The Deadliest Sin (3 page)

But now? Now it felt as though his life was ended. He had fought and killed, and when Calais fell, he had enjoyed a brief spell of happiness, but now God was punishing him – punishing
everyone. Janyn’s wife and little babe were only two among the countless bodies that littered France’s villages and towns after the arrival of the Terrible Death, ‘
atra
mors
’, or what the French were calling the ‘
morte bleue
’. So many: all tossed into the mass graves in cities like Calais, or left to rot in the fields and lanes uncared
for, since all the others had already died. The horror would never leave him, he was sure. God had decided to punish them all. But Janyn knew others who suffered even more than he himself. One man
had thought himself responsible, and suffered in his own private hell.

That was his curse.

When the travellers started this stupid game, asking about the worst sins, Janyn almost shot to his feet and left the room, struck with the urge to vomit. Scenes appeared in
his mind, pictures of the corpses at the roadside, women screaming as they were raped, soldiers laughing and queuing for their turn, a nun’s corpse decapitated, babies . . . the world was
full of sins. The deadliest sins? They were all deadly. Wherever men went, they brought evil with them. For a while he had been happy with his wife. He had been content. Seeing the miracle of
pregnancy and birth, feeling the wonder as he held for the first time his little pink, mewling son, he had thought life could not offer anything so marvellous and awe-inspiring. Then the joy in his
heart had almost crushed him. He adored his wife and son so much, he would happily have died for them.

But now both were gone. God had taken them.

Janyn Hussett wanted to shout at the other pilgrims: ‘You know what I think? I think you have no idea what real life is like! Look at you, all of you! Sitting here in comfort, out of
the rain, whining about the weather . . .’

But he held his tongue. He held his hands to the fire and gritted his teeth. It was better not to speak, but to hold himself in resentful silence, ignoring their vapid maunderings.

But they would keep going on about their pointless, stupid, irrelevant lives.

‘Friend, you are very quiet,’ one of the pilgrims said to him. ‘Tell me, where do you hail from?’

Janyn looked up and snapped, ‘What is it to you where I come from? Why do you want to know?’

‘Please, friend! I was being amiable, that is all,’ said the man. He was stocky, serious-looking. His name was Nicholas. ‘We are all friends here, aren’t we? We are
making a long journey. It would be good to know you better. Then, if we meet again, we can exchange stories about our lives.’

‘Exchange stories?’ Janyn said with contempt. He took a stick of kindling and broke it, hurling the halves into the flames. ‘What stories do you want? Tales of death and
horror? Shall I tell you how I have seen nuns raped and slaughtered like so many sows? Or children taken from their mothers’ breasts to have their heads dashed against a wall? Is that what
you would hear? No: you don’t want that. You don’t want to know my story.’

‘I would hear it,’ Nicholas pressed him quietly. ‘Come, friend, we are all here together. You are a man of much experience, I’d wager. I would value your tale. Which
sin do you think is the most terrible?’

‘Why do you ask me that?’ Janyn demanded. He was wound tight as a cog’s rigging as he leaned forward, his hand straying to the knife at his belt.

Laurence saw his hand’s movement and the innkeeper shook his head, smiling and holding his hands up pacifically, but stepping forward to prevent a fight. ‘Hoy, friend, he means
nothing by it: nothing. But we were talking about the deadly sins. From the look of you, you must have a view on such things. Which would you say was the worst?’

‘I have seen all the sins imaginable committed while I was in France. There are men there who have sought to offend Christ and His saints every day with their debaucheries,’ Janyn
said, grimacing. ‘Ach, no! Why do you want me to speak of them? I would forget them all.’

‘You were a fighter in France?’

This was the prior, the churchman with the sharp face. He sat at the other side of the fire, smugly arrogant as he eyed Janyn – like a judge presented with a felon of notorious
fame.

Janyn sneered and turned his attention back to the flames. ‘A pox on your cockiness! If you were in France, you wouldn’t survive above a day,’ he muttered. Then he looked
up, his dark brown eyes fixed on the rest of the group as he spoke, glowering with a fixed intensity that spoke of pain and anguish. ‘What can you know of the horror, the suffering of the men
out there? How many of you have been told to slaughter prisoners? To butcher men and women, aye, and their wains? Not one. You cannot appreciate how war changes a man, how it twists him and
torments him, until he is utterly broken.’

He was a grim-faced little man. Like many a peasant, his face was leathery and tanned from exposure, but there was a hard edginess to the lines on his face.

‘You want to know what I think, then? I’d say lust is the worst. Because it’s lust that leads to murder and slaughter. Lust for women, lust for gold, lust for power. All
come to the same: lust! And one man felt sure that his own lust brought about the plague that hunts all men now.’ ‘Tell us your story, friend. Show us what you mean.’ He stood,
caught between the urge to leave them there in the chamber – and the desire to tell them all. He was almost ready to flee the room but, just then, Laurence passed him a green-glazed drinking
horn, and he took it and stared into the pale-coloured ale. There were bubbles and swirls in the drink, and suddenly, as clouds might form the appearance of a cog at sea or a man’s face, he
saw her again: Pelagia, the Frenchwoman with the neck of a swan, the body of an angel. He saw her face as clearly as he saw the flames in the fire.

It decided him. With a gesture of defiance, he tossed his head back and drained the horn in one. He could tell them a tale to make them sit up and listen! A tale of . . .

War is evil for many, but most of all for the people who want no part in it – he began – the women and children. They suffer from the unwanted attentions of men;
they are raped and slain by invaders, or they’re killed by their own because they can’t fight, or they starve because food is kept back for the men who will fight. That is what Calais
was like. A foul city, full of scared, fretful people. When we got there, the place was already encircled by our King’s host, but the fear – you could taste it in the air.

Men react differently to things like that: the smell of fear. Some are like hounds. If a hound senses another is scared, it’ll push it around, snarl, growl . . . anything to make it know
who is the master, who is the villein. Some men are the same: if they can tell another is petrified, it gives them a feeling of power. In the army, there were many men like that. Some beat their
men, some would brawl and bellow, bragging about their conquests, while others would enjoy a man’s terror in silence. They would stand quietly and observe as a man shivered and shook. They
are the ones to watch, the ones who will tease and torment, and twist the knife a little deeper, enjoying every squeal of terror, every rictus of agony.

I knew a man like that at Calais, a man called Henry the Tun. The centener.

At Crécy, I was a vintener myself, responsible for twelve men by the end of the campaign. They were all that was left of two vintaines of forty archers under our banneret, Sir John de
Sully, but my boys were badly mauled during the flight to the north. We were harried all the way from Paris by the French King’s armies, and the people of the towns came out and attacked us
as we drew near. There was never a spare yard that wasn’t fought for.

After Crécy, things eased a bit. We had destroyed the French on that battlefield, and when we finally left it we were filled with joy. The country was ours, with all the wealth. Even poor
archers became rich. And we soon had more men arrive to fill the gaps. My own vintaine needed new blood more than most, and we had seven new fellows join us. But then I was struck down with a
fever, and I had to take to a wagon. My men were sent on before me, and I rattled along in their wake like some kind of pathetic infant, with only a pair of brothers to help me: Bill and Walter
from Southampton. They were recent recruits, sent to help win Calais after our losses on the long march. I didn’t know them, nor the men we travelled with, and, at the first opportunity, I
left the wagon and took up a horse. I wanted to rejoin my men. With the brothers, I tagged along behind another vintaine that was passing, and soon I was introduced to their centener: Henry the
Tun.

He was a short, thickset man, with a heavy belly that stuck over his belt like a sack of oats bound at the middle. His face was round and ruddy, with cheeks as red as the apples that made his
favourite drink, cider. A nose like a plum, and jowls like a mastiff’s gave him a pleasing appearance. He looked jolly, a genial, jovial man like a Bacchus come to earth. His eyes were
constantly creased as though in great humour – but when a man looked into them, it was clear that there was nothing there. No kindness, no humility, only an overweening greed and desire.

When we were within eyesight of the town, he sat back on his mount and breathed deeply, before pointing to it and grinning at me and his own vinteners. ‘There, boys, that’s where
we’ll make our fortunes,’ he said.

One of his sergeants, a man called Weaver, looked over at the town. Most of us in that army were good at grumbling. We’d fought all the way from the coast down to Paris and, like I say,
been chased away from there all the way to Crécy. There we won our famous victory, it is true, but the cost was high. We lost many friends, good friends, on that march homewards, so we felt
entitled to grumble.

Anyway, Weaver was there at the front with Henry, and as he looked out over the town and the army, he drew his face into a sneer. ‘The King wants that? I wouldn’t pay a clipped penny
for the whole place.’

‘Shows how much you know of things like that,’ Henry said. He sat back in his saddle, gazing ahead of him, that smile on his thick lips, like a glutton presented with a whole roasted
suckling pig. ‘It’s the King’s delight, is Calais, and should be yours, too, Weaver. It’ll be an easy sail home from here. You can almost see England over there.’

Weaver, he just grunted. All we could see was a greyish mess. Could have been clouds, but more likely it was the thick smoke rising from all about the town. When you have a few thousand
Englishmen in an army, you have a mess. Weaver wasn’t stupid enough to argue. We’d all seen others who’d argued with Henry. They hadn’t done so well.

Anyway, Weaver, he said nothing. I thought it was because he didn’t want to be beaten, but when I looked at him, I saw why. He was staring down at a figure by the side of the road. A young
woman.

Like I said, war is a horrible thing for the poor souls who work the land it smothers. That’s what war does, it engulfs whole lands; and the poor people who live there,
they’re like cattle. Captured, milked dry, and killed. Of course, for women and children, it’s worse. They are little better than slaves to an invading army, and any can be taken or
slain on a whim. I saw enough of that kind of casual brutality on the way to Calais. Even English boys who were there to help support the fighters were often beaten for no reason, just because the
soldiers knew they could.

This girl had been brought up well. She had soft skin on her hands, and her knees were unmarked. She wasn’t a peasant’s child, I could see that from the first. But her clothing was
rough, tattered stuff that would have suited a maid from a plague vill. You know what I mean. We’ve all heard of folk who’ve lost their families since the plague. In France, I’ve
seen worse: girls and boys without their fathers, who’ve had to fend for themselves for months until they starved. All with swollen bellies, their faces pinched and grey. Well, this girl had
the same ragged clothing, but her belly was flat, her face still haughty. It was a wonder she had not learned humility yet, I thought. After all, a girl with that kind of manner appeals to many
men.

You can imagine how a girl like her would have found life under the English boot. She had been brought up to enjoy all the finer things: good food, wine, servants. Suddenly she was homeless,
wandering with the refugees trying to escape the English. Us.

Who was she? No one. She had been raised in some town or other – mayhap it was Caen – and was daughter to a fuller. He was a good, kind man, apparently, but, as our army approached,
he insisted that she should leave with her mother and two brothers. He was to remain to look after the town with the rest of the militia, so she said when I got to speak with her later. She and her
mother and brothers took a heavy purse of coin, and set off on their way.

But God had set His face against her.

‘Friend, you are feeling out of sorts,’ said Nicholas. ‘Wait, let another tell his story, and take some ale and a rest.’

‘I am fine,’ Janyn snapped. He wiped a hand over his face, remembering, and his voice grew softer as he looked about him at the expectant faces. ‘It is a hard story,
though.’

‘We have heard such tales before. The men lusted after her, and—’

‘You think to tell my story for me?’ Janyn snarled.

‘No, I—’

‘Listen and you may learn something new about men,’ Janyn stated.

He could see her again in his mind’s eye as he spoke. A lovely girl, she was. Slim and perfect as a birch. In her life, he knew, she was raised to wealth. There was
nothing unwholesome about her. Nothing spoiled, unlike the devastated country they had marched through. Janyn had seen war in all its forms, but to walk about a country in which every farm had been
burned, all the stored crops stolen or ravaged, all the cattle driven off or slain – to walk about that ravaged landscape hurt his soul. He felt as though he was taking part in the systematic
rape of the country.