Longbow Girl (24 page)

M
erry strode into the arena, grasping her longbow, her arrow bag slung over her back. She felt more alive than ever. There was more at stake than ever. Her life, the life and lands of those she loved. But she had one job, one focus. She could not think of what she might lose, just of what she needed to do. Of how she would do it.
Nock. Mark. Draw. Loose
. She'd trained for years.
This
was who she was.

She was aware of the wind blowing down from the mountains, carrying with it the scent of new-grown summer grass. She was aware of the voices rising in shock, in question, then falling away at a loud command. She was aware of a presence, huge and terrifying. The king in all his majesty.

Henry VIII sat on a carved, throne-like chair on a raised dais at the back of the arena. Merry looked up, eyed him full
on. The small lips, pursed in judgement, the wide-set, piggy eyes, the square face padded by fat, the furs, velvets and jewels.

Monarch
,
murderer, torturer, tyrant
. . . the words ran through her head, but she kept her face impassive. She bowed low till her hair draped on the muddy grass. Then she straightened, whipped back her head so that her hair swung in an arc of gold.

‘Who are you, girl?' thundered the king. ‘What do you do here with all the men?'

‘I am Merry Owen, Your Majesty,' she answered in a cool, clear voice that carried to the depths of the watching crowds. ‘I am the sister of Longbowman Owen, separated at childhood, raised by a family who could afford to keep me. I heard about Your Majesty's challenge and my brother's imprisonment. I have come to honour the pledge of my ancestors.'

She felt the blood pounding in her veins.

‘I am the longbow girl.'

There was a roar. There were shouts and jeers. Then, as suddenly as they had started, the shouts stopped. The jeering men fell silent as King Henry stood, raised his hand high.

‘Come here,' he ordered Merry.

As she approached, she could see that on either side of the king sat the countess and an angular, angry-looking man who had to be the earl. Both glowered at her. The countess was scrutinizing her, uncomfortably closely. But Merry felt sure the countess hadn't seen her hair and now she had two eyes, not one.

Head high, Merry walked towards the king. She felt the fear she had desperately been trying to suppress bloom and grow inside her. She thought of Anne Boleyn, the wife he had recently beheaded. The brave, feisty, politically involved Anne, a woman who would have excelled in the twenty-first century with her motto of
Complain all you like, this is the way it's going to be
. She thought of Henry's current wife, resting in some palace as she prepared to give birth in the autumn. Dutiful, dull Jane Seymour . . . her motto –
Bound to serve and obey
– self-consciously differentiating herself as much as possible from her murdered predecessor.

Perhaps she wasn't that dull after all . . .
Displease the king and die a horrible death? Well, don't be Anne Boleyn. Be dull Jane. Do your job and get the hell out . . .

Merry paused, just feet from the dais. She curtsied, then lowered her eyes, as she imagined Jane Seymour would.

‘You can shoot a war bow?' boomed the king.

Merry glanced up. ‘I can, Your Majesty.'

There was a hiss from the men-at-arms on the dais, from the earl, who got to his feet.

Another gaudily dressed, puppy-faced man jumped up. ‘You're not an archer!' he yelled, face red with outrage, grinning with the sport he thought he could make of her. ‘You're a
woman
!'

Something fused in Merry's head – the history lessons, her father's tales, her own refusal to be bullied. She raised her arm high, palm inwards. She forked the two fingers of her right hand in a V sign, directing it at the man.

The roars increased tenfold. Merry felt the blood sing in her heart. This was the sign with which the Anglo-Welsh archers had taunted their French enemies from Crécy to Agincourt.
I have my two fingers; I curse you; I can draw a bow; prepare to die . . .
Crécy was two hundred years ago. But the gesture still meant
war
. Merry felt the heat of the crowd pumping back at her. She stood, head high, defiant. Finally, point made, she lowered her arm.

The king got to his feet, strode to the edge of the dais, turned to take in the whole crowd. He raised his arm again. The hissing and the jeering stopped. The puppy-faced man, murder in his eyes, stalked back to his seat. The earl eased back into his. The king looked at Merry, eyes creased with amusement now.

‘So you are an archer, you say. Very poetically . . .'

Merry grinned back. ‘I am, Your Majesty.' He looked massive, up there on the dais, enlarged by his splendid cape, the exuberant ruffles.

Carefully, Merry raised her hand, palm to him, fingers spaced. She wriggled her first two fingers, heavily callused from drawing the bow. She'd never been so glad that she didn't use a glove or a tab on her right hand. Her skin told its own story.

The king's eyes widened. ‘
Why?
You would be a
warrior
? You would join my army? You would
kill
?'

Merry looked back at the king, and when she spoke, her words rang with truth.

‘Not through choice, Your Majesty.' She thought of
Professor Parks. ‘But if I had to, I would. I am ready. All I ask is that Your Majesty give me the chance to show what I can do. And then abide by the results.'

There was a low murmur of disbelief. ‘Impudent wench,' Merry heard someone say.

The king looked at her speculatively. ‘Abide by the results?' he asked slowly, the smile leeching from his eyes. His huge, jowly face turned hard.

Merry felt her breath catch in her throat. She kept her gaze fixed on his, feeling that to look away, to show weakness to the bully would be fatal. She'd taken the confrontational Anne Boleyn route after all. For her, there'd never really been any other way.

‘As I must, Your Majesty. As must the Owens. As must the generations to come. The longbowmen not yet born.' She paused. ‘And the longbow girls.'

The king gave a quick, instinctive smile and Merry felt her breath ease.

He glanced back at the earl, at his other men-at-arms; then he turned to the crowds. He raised his head, bellowed out so that they all might hear.

‘Let the competition commence. One gold coin to the winner!' The king paused and it seemed that the earl, leaning forward, was suggesting something to him. The king smiled. ‘
Ten
gold coins to the winner!' There was a gasp from the competitors, and from the spectators. Ten gold coins was a fortune to most of them. Merry guessed that the earl wanted to make the men compete as ruthlessly as they could. To outcompete
her . . . Something in the atmosphere in the arena changed, became gladiatorial. The men, seemingly friendly before, were eyeing each other narrowly. Merry felt another wave of fear.

‘And if Merry Owen can draw a war bow, if she can loose her arrows with deadly aim,' continued King Henry. ‘If she ranks with the best of these men here today, good enough to fight my wars and kill for me, then her family may keep their lands. Now and for as long as the Owens can fulfil the pledge of their ancestor.'

Merry bowed low. She heard the roar of the crowd. It was time.

T
here were twenty men in the arena. They all turned to face Merry as she walked to the stake where they gathered.

She saw many things in their eyes: outrage, mystification, disbelief, amusement, appraisal and, from a few, pity. She kept her head up, swept her gaze over them all, face impassive. She hoped her glass eye would fool them. The less animated she was, the better. No good having one eye darting all over the place and the other dead. Plus, it suited her just fine. She wasn't there to engage with them. She was there to beat them.

She loosened her arrow bag, took out her string. The men watched her, eyebrows raised as she put her knee to her bow, flexed it, strung it. That in itself was a feat of strength that few other than trained archers could manage.

Ignoring their looks of surprise, she took out each arrow in
turn from her arrow bag and eyed the flights, making sure each one was true. When she was satisfied, she looked up again. All the men were still watching her.

‘I am ready,' she said, in a voice loud enough to carry to the king.

There was a chorus of laughter from the crowd, then a low, mocking voice said:

‘Ready now, is she?'

She turned to the speaker, the one man without a bow. The marshal, she guessed. She looked back at him and waited. Inside, her heart was beating wildly, but on the surface she was cool and controlled.

‘Right then,' said the man when he got no answer from Merry. ‘Here are the rules. With this' – he paused – ‘Merry Owen here, we have twenty-one competitors. We have ten targets set up, so we shall have three opening heats. The test is for skill and accuracy.‘

Behind her back, Merry crossed her fingers tight, dared to feel a flurry of hope.

‘The targets,' continued the marshal, ‘are set eighty yards from the shooting line.'

This news was met with shouts and jeers from the crowd.

‘I know, I know, not the full distance by any measure but, believe it or not, we're short of space on this hillside today. Blame the knights and their destriers needing so much ground for the jousting! Blame the sloping Welsh hills!'

Merry felt a surge of elation. Eighty yards. She could
do
this.

‘And as I said, accuracy is what His Majesty, the King
Henry, is seeking today.'

That silenced the crowd.

‘Each competitor must shoot three arrows. Judged by totalling their scores, the ten best men,' continued the marshal with a dismissive glance at Merry, ‘will go into the next round, where we move the start point back ten yards. From those ten men, I shall select the winner. If no clear winner is discernible, we shall have a further round between the leading competitors, where we shall move the start point back another ten yards. All clear?'

There was murmured agreement from the men. Merry nodded, squared her shoulders, started up a rhythm of deep, slow breathing, working on getting her pulse to drop. A slower pulse aided accuracy. Not by much, but perhaps by enough to make all the difference.

‘Right, are we all ready?' called the marshal.

‘Yes,' roared the men, drowning Merry's soft answer.

‘Glory and His Majesty's gold to the winner!' bellowed the man, to roars from the spectators.

Merry glanced around, caught a glimpse in the crowd of the faces she sought – Mair, Rhiannon, Angharad and Gawain. Then she went into a kind of cocoon where the noise dimmed and her focus sharpened. She felt like she could see individual blades of grass, sense the direction of the wind from its feel on her skin, smell the lands over which it had blown.

The marshal stalked down the column of men, separating them. ‘Heat one,' he announced, pointing to one group. ‘And heat two,' he declared, pointing to the other. Like an after-thought,
he turned to Merry. ‘You will be in heat three – alone.'

Merry nodded, refused to acknowledge the implicit insult. It was fine. She'd have more time to watch, to sense the mood of the breeze, to adjust . . . let him think he was putting her off. Let them all underestimate her, until it was too late . . .

The contestants in heat one lined up. They stood with their backs to the king so there was no danger of a rogue arrow, or an assassin, felling His Majesty. The targets were round pieces of white-painted wood, with a central black circle and inside that a small white inner circle. They were attached to wooden stakes, just like the one she had practised on.

Merry sized up her competitors. All the men were taller than her, most of them around six foot.

She guessed they were farmers or tradesmen, carpenters, blacksmiths and labourers. Some of them might have been full-time archers employed by a lord, perhaps by the earl himself. Either way, they would have been skilled archers. Henry VIII's royal edict commanded that all such men practised weekly on their bows.

There was one man who stood out among the more humbly dressed competitors. A
gentleman
who wore elaborate clothes. That was unusual. Gentlemen or aristocrats preferred to be men-at-arms, swordsmen, or else to fight from the back of a destrier.

Not that the clothes had improved the gentleman's manners. The look he sent Merry was one of contempt. Merry looked away, but not before she'd registered the coldness, the
flash of hatred, the barely contained violence.
Another Professor Parks
. Maybe he was an archer because he liked killing so much . . .

The marshal strode in front of all the men, ensuring they stood behind a white line, marked out on the grass with lime.

He moved off to the side, taking up position a few feet behind the bowmen.

‘Ready your bows!' he cried.

The competitors stepped their bowhand foot forward.

‘Nock!' called the marshal.

Arrows were slid into position. The men bent, readying themselves.

‘Mark!'

All eyes were raised and focussed on the distant targets.

‘Draw!'

The archers pulled back their bowstrings, straightening as they did so.

‘Loose!' yelled the marshal, and the arrows flew. They hissed softly, like deadly rain.

Merry watched them, eye flicking from archer to target. The commands came again in quick succession: ‘Nock, mark, draw, loose.' Some competitors flaunted their skills at rapid shooting, but with only three arrows each, it was a showman's gesture and not very effective in most cases. Some competitors were slower and the marshal glowered at them. Merry wondered if he took away points for dithering.

The contestants were a mixed bag. Some were very good; most were average. In heat one, the clear winner was a small,
wiry man just a bit taller than Merry. He hadn't spoken much, just got on with his business with an air of ruthless concentration. Some of the bigger, beefier men were powerful but not accurate, hitting only the outer edges of the target.

When all the arrows had been shot, the competitors stood back, some laughing and joking with each other, others gazing at the row of targets where the marshal prowled, scribbling on parchment with a quill pen.

He scowled at his jottings, eyed the targets again, then strode back to the competitors.

He picked out five men. There was cheering and shouting and back-slapping and dejection.

The losers trooped out of the arena. The next competitors stepped forward.
Nock, mark, draw, loose
. The arrows flew. Merry's heart began to beat faster. This time, the winner was the gentleman. Five competitors were selected for the second round. Clearly, the marshal thought that Merry would never get that far. Time to upset his numbers.

‘Heat three!' he called out. ‘Merry Owen.'