Was there any army which could withstand the Black Prince? Thomas wondered.
“And they would join with Charles?” he asked. The Dauphin was only a young man, perhaps three or four years younger than Thomas, and had not had any battle experience, let alone success.
And, besides, who knew if the madness that had afflicted his father also lurked within him? Few people had seen John’s son, Louis, in the past ten years. Not since his extraordinary encounter with a peacock in the courtyard of the Louvre. It was said that John kept his son locked away in a remote castle.
Officially Louis was dead.
Unofficially, all knew he was alive… if raving mad. For the past eight years, on Louis’ nameday, Edward III had solicitously sent a cartload of peacock feathers to the French court for “the Crown Prince’s adornment and comfort.”
His gestures hadn’t helped the cause of peace, and Thomas was sure that if the outcome of Poitiers had been reversed, the Black Prince would have been sent back to his father with every single one of those eight years’ worth of peacock feathers stuffed inside his throat.
De Noyes shot Thomas an unreadable look. “It is join with Charles, or accept Edward as our king.”
Then his face creased in worry. “Charles has worse news to deal with than the
capture of his grandfather.”
“Yes?”
“His mother, Isabeau de Baviere, has set about a rumor that she is not sure who Charles’ father is … there is her husband, Louis, true, but there was also the Duke of Orleans, and the Master of Hawks, and an unnamed man at Palm Sunday celebrations that she dimly remembers.”
Thomas laughed shortly. “Isabeau has always been the opportunist. No doubt she hopes the Black Prince will pay her well for her tale of random fornications.”
“Whatever, her slur has cast doubts in many men’s minds. Has God withdrawn his favor from the royal house? Louis is demented, and his son … well, has he a son? Is there a direct heir to the throne should John succumb to his age?”
De Noyes shook his head, and fiddled with a twig he’d picked up. “The only way we can hope to repel the English is by a strong and decisive leader. And Charles …
well, he is all we have.”
“Where are the English now?”
“They won the day, but they were badly scarred. I hear that the Black Prince has his forces ensconced in Chauvigny. But the rumors …” he waved his hand helplessly about the scene below, “the rumors swear that the Black Prince is advancing on Paris and will overrun the north within a month. France is terrified … and the rural folk are angry that the nobles don’t seem to be able to protect them. Violence is spreading as peasants take the law into their own hands, trying to grab what they can while they can, and, as has happened here, venting on the innocent their years of frustration at the high taxes John has had to impose to fight the English.”
De Noyes paused, gathering his thoughts. “I do not believe their grievances. They have just suddenly thought that here was the opportunity—their lords slain or captured in the bloody field of Poitiers—and so they seized upon it. I, as many of my fellows in these parts, have spent the past few days riding about the countryside, trying to impart order. If there is no priest here, then he has either fled, or been murdered. I hadn’t thought it too serious … not until this afternoon.”
“There is evil about,” Thomas murmured. “I have come from the east, from Lorraine, and yet I have seen no violence there, or on my passage west,”
“No. This is the furthest east it has spread. Most of the trouble is in the regions closest to Paris. The city itself is in turmoil, and—”
“Paris is in turmoil?” Thomas said.
“The entire world is in turmoil,” de Noyes said quietly, and to that Thomas had nothing much at all to add.
That night he dreamed.
HE DREAMED that he ran through an ancient dead forest with the tiny girl in his arms. She was not dead now, but screamed with the thin animal wail of terrified children.
Behind Thomas thundered something so horrible that Thomas knew that both he and the girl would die if it caught up with him.
He wanted, more than anything else in the world, to be able to save the girl from the beast.
He ran for what seemed like hours, days, weeks, he ran until the breath tore raggedly through his throat, and until he begged brokenly for mercy for the girl.
He thought he had finally won mercy for her when he believed the horror behind him had lost pace and interest, hut just as he slowed himself, he caught his foot in an exposed tree root, and he tripped.
He thudded painfully to the ground, rolling into a hall as he did so to protect the still-screaming child in his arms.
Suddenly the malevolent horror was upon them, and Thomas turned and stared at the murder that was about to descend on him.
It was the archangel St. Michael.
“Time she went to hell,” said the archangel, and reached down flaming arms for the girl.
Thomas screamed, but the archangel was too strong, and tore her from Thomas’arms.
He screamed and screamed, struggling to his feet, but it was too late.
The archangel hadgone, the girl with him.
All that was left was Alice, standing before him, her body afire, a land held out in supplication.
“Why did you let our child die?” she asked.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Friday before the Feast of St. Michael
In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III
(24th September 1378)
“BROTHER THOMAS? Brother Thomas?”
Thomas rolled over, and groaned. His head felt as if a hive of angry bees had colonized it during the night.
“It is day, Brother Thomas, and the Office of the Dead waits to be performed.”
Thomas opened his eyes, blinking against the light.
De Noyes stood over him, fully mailed, helmeted and weaponed, his hands on his hips. “Brother Thomas?”
Thomas groaned once more, and rolled onto his hands and knees, shaking his head free of the worst of the bees. His nightmare must have been sent by the demons.
De Noyes grasped Thomas by an arm and helped him to rise, handing him a flask of watered wine. “Drink.”
Thomas accepted the flask gratefully and slaked his thirst. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked about.
He was still in the orchard, now bathed in gentle dawn light. He shifted, and stilled.
In the churchyard below were arrayed five bodies sewn into shrouds. The smallest of them had been placed atop one of the adults: the dead girl, held and comforted by an equally dead mother.
For an instant Thomas’ mind was consumed by the image of Alice on fire, her hand held out, pleading for their child.
“We did not know if you needed them in the church,” de Noyes said.
Thomas dragged his eyes away from the girl’s shrouded corpse. “Take them inside,” he said, “and place them before the altar.”
Without further word Thomas started down the hill, his mind again filled with images. But this time they were not of the six people he went to farewell, not even of Alice, but of the little girl he had been carrying in his arms in his dream of the night before. A girl… had Alice been carrying a girl?
A daughter. Grief suddenly threatened to overwhelm Thomas, and he had to pause just before he reached the church and compose himself… and to convince himself that the grief he felt was for the dead awaiting him inside the church, not for the daughter he had lost together with Alice.
THOMAS MANAGED, somehow, to get through the Office of the Dead.The ritual itself was familiar enough to him—saints knew how many funeral masses he’d attended in his lifetime!—but as a friar attached to a scholarly order, Thomas had not had much experience in actually conducting the funeral mass.
Nevertheless, for the sake of these six poor souls, he coped.
The village church was relatively plain. There were several poorly executed paintings on the walls—variously depicting Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the flood, Noah’s Ark, and the Day of Judgment—two exquisitely embroidered hangings behind the altar (doubtless the handiwork of Marie Lescolopier or her sister-in-law, Beatrice), and an enameled and jeweled cross on the altar itself. There were two carved pews for Sir Hugh and his family, and rushes strewn over the floor for everyone else.
Of the resident priest there was no sign. As Thomas prepared himself for the funeral mass Gilles de Noyes had murmured that there was blood found in the priest’s quarters. Thomas had no doubt that the priest’s corpse lay dismembered in some dark corner of the village or surrounding fields.