up in the higher valley of the river sarthe, which runs between low knolls through easy meadow-land, and is a place of cattle and of pasture, interspersed with woods of no great size, upon a summer morning a troop of some hundreds of men was coming down from the higher land to the crossings of the river. it was in the year 866. the older servants in the chief men's retinue could remember charlemagne.
two leaders rode before the troop. they were two great owners of land, and each possessed of commissions from the imperial authority. the one had come up hastily northwards from poitiers, the other had marched westward to join him, coming from the beauce, with his command. each was a comes, a lord[pg 144] administrator of a countryside and its capital, and had power to levy free men. their retainers also were many. about them there rode a little group of aides, and behind them, before the footmen, were four squadrons of mounted followers.
the force had already marched far that morning. it was winding in line down a roughly beaten road between the growing crops of the hillside, and far off in the valley the leaders watched the distant villages, but they could see no sign of their quarry. they were hunting the pirates. the scent had been good from the very early hours when they had broken camp till lately, till mid-morning; but in the last miles of their marching it had failed them, and the accounts they received from the rare peasantry were confused.
they found a cottage of wood standing thatched near the track at the place where it left the hills for the water meadows, and here they recovered the trace of their prey. a wounded man, his right arm bound roughly[pg 145] with sacking, leaned against the door of the place, and with his whole left arm pointed at a group of houses more than a mile away beyond the stream, and at a light smoke which rose into the still summer air just beyond a screen of wood in its neighbourhood. he had seen the straggling line of the northern men an hour before, hurrying over the down and coming towards that farm.
of the two leaders the shorter and more powerful one, who sat his horse the less easily, and whose handling of the rein was brutally strong, rode up and questioned and requestioned the peasant. could he guess the numbers? it might be two hundred; it was not three. how long had they been in the countryside? four days, at least. it was four days ago that they had tried to get into the monastery, near the new castle, and had been beaten off by the servants at the orchard wall. what damage had they done? he could not tell. the reports were few that he had heard. his cousin from up the valley complained that[pg 146] three oxen had been driven from his fields by night. they had stolen a chain of silver from st. giles without respect for the shrine. they had done much more—how much he did not know. had they left any dead? yes, three, whom he had helped to bury. they had been killed outside the monastery wall. one of his fields was of the monastery benefice, and he had been summoned to dig the graves.
the lord who thus questioned him fixed him with straight soldierly eyes, and, learning no more, rode on by the side of his equal from poitiers. that equal was armoured, but the lord who had spoken to the peasant, full of body and squat, square of shoulder, thick of neck, tortured by the heat, had put off from his chest and back his leather coat, strung with rings of iron. his servant had unlaced it for him some miles before, and it hung loose upon the saddle hook. he had taken off, also, the steel helm, and it hung by its strap to the same point. he preferred to take the noon sun upon his thick hair and to risk its action than[pg 147] to be weighed upon longer by that iron. and this though at any moment the turn of a spinney might bring them upon some group of the barbarians.
upon this short, resolute man, rather than upon his colleague, the expectation of the armed men was fixed. his repute had gone through all the north of gaul with popular tales of his feats in lifting and in throwing. he was perhaps forty years of age. he boasted no lineage, but vague stories went about—that his father was from the germanies; that his father was from the paris land; that it was his mother who had brought him to court; that he was a noble with a mystery that forbade him to speak of his birth; that he was a slave whom the emperor had enfranchised and to whom he had given favour; that he was a farmer's son; a yeoman.
on these things he had never spoken. no one had met men or women of his blood. but ever since his boyhood he had gone upwards in the rank of the empire, adding, also, one village to[pg 148] another in his possession, from the first which he had obtained no man knew how; purchasing land with the profits of office after office. he had been comes of tours, comes of auxerre, comes of nevers. he had the commission for all the military work between loire and seine. there were songs about him, and myths and tales of his great strength, for it was at this that the populace most wondered.
so this man rode by his colleague's side at the head of the little force, seeking for the pirates, when, unexpectedly, upon emerging from a fringe of trees that lined the flat meadows, his seat in the saddle stiffened and changed, and his eyes fired at what he saw. two hundred yards before him was the stream, and over it the narrow stone bridge unbroken. immediately beyond a group of huts and houses, wood and stone, and a heavy, low, round-arched bulk of a church marked the goal of the pirates—and there they were! they had seen the imperial levy the moment that it left the trees, and they were running—tall,[pg 149] lanky men, unkempt, some burdened with sacks, most of them armed with battle-axe or short spear. they were making for cover in the houses of the village.
immediately the two leaders called the marshallers of their levies, gave orders that the foot-men should follow, trotted in line over the bridge at the head of the squadron, and, once the water was passed, formed into two bodies of horse and galloped across the few fields into the streets of the place.
just as they reached the market square and the front of the old church there, the last of the marauders (retarded under the weight of some burden he would save) was caught and pinned by a short spear thrown. he fell, crying and howling in a foreign tongue to gods of his own in the northland. but all his comrades were fast in the building, and there was a loud thrusting of stone statues and heavy furniture against the doors. then, within a moment, an arrow flashed from a window slit, just missing one of the marshals. the comes of poitiers[pg 150] shouted for wood to burn the defence of the door, and villagers, misliking the task, were pressed. faggots were dragged from sheds and piled against it. even as this work was doing, man after man fell, as the defenders shot them at short range from within the church-tower.
the first of the foot-men had come up, and some half-dozen picked for marksmanship were attempting to thread with their whistling arrows the slits in the thick walls whence the bolts of the vikings came. one such opening was caught by a lucky aim. for some moments its fire ceased, then came another arrow from it. it struck the comes of poitiers and he went down, and as he fell from his horse two servants caught him. next, with a second shaft, the horse was struck, and it plunged and began a panic. no servant dared stab it, but a marshal did.
robert, that second count, the leader, had dismounted. he was in a fury, mixed with the common men, and striking at the great church door blow upon blow, having in his hand a stone[pg 151] so huge that even at such a moment they marvelled at him.
unarmoured, pouring with sweat, though at that western door a great buttress still shaded him from the noonday sun, robert the strong thundered enormously at the oak. a hinge broke, and he heard a salute of laughter from his men. he dropped his instrument, lifted, straining, a great beam which lay there, and trundled it like a battering-ram against the second hinge. but, just as the shock came, an arrow from the tower caught him also. it struck where the neck joins the shoulder, and he went down. even as he fell, the great door gave, and the men of the imperial levy, fighting their way in, broke upon the massed pirates that still defended the entry with a whirl of axe and sword.
four men tended the leader, one man holding his head upon his knee, the three others making shift to lift him, to take him where he might be tended. but his body was no longer convulsed; the motions of the arms had ceased;[pg 152] and when the arrow was plucked at last from the wound, the thick blood hardly followed it. he was dead.
the name of this village and this church was brissarthe; and the man who so fell, and from whose falling soldier songs and legends arose, was the first father of all the capetians, the french kings.
from this man sprang eudes, who defended paris from the sea-rovers: hugh capet and philip augustus and louis the saint and philip the fair; and so through century after century to the kings that rode through italy, to henri iv, to louis xiv in the splendour of his wars, and to that last unfortunate who lost the tuileries on august 10th, 1793. his line survives to-day, for its eldest heir is the man whom the basques would follow. his expectants call him don carlos, and he claims the crown of spain.
