Of Hooks and Cods. The Count and the Empress

0.Prologue Frisia 26 September 1345 (revised)

The damp September air was filled with smoke and fire rising from burning huts and hovels. Screams of anger and agony, pleads for mercy and prayers to the almighty. With blinding bloodlust knights pour through the village, pillaging and burning in search for women on which they could release their yearning urges. Those brave enough to flee were hunted as game, used as sport for the excitement of cheering men, watching their comrades try to tackle their female pray or striking down hopeless men. It was a mixture of laughter, crying and screaming, while in the background the fires cracked the wooden structures which eventually gave in to their weight and collapsed, sometimes giving way to the screams of those who were still trapped and were now being burned alive.

Out of the communal hall, left intact, came a man dressed in fine steel armour, partially plated, wearing a red leather tunic underneath, matching trousers, combined with a black leather belt with bronze inlays on which was attached the sheath of his sword and one most precious looking knife. He held a bloodied sword in his right hand. Even when drenched in red it showed that it was made of the finest metal by one of the craftiest of blacksmiths. With his left hand, he wiped aside his brown curls, wet by blood and sweat, from his clear blue eyes which peered unto the slaughter he and his men had created. He had a long face, yet had quite the cheekbones to balanced the figure. The round line of his face was covered with a short beard of slightly lighter, almost ginger, hair.

"William!" a masculine old voice sounded through the chaos of carnage. William turned to his right and saw his uncle John of Beaumont emerging through the thick smoke of the houses burning next to the town's communal hall.

"William!" John yelled again, this time slightly more exhausted while advancing towards his lord, semi-running.

"Something wrong?" William asked calmly with a straight face of someone familiar with the stench of dead and destruction that was intensifying all around him.

"Well..." John gasped for some air, "...maybe. Quite some peasants have gotten away and are fleeing towards Stavoren. If they warn the town the local lord might ride out and surprise us here when our men are too busy pillaging and raping."

"Then we must not be surprised," William replied, unmoved. "Order our men back into formation, we leave this town and advance to Stavoren to show those Frisians that we are ready to receive them in battle. I shall take the bulk of our forces back north to the coast and await our crossbowmen still disembarking from my ships. You take a couple of your best men and go south guarding your own ships and prepare to ambush the enemy if they leave the town."

"As you wish!" John bowed his head and then went back into the chaos of rampaging men, bellowing them back into formation and appeal to their self-control. William then signed to his guards to return to the ships. Confident he walked towards the coast hearing the footsteps of his knights gathering behind him who had picked themselves up again, now following their Count still feeling the exhaustion of their muscles from the slaughtering and other intense bodily 'exercise.' When William found a spot, slightly higher than the surrounding ground, he halted and turned around. His men stopped too, gazing at him. William ignored them as he was looking at the town of Stavoren laying on the coast that turned south and west again behind the town creating a small peninsula. William saw his uncle retreating with a hundred or so men towards the coast south of the town where he had a camp half a mile inland. He could see his uncle's ships on the horizon: seven or so cogs. He turned back north seeing his own ships being unloaded: eleven cogs and one hulk, his personal flagship.

"Henry!" William shouted into the crowd.

A young man, only just in his twenties, stepped forward. "Yes, my lord?"