The Ill-Made Knight (21 page)

When he was gone, I sat with Richard. He was sewing a small tear in the sleeve of his jupon, and his girl – Anne-Marie, I think, but they were all Anne or Marie – watched his minuscule sewing and laughed.

‘That was quite a tale,’ I said. As the only black man in Bordeaux, he was well known, and because he was black, some people thought he was a spawn of Satan, while others assumed he was a paynim. Some of the girls wouldn’t lie with him. That sort of treatment could make a right hard bastard, but he was far better bred than I in many ways; he was very well spoken and he wouldn’t cheat at any game. Not even to win money. He was a prankster when he was young, though, and he did like a tall tale.

Anyway, he grinned at me. Our eyes met.

‘You made it all up,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘Well, you had me going,’ I said. ‘Where are you really from?’

He frowned. ‘Not sure,’ he admitted. ‘My mother said she was from Aethiopia. And that she was born a Christian.’

I nodded. Richard was indisputably Christian. He went to Mass often, and went to church at least once a day, sometimes three times. I went to church less than once a week, and hated the way every word in the Gospels seemed carefully written to remind me of how far I was from grace.

‘Where did you grow up?’ I asked.

‘At the court of Granada, in Spain,’ Richard said. He shrugged. There was a long pause. ‘I was a slave.’

The words cost him something.

But they cemented something, too. I remember that I looked away a moment, because it was a horrible thing to admit. And then I looked back, into his deep-brown eyes. ‘Well, if we do this well enough, you’ll be a knight,’ I said.

Anne Marie heard my leman calling her, and got up and walked to the common room.

‘I was an apprentice in London,’ I said. ‘If we become knights—’

He laughed bitterly. ‘They’ll never make either one of us knights.’

In the morning, there were many kisses and farewells, but we were on the road north before the sun was high. We moved fast, made small camps and saw virtually no one. Brigands weren’t likely to pick on us as we wore too much armour, and carried a small banneret displaying the Prince’s colours. Once we cleared Gascony, the marches were empty. There was a French garrison at Marmande; and Nadaillac and the town of Gourdon were held by a brigand-lord who fought both sides. Such men were becoming more common, and we skirted his hold, camped well up his valley, then Richard and I stripped to our arming clothes and went back at night and climbed the hill above his castle to take a look. Chandos had told Richard that the Prince was considering storming Nadaillac, and we felt that a little scouting might get us included in the expedition.

It was a strong place, set on a hilltop like a woman’s breast. The sides were steep, and a single road wound to the summit. But we watched six men water some horses, and two women haul pails on yokes, and came to the conclusion that the water inside the place wasn’t good as they all used the water from a spring halfway down the hill. It seemed worth knowing.

After Nadaillac, we had no further adventures until we were almost to the Loire. We rode along familiar roads and paths, discussing the campaign of Poitiers, pointing out to each other the places we’d fought, the towns we’d stormed – acting like pompous young pricks, in other words. Sam smiled at us from time to time and chose the camp sites.

We had a safe conduct signed by the King of France. This puzzled me, and puzzled Richard, since we were, as far as we knew, going to arrange the transfer of French castles held by Sir John Hawkwood to English control. By Christ, we were virgins in the ways of Kings and Princes. Master Hoo rode almost entirely silent. Young Chaucer spoke to him more than to the rest of us, and I sussed out that Chaucer was the older man’s apprentice.

As we entered Tours, I was nervous as a maid on her wedding night, riding under the portcullis. A single capture would beggar me, and I couldn’t afford even a small ransom. I was wearing my fortune, in armour and clothes and horses, and it seemed insane to ride openly into France.

But we did, and after the castellan looked at our documents, he wrinkled his nose. ‘Signed by the King,’ he said, and kissed the parchment. ‘Only twenty days ago. Did you gentlemen see him?’

Chaucer bowed. ‘I had that honour, monsieur. At a tournament in Westminster, not two weeks ago.’

The castellan, who had ignored Chaucer as a servant, now looked down his nose at the boy. ‘Really?’

‘Yes, monsieur. I give you my word. I received this and other safe-conducts into my own hand. Indeed,’ he smiled winningly, ‘I wrote them out.’

The castellan leaned forward, called for wine and treated us with more consideration. After we’d been served wine, he asked, as if by chance, ‘Is it peace, gentlemen?’

I looked away. The dissimulation of a seventeen-year-old is not something on which to depend. He grinned and Chaucer grinned back.

‘Please, my lord. You didn’t hear it from us.’ He bowed.

He had a way with him, that imp of Satan. Master Hoo glared at him, but said nothing.

The castellan poured more wine. ‘Ordinarily, I hate the English,’ he said, ‘but tonight, I will make an exception. To peace!’

We drank to peace.

I made the avert sign under the table.

North of Tours, there was war everywhere, and we rode through a wasteland of burned farms, ruined crops, weed-choked fields and rotting corpses. Some of them were very small.

‘Ah, chivalry!’ Chaucer spat when we found a mother and three children dead at a crossroads.

‘Leave off, by St Mary, you foul-mouthed clerk!’ I said. ‘You talk of what you do not know. This is not chivalry, but foul murder.’

‘Oh, aye, keeping maidens as whores in a brothel – that’s chivalry,’ he said.

‘Not a maiden among ’em,’ Richard said. ‘Leave off, Geoffrey. It’s our trade.’

‘That’s just my meaning,’ Chaucer said. ‘Take it at its best, your chivalry is nothing but strong men running a brothel. You protect the weak in return for exploiting them. When they mislike you, you kill them. When they are in the way, you kill them. When you need to punish another knight, you kill his weak people. Pimps and whores!’

I was stung. ‘The life of arms is a life of honour,’ I said. ‘Without men of arms—’

‘Murder, rape and thievery is not a trade,’ he said. ‘Dress it up in pretty armour and fine silk, it’s still crime.’

I punched him so hard he fell off his horse.

‘I didn’t kill these children,’ I said. In truth, the sight sickened me, and in my heart I suspected he was right – and hated him the more for it.

He sat in the horse manure on the road, rubbing his jaw. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.

Richard reached down a hand.

‘Fuck him. He hit me!’ Chaucer said. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

Sam watched impassively.

Christopher watched the hills around us.

Master Hoo whistled between his teeth. I realized he was laughing.

Richard smiled. ‘Sure, I’ll say something, master page. You had that coming. Watch your mouth.’ He reached down his hand again. ‘Care to get back on your horse?’

Chaucer didn’t speak again that day.

I don’t regret the blow. I understood his point – then and now. Remember, good sir, that we were children, all of us. Angry, violent children.

We had passes and
sauvegardes
to the Lieutenant of Brittany. His name was William Latimer, and he was no one’s idea of a paragon of chivalry, but that’s not part of my story. He and all his troops were with Lancaster before the walls of Rennes, and we rode in through the heaviest rain I’d ever seen. The siege was months old even then, and not likely to succeed – the walls were bad, but the French holding them were the best that France still had in the field.

Master Hoo had an audience with the Duke of Lancaster, and Chaucer saw some clerks he knew, and the news was the same: Sir John Hawkwood and his routiers were not in the field with the Duke’s army, where they were supposed to be. They were up country, serving under Sir James Pipe, who was supposed to be Lancaster’s lieutenant in Normandy. In despite of King Edward’s orders, Pipe and a dozen sub-contractors were seizing French garrison towns in Normandy, not towns turned over by supporters of Charles and Philippe of Navarre, but towns held by royal garrisons of the King of France.

Whatever Master Hoo said to my lord of Lancaster, he didn’t like it, and he made that clear in a hundred ways. We were all very glad to see the last of that camp.

As we rode north and east from Rennes, we entered what I can only describe as the world of war. If there had been burned fields and dead children in southern Brittany, Normandy was hell come to earth. Villages were blackened rubble. Whole forests had been burned to black sticks. In one field, I still remember an entire herd of sheep had been massacred, with the shepherd, his wife and their bairn all dead among their sheep. Not one sheep had had its hide lifted and no meat had been taken. They were blown up with gas – ten days dead, or more, bloated and horrible.

Chaucer looked at it all and said very little. But from time to time, he’d smile at me.

Sam Bibbo looked at it and spat. ‘Vermin,’ he said.

He didn’t speak a great deal, so I was interested. I rode up next to him. ‘You were a bandit,’ I said.

He looked at me and made a smacking noise, like a man blowing a kiss at his sister. He flushed red, and I thought I’d gone very wrong.

But then he looked at the ground. ‘Taking armed folk to ransom,’ he shrugged. ‘It ain’t pretty, but it ain’t the same as this, is it. Eh?’

It was late October by the time we found Hawkwood. He was holding Le Neubourg, a prosperous and very strategic town at the crossroads of southern Normandy. He had a dozen lances under him, and he’d laid the whole country around under his obedience, collecting
patis
far and wide – that’s a sort of informal tax that English garrisons collected from French peasants. Like protection money, only a little more feudal.

Anyway, he gave us a royal welcome.

I dismounted in the yard of the citadel, and John of Boston held my horse.

The gate guards sent for Hawkwood, and he came down, booted and spurred, to meet me. We embraced like old companions. I introduced him to Richard and to Master Chaucer, who was, for once, on his best behaviour, and to Master Hoo.

Hoo had been silent – ill, in fact – since Rennes. But now he fairly bounced with enthusiasm. ‘We have an answer to your query, Sir Knight,’ he said.

‘That was speedy,’ Hawkwood said.

‘From which you might deduce the Prince’s interest,’ Master Hoo said.

I looked at Richard. I thought we were the principals. Master Hoo smiled at me. ‘You can go – your work is done,’ he said, as if dismissing a servant.

I’d ridden across half of France, but it had never really occurred to me
why
we’d brought the notary and the page. They both spoke beautiful French, and Chaucer was good at buying things and making the locals like him – he had beautiful manners when he bothered, and I was learning a great deal of courtly behaviour from him, to be honest – but I’d assumed he was along for experience with us, the professionals.

Until that moment, when John Hawkwood squeezed my shoulder. ‘We’ll talk later,’ he said.

Leaving me and Richard standing in the courtyard with our men.

I glared at young Chaucer’s back, as he followed the Prince’s notary into the keep. ‘It’s as if we were carters, and having gotten the wagon to market, the merchants no longer need us,’ I spat.

‘I think you got it in one,’ Richard said. ‘Let’s get a cup of wine.’

A day later, Hawkwood found me in the local wine shop and sat down. He nodded to Richard and to Sam, who was drinking with us.

‘Are you gentlemen at leisure to do a little fighting?’ he asked. ‘There’s a French knight troubling my garrisons and I plan to ambush him. I could use a few more swords.’

Sam shrugged. I remember grinning.

‘What’s with the secrecy?’ I asked. ‘Where’s Master Hoo and his boy?’

‘In the keep, where I can protect them,’ Hawkwood said. ‘This is Normandy, not London. I assume you lads can protect yourselves. Master Hoo is too valuable to risk outside the keep.’ He fingered his beard. ‘Mounted and ready to fight at sunset, after vespers.’

‘Harness?’ Richard asked.

Hawkwood shrugged. ‘If you want to stay alive,’ he said. ‘Unless that black skin is charmed?’

Richard flushed.

An ambush – a mounted ambush – is complex to lay and complex to use, and deadly dull to wait in. Mounted men need to be well hidden by deep brush or trees, but they need to be able to ride out of their covers with ease. The ideal ambush is deep, old woods with little underbrush. France has a plentiful supply of deep, old woods, because the nobility has the peasants cowed and forces them to accept private hunting woods. They dot the landscape, and sometimes the roads run through them.

We rode for two hours, in near total darkness, with a dozen scouts ahead of us on light horses. Sam, I’ll note, went out with the prickers.

A little before midnight, we met another band. Hawkwood clasped hands with the leader, and we rode in among them in the soft moonlight. Their captain was Sir Robert Knolles, a famous knight. He had a forked black beard – that’s about all I could say about him in the dark.

Together we made about fifty men-at-arms and another fifty archers. We headed north.

‘If we catch him, we string him up,’ Knolles said. He was speaking of the French knight we were out to ambush.

Hawkwood shrugged.

‘No one will ransom him. In fact, there
is
no one to ransom him. The French have collapsed. The whole country is a bunch of grapes, ripe for us to pluck.’ Knolles barked a laugh. ‘Are we agreed?’

Hawkwood was watching one of his prickers, a vague form in the moonlight. ‘Sir Robert, we seem to have arrived. If you and your men will take the left side of the road, we’ll take the right.’

Sir Robert nodded. ‘Helmet!’ he called out. A pageboy brought him his heavy basinet. He looked old to me. And wicked.

We filed off into the woods. Sam came and helped Richard and me to get our horses under cover.