VIPER’S BLOOD
David Gilman
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About Viper’s Blood
Tuscany, 1358
Thomas Blackstone has built a formidable reputation in exile, fighting as a mercenary amid the ceaseless internecine warring of Italy’s City States. Success has bred many enemies, who will seize any opportunity to destroy the man they cannot overcome on the field.
When a dying man delivers a message recalling Blackstone to England, it seems almost certain to be a trap. Yet Blackstone cannot decline – the summons is apparently from the Queen.
Blackstone will brave the terrors of the High Alps in winter, face the Black Prince in tournament in Windsor, confront the bloody anarchy of a popular revolt in northern France and submit to trial by combat.
And every step of the way, he will be shadowed by a notorious assassin, a killer who has been instructed to inflict the maximum pain on his target before he despatches him to hell.
For Suzy
Everywhere was grief, destruction and desolation, uncultivated fields filled with weeds, ruined and abandoned houses… In short wherever I looked were the scars of defeat. The ruins go right up to the gates of Paris.
The Italian poet Petrarch travelling through
France after the English army’s passage
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
About Viper’s Blood
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Character List
Part 1: To Seize a Crown
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
Part 2: The Witch of Balon
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part 3: Death of the Innocents
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Part 4: The Scent of Blood
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Part 5: The Devil’s Son
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Historical Notes
Acknowledgements
About David Gilman
About the Master of War series
Also by David Gilman
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Map
CHARACTER LIST
*Sir Thomas Blackstone
*Henry: Blackstone’s son
*William de Sainteny, child born from Christiana Blackstone’s rape
THOMAS BLACKSTONE’S MEN
*Sir Gilbert Killbere
*Gaillard: Norman captain
*Meulon: Norman captain
*John Jacob: captain
*Perinne: wall builder and soldier
*Renfred: German man-at-arms and captain
*Will Longdon: centenar and veteran archer
*Jack Halfpenny: ventenar and archer
*Robert Thurgood: archer
*Collard: man-at-arms
*Elfred: master of archers who commands Blackstone’s men in Italy
FRENCH NOBLEMEN AND MEN-AT-ARMS
*Bernard de Chauliac: captain of the French royal guard
Gaucher de Châtillon: Lord of Troissy, Captain of Rheims
*Philippe Bonnet: brigand
*Grimo the Breton: brigand leader
*Sir Louis de Joigny: commander of Cormiers
Robert de Fiennes: Constable of France
Simon Bucy: Counsellor to the Price Regent
Jean de Neuville: nobleman who led invasion of England
*Paul de Venette: brigand and citizen of Paris
Count of Tancarville: French hostage in England
Jean de Dormans: French Chancellor
ENGLISH NOBLEMEN, KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES
Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster
Earls of Northampton, Warwick and Suffolk
Sir Reginald Cobham
Bartholomew Burghesh: King Edward’s Chamberlain
Sir Walter Mauny
Sir John Chandos
Sir Richard Baskerville
*Sir Oswald de Chambres
*Sir Walter Pegyn: Duke of Lancaster’s knight
ENGLISH ROYAL FAMILY
King Edward III of England
Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales
FRENCH ROYAL FAMILY
King John II (the Good) of France
The Dauphin Charles: King John’s son and heir
Princess Isabelle de Valois: King John’s daughter
ITALIAN AND TRANSALPINE NOBLEMEN, KNIGHTS, CLERICS AND SERVANTS
Galeazzo Visconti: ruler of Milan
Bernabò Visconti: ruler of Milan
*Antonio Lorenz: Bernabò Visconti’s illegitimate son
Count Amadeus VI of Savoy
*Girard Goncenin: feral child
Marquis de Montferrat: Piedmontese nobleman, enemy of the Visconti and Amadeus
*Niccolò Torellini: Florentine priest
*Fra Pietro Foresti: Knight of the Tau
FRENCH CLERICS, OFFICIALS AND SERVANTS:
Abbot of Cluny: Pope Innocent VI’s delegate to King Edward and the Dauphin
Simon of Langres: Dominican monk and papal delegate
Hugh of Geneva: papal delegate
*Clarimonde: lady-in-waiting to Princess Isabelle de Valois
*Cataline: Clarimonde’s daughter
CITIZENS OF BALON:
*Malatrait: mayor
*Aelis de Travaux: healer
*Jean Agillot: barber
*Madeleine Agillot: the barber’s wife
*Etienne Chardon: blacksmith
*Petrus Gavray: furrier
*Charles Pyvain: cobbler
*Stephanus Louchart: pardoner
* Indicates fictional characters
PART ONE
TO SEIZE A CROWN
France 1360
CHAPTER ONE
Thomas Blackstone spat blood.
The axe-wielding Frenchman’s blow missed his open helm but the fist clutching the axe slammed into his face. Blackstone’s height and strength carried him past the assault into the hacking mêlée as John Jacob, a pace behind, rammed his blade beneath the man’s armpit. The snarling ro
ar of close-quarter battle mingled with the screams of mutilated men. Blood and entrails squelched underfoot as the city’s defenders fell beneath English violence. Step by step Blackstone and his men fought their way through the defensive ditches that had been dug around the city of Rheims. The walls were higher than heaven. Men died in their shadow, cast down into bloodstained mud. Some who fought cursed the cold and the rain, and some the King of England, who had brought his host of ten thousand men to this place of death. Sweat stung Blackstone’s eyes as he carved a path towards the Prince of Wales, the man he was sworn to protect and who was in the vanguard of the battle. Two of Blackstone’s captains, Gaillard and Meulon, huge bears of men who matched Blackstone’s size and strength, flanked the Englishman they had served these past fourteen years. Their spears thrust into the terrified French, some of whom were city militia who had never experienced the surging terror that now befell them.
Blackstone saw the Prince wheel, his shield slamming down a French knight. The man raised his visor and cried out, but his voice was swept away in the bellowing cacophony. His gesture was one of surrender. The Prince hesitated, but the weight of men around him forced him across the fallen man as Meulon leaned forward and pushed his spear into the man’s face. The Frenchman’s hands desperately snatched at the steel; his body bucked. Meulon wrenched the blade free; the man was already dead. Blackstone trod on his chest, unconcerned at the spume of blood that splattered his legs. He reached the Prince who, despite being flanked by his retinue, cleaved a path towards the city gates. For the past thirty-three days of the siege no one had expected such resistance from the walled city’s defenders; no one had believed that the winter rain could be so persistent; and only Blackstone believed that King Edward III in his pursuit of the French crown had made a foolish mistake in trying to take the city whose guardian, the nobleman Gaucher de Châtillon, had fortified the walls, blocked the drawbridges and dug defensive ditches. Ditches that Blackstone and his men had fought through for the past two days, and whose quagmire sucked men’s legs and sapped strength. Two days of half-starved fighting so that the English King could seize the city that traditionally crowned every King of France. New Year had passed but Edward wanted that crown.
‘My Prince!’ Blackstone yelled as the King’s son slipped. He leapt forward, slamming his shield into mail-clad footsoldiers, forcing himself between fighters who had poured from the city gates wild with fear and determination to stop the vile English horde from advancing and thinking that they might seize Edward’s son. The sight of the Prince falling to his knees gave them renewed courage but then they saw the shield bearing Blackstone’s blazon: the mailed fist clasping the sword blade. Its cruciform and declaration, Défiant à la mort, heralded death and made them falter. To stand against the renowned Englishman whose very name was enough to make men surrender before his violence was unleashed was an invitation few would accept. But the weight of those behind pushed them forward. Frenzy ruled the day; blood-lust defeated fear. They fell on Blackstone. His shield took the blows of mace and sword as he half bent his body, turning their blows away and thrusting with killing jabs of Wolf Sword’s hardened steel. As he spun around he caught sight of the Prince of Wales vomiting. He spewed across his own men and those who lay dead and dying at his feet. A banner dipped as willing hands reached for him. Rich food and plenty of it! Blackstone thought derisively. A king’s table groaning with succulent cuts and rich sauces. A sight he and his men would never see, let alone share. Most of the troops were starving. Man and horse had been deprived of supplies as the French burned food stores ahead of the English advance and the flooded rivers ran with waste, poisoned by slaughtered carcasses. Deny the English invaders supplies and they will be defeated had been the Dauphin’s command. A worthless son of a worthless French King in a worthless land in a worthless war. For Christ’s sake! What were they dying for in this country? In this ditch?
Blackstone backhanded Wolf Sword’s pommel into a Frenchman’s face contorted with hatred and purpose; then he rammed the rim of his shield beneath the chin of another. He shifted his weight, allowed a strike against him, saw the man stumble past, left him to die beneath John Jacob’s sword and then surrendered to the blood haze that filled his mind and softened the roar of the battle. He was cocooned in the place he knew well. Now the killing rage was with him again; his instinct to kill and maim enveloped him like a rising tide and swept him along, a warring demon blessed by the angels. Beneath the rolling clouds that brought the swirling curtains of rain, a darker storm swept across the battlements. English archers laid a deluge of arrows onto the city walls. Blackstone saw the bowmen in his mind’s eye, felt their effort in his heart. Nock, draw, loose! Sheaves of arrows carried by pages and anyone else ordered to feed the greatest weapon in the King’s army would be borne relentlessly to the thousands of archers. Will Longdon would be in the sawtooth line with his men, Jack Halfpenny, Robert Thurgood: men who had fought and suffered with Thomas Blackstone. All of them had swept across France during the years of war, back and forth to Italy where Blackstone and his men defended the road to Florence until finally returning to France a year before last. It was there an Italian assassin had ripped away Blackstone’s heart by slaying his wife and child.
Blackstone led the assault as the English swarmed forward under cover of the arrows that kept the wall’s defenders’ heads down. Two wooden assault towers were pushed and pulled towards the battlements as carpenters and engineers dragged cut trees and building timber forward across the defences, using them to breach the earthworks and get closer to the five city gates that had not yet been boarded up. Three divisions had assaulted the city, swarming around its walls like wolves bearing down on a beast of prey. The Duke of Lancaster had attacked from the north, the Earl of March from the east, Richmond and Northampton from the north-west, but it was Blackstone’s men fighting with the Prince of Wales’s division from the south-west who had made the most progress. The defenders, however, had taken their toll. Frenchmen had made sorties to block the ditches and fight viciously while others on the walls defied the arrows and used machines behind the city walls to rain down rocks on the attackers. Apart from the Prince’s division, the English were being held, dying where they stood: only Edward’s men were making ground, forcing a wedge through the enemy ground troops in a thirty-foot causeway across the ditch on the western side of the city. They fought shoulder to shoulder, spit and blood and men’s waste staining the ground and the stench of death and shit fouling the cold air.
Despite the rain, choking smoke swirled down the narrow confines of the ditches as the French fighters set the timber fillings alight. Men struggled from one smothering cloud to another, eyes stinging from the smoke as sudden death loomed unexpectedly from the miasma. Blackstone and his men slithered down into another ditch; he glanced up and saw the man who had first taken him to war, who had rallied the English at Crécy against overwhelming odds and who, with Blackstone at his side, had held the gap in the hedgerow at Poitiers years later when the French cavalry tried to crush them. Sir Gilbert Killbere liked nothing better than killing Frenchmen. He yearned for it. Grieved for its loss when fighting in Italy and relished the skill it took to defeat a blood enemy. Now he led a determined group of men against those who had set fire to the timbers, raising his shield above his head as another shower of rocks fell from the sky. Blackstone, Meulon and Gaillard brought their shields together and rammed back half a dozen militia, behind whom were the noblemen who urged their men on, but the city soldiers were no match for the savagery that was being inflicted on them. The Prince’s men, now led by Blackstone, edged forward yard by yard, sword and spear length at a time. If those burning timbers could be dragged to the closed gate Blackstone knew they would have a fighting chance of entering the city.
He turned away from the raised swords and axes of those who opposed him and changed direction, taking them by surprise. Forty men or more turned with him; there were still enough behind them to hold the ditch.
‘Gilbert! The fire! We use it!’
Killbere looked as fatigued as every other man. His raised visor exposed a soot-streaked face. Sweat, rain and blood trickled down his forehead from an earlier wound. He turned his back, shouted a command and the soldiers with him formed a phalanx ready to cut a wound into the Frenchmen. Blackstone, Meulon and Gaillard took the weight of one of the long timbers onto their shoulders. It was burning at one end from pitch that billowed black smoke. With the fire behind them they dragged the wooden beam forward. Blackstone would burn the bastards out, provided he and the others survived long enough to stack burning timbers and beams at those gates. The wind changed; flames threatened to lick their backs. Meulon cursed and Blackstone shifted his shield further onto his back. He altered course and tried to get the wind at an angle. For a moment it worked. The flames were subdued into acrid smoke that screened them from the Frenchmen who were now swarming forward from the ditches into the dense smoke to assault Killbere and his men.
Killbere strode forward. Two, three long strides, shield up, the blood knot from his sword biting beneath his gauntlet. An indistinct bellowing roar rose above the clash of steel and flesh as his men vented their determination to kill. They would protect Thomas Blackstone – or die rather than face the shame of life should they fail.
The gods of war favour the bold, but the King of England favoured their lives even more. As Blackstone got within 150 paces of the gate trumpets heralded the retreat. Their bright notes soared across the battlefield, their command distinct and unquestionable.
Blackstone half turned and saw the look of disbelief and disgust on Killbere’s face as the repeated demands made him falter. It gave the French the chance to retreat.
‘A pig’s arse!’ shouted Killbere and waved his sword, urging Blackstone on. The three men hauled the timber up the slope; Blackstone fell to his knees in the mud, cursed and let his anger give strength to his muscles. He was defying his King. Again. The last time – when he tried to kill the French King at Poitiers – he had suffered exile, but on this occasion he would claim that the noise of battle had deafened him to King Edward’s command. Others broke rank and tried to help Blackstone heave the rain-sodden timber forward. The pitch would flare again with a good strike of a flint and something dry to kindle the flames. But there was nothing dry. Man and ground were soaked, their breath billowing, steam rising from their bodies as the heat of sweat met the cold air. The men’s extra strength gave Blackstone and the others the power to move forward as Killbere fought on one flank and John Jacob rallied men on the other. Blackstone watched his hardened captain methodically strike down those who stood in his path, cutting a way open for Blackstone to get the timber in place. Blackstone glanced back. Others had followed their example, dragging and heaving burning tree trunks and dismantled bridge supports towards the one gate that might yield them the city. Then Edward could have his crown and they could all go home.