had more than once heard his father tell Christina that she was his enseignier—evidence of his blessing, and his second, undeserved chance at happiness.

  Christina had survived her bereavement, and learned to laugh again and enjoy the sound of her son singing poems beside the fire, but a quality of sorrow was always with her. Simon knew that her dreams of personal vindication included Simon’s marriage to a Norman family of wealth, if only to prove that her family had the equal of any pedigree, on either side of the Channel.

  “You will pay Swein this silver, Simon,” said Christina, returning from a cupboard. “And tell him we join him in praying for God’s help against royal criminals.”

  This was the last cut-treasure from the family strongbox, and there was no way of knowing how long this silver fragment had been stored, wrapped in fine-spun cloth to keep it from tarnishing. Some tankard or arm ring from the just-past age, when the Vikings raided the English coasts, must have yielded this precious metal, some Norwegian’s battle hoard. Usher of Aldham had been a tireless defender against the Norse.

  Aldham estate currently prospered, but the mending of walls, relining of wells, and repair and breeding and replanting all took a toll. Christina and Simon were land-wealthy without having much ready money.

  “What do you think of Prince Henry, Simon?” his mother was asking. “I have never laid eyes on the man.”

  “Prince Henry has some great subject on his mind,” Simon said. “I doubt even Bel’s high spirits will give him much happiness.”

  “Henry wishes he were king, I have heard,” said Christina. “The middle brother Robert is in Jerusalem on crusade, and King William the eldest drinks and ruts his way back and forth across our kingdom. I hear that Henry’s pigeon hawk hatched a two-headed chick.”

  Simon had to laugh at this. “That’s a sure sign, Mother—but of what?”

  Christina laughed quietly in turn. “I confess I’m not entirely certain—but when is an omen as straightforward as a beggar’s curse?”

  The sound of riders in the dooryard silenced them.

  Simon counted the hooves by sound—three mounts, at least, along with the chin-chink of chain mail and the rasp of a spear butt d
ragged along the ground.

  The house servants gathered outside, English and Norman speech too tangled for Simon to make out. There was no need to fear—Aldham’s housemen could stave off a good-sized army, and had done just that during Viking times. Certig’s voice could be heard above all, the retainer mastering not a word of Norman speech but calling out in English, “Tell your lord, my good herald, that his horse has squashed our rooster!”

  Simon strode to the wall and took down his father’s sword, a blade with a red carnelian jewel in its hilt. He and Oin had practiced fighting with broadswords and two-handed swords, too, and while Simon had never actually struck steel in earnest, he was not going to embarrass himself.

  Alcuin, the chief house servant, hurried into the smoky firelight and said, “My lady, a noble visitor asks to speak with Simon.”

  “Who disturbs our peace, Alcuin?” asked Christina with an air of hopefulness. She received few guests of note, and while she was gracious to scullery servant and abbot alike, she was habitually eager to be pleasantly surprised by a day’s events, and routinely slightly disappointed.

  “A Norman nobleman,” said the houseman. He said this in the manner of Need I say more?

  Alcuin had attended Simon’s father as a plate servant, pouring wine from a ewer in the days of Simon’s boyhood, when coin was more plentiful. Alcuin had grown gray as his duties increased. “He is of a name unfamiliar to me, if it please my lady,” he added. “And Certig is sore upset. Sangster the breed cock has been stepped on by a horse.”

  “Is the poor bird badly injured?” asked Christina.

  Sangster was the fire and spirit of the dooryard, a menace to man and beast, and a local legend. The chicks he sired proved fertile and healthy, and the red-feathered warrior would not be easily replaced.

  “Worse than hurt, I fear, my lady,” said Alcuin.

  He was his mistress’s loyal chief of staff, and he knew how she liked to learn all she could in the way of detailed gossip. “This noble fellow wears a red agate ring and a cap with a rich plume, my lady,” he offered. “His herald says that he is one Walter Tirel, of a place called Po-icks.”