The Ill-Made Knight (8 page)

The peasant was dead. He’d been prosperous, and he was lying face down in his own yard with a spear through him.

Abelard’s face grew hard. ‘I mislike this,’ he said. ‘The Prince hangs men for this. Let’s be away.’

Still he hesitated. If the peasant was dead, his whole farm – a very rich farm – was open to us.

You know how war is, messieurs?

I was learning very quickly.

Abelard dismounted in the yard, and I’ll give him this, he went to see the peasant and tried his body, but the man was dead.

Peter went towards the nearest barn – a great stone barn that two men could have held against an army.

I went towards the sound of the screams.

Around the side of the house I saw the horses, and I knew them immediately. I recognized Richard Beauchamp’s horse and I knew Tom Amble’s, too. Both squires. The other horses were archers’ rounceys like mine.

It has always been one of my virtues – or vices, whichever you like – that when I’m afraid I go forward. I saw their horses and I heard the screams, and I went forward.

One of the archers was raping a middle-aged woman.

She was screaming, and the other archer was mocking her.

The two squires weren’t even watching. They were eating a ham, consuming it with the lust only a sixteen-year-old boy can bring to eating.

I stood frozen for perhaps as long as it took my heart to beat three times.

What is it that makes a knight?

I ran forward and I kicked the rapist – in the head. My feet were lightly shod, but I put him down.

The other archer was a Gascon – not a big man, but an old, canny one. He didn’t waste any time. He drew his sword.

I whirled so I could see all three of them. ‘So, Master Richard, this is your gentility? Killing our own peasants and raping their wives?’

Until I opened my mouth, I doubt the archers even knew I was English. They probably thought I was the son of the house, or some such.

Beauchamp swallowed a mouthful of ham. ‘Look who it is? The Judas thief.’ He laughed. ‘Look, we have ham and a cook to make it for us – and no priest to come and save his worthless arse.’

I watched the Gascon archer. I was canny enough to know that he was the most dangerous of the lot of them.

Richard drew his sword.

Tom Amble was one of the oldest squires. He’d tripped me once or twice and had laughed when I was the butt end of a prank, but he’d never hurt me, and the look on his face betrayed his intense confusion. ‘He’s English,’ he said, as if that made my person sacrosanct.

‘Don’t be a half-wit, Tom. If he blabs, we could swing for it.’ Richard didn’t seem unduly moved by the murder he was about to commit, and he wasn’t about to charge me. In fact, he was circling quickly to get between me and the farm gate.

I retraced two steps until I had a wall at my back, then drew my sword.

Tom, bless him, just stood there.

The Gascon’s eyes narrowed. ‘We will have to get rid of the body,’ he said, with Gascon practicality.

Then he started to edge to my right. As he passed the corner of the house he gave a little jump and went down. Just like that.

Abelard emerged from the shadow of the stone barn.

Richard Beauchamp went white. Abelard was a low-born man and not a man-at-arms, but everyone knew him and he had the ear of the Earl. Nor was he the kind of man to allow himself to be killed in a fight at a barn.

‘Cover the poor woman,’ Abelard said. ‘Sweet Christ, masters, do none of you care a shit for your souls?’ He smiled and took a step forward. He smiled because he didn’t care a fig seed for his own soul. Or for women.

Amble went to throw his cloak over the woman, and Abelard waited until he’d done it, then placed a knife at his throat as he rose.

‘Now, gentles,’ he said.

The Gascon said, ‘Fuck,’ quite clearly in English. He could see how the whole thing was going wrong. He was a veteran and he didn’t want to die in a farmyard, so he threw his sword down in the manure heap.

Amble was protesting his innocence.

Abelard the Deacon shrugged. ‘Put up, or take what I have to give,’ he said to Master Richard.

‘You always seem to have these men to save you,’ Richard said. ‘The priest, the cook. One day, you won’t have one of your lovers around.’

I stood away from the wall. I’d had a minute to compose my speech. ‘We could just fight,’ I said. ‘Just you and me. With all these men watching. Or don’t you want to face me unless other men knock me down first?’

Richard shrugged. ‘You’re a thief and a man-whore. I’m a gentleman. It makes me dirty even to touch you with my fists.’

I was trembling – with fear, shock, anger, who knows? I remember that I could smell the manure in the sun, and the roses; hear the sound of flies on the manure and the woman crying.

‘I think you are just afraid to face me,’ I said.

He shrugged again and turned to walk away.

Abelard cleared his throat. ‘I have a suggestion,’ he said. ‘You come back and fight him, man to man.’ He laughed. ‘Or I just take this man under my knife to see the Prince.’

Richard stopped. ‘You wouldn’t.’ He shook his head.

Abelard laughed. ‘I’m tempted just to kill this one, to show you what life is like in France. Eh,
boy?’
He rotated the older squire on his shoulder and the young man screamed as his shoulder popped.

Richard Beauchamp frowned and sheathed his sword. ‘And when I beat the Judas into a pulp?’

Abelard nodded. ‘Then we’re all done. You may go and I’ll keep my mouth shut.’ He rotated the other young man’s shoulder and the man squealed. ‘But you’d best hurry, if you want to save your friend’s shoulder.’

Beauchamp looked at me and shed his swordbelt.

Then he shed his arming coat, and I shed mine.

Abelard let Amble go, and he crawled a few feet, lay by the barn and wretched up his last meal. He was a good fighter and he wasn’t injured.

I would love to tell you of how well we fought and how I held him, but he almost had me at the outset. We went for counter holds, as wrestlers do, and in a flash he had my left arm, and he locked it and went to break it.

I didn’t know the hold or the lock, and I was desperate, so instead of giving in under his grab, I slammed my right hand into his hated face, palm flat, and broke his nose. Then, because I was a moment from having my arm broken, my filthy fingernails searched for his eyes.

He let go my arm, slammed a short punch into my broken ribs, and we stumbled apart.

Remember that the priest had broken his jaw?

I pounced, despite the pain, stepped in close, took a blow on my shoulder and another on my cheek and punched over his arms into his jaw, using the advantage of my size. I broke it, and he stumbled and threw a clumsy right-handed punch to back me off.

I had fought other boys all my life.

I caught his right arm in my right hand at the wrist and pulled, jerking him off balance so that he stumbled half a step towards me, then I got my left hand up on his elbow and broke his arm with a snap.

He screamed like a cow giving birth, and I dragged him by his broken arm.

Abelard pulled me off him. I hit Beauchamp more than a few times after he was helpless. Now, I’m ashamed of that, but then . . .

Then it was as sweet as a girl’s kiss.

We rode back to the army, leaving a dead man and a desperately injured woman in a looted house.

That’s the way it was.

We never mentioned what had happened in the yard again.

While I heard the truth said many times – that the Prince was waiting for word from Lancaster up in Brittany – I didn’t believe it, because I didn’t know enough about France to realize how close we were to the Duke and his army. Because the plan – in as much as the Prince had a plan – was that the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Lancaster would march towards each other, join forces and face the King of France, or, if he refused battle, devastate his lands.

Take it as you will, in early August, the Prince held a great council, and there he divided his army. He gave the Lord of Albret – a right bastard, and one of the hardest men and worst knights I’ve ever known, though I didn’t know that then – about 2,000 men, most of the arrayed archers and some of the English men-at-arms and many Gascons. They were to hold Gascony against Armagnac and raid his demesne lands if they could.

The mounted men – the Prince would have no man who was not well-mounted – were to go with the Prince. Nothing was said about leaving cooks behind, or boys. A farrier looked at my little horse and pronounced him fit and ready for war, so I was going to war with my Prince.

It still makes me smile.

We marched the next day. We marched fast – faster, if anything, than we had on the way to Bergerac. I stuck by Abelard, because the looks I got from some of the squires were not just vengeful, but murderous, and we went north to Périgueux, a rich town, part of which was still French, but in territories we considered part of Gascony, and hence ours. We were not allowed to loot, and we paid hard silver for wine, which was growing harder, as no one had been paid for some time.

When we left Perigueux after a day of rest, we moved even faster. I was in the saddle all day, and I remember little except the morning, when I found I had fallen asleep by my horse without taking his saddle off. He was none too fond of me that day, and I felt bad – as bad as being beaten by squires.

We raced across south-western France, and it was all wonderful to me – steep hills, rich farms, often overgrown. A generation of farmers had been destroyed by a generation of war. You could hear wolves at night, and of course the plague had been through not ten years before.

Indeed, as I’ve heard peasants say a hundred times, you’d be hard put to decide which was worse if you were a Frenchman: the English or the plague.

We emerged from this near-wilderness at the great abbey of La Péruse, a few leagues from Limoges. I won’t weary you with details, except to say that when we left Bordeaux I was a raw boy, and by Limoges I was a seasoned campaigner. I could find food and I could make a fire. I could help Abelard choose a campsite, based on local fresh water, wind protection, security and having a place to tether horses – there are a hundred factors that made one campsite better than another. Sometimes the pickings were slim and we all slept on rocks – 7,000 men is a great number, and if they have 15,000 horses, you have a fair number of bodies to feed, water and sleep.

At the abbey, the Prince held a ceremony I had never seen before. He unfurled his banner. It was a formal, chivalric declaration of war, and Sir John Chandos, his standard bearer, held it forth, snapping like three angry leopards over his head. The Prince made a speech about his rights and how just our campaign was.

I felt as if I was going to cry, I was so proud to be there, on horseback, with a sword at my side. Even as a cook’s boy. In an army that murdered and raped peasants.

There was nothing chivalrous about what followed. We were now formally at war, in the domain of the King of France. We proceeded with banners unfurled, burning everything as we went. Abbeys, great houses and farms – all were sacked and burned.

It was stunning. I was, to be frank, horrified at first. I watched a dozen archers rape a pair of sisters and leave them weeping – later one of the men told me they were lucky not to have been killed. I saw children cut down for screaming too loudly; older men butchered by laughing Gascon brigands, and nuns stripped naked and sold to a pimp as whores.

Because that’s what war is, friends, and everyone here knows what I’m saying.

It was an orgy. The land was rich and untouched, and old soldiers, archers who’d been at Crécy or Sluys, laughed and said they’d never seen the like. We took so much money as we went that when we were ordered to leave the farms and great houses of the Countess of Pembroke – an Englishwoman with holdings in France – we did. We went around them.

We spread across the country like a swarm of locusts, and with us went fire and sword, cutting and burning like a farmer clearing land. We ate what we liked, drank free wine, and forced the women to our will, killing the men. This was the land of the King of France, and the message we left was that he was too weak to protect his own.

Mind you, French peasants are no more foolish than English peasants, and most of them, when they had even a little warning, burned their crops, took their womenfolk and ran for the strong walled towns. But they left their sausages hanging from their roof beams, and we burned their cottages and made our meals from their hoarded savings of food, cooked on their carefully built homes.

When we took them by surprise, with our horses and rapid marching, we got everything.

I’d like to say that I neither stole nor burned, but the only sin from which I was free was rape, and that was only because of my sister.

A boy of fifteen does what the men he’s with do. I took what I wanted, and that included Marie, a girl of my age or perhaps a little less. She’d been raped and hurt, and I took her in, carried her on my horse, cleaned her up and then used her myself.

The only difference I can offer is that I fed and kept her.

We were deep in the heart of France by this time. We were shadowed by French knights on horseback – in fact, several times the Earl of Oxford rode out to make them fight, but they slipped away like Turks. We were almost at the Loire – the famous Loire, a name even a boy like me knew – when we sacked a town for the first time.

Here’s how we got in. I was far across the fields, looking for a spot to set up camp for the Earl, when I saw dust, which I knew signalled horsemen moving fast. By mid-morning, we learned from some of Warwick’s men moving from our right towards the town that the Prince had ordered the town be stormed. I was determined to be there.

Abelard was less interested in the fighting. ‘If we can be among the first into the town,’ he said, ‘we’ll be rich.’

I liked the idea of that!

Don’t imagine there was an order given or trumpets blared. It wasn’t like that at all. We followed some of Warwick’s men, and by noon we’d met up with our own Earl, abandoned any notion of camping to the north of the town, and instead were riding at a fast trot along the high road to Issoudun.