The King’s Arrow Read online

  “You said you wanted me to watch and listen,” said Emma. She spoke the Norman tongue, but her New Forest accent made the familiar words sound like a new language. “For signs of poaching,” she added. “And for other things, as well.”

  Roland watched as a pair of wings felt the seam of air just above the greenwood, a night bird on its first hunt of the early twilight. Roland did not envy the predator, required to kill to stifle hunger. What lord prince of the forest, Roland wondered, did the white-feathered owl serve? Nagged by his conscience, Roland had been unable to shake free of the memory of the dying poacher.

  It was a joyless recollection indeed. Roland believed that God allowed a lawman to kill a wide number of criminals in the pursuit of his duty, but that Heaven’s Lord grew displeased if the number became too great.

  The Montfort family was a long line of careful men—chandlers to lords and kings, chamberlains and advisers of judgment. Roland’s background contrasted starkly with the vainglorious Tirel clan, men who would chop off a head with more facility than they could use the one God had given them. Roland would do anything to embarrass and deplete the Tirel family—and to keep their kind far from the king.

  Emma kept her hand in Roland’s and gave a sound like a purr, resting her head against his shoulder. The English criminal was a fearless wight, Roland would grant him that. It took nerve to set a snare so close to the king’s lodge. This was an old snare, set days ago, the hare half dead from terror and starvation. The animal was bleeding between the ears where an owl had injured him moments before. How the long-eared creature had survived so long without becoming some owl’s or raven’s dinner was testimony to his good luck. Roland used a hunting dagger to saw at the sinew of the trap.

  When the hare was released he fell to the ground. Roland had to laugh. The creature believed he was dead! The animal lay, convinced that this muted, forest dusk was the color of eternity. The marshal clapped his hands once, and the jack hare was off, bounding crazily, pausing midair, and then vanishing, only to reappear far off, frozen in flight.

  “He’ll tell all the other hares,” said Emma with a laugh, “what an adventure he’s had.”

  “Is that what you English believe?” asked Roland.

  “Believe about what?”

  “Do you think that woodland animals speak to each other?” His question was serious—he had no idea what the English thought about anything, aside from always overestimating the power of their own flesh to withstand the ax.

  “He’s going to tell his hare bride how kind the royal marshal is,” she said, “how handsomely he smiles, and how his eyes sparkle.”

  This was rank flirtation, purest flattery, but Roland did not mind.

  “Why aren’t the local yeomen,” asked Roland, “as pleasant as their women?”

  “There are women enough,” said Emma, “who would lie with you just to stick a knife between your ribs.”

  If Roland had a characteristic that won him any affection, it was that women—smart, quick-eyed women—sometimes found him agreeable company. But the love life of the royal court was complicated, and it was difficult to woo, seduce, and take pleasure in a creature like Emma under the king’s roof.

  The royal court on procession from one hunting lodge to another across the woodlands of England was a festival of drunkenness and feasting. Once it arrived at a hunting lodge, it filled the location with wine-loving, dice-playing clerks and pitcher bearers, dispensers of the larder and masters of one office or another. The king’s retinue included dressers to arrange the royal clothing, scribes to write up his instructions, and even a dwarf named Frocin who recited ballads and amused the king and his companions with witless hilarity.

  “I heard the miller say that you ate a human heart once,” Emma was saying, “in Ely Green. Cut the pulsing organ right out of a rebel, and ate it on the spot.”

  How could folk believe such a thing? Roland marveled. How would a respectable marshal even begin to go about eating such a still-trembling human heart? A large, bloody organ, as any hunter knew well, anyone who had field-dressed a stag?

  That was the problem with the English—as soon as you started to like one of them, they said or did something that stopped you. “Is that what you believe, Emma?”

  “You mean, it isn’t true?”

  She was teasing, Roland thought. “Oh, yes,” he said, “and I bit the entire head off a hayward last May Day.”

  Emma had the most enticing laugh. She was intrigued by her own good luck at catching the eye of the marshal, and was dazzled at her own daring at coupling with him—this would have been the third time in a fortnight. Roland had first come upon her as she planed the bark off a tree in Fulford Reach—a long, half-boggy meadow—curls of wood in her hair. She’d knife him as merrily as love him, Roland knew that. It was not a contradiction—women sometimes relished a dangerous partner, and at times men felt the same way.

  A sound reached them through the forest—the sharp rhythm of horses’ hooves, three or four men on horses they must have picked up south of Winchester, mounts with plenty of vigor left, spurred on by their riders.

  “King’s men approaching, approaching king’s men,” was the lodge guards’ singsong reassurance, the same stalwarts who secured the castles in Winchester and London, although far less sober here.

  “Undermarshal Climenze,” cried a cheerful voice in the distance. “My lord, did you drink the Thames dry again?”

  Dogs set up a round of barking, both the scent hounds and the running hounds giving welcoming voice to the men returning from London. A larger dog joined in barking, the fearsome Golias—Goliath—an animal whose continuing existence in the kingdom was an annoying mystery to Roland. The marshal knew that duty required him to return at once.

  But he had reason to linger. The sound of distant merriment made the forest seem all the more alive with a bracing, challenging unfriendliness—leaves shifting, unseen wings hunting, and Emma’s willing, teasing companionship enticing him to stay in this perilous darkness.

  And he would have stayed there—if only it were possible.

  “Aren’t you going to give me a reward, then?” she was asking. “For showing you that New Forest poachers aren’t afraid, even this close to where the king sleeps at night?”

  “You’ll meet me here tomorrow evening?”

  She did not respond.

  “Promise me,” he said.

  “What if it rains?”

  It would be pleasant to have a pretty smile waiting for him at night after a day in London’s hectic, duty-ridden court. With a smile and a measure of wine, even a marshal might feel he was very much like a human being, if not one graced by Heaven’s favor—he had killed too many men. A wife like Emma would be the surest route to a new life and certain happiness. She’d have a meager dowry, but the warmest embrace in Christendom.

  But the king would not approve of such a match—he preferred his right-hand men to be undistracted by marriage. Roland owed much to King William. When Lord Marshal Bennett tumbled down the stone steps of the Thames embankment and drowned a few summers ago, Roland had worked hard at resuscitating the jolly old drunk, pummeling his master’s body, trying to pound it back to life. The effort had won the king’s approval, and he had awarded Roland the signet of office right there, the gold ring still warm from Bennett’s finger.

  “I’ll send my sergeant Grestain, Emma,” he said, “to see you home safely.”

  “My brothers would laugh me to shame,” she said, “if I showed up with a royal sergeant dogging my steps.” She put her arms around him.

  Emma might well have a brother waiting behind this beech tree, or that towering elm, waiting to step out with a charcoal burner’s ax and split the royal marshal’s head.

  She had three brothers, all heavily muscled and experienced at chopping and splitting. They could have the royal marshal turned to ash by morning, with no one the wiser.

  “Besides,” said Emma, “upon my soul, Grestain makes me uneasy.”<
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  “Follow the high road home, Emma,” he said. “Be careful.”

  “Whatever do you care, Roland?” she asked in return. “What if Mad Jack springs out on me and cuts me to chops?”

  Roland hurried alone, back toward the smoke and murmur of the lodge, feeling the possibility of English spite from behind every shadowy tree. Their women sometimes saw the lord marshal’s merit, but their men were cunning and resentful. A forest where trapper-thieves worked within bow shot of the lodge was no safe place for a king to ride.

  He would warn King William again: stay in the lodge and let the cup bearers comfort you with drink.

  But when did the king ever listen?

  10

  “Out besporting yourself, my lord marshal?” came the query from the candlelight. “Out jigging in the bracken with a lass?”

  Frocin approached, dancing a flat-footed caper, trying yet again for the impossible—to draw a laugh from Marshal Roland.

  Frocin was a very small man with a large grin. Roland had long ago given up even trying to pretend to smile at his efforts. He had come to feel a subdued sort of pity for the royal dwarf, one of the king’s favorite companions. Perhaps, thought the marshal, someday Frocin would do the court a genuine favor and cut his own throat.

  “Where is Climenze?” inquired Roland with an air of careful patience.

  “At bread or at beer,” said the comic.

  Roland made a show of not following Frocin’s meaning.

  “Over there,” sighed the dwarf. He added, in a murmur, “If you would but give me a smile.”

  Roland knew that the glance he gave the dwarf at that moment would have frightened a hangman.

  “My lord marshal,” said Frocin, correcting himself, “if you would but grace me with the music of your laugh.” He folded his hands on his breast and bowed so low that his absurdly shapeless cap toppled onto the floor. This was a contrived mishap. Roland’s fear was that someday, while chortling at some wheezy tomfoolery like this, the king would not see the approach of an assassin.

  Although Roland had to admit that the stunt with the cap was almost funny.

  “I ate well in London, my lord, if I may say so,” said Climenze with a grin. “Old mutton and fresh loaf, as the saying is.”

  Roland and Climenze sat in a corner of the lodge where they could speak in confidence, the rest of the big hall screened by sheets of canvas hung by the royal tenters for what little privacy such a place could offer. A low fire of blue and golden flame simmered in an iron brazier—fine charcoal made by Emma and her brothers, and purchased by the hundredweight for the lodge.

  “Your mother and father, with Heaven’s mercy,” asked Roland, “are well?”

  “And still grateful that the king’s marshal gave a lowly lad like me a chance in the royal court, my lord, and that’s the truth.”

  “And a wise choice it’s proven to be,” said Roland.

  Climenze waved off this compliment. He had a long, agreeable countenance, like a reliable horse. “My old father can still hoist a dray mule,” said Climenze, his language a sort of Norman debased with the occasional English verb. Hoist. No one in Paris had ever heard of such a word.

  “I am sure the skill proves useful,” said Roland, recalling the skinner’s yard near Cripplegate, carcasses of plow horses flayed and gutted, suspended by hooks the size of anchors. Men greasy with their work bawled out instructions in a language peculiar to their trade, and the youthful Roland had helped block-and-tackle the work-emaciated hulks of oxen up into the skinner’s workplace, for fun—until his father forbade it, saying it was no sport for a gentleman.

  “But even my deaf father, my lord,” said Climenze, “has heard the talk of unsettling signs.”

  “Do we believe in omens, Climenze?” asked Roland, keeping his conversation artful, but inwardly alive with curiosity. “Or are we rational enough to trust our wits?”

  “There is an unsettling occasion in London, my lord marshal,” said the undermarshal, resorting to the official language of clerks to make himself clear, and to determine that his superior took his report seriously.

  “There is always some brew-house riot,” said Roland, fond of the big town, and wishing he were there.

  “You’re right as to that,” said Climenze with a knowing smile. “But this is something new in the way of troubling indications, my lord marshal, if I may put it so.”

  Roland liked Climenze. This was the man he sent to warn the local goatherds to pen their livestock when summer was high. An injured peasant left a gap in the harvest, a skill missing during harness mending, and a strong pair of arms when it was time to beat the fields for hares. Climenze could punish—but not too severely.

  Climenze, however, had been a man of enigmatic habits recently. He had taken to vanishing for hours, and showing up for duty with the perfume of expensive wine on his breath. Something warned Roland now. Don’t trust him.

  A soft-voiced intruder, with a quiet step, startled the two of them.

  “Ask him what sort of troubling indications,” urged Prince Henry, entering the circle of light cast by the nearly smokeless coals. The two stood and gave a bow at the approach of the prince, and Henry gave a smile and a nod in return.

  Roland was surprised. “Do you know my man Climenze?” he asked.

  “Indeed,” said the prince, “I know your undermarshal to be as capable with the bow as he is in the saddle.”

  Roland would have thought Climenze was far better with ax or pike than he was at archery, but he was flattered that the prince took notice of one of his men.

  Flattered, but puzzled. In the daily life of the royal court, a prince and an undermarshal would know each other by sight, but conversation between them would be rare. Roland did not enjoy this sort of by-the-way surprise. He counted on knowing men and what they were likely to do.

  At this time of night—late, with nearly all the dining tables and benches broken down and cleared off—the prince was almost always stupid with drink. This night, however, Prince Henry was apparently sober.

  Climenze did not speak until Roland lifted his forefinger, granting permission.

  He said, “The dogs, my lords, have vanished from the city streets.”

  The prince gave the short, silent exhalation that was his version of laughter.

  “God’s teeth, Climenze, this is a sure calamity. The dogs are gone! Let us fly to our ships!”

  “The dog packs have disappeared entirely?” asked Roland.

  Packs of large mongrels had plagued the streets of London in recent months. They roamed only at night, and had the effect of discouraging nightwalkers—beggars and wandering lunatics. Even so, they impeded horsemen in the early-morning hours, disturbing even the bravest steed with their barking and slavering. The king, it had been generally agreed, would have to order a slaughter of the dogs before winter.

  “Every last pup, my lords,” said Climenze.

  “Only a fool trembles at every unsettling rumor,” said the prince when he and the marshal were alone.

  “This is not an omen, my lord prince,” said Roland. “This is evidence.”

  The prince stepped over to the heavy linen cloth separating them from the main atrium of the lodge. Such cloth barriers provided but scant privacy. He peered, making sure no one was listening, and then froze.

  He put a finger to his lips.

  The prince whisked the cloth aside, overturning a three-legged stool with a clatter. A sleeper somewhere stirred, but no spy was disclosed by the candlelight.

  “I thought I heard someone,” said the prince. He shrugged and gave a little laugh, like a man relieved he did not have to use a weapon after all.

  “Evidence of what?” asked the prince, encouraging Roland to continue.

  “Before we left the city, I ordered two dozen new pike shafts,” said Roland.

  “And?” asked the prince.

  “The armorer told me none could be found,” said Roland, soft-stepping to the very edge of the illum
ination cast by the steadfast candles. “There is a shortage of ash wood and hazel in London.”

  The prince looked at the drinking cup in his hand. He thought for a long moment, and then swallowed his wine. “My dear Roland, London’s wives have no doubt broken their sticks beating their wayward husbands.”

  “By the dozen, my lord prince?”

  “Do you think some conspirator,” said Prince Henry, “has bought up every wooden shaft?”

  “To make pikes and spears—that is exactly what I believe. And this secret enemy has killed off the dogs, my lord prince, to clear the streets for fighting.”

  “Who would he be, this troublemaker?”

  “Not a common Englishman, I think,” said Roland. “Not in London. We have them well beaten in the city, although they still test their fangs in the countryside.”

  “Who, then,” asked the prince, “is the conspirator?”

  11

  Any number of noble schemers were likely suspects, thought Roland—Norman barons and newly minted English dukes. The throne of England had been a prize for the taking for a hundred years, and no doubt some grasping men felt it was ready and waiting for them now.

  But Roland did not voice any of this. He kept his own counsel, believing a judicious silence was his wisest course. Somewhere off in the drowsy hunting lodge, someone was getting sick, disgorging a day’s worth of wine or west-land cider. The sound ceased, and the lodge was quiet again.

  The prince, Roland thought, did not much resemble his brother.

  The king was red-haired and ruddy-cheeked, and expressed nearly every feeling—from glee to anger—with some variety of laughter. The prince, however, spoke in even tones, with a searching, sideways glance. He liked to make other men laugh, but he rarely smiled himself.

  “Marshal Roland,” said Prince Henry, “you would make a challenging enemy.”

  This sounded like a compliment, but Roland felt a chill.