Many an encounter and many an assault was made, by the low-born and the high . . .
Life of the Black Prince by Chandos Herald
For weeks, Squelette moved and watched the roads that led out of Flanders towards the English camp outside Calais.
She moved about the country, changing her watching place each day. Some spots she visited often: a collapsed windmill, a burned-out cottage, an abandoned forge. Others – the hollow of an ancient yew tree carpeted with spiky needles and home to fat, black-shelled beetles who crawled across her face in the night – she used only once.
She stayed away from towns, where she knew her ragged, bone-thin appearance frightened people. She lived simply, but well, off the land. She drank cold fresh water from the streams. She ate berries from brambles and elder trees and filled her pack with nuts from a hazel. She stripped and sharpened young hazel branches and used them to spear fish she caught in stick-traps baited with maggots from rotting toadstools. When the fish did not come, she ate the maggots herself.
And all the while she watched the roads.
She learned which days the butchers came, and which days the cheese merchants. She tracked the cloth-sellers and the armourers. She knew which day pigs were driven along the roads to the market in Villeneuve, and which day the alewives brought their barrels.
She discovered which towns put guards by their gates, and how far they ventured. She established how far outside Villeneuve English patrols would come, and how they were ordered to march to defend themselves.
She learned the routes of the roads and the rhythms of their traffic, so that eventually they grew as familiar to her as her own breath. Until they almost bored her.
She planned her kills and carried them out precisely.
When her home in Valognes was first sacked by the English, she had thought it would be the English on whom she would take her revenge. And one Englishman in particular.
What she had seen since then had changed her mind. She would have her own revenge. But there was so much more to do first.
The English king and his knights brought terror and misery to the people of France. The French king and his knights had let him do it.
The merchants of Flanders and England grew richer every day, feeding the war monster. The French did nothing to drive them away.
It was not a war between peoples. It was a war against the people.
So before she avenged herself, she fought for the people. As though she were the people. She fought not only for the people she loved who were dead, but those whom she had never known, who had also been beaten and robbed and burned and raped and killed.
She picked her targets carefully, and fell upon them like a wraith.
She cut knights’ throats when they strayed into the woods to piss.
She shot a grain merchant through the eye with her crossbow while he changed a broken cart-wheel.
She made traps in the road for horses so they fell on their riders and broke their ribs and spines.
After each strike, she made a nick on her thin arm with the fat kind man’s knife. A tally to tell the story of her war. She picked the scabs to be sure that the lines scarred. She counted them daily like rosary beads, saying a prayer as she ran her fingers over the raised purple scar tissue. Asking God to watch her do His work. Asked for enough time to fill her whole arm with lines.
Certain things made her especially vengeful.
The charcoal burners’ workshop in the forest clearing, where dark blood trails led to the shallow graves of a family of seven.
The village church with all its windows smashed and the dead priest hung up by one ankle from the roof beams and left to die. The flies buzzing around his face, gross and black with his whole body’s blood.
And a kidnapping. One autumn morning, a mile at most from the siege town, she watched a group of young women with a few thin, bare-footed boys and girls clinging to their skirts, hurrying away from Calais. She guessed they had either escaped or been ejected from the besieged city.
Refugees.
She had been one, once.
As they hurried along the road to the south, they were caught up and surrounded by a party of riders from the direction of the siege camp.
She was too far back from the road to hear what was said. But she saw pleading. Heard the shrieks when two of the women were pulled away from the group and roughly bundled across the backs of the riders’ horses.
Felt the air pierced by their wails as they held out their hands to their children.
She wanted to help. She knew she could not. The road was busy with archers and men-at-arms. They would kill her. Or worse.
So she fixed in her mind the image of the leader of the riders. Memorised the outline of the body. The face with its thin patchy bristles and its black eyes. The huge, round shoulders and torso.
The Flemish-style goedendag. Meaty arms. A booming laugh.
A woman.