“Good Christian soul!” said Hugh, leaning to clap a hand on his friend’s tonsure. “I could never have reached them myself. God, but I’m weary! No matter, that’s the first need met—they’re home and so am I.” Constance came sailing in with food and a hot posset of wine, Aline with his gown and to rid him of his leather coat. He had ridden light the last stages, shedding his mail. He scrubbed with both hands at cheeks stiffened from the cold, twitched his shoulders pleasurably in the warmth of the fire, and drew in a great, easing breath. They watched him eat and drink with hardly a word spoken. Even the voice stiffens and baulks after long exertion and great weariness. When he was ready the cords of his throat would soften and warm, and words find their way out without creaking.
“Your man-child held open his eyelids,” said Aline cheerfully, eyeing his every least move as he ate and warmed, “until he could prop them up no longer, even with his fingers. He’s well and grown even in this short while—Cadfael will tell you. He goes on two feet now and makes nothing of a fall or two.” She did not offer to wake and bring him; clearly there was no place here tonight for matters of childhood, however dear.
Hugh sat back from his meal, yawned hugely, smiled upwards suddenly at his wife, and drew her down to him in his arm. Constance bore away the tray and refilled the cup, and closed the door quietly on the room where the boy slept.
“Never fret for me, love,” said Hugh, clasping Aline to his side. “I’m saddle-sore and bruised, but nothing worse. But a fall or two we have certainly taken. No easy matter to rise, neither. Oh, I’ve brought back most of the men we took north with us, but not all—not all! Not the chief—Gilbert Prestcote’s gone. Taken, not dead, I hope and think, but whether it’s Robert of Gloucester or the Welsh that hold him—I wish I knew.”
“The Welsh?” said Cadfael, pricking his ears. “How’s that? Owain Gwynedd has never put his hand in the fire for the empress? After all his careful holding off, and the gains it’s brought him? He’s no such fool! Why should he aid either of his enemies? He’d be more like to leave them free to cut each other’s throats.”
“Spoke like a good Christian brother,” said Hugh, with a brief, grey smile, and fetched a grunt and a blush out of Cadfael to his small but welcome pleasure. “No, Owain has judgement and sense, but alas for him, he has a brother. Cadwaladr was there with a swarm of his archers, and Madog ap Meredith of Powys with him, hot for plunder, and they’ve sunk their teeth into Lincoln and swept the field clear of any prisoner who promises the means of ransom, even the half-dead. And I doubt they’ve got Gilbert among the rest.” He shifted, easing his stiff, sore body in the cushions. “Though it’s not the Welsh,” he said grimly, “that have got the greatest prize. Robert of Gloucester is halfway to his own city this night with a prisoner worth this kingdom to deliver up to the Empress Maud. God knows what follows now, but I know what my work must be. My sheriff is out of the reckoning, and there’s none now at large to name his successor. This shire is mine to keep, as best I may, and keep it I will, till fortune turns her face again. King Stephen is taken at Lincoln, and carried off prisoner to Gloucester.”
Once his tongue was loosed he had need to tell the whole of it, for his own enlightenment as much as theirs. He was the sole lord of a county now, holding and garrisoning it on the behalf of a king in eclipse, and his task was to nurse and guard it inviolate within its boundaries, until it could serve again beyond them for an effective lord.
“Ranulf of Chester slipped out of Lincoln castle and managed to get out of a hostile town before ever we got near, and off to Robert of Gloucester in a great hurry, with pledges of allegiance to the Empress in exchange for help against us. And Chester’s wife is Robert’s daughter, when all’s said, and he’d left her walled up in the castle with the earl of Lincoln and his wife, and the whole town in arms and seething round them. That was a welcome indeed, when Stephen got his muster there, the city fawned on him. Poor wretches, they’ve paid for it since. Howbeit, there we were, the town ours and the castle under siege, and winter on our side, any man would have said, with the distance Robert had to come, and the snow and the floods to hold him. But the man’s none so easily held.”
“I never was there in the north,” said Cadfael, with a glint in his eye and a stirring in his blood that he had much ado to subdue. His days in arms were over, forsworn long since, but he could not help prickling to the sting of battle, when his friends were still venturing. “It’s a hill city, Lincoln, so they say. And the garrison penned close. It should have been easy to hold the town, Robert or no Robert. What went astray?”
“Why, granted we under-valued Robert as always, but that need not have been fatal. The rains there’d been up there, the river round the south and west of the town was up in flood, the bridge guarded, and the ford impassable. But Robert passed it, whether or no! Into the flood with him, and what could they do but come after? ‘A way forward, but no way back!’ he says—so one of our prisoners told us. And what with the solid wall of them, they got across with barely a man swept away. Oh, surely they still had the uphill way, out of that drowned plain to our hilltop—if Stephen were not Stephen! With the mass of them camped below in the wet fields and all the omens at Mass against him—you know he half regards such warnings—what say you he’ll do? Why, with that mad chivalry of his, for which God knows I love him though I curse him, he orders his array down from the height into the plain, to meet his enemy on equal terms.”
Hugh heaved his shoulders back against the solid brace of the wall, hoisted his agile brows and grinned, torn between admiration and exasperation.
They’d drawn up on the highest and driest bit of land they could find, in what was a half-frozen marsh. Robert had all the disinherited, Maud’s liegemen who had lost lands eastward for her sake, drawn up in the first line, horsed, with nothing to lose and all to gain, and vengeance the first of all. And our knights had every man his all to lose and nothing to gain, and felt themselves far from their homes and lands, and aching to get back and strengthen their own fences. And there were these hordes of Welsh, hungry for plunder, and their own goods and gear safe as sanctuary in the west, with no man threatening. What should we look for? When the disinherited hit our horse five earls broke under the shock and ran. On the left Stephen’s Flemings drove the Welshmen back: but you know their way, they went but far enough and easily enough to mass again without loss, and back they came, archers almost to a man, able to pick their ground and their prey, and when the Flemish footmen ran, so did their captains—William of Ypres and Ten Eyck and all. Stephen was left unhorsed with us, the remnant of his horse and foot, around him. They rolled over us. It was then I lost sight of Gilbert. No marvel, it was hand to hand chaos, no man saw beyond the end of his sword or dagger, whatever he had in his hand to keep his head. Stephen still had his sword then. Cadfael, I swear to you, you never saw such a man in battle once roused, for all his easy goodwill takes so much rousing. It was rather the siege of a castle than the overcoming of a man. There was a wall round him of the men he had slain, those coming had to clamber over it, and went to build it higher. Chester came after him—give him his due, there’s not much can frighten Ranulf—and he might have been another stone in the rampart, but that the king’s sword shattered. There was one somewhere close to him thrust a Danish axe into his hand in its place, but Chester had leaped back out of reach. And then someone clear of the melee grubbed a great stone out of the ground, and hurled it at Stephen from aside. It struck him down flatlings, clean out of his wits, and they swarmed over him and pinned him hand and foot while he was senseless. And I went down under another wave,” said Hugh ruefully, “and was trampled below better men’s bodies, to come to myself in the best time to make vantage of it, after they’d dragged the king away and swarmed into the town to strip it bare, and before they came back to comb the battlefield for whatever was worth picking up. So I mustered what was left of our own, more than ever I expected, and hauled them off far enough to be out of reach, while I and one or two with me looked for Gilbert. We did not find him and when they began to come back sated out of the city, scavenging, we drew off to bring back such as we had. What else could we have done?”