The Ill-Made Knight (38 page)

We bought them a half-dozen Hainaulters for sixty florins – men we’d been with all summer, and knew. We made ten gold florins on the deal, and felt we’d done a good deed, as, in fact, we had.

I promised to lead them across the Bourc’s territory. I thought I could do it, and leave Richard to prepare a small army for us. A Company of Adventure. The cardinal’s convoy was crawling across France, and we wanted a piece of it. I thought I could be back before Richard marched. Richard did not.

But the priest – the knight, and I was sure he was a knight – needed me. And I was going to oblige him if it killed me.

It almost did.

The nuns were noblewomen – English noblewomen. They were, I think, in shock at the loss of their servants, who had been murdered. And as I heard their story, told in fits and starts, I realized that they seemed wrong, as nuns, because they were not demure. They were, both of them, women used to command. Shock, horror and violence only left them angry. Neither would tell me why they were crossing war-torn France.

The knight was from the Priory of St John at Clerkenwell, near London. That’s where I’d seen him. He was a brother-knight of the Order of the Hospital. The same order that protected my sister.

God had spoken, indeed.

Still, I wondered what he was doing escorting two nuns and two monks across war-torn France. The nuns held him in high esteem and the monks leaped to obey him.

The man had not said anything, but it appeared, from what the monks said, that he had single handedly held off six routiers in an ambush that had killed their men-at-arms. I was used to men who bragged all day – bragged about the women they bedded, bragged about knife fights in taverns – yet this man didn’t even show his weapons. He seldom smiled, and he never, that I saw, displayed temper. He was courteous to every soul he met, ready with a blessing, and he never cursed or blasphemed.

He was like a paladin from the chansons.

I worked very hard to please him.

We left the Angel an hour before first light. My Hainaulters were good men with good armour, and I took Sam Bibbo and John Hughes to scout and keep me alive. After the nuns were mounted, I led Fra Peter aside.

‘My lord,’ I began, and he put a steel-clad hand on my arm.

‘Fra!’ he said. ‘Brother. I am not a party to human lordship.’ Those words might have been said with false humility, but instead, they were said with something like humour. As if he found his own views amusing.

I bowed in the saddle. ‘My, er, Fra. We have to cross territory held by a man – a man whom even the brigands hold to be evil. I intend to take you north—’

‘We came from the north,’ he said quietly.

I nodded. ‘Yes, my lord. That is, Fra Peter. But there is, from here, but one road south, and the Bourc Camus lies astride it, with armed men on every river crossing. We need to go east along the great river first, and then we can pass through the eastern fringes of his territory with less risk.’

He had a short beard, and he ran his fingers through it and pursed his lips. ‘Good,’ he said.

‘Fra, if the Bourc attacks us in force . . .’ I turned and looked at the two women. ‘None of us should allow ourselves to be captured.’

‘That is in God’s hands, not mine,’ he said. ‘We must do our best. Beyond that –
Inshallah
.’ He smiled, his dark eyes far away.

‘He is a horrible, brutal man,’ I insisted.

‘When you say, “man”, you include the horrible and the brutal,’ Fra Peter said. ‘We all bear the mark of sin.’ He looked at me, and I felt myself judged. ‘Will you ask about your sister, or have you forgotten her?’ he asked suddenly.

Sweet Jesu, I’d been with them for half a day and a night and I hadn’t asked. ‘How . . . how is she?’

Fra Peter smiled. It was a slow smile, full of grace, and it lit his face. ‘She is a remarkable woman,’ he said. ‘Blessed by God.’ He looked at me with his hard, soldier’s eyes, and I was judged again.

He was starting to make me angry, pious bastard.

I led us north at a rapid pace. We turned along the lower Marne and crossed the river that marked the Bourc’s boundary about eight leagues from his precious bridge.

The knight of the Order came and rode next to me. ‘Tell me more about this Bourc,’ he said.

‘The Bourc Camus,’ I said. ‘He makes children into killers. He openly proclaims himself to be Satan’s son come to earth. He brags of it.’ I met the knight’s eye. ‘Nothing would please him more than to take a pair of nuns.’

The knight nodded. ‘He won’t take them,’ he said. ‘I chose you for a reason.’

Those words sat with me all day, I can tell you.

That night, under an autumn moon, and with a hard frost burning like white fire along the ground, I kept them moving. The English nuns were fine horsewomen, and too brave to grumble, but the monks were not. Despite which, we trotted across barren, burned fields with the cold orb of the moon high in the sky above us.

Sometime after the moon set, we saw movement to our right, in the high ground, where there were two fires. But I caught no sounds and saw no glint of reflected light, so we rode on in silence punctuated only by the rattle of armour and the jingle of horse harness.

I was very afraid, and I saw my fear as a penance and I revelled in it.

I have known drunkards who have stopped drinking and thieves who have stopped stealing. I’ve listened to their stories in convents and monastaries, and we all share this. You do not know what the bottom is until you have started to climb out of it.

It was a long dark night, and I didn’t lose my nerve, even when the first crossbow bolt snapped across the frozen air in front of Alexander.

Two years of petty war had taught me that, in a small party, the only possible response to ambush is to attack the ambush. I’m sure that this habit would eventually have seen me dead, but as a doctrine, it was as good as anything produced by the scholars at the University of Paris.

I flipped the visor on my basinet down and put spurs to Alexander. I got my lance couched, identified a crossbowman kneeling in the ditch by the road and went for him.

He decided he could get his weapon spanned. He was brave and determined, and so were his fellows – four more brigands in black and white. They were in the ditch on a long curve, so that they had 300 paces of clear shot.

I had almost 200 paces to ride, and my brute of a horse wasn’t very fast.

The Hospitaller knight was coming up on my shield side. I couldn’t see the Hainaulters and had to hope they were covering the nuns and monks, because ambushes usually had two parts.

One of the crossbowmen got spanned. He hesitated a moment, his eyes wild, his head jerking back and forth between me and the Hospitaller. I was in armour, however poor, while the Hospitaller was in a long brown gown.

The boy shot the brown gown.

He
missed.

Fra Peter struck the four of them the way a hammer strikes an anvil. In two breaths, he had landed blows on each of them and they lay in their blood. His horse kicked in two directions.

I reined in, my sword unbloodied.

The Hospitaller dismounted. He knelt by each corpse and prayed. The third man moved and the knight pinned him gently and opened his clothes, after checking and shriving the fourth.

‘He’s alive,’ Fra Peter said and began to explore the man’s wounds.

The man. The boy. The brigand was perhaps fifteen.

I watched him carefully – the boy – and when he went for the basilard at his belt, I stepped ungently on his hand.

Fra Peter looked at the hand, took the dagger and shook his head.

‘You may as well just kill him,’ I said. ‘He won’t talk. He’s old enough that he’s been one of the Bourc’s killers for two or three years.’

‘He has a soul, and free will,’ Fra Peter said. ‘As do you.’

He was bandaged, tied and then tied to a saddle. I stood in angry silence. I was intelligent enough to know that Fra Peter had just equated me with one of the Bourc’s child-brigands.

A day’s ride saw us south of the Bourc’s territory. At each halt, the knight fed the boy and paid him no more heed. He took him away to defecate and brought him back, red with shame.

He was
good
, but he was also a clever, dangerous man. I saw what he was doing to the boy. He gave the boy nothing. The boy had nowhere to perform. No torture to resist. No statement to ignore. The knight’s complete disinterest was very clever.

We camped that night by a rushing torrent that was, thankfully, only ten paces wide. I crossed with John Hughes and we built a good fire and dried our clothes, then built a pair of brush shelters facing the fire, and hiding most of it, a tactic we’d learned from the bloody Gascons. By the time the main party rode up, we had hot water in kettles and Sam Bibbo was already high on the ridge above us, signalling the all-clear with a mirror.

Fra Peter dismounted, and very carefully picketed and curried his horse. His war sword, which he mostly carried on his saddle and not on his belt, was more than four feet long. I hadn’t seen many swords as long or as sharp. The point was elongated, like a cook’s skewer, and fatter at the point – reinforced for piercing armour. He allowed me to examine it with an amused raise of the eyebrows.

I emulated him and curried my brute of a gelding. I seldom did – horses had become mere tools since Goldie – but I was under his spell, and even as I resented him, I sought his favour.

Sam came in in the last of the light, by which time my Hainaulters and I had woven a hordle – a fence of brush – to block the wind and hide the fire from prying eyes to the north. Then we gathered round the fire and got warm. The nuns served wine – I was surprised – and the Hainaulters, who were for the most part men as hard as me, all muttered their thanks and searched their memories for the manners they should show to noble women. And nuns.

Fra Peter walked away from the fire.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked. ‘The Bourc’s men may be out there and we need to set a watch.’

Fra Peter nodded. ‘Of course. I will be happy to take a turn. In the meantime, I intend to kneel. And pray. You are welcome to join me.’

I must have flushed.

He put a hand on my arm. ‘It is easy to resist change,’ he said. ‘It is easy to wall God out of your heart. But I sense that you want something more than life as a killer. What do you think about, when you contemplate your life? What do you want – beyond gold?’

I couldn’t meet his eye. ‘I want to be a knight,’ I said. ‘But I am not sure what that means.’

He nodded. ‘Come and pray. Let me show you how.’

‘I know how to pray,’ I shot back. ‘And you?
Brother?
When you killed those three men today, were you
holier?
’

He led me two more steps away from the fire. ‘I am not holy,’ he said. ‘Listen, boy. And I call you boy, because that is what you are. Listen,
boy.
When we take our vows, they ask us, would we take the cross if we knew that in killing, we risk hell? So that other, weaker men and women might achieve salvation?’ His dark eyes cut me like blades. ‘If I risk hell, killing the enemies of the church, what are you?’

‘Damned!’ I spat, like the angry boy he called me. ‘I don’t care.’

He shrugged. ‘It is the ultimate defence, is it not? Indifference.’ He shrugged again. And smiled. ‘Listen, William. Will you allow me to teach you to pray?’

‘
Paternoster, qui es in Caelis, santificatur
. . .’ I began.

He laughed. ‘That isn’t prayer,’ he said. ‘That’s repetition.’

Despite my anger – the kind of anger young men achieve mostly through understanding their own shortcomings – he had me. I was curious. I wanted his regard.

I wanted to change, too.

‘Can you see pictures in your head, William?’ he asked me.

I suppose I shrugged. ‘What kind of pictures?’ I asked.

‘Can you see your sister?’ he asked. ‘Look into the darkness and close your eyes. See your sister.’

‘This is praying?’ I asked.

‘Do you see your sister?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I admitted. Truth to tell, I was horrified by how hazy my visual memory of my sister was.

‘What is your favourite scene in the Bible, William?’ he asked.

‘Epiphany,’ I said. ‘The gifts of the magi.’

‘Splendid,’ he said with real satisfaction. His pleasure relaxed me. ‘Can you imagine the blessed Virgin?’ he asked.

I discovered, to my horror, that the blessed Virgin bore a striking resemblence to Emile.

‘See her, in a lowly stable, surrounded by animals, William. With the newborn Christ child on her knee.’ He was speaking quietly. I was simply obeying. As he imagined the scene for me, I obediently filled in the details.

‘Now, can you see the magi? The three kings?’ he asked.

I added them.

‘And their retinues. They are, after all, kings.’ There was gentle humour in his voice.

I added men rapidly: Sir John Chandos, sitting on his horse, and Sam Bibbo, on his. Sir John Hawkwood and Bertrand du Guesclin. It was an odd, mixed set of retinues, and my three kings looked very much like the Black Prince, the Dauphin and Charles of Navarre.

‘Now put yourself there, William,’ he said.

And there I was. With snow on the ground, and a bite in the air, and the rattle of horse-tack and the feel of fur at my throat. The virgin’s crown and halo were a glow of gold past my Prince’s shoulder, and my horse fidgeted.

‘Can you see the Christ child?’ Fra Peter asked.

I could not. I tried to push forward, but all the men in front of me – all the better knights – blocked my view. I realized that I was far at the back, and that I had a wall of famous men between me and the Christ child.

I made to dismount . . .

. . . And Fra Peter was holding me up. I was swaying in the darkness, my eyes unfocused and his arm was around my waist.

‘So,’ he said. His teeth showed in the new moonlight. ‘You are your sister’s brother.’

‘That is prayer?’ I asked.

He blinked. ‘To those who can achieve it,’ he said. ‘You will leave us in the morning?’

‘I must,’ I said. But I was wondering if I shouldn’t simply ride away and follow Fra Peter.