"Adams, Robert - Castaways in Time 06 - Of Beginings and Endings 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Robert)
CHAPTER
THE FIRST
A particularly powerful gust of the icy-toothed arctic wind sent big drops of rain rattling against the leaded-glass panes of window of the archbishop's alchemical laboratory with a sound almost as loud as that of arquebus balls showering in volleys upon stoneworks. Lifting his quill for a moment, the old man turned his head to look at the dull-grey nothingness beyond those panes, then resumed his scribbling of notes on the sheet of vellum. He well knew that his memory was not all that it once had been, and he wanted to be certain that every thought and nuance would be adequately covered in the letter that he shortly must begin to compose-compose personally, not leave to the offices of even his most trusty secretary or clerk-to be sent to Cardinals Sicola and D'Este of the Italian Faction in Rome.
Although their physical appearances had changed very little, of course, the two men who led the Whyf-fler Hall retainers across the border and north into Lowland Scotland in the damp of late-spring A.D. 1489 were drastically changed by their two years of life in a sporadically embattled fortified residence. They had been deadly swordsmen to begin, but now they were become as well accomplished horsemen and more than accomplished also in the uses of spear, axe, mace, crossbow, and various primitive firearms, along with the proper laying of bombards and other engines of defensive siegecraft.
Both now went bearded and wore clothing but little better than that of those who followed them, the clothing in which they had arrived having finally fallen apart of long and strenuous usage. Knowing full well the incipient dangers into which they rode, the peril that might lie between them and the royal camp to the northeast, all rode at least partially armed, weapons ready and slow-matches all lit and smoking, only the heavier pieces of defensive armor left off ... though slung within easy reach at all times. True, they had no fear of ordinary bandits, for none such silly enough to attack a force of fourteen lances existed alive, but stray bands of Balder-ites had been known to do or try some very irrational things, like all fanatics who own little or no fear of death.
They had not been able to plan any sort of direct route to the gathering of hosts, for across any such they had contemplated there always lay the lands of one of the Balderite clans-Armstrong, Kerr, Hay, the southeastern Gordons, and eke some of the Mur-rays. Finally, after the intercession of Lowland Scots relatives of the Widow of Whyffler Hall, it had been arranged for the Whyffler Hall lancers to cross into Eliott lands, join the smaller Eliott contingent of clansmen, then proceed to the town of Hawick-on-Tweed, where they would fall in with the forces of Clans Douglas, Scott, Stuart and Johnstone; then the combined force would march or fight their way to Edinburgh.
As the basically peace-loving Harold Kenmore had feared and the increasingly fire-eating Emmett O'Malley had hoped, the procession of the combined force from Hawick was one skirmish or fight or small battle after another for most of the way, but they were to find in the end that, hard and bloody as had been their hotly contested passage, other English, Welsh, and Lowland contingents as had come by land routes had suffered as much or more, shed as much or more blood in reaching Edinburgh. But reach that great gathering the most of them at last did.
Artair Dubh, Tanist of Douglas, who had been chosen overall leader of the contingent, had commended both of the English gentlemen from Whyf-fler Hall in most glowing terms when he had turned them and their force over to their erstwhile overlord, His Grace Sir Humbert Howard, Duke of North-umbria. His Grace had well known just what the lavish praise of so famous and ferocious a fighter as Sir Artair Dubh of Douglas meant and had mentally marked both men as types who would bear watching in the coming campaign. True, he was unfamiliar with any family called Kenmoor and what of it, but both were patently gentlemen, and any Irish gentleman, such as this Ui Maille, could be nothing if not a fighter or a priest; the gentry of that island produced only the two kinds.
Less than a week after their party's arrival, there had been a stir in camp, great rejoicing and feasting, when, down from the Highlands, the great host of the Clan Chattan Confederation had come, their Captain, the Mackintosh, bearing in his baggage a cask of brine containing the heads of the Balderite Chief of Grant and his three sons.
The kings shortly announced that between the earls and the most powerful clans-MacKay, Sutherland, and MacKensie to the north, Cameron, Campbell, Chattan, Gordon, and Drummond to the south-the brutalized Highlands now had been scoured virtually clean of the bloodthirsty heretics who called themselves Balderites. Now God's will must be done as thoroughly in the Lowlands and wherever else the bestial pagan killers might be found by the fine, God-fearing, Christian fighting men here gathered.
And done it was, messily, very bloodily, exceedingly brutally, and very thoroughly. Those who had killed so mercilessly could not hope for quarter or mercy of any kind; they knew it and fought to the very death in most cases. Those few unfortunates so very unlucky as to be taken alive invariably were, after interrogations by clerics and laity, subjected to deaths by exquisite and inhumanly prolonged torments, these exercises performed publicly, that as many Crusaders as possible might see, hear, enjoy, and exult in the entertainments.
The continuing arrivals of Crusaders from oversea and trickles of Highlanders from the north gave the two kings more men than they really had need for, so at any strongpoint the Balderites chose to hold, they were simply invested by sufficient force while the bulk of the army marched on westward, deliberately herding their mobile foes in the direction of the Clan Kennedy lands and the sea.
The galleys and ships landed enough men on Ar-ran to raise two sieges, then joined with the formerly besieged Hamiltons to drive into the sea or slay every Balderite on that island. The galleys nibbled hard at the coasts of Kennedy lands, raiding, looting, burning, killing, raping, destroying standing crops, and slaying all kine they did not bear away. All communication between the Balderites now established in the northerly portions of the Irish Kingdom of Ulaid ceased as ships and boats from Kennedy, if not taken or sunk in very sight of land, just never returned, nor did so much as one friendly curragh, boat, ship, or galley land anywhere upon their interdicted coastline.
At last, Eideard Kennedy, chief of that ilk, had dispatched a small boat bearing a herald and a message for the Regulus. Two days later, a galley towed that boat close enough that the tide might bear it into shore. The severed and mutilated heads of its crew of oarsmen were stuck or hung to the gunwales of the blood-smeared craft and the naked, incomplete body of the herald stood impaled upon the sharpened stump of the mast, its flesh still warm to the touch; a cour bouilli tube hung from the herald's neck had contained a brusque message: "The Regulus of the Isles, Sheriff of Inverness, and always a most pious Servant of Our Lord Jesus Christ, will have no dealings with honorless, foresworn pagan heretics who delight in the butchery of women and children. There can be no terms, no hope of quarter. If the hellspawn who styles himself Eideard Cean-naideach of that sorry ilk cravenly renders up his sword to the Regulus, he will be afforded the protracted dog's death his infamy has earned him, and if the Regulus has not the joy of hearing the death-screams of this heretical thing, then most assuredly the King of Scots will."
Even while the host of the two kings moved inexorably westward, their outriders having already come within sight of Loch Doon on the eastern border of Clan Kennedy lands, a coalition of smaller, individually weaker neighboring clans who had never succumbed despite all their sufferings to the Balderites assaulted and conquered first Park Castle, in the lands of the Western Hays, then formidable Castle Kennedy itself. As they began to push up northward into the heart of Kennedy lands, driving before them any and all Balderites they could not catch and slay, the Regulus mounted assaults upon all five of the coastal castles with a fleet now augmented by bottoms out of Campbell, Mackensie, MacKay, and Ross. And then another coalition of the warbands of smaller clans fought their way across the River Ayr, slaughtered several hundred Balderites on the banks of the River Doon, then pushed on south into Kennedy.
In the end, a very few Balderites managed to somehow run the grim gantlet of galleys, ships, and boats and win to the temporary safety of Ulaid, in Ireland; all the rest died in Clan Kennedy lands, and not one, of any age, sex, or condition, was left alive in all Scotland by the time the Crusaders and clansmen were done.
The two scientists saw it through to the sanguineous end. In one of the last real battles of the Scottish part of the cf-usade, Emmett O'Malley, separated from his own men in the hurly-burly of combat, chanced to be in the right place at just the right time to save the life of a Scottish earl, standing back to back with the magnate among the well-hacked corpses of his bodyguards and the pagan foes until clansmen could hew their way to a rescue. The earl had knighted O'Malley on the spot, delivering the buffet with his nicked, blood-clotted battlebrand. Later, when things were become less hectic, the earl had summoned his freckled battle companion to his camp, gifted him with a fine destrier and a heavy purse, and insisted that Sir Emmett accompany him and his when they pursued the crusade against the Balderites into Ireland. Emmett had duly set sail for Ulaid with the multinational force of holy warriors, but then he had stayed in Ireland and had not set foot again in England for many a long year. On the eve of the day he was to leave the Northumbrian camp, he and Harold Kenmore had evenly divided between them the thousand or so longevity-booster capsules they still owned and needed to swallow at lengthy intervals of time lest they begin to age.
O'Malley had adapted quickly and thoroughly to the rough, very primitive, and often cruel world into which they had been projected, and Harold had thought that he had too . . . until the long-drawn-out slaughter of the march from Edinburgh and the crowning horrors of man's inhumanity that had been that march's culmination in Kennedy. He had done all that had been required of him, true, but dutifully, not with the marked enthusiasm of his companion. He had fought bravely enough and well, for all his steadily increasing soul-sickness, and when the last of the unspeakable things had been done, he had led the triumphant march of his loot-laden lances back to Whyffler Hall.
There, the Widow-a fine figure of a woman, really, of less then thirty winters, still in firm possession of all her teeth and with not a trace of grey hair-had made it clear that the hall needed an adult man as master, that she needed a husband and would favorably receive importunings from Squire Harold, who already owned the high regard of everyone he had aided and sustained before the king had come north, the men he had so well led and captained on the recent crusade, the nearer Scots chiefs, and eke the mighty Duke of Northumbria.
But poor Dr. Harold Kenmore, haunted waking and sleeping by horrible memories of events which he had felt duty-bound to take part in or at least witness in the commission, could not then think of, contemplate, the seeking of happiness, wedding, begetting of children into a callous, brutal world wherein such hideous enormities could be wrought upon the tender, quaking flesh of not only men and women but children and even helpless infants, these very deeds being committed in the holy name of God.
And so he had taken leave of Whyffler Hall and the folk he had come to know and love, those with whom he had shared privations, hardships, and danger for so long. He had set out with no real destination in mind, and when he chanced to fall in with a large party of knights, gentlemen, and their retainers bound for York and points south of that city, he had accompanied them, the roads and tracks across mountains and moors being far too dangerous then to afford safe passage to lone riders or even smaller parties. As the most of these men were also vassals of His Grace Sir Humbert Howard or of that man's near-relatives, the Percys, Squire Harold was well known to them and more than welcomed as traveling companion through lands still infested with robbers of all kinds, outlaws, and wild beasts.
It proved a lengthy trip with so large and slow-moving a party, but for the same reason, it was a peaceful journey; there were just too many bannerets and pennons borne above too many well-armed men to suit the bandits resident in the areas through which they passed. The only deaths and injuries which occurred were caused by pure accidents or resulted from hunting, and these could have as easily happened anywhere and anytime.
For all the companionship and hearty camaraderie of the men with whom he rode-few of them other than outgoing, gregarious, and very generous-Harold still found much time to think along the way, and he came to one rock-bound decision: However he chose to sustain himself in future, it would have, must have, nothing whatsoever to do with war, with fighting, with killing. After quite seriously considering, weighing out all aspects of retiring to one of the numerous monasteries and taking holy orders, he decided instead to carefully explore the possibilities of entering a trade of some nature, such a course as was being followed by not a few younger sons of noble houses and landless gentlemen.
In York, therefore, owning goodly patience and not lacking for time or the patronage of friends and acquaintances from out the royal host that had gone up to Scotland and extirpated the pagan Balderites, he bided his time and, eventually, found himself first interviewed, then stringently tested, and, at long last, accepted by the Goldsmiths' Guild as a True Master. Although some of his gently born acquaintances sniffed at and frowned upon his entry into this "common tradesmanship," even they had to admit that a man must find or make a way to keep body and soul together; and, too, it was not as if precedent had not been long since established, for Squire Harold was in no wise breaking new ground in becoming a legal goldsmith. And, these acquaintances consoled themselves, as a gentleman born, he was naturally gifted in all the arts-why, it was said that his test-pieces submitted to the Guild Masters were even now displayed by them as examples for all to try to emulate, first-quality work; besides, there never seemed to be enough honest, reputable craftsmen of that water about.
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