The Ill-Made Knight (57 page)

The Hospitaller tugged at his beard. His eyes never left mine. ‘Look at his cap,’ he said.

By happenstance – in an attempt to dress myself better, I suppose – I was wearing my best arming cap. The one my sister had made, with the cross of the Order of St John on the crown.

‘Tell me what you want more than anything,’ he said suddenly.

There are times when, despite inclination, all we can do is tell the truth.

‘I want to be a great knight,’ I said.

‘More than you want to live?’ he asked. ‘More than you want to save your soul?’ he asked.

Now that I had said it, I wondered at myself.

I burst into tears and said, ‘Yes.’

There I sat, a halter around my neck, on a stolen horse in rusted armour, weeping my fool heart out.

For me, that’s the end of Brignais.

Italy 1362–1364

It is our custom to rob, sack and pillage whoever resists. Our income is derived from the funds of the provinces we invade; he who values his life pays for peace and quiet from us at a steep price
.

Konrad von Landau, German Mercenary Captain

We’re almost there, messieurs.

Italy.

I didn’t get there by any direct road.

Before they took the halter from around my neck, Sir Thomas – the Hospitaller – made me swear.

He made me swear to obey the law of arms. And to obey him.

And Father Pierre Thomas made me swear to go on crusade, when and where he commanded me.

Of course I agreed. I was about to die. It is something, when they offer you everything you want, and the punishment is the reward. And then . . .

And then Father Pierre Thomas took the halter from around my neck. ‘Be reborn into the life of Christ,’ he said. His gentle smile was there, as if he saw humour in his own comment.

Sir Peter – fra Peter, as I was to find was proper – shook his head about my armour. He cut it away from me. He didn’t even unbuckle the straps; he cut them.

One piece at a time fell off me to lie under the tree. A pair of mis-matched splint greaves; a right cuisse in faded blue and copper, and a vibrant crimson cuisse in leather, studded with iron and brass in alternating rows of rivet heads. I fancied that cuisse, and it fit well. He cut the straps.

A heavy coat of plates – sixty or seventy in all, raw from the hammer and covered in leather on both sides, well-riveted in brass a long time ago, with a dozen tears, rents and weapon-wounds, some lovingly closed with expert stitches; some barely holding with old thongs or badly placed threads, or bound in wire. I would guess five or six men had worn that armour. It wept rust.

It made a noise as it fell to earth – an almost-human protest.

Arm harnesses – matched, but very poor. Badly made, garish, ill-fitting.

And my poor helmet. It was the last thing I had left of a finer harness – covered in dents, but lovingly maintained by my squire. The chain aventail shone and rippled, and the turban I’d wound around it to hide the worst damage . . .

Clank
.

I had a chainmail haubergeon. I’d had it since Poitiers. Perkin had kept it clean and it was a uniform, well-oiled brown. Fra Peter examined it.

‘It’s one thing to symbolize rebirth,’ he said. ‘And another to be a damn fool. Get the mail off and we’ll oil it for you.’

His squire came forward. He was not English but Spanish, Juan di Ceval. I had never met a Spaniard – even in the odd glow of ‘not-death’, I was curious to meet him. He came and collected my mail. He also unlaced my aventail from my old basinet. He took them both and rolled them in hides that were themselves so oily they shone in the sun.

Sir Thomas looked me over. ‘You stink,’ he said. ‘It’s not just sin. Do you really live this way?’

I was not in the mood to make excuses, but this stung. ‘I’m a soldier,’ I said.

Sir Thomas raised an eyebrow. ‘Young man, I have fought in the East for fifteen years. I wore my armour for three weeks at a stretch, during the siege of Smyrna. I am used to living in the open and fighting in all weathers. You are dirty because you choose not to practice the discipline that would allow you to be clean.’

I said nothing, which indicates, I think, that I was not an utter fool.

They stripped me to my skin. Father Pierre Thomas walked me to the stream beyond the crossroads and watched while I bathed with Fra Peter’s soap. Fra Peter brought me his razor. I had never owned a razor as fine as his – he even had a small bronze mirror in an ivory case.

He smiled, as if reading my thoughts. ‘I have a weakness for nice things,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘I am a man, not a saint.’

I sat naked on a saddle, and he and his squire shaved my beard. It was odd, as if time was suspended. No other traffic came down the road. Birds sang. The sun came out for the first time in days. I shivered, warmed and shivered again.

Father Pierre Thomas opened his panniers and produced a pair of braes and a shirt. They were very fine, the cuffs lovingly worked.

He blushed. ‘People . . . give me things.’ He shook his head in wonderment.

Sir Thomas nodded. ‘Because you are a living saint.’

Pierre glared at him. ‘Please stop saying that,’ he asked politely. ‘I am a sinful mortal like everyone else.’

Sir Thomas nodded, his head tilted to one side like a puppy’s. ‘Like everyone else, except that you cure the sick and bring happiness wherever you go.’

Father Pierre Thomas shrugged his shoulders. ‘I do not mean to show impatience,’ he said, ‘but while the saving of this young man’s immortal soul is worthy, we are due in Avignon.’

Sir Thomas nodded. I put the clean shirt and braes over my clean skin. Fra Peter handed me a pair of brown hose, my own boots and a long brown robe.

The brown robe had the eight pointed cross on the right breast.

‘I’m not worthy to wear this,’ I said.

‘None of us is,’ Fra Peter said.

Juan picked my spurs up from the road. He and Fra Peter re-strapped them in two minutes, from leather they had in a basket on a donkey. I was surprised.

I walked the stolen horse over to Father Pierre Thomas, now fully dressed. ‘Father?’ I asked quietly as he was looking out over the valley.

There was a great deal to see in that valley, if you were newly reborn. The sun shone on fifty fields choked with weeds; at the southern edge stood a stone keep, fire-blackened, the near wall cracked; closer to hand, a small ring of village huts had been burned, and their thatched roofs had fallen in, so that they appeared as black cups on the green board of the earth. And just off the road, where Father Pierre Thomas’s eyes went, was a church. Its destruction was too new to warrant the name ‘ruined’. It had been burned. A human skull lay on the lintel.

He sighed. ‘Yes, my son?’

‘Your horse,’ I said, holding out the reins.

He smiled. ‘A beautiful horse,’ he said. ‘Do you know that I am the papal legate for the east?’

I had no idea. I thought he was a village curate.

He laughed. ‘I am the least warlike of men, nor do I think that fire and sword are the weapons to convert Islam. Look what they do here.’ He shrugged. ‘But the Count of Toulouse, my father’s lord,’ he smiled again, ‘gave me this war horse. Because in his notion of the world, I would need such a beast to fight the infidel.’ He patted the horse’s nose, which, to be honest, I would have hesitated to do.

He looked at the horse. And at me. ‘Men like Fra Peter reassure me that not all violence is towards destruction. That some men must fight to cauterize the wounds that Satan makes on the earth.’ He shrugged. ‘I do not need a war horse. But you will.’

He leaned forward and breathed into my horse’s nostrils. ‘I was born a serf. My father is still a serf,’ he said. ‘We helped raise this horse. I know the dam and the sire. As there are horses, raised by hand with love for man’s purpose to fight well, so may there be men, trained with love, to fight well for God’s purpose.’

I asked no questions. It really was as if I’d died. I simply rode away with them and headed south. We rode through the ruptured landscape, and I was forced, through eyes just opened, to see what the last six years of war had done to the richest province in France.

Ah! You don’t want to hear about it? Eh?

War destroys, my friends. Sometimes, the builder must knock down the old foundations to build anew, but otherwise, we call a man who knocks down a house an arsonist, or worse. Eh?

We’d raped France a hundred times by then. We rode along roads choked with fallen branches and weeds. We rode through villages without a single roof, and we passed fifty churches whose stones were cracked and burned, like the teeth of a charred corpse. We saw vacant-eyed people on the roads. Some wore ragged finery. Had they been gentry, brigands or peasants?

You couldn’t tell. They all had the same empty eyes.

Once we were into Provence, the roads improved, and so did the scenery. The towns were walled, and most of them had destroyed their suburbs and walled up all their gates but one, which made entering and exiting a laborious process.

One of the curious aspects of donning a Hospitaller robe is that suddenly I was admitted to these towns without further question. I was served cheerfully at tables by young men and women who would have cringed to see me, or fled at the rumour of my approach.

Some days passed in a haze. It was, truly, as if I had been reborn. I’ll pass over that now.

We were south of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in country I’d never seen. I think it must have been our last night before Avignon. Fra Peter, Juan and I were to sleep on the floor of the common room of an auberge just inside the gate of the town – a small place, really just a house, recently converted to an inn by a young man and his wife, eager to benefit from the increase in trade from pilgrims travelling south. We had a leek soup that was delicious, and then Fra Peter sat back, unbuckled his sword and leaned it against the wall. He waved to the good wife, who appeared delighted to serve us.

‘My lord?’ she asked.

Fra Peter nodded. ‘How’s the wine hereabouts?’ he asked.

She nodded, eyes wide and serious. ‘My father has his own vines,’ she said. ‘Our wine is very good. A cardinal told me so.’

‘Well,’ Fra Peter said. He barked his odd laugh. ‘He’d know. Pour us a pitcher and bring us some cups.’

She curtsied and reappeared with wine.

I hadn’t had wine since I was hanged. I drank off my first cup rather quickly, and I looked up to find the squire and the knight watching me. Fra Peter was smiling.

‘Our Lord loved good wine, too,’ he said. ‘Never forget the Feast of Canaan.’

Juan drank his with relish. The pitcher was vast and deep, good red clay and nicely glazed. We poured our second cups.

‘You can’t wear my habit in Avignon,’ Fra Peter said. ‘Nor is it my intent to make you a brother knight. I can’t see it.’ He smiled down into his cup. ‘But that may just be my own arrogance.’

I said nothing. I confess I felt some disappointment. Odd, as vows of chastity and poverty would not have suited me at any time.

‘But you have sworn to accompany Father Pierre Thomas on crusade.’ He looked at me. ‘I wonder if you would wear the red habit.’

Juan smiled. ‘As I do,’ he said.

I had never seen Juan wear any habit at all. I said as much, and they both laughed.

‘Donats,’ they said together, and then Juan returned to his usual silence. Fra Peter nodded. ‘Young men of noble birth pay a large sum to the order to be trained. They owe some service later, and are called ‘Donats’. In battle, they wear a red habit.’

I sighed. ‘I have no money,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘I believe that in fact you have some thousands of gold ducats due you.’ He drank more wine. ‘Money you have from taking ransoms in battle.’ He swallowed. ‘Better, at least, than money looted from peasants paying
patis
to keep their daughters from being raped.’

‘I have never raped,’ I said hotly.

He nodded. ‘Father Pierre Thomas would say that every woman you took, because she had no other choice, was rape.’ He sighed. ‘Father Pierre Thomas is a saint, and I am not. So I’ll confine myself to the reality of the man-at-arms. Few women can protect themelves. Will you protect them?’

‘I will,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Have some more wine,’ he said.

The next day we reached Avignon. I’m a Londoner, and to me, London defines what a city should be, but Avignon was a fine city. A little hag-ridden with priests, I confess, and more whores than all of Southwark ten times over, which says something about the state of the church, no doubt, but they were pretty and well-paid, and the churchmen were, for the most part, well-educated and clean. The palaces were magnificent, and the streets were well laid out, narrow but comparatively clean. There were influences that I learned later were Arab or Saracen – for instance, some of the streets had trees trained to run up the shop walls and cover the street from rain or sun.

You could buy anything in Avignon: a beautiful woman, a fine musical instrument, magnificent armour, a horse, the death of a cardinal. You could buy most of those things in London, but they were more expensive and harder to find.

My new-found Christian idealism received some near-mortal wounds. In Avignon, you could sit in a tavern drinking fine wine and watch a monk fondle a child too young to be in school while a priest and a nun embraced in a closed booth. Discussions of philosophy and theology could result in daggers drawn – and used. The Cardinals plotted for power and exercised what they had with a naked purpose that was at least more discreet among merchants and nobles in London and Paris.

That said, though, the new Pope, Urban V, was widely reputed to be the best man to hold the throne of St Peter in two generations, and he was advocating crusade on the one hand and church-wide reform on the other.

We were a week in Avignon before Father Pierre Thomas received an audience. To my shock, I was taken along – clean and clothed decently, in well-tailored dull-red hose and a matching cote with a short brown gown. There were apprentices in London who dressed better, but it was a world with a certain reversal of worldly fashion, and my clothes carefully proclaimed my status as a man-at-arms bound to a churchman. I had neither sword nor dagger. I missed de Charny’s dagger. Its loss was more real to me than the loss of armour. Like Emile’s favour, it had always been the physical embodiment of my chivalric desire.