London - Edward Rutherfurd [102]
Whereas a tailor could cut and fold his cloth, the armourer had to rearrange the rings geometrically, and this arrangement resembled nothing so much as a knitting pattern. Here, a link would be joined to five others instead of four; there, one would be left dangling loose. When finished, however, so close and intricate was the workmanship that it was almost impossible to find the different joins.
For several hours now, Alfred had watched enthralled as the master showed him how this was done, demonstrating the geometry, the lines of stress, the need for ease of movement in the metal shirt that had already protected fighting men for over a thousand years. As he worked by lamplight, the master explained: “Always rivet the same way, from the outside. You can feel why.” When Alfred ran his hands over the coat, he realized that the outside was rough, while the inside, where the rivets were flattened and which would rest against a leather undercoat, was smooth as cloth.
On some of the rivet heads the master would stamp his personal mark. And then the coat of mail was complete.
Or almost. One thing still remained. The iron used by the medieval armourers was relatively soft. To toughen it for battle, it had to be case-hardened. Now, therefore, the master rolled up the finished garment in crushed charcoal, packed it in an iron box, and put it into the forge. Soon it glowed red-hot.
“The iron and charcoal interact,” he explained, “and the iron turns to steel. But you must not heat it too long,” he warned, “or it gets brittle. You want the outside to be hard as diamonds and the inside to remain flexible.”
Then, having shown him these mysteries of his art, he let the boy go home.
From this time on, at least once a week Alfred was summoned to stay behind. And while the other apprentices supposed he was operating the bellows or pulling wire, the master quietly taught him the techniques that were normally reserved for the senior apprentices only. Often, they worked together late into the night, Alfred’s hammer and tongs and pincers flying to their task. They spoke to no one of these sessions, but the boy had an instinct that Barnikel was kept informed by the master, although he could not be sure that this was so.
The crisis broke in September.
The events that were to change the face of England for ever were made possible by a simple and regrettable fact. In September, it being the month of harvest, the men manning the English fleet announced that they had to go home. Nothing King Harold could say would stop them. Accordingly, Alfred, Barnikel and Leofric stood on the quay at Billingsgate one morning and watched the last of the little sailing vessels tie up. From which moment, as they all knew, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom lay open to invaders.
They struck almost at once.
The invasion planned by William of Normandy could hardly have gone better. His timing was perfect. Two weeks after the English fleet put in, the King of Norway led an attack on the shores of northern England and took York. King Harold raced northwards and, in a well-fought battle, smashed the invaders. However, he and his army were now two hundred and fifty miles away from the south coast – where William promptly landed.
His army was not large, but it was formidably trained. Some, the élite, were retinues headed by great magnates with famous names like de Montfort, but most were men for hire, landless knights from Normandy, Brittany, France, Flanders and even southern Italy. Thanks to William’s staunch support of the Church, they rode under the papal banner. On arrival at the bay of Pevensey, near the little settlement of Hastings, they built an earth and wooden fort and set out to reconnoitre.
In Alfred’s memory, the events of the next few days were forever blurred. The king returned to London. The city was arming. The Staller – the head of the city’s Defence Guild – and his captains were commandeering every able-bodied man they could find. Each day Barnikel stormed into the armoury with