Honour and the Sword Read Online Free PDF

blood.
    We kept going. We followed the bridle track where it circled the rear gardens below us, and went on to the northernmost part of the estate and the back meadow. There was rougher land there, where trees had been cut down for building, and it was fringed directly by the main Forest of Dax. As we finally reached the tree line it was just starting to get light.
    I slowed down Tonnerre, and let the foal catch up to Perle, which was a mistake, because he was under her belly and suckling in a minute. The boy came up more slowly, and stopped to watch us. He looked even more bedraggled now it was lighter.
    ‘We’ll need to lie up in here for a while,’ I told him. ‘Let things die down. We’ll go back down when it’s dark, and find out what’s happening.’
    He nodded like it didn’t matter much, looked vaguely about him, then stiffened suddenly and stared towards the estate below. The rain was making a kind of gentle mist, but through it I could see a plume of dark smoke sort of rolling and coiling into the air in thick purple waves. I followed it down to the dark shape below, where I saw more smoke and little flashes of bright orange flame.
    They were burning his home.
    He didn’t say anything. He just looked at the fire for a long while, and his face had no expression at all. He didn’t get angry, he still didn’t cry, he just watched. The air round us was shimmering in a strange way, making little shadows pass over his face, like something was on fire behind that too.That was fair enough. It was his whole world going up in smoke down there.
    What I didn’t realize at the time was that it was mine too.

Two
    Stefan Ravel
    From his interviews with the Abbé Fleuriot, 1669
    I don’t know what you’re talking to me for. Oh, don’t give me that balls about the pursuit of truth, you’ll be after canonization before you’re done. All you want to hear is how perfect he was, and I’m afraid, M. l’Abbé, he fell a little short of that.
    Not that I knew him back then, the night the dons came to Picardie. I’d somehow survived to the age of nineteen without having set eyes on André de Roland, and can’t say I was breaking my heart over it. I didn’t much care for nobility, not what I’d seen of them. I’d joined my brother in the army at fifteen, and come across enough officers who treated men worse than horses to last my humble lifetime. My brother died in the army, as it happened, Abbé. He died there.
    So when the old man dropped dead in ’35 there was no one but me to go home and take over the tannery. Verdâme wasn’t the nicest place to live back then. The whole village had been sold with the title to this du Pré bastard, who upped all the rents he could, and charged everyone the earth for using the mill, the wine-press, the bake-house or just about everything except breathing. But I wasn’t a peasant, Abbé, I was safe from the worst of it. I was a skilled artisan, and I was getting by.
    And then the dons came. Christ, yes, of course I remember, there’d been a bunch of us at the Lucheux Market, and there we were sweeping home through the Dax Gate only to find ourselves in the middle of a battle. Not a real one, no officers, no order, nothing but a bunch of civilians weeping and wailing and running out the Gate with their little handcarts, and a few stouter folk desperately flinging up a barricade across the Ancre Road. Well, what’s a man to do? I wasn’t going to save my home by running away from it, so I went with the others to the barricade.
    It was all very amateur. We had civilians with scythes and reaping hooks, and behind us a priest trying to ward off the danger by saying prayers. At least we had a militia sergeant, and when he heard I’d been in the army he gave me a wheel-lock musket, and stuck me in the front by a young Verdâmer in the uniform of the Baron’s Guard. That’s right, Abbé, Marcel. He seemed a nice, well-brought-up lad, but there wasn’t much time for conversation