The Champion (22 page)

Hervi yanked the reins out of Osgar’s grip, vaulted into the riderless destrier’s saddle, and spurred in pursuit of his beleaguered brother.

Alexander wove and ducked like a Saracen bowman, using all his skill and agility to evade le Boucher and his inept young employer, for he knew that if it came to a straight fight he was finished; he could not match le Boucher blow for blow. Veering to the right, he began to work his way back towards the sanctuary, but two knights engaged in heavy combat crossed and blocked his path. He had to rein Samson sharply, and before he could spur on, le Boucher reached him.

There were no words. Eudo le Boucher was too experienced a warrior to waste his breath. He let his sword speak for him.

Alexander warded the first blow on his shield, and felt the impact vibrate all the way up his arm. He clenched his teeth, and out of sheer bravado made a vicious counterstrike. Le Boucher recoiled, as if he had not expected to find quite so much force behind the younger man’s response. Alexander pressed with his thighs and Samson rose on his hind legs to strike at le Boucher’s horse. The animal shied, and the blow that le Boucher had aimed at Alexander went wide. Henry FitzHamelin tried to make a crafty attack from the side, but Hervi’s late arrival put a swift stop to that and forced the youth into a fight he would never have picked on the battlefield.

Alexander dodged another vicious swing of le Boucher’s sword, and drawing hard on the right rein, commanded Samson to gallop for sanctuary. Le Boucher tore after him, curving around Hervi and FitzHamelin, and almost riding into the crimson and black colours of Arnaud de Cerizay.

‘Out of my way!’ le Boucher bellowed, by now as furious as a fly-goaded bull.

De Cerizay shook his head and lifted his sword. ‘You’ll have to come through me,’ he challenged through his helm, and without further warning than that, launched a flurry of vicious, deliberate blows at the other man.

Somewhat taken aback, le Boucher defended the first onslaught clumsily, but rage at having his prize snatched from beneath his nose soon overtook his surprise, and he returned de Cerizay’s assault twofold.

It was so swift that there was nothing anyone could do but bear witness. Alexander’s relief at reaching the safety of the withy screens was replaced by the nausea of horror as he watched Arnaud de Cerizay cease defending himself and open his arms like a martyr embracing heaven.

‘No!’ the young man bellowed, in appalled denial. ‘Arnaud, in God’s name, no!’ He dug in his heels and urged Samson back towards the brawl, but already it was too late. Le Boucher’s blow struck home, and Arnaud took its full force across his open breast. Slowly, almost as if time itself was drawing back from the event, the knight toppled from his saddle and hit the ground, bounced once and lay still. His horse broke away then circled back, its ears flickering nervously.

Alexander drew rein in a flurry of churned soil and threw himself down at Arnaud’s side. Beneath the slashed surcoat, some of the iron hauberk rivets had burst under the impact, but there was no blood, no gaping wound, and Arnaud’s chest still rose and fell with the breath of life. Swiftly, but gently, Alexander worked to remove de Cerizay’s helm.

Hervi, having allowed young FitzHamelin to run away down the field, dismounted and knelt at Arnaud’s other side. ‘Christ, you stupid, stupid lackwit,’ he groaned at his friend, and tearing off his own helm, glowered up at Eudo le Boucher, who still sat his horse, the sword frozen in his hand. ‘You murdering whoreson!’ he said through his teeth.

Le Boucher’s enormous fist clenched on the reins. ‘I did nothing outside the rules,’ he retorted harshly. ‘Any man worth his salt would have defended that blow on his shield, but he just opened himself to it. The fool wanted to die.’

‘You could have pulled back!’ Hervi’s eyes glittered.

‘There wasn’t time. Besides, how was I to know it wasn’t a ruse on his part?’

‘You can see it wasn’t!’

‘Now I can,’ le Boucher said with a sarcastic flourish. He wrenched his horse around brutally, and it rolled its eyes, fighting the bit. ‘De Cerizay should never have taken to the field. He’s a toss-pot. Everyone knows that he is finished. Stop whining, Montroi. You know the risks we take as well as any man here.’ He rode away, pausing only to collect the bridle of Arnaud’s bay stallion, now his property by the law of the tourney field.

Hervi dug one hand through his sweat-drenched hair and cursed roundly.

Arnaud’s face was grey, his breathing rapid and shallow. Alexander leaned over him. ‘There is no open wound,’ he said on a note of question and hope.

‘No,’ Hervi agreed, tight-lipped. ‘But there will be much damage inside where we cannot see. He took the full force of le Boucher’s sword across his breast, and then a heavy fall. I fear that …’ He broke off and shook his head, unable to voice the fact that they were looking at a dying man.

‘I’ll organise a stretcher to bear him back to his tent,’ Alexander said. ‘And I’ll find Monday.’

Hervi nodded wordlessly, and the young man departed in haste.

Arnaud’s eyes flickered open, and he tried without success to raise himself up. Hervi laid a soothing hand on his shoulder.

‘Lie still,’ he commanded. ‘You have broken your body enough.’ He watched in concern as Arnaud’s lids tightened and squeezed. Tears leaked and made spikes of the thick, dark lashes.

‘I cannot even kill myself cleanly,’ Arnaud groaned. ‘I thought that le Boucher was bound to make a swift end.’

‘Never look to le Boucher for mercy,’ Hervi said, and then struck the ground with his fist. ‘In God’s name, were you so desperate that you had to seek your own death?’

‘You know I was. After I threatened you with my blade, I knew that I was finished. I would have run myself through, but that would have been undeniable suicide. This way …’ Arnaud choked and a trickle of blood appeared at his mouth corner. ‘… this way there is a chance of purgatory and after that to be with Clemence again.’

Despite his great grief and pity for his friend, Hervi found a moment to be glad that no woman had ever instilled such overpowering emotions in his own breast. He did not think he would ever seek his own death in the hope of being reunited with a loved one in the afterlife. ‘Of course there is,’ he muttered.

‘You think I’m out of my wits,’ Arnaud said with a bloodstained smile. ‘It has been a long sickness, for I lost them on the day I set eyes on Clemence in her father’s bailey and the rest of the world went away … It’s going away now.’ He choked and his eyes grew glassy.

Hervi gripped and shook the dying man’s shoulder. ‘Arnaud, stay, wait a moment, curse you. Clemence might be everything to you and the rest of us nothing, but what about your daughter? What about Monday? She cannot live this kind of life without a protector!’

‘I appoint you her guardian,’ said Arnaud with the certainty that came of long thought on the subject. ‘You’re decent and honest, and I know you will do your best for her – find her a good husband.’

‘What, from amongst this rabble?’ Hervi’s voice rose incredulously.

‘I trust you … You cannot refuse the wish of a dying man.’

‘I will kill you myself!’ Hervi declared, and Arnaud gave him a weary smile. The shadows beneath his eyes were darker than wine and his breathing had grown laboured. Drawn by the horror and fascination of impending death, a crowd had gathered. Brother Rousseau pushed his way through the throng. For once he was sober, but his breath could have stripped the bark from an entire forest. Kneeling down, he muttered a string of Latin phrases and made the sign of the cross in wine upon Arnaud’s clammy forehead.

‘
Vade in pace
,’ he intoned. ‘
In nomini patris, et filius, et spiritus sancti
.’

‘Papa Papa!’ Monday screamed, forcing her way through the crowd and on to the field, Alexander at her heels.

A final breath rattled in Arnaud’s throat. Even as Monday flung herself down at his side, his body twitched and was still.

At first she did not realise that he had died, for he was warm and pliable to her touch, and aside from the small dribble of blood at the corner of his mouth there was not a mark upon him.

‘Papa …’ She leaned across him, laying her head to his silent breast. ‘‘Papa, I’m here, wake up!’

His muscles were lax and unresponding to her plea. His head lolled, the blood drying on his grey skin. Monday shook him, and he followed the tug of her hand, unresisting. But when she stopped, his flesh stopped too. She shook her head vigorously. It was a mistake, he could not be dead. But she had seen death often enough in her young life to know in her heart of hearts that she was railing at a corpse and that she was alone.

Hervi gently touched her arm. ‘Let him be borne back to his tent,’ he said, his deep voice cracked with tears.

‘Why, because he is disturbing the sport?’ she flashed, desiring only to wound as she herself had been wounded.

Hervi’s great bovine body flinched. ‘So that you may have peace in your grief,’ he said reproachfully.

‘Peace!’ There was a world of sarcasm in the word.

‘Listen, lass …’ Hervi stretched out his hand, but she shrugged away from it, not wanting him to touch her. He withdrew, looking baffled and hurt.

It was Alexander who quietly beckoned to the two men he had hired as stretcher-bearers, and who saw to the practical details.

Monday watched them ease her father’s body on to the woven ropes, and compose his hands upon his breast. Father Rousseau hovered like a vulture. From the depths of his habit he produced a flask, took a swig from it, and having poured some of the contents into his hands, proceeded to flick drops over Arnaud’s body whilst intoning a prayer. Monday thought that she was going to be sick.

Alexander gave the man a silver coin, thanked him for his prompt services and dismissed him with a shudder.

Monday walked beside the stretcher as her father was borne away from the tourney field. The clash and clamour of weapons rang in her ears. Death on the field was so commonplace that the sport had not even stopped to mark the passing of another victim.

‘He won’t even be allowed to rest in hallowed ground, he will be deemed a suicide,’ Monday said later, as she knelt beside her father’s pallet and looked upon his waxen corpse. Death had not taken the ravages of recent years from his face, rather it had brought them to prominence, a ruined landscape over stark bones. Once, Arnaud de Cerizay had been a handsome, strong young man. But not even an echo remained to the eyes of those who sat in vigil around him.

Monday looked bleakly at Alexander. They both knew that crossroads were the traditional burial places for those whom the church had cast out – a symbolic place of meeting and departure from pagan times. They were places where the corpses of felons, outlaws and murderers rotted to the bone beneath the soil, or swung from gibbets above the ground. Sometimes a priest would permit such an outcast to be buried within the precincts of his churchyard – usually for a vast fine in silver for prayers to bring the departed soul into a state of grace. She knew that there was not enough silver in her father’s coffer to pay for such a privilege.

Alexander frowned thoughtfully. ‘A priest might not allow him to lie in a hallowed grave,’ he murmured, ‘but there is nothing to stop us from burying him in hallowed ground of our own accord.’

‘You mean without a priest’s permission?’

‘Yes.’

Monday stared at him with widening eyes. Several protests hovered on the tip of her tongue but were silenced by the sheer audacity of his suggestion. It was blasphemy, but no more so than having to pay a huge amount of silver into some churchman’s coffer.

As if reading her mind, Alexander added, ‘It used to happen at Cranwell sometimes – a villager’s child would be stillborn and they would come at night and bury the body within our cemetery grounds. The prior used to turn a blind eye because it was too powerful a custom to be stamped out without a deal of ill-will and opposition.’

Monday bit her lip. In her mind’s eye she saw them stumbling through a graveyard in the dark, her father’s body sewn in a shroud. The images made her shudder and recoil, but the alternative was the haunted, unhallowed crossroads where unquiet spirits roamed the night, and she could not bear to think of leaving him in such a place. Surely God would understand.

‘Then let us do it,’ she said with sudden decision, and clenched her fingers in her gown. ‘Let him lie within the hearing of prayers.’

Alexander was grooming Samson, a task in which he took great pride. In the early days he had been meticulous in this labour because he had wanted to prove to Hervi that he knew how to look after the horse, but the diligence had swiftly mellowed into a genuine pleasure. It gave him great satisfaction to see how other knights admired the stallion. Samson was proving a destrier of the highest calibre. He stood a little over fifteen hands at the withers, short-backed, powerful in the haunch, sturdy in the leg. For a stallion, he was also very biddable beneath Alexander’s hand. Some men said that a good warhorse should be headstrong and vicious, but Alexander had never seen the sense in that belief. When your life depended upon the beast beneath you, God help you if you could not control it.

Alexander whistled softly between his teeth as he worked. He always found that grooming his horse made for good thinking time. He could air his thoughts, examine them and make decisions without being disturbed. The prospect of tonight’s expedition to the priory graveyard in the town had set him on edge. He disliked entering holy precincts even in the full light of day. In the dead of night, it would be all too easy for his imagination to run riot. At least he would have the comfort of Hervi’s presence. Following his initial disapproval, his older brother had been brought to see that burying Arnaud within the priory grounds was the lesser of the two evils.

‘Do you want to lie at a crossroads when your time comes?’ Alexander had retorted to Hervi’s protest that they would be trespassing on God’s ground.

As he had known, Hervi had shaken his head and grudgingly agreed to help them, all the while insisting that Alexander’s tendency to flout church discipline would get him branded a heretic. And yet what else could they decently do? Arnaud de Cerizay deserved better than six feet of earth beneath a crossroads gibbet on the way to Verneuil.