They were all dizzy from too much winter ale, for that heavy drink was a meal unto itself. Fifteen men had volunteered to come to Venice with him. Raynar needed only three. There was nothing distinguishing the men to make the choice easy. None of them had wives or warm homes for the winter. They had all crewed with him. They all had the heavy shoulders and arms of oarsmen. They were all experienced in bows, slings, and knife fighting, and they had all killed Normans. All of them could speak more than one language, and could read a bit, if not write.
"There they are," slurred Raynar as he pointed to some shepherds crooks hung on hooks behind a stack of seasoned bow staves in Hereward's armoury. "Pull them out. The strings should be hung with them.” The bawdy calls at the sight of the crooks came fast and humourous.
"Cor, Ray, you said we wus to be pilgrims, not shepherds."
"What, have none of you heathens ever listened to the Christian holy rollers. Their demi-god Christ was a shepherd."
"No e wasn't. E wus a fisherman."
"A carpenter."
"That's Romanized crap," called out another man on wobbly legs. "To the Christians I met from D’Oc in the south of France, he was a prince. The son of a king deposed by some Emperor. And Prince Jesus married Princess Mary and their daughter was the great, great, great grandmother of King Clovis. Now since I am a descendant of said Clovis, that makes me descended from the gods. And that is why you should take me with you to Venice."
"Why, so you can be burned as a heretic?" laughed his friend.
"Like to see them try."
"Stop all this talk of roasting meat. It's making me hungry."
"Got em. There's only four crooks."
"I count sixteen if you include Ray."
The men all groaned at the pun.
"That explains why only Ray and three others. There are only four of these bow staffs."
"Exactly," said Raynar. "We can't take anything with us that marks us as targets for thieves or marks us as dangerous men. We must travel dressed in homespun and look like pilgrims. No gold, no silver, no steel. Just a woman's kitchen knife.” He held up his Valkyrie knife, which was nothing more than a common fish filleting knife, and the others whipped out their own Valkyrie knives and howled like wolves.
"Shhh, Shhh, shush. You'll wake up the guards," one of them slurred. Everyone laughed. The guards had been pouring the ale.
"You said no steel. What about arrow points?"
"Bog iron fishing points, with ribbons of lead if we need to add weight," replied Raynar. "And a belt that becomes a sling, weighted with slinger shot so it can be whipped around and used as a garrote."
"And a rough wool farmer's cloak," said the very tall man beside Raynar, "with a very deep hood to hide our faces. Sounds like the bad old days in Sherwood Forest."
"Right you lot." Raynar slurred. "The best three shots with one of these, ugh, bows, get to come. You lot run the match for yourselves. I have to lie down before I fall down."
It took them a while to figure out how to string the shepherd's crooks as bows. Raynar watched them through the slits of his eyes. He had first designed this bow when he was about twelve and too small to porter lead down from the lead mines, so he had helped the old shepherd up in the high meadows above Peaks Arse.
He chuckled at the wisdom of the miners who had named that cleft and cave system. When the wind blew it sounded like the very peaks were farting at the wind gods. He must have dozed because suddenly he was dreaming of the sound of Peaks Arse. No, it was just that the squabbling was finished and the contest was finished, and men were laying about him snoring in that loud way of men after too much ale.
"Who won," his whispered question came out sounding like another snore.
"Buck, Flint, and Ned," came the answer from a half a dozen lips but all in different orders so it took Raynar a while to figure the names out.
"Good choice," replied Raynar.
"Only ones who could hit the barn door, never mind the target. Effing bows. You did that on purpose."
Raynar rolled over and smiled to himself. Of course he had. There was no way he was going to play favourites with such loyal men. And this had been more fun than drawing straws or tossing dice, and had taken much more ale. Too much ale. His head was swimming so he lay back down.
* * * * *
"I created the first of these crook-bows to be used by shepherds or porters," Raynar explained. It was time to train these men in them. "I was sure I was going to make a fortune from making them. It hadn't crossed my mind that shepherds and porters never had much in the way of coin. Neither lot could afford to spend much on weapons, so they used slings. Besides, if you sling a stone, you don't have to run and fetch it. You just pick up another. Not like an arrow."
He showed them how to string it as a bow for maximum power, and how hold it planted at a slight angle to the ground so that when you drew it, the arrow would be horizontal, and centered in the bowing portion of the staff. Once they understood all of that, they quickly became proficient with the cumbersome thing.
"The staff is strong, for anyone who walks miles in rough country under load needs a stout staff. Now look down at the foot of the thing. Grab it and twist it and pull top and bottom apart." They all did so and the foot of the staff came away, and revealed a dagger blade fixed into the bottom of the staff. "You see, with a twist and a pull you turn a staff into a pike. The other end is the crook. It is not just lambs necks that you can hook with the crook, but parts of men as well."
"Oye, Ray, it's bloody marvelous. All those things in one innocent looking staff."
"Well, the bow is a bad bow, the pike is a bad pike, the hook is a bad hook, and the staff is a bad staff, but it is all those things at the same time, and it does look innocent." He spun around and loosed his arrow at the target shield propped up on a stool against the barn wall. The arrow did not hit the center of the shield, but it knocked the heavy shield off the stool. "The bow has power enough for an armour piercing arrow, and that means it has range enough to keep you well away from the danger."
They practiced a while with the crook-bow, but then their heads began to swim again, so they practiced with the sling instead. It was a typical looking shepherds sling made from long ribbons of linen scraps sewn together, but with a few loops so that it could be worn around your waist as a belt. There were hidden pockets at each end, just big enough for a few coins or a few lead shot. With the lead shot in the pocket, the sling could be swung around and became a hitting weapon. Or if you needed a true aim with the sling, you could use the round lead shot instead of a stone.
All of these men knew slings, and had practiced with slings. They were a good alternative to small bows with light arrows. Fast to shoot. Dangerous with a true aim. Deadly if you are lucky enough to hit a head. And endless stones to use in them, unless you were in the muddy lands where Frisians normally lived. A peasant's weapon, and not worth threpence in a market, so not worth thieving.
They already had their own Valkyrie knives. By tradition all men who rode in bowman wolfpacks were given these knives by their women. Raynar's own knife had been Anske's, his first wife. Just a cheap kitchen knife designed for filleting fish, but it was its shape that made it so useful. Long, thin, tapered and very sharp. Long enough and thin enough to stab through cheap mail, or through the eye holes of a helmet's visor.
The only other weapon they would take with them was the small wooden crosses given to each by the monastery. "Not likely," said Flint as he looked at the symbol of Christ the martyr. "I'm no Christian."
"You will wear it always around your neck," replied Raynar. "And that you are no Christian is the best reason to wear it. As we get closer to Rome, it will become more dangerous to admit that you are not a Christian. Now look at the bottom of the cross. See the squiggles. Don't let them come to harm. That is why you must wear it hung around your neck, to keep the bottom from coming to harm. Show that squiggle at almost any large monastery and you will be housed and fed, and in some of them you may ask for the gift of a few small coins, or ask for a message to be sent across Christendom on your behalf."
"Now I know why the Christians pray to these little crosses," said Flint as he carefully pulled the crosses chord over his head. "They truly do stop hunger."
"How will we carry our arrows?" asked Ned.
"In our bed rolls out of sight."
"Must we walk all of the way?" asked Buck. "I am a seaman."
"When we are offered rides on carts or barges or donkeys, we will accept them. Otherwise we walk. The pilgrimage routes have hostels spaced a day's slow walk apart. We are young and healthy, so we will walk past many of those hostels without stopping."
"Ray, I'm still a bit fuzzy about why we are going. Not that I need a reason cause it sounds like a good adventure. Just tell me it is about gold, if you don't want to tell me the truth."
"We are delivering a scroll from one abbey to another. Nothing more. I will carry it with my maps in a scroll pipe in my sleeping roll. If I am crippled or killed, then you must continue on with it that pipe to the abbey in Venice and hand it to the Abbot, and to no other."
"No gold then," complained Ned.
"Not even silver. Just a long and dangerous walk,” Raynar told them as he showed them his pipe, and the scroll of names, and the maps, and began to show them how to read the maps by pointing out which route they were taking.
* * * * *
It rained the day they left for Venice. Rained hard. How many times had Raynar seen men off on this road. English men. English exiles on their way to make a new life in the East. All of his little group were tired before they began. Roas had ridden Raynar hard last night, and the other men had suffered similar fates. They turned and waved to the monks. There was no one else there to see them off. The Count wanted no remarkable attention to be given to these four pilgrims.
Four turned out to be a good small number for a group of pilgrims. They had only walked five miles when a worthy carter offered them a ride that took them ten more miles. True, his horse was slow, but it was slightly faster than walking, and saved boot leather.
After the cart turned off the road, they walked for miles to a river village, where they were offered a ride on a barge, and more walking, and eating and sleeping and barging and walking and carting and walking and the days passed by and by and by. It was wonderful scenery the whole way, and since they were walking south it seemed warmer each day, and the spring blossoms seemed further along each day. On the tenth day they saw the Alps, but they did not know that they were the Alps at first, because they looked just like white clouds on the horizon.
On the eleventh day they began to ask at each church for the pilgrimage route to Salzburg. The farmer who pointed out the main fork in the road also told them that the clouds were not just clouds, but clouds surrounding snow covered peaks.
"Jesus," hissed Flint. They had all been trying their best to use Christian names in their curses, just to get in practice for pretending to be Christians. "How tall do ya think they are."
"They are the bigger than those I saw in Scotland," replied Raynar, "and those were almost a mile high. At least that is what the Scots told me, but according to their women, a Scot's six inches is only five inches of true measure."
Laughter was how they kept their mind off endlessly putting one foot in front of another. Raynar's longest march had been just last year, when he had been captured along with other archers in the New Forest, and marched all the way to the new castle on the River Tyne. That had been about two weeks of slow trudge, roped to other men, some of whom had no boot or were weak. He had just walked twice that distance. At least twice.
The lads wanted to climb up off the pilgrimage road and walk along some of the low ridges so that they could better see the Alps, but Raynar vetoed the idea. Despite his own eagerness to see the view, his own first rule for this mission was to take no unnecessary risks or detours until the list of names was in the Abbot's hands in Venice.
A few days later, in Salzburg, they took a full day of rest while they waited for news about the mountain passes from travelers coming north from Venice. There were no travelers. Was that because it was too early in the year for travelers to be heading north, or because the passes were closed, or both? They went out from the monastery and into the town in search of an answer.
Of course they were laughed at. They had another day of easy walking south along the valley to Radstadt before they would hear any news about the passes. So that is what they did. Of course an easy day for the locals was exhausting for them, and after a late start they arrived in Radstadt after dark. Dark came early at the bottom of these steep valleys, because the sun dropped behind the tall mountains so quickly. Spring had now left them and Winter had returned, or had never left these valleys.
* * * * *
* * * * *
The Hoodsman - Popes and Emperors by Skye Smith