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  Historical Notes

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  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Epigraph

  Character List

  Map

  Part 1: City of Spears

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part 2: Tournament of Kings

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part 3: The Terror

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Part 4: Blood Oath

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Historical Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About Gate of the Dead

  Reviews

  About David Gilman

  About the Master of War Series

  Coming soon from David Gilman

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  ...as skilled in war as any man could be, wonderful men at planning a battle and seizing the advantage, at scaling and assaulting towns and castles, as expert and experienced as you could ask for...

  Bascot de Mauléon, man-at-arms, relating the skills of men of the Free Companies to Jean Froissart, fourteenth-century French chronicler

  Character List

  *Sir Thomas Blackstone

  *Christiana, Lady Blackstone

  *Henry: Blackstone and Christiana’s son

  *Agnes: Blackstone and Christiana’s daughter

  Thomas Blackstone’s men

  *Sir Gilbert Killbere

  *Gaillard: Blackstone’s Norman captain

  *Meulon: Blackstone’s Norman captain

  *John Jacob: Blackstone’s captain

  *Perinne: wall builder and soldier

  *Elfred: master of archers and bowyer

  *Will Longdon: centenar and veteran archer

  *Jack Halfpenny: archer

  *Robert Thurgood: archer

  German knights

  *Werner von Lienhard

  *Conrad von Groitsch

  *Siegfried Mertens

  Gascon knights and men-at-arms

  Jean de Grailly: Captal de Buch, Gascon lord and English ally

  *Beyard: Jean de Grailly’s captain

  Gaston Phoebus: Count of Foix

  French knights

  John, Lord of Hangest: French protector of the French royal family at Meaux

  Loys de Chamby: French knight at the siege of Meaux

  Bascot de Mauléon: fought with the Captal in Prussia and then at Meaux

  *Sir Marcel de Lorris: minor French lord, mentor to Henry Blackstone

  English noblemen, knights and squires

  Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster

  Ralph de Ferrers: English Captain of Calais 1358–61

  Sir Gilbert Chastelleyn: knight of Edward III’s royal household

  Stephen Cusington: Edward III’s representative.

  *Roger Hollings: a squire

  *Samuel Cracknell: messenger, sergeant-at-arms.

  *Lord Robert de Marcouf

  *Sir Robert de Montagu

  English rulers

  King Edward III of England

  Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales

  Isabella of France (Isabella the Fair), dowager Queen of England

  French rulers

  King John II (the Good) of France

  The Dauphin: the French King’s son and heir

  The Duchess of Normandy: the Dauphin’s wife

  Charles, King of Navarre: claimant to the French throne, King John’s son-in-law

  Philip of Navarre: Charles of Navarre’s brother.

  Italian noblemen, knights, clerics, merchant and servants

  Galeazzo Visconti: ruler of Milan

  Bernabò Visconti: ruler of Milan

  Marquis de Montferrat: Piedmontese nobleman

  Pancio de Controne: physician to Edward III’s father.

  *Niccolò Torellini: Florentine priest

  *Paolo: Torellini’s servant

  *Fra Stefano Caprini: Knight of the Tau

  *Brother Bertrand: monk

  *Oliviero Dantini: silk merchant of Lucca

  English physician

  Master Lawrence of Canterbury: Queen Isabella’s physician.

  Mayor of Meaux

  Jehan de Soulez

  Leader of the Jacquerie uprising

  Guillaume Cale

  * Indicates fictional characters

  Map

  Part 1

  City of Spears

  1

  The screams echoing down the stone walls sounded as if souls were being cast into the devil’s fire pit. Mercenaries hurled burning torches into buildings and cut down those who tried to escape. The town was aflame and its citizens had no chance of survival against the invaders who had descended from the mountains like a river of blood. The mixed force of German and Hungarian killers hurled aside the flimsy defences. Small knots of men tried to defend their homes but were overwhelmed. Some were hamstrung and forced to watch the violation and murder of their families. The horror made men beg for a quick death. None was given.

  These humble townspeople had dared protest at their winter supplies being seized without payment by mercenaries returning to Milan through the mountain passes. As the column of troops made their slow progress home their commander had left men behind in Santa Marina. A lesson needed to be taught, so the slaughter began. The mercenaries took to the task as savagely as any battlefield barber-surgeon hacked off a gangrenous leg. No artisan or farmer could stand up to the might of these soldiers contracted by the Visconti, Lords of Milan, and there would be little chance for another mercenary force to oppose them. To the south of the town ran a broad river fed by the mountain snows. Cold, and in places deep, it formed a natural barrier to anyone attempting to relieve the stricken town. Men would have to traverse narrow mountain tracks into Santa Marina, and such an approach would be seen. No one would dare risk traversing goat paths by night.

  Except Thomas Blackstone and a hundred of his handpicked men.

  *

  Five captains each had twenty men behind them; each group was led by a scout who trailed a hemp rope held by every man to guide them along different paths through the darkness. When daylight came they slept hidden among the boulders and scrub from which they could spy out where their
route would take them that night. Step by stumbling step – tripping and cursing beneath their breath, ignoring the cuts and wounds to hands and legs – they finally reached the near bank of the river that skirted Santa Marina’s southern edge on the third night, guided by the campfires of the thirty or more tents encamped between river and town. Beyond these mercenary billets the town still smouldered, and the dull crimson glow of deep-seated fires tinged the night sky. Shrieks still reverberated down the streets. There could be no more than about seventy men left in the town. The odds favoured Blackstone.

  ‘Bollocks,’ said John Jacob, Blackstone’s English captain, as he lay in the grass peering across the river. ‘Wet feet.’

  ‘And arse,’ said Sir Gilbert Killbere, who was at Blackstone’s other shoulder. ‘Sweet Jesus, Thomas, did you have to bring us this way? That’s a hundred paces across if it’s a yard.’ He rolled onto his back and pulled his helmet free. The going had been hard enough up until now. He dragged a grubby paw over his grizzled stubble.

  Blackstone lay watching for shadows moving between the tents. There were few to be seen and he guessed that most of the killers would be in the town. The campfires burned brightly enough to cast their glow across the river. His attack would be exposed to anyone who came out of a tent and looked the wrong way. No matter how quickly his lightly armed men could move, a boulder-strewn river would take time to cross.

  ‘The river won’t flood for months. It’ll be waist-deep at worst. Where’s Will?’ he said.

  There was a scuffle of movement behind them in the reeds that grew on the shore.

  ‘Here,’ answered Will Longdon. He belly-crawled closer and peered over the low bank. ‘Ball-ache time, Sir Gilbert. That mountain water will be bloody cold,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, for short-arsed archers like you,’ said the veteran knight.

  ‘The fires will guide us in,’ said Blackstone. ‘Deploy your archers, Will. Three hundred yards downstream. That’s the shallowest part and those who escape us will run for it come first light. Half the men there, half here. Snap shut like a wolf trap.’

  He looked down the line of men who lay on the embankment. Gaunt from lack of sleep, dirt-engrained faces, fists clutching sword, axe or mace ready for the slaughter. The firelight’s glow caught their eyes. They looked frightening enough to scare the scales off a devil’s imp. Without another word Blackstone clambered to his feet and, as one, the men followed. He waded into the shallows, finding what footing he could among the stones underfoot. The near-darkness made the crossing even more difficult but Blackstone and his men had forded more dangerous rivers in the past – times when French crossbowmen had loosed a sky full of quarrels down onto them – but still they had gone on and beaten their enemy. No man who had ever made that journey would think this to be anything more than an inconvenient, cold soaking. They would warm soon enough when they started to kill.

  The gentle sloshing of men’s feet soon gave way to silence as they waded waist-deep into the river and the sound of their passage was hushed by the water gurgling over the shallows. Blackstone glanced left and right at the ragged line of men who followed him. Spear and sword were used to steady themselves against the current. Once he was satisfied that they were all across, he pushed his way through the grass and reeds that gave them the final few moments of flimsy cover.

  The sixty fighting men slipped silently between the tents, quickly pulling back the flaps to see if any mercenaries slept. Blackstone and others ran on, ignoring the grunting cries of men who thought themselves safe in their blankets. The closer he got to the town, the louder the screams he heard.

  Blackstone ran into the first square. Bodies lay strewn: smashed heads, slit stomachs, dark streams of blood glistening on the cobbled surface; men, dogs, women and children – all had been put to the sword. A dozen soldiers taunted a man with their spear points as he crawled on all fours, a mass of entrails billowing below him. They jabbed and cut at him, inflicting ever more pain and misery. They guzzled wine from clay pots and laughed at the man’s agony. Left and right, narrow alleys echoed with similar cries. Torches flickered here and there, their light throwing night demons up against the walls as the Visconti men heaved women from doorways and butchered children who ran screaming for their mother’s skirts.

  One of the soldiers half turned as he heard the sound of pounding boots. Thinking they were men from the tents coming into town to enjoy the slaughter, he grinned, but his leer gave way to a look of puzzlement as he squinted into the uncertain light at the charging, silent men. By the time he realized they were not his own his warning scream was too late. Blackstone’s men fell on them with a suddenness that gave no time for defence.

  ‘Left!’ Blackstone ordered, moving around the men’s bodies, running towards the sound in one of the alleys. The wounded townsman rose to his knees, bloodied hands holding his entrails, blinded eyes lifted to a bearded giant of a man, as tall and broad as Blackstone, a man he would never see and who swiftly cut his throat in an act of mercy.

  ‘Meulon!’ Blackstone shouted. ‘Five men! Over there!’

  The throat-cutter looked quickly to where several men in another side street had turned towards them. The half-obscured killing in the square had alerted them but like their fallen comrades their moment of uncertainty lost them any advantage they might have had. They fumbled as they saw that the men who attacked looked more vicious than their own kind; fear made them falter. By the time they advanced against the intruders they were shoulder to shoulder in the narrow confines of the alleyway and no match for lunging spears followed by axe and sword blows.

  Blackstone wore an open-faced bascinet and his men’s clothing was little different from that of the men who had attacked and torched the town. Some wore greaves to protect their legs and pieces of armour on their shoulders and upper arms; all had a mail haubergeon beneath a jupon bearing Blackstone’s coat of arms – a gauntleted fist grasping a sword blade like a crucifix – cinched at the waist with a belt from which hung a fighting axe and dagger.

  Halfway down another narrow passage a woman clawed and kicked against her attacker as a second man relieved himself against a wall, a burning torch in his free hand. He looked over his shoulder as the darkness from the alleyways seemed to move. He turned and pushed the torch forward and then felt the warmth flood against his leg. By the time he had dropped the torch and fumbled for his sword John Jacob had swung his blade in an upward arc and taken the man between the legs. The pain from his slashed genitals made him bend double, grasping the bloody mess, and another of Blackstone’s men swung his axe down across the man’s exposed neck. Blackstone rammed the soldier attacking the woman, throwing him off balance, then smashed Wolf Sword’s pommel into his snarling mouth. Bones and teeth cracked, the man’s head snapped back, and Killbere’s sword lunge took him in the throat. Blackstone’s men moved forward; all ignored the half-naked woman.

  ‘How many with us?’ Blackstone shouted as he came into another small square where twenty or so men were using a horse trough to beat down a heavy chestnut door, its iron hinges the size of a war shield. More bodies lay scattered, blood smeared the walls and the square’s flaming torches illuminated the carnage.

  ‘Enough!’ answered the veteran knight who pushed past Blackstone, eager to kill.

  ‘Gilbert! Wait!’ Blackstone shouted. There were only nine men with them as the others were fighting running battles in the streets behind them.

  Those who assaulted the doorway turned and in a heartbeat saw that they were superior in numbers to their attackers. Blackstone’s feet slithered on blood-wet stone, and by the time he’d recovered his pace two or three men had gone past him after Killbere. Swords clashed; ill-timed strikes sparked against the cobbled street. Some of Blackstone’s men picked up fallen shields and came shoulder to shoulder to form a wall against the erratic attack. Blackstone could see that Killbere was in danger on his exposed left flank. The older man would soon go down. Blackstone ran towards him, but three men lunged
from a doorway where flames licked the wooden stairwell behind them. The force of the attack pushed him back against a wall as he parried their blows. He half turned, letting the first man’s momentum carry him stumbling past into the wall. Blackstone reached down and pulled a fallen shield onto his exposed arm. A sudden flurry of blows from the other two men hammered down on the metal rim but he ran his weight against them and the look in their eyes told him what they saw: a snarling apparition as the shadows contorted his face. He beat them back. One turned and ran; the other sidestepped, swung and cut at him with his arm raised. Blackstone rammed Wolf Sword’s hardened steel deep into the exposed armpit, then shouldered the dying man aside. The man on the ground rolled clear, abandoned his sword and ran into the safety of an alleyway.

  Blackstone turned to try and catch sight of his friend but Killbere was obscured by two hulking frames: the two Norman spearmen, Meulon and Gaillard, who had brought their men from a side street and boxed in the now helpless mercenaries, seven of whom backed into a corner and threw down their weapons.

  ‘Mercy!’ they cried, some going down onto their knees.

  Before Blackstone could stop his men they had cut into them. Two survivors cowered back, their arms raised in a futile attempt to shield themselves from the coming blows.

  ‘Wait!’ Blackstone ordered.

  Killbere turned a blood-splattered face towards him. Blackstone knew his own would be similarly smeared by the fighting.

  ‘Spare them?’ asked Killbere incredulously.

  Blackstone’s men parted as he strode through them. ‘For now. Get up,’ he ordered. Over his mail one of the men’s jupons bore the insignia of his lord, a viper swallowing a child.

  ‘I know Visconti’s blazon,’ he said and turned to the second man, whose blood-splattered covering revealed a partial image. The cloth was so faded and worn that the image could barely be seen. A crown sat on what appeared to be a woman’s head. But instead of arms there were outspread wings, and where there should have been legs were eagle’s talons. For a moment the image of those talons clawed at his memory. He knew that coat of arms. He had seen it in the heat of battle.