Kemp: Riders of Fury

For Ed

Chapter One

Kemp reined his horse in by the calvary on Lanpavas Heath. The garishly painted figure of Jesus hanging from the cross uplifted his eyes to the heavens in the familiar expression that spoke less to Kemp of piety or dolour than it did of mealy mouthed sanctimony: forgive them, Father, they know not what they do. Kemp reflected he would not have forgiven them if they had nailed him to the cross: he would have spat defiance at them from the maw of hell.

Just as he wanted to spit defiance at the whoresons who had ambushed his troop of mounted archers.

The Bretons wore jupons of azure and white over their chain-mail habergeons; all except one, who wore scarlet – Kemp supposed he was their leader. None had yet come close enough for him to make out the device. He twisted in the saddle. A knot of them sat on their horses perhaps a hundred yards away across the tussocks of sedge grass, not close enough to use their crossbows with any accuracy. He could have picked a couple off with the longbow slung across his broad back in its greasy woollen bow-bag, but to do that he would have to dismount, and his men were making slow enough progress across the heath as it was. Dismounting to shoot their arrows would make them easy prey for the men-at-arms amongst the Bretons, who would ride them down and spit them on their lances. His flint-blue eyes darted about in search of cover, a stout wall perhaps that would offer protection from crossbow bolts and lances.

What he saw was two dozen figures gathered on the highest point of the heath, silhouetted against an azure sky. Realising some of their ambushers had got ahead of them to cut them off, he felt a pang of despair. Then he saw the figures did not wear the azure-and-white jupons of their pursuers, because they were not men at all, but standing stones arranged in a circle.

Although a bright summer sun hung in a gentian sky, a blustery wind gusted across the boggy heath, making the brown heather ripple.

Iron-shod hoofs clattered on the occasional paving stones that marked out the rough track. Kemp turned to see Hudd Ryedale riding towards him.

‘Where’s Reynold?’

Ryedale was a big, burly Yorkshireman with a thatch of sandy hair atop a ruddy face. He gestured to where another archer cantered across the heath a furlong to their right. ‘O’er yon.’

A crossbow bolt whipped between Kemp and Ryedale. ‘Hell’s teeth!’ Kemp gestured to the standing stones. ‘Ride for yon cromlech. We’ll dismount and hold them there.’

‘Aye, Martin.’ Ryedale put his heels back, galloping past Kemp towards the stones. Kemp was about to dismount so he could loose a couple of arrows towards the Bretons. Perhaps he could discourage them from getting too close before his men had had a chance to reach the stones. Hearing more hoof beats, he turned and saw Brother Quentin riding bareback on one of the two sumpter horses that had been drawing the cart, the cowl of his grey habit thrown back to leave his tonsured head bare.

‘Where’s the cart?’ Kemp asked him.

‘They have it.’ The Franciscan friar gestured at the men-at-arms.

Kemp grimaced. The cart had held the coffer containing all the silver they had collected from the villages in the area. Tanguy du Chastel would have his hide for this. ‘You let them take it?’

‘I’m forbidden to spill blood,’ Quentin reminded him. ‘What should I have done? Held them at bay with a sermon against the sin of avarice?’

Kemp ran a hand over fair, close-cropped hair. ‘Were not Horsnall and his men there to guard you?’

‘Horsnall and his men! Speak not to me of them. They fled the moment they clapped eyes on these whoresons—’ Quentin flinched as another bolt soughed past his head.

Kemp jumped down from the saddle, giving his rouncy’s halter a couple of turns around the base of the calvary’s crucifix before unslinging his bow. He pointed it towards the stones. ‘Ride for yon cromlech,’ he told Quentin.

‘Will you not ride with me?’

‘I’ll tarry here a while.’

‘Do not tarry overlong!’

Kemp grinned. ‘No longer than I must.’

Quentin opened his mouth to call out another retort, but another bolt swished past, and the friar thought better of it, putting his sandaled heels back to canter after Ryedale.

Kemp stripped the bow-bag off his bow stave, tucking it under his belt, then braced one end of the stave against the inside of a foot and bent it until he could loop the cord over the nock at the upper end, his powerful thews plying the stout yew effortlessly. He selected an arrow from the sheath tucked under his belt in the small of his back and nocked it to the cord. The nearest Breton was less than sixty yards away, spanning his crossbow with a ‘goat’s foot’ lever. Two more had reined in about thirty yards beyond him, too far away to make any shots from such light crossbows tell.

Kemp had been six years old when his father had given him his first bow, a plaything suited for a child, but it had started him practising daily to master the skill of archery. Sixteen years later he could judge the distance, take account of the breeze and loose without even thinking about it. He drew and let fly almost in one motion, sending the arrow whistling towards its target.

The Breton who had just spanned his crossbow put his heels back, wheeling his mount away, but the arrow’s high arc was deceptive: it had been one of the other two Kemp had aimed at. Realising at last the arrow was coming their way, they both put their heels back, but too late for one. It took him in the shoulder, the bodkin-tipped shaft punching through the chain mail of his habergeon, and he tumbled from the saddle. The other two Bretons cantered back towards their companions, having gained a greater respect for the Englishman’s prowess as an archer.

Kemp slung his bow across his back by its string: he doubted a single shot would be enough to deter the Bretons, and guessed he would have further need of it before an hour had passed. Swinging himself back into his rouncy’s saddle, he galloped to where a dozen of his men had gathered within the circle of stones and dismounted to string their own bows. Like Kemp, they were broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, their thews strengthened by a lifetime of drawing their longbows. Each man wore a leather bracer on his left wrist and carried a sheaf of arrows tucked under his belt at the back. The French called such men ‘les Goddams’ because blasphemy was never far from their lips.

As they rallied, they handed their rouncies’ bridles to Brother Quentin and took up position by the standing stones, ready to duck behind them when necessity demanded, or to shoot with their bows when a target came within range. Kemp glanced at their faces, noting who was there, who was missing. Fañch – a Breton appointed by Tanguy du Chastel to accompany the archers as a guide – leaned against one of the standing stones with a crossbow bolt jutting from a shoulder, his screwed-up face ashen and beaded with sweat. ‘Let me get that for you,’ said Brother Quentin, approaching him.

Fañch shook his head. ‘It’s barbed.’

‘Fear not, I only mean to snap the shaft off closer to the wound, so you don’t catch it on anything and make the wound worse. Put your faith in me: I have studied physick—’

Fañch drew the knife from his belt and brandished it at the friar. ‘Stay away from me! If you want to help me, make me a sling for my arm.’

‘Where are Ieuan, Adkin and Goddard?’ Kemp asked Lovett.

‘I bain’t seen Ieuan since we was attacked in the woods.’ A thin-faced, hollow-eyed youth with lank, flaxen hair reaching down to his shoulders, Reynold Lovett hailed from Bristol and spoke with the broad accent of the West Country. ‘Adkin was shot through the throat with a crossbow bolt. I think Goddard got away.’

‘Nay,’ said Ryedale. ‘I seen him fall from his horse, and as he fled on foot one o’ the men-at-arms cut him down with a sword.’

‘Devilwey!’ Kemp exclaimed in dismay. He had only known Adkin and Goddard for a few weeks, but they were good men, and it galled him when good men died while cowards like Horsnall ran away and lived to tell the tale.

Ryedale pointed. ‘There’s Ieuan!’

The Welshman’s horse had fallen and Kemp could not see it making any attempt to rise. Ieuan was running to where his companions rallied amongst the standing stones, but he was a good 300 yards away, too distant for the archers to offer him any help, and a couple of men-at-arms were cantering towards him.

‘God damn it!’ Kemp had lost count of the number of times Ieuan had been there to save his life, and he had no intention of standing idle when he had a chance to repay a part of that debt. In his mid-thirties, Ieuan ap Morgan might be the oldest member of Kemp’s twenty, but the stocky Welshman could outrun any of the younger men over a distance of more than a mile, clamber as nimbly up a siege ladder, and he had the sharpest eyes of any of them.

Putting his heels back, Kemp galloped out of the circle, goading his horse through the heather and tussocks of grass. He was still fifty yards short of where Ieuan ran to meet him when he saw the men-at-arms were only moments away from skewering the Welshman on their lances.

Kemp reined in and jumped down from the saddle. He nocked another arrow and let fly. He could not see whether it struck the man he aimed at, or his mount, but it had the desired effect: the horse reared, and the man-at-arms tumbled from the saddle into the heather.

The other man-at-arms was within a heartbeat of spitting Ieuan. But the Welshman was not deaf: he could hear the hoof beats behind him. He threw himself aside at the last minute, rolling in the grass. The point of the lance met only air. Ieuan rose to his feet, drawing his bidog – a Welsh short sword – from the scabbard in the small of his back. The man-at-arms tried to wheel his horse, but struggled to swing the cumbersome lance around in time. Ieuan ducked beneath it, and scrambled up to sit astride the horse’s rump behind the man-at-arms, driving the bidog’s blade up into the man’s chest through the hole in the armpit of his habergeon. Pushing the man-at-arms off the horse, he took his place in the saddle and cantered across to meet Kemp.

The knight in a scarlet jupon charged towards the archer behind one of his men-at-arms. Kemp got his first good look at the blazon on the men-at-arms’ jupons, a hand holding a white sword aloft on an azure background. He shot the man-at-arms in the chest. A tall, brawny fellow in gleaming mail and a burnished bascinet, the knight wheeled away, brandishing a broadsword. Realising he had enough time to remount, Kemp slung his bow across his back once more, caught hold of his rouncy’s bridle, and swung himself back into the saddle. Seeing the Englishman no longer had his bow in his hands, the knight charged again. As he approached, Kemp saw the blazon on his scarlet jupon: seven yellow hollow lozenges – the arms of Rohan – but differenced with a label, a sort of dagged strip near the top, denoting a cadet branch of the family.

Kemp drew his own broadsword, parrying the stroke the knight aimed at his head, before landing a blow against his dog-faced bascinet powerful enough to break the catch on the visor. It swung open to reveal a handsome face with a square jaw and a dimpled chin, a stray lock of black hair plastered to his forehead with sweat where it curled down from under the hood of his gambeson.

He swung at Kemp’s head again. Kemp parried, goading his horse in close so he could smash one of the quillons of his sword into the knight’s bascinet. He tried to push the quillon into the man’s eyes to blind him, but misjudged the blow. It glanced off the rim of the bascinet just above his brow, but it was mighty enough to make the knight reel in the saddle. As he tried to sit upright again, Kemp smashed the pommel of his sword against his bascinet, and this time the knight tumbled out of the saddle altogether.

Kemp gave his horse a pat on the rump with the flat of his blade, sending it cantering out of harm’s way, so that by the time the knight rose to his feet, he had no hope of regaining his mount. Kemp swung his sword down at him. The knight raised his blade to parry, but with the advantage of height to add to his strength, Kemp knocked the other’s sword aside and dented the bascinet below. The knight sank to his knees with blood running down through his eyebrows. He swung his sword wildly at Kemp’s rouncy’s fetlocks. Kemp hauled back on the reins, making her rear just in time to lift her hoofs over the swinging blade. He aimed another stroke at the knight’s bascinet, but a crossbow bolt whistled between the pair of them before Kemp could land the coup de grâce.

More Bretons were flocking, several of them spanning their crossbows. After glancing to make sure Ieuan was safely on his way to where the others waited by the standing stones, Kemp put his heels back and galloped after him, leaving the knight to fight another day.

Reaching the cromlech, he leaped down from the saddle again, handing the rouncy’s halter to Quentin before joining Ieuan behind one of the menhirs.

‘Did you fall off your horse?’ Kemp asked him.

Ieuan’s mouth curled into a grin beneath his bushy moustache. ‘I got a better one back, though.’

A Breton man-at-arms led a riderless horse to where the knight stood. He swung himself back into the saddle, and then a dozen of them rode towards the standing stones, reining in when they were a little more than a bowshot away.

‘Who are they?’ Kemp asked Fañch.

‘The Demoiselle de Poutrocoët’s men—’ The Breton broke off to swear sharply at Quentin, who had used his own rope belt to fashion a sling for the Breton’s arm, and was now trying to wrap a rag around the shaft of the bolt sticking out of his shoulder to try to staunch the bleeding.

‘Stand still, damn you!’ said Quentin.

‘I am standing still! It’s you who is clumsy!’ Fañch turned back to Kemp. ‘The demoiselle lays claim to Brazargoët just as the Lord of Trénouës does.’

‘But she gives her fealty to Charles of Blois?’

Fañch nodded.

The Duchy of Brittany stood on a peninsula sixty leagues long and twenty leagues wide, with the English Channel to the north, the Bay of Biscay to the south and the Kingdom of France to the east. After three months in the duchy, Kemp had got his head around the local politics. There were two claimants for the dukedom, one backed by the King of France, the other backed by the King of England. At present there was a truce between King Edward and King John – ‘Jehan’, as his subjects called him – but the truce did not cover the fighting in Brittany, and Englishmen like Kemp who were minded to serve their king overseas could earn good money fighting here.

The claimant backed by the King of France was Charles of Blois, but he was unpopular in the duchy itself: only eight years had passed since his troops had taken the city of Quimper, and the Bretons had not forgotten how Blois’s men had butchered hundreds of its citizens. Two years later, Blois had been captured by the English at the Battle of La Roche-Derrien. Because it suited King Edward’s purposes to keep the pro-French party in Brittany leaderless, he was demanding a ransom Blois could not possibly pay, hence Blois remained a prisoner at Windsor, leaving his duchess to manage the fight for his right to rule the duchy in his absence, supported by the Viscount of Rohan and Gui de Nesle, the Seigneur d’Offemont. Nesle had been made a Marshal of France four years ago and, more recently, King Jehan had appointed him Governor-General of Brittany to rule the duchy, nominally in the name of the captive Charles of Blois, effectively for the benefit of King Jehan.

The claimant backed by King Edward was Jehan de Montfort, a fourteen-year-old boy and another of King Edward’s guests at Windsor. His interests in Brittany were protected by Tanguy du Chastel and King Edward’s lieutenant in the duchy, Sir Walter Bentley. The various lords of Brittany backed one side or another, depending upon self-interest, family loyalty or – occasionally – whichever side they happened to think had the stronger claim. Local disputes between rival families found a bloody outlet in the civil war, though loyalties could change in an eyeblink as necessity demanded.

‘Be it true the demoiselle be an enchantress?’ asked Lovett.

‘So it’s rumoured,’ said Fañch.

Sunlight flashed on the knight’s broadsword as he gestured for his men to charge. They did not, however. ‘Why in hell do they tarry?’ wondered Kemp.

‘Perhaps they’re superstitious,’ said Fañch. ‘The locals say this is a place of ill omen. It’s said once a man who committed suicide was buried here. Afterwards a coven of witches came hither to summon the Devil in the likeness of the dead man, that they might enjoy his lustful embraces. As they danced in a circle, the Angel of the Lord chanced by and turned them all to stone for their blasphemy.’

‘Why’d they want to lie wi’ the Devil in the likeness of a dead man?’ asked Ryedale.

‘That be the sort o’ thing witches do, bain’t it?’ said Lovett.

‘Perhaps the dead man was full handsome,’ said Ieuan. ‘I remember when I was growing up in Abergavenny, Einion Hen’s daughter Angharad was got with child and she said she’d been seduced by an incubus.’

‘What be an incubus?’ asked Lovett.

‘A kind of fiend that goes around getting women with child.’

The Bristolian wrinkled his nose in contempt of the Welshman’s credulity. ‘Don’t talk daft. Everyone knows fiends can’t make their own seed the way men can.’

‘No indeed,’ agreed Brother Quentin. ‘That’s why an incubus needs a succubus to seduce a man and take his seed first. Thomas Aquinas contends that every incubus is also a succubus, first taking the likeness of a beautiful woman to rob a man of his seed, then taking the likeness of a man to seduce a woman and plant the seed in her womb.’

‘Aye, well, whatever the truth of it,’ said Ieuan, ‘when Angharad’s child was born, Father Huw took it out into the woods and put it to death.’

‘Put it to death?’ Quentin echoed in horror.

‘Oh aye. He said no good could ever come of a child born of a liaison with an incubus. Mind you,’ the Welshman added with a twinkle in his eye, ‘that was about the time Gwilym ap Cadwaladr’s wife gave birth to a child over in Blaenavon, and Gwilym never having been able to get her with child before that time. And I ran into Iolo ap Gwilym in Striguil a couple of years ago; a big, fine strapping lad he’s grown into, though I do declare he’s the spit-and-image of Brychan Goch, who was always hanging around Einion Hen’s house when I was a lad.’

Lovett snapped his fingers. ‘Mayhap a succubus done stole Brychan Goch’s seed, then turned into an incubus and planted it in Angharad’s womb!’

‘That’s one explanation,’ said Brother Quentin. The friar had studied under William of Ockham in his youth, but if he could think of a simpler explanation for how Angharad had given birth to a child that looked just like Brychan Goch, he was too discreet to point it out.

The Bretons rode off with the knight at their head. ‘Should us pursue them?’ asked Lovett.

Kemp shook his head.

‘They’ve got the silver,’ said Ieuan.

‘Aye, but maybe they seek to draw us out of this stone circle so they can attack us.’ As angry as he was that the Bretons had got the better of them this time, there was no getting away from the fact they outnumbered Kemp and his men; and besides, they needed to get back to Quécieux so Fañch’s shoulder could be attended to by a surgeon. ‘I say we wait till they’re out of sight, then go hell for leather the other way.’

And he would have to think of some way to avert Tanguy du Chastel’s anger when he learned they had returned empty-handed.

‘Halt! Who goes there?’

One of the English sentinels held up a hand, signalling for the knight and his squire approaching the Boulogne Gate of Calais to rein in.

‘I am Nompar, Bourc de Cazoulat,’ declared the knight. He rode a destrier, a horse that, like its owner, was a tall and muscular animal with a black mane and a thick neck. A saturnine man with a hooked nose, stubble on his jaw and melancholy brown eyes, Nompar gestured to the squire following on a palfrey, leading a packhorse laden with his arms and armour. ‘And this is my squire, Peire de Vézaud.’

‘You’re French.’ The sentinel made it an accusation.

‘I am Gascon, and therefore a subject of King Edward, the same as yourself.’ It was the truth, but not the whole truth: Nompar also considered King Edward a vassal of King Jehan of France, and therefore considered himself a vassal of both kings; but as King Jehan was the senior of the two, he considered that was where his first loyalty lay. Had not Edward paid homage to King Jehan’s father for his lands in France soon after his coronation? ‘In any case, there is peace between King Edward and King Jehan, n’est-ce pas? So you would be obliged to let me pass regardless of where my loyalties lie.’

The sentinel furrowed his brow. ‘What did you say your title is again? The what of Cazoulat?’

‘"Bourc". It is a Gascon title. It means I am the natural son of the Captal de Cazoulat.’

‘So… what… your title means Bastard of Cazoulat?’ The notion seemed to amuse the sentinel.

Nompar sighed. Before he had left Gascony, he had been warned that foreigners considered it a disgrace to a man if he had been born out of wedlock, though he could not understand why a man should be blamed for his father’s indiscretions. ‘May I pass?’

The sentinel stepped aside with a shrug. ‘Aye, right enough.’

Nompar and his squire rode through the gate into the streets within the walls, the bourc keeping his eyes open and one hand on the hilt of the broadsword scabbarded at his hip, while Peire constantly glanced behind him to make sure no cutpurses were taking their knives to the straps tying the bourc’s expensive chain-mail habergeon to the packsaddle. Calais was full of outlaws exiled from England.

Nompar indicated the sign hanging in front of a large inn, depicting a white lion rampant on a blue field. ‘The coat of arms of Sir Thomas Holland,’ he explained to his squire in the Langue d’Oc, the dialect of French spoken in their native Gascony, which was very different from the Langue d’Oïl spoken in the northern parts of France. ‘Lord Geoffroi mentioned that the man we seek once served in Sir Thomas’s retinue. Perhaps if we ask here, they can tell us where to find him.’ Dismounting, he handed his horse’s bridle to Peire. ‘Water the horses and see to it they are properly groomed.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ The squire led the horses through the archway into the courtyard, while Nompar ducked into the hall. Inside, a wench bent over a kettle suspended by an iron tripod over the central hearth, filling the room with an aroma less redolent of savoury meat than it was of sweaty feet, while the tapster stood behind the counter, spitting on a clout and rubbing it over a stubborn stain inside one of his cups. Four rough-looking men sat at the long table dominating the middle of the room.

With his swarthy face covered in several days’ stubble and wearing no garment finer than a quilted gambeson showing stubborn, rust-coloured stains that had somehow splashed through the chain mail worn over it in battle, Nompar might have been mistaken for a common freebooter had it not been for the obvious quality of the broadsword hanging at his hip. The tapster decided to play it safe and bowed: it was generally wisest not to give offence to someone who might turn out to be nobility. ‘Welcome to the White Lion, my lord.’

‘I am Nompar, Bourc de Cazoulat,’ the bourc said in English. Captured by the Earl of Lancaster during the sack of Poitiers, he had learned the language while a prisoner in England. ‘I seek a man named Martin Kemp. Have you heard of him?’

‘Martin Kemp of Knighton, who helped John of Doncaster take the castle of Guînes?’

Nompar nodded. ‘You know where I may find this Kemp?’

‘What’s your business with him?’

‘My business is none of yours.’

‘Then I don’t see what business of yours Kemp’s whereabouts are, either.’

‘You know where I should seek for him?’

‘Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.’

Nompar leaned across the counter to seize the tapster by the throat in one powerful hand. ‘Do you, or do you not?’

One of the men sitting at the table rose to his feet, clapping a hand to the knife sheathed on his belt. ‘Unhand the tapster, stranger!’

Nompar shook his head. ‘I advise you to attend to your own business, friend, and leave me to attend to mine.’

The other three men at the table also rose to their feet and followed their friend as he swaggered across to where Nompar stood. The bourc threw the tapster back, hard enough to make sure he cracked the back of his skull against one of the massive tuns behind the counter, so he would be too dazed to interfere for a space of time. Four against one was desperate enough odds as it was. He turned to face them.

The back door opened and Peire entered. ‘This inn’s closed,’ one of the Englishmen told him.

The squire looked confused. ‘My lord?’ he called to Nompar in the Langue d’Oc.

‘Flee for your life, Peire!’ called the bourc. The squire was scarcely fifteen and had never fought with any weapon more deadly than a wooden sword. Nompar would have been proud to tell Peire’s father that his son had died nobly on the field of battle; he would be less enthusiastic about telling him how Peire had been butchered in a tavern brawl.

‘Get him, Jankin!’ snarled the leader of the Englishmen. As one of his companions ran down the hall to tackle Peire, the leader drew his knife and thrust it at Nompar’s gizzard.

The bourc was waiting for it. He knocked the thrust aside with his left arm and balled his right fist, throwing a punch into the leader’s Adam’s apple. Even as the man went down, making a choking sound through a crushed windpipe, the other two reached for their knives. Nompar kicked the nearest in the crotch. As the man doubled up, clutching at himself with a hoarse scream, the other drew his knife and lunged at the bourc. Nompar side-stepped, snatching up a chair and holding it between him and his attacker, jabbing its legs at his eyes. He thought about drawing his broadsword to defend himself, then decided against it: the sword was a noble weapon, not to be stained with the blood of lice such as these. Behind his opponent, he could see Peire now grappling with Jankin. The Englishman had a knife in his hand which Peire was struggling to hold at bay, the two of