The Fatal Child

P
ART
I
T
HE
L
ANTERN

he wall was down, the breach taken. Buildings were on fire. In the courtyards the men had turned to murder. They peered through armoured eye-slits at the figures who ran before them. They bellowed in their visors with the lust of the chase. Screams hung like the smoke in the air.

Among the sheds near the palace gardens some fugitives were cornered. They were servants – unarmed scullions and barrow-boys. But the attackers in their madness saw only living flesh. They hunted after them through the little rooms, overturning the pots and barrows and flinging aside the stacks of hoes to catch the squirming, rag-clad bodies that hid there, and to hack and hack and hack and stand grunting, even laughing, over the bloody figures at their feet.

One of the sheds had been barricaded. An armoured man, covered in dirt and blood, was flinging himself at the door. It shuddered at each rush but inside there were bodies pressed against it. It did not
give way. The attacker roared like a drunk,
‘Here, here!’
and threw himself at the door again. Others were beginning to gather, clutching weapons that dribbled with fresh blood.

‘Fire it!’ cried one.

‘An axe, an axe!’ bellowed the madman at the door. Another yelled and lunged at a little window where a pale face had shown itself fleetingly from within. His blade prised the shutter open. He reached through to flail at the people inside. They must have recoiled, for suddenly the door was giving and the men battering at it were tumbling forward in a clatter of arms and swearing.

More cries, from behind them now! Another group ran up, yelling ‘
Quarter!
’ in voices already hoarse from shouting. They were armoured, too, with mail and open helmets, but carried only staffs. Frenziedly they seized on the knights in the doorway and pulled them back.

‘Quarter!’ screamed one, kneeling on the chest of the fallen madman with his nose an inch from the man’s helm. ‘In the King’s name!’

The madman thrashed and bellowed but his sword was gone and he was pinned. The newcomers clustered around their leader, blocking the doorway. One looked within.

‘They’re alive still,’ he said.

‘Quarter!’ cried the man on the fallen knight’s chest. He was a fat, red-faced fellow with greying brows who glared at the murderous men before him. ‘In the name of the King.’

‘King?’ groaned the knight on the ground. ‘Who calls on the King?’

‘Thomas Padry, King’s chancellor,’ said the fat man, sweating in his helmet and coat of iron. ‘The King promised me every man, woman or child over whom I laid my staff.’

The knight was silent for a moment, as if the things that made him human were reassembling slowly in his brain.

‘He did,’ he muttered. ‘He did. Let me up.’

Slowly they picked themselves off the ground together and looked at one another. The bloody knight towered over the fat chancellor. His face, enclosed in his helm, could not be seen. His surplice was gone, torn from him in the fight, or perhaps he had never worn one. His shield was gone, too. There was no device on him but the streaks of blood on his mail.

The chancellor stood his ground and held his staff. All around them the air drifted with smoke and the sounds of screams.

The knight bowed his head and turned. ‘Come,’ he said to his fellow murderers. ‘There is more to do.’ With a slow clatter of arms and the faceless glances of helms they followed him away.

Thomas Padry stood at the door to the shed. He could see, above the line of the rooftops, the battlements of the great round keep. Up there, tiny but clear, the dark heads of the defenders moved quickly in and out of the cover while the delicate
flick, flick
of arrows flew around them. Down below there were shouts and the sound of running. Beside him someone
was giggling – a high, hysterical sound that broke into sobs. Some of his companions had begun to coax the survivors out of their refuge and into the dreadful sunlight. Others were checking the remaining sheds, pausing cautiously in the doorways and calling within – into the seeping, responseless dark where murder had been done.

He leaned against the doorpost, shaking with exhaustion. His throat was hoarse and his skin was soaked. He felt the weight of his armour settling heavily on him. Armour! By the Angels, he hated it almost as much as the things it was supposed to protect him from! The padded leather coat rucked and heaved with every move he made, rubbing his skin sore in a dozen places. And the shirt of iron rings he wore over that dragged him down so that his shoulders and knees sagged. He could not run so much as waddle, and he could not see so much as peer through the frame of his helmet like a poor carthorse trying to look past its blinkers. He was sweating like a roast in an oven. He could have drunk a bottle – no, a butt – of water without stopping for breath. Come to that, he was short of breath as well. But there was no time to rest or think or drink. There was more to do.

One of his men hurried white-faced from a shed, propelled by something he had seen there. He dropped to his knees. A second later he began to vomit.

Padry heaved himself from the doorpost and lumbered over to the kneeling man. He knew he should have told them. He
had
told them, but he should have told them better, the things that really
happened when men had iron in their hands. These boys were not warriors. They were clerks and priests who spent their days copying his documents. They had volunteered when he had appealed to them, but they had had no idea what it would be like. And it was too late to tell them now. Now they knew, and they would never forget. They had seen men pinned to doors by arrows through the ear or tongue or testicles. They had seen a babe still mewing bloodily on the point of a pike. They would carry the images in their heads for ever, as he did.

All he could do for them was …

‘Be glad if your stomach turns, Master Ricard,’ he said, patting the clerk’s shoulder and speaking in what he hoped was a kindly, jovial voice. ‘For it is a sure sign that you are still with us.’

The man climbed slowly to his feet, pointing into the shed. He could not speak. Padry, who had no wish to look on this particular horror himself, took him gently by the arm and steered him away.

‘The one in there has no need of us, I take it,’ he said.

‘No, master,’ grunted the young man. ‘No.’

‘Well then,’ said Padry, as cheerfully as he could, ‘let us busy ourselves with those who have. And if your heart is the heavier, why, your belly is the lighter now. So you may make the same speed as before!’