1356

de Verrec. But for the moment,’ he pointed to Sculley, ‘fetch me that animal.’
    And so the Order of the Fisherman was born.
     
    Brother Michael was miserable. ‘I don’t want to be a hospitaller,’ he told Thomas. ‘I get dizzy when I see blood. It makes me feel sick.’
    ‘You have a calling,’ Thomas said.
    ‘To be an archer?’ Brother Michael suggested.
    Thomas laughed. ‘Tell me that in ten years, brother. It takes that long to learn the bow.’
    It was midday and they were resting the horses. Thomas had taken twenty men, all men-at-arms, their job merely to provide protection from the
coredors
who haunted the roads. He dared not take archers. His longbows rode with the Hellequin, but when he travelled in a small group the sight of the dreaded English bows stirred up enemies, so all the men with him spoke French. Most were Gascons, but there were two Germans, Karyl and Wulf, who had ridden to Castillon d’Arbizon to offer their allegiance. ‘Why do you want to serve me?’ Thomas had asked them.
    ‘Because you win,’ Karyl had answered simply. The German was a thin, quick fighter, whose right cheek was scarred by two parallel furrows. ‘The claws of a fighting bear,’ he had explained. ‘I was trying to save a dog. I liked the dog, but the bear didn’t.’
    ‘Did the dog die?’ Genevieve had asked.
    ‘It did,’ Karyl said, ‘but so did the bear.’
    Genevieve was with Thomas. She would not leave Thomas’s side, fearing that if she was alone the church would find her again and try to burn her, and so she had insisted on accompanying him. Besides, she had told him, there was no danger. Thomas only planned to spend a day or two in Montpellier in search of a scholar who could explain a monk kneeling amidst snow, then they would all hurry back to Castillon d’Arbizon where the rest of his men waited.
    ‘If I can’t be an archer,’ Brother Michael said, ‘then let me be your physician.’
    ‘You haven’t finished your training, brother, that’s why we’re going to Montpellier. So you can be educated.’
    ‘I don’t want to be educated,’ Brother Michael grumbled. ‘I’ve had enough education.’
    Thomas laughed. He liked the young monk and knew well enough that Michael was desperate to escape the cage of his calling, a despair Thomas knew himself. Thomas was the illegitimate son of a priest, and he had obediently gone to Oxford to learn theology so that he could become a priest himself, but he had already found another love, the yew bow. The great yew bow. And no books, no sacrament, no lecture on the indivisible substance of the triple-natured God could compete with the bow, and so Thomas had become a soldier. Brother Michael, he thought, was following the same course, though in Michael’s case it was the Countess Bertille who was the lodestar. She was still at Castillon d’Arbizon where she accepted Brother Michael’s worship as her due and was kind to him in return, but seemed oblivious to his yearning. She treated him like an indulged puppy and that made the young monk yearn even more.
    Galdric, Thomas’s servant, and more than able to look after himself in a fight, brought Thomas’s horse back from the stream. ‘Those folk stopped,’ he said.
    ‘Close?’
    ‘A long way back. But I think they’re following us.’
    Thomas climbed the bank from the stream to the road. A mile away, perhaps more, a small band of men were watering horses. ‘It’s a busy road,’ Thomas said. The men, he thought they were all men, had been behind them for two days now, but they were making no attempt to catch up.
    ‘They’re the Count of Armagnac’s troops,’ Karyl said confidently.
    ‘Armagnac?’
    ‘This is all the Count’s territory,’ the German said, waving an arm to encompass the whole landscape. ‘His men patrol the roads to keep the bandits away. He can’t tax merchants if they’ve nothing to tax, eh?’
    The road became even busier as they neared Montpellier. Thomas had no wish to draw attention to himself by entering the city with a large band of armed men so, next afternoon, he looked for a place where most of his men could wait while he entered the city. They found a burned mill on a hilltop to the west of the road. The nearest village was a mile away and the valley beneath the mill was secluded. ‘If we’re not back in two days,’ he told Karyl, ‘send someone to discover what’s happened and send to Castillon for help. And keep quiet here. We don’t