The Champion (18 page)
‘Yes, sire.’ Alexander glanced at Richard, then studied the ground.
‘And is this your usual behaviour?’
Grooms had emerged from the stables to attend to the horses, and other knights were riding into the stable yard.
‘No, sire, but Monday and I …’ He made a gesture serve for the rest, and drew her closer to his side. His fingers gripped hers so tightly now that it was all she could do not to wince with pain.
‘And an empty stable is a fine place for a tryst?’
Alexander said nothing, continuing to look at the ground. The colour in his face was unfeigned.
‘Get out of my sight,’ Richard said with cold contempt. ‘If you are strong enough to swive a wench, then you’re strong enough to weather the open road.’
‘Sire.’ Alexander bowed, and still without raising his eyes, dragged Monday away around the corner of the stables, to the sound of guffaws from some of Richard’s knights. He collapsed against the wooden gable-end wall, his body quivering with nausea.
‘I’m sorry.’ He gave her a shame-filled look. ‘It was the only thing I could think to do on the spur of the moment. Otherwise he would have invited me to keep company with him, and I would have had to refuse in a more direct manner.’
‘You hurt me,’ she said. Her own legs were shaky, and she sat down beside him, touching her crushed lips with her equally crushed fingers.
‘I know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
They leaned against each other in silence to recover, he with his lids closed, she with her eyes wide open. She watched the cloud patterns change and form across the wide canvas of the sky and tried to think of nothing. At length he took her hand again, and squeezed it, but gently this time. ‘I can sing songs about the courtly arts, but I know nothing of them in practice,’ he said ruefully. ‘I would deserve it if you never spoke to me again.’
The core of her anger melted at his words, and with great daring she kissed his cheek, as she would have done a brother. ‘I forgive you,’ she said, ‘providing that you tell my father the truth before anyone else tells him a lie about my reputation.’
‘I swear so.’ He kissed her cheek in return, and then her lips, gently, chastely.
To her chagrin, Monday wondered what a proper kiss between man and woman was like.
Alexander escorted Monday back to the hall, but he could not bear to return to the inactivity of the bower, and made his excuses to Monday’s troubled enquiry.
‘I need some time alone to find my balance,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you understand, but it is as necessary to me as the breath of life.’
Monday pursed her lips, then slowly nodded. ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘I do understand, but I confess myself jealous. I have to seek my own solitude inside my head. A woman’s desire to go off on her own is viewed with suspicion. Why should she wander away except to sin? She is inviting trouble, she makes herself into prey, and if anything happens, the fault is all hers.’
‘Monday, I …’
She shook her head and gave him a gentle push. ‘Go on. Ignore my carping.’ Turning from him, she walked swiftly across the hall to the tower stairs.
Alexander watched her, feelings of tenderness, bewilderment and exasperation joining the mêlée of other emotions churning within him. Then he too shook his head, but like a beast at the irritation of flies, and returned to the stables to saddle up Samson.
The stallion was delighted to see him and made a thorough fuss as Alexander harnessed him up. He bucked with high spirits when Alexander rode him out of the castle and down to the river meadow beyond the looming grey walls. Slackening the reins, he let the horse have his head and they burned along the river bank at a hard gallop. When the first exuberance had flown like sparks from Samson’s hooves, Alexander steadied him to a canter, then eased him down to a swinging walk. Patches of yellow grass and bald cinder stains were the only indication that a camp had stood in the meadow. The river glittered, and three fishermen sat on the bridge, lines trailing in the current. On the opposite bank, a goat and two kids stood shoulder-deep in a clump of thistles, munching blissfully. The clash of battle seemed as distant as a dream.
Alexander drew Samson to a halt and began to go through the exercises which he and the horse had been painstakingly learning together. The rear, the back-kick, the change and turn of leading forehooves. Absorbed in his work, the rough edges were smoothed from Alexander’s mind. A sense of control returned, and the feelings of panic and anger diminished.
He was nothing to Richard Coeur de Lion, a passing fancy along the way and quickly to be forgotten. Alexander had no great affection or loyalty to Lavoux and would harbour no regrets about leaving. Lord Bertran had been a brigand, and Lady Aline, although intelligent and beautiful, was something of a
belle dame sans merci
, a manipulator of men. He would lose nothing by riding out tomorrow.
That much decided, he relaxed and thought with anticipation of the open road and the opportunities awaiting on the tourney field. He cast his eye over the fields in search of the returning hunt, but there was nothing to see except lush meadows … and in the distance a single horseman watching him. For a moment he thought it was Coeur de Lion and his heart began to hammer. Samson threw up his head and uttered a stallion neigh of challenge.
Alexander reined him in short and turned to face the rider, head on, realising as he did so that it was not Duke Richard, but William Marshal. The baron had exchanged his armour for a plain tunic and chausses, although both were of excellent quality and spoke of the status he had carved for himself by a mixture of intelligence, astuteness and sheer athletic ability. The weakness of relief surged through Alexander’s muscles.
‘You ride well, lad,’ Marshal complimented as he rode forward. A half-smile curved beneath his moustache. His face was powerfully boned, brow and cheek and jaw thrusting like rocks against the sun-browned skin.
Alexander reddened at the compliment. ‘Thank you, my lord.
I practise when I can.’
‘A fine horse, too. Is he yours?’
Alexander hesitated, and saw the Marshal’s flint-coloured eyes sharpen. ‘Yes, he’s mine,’ he said, and smoothed the glossy black neck.
‘And yet you seemed uncertain for a moment?’
‘Because I was not sure how to reply,’ Alexander said, deciding that candour would serve him best with William Marshal. ‘He is a gift of God really, since I came across him tied to a tree in a forest beside his dead master.’ He told Marshal the tale, the stark details, bare of elaboration. ‘I never sought to discover whose he might have been. I had burdens of my own, and the tourney life is a nomad one. By the time I had space to think, we were far away in Normandy, and besides, we had grown attached to each other.’ He tugged affectionately on one of Samson’s sharp, pricked ears.
‘Then if he was not yours before, you have made him so now,’ the older man said with a smile in his voice. ‘I would like to see what else you and he can do.’
A glorious, golden hour passed in which Alexander became a willing pupil to William Marshal’s tuition, and Marshal shed the burdens of his higher responsibility and became a young knight himself, back in the fresh meadow grass of his youth. His squires, hovering on the periphery of the encounter, were sent back to the keep to fetch lances, helms, shields and a quintain. Alexander was given a lesson in the art of jousting by the greatest jouster alive.
‘The weight of the lance must be supported by the palm of your hand, not your fingers,’ Marshal said, eyeing Alexander critically and riding around him to judge his posture. ‘Yes, just so, but I think you need a lighter lance.’ He snapped his fingers, and a squire came running with the required article.
‘As your strength increases, so you will be able to use heavier weapons. You do not have the power to unhorse a man by brute force alone, so you will need cunning and skill and technique to win through. Therefore you must practise harder than any of your opponents. You have a talent; what you make of it is up to you.’
‘As you made use of yours?’ Alexander ventured.
The Marshal smiled and shook his head. ‘You may take my career either as a warning or a spur. That too is your own decision.’
Alexander and his tutor tilted at the quintain, and then gently with each other, the more experienced and powerful man drawing his blows, Alexander learning with each run.
The sun had trailed towards the west and lay over the fields in a flood of late gold when finally they drew to a close in consideration of the horses, which were tiring, and repaired at a slow, companionable walk to the castle.
‘Keep a clear head and you will go far, young man,’ said Marshal with a benevolent glance at Alexander.
‘Thank you, my lord.’ Not unnaturally, Alexander was filled with a glow of pleasure and pride.
The Marshal rubbed his forefinger down his bony nose where the jousting helm had left a streak of rust. ‘It was not so much a compliment as a warning,’ he said. ‘You live too close to the edge. This afternoon, with me, you have been using your mind as well as your gut, and the results have been promising. But I saw you take wild risks in the battle for Lavoux, and I have heard the tale from my nephew, John, about how you rescued him from a vindictive opponent on the tourney field by rushing out unarmed except for a spear. One day your rashness will be your undoing, unless you can curb it.’
The glow Alexander had been feeling turned to chagrin. He fiddled with a hank of Samson’s mane. ‘It is a reaction to fear,’ he muttered. ‘One moment I am almost emptying my bowels with terror; I want to run away and never stop; the next I am angry at my own weakness, and I charge into the fray without thought.’
‘You cannot abdicate that responsibility,’ Marshal said sternly. ‘You will be nothing, a man used by other men, and that would be an utter waste of your life. I have seen today how swift your wits are when you have them about you – and I do not mean here in the meadow.’
Alexander’s head jerked up, and beneath him Samson gave a spine-jarring leap. He grabbed for the reins and tightened them. ‘My lord?’
‘That girl, the young sempstress. Are you and she lovers? I judge not, although it was a handsome performance.’
‘How could you tell?’
The Marshal’s lips twitched. ‘Unless you were trying to break the poor lass’s spine your embrace was a shade too vigorous, and with the stables so close, you would not have engulfed her like that unless you intended to be seen.’ He laid a reassuring hand on Alexander’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, I believe you attained your goal. As a statement of rejection, it was crude but effective.’
Alexander risked a glance at his companion, but the stern features gave nothing away. William Marshal was known to be a man of high honour and discretion, loyal to the last drop of blood, and Richard Coeur de Lion was his liege lord.
‘I will not be sorry to leave this place,’ Alexander muttered as they rode into the shadow of the looming walls. ‘It was supposed to be a sanctuary, but it has been nothing but a prison.’
‘All experience is grist to the mill,’ said the Marshal. ‘Live and learn.’
Behind them, the notes of a hunting horn sounded on the sweet evening air, and riders appeared on the horizon, hounds loping beside the horses. Alexander glanced at them, then faced the keep. No, he would not be sorry to leave Lavoux, but if not for his sojourn here, he would never have encountered William Marshal and been given an afternoon’s tuition in not only the art of jousting, but the art of life.
And when later, in the great hall, Monday asked him if he had found his balance, he smiled. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said, ‘but the scales weigh more evenly than they did before.’
‘Hah!’ yelled Alexander and dug in his spurs. The black destrier leaped from its hocks and plunged into a ground-eating gallop, the summer dust exploding in small puffs from beneath the reaching hooves. Hervi to one side of him, Arnaud to the other, Alexander levelled his lance and concentrated on the man he had chosen to take. He pinned his vision to the four nail heads slightly to the left of centre. Time slowed down. There was only himself, the fluid motion of the black, and the oncoming crimson and green shield.
The impact was sweet and clean, and his adversary’s lance scarcely had time to rattle Alexander’s shield before the man was propelled backwards over his saddle cantle and crashed on the dry ground. Alexander turned Samson on the space of a penny, and lowered his lance to the throat of his sprawled victim.
‘I yield!’ the knight cried, and gave Alexander his name and his oath of recompense. Alexander withdrew the lance, saw that Hervi and Arnaud were in no difficulty, and set off in pursuit of the loose horse.
Around the perimeter of the field and within the safety of the withy sanctuaries, onlookers cheered and shouted encouragement at the fighters. They wanted to see courage and wild bravado, to be entertained. Some of them even wanted blood. Alexander grasped the bridle of the loose destrier, a handsome although rather flat-footed bay. Useful for wet ground, he thought, as he led it over to the sanctuary where Monday was waiting.
‘First ransom of the day,’ he said cheerfully as he handed her the bridle. Then he removed his helm and glanced around.
A young woman captured his eye. She did not belong with the regular inhabitants of the tourney field but was, he guessed, one of the townswomen, out to view the spectacle. She wore a fetching gown of dark-blue linen, the colour and weave proclaiming her a person of some wealth. A veil of the finest gossamer silk covered her head, but her braid of corn-blonde hair had been allowed to remain free and was woven with scarlet ribbons. She cast a look through her lashes at Alexander, her eyes so deep a blue that they were almost violet. Fire sparked through his body and centred in his loins. His hands were suddenly damp on the reins. He noticed that there was an elderly maid by her side and a serving man, but no sign of a husband.
