Dark North

Fifteen

Despite Emperor Lucius’s soaring confidence about the campaign, New Rome was not to have everything its own way in Brittany.

Serving in Emperor Lucius’s army were two North African princes, two bothers — Jalhid and Priamus. Their lands in Cyrenaica had been overrun during New Rome’s reconquest, and they and some twelve thousand of their finest warriors had now been compelled to serve on the campaign in Gaul. The brothers had differing views on this matter. Jalhid was the older by twenty years; he knew better than his younger sibling, or so he assumed, the value the Romans placed on their loyal allies, and the riches and power that could be had in the service of the Empire. Priamus saw only that his tribe, who had finally established their own rulership after rising against the Vandals and destroying them, had suddenly been made slaves again. Priamus also did not share his brother’s belief that all men were cruel and lustful, and that suffering was the inevitable consequence of Man’s quest for power. As such, when Emperor Lucius’s spies brought news to Nantes that the first of King Arthur’s contingents were landing at Brest, and Priamus was dispatched with his six thousand troops to reinforce Consul Gainus at Rennes, the Moorish prince was appalled to witness the depredations committed by Gorlon and his forces.

All the way to Rennes, they encountered villages laid waste, fields and vineyards reduced to blackened ruins, trees groaning beneath the weight of dangling corpses. The final straw came when Priamus’s scouts drew his attention to the remains of a free-company camp abandoned by the roadside. Concealed amid the trees was a fire-pit with a charred pole laid across it, on which were mounted the remains of several children, broached like young birds. Priamus at once convened a meeting with his senior officers, and the decision was reached that they would sooner serve the Devil than pay fealty to any potentate who permitted such atrocities. They thus proceeded west, but now veered away from Rennes, intent upon traversing the whole of Brittany if necessary until they met Arthur’s forces, with whom they would hold parley.

News of this mutiny reached Consul Gainus, who, having finally opened the Treasury, had been living in Rennes like a king. Enraged, Gainus called ten squadrons of cavalry from the Roman force now barracked in the city — five thousand men in total — and rode out at their head, determined to capture and punish the transgressors. Twenty miles west of the city, in a barren, rocky region, they were ambushed by Breton irregulars bolstered by forward companies of Arthur’s army acting under the joint command of Sir Gawaine and Sir Lancelot. A fierce melee was joined, and for a brief time the numerically superior Romans looked to be getting the better of it, until a third party arrived on the battlefield — Priamus and his Moorish warriors. The Romans had pushed the Britons onto a broad hillock, where they subjected their shield-wall to relentless attacks, but now Priamus charged into Gainus’s right flank, causing panic and confusion.

The Roman formation broke, and there was a stampede to escape. The Britons took advantage, mounting up and galloping downhill, overrunning what remained of the Roman camp. Many Roman officers were slain, Gainus among them. The rest of the Roman force fled east towards Rennes, a shredded relic of what they once had been.

On the battlefield, Prince Priamus surrendered his army, explaining that his days of servitude to Rome had ended. The Moors made a strange sight for the eyes both of Briton and Breton alike, with their dark faces and curled black beards. They wore polished steel corselets over flowing silken garb, and steel helms only the upper spikes of which were visible above their ceremonial turbans. When they fought, they did so with great courage and skill, wielding lances, short, double-curved bows which they could shoot from horseback, and long crescent swords.

Despite the strangeness of such allies, Gawaine — as always, energetic and hearty — congratulated Priamus on this decision, and said that he should join his host with theirs. However, Priamus was reluctant. He knew that his brother, Jalhid, still lived in Rome’s favour and would never switch allegiances, which meant that Moor would at some point be fighting against Moor, and Priamus could not be party to that. Lancelot thus proposed a compromise. He suggested that Priamus and his troops should voluntarily become prisoners-of-war. If they laid down their arms, they would be escorted out of Brittany and into the lands held by Childeric — maybe to Paris itself, a neutral capital from where they could watch the rest of the campaign as observers.

Priamus and his men did as requested. They turned over their weapons, and allowed Lancelot and Gawaine, with four hundred knights and men-at-arms and six hundred infantry, to escort them to the kingdom’s northeast border.

When news reached the garrison at Rennes that Consul Gainus was dead, there was great concern. Second-in-command to Gainus had been Romeus Baldoni, a portly fellow who in civilian life had been a merchant and land-owner, and whose main position in the military was as Staff Prefect. Throughout the many campaigns of Emperor Lucius, he had organised logistics, built camps and served as secretary to the various fighting-men he had served under. He had never himself seen the face of battle.

Baldoni now sent a frantic missive to Nantes to the effect that he and his reduced command were in dire peril. The return mail, signed by Emperor Lucius himself, instructed Baldoni to re-fortify Rennes, and reassured him that fresh forces would soon be en route to relieve him. In the meantime, the traitor Priamus could not be allowed to escape and Baldoni was ordered to send the only mobile force he had left — Gorlon and his free-companies — in pursuit. Relieved on several counts, not least because the free-companies themselves made him nervous, Baldoni passed the orders to the ogre captain, who yet again was given express permission to ‘do his worst.’

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.

A rain of fire slashed down through the tinder-dry foliage of the wood wherein the freebooters milled, covering every quadrant and puncturing the skins of naphtha hanging in the canopy.

The blood-red glare of the exploding skins lit the landscape for dozens of miles. On the crest of a hill just north of Dol, Gorlon glanced back, his misaligned features awed as he gazed on the inferno. By his reckoning, almost the entirety of the free-companies had blundered headlong into the disaster. Even as he and his officers watched, frantic figures could be seen floundering in the white-hot heart of a conflagration which roared from the forest floor to a hundred feet above the tips of the tallest trees.

It was at first light, when the smog of smoke and morning mist had cleared, and Lancelot, Gawaine and their men-at-arms advanced on horseback through the ash and embers. Scenes of horror greeted them: scores of fallen men, more than they could count, lay huddled together, blackened, twisted, and melted into each other. A fortunate few were riddled with arrows and had probably died swiftly; some had perished on their own blades; others had been incinerated in attitudes of prayer, desperately seeking shrift before plunging into that even more terrible fire. The stench was nauseating, eye-watering.

“We couldn’t beat them in a straight fight,” Lancelot reminded Gawaine, who nodded grimly, for once every jest knocked out of him. “They were too many. They’d have killed our men as surely as the unarmed villagers they massacred so routinely.”

They assessed the town of Dol, to which only minor damage had been done, and rounded up the small groups of freebooters who had either crawled there with burns and arrow wounds, or had simply stayed behind to cower in sheds and stables. It did not take long to establish that those most responsible for the path of destruction had headed north. Gawaine was thus to take the infantry and escort Priamus across the border and northeast to Paris, while Lancelot mounted a pursuit.

By Lancelot’s estimation, the freebooters still in harness numbered between six and seven hundred. But they were easy enough to track — by the trail of items they discarded to lighten their load. Some even abandoned their loot.

But not Sir Turgeis of Coutrances.

The Jackal of the Southeast was master of a cavalcade of twenty wagons, each crammed to the brim with sacks of coin and silver plate. He would not release a single spoon, and so he and his party lagged dangerously behind the rest. Perhaps it was no surprise when, around mid-day, an arrow struck him in the back, pierced his habergeon and severed his spine. He fell from his horse, twisted and paralysed. His underlings, who saw this as a double opportunity — both to lighten their load and to enrich themselves — ignored him. He wept and pleaded until a wagon wheel passed across his body, crushing his ribcage.

Baroni Benevento, fearing more for his skin than his ill-accrued wealth, abandoned his haul altogether, and rode east, accompanied only by his most loyal bodyguards: eight raw-boned Danes who had never yet failed him. But like their master, these doughty fellows also had survival instincts. Hoping to curry favour with their pursuers, they tied the disgraced merchant to an alder tree, where they used him for axe-throwing practice. When a band of Lancelot’s mounted archers rode up it was all over for Benevento, and his former bodyguard willingly laid down their arms and went into custody.

The others, who had chosen to remain close to Gorlon, made it as far as the coast. It was believed that Mont St. Michel, the island stronghold, could be made defensible and that, as King Arthur and his army would soon have bigger fish to fry, they might, if they proved defiant enough, be left alone.

Not so.

When Gorlon crested the last rise, he found the strait between the coast of France and his island-home hosting several vessels, including one particularly large galleass, at whose prow and stern the timber castles were draped with flags bearing Arthur’s dragon standard. Smoke unfurled from the black barge that normally transported the ogre captain to and from his island, as it burned at its mooring.

Along the beach from both sides, knights and men-at-arms cantered with lances levelled. On the skyline at Gorlon’s back, Lancelot appeared with his men.

Close to the water’s edge, a royal pavilion had been pitched. Banners and shields hung alongside it. More squadrons of armoured horsemen were mounted to its rear. In front, there was a table at which was seated a man in full mail with burnished steel roundels at his joints and a handsome white and scarlet surcoat belted at his waist. He barely acknowledged Gorlon’s arrival as he dined on brisket, sweet-peas, onions and carrots. With his mail aventail pulled back and the sun embossing his light-brown hair, this could only be King Arthur himself. The two knights flanking him — Sir Bedivere and Sir Kay — were less relaxed, with visors down and longswords drawn.

Not that further fighting was in any way likely. With the forces of Albion circling them, the remaining freebooters could do nothing more than disarm themselves, though one — Darra O’Lug — attempted to break for it, galloping at a gap which briefly appeared in the enemy ranks. He made it through, but was pursued and caught easily from behind, a longsword cleaving his tonsured cranium at a single stroke.

At length the King stood and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. He approached Gorlon on foot. “They told us you were coming. We so hoped we hadn’t missed you.”

Gorlon twisted his tusked mouth into a hideous, sneering smile. He said nothing as he and his men were put in chains and led away.

“Prisoners?” Arthur asked, as Lancelot dismounted.

“A handful slipped through our fingers, but I’d say just short of two thousand.”

Arthur stroked his beard.

“Too many to hang,” Bedivere observed.

“I agree,” Arthur said. “I’ll settle for having them all castrated. But not our friend Gorlon. A real example must be made of him.”

The destruction of the free-companies was not the end of Arthur’s campaign in Brittany.

It was around this time that Emperor Lucius was victorious at Nantes. He finally persuaded the city to yield when, at great cost to himself both in time and money, he ordered the construction of thirty siege-towers, including a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot helepolis,²⁴ each of its four levels armed with three catapults and three arbalest. With their ramparts broken, what remained of the garrison raised a white flag rather than face an onslaught of this magnitude. Emperor Lucius took the surrender in a grand ceremony, only to discover halfway through that King Hoel had escaped weeks earlier and, even now, was raising new forces.

The Emperor was so enraged that he failed to speak for the remainder of that day. Only the following morning had he regained his equilibrium. He emerged from his pavilion and issued orders that one-third of his forces were to advance into Brittany, two army-groups of thirty thousand each to invest the castles of Fougeres and Vitre, the rest to march through the centre of the kingdom, ultimately to attack Brest. All this time, of course, the bulk of King Arthur’s forces were coming ashore, not in Brittany but in France, north of Mont St. Michel, far beyond the range of Roman scouts.

It was therefore even more of a shock for Lucius, still quartered on the Loire, when his breakfast was interrupted by the news that his significantly reduced encampment was being approached — not from the west, as he’d expected, but from the north. When he enquired who by, he was speechless to learn that it was King Arthur and his entire host.