castle rampart and men-at-arms, wearing the same coloured liven', challenged Thomas and Robbie as they were leaving the old city. Thomas answered by saying they were Scottish soldiers seeking employment from the Count of Coutances. 'I thought he'd be here,' Thomas lied, 'but we hear he's at Evecque.'
'And getting nowhere,' the guard commander said. He was a bearded man whose helmet had a great split that suggested he had taken it from a corpse. 'He's been pissing at those walls for two months now and got nowhere, but if you want to die at Evecque, boys, then good luck to you.'
They walked past the walls of the Abbaye aux Dames and Thomas had a sudden vision of Jeanette again. She had been his lover, but then had met Edward Wood-stock, the Prince of Wales, and what chance did Thomas have after that? It had been here, in the Abbaye aux Dames, that Jeanette and the Prince had lived during the brief siege of Caen. Where was Jeanette now? Thomas wondered. Back in Brittany? Still seeking her infant son? Did she ever think of him? Or did she regret fleeing from the Prince of Wales in the belief that the Picardy battle would be lost? Perhaps, by now, she would be married again. Thomas suspected she had taken a small fortune in jewels when she had fled the English army, and a rich widow, scarce more than twenty years old, made an attractive bride.
'What happens' — Robbie interrupted his thoughts — 'if they find out you're not Scottish?'
Thomas held up the two fingers of his right hand that drew the bowcord. 'They cut those off.'
'Is that all?'
'Those are the first things they cut off.'
They walked on south through a country of small steep hills, tight fields, thick woods and deep lanes. Thomas had never been to Evecque and, though it was not far from Caen, some of the peasants they asked had never heard of it, but when Thomas asked which way the soldiers had been going during the winter they pointed on southwards. They spent their first night in a roofless hovel, a place that had evidently been abandoned when the English came in the summer and swept through Normandy. They woke at dawn and Thomas put two arrows into a tree, just to keep in practice. He was cutting the steel heads out of the trunk when Robbie picked up the bow. 'Can you teach me to use it?' he asked.
'What I can teach you,' Thomas said, 'will take ten minutes. But the rest will need a lifetime. I began shoot- ing arrows when I was seven and after ten years I was beginning to get good at it.'
'It can't be that difficult,' Robbie protested, 'I've killed a stag with a bow.'
'That was a hunting bow,' Thomas said. He gave Robbie one of the arrows and pointed to a willow that had stubbornly kept its leaves. 'Hit the trunk.'
Robbie laughed. 'I can't miss!' The willow was scarcely thirty paces away.
'Go on, then.'
Robbie drew the bow, glancing once at Thomas as he realized just how much strength was needed to bend the great yew stave. It was twice as stiff as the shorter hunting bows he had used in Scotland. 'Jesus,' he said softly as he hauled the string back to his nose and realized his left arm was trembling slightly with the tension of the weapon. but he peered down the arrow to check his aim and was about to loose when Thomas held up a hand.
'You're not ready yet.'
'I damn well am,' Robbie said, though the words came out as grunts for the bow needed immense force to hold in the drawn position.
'You're not ready.' Thomas said, 'because there's four inches of the arrow sticking out in front of the bow. You have to pull it back until the arrow head touches your left hand.'
'Oh, sweet Jesus,' Robbie said and took a breath, nerved himself and pulled until the string was past his nose, past his eye and close by his right ear. The steel arrow head touched his left hand, but now he could no longer aim by looking down the arrow's shaft. He frowned as he realized the difficulty that implied, then compensated by edging the bow to the right. His left arm was shaking with the tension and, unable to keep the arrow drawn, he released, then twitched as the hemp string whipped along his inner left forearm. The arrow's feathers flashed white as they passed a foot from the willow's trunk. Robbie swore in amazement, then handed the bow to Thomas. 'So the trick of it,' he said,
'is learning how to aim it?'
'The trick,' Thomas said, 'is not aiming at all. It's something that just happens. You look at the target and you let the arrow fly.' Some archers, the lazy ones, only drew to the eye and that made them accurate, but their arrows lacked force. The good archers, the archers who drove down armies or brought down kings in shining armour, pulled the string all the way back. 'I taught a woman to shoot last summer,' Thomas said. taking back the bow, 'and she became good. Really good. She hit a hare at seventy paces.'
'A woman!'
'I let her use a longer string,' Thomas said, 'so the bow didn't need as much strength, but she was still good.' He remembered Jeanette's delight when the hare tumbled in the grass, squealing, the arrow pinned through its haunches. Jeanette. Why was he thinking of her so much?
They walked on through a world edged white with frost. The puddles had frozen and the leafless hedgerows were outlined with a sharp white rime that faded as the sun climbed. They crossed two streams, then climbed through beechwoods towards a plateau which, when they reached it, proved to be a wild place of thin turf that had never been cut with a plough. A few gorse bushes broke the grass, but otherwise the road ran across a featureless plain beneath an empty sky. Thomas had thought that the heathland would be nothing but a narrow belt of high country and that they must soon drop into the wooded valleys again, but the road stretched on and he felt ever more like a hare on a chalk upland under the gaze of a buzzard. Robbie felt the same and the two of them left the road to walk where the gorse provided some intermittent cover. Thomas kept looking ahead and behind. This was horse country, a firm-turfed upland where riders could go full gallop and where there were no woods or gullies in which two men on foot could hide. And the high ground seemed to extend for ever. At midday they reached a circle of standing stones, each about the height of a man and heavily encrusted with lichen. The circle was twenty yards across and one of the stones had fallen and they rested their backs against it while they took a meal of bread and cheese. 'The devil's wedding party, eh?' Robbie said.
'The stones. you mean?'
'We have them in Scotland.' Robbie twisted round and brushed fragments of snail shell from the fallen stone. 'They 're people who were turned into rocks by the devil.'
'In Dorset,' Thomas said, 'folk say that God turned them into stone.'
Robbie wrinkled his face at that idea. 'Why would God do that?'
'For dancing on the sabbath.'
'They'd just go to hell for that,' Robbie said, then idly scratched at the turf with his heel. 'We dig the stones up when we have the time. Look for gold, see?'
'You ever find any?'
'We do in the mounds sometimes. Pots anyway, and beads. Rubbish really. We throw it away as often as not. And we find elf stones, of course.' He meant the mysterious stone arrow heads that were supposedly shot from elfin bowstrings. He stretched out, enjoying the feeble warmth of the sun that was now as high as it would climb in the midwinter sky. 'I miss Scotland.'
'I've never been.'
'God's own country,' Robbie said forcefully, and he was still talking about Scotland's wonders when Thomas fell gently asleep. He dozed, then was woken because Robbie had kicked him.
The Scot was standing on the fallen stone. 'What is it?' Thomas asked.
'Company.'
Thomas stood beside him and saw four horsemen a mile or more to the north. He dropped back to the turf, pulled upon his bundle and took out a single sheaf of arrows, then hooked the bowstring over the nocked tips of the stave. 'Maybe they haven't seen us,' he said optimistically.
'They have,' Robbie commented, and Thomas climbed onto the stone again to see that the horsemen had left the road; they had stopped now and one of them stood in his stirrups to get a better look at the two strangers at the stone circle. Thomas could see they were wearing mail coats under their cloaks. 'I can take three of them,' he said, patting the bow, 'if you manage the fourth.'
'Ah, be kind to a poor Scotsman,' Robbie said, draw-ing his uncle's sword, 'leave me two. I have to make money, remember.' He might have been facing a fight with four horsemen in Normandy, but he was still a prisoner
