The Point of Death Read online

  'War's advancing,' the Sergeant at Arms, their leader, bellowed. 'The Captain's in the field and the General himself's a-horse. To your posts now or your necks'll answer for it.'

  Talbot swept the men outside, one arm over the leader's shoulder and the other showing his Forager's Pass. A few moments later he came back alone. 'We've little enough leisure,' he warned. 'They'll be back soon and they'll have a noose with them next time. The Captain likes shirkers less than Spaniards.'

  'And the General likes his men less than their money,' growled Tom.

  'A poor enough fancy,' laughed his partner. 'Sharpen your wits on that.' He pushed across a neatly written set of Roman numerals:

  iii - xxiii - xliv - xlv.

  'A simple matter thus far,' he said as Tom pored over his workings. ' "A" equates with "i" or one, "b" with "v" or five, "c" with "x" or ten and "d" with "1" or fifty. "E", I believe marks the periods that define the numbers. The final "e" ends the message.'

  'Three, twenty-three, forty-four and forty five. What numbers are these?' wondered Tom, his mind ranging over infinities of possibility. The wise eyes alongside were also lost, for the numbers could refer to any thing. Just the books alone beggared computation. Did they refer to lines in Virgil? Thoughts of Demosthenes? Histories of Plutarch? Speeches of Tully? Satires of Juvenal? Battles of Caesar? Adventures in Homer? Dicta of Socrates? Laws of Justinian? Theorums of Pythagoras? Tragedies by Sophocles or Euripides? Comedies of Aristophanes or Plautus ...

  'I hear numbers like that every Sabbath,' observed Talbot.

  Again, Tom's eyes met the Master's. 'Were I to send a message from one captain of one faith to another, through the massed ranks of heresy, I could choose no better,' said Tom, careful to avoid the word papist, even here. 'But it would be safest with Tyndale ...' He tensed to move.

  The other was up before him, crossing to the doorway of the tent. 'Come,' he said

  quietly. ' 'Tis early for the chaplain to be gone. He'll be at prayer, not ministration. The misericords come later.'

  The sight of three hale, hearty, well-armed men running through the camp at this stage of the battle turned a few heads. But then enquiring eyes recognised Talbot Law at least and returned to their business again. Behind and above the slushy, rough-tented midden of the pressed men's infantry lines stood the high, dry, gaudy and well-guarded marquees of the masters at arms, the captains, the colonels and the General. No mere mustered men here, but the sons of noble houses whose names were known at Court and whose families were titled for the towns, shires and counties which they owned. Only their squires and equerries remained now, little older than the boys down the hill and no wiser; a little better dressed, perhaps; a little better educated. The guards were from the Sergeant at Arms' men, even so, and they knew Talbot Law, as the Sergeant did. In a moment, old Law had wheedled Tom and the Master past them and into the Chaplain's tent.

  The Chaplain was on his knees and there before him, on the lid of a travelling chest, lay open a copy of Tyndale's new Bible, translated from the original Greek and Latin scarcely sixty years before. So different in form and numbering from the Vulgate used in Rome.

  'The third book must be Luke's Gospel,' said the Chaplain, turning to it as they explained their mission to him and held the Master's decypherment of the dead man's message under his bulging eyes. He was an elderly man of holy reputation; too honest, ancient and scholarly to be in the common run of camp-follower priests. Some said he had been the General's tutor as well as his chaplain and followed him now for love. 'And if we read the forty-fourth and fortyfifth verses of chapter twenty-three, we find, "And it was about the sixth hour and there was darkness over all the earth until about the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst." ' He looked at the three men blankly, his mouth working while his brain most patently was not. 'It tells of the death of the Lord himself,' he said. 'But what can that mean here and now to us or to our General?'

  'It gives times of day and warns of darkness,' mused the Master of Cyphers. 'But there's little enough there. Perhaps we were wrong after all. And yet ...'

  'I've often wondered about that,' said Talbot, apparently more interested in the meaning of the text than any message it might conceal. 'If the Good Lord was taken before Pilate and scourged, then the people were asked whether to release Barabbas or no, all before Our Lord was led through the city up to Golgotha, how could it only be six in the morning? How could it only be the sixth hour?'

  'Because the Jews counted their hours from the dawn of the day,' said the priest. 'Not from the midst of the night as do we.'

  'So their first hour was our sixth ...' said Talbot, with simple wonder.

  'And the sixth hour will be midday!' snapped Tom. He turned to the others at once. 'Coming at such speed, with such moment - and in such fashion - from the engineers' lines to ours, and, like enough, from their captain to our General, it can only be a warning to stay our regular assault at noon. For at noon today, the world will go dark and the veil in the temple will be torn ... Chaplain, how goes the clock?'

  The poor priest shook his head, his face still vacant with shock. 'What should a priest do with a clock?' asked Talbot's friend coolly, leading the way back to the doorway. 'The General and the Colonel. Such men as these need to count the hours carefully...'

  'Aye,' agreed. Tom, stepping out into the light and glancing up at the overcast, hoping for sight of the sun. 'They'll count their minutes as carefully as they count their men.' He sniffed and shook his head. The clouds were too thick. It seemed halfway to night already. 'But I know which they'd be readier to lose. Law, how will we get into the General's tent?'

  'This way,' answered Law and the three of them were off again.

  Chapter Three - The Made Men

  It was not until they were close beside the bright walls of the General's own palatial abode that Tom slowed. 'But wait. We do not need the clock. Whatever the hour, however near to noon, it is the General himself we need, for only he can hold the army back.' The others paused beside him and turned, only to swing back again at once, called away from the prospect of the distant war by the immediate imperative of a scream. It was the scream of a woman and it came from within the tent itself. The gaudy portal stood a little way ahead and Tom reached it first, even as the terrible sound was repeated. There was a guard on duty, but he had swung round at the sound and was too busy looking inwards to see the three men coming up behind him - let alone to stop them. They simply charged him down and tore into the silken confines within.

  The atrium of the tent was split into several chambers, floored with carpets, walled with cloth of gold and well stocked with servants who, like the guard, stood gaping. A third scream guided Tom like Theseus through the scented maze and he first tore into the inner sanctum and skidded to a halt. There, on a curtained bed at least as weighty as one of the ill-aimed culverins, stood a woman. Stark, panting, a golden hind at bay. She was scarcely more than a girl - perhaps sixteen. All her clothing was the riot of her tumbling hair, golden as the wires in the walls; all her defence was a dagger - scarcely more than a bare bodkin - and the power of her screams. The hair gave some pretence of decency to the pale, pink-tipped swell of her breasts, scratched and reddened though they were. But nothing could hide the cloud of golden brightness at her loins - nor the black bruises of abuse and the ruby-red streaks across her thigh.

  Ranged against her stood a burly youth, little better dressed than she, and all at a point to push his rapine home, dagger or no dagger. He swung round with a snarl as the three men burst in. His hot gaze swept over them and pegged them all alike. 'Out, you whoreson peasants!' he spat.

  'What, Prince Tarquin?' raged back Tom at once. 'And leave you to your ravishment? Sir, not I!'

  His refusal enraged the boy beyond control. Naked as he was, he threw himself to one side and snatched up a sword belt. Hurling himself between his screaming victim and her would-be rescuers, he tore the sword from its scabbard and launched
himself into the attack. Tom's own weapon whispered into the air, a good yard of razor steel, borne with honour by his father's grandfather at Bosworth Field itself. The blade began as broad as both his thumbs pushed together with a blood-runnel separating the sharpened edges. It ended with a flat, rounded point, but remained at its sharpest along the edge. It had a strong basket guard over the handle above the crosspiece, and a pommel half the size of a fist. The better part of a hundred years old, it was still a potent man-killer, and Tom had been well trained in its use. He stood open, square on to the charging boy, whose own advance was proceeded by a more fleshly blade before his steel one.

  The boy struck first, and high. Tom saw the stroke coming and turned it away, edge to edge, using the instant of respite to catch a rag of the bed-curtain and wrap it, like the tail of a cloak, around his forearm. The boy had received some training and recovered swiftly, striking in at Tom again, high and from the right.

  Given leisure, Tom would have taken time and exercised the both of them a little, especially as he was well armoured and facing a naked foe. But there was no time here - and now a girl to see to even before the secret message could be delivered. With contemptuous ease, therefore, remembering what his father had taught him of the method of the great English Sword-Master Silver, he turned the boy's blade with his cloth-wrapped forearm, stepped into the circle of the boy's reach and punched him in the face with the basket guard over his fist. There was a sound like an apprentice's foot striking the bladder of a football. As the boy reeled back towards the bed, spitting blood, Tom's left gauntlet closed on the wavering blade of his sword, at once disarming him and, for an instant, holding him upright. Tom's sword rose again and struck down like a club, driving the pommel with jarring force, down into the centre of the boy's forehead. There was a sharp report of steel on bone, as crisp as a shot from a pistol or a dag, and the boy's eyes rolled up. He slumped back on to the carpeted flooring, no longer so fierce; scarcely alive indeed. And, wrestling almost as closely with death, the naked girl collapsed on to the ground beside him.

  Into the silence that followed there came the most unexpected sound - the tinkling clamour of a travelling clock, striking the half-hour.

  'I must away,' spat Tom.

  Talbot Law swung a little wildly, torn between the work here and the urgency he shared with Tom.

  'I must find Bess and take the horse. Wait for her here,' said Tom, sliding his sword back into its sheath as he spoke. 'Bess must look to the girl. And the Master at Arms or the General must look to Sir Rapine the ravisher here. Only you, old Law, can hold the square till then.'

  Talbot Law turned, almost desperately, to his friend. 'Will,' he said, 'could you ...' the sweep of his gaze encompassed the tent and all the measureless evil done and pending therein.

  The Master of Cyphers smiled. 'I'll go with Tom, old Law,' he said gently.

  And so all their fates were sealed.

  The horse's hooves struck sparks from the cobbles of Nijmagen town ten minutes later, but the bay was all but done and her gallop, which had slowed to a canter, staggered to a spavined walk now. Will slid off the broken jade's hips and ran along at its shoulder while Tom buried his heels yet again in the shuddering heave of its sides. The wreckage of the town's shattered out skirts rose around them, falling away from the almost mediaeval thrust of the fort walled bridgehead. Here the English army was beginning to gather, standing beside their good Dutch allies, under the eyes of their leaders, William, Prince of Orange, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Tom knew well enough where the generals would be. He would find them on a little eminence that gave a clear view of the great bastion of the portcullis of the castle that cut the road off from the bridge. Against these stone foundations the armies had been hurled every noon for a month like a relentless, steely tide. Up atop that ridge they would be sitting, at the far end of this very road, five minutes away, no more, behind wall after wall of guards. More than once of late the more daring of the defenders - the Italian bloods rather than the Spanish professional tercio men - had come around the back here, in true 'Hole land' fashion, hoping to stab the generals from behind.

  From here on up, indeed, wild riding should give way to wary walking. This was where the horse's original owner had died. This was where the Italians were, with their half-magic swords from Ferarra. This was where the hard, quick-shooting Hollanders were, with their pistols and their wheel-lock dags, banned in England on pain of death since the days of Henry VIII.

  Tom slid off the bay's back and dropped the reins. 'This is not a carne vale,' he warned the animal, 'unless this is my Shrove Tuesday.' Then, like his black-clad companion, all dull except for his breastplate and his sword-blade, he slid into the shadows under the ruins of the walls. He repeated the witticism to himself: this is not goodbye to meat, unless he ended up being shriven himself. And by God's grace it was indeed a Tuesday! As witticisms went, it was worthwhile, he thought, savouring its repetition to Talbot Law, should they ever meet again. Meet or meat again ...

  Tom's lip was still curling in a satisfied little smile when he ran into the Italians. They stepped out of a hollowed house, coming through the doorframe as though it still had walls around it. Tom ran headlong into them and, as he was drawn, it was they who were taken by surprise. A backhand flick sent his high-held blade between the top of gorget and the armoured down-swell of chinstrap, straight across the pallid vulnerability of a throat. The first Italian span away spraying blood even as Tom swung to face the next, sensing his dark companion falling in at his shoulder to face the third and last.

  Echoing the English style which had despatched the rapist in the earl's tent a scant quarter-hour before, the two men stood square on to their opponents, the blades of their short swords held high, ready for the inward cut, the step forward, the punch and the pummelling. As this was war, both men also slid a long dagger out from its sheath across their buttocks and waited to go at it, hammer and tongs.

  Ignoring their choking, drowning ex-companion, the Italians fell into an altogether different stance, however. It was a stance that Tom had never seen before, though he had heard it whispered of. Side-on, the Italians looked at their English opponents over their right shoulders. Before them they held, not the weighty, double-edged English short swords left over from the Wars of the Roses like Tom's, but brand-new, Ferarra made, long, slim, needle-sharp rapiers.

  Tom, confident of his strength and experience, swung into the attack first, only to find his first strike flicked away by a swift blade and an iron wrist. The return stroke struck at him like a snake, so fast he never saw it coming and luck alone set the point slithering off the boat-belly roundness of his breastplate a hair's breadth from his own throat. He tore his left breast swinging in the dagger thrust, but the Italian had danced back immediately on missing his stroke. Feeling as clumsy as an ox, Tom stepped forward, falling into the familiar stance that had served himself so well all his life. That would serve him through to its fast-approaching end, by the look of things.

  It was hard to say whether it was the sword or the way his opponent used it that unnerved Tom more. A flurry of movement and a hiss on his left warned him that his companion was in little better case than he was himself. In the face of the deadly rapier, Will had begun a careful, skilful retreat, clearly looking for some other help or advantage. Will was wise, thought Tom. Attack had not worked; perhaps careful defence might reveal something of use. He too stepped back, waiting, all too well aware that time was ticking by with relentless pace.

  Tom waited less than a second, and that fearsome blade was hissing for his throat again, as the Italian threw himself forward, all his weight and strength behind the point. For all his experience and agility, Tom was far too slow to stop it; instead he turned it with a club-swing of his own blade, and the point hissed past his throat - but through his very ear lobe. In came the dagger again, swift enough to screech across the Italian's back-plate before the burning kiss of the rapier was gone, retreating along a line so
true, that Tom's ear lobe didn't even tear.

  'I will put a pearl in that, when I go to Court,' said Tom, in his flat but fluent Latin, all bravado to the end.

  The Italian laughed, a light, mocking sound. Behind the vizard of his chased silver helmet, his face looked young and fresh; scarce bearded. The eyes narrowed and Tom jerked into action again. He was quicker this time, warned by that flicker of olive eyelids, but the boy's wrist was every bit as unyielding as his blade and this time his target was clear. Tom's right earlobe was spitted like a chicken ready for the fire. No sooner was the fiery ice of the kiss there than it was gone again, and the endgame of the duel was upon them.

  'Now,' said the Italian youth, in liquid Latin fit to grace the lips of Tully himself, 'you can wear a pair of ruby drops, down to the courts of H-' He exploded forward on the aspirate of the word and Tom turned his face helplessly aside, truly expecting that terrible, unmatchable, unstoppable point to pierce his eyeball and send him straight to the courts of Hades indeed.

  But, unaccountably, the Latin youth threw himself into Tom's arms instead, their breastplates chiming together like cymbals.

  Tom was thrown backward by the weight and power of the assault and came near to losing his feet. The Italian's helmet slammed into his face, rattled his teeth and all but flattened his nose. In a pure reflex, he wrapped his arms about his assailant, his mind still far away from thoughts of wrestling. His senses, in truth, were questing for the tiny, deadly wound that must, some where about his skewered body, be draining his life away.

  But then the Italian's knees gave and the forward push of his power became the backward drag of his weight. Tom fell forward on to his knees with his erstwhile foe lying beneath him, like the body behind the horse which had started all this. The boy's lips moved but nothing issued from them except a choking froth of blood.