Heathenesse

By D.P.G. Farrington

In 1361, an English master-of-arms tries to protect his headstrong lord during a wintry pilgrimage to fight against Europe's last pagans in the lands controlled by the Knights of the German Order (AKA the Teutonic Knights).
 

Hearing that a precious relic has been stolen, the pilgrims set out to recover it on a perilous snow-bound journey into the frozen depths of Heathenesse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Two Dogs Books
• Release date: Feb 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781739397401

D.P.G. Farrington

D.P.G. FARRINGTON writes fiction, screenplays and drama with a mix of British, Czech, and Japanese influences. He is British and lives in Tokyo, Japan. To find out more, or get in touch please visit twodogswriting.com.

Book preview

Heathenesse

D.P.G.  Farrington

Two Dogs Books

Copyright © 2024 D.P.G.  Farrington

All rights reserved

ebook edition

ISBN: 978-1-7393974-0-1

Written by D.P.G. Farrington

Book Cover Design by ebooklaunch.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This novel’s story and characters are fictitious. Certain historical institutions are mentioned, but the characters involved are totally imaginary.

Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne

Aboven alle nacions in Pruce;

In Lettow hadde he reysed, and in Ruce,

No cristen man so ofte of his degree.

– The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

Prologue: 1346

Late one August afternoon, two armies faced each other ready for battle. Thousands of men and horses were arrayed in rolling fields at the edge of a forest with banners flying for their kings, Edward and Philip, and each side claiming God for their cause.

They were not evenly matched. The flower of French knighthood and their ranks of hired Genoese crossbowmen outnumbered the English expedition by at least two-to-one.

A pair of young soldiers, Thomas, an archer, and his friend, Silas, Lord John Colville’s licensed fool, stared at the troops amassed in front of them, knowing that each glinting dot they saw in the distance was an enraged French knight encased in armour, wanting to spill the blood of an Englishman.

‘God’s holy balls,’ said the fool, ‘look at them all … we’re done for.’

Lord John took his fool everywhere, even to war. Standing at the height of a child of ten – though he was more than twice that age – Silas was unlikely to be of much use in the coming fight, but just seeing his face improved everybody’s mood. And right now, looking at all those bellicose Frenchmen in formation, Thomas needed encouragement more than ever.

‘If they take you prisoner,’ said Thomas, ‘pray they take pity on poor fools.’

Who knew how many other enemy soldiers were waiting in the wings? For Thomas and Silas, there would be no reinforcements and they could expect no quarter. A fool, even a lord’s fool, was not worth ransoming, and a mere archer was barely worth the stain on your blade.

A blast of trumpets and rumble of drums. The onslaught was about to begin.

‘See you on the other side, fool,’ Thomas said as he bounded off, scrambling to join the ranks of archers on the flank.

Silas gave a lazy salute to his friend’s departing back, ‘You and me both. War makes fools of us all.’

Stomach creasing and threatening to heave, Thomas took his place amongst his fellow bowmen, telling himself to keep it together: for Lord John, for the king – but most of all for Emily, Jack, Ned and his dog Talbot waiting for him back home. His hand shook as he pressed three arrows into the soft ground at his feet.

To steady himself, he conjured up thoughts of home, which flew to his own boyhood at a fishmonger’s stall in a narrow alley next to Crowhurst Castle.

His earliest memory: knives. Laid out in a gleaming row next to a cutting block. Gigantic hands delivering the coup de grâce with flawless economy to wall-eyed dace, graylings and tench, each begging to be thrown back to the water. In time, he grew to despise the sour smell of fish guts that lingered on everything his father touched, but he never lost his admiration for the man’s proficiency with a blade.

Another memory: swords. Besides selling fish and drinking as much as one, his father had a lucrative sideline in sharpening the skills of fighters in judicial duels. Before his body was wrecked by pain and the rotgut wine he used to dull it, and moreover while he still had a left foot, the old fishmonger had been a champion-for-hire himself, but after the accident he stuck to cutting fish and teaching men how to cut each other. The words still rang in Thomas’s head like a church bell: filleting fish and men ain’t so different.

He learned what he could of the art of bladework from his father, but it didn’t take him long to decide the family’s reeking trade was not for him.

Escape came in the form of an unruly gang of thieves who allowed him to ride off with them. Unfortunately, their outlaw dreams were grander than their capabilities. The first raid he went on was a complete disaster. A desperate scheme to rob a wagon of the king’s coin ended with a chaotic chase through a forest and the sheriff cornering him with a blunt choice at the tip of his sword: certain death by hanging, or uncertain death by duelling, with a noose-width chance of earning his freedom.

By then he had already married Emily, and had a baby on the way. It was no choice at all.

Swallowing his morals to save his neck, he became an ‘approver’, a paid informer earning one-and-halfpence a day while he fought a fistful of duels against five of his one-time companions-in-crime.

Each fighter was allowed a trainer. He picked the best he knew, an old man who ran a fish stall near the castle. His father hid any recriminations he might have harboured about his son’s chosen path behind a mask of professionalism. Father and son readied for the fight with weeks of exercises and drills. He had never known his father to be as dutiful and tender as during those preparations.

The last stage was a ritual shaving of his scalp using the sharpest blade his father possessed. Bareheaded, Thomas stood forth to accuse the gang in public and pledged to back up his words with his body using the arms laid out by the law: armour of greased leather, a wooden shield, and a newly-made club of green ash with the bark intact, tipped with an iron barb the shape of a ram’s horn.

They cleared a square for the fight in the marketplace, quite close to his father’s stall, setting up wooden posts to hold back the eager crowd. It was sport as much as justice. Amongst the blur of faces, Thomas recognised an old grey-haired man with one foot who gave him a stiff wave. He did not know it then, but that was the last time he would see the old fishmonger alive. He died quietly, after an odd sensation of rising pain drew him away to his fish stall to rest awhile and there he collapsed suddenly, at least safe in the knowledge that he had done his last work as well as he knew how.

The fights that followed were brutal. Thomas gouged eyeballs, bit noses, and spat teeth on the floor in bloody pools. He fought hard. For Emily and the unborn bulge in her belly, and to smash the shame he felt at having turned approver.

Five men cried craven before him and his ram’s-horn-shaped club, and Thomas watched all five hang. Then the sheriff kept his side of the bargain and let him go.

A smooth man dressed in fur and velvet waiting near the gaol door moved in close, offering a coin, and a word in the young fighter’s ear: Lord John Colville could use a man who can fight furious and deadly like that. The coin and the name worked their magic, transforming a dishonoured approver with no prospects into a lord’s protected man in much less time than it took to haggle over the price of a mule.

Emily could hardly believe the news, but it was true: as long as he pleased the new master, they were set for life. Ever since, he never forgot how fast fortune’s wheel had turned to send him from gaol to the lord’s castle. And he never forgot there was always a chance he could tumble right back down into a barrel of fish guts.

Another blast of horns and rumble of drums.

The enemy let fly a whooshing volley of crossbow bolts that fell in front of the English lines, pricking the grass uselessly, and the archers all realised at the same time with an excited murmur that the crossbowmen were within longbow range.

Raising his bow, Thomas nocked and loosed swiftly with the others. His arrows joined an arcing cloud that slammed the front ranks of the enemy to the earth. Panic and disorder followed as impatient French knights cut down their own crossbowmen to make way for a charge. If that heavy cavalry reached the lightly-armoured ranks surrounding Thomas, they were truly done for, just as Silas had said.

Warhorses thundered over the ground a dozen and more times, but each charge was held back by longbows and mud loosened by a recent rainstorm, until it began to feel almost one-sided, and the gently-sloped valley resembled an attempt to reap a bloody crop of arrows and French armour.

It was time to swoop in and finish the job before darkness fell. Charge! Thomas followed the others down the slope into the thick of the fray. A warlike serenity descended, instinct took over and his movements became fluid and deadly.

A screaming knight tried to lop off his arm, but he dodged and stuck the bastard right in the throat with his curved falchion. Gurgling blood, the man slumped onto him, but he sloughed the body off and moved aside, marked by the dripping kill.

A roar from all around made him climb a mound of bodies to get a better vantage point. He saw an ebbing tide of French knights disappearing into the distance. The day was theirs. Clambering down the heap of dead men, he joined a gleeful surge chasing the vanquished foe into the woods and marshes where they fell by the hundred cut down by arrow and blade.

Growing weary, Thomas slowed and saw how far he’d come from his original position. In all the confusion, he’d separated from Lord John’s men. He turned back and began to pick his way through the slain, moving past doubled-over scavengers greedily picking over the fallen, cutting off whole fingers for rings.

It was a relief that few of the dead he passed looked like his countrymen and none were short enough to be the fool. At a horse trough he did his best to wash gore from his face and just as he noticed that the horses had Lord John’s crest on browband and saddle, he heard someone shout his name. Turning towards the sound, he saw figures gathered round a fire. A little man: Silas.

The fool beamed as he offered Thomas a cup of wine.

‘Have a slurp o’ that,’ he said. ‘Captured barrels of the stuff.’

Whether it was the exhaustion of battle or the quality of the pilfered vintage, it was by far the best wine or any drink he had ever tasted. As sweet as victory itself.

+

The English royal army pushed north. Towns and cities crumbled before them. Breaking the walled city of Calais, however, took almost a year of siege and starvation. It succumbed in the end, a peace was signed and many of the English returned home. Lord John, however, smelled gold in the devastated land and decided to stay and try his luck as a mercenary, offering protection to the highest bidder, albeit usually creating the need for protection in the first place.

After a profitable year of terror and treasure, something happened that they could not protect any paying customer from, something that defeated even Silas’s powers of merry diversion. Death’s cruel scythe cut a swathe through every town and city they visited, without pity. Silas the fool no longer joked or danced – despair was his new permanent motley.

Thomas was glad when Lord John decided to head back home, but Death’s pale horse galloped in front every step of the way. Processions of penitents whipping the flesh on their backs into bloody rags passed by, towns refused beds for the night, whole villages lay deserted except for crows and wolves feasting on the dead. Death punished France for its manifold iniquities.

Landing on home shores brought no respite. Men, women, children of all degrees discovered foul black swellings growing on their bodies that burst. Just like in the days of Noah, God repented of his creation and sought to destroy man, beast, and all creeping things from the face of the earth, even in England. But not Thomas and Silas, not yet. God spared them as witnesses to follow in Death’s wake, to see and remember it all, scarring their souls deeper than any plough ever furrowed, deeper than any pit dug for the dead.

They came to a parting of the ways where the path turned off for the village of Crowhurst one way and the lord’s castle another. Bidding Silas and Lord John’s party farewell, Thomas spurred his horse forward with mounting dread as the same doleful sights he had seen along the road from France arose before him. Quiet fields of unharvested crops, howling dogs driven mad with hunger. Hollow homes and empty streets. Sights all the more chilling because he knew each missing face that should have been there to welcome his return.

Outside his own cottage at the wooded edge of the village there was a terrible silence. The front door pushed open too easily and he was startled by crows flying out, cawing an angry protest. Inside, he saw what at first looked like a heap of hastily discarded clothes, but then realised were the disturbed remains of Emily and his two sons, sheltered by the gnawed stump of her arm, with Talbot the dog curled up at their feet. A pile of ravaged woe. Thomas fell to his knees and wept.

There were no gravediggers – anyone who might have had the strength to dig had already fled.

Stealing a spade from the edge of an open pit filled with half-buried bodies, he cut deep into the ground where he had once grown carrots. Hours later, drenched in sweat and almost broken by the effort, he laid the precious remains in the hole and covered them tenderly with his own cloak and the dug-up dirt.

Then he turned away from the house and site of all those horrors and staggered off like a wounded dog looking for a place to die. Falling asleep in the heart of the woods, like the outlaw he had once tried to become, he cursed Man, God, Death and the Devil, and swore black vengeance on any creature foolish enough to cross his bitter path.

In his bleary confusion, he did not recognise the short figure who prodded him awake the next day, and drew his knife against them.

‘Let me alone, boy.’

‘It’s me, you fool, Silas. You can’t live out here like a wild man of the woods.’

Numbed into obedience, Thomas allowed himself to be led by his friend the fool back to the castle, where the lord and his household huddled in incense-shrouded chambers, praying for a swift and merciful deliverance.

Twelve years later …

I.

A longsword’s tip caught the light as the blade darted upwards, gliding through an imaginary slit in an opponent’s imaginary armour at their imaginary neck. One-two, position and thrust. Thomas demonstrated the proper technique for finishing off an armoured foe against a sturdy wooden post while his adult pupil, Stephen, the new Lord Colville, watched intently.

Another stretching lunge from Thomas and the tip of the blade hammered into the wood as if smashing through a windpipe.

To anyone who asked, Thomas had simple advice on fighting, a line he’d borrowed from his long-dead father: the most important thing was to not get hit. Also, if you could, try to give them a good wallop. There was, of course, only one guaranteed way to win every time: run like a bastard. Flee, and you’d at least live to see another sunrise, with only your honour dented.

His lordship had nowhere to run to that day. The lesson took place in a barn usually set aside for training horses, on a floor covered with rough straw.

Master and pupil squared up to each other wearing no armour except for quilted gambesons. Stephen swung his sword around nervously, warming up, while Thomas stood unmoving, blade held high, at the ready – always ready. Not yet thirty, Stephen already had almost everything a man of his times could possibly want: a good name, a castle to protect it, a fair wife and a young family to carry it into the future. But a cloud of dissatisfaction swirled around him. He lamented that he had done nothing, won nothing of his own. Everything had been served up on a hereditary platter according to his father’s plan. Knowing too little of life’s bitterness left him no taste for any of its sweetness.

The pupil chose his opening guard, gripping the sword with both hands low in front of his belly. For a few breaths, the only movement in the barn came from the glittering motes of dust dancing in the diagonal shafts of June sunlight that pierced through the barn’s high windows.

His lordship opened with a sloppy chop to the neck. Thomas parried it easily and replied with a fierce thrust to his now unguarded belly that Stephen escaped only just in time. Circling each other like angry beetles, they dodged and feinted, kicking up straw as they twisted, jabbed and cut, blades locking in a series of binds. The master broke free with a vicious kick that would not be easily forgiven if the high-ranking pupil was in a petulant mood, but Thomas was determined to teach his lordship what real fighting was like. Stephen held back, all the attack drained out of him, and that would not do.

‘Come at me!’

Social rank dissolved during weapons practice. For a short while they were something like brothers-in-arms.

‘Keep that guard up!’

Stephen’s bladework grew careless. Thomas stepped in quickly and whacked his nose with the rounded pommel of the sword with just enough force to hint at the damage he could have done. A calculated humiliation that must have hurt in more ways than one, but thank goodness nothing was broken.

‘Do you yield?’

His lordship grimaced and became frantic. Good, thought Thomas. Defeat was the keenest tutor.

The younger man overextended himself with a clumsy lunge, and the older man seized his chance, throwing him to the ground and resting the edge of his blade close to his reckless pupil’s neck.

‘Yield, my lord.’

Not a question this time. A sullen silence was the only reply. If it was a real battle, he would have to pray they were taking prisoners. Perspiration ran down Thomas’s forehead and into his eyes, slicked down his body and dripped