The Yeoman's Tale, page 19
‘What are they doing?’ Chaucer asked. He was looking at the wall at his level, trying to see if there was a chink through which he could peep, but Hardesty had done his job well – there wasn’t room for an ant to get through.
Hardesty shrugged. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘They are just standing, staring. It’s … unnerving. We’ll watch and wait. That’s all we can do. Wait a moment …’ He pulled out a parchment from the breast of his jerkin. ‘I have you down for a watch now, Master Gower. Look.’ He pointed to a row of columns. ‘In the event of a siege, Master Gower will take the sixth watch. That’s now. Can you remember what you have to do?’
‘Of course I can,’ Gower said airily, climbing the ladder. ‘But if you would like to remind me one more time, Master Hardesty, that might be best …’
Chaucer was not listed to be on watch until the wee small hours, but thought he could do with a reminder of exactly what he had to do, so stayed with Gower up on the ramparts. He had only intended to stay a while, but there was something about the massed crowd, about their eyes fixed on their new horizon, the top of the Tabard walls, that was mesmerizing. The crowd was not completely silent any more. There was a low hum, not of words; something recognizable would have been a comfort, even if it was only a harbinger of doom. The hum was made of shuffling feet, rustling, rough-made clothes, the occasional sharp zing of a whetstone drawn along a blade. It seemed to get into a man’s spine, running along it like St Elmo’s fire, making the skin crawl and the hair crackle. It was like the calm that comes just before the lightning strikes, before the thunder splits the sky in two. Chaucer was sorely in need of something normal. A slice of Alice’s home-made bread. A draught of Doggett’s new ale. The smell of wool in the warehouses. Something from his old life, a life he feared he would never see again.
‘Dark times, eh, Master Chaucer?’ Ludlum touched the rim of his kettle hat as he arrived to relieve Gower and his crew. Chaucer had never been so glad to see anyone in his life. The comptroller’s houppelande was open at the neck and his belt had gone. Ludlum was amused to see that the man whose gate he used to keep was standing with a halberd in his hand; he clearly barely knew one end from another.
‘Dark indeed, Ludlum,’ Chaucer murmured. ‘Dark indeed. I still can’t believe that William Tonge just let the peasants in.’ A sudden thought struck him. ‘My God! My books! The bastards have got my books!’
‘One thing’s for sure, sir,’ Ludlum said, although it failed to cheer the poet, ‘they won’t have read any of ’em.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Chaucer tore his mind away from imaginings of his ruined room. ‘And my wine! My daily gallon from the King. They may not read my books, but they’ll certainly drink my wine! What time do you think it is?’
Ludlum clicked his fingers in faked annoyance. ‘Damn, I left my astrolabe behind, not that it’s much good in the dark. It’s time for my watch to begin, that’s all I know. If you wait awhile, St Martin’s le Grand’s bell will tell us when the market opens. Trust in that.’
‘Yes,’ Chaucer sighed. ‘I suppose you’re right. Umm … have you looked … down, lately?’
‘No,’ Ludlum chuckled. ‘Haven’t you? I thought you were on watch.’
‘Not strictly speaking. I was just keeping Gower company. It’s just that … they’re so silent. It’s hard to believe they’re there if you don’t look.’
‘My old gammer used to say to us nippers when we couldn’t sleep, that if we shut our eyes, nothing could hurt us. Nothing’s there if you can’t see it. We’d be off to sleep like winking.’
‘You believe that?’ Chaucer’s voice held endless hope.
‘When I was five,’ Ludlum said. ‘It isn’t something I would care to trust in now.’ He crouched low and looked over the parapet. Down below, in the moonlight, there was a shimmer, as if from ripple in water. The crowd was thinner now, and it was harder to make out shapes. After the glaring heat and brightness of the day, the half-light was trying to the eyes. The peasants were well led – someone knew about the madness of crowds, that was certain. Chaucer joined Ludlum, but the man restrained him, a friendly hand on his arm. ‘Best keep low, sir. A man on watch is a target; believe me, I know. These nightwalkers they’ve left behind, they will be the cream of the crop; they’ll know their business. Once they stop relying on numbers, that’s when we need to be on our guard.’ Ludlum narrowed his eyes, attracted by some movement in the street below which meant nothing to Chaucer. ‘Please keep calm, sir, but perhaps you’d care to call Master Hardesty. He’ll need to—’
There was a sudden roar and a burst of flame in the street and the sound and sight of people running. Chaucer dropped the halberd as Ludlum swung down the roll into the yard, grabbing a second rope to ring the alarm bell.
‘Mother of God!’ Geoffrey Chaucer had been more worried than this, but he couldn’t remember when. His knees felt at once nailed to the floorboards of the palisade and wobbling like water. For what seemed like hours, he was alone on that parapet. Then, there were people everywhere – hostelmen and pilgrims, shaking the sleep out of their eyes, hauling on their clothes, clattering up ladders onto the wall walks.
Fire. Of course they’d have fire. In that desperate madhouse, probably only Chaucer and Gower knew the story of Prometheus, who had stolen the secret of fire from the gods. Damn his eyes! Why couldn’t the Greek bastard have left well enough alone?
Hardesty was at Chaucer’s side, looking down at the Comptroller of Woollens. Hardesty looked like a giant, solid on the defences that he’d built, ready to take on the world.
‘Fire, Hardesty!’ Chaucer gabbled. ‘Fire!’
The yeoman nodded. ‘And what are the two things to put out fire, Master Chaucer?’
‘Er …’
Hardesty’s hand was in the air. He was watching the peasants, even more numerous now than when they first had silently appeared, moving forward, out of the cover of the surrounding houses, chanting and shouting, their faces flickering in the light of the burning brands they carried. After their sinister silence, this chanting seemed to come from the bowels of some hell of hatred. Chaucer looked about him and couldn’t believe it. Nothing was happening. Along the ramparts, to his right and left, a motley crew of defenders crouched poised, armed with anything they could find, faces grim, eyes wide, staring at the mob coming for them, its front fringed with fire.
‘Now!’ Hardesty’s arm came down, and along the walls of the Tabard there was a rattle of chains and a thud of timbers. Barrel after barrel tilted and swung from behind shutters, revolving on the pivot that Hardesty had built over the front gate. Gallons of water crashed down on the attackers, extinguishing their brands and bowling most of them over with shouts of shock.
‘Cold, isn’t it?’ Hardesty yelled at them. ‘For flaming June, I mean.’
For several minutes, the peasants were in disarray, men falling over each other, wet through and slipping in the dust of the road, which had become suddenly a morass of sticky mud. Some were out cold; others cut and bruised from the barrels that had followed the water crashing over the palisade. While the defenders cheered, John Gower scuttled over to Chaucer. ‘That’ll teach them,’ he said, gleefully. ‘They won’t do that again.’
‘Oh, but they will, Master Gower,’ Hardesty said. ‘And we’ve emptied all our water barrels.’
There were still a dozen or so torches burning at street level and the mob reorganized, pulling fallen comrades out of the way, aiming for the front gate.
‘We’re finished,’ Gower said, crossing himself.
Hardesty smiled down at him. ‘Oh, ye of little faith,’ he said. His hand was in the air again and Chaucer, for one, was more than a little confused. As the peasants reached the gate and the defenders heard the thud as clubs and staves hit the oak, the yeoman’s arm came down again. Again, there was the scream of pivots, wood on wood and tensioned iron. More barrels were bursting out over the parapet, their hoops pinging apart into flying razors, and an avalanche of pale sand coated the front ranks at the door.
‘Sand!’ Chaucer yelled, back in the schoolroom as the clever boy with the right answer, ‘Of course! That’ll put any fire out!’
‘It will,’ Hardesty said, ‘but it’s not as simple as that. Look!’
There were screams from below. Men were falling back, covering their heads and faces, their nostrils choked, their ears full, blind and in agony. ‘Hot sand is the secret,’ the yeoman said. ‘Have you ever stood on a beach, Master Chaucer, at the height of summer?’
‘Good Lord, no.’ The comptroller was horrified. What kind of animal did Hardesty assume he was?
‘If you had,’ the yeoman said, ‘you’d know something of the pain these knarres are feeling now.’
In the street, the peasants were pulling back, groaning and sobbing, coughing in their agony.
‘Damn!’ Maghfield grunted, sheathing his falchion. ‘I was looking forward to tangling with those bastards.’
‘You may still get your chance, sir,’ Hardesty said. ‘They’ve got a handful of torches yet and we’re out of water and sand.’
The attackers had pulled back out of range of the yeoman’s improvised artillery and stood in a body, shaking their weapons and yelling obscenities. Then, it fell quiet.
‘Hoo, the Tabard!’ a voice called.
Harry Baillie assumed the responsibility of a reply. ‘What do you want?’ It seemed rather an odd question after the last few minutes, but Baillie was having to make it up as he went along; in an eventful life, this was the first time he had faced down an angry mob. An angry mob of this magnitude, at least; he had had rather a torrid time with the Guild of Haberdashers once or twice, but they didn’t number this many, even at a quorum.
‘The Comptroller of the King’s Woollens,’ the voice came back. ‘Give us Geoffrey Chaucer and you will all live.’
There was a stunned silence. John Gower turned to his friend. ‘Mother of God, Geoff,’ he whispered. ‘How did they know?’
‘Our friend Cog Buckley,’ Chaucer told him. ‘Father Ambrosius who is not Father Ambrosius. If what Nell says is true, he’ll have told them all that they need to know.’
‘Judging by what you’ve achieved so far,’ Baillie shouted, ‘we’re all going to live anyway.’
There was a silence.
‘Is that you, Baillie?’ the voice came back. ‘Harry Baillie, prop.? How’s that nice-looking wife of yours, eh? Ready for a bit of action tonight, is she, after the birth of the sprog? And how will he look, nailed to your front door?’
Baillie’s jaw twitched. He was on the parapet, sword in hand, ready to leap to the street below. Hardesty held his arm and hauled him back. ‘Only one way to answer that,’ he said. ‘I can’t see the speaker, but …’
There was a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. He raised his chin, licked a finger and held it up to the slight breeze. ‘Third head from the left, Master Baillie,’ he said. ‘Just to make a point.’
There was a hiss and a thud and the third head from the left disappeared. There was cheering from the ramparts, but Hardesty shook his head. ‘He was somebody’s father,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s son.’
‘Oh, no,’ Ludlum growled. ‘People like him don’t have fathers.’
Chaucer passed the halberd he had regained to Gower. ‘Here, John,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be needing this; not where I’m going.’ He clapped his old friend on the shoulder and pushed past him. He looked up and was surprised by who stood in his way.
‘Oh, no, you don’t, Master Chaucer.’ It was Alice, a leather jerkin over her apron, a kettle hat on her head. ‘If you give yourself up, who will I have to do for back at the Aldgate when all this business is over? Besides, and I hate to bring it up at a time like this, but you owe Doggett … well, I won’t embarrass you in front of all these people.’
‘Here they come again!’ Maghfield drew his sword once more and everybody closed to the ramparts.
‘Down!’ Hardesty bellowed and the whole line ducked as a volley of arrows hissed out into the night, clattering onto the parapet and biting into the wood. The yeoman, Ludlum and his men and anybody else who dared, reached out to jerk the shafts free and add them to their quivers. Then, with a roar, the peasant line pushed forward, batting their bowmen aside and surging on the gate.
Hardesty’s arm was in the air again. Chaucer and Gower looked at each other; what had the man got left?
‘Now!’ the yeoman shouted and more barrels spun and clanked, staves creaking and oil pouring like molten lava onto those who had reached the building. If the screams had been deafening before, as first water, then hot sand hit the attackers, it was unbelievable now.
‘That’s the thing about oil,’ Hardesty muttered. ‘It clings so, especially to sand.’
Men were floundering in the sea of chaos outside the Tabard, tumbling over each other in a mad, desperate frenzy to escape the scalding, crawling liquid. Slowly, the pandemonium died down and there was no sound but the sobbing of the maimed and dying.
Chaucer looked up to the sky. Dawn was breaking, lending an eerie light to the city over the river. But there was no great bell of St Martin’s le Grand, nor any others that should have followed to mark Prime.
‘My God,’ somebody on the ramparts murmured, ‘they’re going.’
And they were. The peasants were crawling away, dragging their injured and licking their wounds. At the last, only one man stood under a tattered flag of St George, scowling at the Tabard and the battlefield in front of it. Against all the odds, one little inn had held out against thousands. Most of the defenders were on their knees, thanking God for his mercy and Tom Hardesty for his arcane knowledge.
‘We’ll be back,’ the lone peasant said. ‘All of us. And we won’t just be hanging Geoffrey Chaucer. Count on it.’ He turned to go, to thread his way through the still, dark tangle of Southwark streets. Then he turned back. ‘In the meantime,’ he said, ‘look at your city; what’s left of it.’ And he was gone.
To a man and woman, they turned to the north. The river lay pale and dead, even the roaring below the bridge a muffled growl. Beyond, there were fires everywhere, the glow lighting up the dawn, heralding a new age that no one could quite understand. In the Tabard, they hadn’t lost a man, but what of the city? The drawbridge on the bridge was open and the shops beyond it wrecked and looted. There was rubbish everywhere, scattered in the streets and floating on the water, where the eddies swirled and carried it this way and that, as Fye Gillis’s body had been carried what seemed like years ago.
‘That’s Clerkenwell,’ somebody said, pointing to one of the fires. ‘The Templars’ Priory of St John.’
‘God, no,’ somebody else chimed in. ‘The Temple church; it’s on fire. How can you burn a church?’
‘Mother of God.’ It was Geoffrey Chaucer’s voice. ‘That’s John of Gaunt’s Palace of the Savoy. It’s an inferno.’
‘And where is His Grace the Duke of Lancaster?’ Maghfield growled. ‘Where are any of the bloody nobility?’
‘They’ll be in the Tower,’ Baillie informed him with the air of confidence of innkeepers the world over. ‘Shitting themselves.’
All eyes turned to the silent stone fortress with its square towers, a bastion of civilization in a world of chaos and slaughter. And there, ranged over Tower Hill, like an Old Testament plague, were the peasants.
Waiting.
They were still erecting the tents on the Mile End Waste, on either side of the road that ran to the Aldgate. Beyond Spitalfields and Goodman’s Fields, littered now with the debris of the peasants, they could see the city walls clearly and the Tower, white and solid in the June sun.
‘It’s a lovely day, Master Buckley.’ Wat Tyler was lolling on a velvet couch he’d taken a fancy to at John of Gaunt’s Palace of the Savoy, most of which now clogged the river below the Strand. ‘I hope you’re not going to be the bastard who spoils it.’
Cog Buckley was still wearing his sackcloth and it would be weeks before his hair would grow back. ‘About the Tabard …’ he began, but Tyler brushed it aside. His minions had closed around him, the new king in his makeshift court; one of them was actually plucking a lute.
‘We’ll come to that,’ Tyler said. ‘Tell me about the Tower.’
Buckley threw his arms wide. ‘Beyond my expertise, Wat, I’m afraid.’
The peasant leader frowned. ‘But you went there, didn’t you, as Father Ambrosius, I mean?’
‘I was with the Bishop of London for a week, yes,’ Buckley nodded, ‘but we were mostly in Lambeth Palace.’
Tyler put his goblet down. He could get used to Gaunt’s Romonye; it tickled his palate. It tickled him to think that he’d got it for nothing. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘from what you remember. Do the best you can.’
Buckley thought for a moment. ‘The river’s the best way in,’ he said. ‘Henry III’s watergate.’
Somebody was scribbling all this down at Tyler’s elbow.
‘And then?’
‘It’s a narrow entrance. If I was a military man …’
Tyler snorted.
‘… I’d make a feint from Tower Hill – you’ve got men there already. Use the Essex boys to hit from the north and east, down the Minories. There’s a postern gate to the north. Make them think you’re going for that.’
‘Night attack, you reckon?’
Buckley nodded. ‘That’d be best,’ he said.
Tyler yawned. ‘Didn’t do us much good at the Tabard, though, did it?’ he asked.
‘Ah, well …’
Tyler was on his feet. ‘Ah, well, there doesn’t seem to be much point in us having a man on the inside if he doesn’t tell us anything.’
‘I didn’t know about Hardesty’s contraptions,’ he said, ‘as I live and breathe. He kept all that close to his chest.’
‘Water, sand and oil,’ Tyler murmured. ‘They’ll have all that and more at the Tower – cannon, too. Not to mention Robert Knollys’s crossbowmen. It’s going to be bloody, Cog; it’s going to be bloody.’
