The Invention of Fire (19 page)

By the time I moved thirty feet along Settler Lane myself he had already disappeared into the thick press. By that point Norris could have been anywhere, and I knew better than to attempt a pursuit, not with these weak eyes and unyouthful legs. I thought of him many times over the remainder of that day, haunted by the boy’s face, the earless head of a new orphan, his life no better than a rat’s.

A
LIGHT MORNING SHOWER
was passing as Stephen Marsh went out from the city through Bishopsgate. The slickened stones along the lower end of Ermine Street spat up an ugly spray that wet and cooled his legs, helped to calm him as he left London behind for this first and perilous test. The way quickly thinned, a few last foot vendors barking for coin, and soon the urban street gentled into the dirt and gravel pack of the road north, though he wouldn’t travel even as far as Ware that day. Beneath him the mare relaxed into a steadier rhythm as any signs of the city receded with the gentle descent into the valley below Hornsey.

This part of the ancient road was well patrolled and safe, at least in the daytime hours, crowded with cartloads of grains, greens, and fruits, all bound for the gates and the many mouths between the walls, and Stephen had little worry that he would be waylaid by highwaymen. He left London less than twice a year, though each time he did he vowed to make such sojourns a more frequent part of his life, which was too often consumed by his work and its demands. Founding, forging, bending, banding: metals and ores ran in Stephen’s veins, yet they were not all of his heart, and with this October sun on his face, these first nips of autumn in the air, his thoughts could turn for a while to the purer beauties of the natural world around him.

It had been less than two hours by the sun when he reached the
top of the rise he remembered. As Stephen knew from his last trip up this way, the fields on either side afforded an excellent vantage on the surrounding countryside. To the east of the road spread several long and narrow fields, all dead flat and several of them neatly furrowed, a line of tenants in the far distance likely sowing winter rye. Beyond the next furlong stood a manor house, with one of the new and higher chimneys of eight sides crafted from a lighter stone. To the west, a fallow field, then a wooded copse, perhaps a mile distant from where his horse stood, and leading to it a winding path partly obscured by the brush.

Stephen looked back to the south, toward London. A quarter mile behind him the road cut sharply right. No traffic between here and there. Same to the north, where the way ahead went gently downhill before disappearing behind a high hedge. No one would see him leave the road, and with a bit of fortune, Stephen might even make the woods without being observed.

A tug on the reins and the horse was cutting down the track, which soon met the course of a creek flowing along the edge of the field. No huts or houses in sight, and his progress was quick. At one point he heard the faint tinkle of bells from behind him on the road. He slowed his mount and turned in the saddle to look back up the track. A company was passing, five strong, merchants or tradesmen. Men’s voices, mingling, laughing. Marsh went unnoticed, and when they had gone he turned for the copse.

At the far side of the small woods the land dropped sharply away over a stone cliff. The ground here was still damp, though he was able to gather enough dry brush and wood for his purpose. Lighting a fire took little time. Soon he had a small blaze crackling merrily beneath the trees, and all the while the question wormed through his mind, shaping and consuming his every thought.

Will they work?

For it was all very well to imagine such a clever firing device as he had created, to design it and craft it in the familiar safety of Stone’s. And it had been all very well to make these four simple handgonnes, two forged of iron and welded at the seam, two founded of bronze in
a single piece. Yet to fix snake to gun and actually deploy it, with all the shot and powder and flame this required—this was something else entirely.

Stephen started to prepare one of the iron guns. First he attached the serpent device in its proper place along the barrel, testing the hinged mechanism with his free hand. Then a measure of coarse powder procured from Snell, poured down the barrel and shoved to with a parchment wad and a drivel fitting the width of the barrel. No ball for this first firing, he’d decided, as he wanted to test the soundness of his weld before adding a projectile. Next the matchcord, a simple length of rope soaked in saltpetre and oil, dried, and cut to a few inches. Stephen carefully lit the cord at the fire, then clipped it into the upturned mouth of the snake. The snake’s mouth would bring the smoldering end of the rope into the firing pan, a small metal semicircle affixed to the barrel that would carry the flame through the touchhole and set ablaze the powder in the barrel, which would in turn fire the ball. Holding his breath, he filled the pan with a final tap of powder.

He gave the loaded gun a close look, end to end, and thought through the firing. Left hand braces gun against chest. Right hand raises tail of snake. Snake’s mouth brings flame to pan. Pan lights powder in barrel through touchhole. Powder shoots ball.

Simple. Efficient. Beautiful.

Stephen grimaced. The matchcord, he saw, was cut too long, forming an awkward curve away from the pan. He could straighten it, though then he wouldn’t know how far the snake would have to travel to light the powder. As he pulled on the matchcord, still lit, to shorten the inner length, Marsh’s hand jostled the snake. The mouth dipped, the ember touched the pan, and—
crack!
—the gun fired, throwing a spray of flame at his face.

“By
Jesu,
” he cried, slapping at the scattered powder and reaching for water. He splashed it on his left cheek, where a flame had licked at his skin and caused a burn. The noise had astonished him, and as his ears rang with the report, his good sense told him to abandon his guns and powder and flee, so certain he was that the strange noise would bring unwanted attention, perhaps a pursuit.

He jogged to the other side of the copse facing the highway. No movement on the road, and as his breaths lengthened he appreciated the security of his situation, at least for the moment. The gun’s report, though unfamiliar, could have come from anywhere, and no one curious about the alien noise would think to look in the copse. He would need to be cautious, however, and limit his test firings.

Stephen was more careful with the next loading, as this time he would shoot one of the molded balls provided by the armorer. The barrel was fouled with powder, so first he had to spend some time cleaning it out with the drivel. Once the gun was loaded he kept the smoldering cord well away from the powder until nearly ready to fire. When all was prepared, he brought the stock up beneath his left arm, steadied the gun, and lowered the barrel. His target was a broad elm about thirty yards away, wide enough that he could reasonably hope to hit it, yet sufficiently distant to present a real challenge. A deep breath, and his right hand slowly lifted the snake’s tail, allowing the curved neck and the head to descend toward the pan. He whispered a prayer, then touched coal to powder.

Crack
.

The gun’s slight jump raised his head, though his gaze remained steady enough to see a spray of wood fly from the elm. With the gun still in hand he darted toward the tree.

A hit!
And from his own gun!

Not in the center of the trunk, but the ball was now embedded in the thick bark to one side. He fingered the splintered wound, marveling at the power of metal and fire to cause such damage to a surface so unyielding to the touch. A knight’s shield would be useless against these weapons. Even plate armor would be vulnerable to the new guns.

For the next hour or more Marsh remained in the wooded rise, trying out the four guns, fixing the snake to each of them in turn. Every handgonne, he discovered, sent its missile in a slightly different direction and kicked with its own degree of force. Yet he quickly mastered their oddities, taught himself how to aim so the balls would follow the truest possible course to their target. He noted the results of his test firings on a small wax tablet brought along from the foundry
and carried at his belt, one he normally used to record bell soundings but suited his present purpose well. Depth of impact, trueness and angle of aim, ideal length of cord: all these factors had to be calculated into the effectiveness of each weapon. For these handgonnes, Stephen came to understand, were a marvelous, demanding art in themselves, and his imagination soared with the many new innovations and inventions he might introduce to their manufacture and use.

By the time he had taken six shots with each of his four guns, the elm’s lower expanse was ribboned into a marvelous wreck of slivers and burned gashes, and Stephen knew his weapons like he knew his own limbs. He gave them dragons’ names. Ironspitter shot high and right, and needed a touch of extra powder in her priming pan. Firebreather shot low but straight, though Stephen hadn’t fixed barrel to stock tightly enough, and she wanted a firmer embrace beneath the arm. Torchtongue was a girlish mess, her barrel too wide by far, firing her ball in no predictable direction.

And then there was Flame. His beautiful Flame. A nearly perfect handgonne, her bronze barrel smooth and sound, her aim so true you could sight along her length and she’d spit her ball right where you wanted it to go. It was often like this with metaling, even when you were making ten versions of a thing that were supposed to be identical. One of them always stood out from the others, with superior lines and balance, a congruence and a kind of inner harmony that could be achieved only with great patience and greater luck. If every handgonne could fire like Flame, how his fame would grow!

The sun was starting to lower in the sky. Time for his return to London. He cradled Flame in his arms and fed her a final meal of powder, slipped a patch into her barrel, driveled her good, checked her cord. He stood, this time seeking out a more distant target, a harder test for her, a tree another thirty feet beyond the ruined elm. He raised Flame to his chest, tucked her stock beneath his arm, and took his aim. His finger touched the serpent’s tail, lifted slowly—

Then, behind him, a rustle of leaves.

Marsh spun on his heel, the snakehead dropped—

Crack.

The barrel exploded in his hands just as the face of a young woman appeared in his line of vision. It happened all at once, a crimson burst from her neck, his hands releasing Flame, the dull thud of a milkpail dropped on leaves.

The smoke cleared and the powder burned in his nose. Stephen stared at the young woman’s crumpled form.

He walked slowly toward her, then went to his knees. She writhed, looking up at him with the widest eyes, blood pouring from her neck to mingle with the milk seeping into the forest floor, her mouth moving in vain gasps to choke out breaths already gone.

He reached forward, lifted her head. With his other hand he palmed the miserable wound, still pulsing out her life. The blood gushed through his fingers. It reddened his wrist. It moistened the end of his sleeve. Her limbs shook. Her gut buckled. Soon she was still, her eyes fixed on her killer’s face.

Stephen rested the limp head on the leaves and staggered to his feet, looking down on this fair innocence he had ended. She was a poor tenant’s daughter, it seemed, in a rough dress of undyed wool, cinched with a belt of hemp. Her head was uncovered, her hair trussed at the back of her head and now matted with the leaves it had gathered in her final throes. Likely she had been delivering milk to a neighbor, only to hear one of his earlier shots. Girlish curiosity, and a ball in the neck.

At a certain point in his dazed circling of her body Stephen stopped. His heart continued to race, yet his mind was already reckoning the consequences of what he had done. A gun, a shot, a girl, a death. There
would
be consequences, and deadly ones. Accident or not, he could see no way to escape the noose, nor did he deserve to. And yet—

Yet for the moment he remained alone with the woman he had slain. Stephen stepped out from beneath the tree cover and looked off the cliff. Empty fields, the path continuing its course until it merged with the unpeopled landscape at the far end of a distant pasture. No hue and cry, no rush of hooves pursuing a murderer through the wooded copse.

No one. Nothing.

He looked through the trees at the corpse. She seemed so small against the forest floor, almost hidden even in her present position. He surveyed the landscape once more, then pushed back through the lower branches until he reached the young woman’s body. Gritting his teeth and clutching her by the wrists, he dragged the load deeper into the woods, not stopping until he had her concealed beneath the thick branches and stems of a hawthorn stand. Loose limbs, several armfuls of leaves, and a few sprinklings of dirt served to obscure those parts of her body and dress still visible from beyond the shrubbery. The milk pail he threw into a deeper part of the woods.

He walked backwards, evaluating his work. Anyone coming by would surely miss her there in the brush, thinking of the slight mound as a buried log if they thought of it at all, which they likely wouldn’t.

With the grim task accomplished, Stephen returned to the elm to gather his things. His hands shook as he wrapped his guns in their sailcloth, tucked away the remaining powder and shot, and led his horse from the woods. At the stream he stopped to scour blood, soot, and soil from his hands and sleeves, plunging his head beneath the water to cool his skin and calm his fear. He joined the road back to London behind a merry company of Cambridge clerks, robes doffed, sporting the colored silks of the season, yet a girl’s ruined body was all he could see.

C
RACK
.

Crack.

Crack.

Finally the hazelnut split beneath the hammer. Iseult reached for the meat, splayed on the stone.

“
Non non!
” Her father scowled, slapped her hand, but not before she had her treasure. Nutflesh, earthy and rich on her tongue. She mashed it up against the roof of her mouth and wriggled it around to gather the most texture and flavor. She’d always liked the raw ones over the roasted ones; why she couldn’t say, but it was a purer taste somehow, a greater challenge to extract.

She spit out a fragment of shell, then dashed off toward the horse line to find her husband. Well, her future husband, Donard.

Iseult was eleven, and her hair could still be allowed to fly without a bonnet or a bothering hood. But Donard was twelve, and together they would rule all France, and England, too, and Donard would be king, and Iseult would be his queen, and there would be endless cream and meats and spices and capons and no wars or hangings and no burning fields and no church and every day would be a loveday like today, with an October sun sharing its glow and promise over the fields and shadowing her favorite nook amidst this colorful sprawl of market day up against the walls of Desurennes.

At least a hundred folks from town and tenantholds alike were gathered for market, though to Iseult they might as well have been a thousand, or ten thousand. She liked to imagine the world bigger than it was, so her mother said, bigger even than God made it, and on days like this it was impossible to think the world had any limits. The air was crisp, the last week’s rains had passed, and spirits were high.

She found Donard in the paddock, where he worked on market days tending the visiting animals along the horse string. Always with the horses, her future king; he smelled like a horse more than a man she sometimes thought, but that was fine with Iseult. She liked horses, too.

Though his father was a farmer, Donard was a smith’s apprentice, richest smith in Desurennes, not that there were a lot of smiths in Desurennes, one in fact, but he was a good man and Donard was a great man and would be a great smith before he was king, and he
would
be king, and she queen.

He was looking at an unshod hoof, had it shoved up between his knees that way he did, studying it like a book, as his master told him he must. Know your horses, know your hooves, Donard’s master liked to tell Donard.

She sneaked up behind him. She was too quiet for his ears but the mare saw her coming, blinked its big eyes at her, didn’t move.
Good girl.
She gave the pretty beast a wink.

Donard was about to set the hoof down when she chopped him in the sides. He jumped a foot at least and the horse stepped away. She laughed, and when Donard spun, there was a cross look on his face that melted right off when he saw her, as she knew it would, and now the kisses.

He got her on the right cheek, then the left, then the lips. She loved that, the warm and wet he gave her, the downy tickle of his upper lip here in private, between the big animals.

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she saw Donard’s eyes up close, that deep berry blue, and that was when she noticed the gathering men, at the edge of the woods beyond the market.

There was nothing odd about strangers lurking around on market
days. Desurennes sat at a crossing along a main road from the coast, and even with England and France at each other’s gullets there was always a deal of traffic, with frequent visitors to the lord and lady of the manor. Market days saw good crowds spilling into Desurennes from the surrounding villages, towns, and farms, as the people flocked to sell and trade.

These men, though, showed no interest in the market. They had appeared somehow from within the thick woods, fifteen or twenty of them, their horses left along the nearest stand of trees. They carried themselves like soldiers, though they weren’t heavily armed, not that Iseult could see. Swords and knives, but no armor, no lord’s banner to mark them out.

They all bore long leather bags strapped from their shoulders, some as long as the men themselves. What was in them Iseult couldn’t see, and didn’t much care, though she was curious about the look of these fellows. English, she thought. She would go to England when queen, she and King Donard, take it back for France, as her father whispered, and they’d see London and Westminster and all of it.

After a final kiss she left Donard with his horses and walked back into the market, where she rejoined her parents in among the vintners’ stands. Lots of talk, mostly about the wines, though as always in the market there was news being swapped, stories from close by and abroad, a lot of boasts and lies.

Others had noticed the men, too, and word soon spread. They were an arm of a garrison, it seemed, sent out by the captain of Calais at rumors of invasion from King Charles. Every village in the Pale was getting a company, someone grumbled, a small group of men to watch the roads and fields, stay alert for marauders, for chevauchées from Burgundy and France.

We Desurennes folk, we tolerate the English, yet not for long, her father and the other men would mutter. They lay siege to Calais, empty it of its native inhabitants, ravage the countryside and its villages, and all over a false claim to a throne already occupied by the rightful King Charles. War, they said. War and rebellion is what the English need.

Iseult had heard the stories of brutality from both sides, of
townspeople slaughtered in their sleep and on their streets, in Crécy, Quimper, l’Humeau, towns she knew as well as she knew London itself, which was not at all. Yet who could say which stories were true and which false? Besides, Iseult had met a few of the English in the past. They seemed perfectly friendly to her.

Her father was trying to sell another cask to a steward from out by Béthune. Voices were raised, though the bartering stayed at an amiable pitch.

She looked across the field. The men had made a fire at the base of the hill, a drift of smoke idling to the sky.

Odd. It was a warm day for October. Why a fire on a market morning?

Now they were slinging the long bags to the grass, arranging them in lines along the ground.

She tugged her father’s sleeve.

“What is it, gosling?” He turned from the steward, whose lips were smacking a possible purchase.

“What are they doing?”

“Who?”

“Those men.”

Her father looked up at the company, milling on the hill. He shrugged, his attention on his work. “A patrol out of Calais, my chick, come to protect us against ourselves. You know the English. Naught to concern the little likes of you.”

Her mother’s stare lingered on the soldiers as they began unpacking the elongated bags slung at their sides. Then she too looked down at her work.

Iseult watched the men as they tarried by the fire. From each of the bags a soldier removed two sticks. Not wood, as they gleamed dully in the full sun. Metal of some kind, like pot iron. They were handling them now, inspecting their length, shaking them and tapping them on the ground as if to conjure spirits from the lower earth.

Several villagers had gathered a respectful distance away to watch them at their mysterious toil. Yet the men themselves made no secret of their task. Every soldier had brought two of the rods in those strange
bags. The rods were not long, no lengthier than a grown man’s arm. They looked heavy, though, unwieldy as the men tested their weight on forearms and shoulders, patted the backs of their fellows, made adjustments here and there.

Curiosity nipped, and so Iseult slipped from her parents’ station, through the crowded makeshift lanes of the market, and approached the visitors. One, two, three . . . thirty-one steps to the top of the low rise, lifting her dress above the dirt and clumped grass.

One of the strange men saw her coming. He murmured something to a fellow, then squatted in the dirt before her.

“Yes, little mother?” he said.

She wrinkled her nose at his speech. “What are those sticks?” she asked him, pointing to the rods. One was in his hand, the other on a rough blanket. Next to the second one sat a small horn, polished to a gleam and with a spill of black powder of some kind visible along the lower rim.

He looked up at a companion, back to her. “They are fire sticks.”

Bâtons de flamme.
“Fire sticks!” She laughed. “But what are they for? What do they do?”

He laughed, too, pointing to his ears. She looked up at his companion, a huge fellow, big as a tree. The man’s face was unmoving, his gaze fixed on the first man. He would not look at Iseult. She glanced back at the friendlier one.

“Will they letting you up big walls, my pretty mother?” he said, pointing to the city walls behind her.

His wretched French tickled her. “They will,” she boasted, thinking of the last time she was up there on the town walls, with Donard. More kisses and love talk.

Then a few low calls from the other men, words she could not comprehend, English words.

Her soldier stood and gave a signal to the company behind him. He turned back to her. “Allow me seeing you waved,” he said. “That place there from.”

He pointed to a spot along the gate parapet, where two town guards stood watch in the crenels. She understood what he was asking
and felt a flush of excitement. She looked over her shoulder, saw her mother and father down below. They were watching Iseult’s talk with the soldiers. So were a number of other villagers now, all looking warily at the girl’s exchange with these Englishmen.

She glanced back to him, unconcerned. “I will do it. Wait just here.”

“Not yet,” he said.

She looked at his mouth.

“Do you like swans, little mother?”

“I like all birds,” said Iseult, lifting her chin.

He reached his right hand up to pull at a portion of his left sleeve, uncovering a band wrapped around his forearm. On it was an embroidered badge. Two swans, very pretty, with their necks entwined about a rod or tree and wrapped with a chain of gold.

“Remember the swans, little mother,” said the man, patting her lightly on the head. “Will you remember the swans?”

“I will,” she said.

“Now go,” he said.

With a quick smile she turned and glided down the rise, rushing through the market murmurs.

“Iseult, come,” her father called as she swished through. She ignored him.

Once within the gate she darted to the left, then slipped into the western tower and up the stairs, feet pattering on the stone, breaths coming heavy, heart lifting as she neared the parapet.

Sunlight flooded the top of the staircase and now she was above the Desurennes market, leaning across a crenel, the breeze rustling her hair and cooling the light sheen of sweat on her face.

Iseult loved it up here, high above the loud press of the crowd along the walls. On market days it was as if a lord’s chess table were arrayed below her, with all the wagons and carts and stands on the outer edge opposing the fixed stalls against the wall, the colorful slashes of cloth and fruits in their bins.

She looked across to the rise and saw the English company. They were standing in a rough arc now, no longer jumbled together, and she
could count them.
One, two, three
. . . there were twenty-two of them, bunched in groups of two along the length of the arc. In each group one man carried four of the tubes while the next held a torch, lit from the fire by the woods. Two men, one at each end, bore neither tubes nor torches, though they had bows slung over their shoulders.

She hadn’t noticed the bows.

Iseult found the friendly soldier, waved wildly and hopped twice to get his attention. He looked up, his gaze lingering for a long moment; then he leaned over to speak to his fellows. The company advanced toward the market, slowly down the gentle rise.

Iseult searched the soldiers’ faces. No lightness or laughter now, only a line of ugly frowns, the men’s eyes fixed on the market crowd before them. The friendly one glanced up at her, a last, bright glimpse. She smiled, started to wave again.

No smile this time. His face was sad. He shook his head and looked away with a strange grimace. He looks, she thought, ashamed.

Iseult felt her arms pimple, suddenly cold.

Something was wrong.

A glint of color, off to the right, from the horse string. It was Donard, passing by the stalls to look for his father, who came to the autumn markets selling beans and greens from a cart. Donard reached the cart and, after a whisper from his father, turned and found her on the wall. He spread his arms in a question. What are you doing up there, my only love?

She pointed to the line of soldiers, now less than fifty feet from the edge of the market. He frowned and turned away. Iseult would forever remember that last pale flash of his face, the wisp of golden hair tumbling over his left eye as his head spun from her a final time.

The din quietened as the soldiers reached the outer edge of the market, everyone now aware of the company’s march. With a deft swiftness that surprised her, the two soldiers on either end of the line spun their bows from their shoulders, nocked arrows, took aim, let fly.

A hiss to her left, an ugly spit. She turned to look. The guard closest to her fell forward, collapsing against a merlon. An arrow protruded from his neck.

At the far end of the parapet the second guard fell backwards, two arrows in his chest. A third missile whistled over the gate tower.

Before she could scream Iseult heard a series of loud pops.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

Something came hissing through the tents. Fruits jumped and popped, throwing pulp and juice across the wagons.

Iseult’s body clanged and shuddered as if a devilish bell had rung inside her. She wet herself. A stream of piss ran down both legs. Where was Donard?

She looked through the crenel, her head a mush of sound, too muddled to think of her own protection.

There he was. He had put a necklace on, a ruby shining from the center of his neck. Was it for her?