Read Chapter 3: Under the Leopard

In February 1359, the Grey Hounds entered English service.

They did so in a church porch while snow blew through a broken window and a notary from Calais complained that Hugues's men smelled like livestock.

The contract required sixty armed men for forty days. Hugues had fifty-one.

“We have sixty,” he said.

The notary looked behind him.

“I count fifty-one.”

“Nine are scouting.”

“Where?”

“If I knew, they would not be scouting very well.”

The English captain standing beside the notary laughed. His name was Sir Thomas Greybourne, a younger son from Kent with a scar under his chin and French good enough to insult a bishop. He signed for sixty.

Their task was to reinforce an English-held manor south of Guînes and harass French supply roads. For Martin, wearing an English badge felt stranger than he expected. He had fought Englishmen. He had watched them loot villages. He had also watched French men-at-arms do the same thing with better explanations.

On the second week, Greybourne ordered Hugues to burn three farms suspected of supplying a French garrison.

Hugues rode out with twenty men and returned at dusk with smoke on the horizon.

Martin had gone with him. They burned only empty sheds.

The farms themselves stood untouched.

Greybourne noticed.

“Those roofs look remarkably unburned.”

“Wet thatch,” Hugues said.

“It has not rained in five days.”

“Very wet thatch.”

Greybourne looked at Martin, then back at Hugues. “One day your arithmetic will hang you.”

“One day everyone's arithmetic hangs them.”

Instead of punishment, the Englishman began using the Grey Hounds for scouting and ambushes rather than destruction. Martin respected him for that, though he trusted him no more than he trusted any lord.

Near Ardres, Martin's patrol captured a French courier carrying letters between two noble households. Most concerned horses, debts, and marriages. One letter was different.

It listed quantities of wheat, rye, oats, and dried peas stored in six locations across Artois. Beside each location was a price—not the current market price but three times as much.

At the bottom appeared a seal: a tower above three sheaves of grain.

Martin showed it to Hugues.

The captain's mouth tightened.

“Marconne again?”

“The letter is addressed to his steward.”

Hugues took it to Greybourne.

The Englishman read slowly, tapping one finger on the parchment.

“This depot here—Licques. We buy from them.”

“So do French garrisons,” Martin said.

Greybourne looked up. “How would you know?”

Martin pointed to another letter. “Same clerk. Same seal. One price for your quartermaster, another for a French castellan at Saint-Pol.”

Greybourne gave a low whistle.

“A merchant selling to both sides is not treason if he is clever enough.”

“This is not one merchant,” said Martin. “These stores cover half the roads between the coast and Arras.”

Hugues folded the letter. “And they are withholding grain until buyers are desperate.”

Greybourne's humour vanished.

“If my men miss rations because some French lord is playing market games, I can hang him.”

“If he is a French lord, you would hang him anyway.”

“That is what makes the law efficient.”

They laughed, but Martin did not.

Three days later, Greybourne received new orders from Calais. The captured correspondence was sent north. No further questions were asked.

A week after that, an English quartermaster arrived with six wagons of grain purchased at Licques.

The price, Martin learned, was exactly the inflated figure in the letter.

Greybourne swore for a full minute.

“Someone above me approved it.”

“Someone always does,” said Hugues.

Martin stared at the sacks stacked beneath the manor's stone hall.

War ate, yes.

But perhaps war also had cooks.

English service brought Martin close enough to Calais to smell the sea. He had never seen the city itself, only its distant walls and the traffic moving toward it. Wool went north and west; wine, salt, iron, and coin came back. Grain travelled both ways depending on prices and armies. The border that seemed absolute in royal proclamations dissolved around carts.

Greybourne taught him something else. English captains feared their own supply officers almost as much as French attack.

“An arrow kills one man,” the knight said while inspecting mouldy oats. “A clerk kills a hundred and writes that weather did it.”

One evening Martin joined Greybourne's men around a fire. They spoke mostly English, a language he knew only in fragments, but Will Hobb translated with deliberate inaccuracy. A Kentish archer complained that French bread was too hard. A Picard Grey Hound replied that English teeth were too soft. Within minutes men who might have killed one another under different banners were arguing about cheese.

Martin found the ease disturbing.

He had grown up hearing that the English were enemies by nature. Yet individual Englishmen snored, cheated at dice, feared infection, and complained about officers exactly like French soldiers. None of this made the war less real. It made the explanations for it feel thinner.

When Greybourne learned Martin had served a lord killed by English arrows, he did not apologise.

“Perhaps my men shot him,” he said.

“Perhaps.”

“Would that make you leave?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Martin looked toward the storehouse where overpriced grain had just been delivered.

“Because today I know who is paying me.”

Greybourne nodded as if that answer made perfect sense.

Months later Martin would remember the conversation and realise how far he had already moved from Raoul's household, even before he admitted it to himself.

During the weeks near Guînes, Martin also learned the economics of a garrison. A castle might contain two hundred men and twice that number of mouths once servants, craftsmen, washerwomen, children, and camp traders were counted. Every horse consumed grain that could have fed a family. Every day of bad weather increased the amount of fodder lost to mud. The heroic image of a fortress was stone; its daily reality was bookkeeping.

Greybourne's quartermaster, a Welshman named Dafydd ap Rhys, allowed Martin to watch the ration count after Martin caught a clerk entering the same sack twice. Dafydd kept small notches on a stick as a private check against written totals.

“Why not trust the ledger?” Martin asked.

“Because the man holding the quill is as hungry as everyone else.”

Dafydd showed him how a few missing bushels each day became a crisis within a month. He also explained that merchants could profit without openly stealing: deliver slightly damp grain so weight increased, mix old oats with new, delay carts until emergency prices were declared, charge for guards who did not exist.

Martin thought of battles in which commanders blamed cowardice for collapse. How many had begun with a rotten sack weeks earlier?

That night he added more columns to his hunger book: promised quantity, delivered quantity, date expected, date arrived. He did not yet understand what pattern he sought. He only knew that the same names appeared wherever numbers bent in the same direction.

Hugues watched him write by firelight.

“You are becoming a clerk.”

“Is that worse than a robber?”

“Much. Clerks live longer.”

The joke concealed approval. Hugues had survived by intuition. Martin was beginning to convert intuition into records.