'Oh, I'm sure, and I'm the goddamn Duke of Normandy.'
'What you are,' Thomas said mildly, 'is a goddamn nuisance,' and he heaved the bowl of soup into the man's face and kicked the table into his groin. 'Get out!' he told Robbie.
'Christ, I love a fight!' Robbie said. A half-dozen of the scalded man's friends were charging across the floor and Thomas hurled a bench at their legs, tripping two, and Robbie swung his sword at another man.
'They're English!' the scalded man shouted from the floor. 'They're Goddamns!' The English were hated in Caen.
'He's calling you English,' Thomas told Robbie.
'I'll piss down his throat,' Robbie snarled. kicking the scalded man in the head, then he punched another man with the hilt of his sword and was screaming his Scottish war cry as he advanced on the survivors.
Thomas had snatched up their baggage and his bow-stave and pulled open a door.
'Come on!' he shouted.
'Call me English, you tosspots!' Robbie challenged. His sword was holding the attackers at bay, but Thomas knew they would summon their courage and charge home and Robbie would almost certainly have to kill one to escape and then there would be a hue and cry and they would be lucky not to end dangling at rope ends from the castle battlements, so he just dragged Robbie backwards through the tavern door. 'Run!'
'I was enjoying that,' Robbie insisted and tried to head back into the tavern, but Thomas pulled him hard away and then shoulder-charged a man coming into the alley.
'Run!' Thomas shouted again and pushed Robbie towards the Ile's centre. They dodged into an alley, sprinted across a small square and finally went to ground in the shadows of the porch of St Jean's church. Their pursuers searched for a few minutes, but the night was cold and the patience of the hunters limited.
'There were six of them,' Thomas said.
'We were winning!' Robbie said truculently.
'And tomorrow,' Thomas said, 'when we're supposed to be finding Pierre Villeroy or one of the others, you'd rather be in Caen's jail?'
'I haven't punched a man since the fight at Durham,' Robbie said, 'not properly.'
'What about the hoggling fight in Dorchester?'
'We were too drunk. Doesn't count.' He started to laugh. 'Anyway, you started it.'
'I did?'
'Aye,' Robbie said, 'you chucked the eel stew right in his face! All that stew.'
'I was only trying to save your life,' Thomas pointed out. 'Christ! You were talking English in Caen! They hate the English!'
'So they should,' Robbie said, 'so they should, but what am I supposed to do here? Keep my mouth shut? Hell! It's my_ language too. God knows why it's called English.'
'Because it is English,' Thomas said, 'and King Arthur spoke it.'
'Sweet Jesus!' Robbie said, then laughed again. 'Hell, I hit that one fellow so hard he won't know what day it is when he wakes up.'
They found shelter in one of the many houses that were still abandoned after the savagery of the English assault in the summer. The house's owners were either far away, or more likely their bones were in the big common grave in the churchyard or mired in the river's bed.
Next morning they went down to the quays again. Thomas remembered wading through the strong cur-rent as the crossbowmen fired from the moored ships. The quarrels had spat up small fountains of water and, because he dared not get his bowstring vvet, he had not been able to shoot back. Now he and Robbie walked down the quays to discover the Pentecost had magically appeared in the night. She was as big a ship as any that made it upriver, a ship capable of crossing to England with a score of men and horses aboard, but she was high and dry now as the falling tide stranded her on the mud. Thomas and Robbie gingerly crossed the narrow gangplank to hear a monstrous snoring coming from a small fetid cabin in the stern. Thomas fancied the deck itself vibrated every time the man drew breath and he wondered how any creature who made such a sound would react to being woken, but just then a waif of a girl, pale as a dawn mist and thin as an arrow, climbed from the cabin hatch and put some clothes on the deck and a finger to her lips. She looked very fragile and, as she pulled up her robe to tug on stockings, showed legs like twigs. Thomas doubted she could have been more than thirteen years old.
'He's sleeping,' she whispered.
'So I hear,' Thomas said.
'Sh!' She touched her finger to her lips again then hauled a thick woollen shirt over her night-gown, put her thin feet into huge boots and wrapped herself in a big leather coat. She pulled a greasy woollen hat over her fair hair and picked up a bag that appeared to be made of ancient frayed sailcloth. 'I'm going to buy food,' she said quietly, 'and there's a fire to be made in the forepeak. You'll find a flint and steel on the shelf. Don't wake him!'
With that warning she tiptoed off the ship, swathed in her great coat and boots, and Thomas, appalled at the depth and loudness of the snoring, decided discretion was the best course. He went to the forepeak where he found an iron brazier standing on a stone slab. A fire was already laid in the brazier and, after opening the hatch above to serve as a chimney, he struck sparks from the flint. The kindling was damp, but after a while the fire caught and he fed it scraps of wood so that by the time the girl came back there was a respectable blaze. 'I'm Yvette,' she said, apparently incurious as to who Thomas and Robbie were, 'Pierre's wife,' she explained, then fetched out a huge blackened pan onto which she broke twelve eggs. 'Do you want to eat too?' she asked Thomas.
'We'd like to.'
'You can buy some eggs from me,' she said, nodding at her sailcloth bag, 'and there's some ham and bread in there. He likes his ham.'
Thomas looked at the eggs whitening on the fire. 'Those are all for Pierre?'
'He's hungry in the morning,' she explained, 'so why don't you cut the ham? He likes it thick.' The ship suddenly creaked and rolled slightly on the mud. 'He's awake,' Yvette said, taking a pewter plate from the shelf. There was a groan from the deck, then footsteps and Thomas backed out of the forepeak and turned to find the biggest man he had ever seen.
Pierre Villeroy was a foot taller than Thomas's bow. He had a chest like a hogshead, a smoothly bald pate, a face terribly scarred by the childhood pox and a beard in which a hare could have become lost. He blinked at Thomas. 'You've come to work,' he grunted.
'No, I brought you a message.'
'Only we've got to start soon,' Villeroy said in a voice that seemed to rumble from some deep cavern.
'A message from Sir Guillaume d'Evecque,' Thomas explained.
'Have to use the low tide, see?' Villerov said. 'I've three tubs of moss in the hold. I've always used moss. My father did. Others use shredded hemp, but I don't like it, don't like it at all. Nothing works half as well as fresh moss. It holds, see? And mixes better with the pitch.' His ferocious face suddenly creased into a gap-toothed smile. ' Mon caneton!'
he declared as Yvette brought out his plate heaped with food. Yvette, his duckling, provided Thomas and Robbie with two eggs apiece, then produced two hammers and a pair of strange iron instruments that looked like blunt chisels.
'We're caulking the seams,' Villerov explained, 'so I'll heat the pitch and you two can ram moss between the planks.' He scooped a mess of egg yolk into his mouth with his fingers.
'Have to do it while the ship's high and dry between tides.'
'But we've brought you a message,' Thomas insisted.
'I know you have. From Sir Guillaume. Which means he wants the Pentecost for a voyage and what Sir Guillaume wants he gets because he's been good to me, he has, but the Pentecost ain't no good to him if she sinks, is she? Ain't no good down on the seabed with all the drowned mariners, is she? She has to be caulked. My darling and I almost drowned ourselves yesterday, didn't we, my duckling?'
'She was taking on water,' Yvette agreed.
'Gurgling away, it was,' Villeroy declared loudly, 'all the way from Cabourg to here, so if Sir Guillaume wants to go somewhere then you two had better start work!' He beamed at them above his vast beard, which was now streaked with egg yolk.
'He wants to go to Dunkirk,' Thomas said.
