I forced myself to smile at him with a serenity I suddenly did not feel, and highly aware that others, including Mirren and her two women, were listening to our exchange.
“No, Geordie,” I told him, waving a hand dismissively and trying hard to keep my voice sounding relaxed and confident. “There’s nowhere near as many. There might be half a hundred men in that whole train, give or take a handful, but few of them are priests. We counted them last night, from the top of the same cliff. There are twenty-eight clerics in all. Two of them are bishops, six are priests, and the remaining score are Cistercian monks. And on top of that, there are these ten scouts, five on each side of the road, and this knight who was in charge of them, and perhaps half or threequarters of a score of servants.”
He cocked his head like a bird, one eye glittering as it caught the light and adding subtly to the birdlike resemblance. “Cistercian monks, ye say?” His voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “Are they no’ French, tha’e Cistercians? Aye, they are …What are French monks doin’ ower here?”
This Geordie was a curious soul, and simple, and I glanced down at Mirren, who was looking back up at me. She rolled her eyes as though to let me know I would receive no help from her.
“Geordie, I can’t tell you that. You know more about them than I do, so shush you now and let me go. I have to see to the knight there.”
I was less than ten paces distant from the fallen rider, and no one moved to join me as I walked over and stood looking down at him. I suppose there must have been some thought in my head of baring his face and identifying the man, for I was still convinced I had seen him somewhere before, but long before I reached him I knew I would do no such thing. He was unmistakably dead, reeking with the stench of voided bowels, and his face would remain unseen. The arrow that had killed him, travelling with incomprehensible speed and force, had hammered diagonally up through the front of his war helm and lodged inside, twisting the visor violently out of true and jamming it shut, and blood and grey matter from the shattered skull within had filled the helm and now oozed, thick and obscene, through the openings in the metal.
My stomach lurched and I snatched my gaze away, trying to empty my mind and resisting the urge to vomit, and as I did so my eyes fell on the man the knight had killed. The difference was startling, and somehow pitiful. The knight appeared largely unbloodied. The man he had killed, though, had been unarmoured, and the knight’s broad-bladed sword had split him wide open, carving him like a slaughtered deer and sending his lifeblood flying in all directions to stain the grass and the bushes for yards around the spot where he had fallen. I crossed to where he lay, holding the skirts of my robe high to avoid staining them with his blood, then bent forward slightly so I could see his face. He was a stranger to me, heavily bearded and poorly dressed in a tunic-like garment of rough homespun wool, and I could see no weapon anywhere near him. I wondered what had possessed him to attack a heavily armed and armoured mounted knight, alone as he was, on foot and unarmed, for I remembered seeing him springing high towards the falling sword.
I found myself suddenly seething with outrage. Will had sent me away from the coming day’s activities, with the women, in order to protect my feelings, because he knew I was uncomfortable with anything that smacked of defiance of Holy Mother Church. Now, though, with this single instance of mindless violence and unnecessary slaughter, a new understanding of what was happening everywhere in my country crashed down upon me. I saw that what I had been objecting to—what Will had tried to protect me from—was nothing less than an atrocity, an atrocity carried out against my fellow countrymen by a cynical foreign king using the Church’s name and privilege to abet a damnable war of aggression.
Bishops and senior clerics, indeed all clerics, by general consent, had no need to fear travelling alone, for no one in his right mind would ever dream of robbing a priest. But the two English Bishops whose presence here today had demanded our attention were engaged in activities that set them apart from their peers, and priestly innocence played no role in what they were about. They had a screen of killers thrown out ahead of them, purely to ensure that no profane eyes would gaze upon whatever it was that they were transporting. And I had been puling and fretting like a callow, unformed boy because I was afraid that Will was doing something that might draw down the displeasure of the Church upon my head. I stood there for some time, feeling my flesh crawl with the sickness of self-loathing and thinking about what that voluntary and wilful blindness said about me, and then I swung around and strode back to where Mirren, alone, stood watching me.