The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [478]
“Until two days ago.”
“And where did he go, can you tell me that?”
“Oh, yes, I can,” she said. “He and his outlaws have gone to fight for Henry.”
“Henry?” William said. He had a dreadful feeling that he knew which Henry she meant. “The son of Maud?”
“That’s right,” she said.
William went cold. The energetic young duke of Normandy might succeed where his mother had failed—and if Stephen was defeated now, William might fall with him. “What’s happened?” he said urgently. “What has Henry done?”
“He’s crossed the water with thirty-six ships and landed at Wareham,” the witch replied. “He’s brought an army of three thousand men, they say. We’ve been invaded.”
III
Winchester was crowded, tense and dangerous. Both armies were here: King Stephen’s royal forces were garrisoned in the castle, and Duke Henry’s rebels—including Richard and his outlaws—were camped outside the city walls, on Saint Giles’s Hill where the annual fair was held. The soldiers of both sides were banned from the town itself, but many of them defied the ban, and spent their evenings in the alehouses, cockpits and brothels, where they got drunk and abused women and fought and killed one another over games of dice and nine-men’s morris.
All the fight had gone out of Stephen in the summer when his elder son died. Now Stephen was in the royal castle and Duke Henry was staying at the bishop’s palace, and peace talks were being conducted by their representatives, Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury speaking for the king, and the old power-broker Bishop Henry of Winchester for Duke Henry. Every morning, Archbishop Theobald and Bishop Henry would confer at the bishop’s palace. At noon Duke Henry would walk through the streets of Winchester, with his lieutenants—including Richard—in train, and go to the castle for dinner.
The first time Aliena saw Duke Henry she could not believe that this was the man who ruled an empire the size of England. He was only about twenty years old, with the tanned, freckled complexion of a peasant. He was dressed in a plain dark tunic with no embroidery, and his reddish hair was cut short. He looked like the hardworking son of a prosperous yeoman. However, after a while she realized that he had some kind of aura of power. He was stocky and muscular, with broad shoulders and a large head; but the impression of crude physical strength was modified by keen, watchful gray eyes; and the people around him never got too close to him, but treated him with wary familiarity, as if they were afraid he might lash out at any moment.
Aliena thought the dinners at the castle must have been unpleasantly tense, with the leaders of opposing armies around the same table. She wondered how Richard could bear to sit down with Earl William. She would have taken the carving knife to William instead of to the venison. She herself saw William only from a distance, and briefly. He looked anxious and bad-tempered, which was a good sign.
While the earls and bishops and abbots met in the keep, the lesser nobility gathered in the castle courtyard: the knights and sheriffs, minor barons, justiciars and castellans; people who could not stay away from the capital city while their future and the future of the kingdom were being decided. Aliena met Prior Philip there most mornings. Every day there were a dozen different rumors. One day all the earls who supported Stephen were to be degraded (which would mean the end of William); next day, all of them were to retain their positions, which would dash Richard’s hopes. All Stephen’s castles were to be pulled down, then all the rebels’ castles, then everyone’s castles, then none. One rumor said that every one of Henry’s supporters would get a knighthood and a hundred acres. Richard did not want that, he wanted the earldom.
Richard had no idea which rumors were true, if any. Although he was one of Henry’s trusted battlefield lieutenants, he was not