Rhuddlan (15 page)

A messenger met them on the road back to
Rouen the next day. The people of Avranches, on the western edge of
Normandy, begged for royal assistance. For the past month their
viscount, Earl Hugh of Chester, and another rebel, Ralph de
Fougères, had been harrying the province which remained loyal to
the king. De Fougères was a well-known malcontent from Brittany,
one of the more troublesome duchies in Henry’s empire. Chester’s
treason, however, had come as something of a surprise to the king;
not because he didn’t doubt the earl believed he had sufficient
reason to rebel but because he hadn’t thought Hugh possessed the
backbone for it. He’d known Hugh all the younger man’s life and had
always dismissed him as a rather colorless personality.

Longsword and his mercenaries were dispatched
to the rescue of Avranches while the king continued to Rouen and
inspected the security of his eastern border along the way.

One of the traits Longsword shared with his
father was the ability to move fast. Henry, never one to remain
still for too long in any case, was capable of shifting armies at a
pace seldom matched by more cautious leaders. That the theater of
operations in this instance was Normandy, the king’s home base,
only facilitated movement. The progress of the army wasn’t hindered
by the need to lumber heavily laden supply carts with it or to go
at an easy walk to spare the horses. Longsword also used the long
summer days to his advantage. So eager to be off that he could
barely sit still as the king gave him explicit instructions (which
Delamere doubted he was listening to, anyway), he declared to his
men that they would be traveling hard all day, stopping long enough
only to exchange mounts at royal castles along the way and to sleep
when darkness made safe passage impossible.

By mid-morning of the third day, sweaty,
stinking and hungry because Longsword had insisted on leaving their
previous night’s accommodation at first light, they were in
Pontorson. The fortress was a stone’s throw from the Breton border
but had thus far been spared the devastation which Chester and de
Fougères seemed intent on wreaking in the area. As they ate a hasty
meal, the garrison commander, Walter fitz Hamo, told them that he
had sent out small bands of soldiers during the past two weeks to
confront the rebels, only to discover that they had vanished. In
addition, the rebels had yet to launch an attack on any of the
royal castles in the vicinity. It was evident that Chester and de
Fougères were more interested in ravaging the countryside and
plundering the little towns and churches than in taking castles.
“If they took Avranches, they could conceivably control the western
coastline and no doubt all of Brittany would be solidly behind
them,” he said. “That they haven’t tried it tells me they haven’t
got the manpower for a siege. But merchants fear to travel because
they’ve been attacked, robbed and killed and commerce has been
slowing to point where there’s few supplies going into the towns
now.”

“No need to besiege a mere castle if you’ve
got the whole countryside in a stranglehold,” Delamere commented.
He looked unfavorably into his wine cup. Obviously the rebels had
managed to intercept the latest shipment from Bordeaux.

“Not enough men!” Longsword scoffed. He
dropped his cutting knife to the table with a loud thud and picked
up a chunk of cold meat with his fingers. He gestured with it as he
spoke. “Chester’s got to have a hundred knights and with his money
he’s probably bought twice as many mercenaries. De Fougères, with
all the damned Bretons queuing to commit treason against my father,
must surely be able to match those figures.”

Sir Walter shrugged. “Then
they don’t
want
to
take a castle, though God alone knows why.”

“
I
know why,” Longsword said flatly,
wiping his hands on a linen napkin and extricating himself from the
bench on which he’d been sitting. Immediately, his men followed
suit, hastily stuffing the rest of their breakfasts down their
throats and draining their cups. “Because they know the royal
castles in and around Avranches are well-defended and they could
sit outside one for weeks with no progress and in a countryside
which will not provision them. It would give my father time to
secure the east and then leisurely make his way here to crush them
and relieve the besieged. On the other hand, if they continue to
harass this area and avoid open battle, they weaken the populace
and disrupt trade so much so that the king has no choice but to
leave Rouen and rush here to a pitched battle. They’ve got enough
men for that and besides, Louis could follow from the east and then
the royal troops would be trapped between two armies.”

They walked out into the glaring sunlight.
Servants and soldiers of the garrison collected to gape at the
king’s men, so disheveled and travel-worn that they must be on a
serious errand. Being the center of attention made Longsword feel
important. So this is how it felt to command men, he thought; to
have your least order instantly obeyed. He liked the power. “I’ll
show him,” he said to himself.

“What? Speak up; I can’t hear you,” Delamere
said.

Longsword turned to his friend eagerly.
“Richard, I’ll show him that I can do it!”

“Show who you can do what?”

“My father, of course! I’m going to crush the
rebels. It’s perfect; his pride and joy couldn’t take one miserable
town even with the French king’s help but I’ll defeat de Fougères
and Chester on my own!”

Delamere put up a hand to block the sun as he
squinted uncertainly at Longsword. “The king told you only to
organize the available armed resources and contain the rebels…”

“Do you imagine,” Longsword scoffed, “he’ll
be upset if we crush them instead?”

Delamere supposed not and upon reflection
thought his friend’s scheme was natural enough. After all, it was
no secret to him that Longsword felt he had something to prove to
his father. Avranches was as good a proving ground as any. The only
problem was that the rebels had gone inexplicably quiet.
Pontorson’s scouts came back just before dusk with nothing to
report. Longsword couldn’t believe the puny threat of forty
mercenaries was enough to compel the rebels into hiding and thought
that they were gathering strength for some murderous assault. He
spent the idle hours planning his response to a variety of possible
confrontations.

He came up to Delamere as the latter sat on a
bench in the hall holding a young woman’s hand between his own and
speaking in low tones to her as she gazed rapturously into his
green eyes, and tossed a large object at his feet. It landed with a
disturbing clunk.

Delamere looked up with some annoyance.
Friend or no, he hated being interrupted just as he was finalizing
plans for the night. “What’s this?”

Longsword grinned and nudged it with the toe
of his boot. “What’s it look like?”

“I can see it’s a shield, Will,” Delamere
answered patiently, “but why have you put it there?”

“Turn it over.”

With a sigh, Delamere reluctantly dropped the
young woman’s hand and bent to pick up the shield. His eyebrows
shot up with surprise. “Who did this for you?”

“The armorer. Nice, isn’t it? The man’s got a
talent.”

Longsword had discovered that the armorer in
Pontorson was something of an artist who had decorated many of the
garrison knights’ shields with various devices of their choosing.
He had paid the man to paint his own with the traditional emblem of
the house of Anjou: three golden lions standing on their hind
legs.

“I know my father prefers a red background
but I had the man put the lions on blue because that’s the color my
grandfather used on his shields,” he explained.

The true explanation probably had more to do
with the fact that Longsword’s legitimate half-brothers also
preferred red than with any purist tendency, Delamere thought but
was kind enough not to point out. He held the shield up and
Longsword took it and, putting his arm through the brases, struck a
warlike pose.

“Wait until those damned
Bretons catch sight of
this
gleaming in the sun,” he chortled. “They’ll know
it’s blood of the royal house that’s confronting them and they’ll
turn and run. I guarantee it, Richard. My first real command. I
feel damned near invincible!”

The wait was ended on the fourth day when two
of Pontorson’s knights galloped through the hastily thrown back
gates and presented themselves with great urgency to their
commander and to Longsword. They had, they breathlessly explained,
been patrolling to the east of the castle when they’d run into a
barefoot, dirty-faced boy who claimed to have seen a convoy of
wagons a mile or two away which had just pulled off the main road
to take a lesser used cart track. He had told them that he was on
his way to Pontorson to inform the garrison of this phenomenon and
when the knights had laughed and asked him why, he’d answered quite
seriously that he doubted the convoy was on honest business because
there was not one merchant among its company.

If this convoy was only a short distance
away, then it couldn’t hurt to investigate the knights reasoned.
The boy was prevailed upon to guide them and they set off through
the forest along the main road which wound from the harbor at
Avranches, to directly underneath the watchful eyes in Pontorson’s
towers and then into Brittany. Surely any tradesmen on ‘honest
business’ would keep to this route; it was wide, maintained and
well-traveled. But the boy’s hunch proved shrewd. The trio stood in
the relative protection of the trees and could plainly see teams of
plodding oxen dragging a dozen wagons in a neat, slow-moving line
through the fallow fields which skirted the forest. Surrounding the
wagons on all sides and forward and back were soldiers; mounted
knights and crossbowmen on foot.

“How many?” demanded Longsword, his
expression composed but his eyes glittering, thought Delamere, with
excitement.

“Sixty knights…a few more bowmen.”

“For twelve wagons? There must be quite a
treasure in them! Coming from Avranches, you say?”

One of the scouts nodded.
“My lord,
we
didn’t
actually see them on the road from Avranches but the boy said he
did.”

“Either they sacked the castle or the earl
has had supplies and more men shipped in,” said Sir Walter.

“Or gold with which to pay his Flemish
mercenaries,” Longsword grinned. “Tell me, did you see any colors?
Banners?”

“No, my lord,” replied the other man. “But
we’ve no doubt the convoy was on its way to Brittany. With all the
raiding that’s been going on the boy was suspicious of strangers
and hid in a tree when they passed him just before they turned off
the road and he said he couldn’t understand the strange tongue they
used when they spoke.”

Longsword spat onto the floor. “Bretons!
That’s what comes of putting a duchy into the hands of a child,” he
said over his shoulder to Delamere. Henry had made his third
legitimate son, Geoffrey, now fifteen years old, the duke of
Brittany. He turned back to the knights. “This cart track they’re
on—how far from the castle is it? And can it be seen from the
towers?”

“It lies three or four miles away, my lord,”
answered Sir Walter. “And if it could be seen from castle,” he
added drily, “there wouldn’t be any use for it.”

Longsword digested this information. “Once
they slip over the border they’re lost to us. Obviously they’re
heading for Dol and there’ll be more men to meet them. We’ve got to
intercept them before they reach Pontorson, then.”

“Oxen don’t travel fast,” said Delamere.
“We’ve got a few hours to work with.”

“How many men can you spare us?” Longsword
asked Sir Walter.

It was a tricky question. Although it was
tempting to throw almost every one of his soldiers into the ambush,
Sir Walter had to consider the possibility that none might come
back. The strength of the castle couldn’t suffer for this conflict.
“About two dozen,” he said, regretfully. “But I would like to offer
myself as one of them, my lord.”

Delamere did a quick sum in his head. “That
makes us sixty-odd to their 130,” he said.

“Fine,” said Longsword with a grim smile.
“Our success will look even better.”

It had been cooler in the forest. The faint
track they followed now baked under the bright sun, which had
thankfully begun its slow descent. Sweat trickled from beneath the
knights’ coifs and the heavy mail encompassing torsos all but
turned them into human ovens. Even the bowmen, wrapped in thick
leather shells, trudged rather than walked beside the lumbering
oxen. There was another complaint: the road had been better in the
forest, as well. This one was obviously used primarily by foot
traffic; it was narrow and uneven, following the bumpy contours of
the land, and the carts became harder to move. Their pace had
slowed to less than two miles an hour. It would be like this almost
the rest of the way to Dol, some twenty miles from where they now
plodded. They wouldn’t reach the fortress until the next
evening.

They had been warned to divert from the main
road just before Pontorson. King Henry, to check the ambitions of
the fractious counts of Brittany, had built the fortress smack in
the middle of the road instead of throwing up, like any sane man,
an artificial mound a mile or two away and creating an imposing
vantage point from which the impressive symbol of his might could
glare down at the comings and goings of potential malefactors…and
give them a decent chance of escape. With their manpower, they had
no reason to fear an outright assault by the skeleton garrison but
their pace was so slow that they were easy arrow fodder for even a
handful of archers in the castle towers. So they had diverted as
instructed and now had to contend with nothing more serious than
heatstroke and pitted track. They were relaxed and even a little
bored with this job; their number was intimidating and they’d been
assured that the king was currently pinned down in eastern
Normandy, trapped between the count of Flanders and the king of
France. They didn’t even bother to send forward scouts.