War Stories Read online

  ‘Maybe,’ he replied, ‘but the truth is, I think I do frighten your mother a little, even now. So Annie was right, in her way. Your mother came to see me for the first time after she’d left school, when she wasn’t a little girl any more; practically grown up, she was. She came without ever asking her mother, to find out who her father was, she said; because she hadn’t ever known me, not properly. She was kind to me. She’s always been kind to me ever since. But even now she can’t look me in the eye like you do. She writes letters, keeps in touch, calls me Dad, lets me visit, does her best by me, always has. And I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong. But every time I came to you for Christmas when you were little, I longed for her just to look at me. She wants to, but she can’t. And she’s angry too, like I was. She can’t forgive her mother for what she did either, for taking her away from her dad. She hasn’t spoken to her mother now in over twenty years. Time’s come to forgive and forget; that’s what I think.’

  So now I knew the whole story for the first time. We relapsed after that into our usual, quiet ways for the rest of the holidays. But by the time I left I think I was closer to him than I have ever been to anyone else in my life.

  I went back a year later, this time with my mother to visit him in hospital. He was already too ill to get out of bed. He said he was a lucky man because he could see the sea from his bed. He died the second night we were there. He’d left a letter for me on the mantelpiece in his cottage.

  Dear Michael,

  See they bury me at sea. I want to be with Jim and the others. I want Annie there, and I want your mother there too. I want you all there together. I want things put right. Thanks for looking at me like you did.

  Love, Grandpa

  A few days later Annie came over to Scilly for the funeral. She held hands with my mother as Grandpa’s ashes were scattered out beyond Scilly Rock. We were lucky. We had a fine day for it. The gannets were flying, and everyone was together, just as Grandpa had wanted. So he was right about gannets. Grandpa was right about a lot of things. But he wasn’t half a man.

  Geraldine McCaughrean

  The precepts of most religions are peaceful, and yet throughout history greedy, well-meaning, bigoted,

  misguided, politicking or thrill-seeking men have used religion as an excuse for killing and robbing their fellow human beings. To my mind, ‘holy war’ is a contradiction in terms. War is the ultimate sacrilege. That’s why I wrote this story.

  I chose 1148 AD and the end of the failed Second Crusade as the setting, because it was a time when Christianity was being stretched out of shape in other ways. Many monasteries, founded as centres of prayer and simplicity and bound by strict rules of chastity, poverty and obedience, were changing into something quite different. Some grew both rich and corrupt, abusing their power over the ordinary people whose food and money they sapped. The abuse was so bad in parts that the locals rose up and evicted the monks.

  It was the practice of knights returning from the Crusades to carve a cross in a church wall or floor – a symbol of their thanks to God at surviving. These symbols were called ex-votos (literally ‘by reason of a vow’). You can still see them in some medieval churches today. And this is where my story begins.

  EX VOTO

  As his sword hit the plaster, a spark flew, then the blade’s tip snapped off. Hugh’s breath escaped him in a heavy sob halfway to a laugh. That it should break now – this blade that had travelled so far with him! Having weathered the blazing desert heat, the freezing desert nights, having struck limbs from bodies, heads from shoulders, having driven chain-mail links into flesh like currants into dough, it chose now to snap, inside the chapel of this peaceful English monastery. Plaster fell on to his face, like quicklime on to a corpse.

  Sir Hugh shrugged – well, would have shrugged but for the wound in his shoulder. The flesh had healed but not the joint beneath, which never would. He could already foresee the nicknames they would dub him: ‘Lapwing’, ‘Hunchback’, ‘the Tilt’ … What name would his mother call him, he wondered, if she proved still to be alive? He went back to gouging away at the wall of the nave. His bad shoulder ached. The pain no longer troubled Hugh; he had endured so much that it had lost the power even to annoy him.

  Morning sunbeams, shining in over the rim of the high windows, also drove long blades of light into the plastered wall. Perhaps the sun too was carving its exvoto, in thanks at having survived another night. How quiet it was, this place he had chanced upon. Unusually quiet, even for a monastery chapel.

  ‘Devil toss you on his pitchfork, you thieving dog!’ said a voice behind him and a blow across his back felled him to his knees. As he fell, he assessed the degree of pain, the likelihood of death. He also began counting seconds: he had learned precisely how long an enemy took to deliver a second blow. Before his attacker could hit him again, he had rolled over and up and lunged with his sword. If the tip had not been broken, it would have pierced the abbot’s belly.

  The abbot was holding the candle sconce like a quarter-staff, and his lips were drawn back off his teeth in a ferocious snarl.

  ‘An ex-voto! I was carving an ex-voto!’ cried Hugh in self-defence and the abbot, recognizing a cultured voice, stood the large candlestick back on its base.

  ‘I thought you were prising the chains out of the wall,’ he said (though he did not apologize). And now that Hugh looked, he could see that the beautiful wooden font had indeed been chained to the chapel wall. ‘They pilfer. All the time, they pilfer, God rot them,’ said the abbot. He examined the hole Hugh had made in the plaster. ‘Poor effort.’

  ‘Not for want of gratitude to my maker,’ said Hugh. ‘Only for want of a fit tool.’

  The abbot promptly disappeared out of a side door and returned a minute later with a mason’s awl that he tossed to the knight. ‘I fine you one crown for scarring church fabric … Here. You’ll make a better job with this.’ As Hugh paid, the abbot tried his hardest to see into the purse.

  Hugh gladly laid aside his sword. It was much easier using the awl. He was able to scrape out the shape of a fluked cross around the dent he had already made. He worked on steadily, tongue creeping out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on his ex-voto – his note of thanks to God for bringing him safe home from the war.

  He was not the first returning Crusader to carve on the chapel wall. Several ‘fines’ must have been paid to the abbot. Two dozen crosses were cut in the plaster – even into the marble floor around the font – some as deep as arrow slits, some as shallow as hastily dug graves. Hugh’s heart filled with gratitude that these men, too, had survived the bloodbath of the Holy Wars – had dragged themselves home across desert, through hostile countries, escaped diseases, avoided capture or slavery or shipwreck or bandits or open wounds festering or rotten food … Each carved cross represented a miracle really.

  His head also filled with the faces of those who had not survived – friends, comrades, yeomen of his own levy, his brother Luke …

  ‘You use the devil’s hand to work, I see,’ said the abbot sourly.

  ‘I took a hurt in my shoulder,’ said Sir Hugh. ‘I have to use my left hand.’

  One question had rolled around inside Hugh all the way home, like a stone in his boot. Suddenly – he did not know why – it found its way out of his mouth. ‘Why did God not grant us the victory, Father Abbot? I know, I know – serving the Lord is a privilege … But you would suppose – given that He called us to go on Crusade – that God would grant us the victory. Or why—’

  The question gave the abbot no difficulty at all. ‘Too many sinners among you,’ he said. ‘The feet of the army stumbled upon their own trespasses and they were mired in sin.’ It sounded like a quotation from the Bible, though Sir Hugh could not place it. He tried to picture the great army of the Second Crusade, and behind it its siege engines, forges and field kitchens, and behind them – biggest of all – a vast bundle holding all the sins of the marching men, gradually dragging them to a standstill.
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  ‘But we went on the Crusade to be forgiven, Father! The priests told us it was our duty to go and our reward to be forgiven! One thousand years less in purgatory! Our accounts wiped clean! Our souls washed in the blood of the Heathen! Why did the victory go to the heathen, Father?’

  ‘The ways of God are not our ways,’ snapped the abbot glibly. ‘You brought home other rewards, I dare swear. Loot? Plunder?’

  Sir Hugh thought of the contents of his saddlebag. ‘Something for my sweetheart,’ he admitted.

  The abbot shuddered with distaste at the mention of a sweetheart but still wanted to see what loot the knight had brought. So Hugh went outside to his horse, tethered in the monastery garden. He stayed to stroke her – the winded, galled, ringwormed nag that had once been the finest in the county. Hardship had made them the best of friends. He told her about the ex-voto he had carved and the horse nodded her head in approval. Then Hugh got the pomegranate out of his saddle-wallet and took it back into the chapel. He had picked it in the Holy Land. The hard rind was browner now, but still as hard as eggshell.

  The abbot took hold of it with a look of disgust. ‘Is this all?’

  ‘We had to travel light. It was bad. At the end. Chaos. We were lucky to get away with our skins. The ones who did.’ In the back of Hugh’s head familiar monsters squirmed into view – the ones he tried so hard to block out: the pomegranate hanging on its tree; the men lying under that tree as though resting in its shade; its roots soaking up their blood. Perhaps the fruit of the pomegranate tree grew red from drinking the blood of the Crusades.

  A cord ran down inside the abbot’s skirts. He pulled out a bunch of keys and useful implements. With a knife he ringed the pomegranate and twisted it open. Some of the seeds fell out on to his foot. The juice stained his hands. Those hands will be sticky all day now, thought Hugh absently.

  He did not trouble to grieve for the loss of the pomegranate. Such things are not important in comparison with being alive. And now that it was open, the fruit reminded him too much of things he had seen after a sword stroke cut through a helmet, a limb, a horse’s flank.

  ‘How many did you kill?’ asked the abbot, sniffing the fruit dubiously and giving both halves back to Hugh.

  ‘Sorry, Father?’

  ‘How many heathens did you kill?’

  Hugh shook his head. The colourful monsters writhed in the back of his brain: black, blood-red, tripe-white, chestnut, sallow, bay … ‘Fifty. Sixty, maybe.’

  The abbot raised his hands, so that the sunlight fell on his fat white fingers. Hugh bent one knee, thinking to be blessed. But the abbot was simply doing his sums. ‘Eight hundred crowns should void it,’ he said.

  ‘Father?’

  ‘Well? Did you think to break the Sixth Commandment and not pay the price? Thou shalt not kill. The fine has been fixed at twelve crowns per head. Best pay me as much as you can here and now and receive forgiveness. You could wait until you reach your own estates, but the roads are rife with thieves, and if you were to die unshriven …’

  Hunger and sickness had kept Hugh company all the way from Palestine. Now they gave him a push and he reeled with dizziness. ‘I’m sorry. I fear I do not understand you, Father.’

  The abbot pursed his lips impatiently. His face seemed to ask how such a stupid knight had managed to find his way home at all. ‘Blood weighs heavy, young man. I counsel you earnestly to wash away your sins! Ransom your soul. Some piece of carving on a wall won’t do.’

  Hysteria, somewhere between laughter and tears, caught in Hugh’s throat.

  When the call to arms had come, his parents had dug deep to furnish him and his brother with horse, weaponry and armour, so that they might serve the holy cause – recapture Jerusalem for Christ and Christendom! Now Hugh alone was home again, penniless, his only wealth oozing from the broken rind of a pomegranate. And was his surcoat too soaked, his soul too sodden, his scabbard too brimful of blood for him to enter heaven?

  ‘Let me be sure I understand you,’ Hugh said slowly and deliberately. ‘The Church sends us to war, telling us that fighting for Christ will save our souls. Then, when we come home, you tell us we are sinners for taking lives? And must buy back our innocence with twelve pieces of silver?’ Rage flashed behind his eyes as red as blood.

  What hatred had he ever felt for the dark-faced strangers who had confronted him over the rim of his shield, who had crossed swords with him, whose thighs had touched his as their horses collided? What wrong had he ever felt he was righting? How holy had it ever felt to wipe the sweat from his lip and taste blood on his glove?

  Now this fat abbot, smug and supercilious, was telling him it had been for nothing – for less than nothing – had fitted him for nothing but damnation, had earned him nothing but the tortures of hell. And was his brother even now roasting in hell, for killing Moors at the Holy Church’s command?

  A red fog clouded Hugh’s eyes. The same fog had helped him face a charging horde of Arab horsemen without turning tail, had let him torch a village and trample the dead under his horse’s hoofs. Now it blinded him to the sacredness of his surroundings, the light-pierced beauty of the nave, the reverent respect owed to a minister of God. Hugh went for his sword. But of course he had laid it aside. His scabbard was empty.

  All of a sudden, something flew through the sun-filled slit of the window above him and landed on the floor of the nave with a crack. It was a rock. Hugh stared at it, bewildered. More rocks hit the outside of the wall, with a noise like hoofs clipping flint. The abbot moved with remarkable speed to push shut the open door, shooting the bolt just as someone tried to enter.

  Fuddled by hunger and fatigue, Hugh was slow to grasp what was going on. ‘Are we under attack?’

  The abbot was running full tilt from font to vestry to transept, bolting doors, shouting as he did so, ‘Three thousand years in hell to you all! Devil gripe you, you godless Gadarene swine!’

  As more rocks rattled down round and about him, Hugh recovered himself. The red fog cleared. He slipped back into the role of Christian knight defending the True Faith. Who but the wicked would attack a monastery chapel? He only wished he could have brought his poor mare indoors.

  Cakes of dung and half a rusty ploughshare came through the lancet windows. He retreated to the centre of the nave. Fists were beating on all the doors now, filling the nave with a clamour that reverberated through the choir stalls and up the yawning emptiness of the bell-tower. Birds and bats swooped in terror through the nave. Hugh’s sword still lay by the font.

  ‘Scum! Vermin! Devil slit you, you heathen plague rats!’ bawled the abbot, his voice cracking like an old stirrup leather. ‘By bell, book and candle I cut you off from all hope of heaven!’ He ran to the vestry and fetched out a richly embroidered surplice.

  At least the man means to die in the robes of his calling! thought Hugh. And he resolved to do his Christian duty as a knight and defend the abbot with his life’s blood against whatever godless fiends were outside.

  The fiends outside seemed to care nothing about damnation, but redoubled their efforts to break in. A tree branch hit the window and fell back on to the person who had thrown it, who cursed.

  ‘Who are they?’ Hugh asked. In his weary bewilderment he had begun to imagine Moorish faces, Moorish swords, Moorish pavilions massing outside this English monastery.

  ‘The devil’s brood, that’s who!’ panted the abbot, kneeling beside a gigantic coffer by the door, rattling a key in its lock. It was an intricate lock, its workings a maze of rods and junctions and curlicues filling the lid of the chest. But at last the mechanism grated and clanked, and the hasp was free. The abbot threw open the lid and began pulling out various leather bags, jute sacks and church plate. ‘They’d sooner buy cheese and ale than pay their tithes to me!’ His spittle spattered the plates and chalices as he wrapped them in the embroidered surplice. As he worked, he shouted at the top of his voice: ‘Sons of Gomorrah! Worshippers of Mammon!’

  (Daughters of Go
morrah too, to judge by the shrill taunts coming through the lepers’ window.) Who could they be, these witches and demons who felt no fear of God or His ministers?

  ‘Thankless serpents and vipers!’ hissed the abbot, knotting together the corners of the surplice and dragging it to the side door. ‘You must hold them off, knight, while I … while I … save the treasures of St Ivo!’ Suddenly remembering the saintly relic kept under the altar in a lead-lined casket, he dragged it out and shunted it down the choir, like a child trying to toboggan on thin snow. ‘Want to kiss it?’ he grunted.

  Sir Hugh knelt and kissed the casket as it skidded past him, its hasp catching him a blow across the nose. The heart of St Ivo encased in lead made a screaming noise as the nails in its base scraped the marble floor.

  ‘Why does no one come to our aid?’ Hugh asked, realizing, for the first time, that he had seen no monks other than the abbot since riding up to the chapel door an hour before.

  ‘Gone already – like rats from a leaky ship. Judgement fall on them! Fire and brimstone scorch their dirty hides!’

  Hugh had the nightmarish impression that he must have brought war home with him, along with the lice in his hair, the fleas in his blanket, the ringworm in his horse. It was as if the ghostly spectre of war had ridden home behind him, sharing his saddle, resting its sharp chin on his shoulder. Now chaos would engulf the rolling green English countryside – and it would all be his fault!

  ‘In the name of Christ, I charge you to defend this place!’ commanded the abbot, thrusting Hugh’s sword at him so that he dropped the pomegranate. ‘I must save the relic of St Ivo! Defend this place, knight, and God will reward you!’ And, dragging the heavy casket across the brass effigies in the aisle, the abbot disappeared into the shadowy transept.

  And Hugh did wait, sword in hand.

  A lifetime of obedience to the commands of Mother Church is not easily dislodged. Since childhood, the words ‘Church’ and ‘Goodness’ had been tangled tight in his breast: he was far too weary to wrench them apart now. Stones rattled down around him, and smoke began to crawl in under the doors. From time to time some kind of battering ram jarred the lock. Glancing down, Hugh saw that St Ivo’s heart had crushed one half of the pomegranate and smeared it like blood and gristle across the brass faces of the dead.