DE NOYES roasted him as Lescolopier had been roasted. He even used the same stake that Lescolopier had been spitted on, although he had the man tied to it with chains rather than driving it through his body; de Noyes wanted the man alive to feel the full enjoyment of the fire. De Noyes personally worked the spit, turning the peasant over the bright flames that one of his soldiers had built, until the man had screamed out the hiding place of the other villagers.
Then de Noyes simply walked away, leaving the man screaming as his flesh blistered and burned, calling to his side his company of soldiers.
Thomas stood to one side the entire time, silent, holding the girl’s corpse in his arms. De Noyes had finally handed her to him at the prospect at being able to torture one of her rapists.
Finally, in the absence of de Noyes and the soldiers, and to the accompaniment of the screams of the man roasting alive above the fire, Thomas calmly walked over to the corpses of the women, the other children and the blackened corpse of Lescolopier, and, shifting the tiny corpse into the crook of his left arm, knelt to begin the ancient ritual of the last rites.
The Lescolopiers would be heaven bound, even as their murderers would undoubtedly roast in hell.
If de Noyes didn’t give them a roasting in this life first.
DE NOYES AND his soldiers returned at sunset. With them, bound and either cursing or screaming, were some nine men and three women.
The rest, de Noyes informed Thomas, had managed to flee before he’d found their hiding place.
“Attend to the bodies of the innocent first,” Thomas murmured as the weary de Noyes dismounted. “I have already given them the last rites, and we can bury them in the churchyard tomorrow.”
De Noyes nodded. “I do give you my thanks for your presence and aid, Brother,”
he said. “Without you their souls would surely have been in purgatory.”
“Surely there must be a priest close by?” Thomas suddenly realized he hadn’t thought about the priest who, in normal circumstances, would surely have lived in the house close by the church.
De Noyes shook his head, almost too weary to speak. “Later,” he said. “When we have time to sit and eat. Did you give the girl her rites as well as the others?”
“Yes. Gilles, she will be heaven bound, surely.”
De Noyes nodded. “You will say the funeral mass for them in the morning.”
ONCE THE bodies of Lescolopier, his wife and children, and the Lady Beatrice had been washed and wrapped in the fresh linens one of the soldiers had fetched from the manor house (along with the steward and two serving boys who had remained hiding in the house’s buttery during the terror), de Noyes turned his attention to the peasant men and women. He asked them the reasons for their brutality.
None replied, staring at de Noyes with faces stony with rebellion in the flickering torchlight.
De Noyes asked them again.
Still there was no reply.
De Noyes sighed, and nodded to his sergeant.
The three women were, for the moment, hauled to one side, screaming abuse as they watched their menfolk being stripped and tied to stakes de Noyes had caused his soldiers to erect in the green.
As soon as the peasants were secured, de Noyes drew his sword, walked up to a man picked at random, and sliced off his genitals, tossing them on to the still burning fire with its still turning spit of now dead and over-roasted meat.
While the wounded man screamed and sobbed, twisting about the stake as blood pooled at his feet, de Noyes again asked the line the reason why they had attacked and killed Lescolopier and his family.
Again, no reply.
And again de Noyes strode to one of the tied men. This time he contented himself with grabbing the man’s genitals in his hand, and raising his sword, again he asked, Why?
“Because,” the man hissed between teeth clenched in pain and fear and resentment, “he was unreasonable, and too zealous in collecting his taxes. He made our lives miserable, and he deserved to die miserably.”
“As do you,” de Noyes said, and the sword dropped.
The man’s eyes popped, and his entire body went rigid as de Noyes turned away and tossed the now severed genitals on the fire.
Then de Noyes turned aside to a pile of metal bolts one of his soldiers had gathered.
Beside the pile of bolts lay a mess of dog excrement.
De Noyes leaned down, took a hammer, then a bolt, and carefully coated the shaft
of the bolt with dog shit.
Then he walked back to the line of staked men, and hammered the bolt into the belly of the first man.
He smiled as the man shrieked and sobbed, and turned back to the bolts and dog shit.
To the side Thomas watched unblinking. De Noyes was ensuring the men a painful and lingering death. The bolt shaft itself would not kill instantly, but, rather, the men would die over the next hours and days as the poison shafted into their bellies took hold.
Their deaths would not be pleasant, but then, neither had Lescolopier and his family enjoyed agreeable deaths.
As de Noyes walked away from the last screaming man, he nodded to the men holding the women.
They shouted, laughing, and dragged the women to the ground, tearing their clothes from their bodies as they did so.
There were three women and over sixty men, and Thomas understood that the women’s deaths would not be either quick or painless.
Thomas knew these women had been party to the terrible torture and murder of the Lescolopier family, yet even so their own forthcoming deaths did not leave him untouched. There had been so much hatred and death this day, so much sorrow, that Thomas felt dispirited at the thought that the day held yet more pain and death.
It had been a bad day. It would get yet.
THOMAS AND de Noyes sat under an apple tree in an orchard that had been planted just below the stone and timber manor house. Below them rose the church and cemetery, and below this still further lay the village. The orchard was a good place to rest and eat, airy enough on this hot night for comfort, and far enough from the village green that the sounds of the dying men and the brutalized women were far from the ears of the two men, if not from their hearts.
Neither Thomas nor de Noyes had wanted to rest in the close and stifling manor house.
Across the small fire they had built (more to keep the insects away than for warmth), de Noyes watched Thomas with a drawn and haggard face. He’d taken off his basinet and mail, and sat clothed only in a linen tunic and leggings.
His sword he kept close by.
Neither of the men had eaten.
“Why travel westward, Brother Thomas?” de Noyes said eventually.
“I need to reach my home friary,” Thomas said. It was not strictly true, but it was close enough.
Again de Noyes shrugged. “For your aid and comfort here, brother, I wish you Godspeed … but I doubt you will manage your journey without some misadventure.”
“Have you heard news, Gilles?”
“Oh, aye.” De Noyes glanced over to the village green. “Did you know King John
was riding south to meet the English?”
“Yes. Toward Poitiers, I believe.”
De Noyes nodded. “There has been a great and bloody battle at that place.” He gestured tiredly toward the green. “In part, this is a result of it.”
“A battle? What news?”
De Noyes grimaced, and in the firelight his eyes glinted.
“Your Black Prince—”
“I am of God, not of England.”
“Whatever. The Black Prince, may his blood stain French soil, led his forces to a mighty victory. Many thousands of the flower of French knighthood died in the fields outside Poitiers.”
“Sweet Jesu!”
“And that is not the worst of it.” Suddenly de Noyes’ face appeared to collapse in upon itself, as if death’s fists had seized hold in his bowels. “The Black Prince has captured King John, and holds him to ransom.”
Thomas was too shocked to speak. The English had the French King! But that would mean the war was all but over… unless …
“And the Dauphin?” Thomas said, referring to Prince Charles, the grandson and heir of King John. “Is he … ?”
“He is in Paris, Thomas. That is all I know. I was riding to join him… there are still good men left alive after Poitiers, and there are many knights and lords of the north of France who had not joined King John’s force. Mon Dieu, Thomas. John had fifty thousand men with him. Who thought he would have needed a hundred thousand to defeat the English?”