Dacre's War (5 page)

‘It's us they won't forget, not for a long time,' said Christopher, unbuttoning his woollen waistcoat as the fire reached him, and stretching out his legs under the table. He cupped his goblet in a hand bound in a rusted rag. A large, dishevelled man, with a farmer's ruddy complexion, he was more like Dacre in appearance than the whip-thin Philip, though all three shared a manner, and a cast of mind, that showed they came from the same litter.

He caught his brother's eye. ‘Ye gods, Tam, I've never seen a blaze like it. Two days later and the abbey was still sizzling. And there's hardly a hovel left in the town. The place is nothing now but ash.' He frowned. ‘The screams of the folks as they roasted would've touched the hardest heart. I had to remind myself not to run back and save them. Christopher, I said, they are all infidels. There's not a Christian among them. Even the monks held the devil in their hearts.'

William Eure, Dacre's deputy, nodded. ‘Should have s-s-seen them, running around, pressing their crosses to their lips, as if their Antichrist would be able to save them. Pitiful, it was. Getting rid of them, I've s-s-saved a place for myself in heaven.'

From the far end of the table, Philip spoke. ‘Our work in the borders is like the good Lord's crusades in the holy land, except that out here the trophies are worthless.' He sniffed, wiping his nose on his linen sleeve. It was one of his lesser drips, a late summer sniffle rather than the ripe winter snorts that, better than a bell round his neck, told the world he was approaching long before he came into sight.

Christopher nodded: ‘It's a crusade, all right, but the Moors are half as savage.'

Surrey leaned forward. ‘Gentlemen, apart from their misbegotten beliefs, I hear the Mohammedans are educated and civilised men. Those are not words that could ever be used in these parts – of either Scots or English.'

Dacre shifted in his chair. These were his people the earl and his brothers were talking about. Enemies or not, he was one of them. He eyed his companions with dislike and knocked back his wine.

Night blackened the arrow-slits above their heads, and in the quickening draught tar shadows danced. The tallow flares flickered and darkened and it seemed, for a moment, as if he were once more in the woods by Jedburgh, that the spirits he had met there had followed him back to Harbottle. He shivered. He had seen many terrible things in his time, but nothing so alarming as what he had witnessed in those woods. That was a private message, for his eyes only, though why he could not fathom.

The creatures had appeared with the suddenness of a nightmare. He and his lieutenants had stretched out for a few hours' sleep before the morning's assault. They were an hour's ride from Jedburgh, a douce little abbey town, which Henry had commanded the Warden General to destroy. The king's patience had run out, and he did not want peace in the north. The time for that was past, he said. Overriding Dacre's protests, he insisted the Scots be harried, hounded, and killed.

The month before, he had ordered Kelso, Jedburgh's border twin, to be destroyed. It was an easy conquest and Dacre had fulfilled his instructions to the letter. Within hours of their siege, the abbey and its tower had lain desolate, reduced to cinders. Now that the Scots were at a disadvantage, Henry wanted Jedburgh, Teviotdale's jewel, to be ground to dust, and this time its people with it.

Dacre read the king's orders with distaste. He believed Henry was wrong to punish the Scots in this way. Vulnerable as they were under a regent who was rarely in the country, now was the time to settle a truce, on advantageous terms. Henry, however, did not agree. His venom for the north seemed unquenchable. Quelling his doubts, the baron marshalled his troops and summoned each of the king's lieges along the border, with all the mounted men they could muster.

The riders were eager for the task. As the fighting season gathered pace, so, Dacre observed, did their hunger. It was as if their swords and knives had an appetite of their own. He had seen smallholders and bakers and cattle drovers who at home were kind to their dogs and their women become so fierce in the fight, none would have recognised them. When a sword was in their hand and prey in their sights, it was as if their senses had been smothered and something else had taken control. Once the blade was back in its sheath, they seemed scarcely to remember the way they had behaved. How else to explain their tenderness when they returned to their children and wives?

But perhaps they were all like that. They had to be. He made no excuses, because what they did, and how they lived, was the only life Dacre knew or wanted. Yet in the days after Jedburgh, he found himself wondering if the fiendish horror he had seen was a call to his conscience, a reminder of all the unforgivable things he had done in a long and heartless career.

His bedroll had been farthest from the camp fire, and where he lay the forest gloom was barely touched by its light. Since he was a boy he had hated the dark, and he closed his eyes to keep it at bay. Soon his companions had settled, breathing deep, and he too was almost asleep when he heard a rustle of leaves, as when a boot treads softly upon them. He opened his eyes.

Pines and larches marched row by row into the darkness, like an army in retreat. Where they melted into black, he saw a pale shape lurking behind a tree trunk that, when he peered harder, became a face. Another appeared from behind a neighbouring tree, and another, until he could make out six sets of eyes, all looking in his direction. He sat up with a grunt, shaking his head, hoping he was confused by the murk. When he looked again, the faces had gone. Only then did he feel the pounding of his heart behind his ribs.

He chided himself for his childish alarm, and lying back down pulled the blanket up to his chin. Turning his back to the woods, he settled to sleep, but barely had his breathing steadied when a crawling sensation ran over his scalp. Looking over his shoulder at the woods, he almost cried aloud. The faces had reached the trees nearest him. Their black eyes flashed, and tongues flicked lizard-like from scarlet, fleshy lips.

Dacre leapt out of his bedroll, shortsword in hand. ‘How dare ye . . .' he growled, swiping the air as he advanced upon them. Silently, the figures darted out of reach. Fingers beckoned from behind the trees, unearthly pale and tapered, leading him onwards into the dark. As his tormentors crept deeper into the woods, moving from pine to pine in a mockery of hide-and-seek, he saw that their hind legs were crooked, as if they preferred to walk on all fours. It was then that he noticed the nubs of bone on their close-cropped heads, the cloven hooves where feet should have been. As the significance of this sank in, the last of the six turned to face him. Its owner put his hands on his hips. From his untied britches rose a cock the size of a cudgel. The devil leered at the baron and began to tug the monstrous appendage. As dizziness overcame him, Dacre heard a cackling laugh. He dropped to his knees, the night swimming around his head.

A hand was on his shoulder. ‘Brother,' said Christopher, ‘what's wrong?'

Dacre looked up, wild-eyed. ‘Can ye no see them?' he cried. ‘Devils, a pack of them, sent to pursue me.'

Christopher followed his gaze, but as Dacre too could see the woods were empty. ‘You've been dreaming, Tam,' he said, helping the baron to his feet. ‘How much did ye drink at dinner?'

Dacre spluttered. ‘Don't take me for a fool. I wasn't asleep, and I am not drunk. God help us, I've seen the devil's own men. They were meant to scare the life out of me, so they were.' Shakily, he picked up his sword, and sheathed it.

‘Come over here,' said Christopher, taking his arm, ‘and sleep near the fire. I will keep guard for a watch, and Armstrong after me. It's not long till dawn. By light, no one will dare approach.'

Subdued as a sleepwalker woken from his trance, Dacre allowed himself to be coaxed back to bed. This uncommon meekness worried his brother more than the talk of devils. Too perturbed to feel drowsy, he kept a keen look-out until the first cockerel crowed.

Christopher's consternation had faded in the days after Jedburgh, but in the flaring light of Harbottle's torches, Dacre glanced over his shoulder more than once. As the wine took him in its grip, he trembled. The devils had boded ill, and their promise had been quickly fulfilled. Unsettled by his night visitors, the next day the baron had driven his men to attack without mercy. It was as well they did. Jedburgh had put up a fight worthy of a king's army, refusing to be cowed. As his troops swept down on the town, four thousand and more of them whooping and yelling, brandishing swords and clubs, they were met by a cannonade that sent their ranks tumbling one over the other like breakers reaching a beach.

A bitter fight followed. The townsfolk manned their walls and the abbey with a courage that Dacre could only admire. Women as well as men fought them off. Children launched nursery missiles – stones and bricks, old apples and tumshies – and screamed in delight when these found their mark. More than a few English raiders were toppled off their horses as the young catapulters broke their noses or blackened their eyes.

By dusk, Dacre doubted they would breach the town's defences that day. Calling his lieutenants, he ordered them to slacken their assault. Given false hope, he said, Jedburgh might relax its guard sufficiently for them to slip through it.

And so it proved. As the Warden General's men retreated, as if to remuster, the Jedburgh defenders put down their weapons. In their relief, they did not notice a line of raiders slithering over the abbey walls, slitting the throats of the abbot and his brothers, and breaking into the church. Not until the first oiled rags had been hurled and flames were blazing behind its windows did they realise their mistake. In fury, they surged towards the abbey, but by then it was too late. Dacre's men had gained entry. A net had been thrown over the town's head, and it remained only to drag it tight.

Street by street, as the sky darkened, the raiders pressed back the townsfolk, fighting hand to hand and setting alight every house and cottage and hut in their path. After an hour, almost as many English bodies littered the town as those of Jeburgh's people, but where Dacre could afford to lose hundreds, the town could not.

By nightfall the place was destroyed. The screams of the dying had ceased, the air was gritted with smoke, and the only sounds, as Dacre departed, were falling timbers, and the whistling whine of fire as it licked from one turfed roof to the next. The crimson glow of the abbey lit a scene of desolation, and brightened his way better than a torch as he galloped after his men.

Their encampment was safe on a hillside some miles out of town, yet it was here that the baron's fears came to pass. Anxious in case his night-time visitors returned, he lay beside his brothers, staring through the canopy of trees at the stars. The sky shimmered with lights so serene and comforting one would have thought that all was at peace with the world below. A barn owl swooped overhead, a pale blur against the oaks, and was heard hooting throatily from nearby. Lulled by the owl's crooning, the baron's eyes closed. He had fallen into a profound sleep when the woods around him came alive.

There was a crackling and snapping of breaking branches, a wild rustling of undergrowth disturbed, and a pounding of earth so thunderous it was as if the trees had uprooted themselves and begun to march. Dacre and his men rose sluggishly, slow to make sense of what was happening. Only when they heard the cry ‘The horses are out!' from lower down the hill did they understand.

The loosing had been brutal. Hooded figures had pulled up the palisade posts, cut the ropes, and got between the horses. The beasts had shifted uneasily and begun to trot out of their compound, skirting the bodies of the murdered guards. More had followed, but not fast enough, and the robbers had lost patience and started to yell. Whips were cracked, flanks were lashed, and the horses were terrified into flight. Stamping upon each other in the rush to escape, they surged out of the corral, biting and kicking all within reach in their bewilderment and fear.

By the time the camp awoke, the palisade was emptying fast. The ground trembled under panicked hooves, the terror so great it could be smelled. As the stampede gathered pace and men began struggling out of their bivouacs and reaching for weapons, their shouts were lost beneath the roaring of the animals' flight, their passing as violent as if they were warhorses on the charge.

All this was heard in the camp, yet nobody could see what was happening. Blundering through the forest, Dacre and his men reached the palisade and looked in dismay at the empty, trampled grass. Those beasts that had managed to escape the round-up careered through the trees, a danger to the men and to themselves. Some were later caught, others were lost for ever. These were the lucky ones.

Farther up the hill, the horses were driven on by the thieves, who shrieked and wailed like banshees. ‘After them!' cried Dacre, and the swiftest of his men were soon in pursuit, following the path the beasts had beaten, leaving behind the scent of broken pines and sweat. The chase had barely begun when it became clear what was happening. This was no robbery. It was far uglier than that.

The galloping hoofbeats were far ahead of the baron's soldiers, growing fainter as the distance between them increased, when a new noise cut through the night. Beyond the forest, across the hill, came high-pitched, helpless screams. They came not from one horse, or ten, but from wave upon wave, until it seemed as if every one had emptied its lungs in horror as it plunged to its death. Dacre's heart clenched. His horses were being chased over the cliffs.

When at last he came on the scene, the marauders were long gone. So too were the horses. The grass was churned to mud, and the darkness felt alive, the commotion the hilltop had witnessed too recent for the air to have settled. But now it was quiet, horribly so, save for the groans that reached them from the valley where the animals lay.