Chapter 16

The Spectre of the Earl

We jumped out of the boat as it passed alongside the stone pillar at the mouth of the Steyne. We battled to the shore through the waist deep water and struggled up the bank, streaming wet, running straight for the castel, by the priory of All Hallows, over the pagan mounds at Hoggen Green, splashing carelessly through the filth in the gutters past the gateway of St. Mary’s de Hogges and the dense pack of new houses thrown up in the shelter of its walls. Skirting the great wattle feasting hall the great King Henri had built to receive the Gaelic kings, we came to the castel ditch. Scrabbling down its scum-covered side, we slid dangerously close to the rank waterline, running upstream against the flow of the river Salach—the ‘shit-brook’—and reached the place, clogged with straw and broken hogsheads, where a tumble of stone from the rampart had yet to be cleared, some of the blocks breaching the turgid surface of the oozing river. We skipped across and up the eroded bank to run along the thin blade of ground between the inner top of the ditch and the castel wall, barely a hand’s breadth wide, our speed keeping us level. We stopped at the place where the wooden strut of the overhanging garderobe projected from the wall. Without speech or sign, I bent and made a mesh of my fingers. Hamund, without breaking stride, stepped into my webbed hands, and I heaved upwards. He leapt and grabbed at the timberwork, his feet pushing off the excrement-stained wall until he was perched in the beams. He reached down, and I leapt to find his hand with my own. He hauled me up until I found footing, crouching between the boards above.

‘Ho—coming up’, I shouted, and we swung ourselves inwards, finding the privy hole, our heads poking up into the small wooden space—Hamund in a simultaneous movement appearing from the second hole—and we clambered out like rats. The sight, which had caused many surprised, laughing insults in the past, was now a commonplace one to the sergenz of the wall walk. But there were none there to pass remark or make jest. The yard was busy with men moving around with purpose.

We raced on regardless, pushing on to carry the news to the great hall—the name ‘Pembroke’ on our lips. But the Justiciar was already apprised, word having come in with riders from lookouts farther up the coast. The place was upended in a fury of sweeping out, opening the shutters, setting the tallow candles, building up the fire and clearing away tables to lay out benches, the finest rugs being brought out from storage, the best jugs for the best wine with studded glassware and silver plate being set with ostentation by the dais. De Lacy paced around sternly, bawling orders, upbraiding his cup-bearers, who were racing around with charged trays or changing frantically into the finest surcoats of the household thrown at them by Saer the steward. Angret and a horde of other servants padded around each other, adroitly, their movements recalling the swift co-ordination of flocking starlings—putting the room to rights. The Lady Monmouth, seeing us loitering at the door, shouted sharply.

‘Garsunz, fly to the markets and order a halt to the day’s selling. Not a gigot, a crannock or a lamprey to be sold until our cook comes to take what’s needed. We need to lay in store for a feast—market prices will be paid’. She turned to cuff a cup-bearer who had jostled past, preoccupied with tying the leather fasteners of his surcoat.

As we crossed the yard, Hamund tugged at my sleeve, making the most of the urgent hive of action as sergenz and garsunz jogged around shifting hogsheads and mounds of hay that had been cluttering the castel bailey since the early harvests had come in.

‘Not to worry—the cook will get his vittles’.

We ducked through the shadow of the gate and over the castel ditch, and instead of turning west for the market, Hamund pushed me quickly to the east, passing the big houses close to the castel. At the Dam Gate, we climbed the steps to the parapet and ran along the wall top to the angle where the wall reached the edge of the tide and turned west to run along the riverfront. A projecting wooden hoarding had been built here, overhanging the wall to protect defenders and allow them to drop missiles below. The men-at-arms had all left their posts to crowd the parapet farther down towards the quay, along with the nobility and wealthy of the civitas. We scaled the side of the hoarding, dragging ourselves up onto the broad, sloping timber roof. A band of urchins had beaten us to it, perched close to the edge watching the river—ragged, hungry-looking creatures. ‘Fendinn’, Hamund growled at them, waving his hands upwards as if to shoo a pack of gulls. They poured over the other side, shinning out of view like startled cats. We took their place, sitting on the shingles, the incline of the roof giving us a good view of the river downstream of the quay.

We watched the cog come up the river slowly, negotiating sandbars, the smaller boats of the city coming out to swarm around, guiding the ship in as far as it could go. We saw the anchor drop into the water, a tiny plume of white froth erupting against the dark, bulbous hull. There would be time now as the boats ferried the Earl and his entourage to shore. Hamund reached in beneath his léine and pulled out a heavy flap of leather, tooled with scenes of a hunt.

‘Gautier’s skin?’ I said, fear fringing the question.

‘Our skin’, he replied, keeping low and pulling the cork bung out with his teeth. We drank then, feckless, both complicit in our actions. The warm wine exploded with its flavour into mouths more accustomed to dull milk and plain oats. I sat back against the warm wooden shingles, propped on my elbows, listening to the sounds below, the nervous, excited edge of disobedience adding to the tumult and anticipation that had descended on the civitas.

‘He’s in a fury, the seignur’, I said. Hamund laughed lightly.

‘There is no love lost between the Earl and the Justiciar’, Hamund said, echoing something I had learned through a hundred ill-defined, unspoken signs during my time in the castel.

‘What is the cause of their quarrel?’ I asked.

‘I would not say quarrel’, Hamund said, searching, and he switched to the Gaelic tongue, ‘rather, competition. The Earl, at great personal risk and expense, was the chief man in winning back Mac Murchada’s kingdom. He secured the submission of Veixfjord, Vadrafjord and Duiblinn and married Mac Murchada’s daughter, and now that Mac Murchada is dead, he claims the kingdom as his own. The Earl is no favourite of the great Henri, however. The poor fool was against Henri’s mother in the war of succession many years ago, and Henri will never countenance him to reign unchecked on this island. De Lacy is the king’s man, and he is here to check the ambitions of the Earl and to expand the reach of Henri where he can’.

Some of this I knew, but I listened with interest to Hamund, a boy I had trusted as a source of information about the streets and families of the civitas. To hear him speak so clearly of the alliances of the great men of the foreigners was strange and revealing. I looked at him anew with a guarded glance. This was a new Hamund, speaking not like the easy youth but as a man of court, and I remembered that his father had been one of the lagmen of the civitas.

A silence fell, and we drank in turns from the skin. The wine worked through me, the flush spreading across my face, soaking down my back—recklessness, lightness. I lay my head on the wooden slats of the roof and gazed upwards. The clouded sky a maze of bright and dark, knots and whorls of grey shafted through with whiter patches of cloud, backlit and silvery from the light of an invisible sun. The pennant of Henri, hoisted above us on a pole fixed to the hoarding, twitched fitfully in the uncertain breeze, and for a time, we contemplated the sky and said little.

A splash and high animal screeching brought us back to earth. We looked down to see the horses being lowered with ropes into the sluggish current. The animals, tethered in close to the hulls of the small waiting boats, were swum to the nearest bank of the river. They came in towards the Steyne, the same way we had splashed not an hour previous, the horses finding their footing in the shallows and pulling the light boats around in thrashing arcs as the men tried to calm them. A crowd was building on the shore as men from the army billeted outside of the walls gathered, laughing and jeering amiably at the sight. We watched the spectacle for a time, quietly, bathed in a feeling of freedom, of escape from the world below.

‘It was the Earl who first came here’, Hamund said after a long silence, and this pulled me out of a heavy reverie, ‘on the feast day of St. Matthew the Apostle’. He seldom spoke of the harrowing of the civitas, the murder of his people. I had never imposed upon him to ask.

‘When he came it was with a great force of men, led by Mac Murchada over the mountains from Gleann da Locha to evade the armies of Ua Conor. The Earl of Pembroke, Ricardus fitz Gilbert de Clare, spoke to us volubly at the gate. Lorcán was out amongst them, his crozier in hand and a great agitation of horses and men churning up behind the Earl. Our men were ready to fight, and a large fleet was expected from the King of the Island of Manannán, who is our friend and who would fight at our side.

‘As the Earl spoke with our lagmen, entreating and promising, that grey-eyed terror, that malformed churl—Raymond le Gros de Carew—he and a band of villains rode the length of our walls in stealth when our eyes were elsewhere. Raymond spied a weakness in our wall—the bastard. He rode across our ditch, unheeded, and wrenched a hanging beam downwards, lashing his reins around it and walking his horse backwards, calling for his fellows to do the same until the wall came away in a shuddering cascade, filling our fosse in part, and he rode in with his marauders while our men kept good faith by the gate and were only alerted by the screams of our women and children rushing all in panic down towards the quay as the brutes, those bastard abominations, those hell-aborted ghouls, rode their huge beasts through our fences and houses, killing without pause, without hesitation, under hoof and flail and sword and spear. They drove on until our people waded out into the river. The men, hearing this, ran back into the town to give battle, leaving the gate unguarded. The Earl then showed that treachery was in his heart from the outset, and his hordes rushed into the open breach, flooding around Lorcán, who stood in their midst, his arms raised, crying out, shouting with all of his strength, “Pitoye pitoye, touchez pas aux innocenz”. I can see him now, as I saw him then from the wall, his crozier held aloft, riders thundering around him, funnelling together to cross the causeway over the town ditch, hustled and buffeted to his knees. Then he cried out in desperation, “Canterbury, Canterbury, Canterbury”, until he disappeared from view in a haze of dust and blurring horses. Hascaluf led many to the boats, and they fled even as the attackers waded out into the surf after them. Most of them escaped to the Island of Manannán or the Northern Isles.

‘The sack lasted a full day, until the Earl could regain control of his men—our people huddled together within the enclave of the cathedral as, outside, the Engleis plundered our homes and killed and defiled any they came upon. Our great King Hascaluf fleeing by sea in shame and distress. Lorcán returned to us then and led us in prayer, incessant prayer inside of the cathedral, and we drowned out the sounds of the pillage with song’.

Hamund spoke with authority, and, between discourses, he drank with viciousness—uncaring of danger or reproach. His cheeks flushing red in his fine face. He looked at me with his eyes bright before a guard fell back in place, a couvre-feu over a hot ember, and he corrected his demeanour. But in that instant I caught sight of something burning in that otherwise blond and easy face, the germ of a fire. But then it was gone, and we were at ease once again, the servant and the slave.

‘Why Canterbury?’ I asked. ‘Why did he cry out for Canterbury?’

Hamund smiled bitterly. ‘Because we are of that diocese—not of Ard Mhaca, not fettered to any Gaelic Church. We were under the protection of Canterbury and the great martyred bishop, Thomas à Becket. Oh, how Lorcán wept when he heard the news of that great man’s murder in his cathedral a short time later, while Duiblinn was bridled and scoured and my people dogs beneath the table. Or bitches in the straw. Lorcán wept the tears of one who has lost all, on his knees for a week without food or water, knowing that the sack of the civitas and the death of the bishop were wrought by one and the same hand—by the mover in the dark, the unseen sword, the insatiable and unloved braggart Henri’.

As he spoke, we caught glimpses through gaps in the houses of a cortege moving up from the quay. A noble, surrounded by five mounted men, the horses preceded by a small parcel of servants all led by the Justiciar’s steward with his halberd held out before him, parting the crowds. They progressed uphill from the river, wending through the close streets, and an expectant mass followed on and converged from the little laneways and from the dark doorways to stand, bowed, in welcome.

We watched from the heights until they drew close to the castel.

‘Come’, said Hamund, and we shinned down the hoarding wall and ran back along the deserted wall walk, racing for the castel.