Read Chapter 2: The Grey Hounds

The Grey Hounds fought their first battle under no banner at all.

Three days into the contract, the grain convoy entered a wooded hollow near Fruges. Hugues halted the carts because a jay had stopped calling. Martin, walking beside the third wagon, saw nothing except wet trunks and autumn leaves.

Then a quarrel struck the driver of the lead cart in the cheek.

He fell without a sound.

Men erupted from the trees.

They were not peasants. Peasants attacked wagons with axes, scythes, and too much shouting. These men came in two groups, one toward the horses and one toward the rear, each with shields painted over in brown mud. Professionals.

“Hounds!” Hugues roared. “Teeth out!”

Martin put his boot through the stirrup of his arbalest, bent, hooked the cord with the belt claw, and hauled until the string clicked into the nut. Around him the company transformed from a disorderly procession into something harder. Spears came level. The two Englishmen pulled longbows from waxed cloth. Ysabeau dragged the wounded driver beneath a cart and took his short sword.

Martin chose a man with a kettle hat and a mail collar. He aimed not at the chest but at the upper thigh, where the skirt of mail ended.

The quarrel struck exactly where he intended.

The man folded.

Martin reloaded while the attackers closed. His second bolt punched through a wooden shield and pinned a hand behind it. Then there was no time for shooting. He dropped the crossbow on its sling and drew a falchion.

The fight lasted less than five minutes.

Afterward, six Grey Hounds were wounded, two badly. Nine attackers lay dead. Four fled. One survived because Ysabeau had broken his knee with a cart pin.

Hugues dragged the prisoner upright by his hair.

“Who sent you?”

The man spat blood.

Hugues sighed. “Martin, do crossbowmen know anything about knees?”

“Enough.”

The prisoner spoke before Martin moved.

They had been hired in Saint-Omer by a clerk working for Lord Eustache de Marconne. Their orders were to seize the grain and burn the wagons if seizure failed.

Hugues's face changed.

Martin noticed.

“You know the name?”

“Everyone who moves food in Picardy knows Marconne.”

The surviving attackers carried no badges, but three had identical silver coins sewn inside their belts: newly minted gros tournois, clean-edged and uncirculated.

“Payment in advance,” said Martin.

Hugues nodded. “Generous.”

The convoy's owner, a merchant named Bellon, became less generous when they reached Thérouanne. He insisted the ambush had been caused by the company's poor scouting and refused to pay the promised hazard bonus.

Hugues smiled through the argument, then quietly ordered two Grey Hounds to remove one sack from every tenth wagon before the grain entered Bellon's warehouse.

“Is that theft?” Martin asked.

“Accounting.”

That night, the company divided wheat in an abandoned tannery. Each man received a measure in addition to coin. Martin noticed that Hugues set aside three sacks.

“For the wounded?”

“One. The other two go to the villages we passed.”

Martin stared at him.

“You steal from our employer to feed peasants?”

“I steal from an employer who steals from peasants to keep roads quiet enough that peasants do not cut my throat while I sleep.”

“That sounds less charitable.”

“It is. Charity is expensive.”

Hugues handed him a cup of ale.

“Listen, crossbowman. Kings pay late. Lords pay when watched. Merchants pay when frightened. Villagers pay because armed men are standing in their yard. A company that survives learns which coin has blood on it and which blood comes looking for repayment.”

Martin thought of Raoul de Beaulieu, who had been considered an honourable lord because he attended Mass and never hanged more than three men for tax arrears at a time.

“What are we?” Martin asked.

Hugues raised his cup.

“Alive.”

For the next six months, that seemed enough.

The Grey Hounds escorted salt, guarded bridges, collected ransoms, and once spent nine days protecting an abbey from men officially serving the same king as the abbey's patron. Martin learned that a mercenary's world was made not of countries but of contracts, distances, fodder, walls, and pay chests.

He also learned that grain was becoming harder to find.

In villages where mills still turned, barns stood strangely empty. Merchants complained of bad harvests, yet caravans travelled at night under heavy guard. Prices doubled in Arras and tripled near Calais.

When Martin asked Hugues about it, the captain only said, “War eats.”

But Martin had begun to suspect something was feeding it.

The wounded ambusher survived long enough to reveal more than his employer's name. He described a room above a wool shop in Saint-Omer where hired men waited in separate groups so they would not know one another. A clerk paid them in new silver and forbade questions about the wagons. The clerk's sleeves had been edged in green silk, expensive enough for a merchant's household but plain enough to pass unnoticed among richer men.

Martin remembered the detail because Hugues made everyone repeat what they had heard independently. Accounts differed at once. One Grey Hound remembered blue silk. Another swore the prisoner had said the clerk wore a fur collar. Martin alone recalled green.

“Truth gets drunk quickly in a company,” Hugues said. “Write before it falls over.”

They had no clerk, so Martin scratched the facts onto the smooth side of a split roof tile with charcoal. The object travelled in the baggage cart for months. Later Brother Matthieu would laugh at the crude record, but it became the first entry in what Martin privately thought of as the hunger book: names, seals, places, odd prices, roads where grain moved when villages had none.

At Thérouanne, he also noticed that Bellon's warehouse guards were better armed than many castle men. They wore matching kettle hats and carried new spears. A merchant expecting ordinary trade did not need that many professionals.

“Perhaps grain is more valuable than castles now,” Martin said.

Hugues looked toward the warehouse doors. “Castles cannot be eaten.”

The remark stayed with Martin. In songs, wars were decided by banners captured and noblemen ransomed. On roads, the important questions were uglier: whose horse still had oats, whose men still had bread, whose millstone still turned.

Martin began watching wagons as carefully as armies.