The Water Devil Read Online Free PDF Page A

horses?”
    “No, my destriers, dammit. My heart, my blood. Come look. It's something in this accursed French fodder. You pussyfoot around the Duke all the time. Take some advantage from your position, and tell him about my horses. If we stay longer, the Brokesford stud is dead. I have three stallions left, Gilbert. Three, counting the one you'vegot. God knows if I'll bring even one of them home sound again.” Gilbert had not seen his father in such a state for the entire campaign, even when he'd lost the eighth archer from the manor and begun to doubt he'd have enough men for plowing, if they ever got home. Gilbert rose quickly, threw a heavy, fur-lined cloak over his stained leather gambeton and wool tunic. Outside, his own horses were picketed, where his boy was feeding them. His father stopped, and peered fiercely at the fodder, running it through his fingers and smelling it. “No, no. This stuff's all right.” He eyed the big black destrier whose fodder he'd just inspected. Thin and winter coated, the stallion rolled his eye and skittered sideways. “Thin, dammit, thin. But at least his spirit's still there.”At this, the boy feeding the horses snorted. Calling Urgan spirited was flattery indeed; he was bad tempered and crazy, the best looking and the meanest, most unreliable horse the manor possessed. That was why Sir Hubert had decided to lend him to Gilbert for the campaign.
    They made their way through the lit fires roasting rabbits, roasting hedgehogs, roasting any small unmentionable creature that had allowed itself to be caught. Around them archers and pikemen, and sappers huddled and drank watered French wine. Outside his father's and his older brother Hugo's tents, the last of the Brokesford stud was picketed. Three men in soft, knee length leather boots, their heavy, fur-lined cloaks drawn close around them, were gathered around a bloated, dead destrier. Another man, one of the stable hands from Brokesford, knelt at the creature's head.
    “My lord!” cried Sir Hubert, sweeping the quilted arming coif from his white hair and kneeling before the great Duke of Lancaster.
    “Rise, rise at once, Sir Hubert,” said Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, Earl of Derby, Lincoln, and Leicester, steward of England, Lord of Bergerac and Beaufort, and second only to the king himself in power and lands. “Your destrier seems to have died. What is your opinion?”
    “My lord, there's too little fodder, and what we have is going bad.” He paused. The word “retreat” was not in his vocabulary. “If we stay another week, we will lose the horses.”
    “That is exactly what I think. But I would rather say,‘another two days.'” said the Duke. He was a shrewd-eyed, sober-headed man of fifty, who had learned through long experience when to take chances and when risk was futile. Now as he paced about the destrier, a handsome dappled gray he had once thought to have for himself, he was making up his mind about something.
    “That is my opinion, too,” said the Earl of Warwick, one of the commanders who had accompanied the Duke.
    “Someone must tell the king that he risks losing in a day what it has taken him twenty years to get,” said the Duke quietly. And silently he added to himself, and that someone will have to be me. Your will be done, Lord.
    THE FOLLOWING DAY , the archers on the city walls looked out at a sea of churned mud and garbage, spotted here and there with the decaying corpses of horses. Across the low, undulating fields, blackened and ruined, the columns of supply carts, footsoldiers, and mounted cavalry wound into the distance toward Chartres. In the rear, a detachment of horsemen and archers, banners whipping in a curious, icy wind that had sprung up, guarded the last of the supplies from any pursuit that could be mounted from the city. Black clouds were moving across the sky, and the cold wind blew away the sound of the bells of Cathedral of Notre Dame, ringing for the
Te Deum
that was being