Gorlon relished his new commission, as it meant that he and his army could head north. This would bring them into the orbit of towns and villages as yet untouched by the war, which he could plunder with impunity — and this he did, delaying often so that he and his followers could thoroughly enjoy these fruits of their labour. This was also wine-growing country, so his army finished most days’ work not only replete with theft and rapine, but also drunk and insensible. If his mission in Brittany was becoming a lawless holiday, Gorlon had no great concern. He saw no actual value in taking the Moorish captives his paymasters sought — even if they had wealthy families back home that might trade for them, North Africa was too far away for business to be done — so the pursuit was pressed in leisurely fashion.
Lancelot’s scouts continually reported these developments. With a baggage of prisoners who were happy to go quietly, he was able to deploy more and more men in his rearguard until this was virtually the entirety of his force, with only a token handful to perform the escort duty. He finally opted to make his stand at a pass between low hills, filled with dense woodland. Unusually, it had not rained in Brittany for nearly two months, so the wood was tinder-dry. This suited Lancelot even better, as did the market town of Dol, located on its western flank. His first action was to evacuate Dol as the free-companies would soon be arriving, but to leave stores of food and wine there which could easily be found. His own troops were arrayed east of the wood, though first he had parties of sappers hang many skins filled with naphtha23 from its high boughs.
In late afternoon, Gorlon and his companies entered Dol in their usual fashion, riding pell-mell along the streets, hurling torches. When no-one fled screaming, they dismounted and began to search. They found no living soul to vent their wrath upon, but of course there was a wealth of food and drink. Suspecting the villagers had left these offerings to buy off his ferocity, the ogre captain opted to pitch his camp here for the night. He would still destroy the town, but only in the morning.
Dusk was descending when Lancelot, Gawaine and groups of other mounted knights emerged from the wood, their colours and badges prominently displayed. With much shouting and blowing of horns, they charged the free-company pickets, slaughtering many at their posts, and sending the remainder scampering into the town. Roused from their drunken slumbers, the rest of the freebooters armed themselves. When they learned that vivid crests were borne by those assailing them, their greed was ignited. Arthur’s knights were no ordinary knights: they counted dukes, barons and princes in their order; even one or two, made hostage, would be worth a fortune. The freebooters were even more encouraged to attack when they saw that their enemies were few, and now galloping back into the wood as though to escape.
A mad pursuit was launched, the freebooters leaping onto their mounts half-dressed for battle, weaving between thickets and tangled trees, and in the darkest depths of that place, where their numbers became irrelevant, they were met head-on by a furious counter-charge.
Lancelot and Gawaine wrought brutal execution. Swords and axes rose and fell in shimmering, moon-lit patterns as the knights hacked their way in and out of the straggling, disordered horsemen, felling them to every side.
“This is no trouble at all!” Gawaine laughed, as he and Lancelot passed each other in the noisy gloom.
“They still outnumber us ten to one,” Lancelot replied. He stood in his stirrups to peer into the depths of the wood. It was impossible to distinguish friend from foe, but figures were battling back and forth, blundering into one another, cramming every glade with distorted, chaotic forms.
Realising the time was right, he put his hunting horn to his lips, and blew a single, piercing blast. At once, those knights and men-at-arms still locked in combat struggled free and rode away along pre-determined paths, Lancelot and Gawaine among them. They rode hard and recklessly, for they knew they only had seconds before the six hundred archers ranked to the east of the wood poured death into its naphtha-filled branches.
Gorlon wasn’t worried about the welfare or even the lives of his fellow freebooters. He’d shed no tears to see their broken bodies hanging from the scaling-ladders at Rennes. He felt no apprehension now as more and more of them galloped furiously into the darkened tangle of trees. After all, the fewer those remaining, the more there was of the final haul to go around. And he wasn’t alone in this philosophy. There were several wise heads among the free-companies, most of whom had come to serve as Gorlon’s lieutenants.
Pepe la Lieux, real name Ranulf Guiscard, was the son of a Frankish lord who, with no fervour for the law of primogeniture, had murdered two of his three older brothers before being discovered. The free-companies had made a convenient bolt-hole for him, but now, with the unerring instinct for survival that all noblemen possess, he came to share Gorlon’s suspicion that a trap was closing.
Darra O’Lug was an itinerant monk who had prowled the leafy byways of Ireland preaching ‘redemption through sin.’ From village to village he took his perverse gospel, debauching the young girls trusted to his ministry. On being chased out of Ireland, he had arrived among the free-companies, finding like-minded companions. He had particularly enjoyed the daughters of Rennes, but now he, too, could sense that it was time to depart.
Baroni Benevento was a Genoese merchant who had earned himself the soubriquet ‘Death-Dealer’ for his provision of mercenary forces — plus expert torturers and assassins — to private wars. Only when Roman hegemony was restored over Italy’s great merchant cities, and his business rivals filed charges of embezzlement against him, did Benevento take his military market-place on the road, heading north into Gaul, where at the time the jockeying forces of Frank, Saxon and Visigoth still had scores to settle with each other. But first he settled a few of his own, sending his bravos to silence those business rivals who had offered evidence against him. Then, as now, it had come to Benevento that it was time to leave.
Sir Turgeis of Coutrances was a knight turned robber, known as the ‘Jackal of the Southeast,’ whose band had terrorised the highways of Aquitaine for many a year. When he was eventually captured and hanged by the roadside, so thick were the thews in his neck, and so clumsily tied was the hangman’s knot, that he survived an entire night on the gibbet and when, in the morning, the local executioner — a village bumpkin of the first order — came to cut him down, he turned the tables on that oafish official, binding him hand and foot and suspending him from the gibbet instead. Whether any of his accomplices who had also been hanged by the roadside had survived the night, he cared too little to check, and made off quickly on the executioner’s cart. For Turgeis, self-preservation was an overriding priority.
This was the case where all these men, and others like them in Gorlon’s makeshift command, were concerned — so much that they watched in silence as one disorganised company after another rode into the darkling wood, yelling like demons. Long before Lancelot’s fire engulfed it, they saw that the days of the freebooter army were over. So thinking, while the battle raged amid the trees, they furtively stuffed whatever spare loot they could find into bolsters, loaded their wagons and packhorses, and vacated the town of Dol to the north.
Lancelot’s archers used incendiary arrows, with clumps of tightly-bound pitch-soaked fleece fitted just below the arrowhead, ignited in braziers of hot coals. Their bodkin tips, projected by the powerful, thick-staved longbows favoured by Arthur’s infantry, easily penetrated mail and leather coats and continued to burn deep inside their targets’ bodies. Of course, in the depth of night, clean shots were impossible — not that they were needed.