elasticity not found from any substitute.’
De Warenne waved a scornful, dismissive hand.
‘What do you know, priest? Other than one of your old Councils banned the thing.’
‘Canon 29 of the Second Lateran,’ Cressingham offered haughtily.
‘I understood,’ Sir Marmaduke said, his lips curled in what might have been a wry smile or a sneer. ‘that it was a ban only on foolish marksmanship. Shooting apples from heads and such. A ban on that seems sensible enough.’
Brother Jacobus nodded unctiously.
‘Even if it had been an entire ban,’ he replied, ‘such would not apply to use against unbelievers – Moor and Saracen and the like. Happily, English bishops have declared the Scots rebels excommunicate, which means we may use these anathema weapons freely.’
‘Unhappily,’ Thweng replied dryly, ‘I believe Scotch bishops have excommunicated us, which means the rebels can point them our way, too. The Pope is silent on the matter.’
Jacobus looked at Thweng. It was a look that had seldom failed to make folk quail, combining, as it did, displeasure and pious pity. Sir Marmaduke merely stared back at him, eyes blank and glassed as the black friar’s beads.
Sturgeon bones, De Warenne thought wildly. God’s Wounds, this whole enterprise could fall because we don’t have enough fish heads.
Men and food, the endless problem since armies had started marching. De Warenne felt the crushing weariness of it all – the whole business of this pestilential country was a clear message that Longshanks had displeased God and He had turned His Wrath on them. More to the point, De Warenne thought sourly, Longshanks has displeased the likes of me and, one day soon, I will turn my wrath on him, together with all the other lords fretting under the divine right.
Yet the king was not the throne and De Warenne, Earl of Surrey would defend that to the death. His grandfather had been uncle to the Lionheart himself, his father had been Warden of the Cinque Ports and every De Warenne had been a bulwark against the foes of God, for whoever attacked the throne of England assaulted God Himself. John De Warenne, Earl of Surrey, Warden of Scotland, would hold His Fortress against all the rebel scum of the earth.
The thought drew him up a little, even as a cold wind curled the length of the hall, stirring the smoke into swirls and eddies.
Strike north. Find this Wallace and cut him down shorter than Longshanks, so that the king would be pleased with his earl at that. The thought made De Warenne bark out a laugh.
‘Then there are the Welsh,’ Cressingham declared and De Warenne looked at him with a curled lip. Like a fly, he thought, buzz-buzzing in the ear. One good slap…
‘What of the Welsh?’ Sir Marmaduke asked and watched as Cressingham fussily arranged his blue robe – bad choice of colour for a pasty man, Thweng thought – and imperiously waved at some distant servant. An instant later a man slouched through the far door from the kitchen and across the floor to be eyed up and down. He studied them back from a face dark as an underground dwarf, black-eyed and challenging.
A fist of a face, the beard on it cropped to stubble, but with a great gristle of moustache, as if some giant black caterpillar had crawled under his nose. Cheekbones like knobs and a single scowl of eyebrow – typical Welsh, Sir Marmadule thought, from the south, where the archers are, for the north are mainly spearmen. He said so and De Warenne nodded. Cressingham pouted and scowled.
‘Look at him,’ he said, quivering. ‘Look at what he is wearing.’
Not much, Sir Marmaduke thought – a ragged linen tunic in a distant memory of red, a great shock of dark hair like a sprout of bush on a rock. Nothing on his legs but his bare feet, though there were shoes hung round his neck. He had a leather bracer on one arm, a bow the same size as himself in a bag of some strange-looking leather and a soft bag of the same hanging from one side of a belt, a long, wicked-looking sheathed knife from the other.
In the bag at his hip were arrows, though they were all neatly separated by leather to keep the fletchings from fouling, and the way the bag swung told Sir Marmaduke that it had damp clay shaped to the bottom of it, to prevent the points bursting through.
Across the powerful shoulders, one humped slightly as if he was deformed, hung a long roll and fall of rough wool fabric which had been russet-brown once and was now just dark.
‘A Welsh archer,’ Sir Marmaduke said, ‘with bow, a dozen good arrows and a knife. The thing round his shoulders is a called a brychan if I am not mistaken. Serves as cloak and bed both.’
‘Well, you would know that, certes,’ Cressingham declared with a sneer, ‘since you have spent a deal of your life fighting such. No help in present cirumstances, mark me.’
‘Is there a point to this, Treasurer?’ De Warenne sighed. Cressingham made a show of plucking a paper from Frixco’s fingers.
‘Item,’ he said. ‘Welsh archer, cap-a-pied, with a warbow of yew, one dozen goose-fletched arrows, a sword and a dagger.’
He thrust the paper back at Frixco.
‘This is what is being paid for from the Exchequer,’ he declared triumphantly. ‘And this is what I expect for the price. Cap-a-pied. Which means one hat of iron, one coat of war, either maille or a leather jack, studded for preference. One sword. One yew bow and a dozen finest shafts. That is what is being paid for and that is what we do not have. This man is a ragged-arsed peasant with stick and string, no more.’
Addaf had followed a deal of it, despite their being English, for that tongue was now heard more and more in Wales and it was a sensible man who learned it and spoke it well. Then, he thought, they turn round and speak an even stranger tongue, the French, which wasn’t even their own but belonged to the people they were fighting. Among others.
He had listened quietly, too, for it was also a sensible man who realised that fighting against these folk was now old and done, though the defeat in it was still a raw wound no more than a handful of years gone. Yet taking their money to fight with them was almost as good a revenge for Builth and the loss of Llewellyn and better than starving in the ruin war had made of the valleys.
Yet peasant was too hard for a man of those same valleys to bear.
‘I am Addaf ap Dafydd ap Math y Mab Lloit Irbengam,’ he growled in English, ‘and no peasant with an arse of rags.’
He saw the look on them, the same as the look on folk’s faces when they had seen the two-headed calf at the fair the year he had left. The fat one looked bemused.
‘Do. You. Speak. English?’ this one demanded, leaning forward and talking as if Addaf was a child. The tall one with the long face, the one pointed out as having fought Welsh once, twitched the mourn of his moustaches into a brief smile.
‘You are annoying a Welshman, Treasurer,’ he said, ‘for English is what he is already speaking.’
Addaf saw the fat one bristle like an old boar sow.
‘His name,’ Sir Marmaduke explained, speaking English, both clear and slow, Addaf noted, so that everyone would understand, ‘means Addaf son of David, son of Madog, though the last part confuses me a little – The Brown Lad With The Wrong Head?’
He knew the Welsh – Addaf took to this Sir Marmaduke at once, for he had once been a bold adversary and he knew the Welsh a little and the English as spoken by True People; Addaf heaved a sigh of relief.
‘Dark and stubborn, I am after believing it is in your own tongue,’ he said and added ‘Lord,’ because it did no harm to mark the trail of matters politely.
‘I am from the gwely of Cilybebyll,’ he explained earnestly, so that these folk would know with whom they dealt. ‘I have a cow and enough grazing land to feed eight goats for a year. I am a free man of the True People, by the grace of God, sharing an ox, a goad, a halter and a ploughshare with three others in common. I am not a serf with ragged arse.’
‘Did you understand any of that?’ Cressingham demanded waspishly. Sir Marmaduke turned slowly to him.
‘You have offended him, it appears. In my experience, Cressingham, it does no good to offend a Welshman. Particularly bowmen – see you the shoulder? That hump is pulling muscle, Treasurer. Addaf here has some
