The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  I was, by all accounts, the first man into the town. The Earl came and gave me his hand as a token of esteem. From that sack, I got two suits of clothes, a fine helmet and a French brigantine that was far better than John’s. It fit, too. So when I clasped arms with the Earl, I looked like a man-at-arms for the first time.

  Of course, I wasn’t. I was a cook’s boy. But in my mind, I was a great knight. I took several shifts and a fine kirtle for my whore, and she was pleasantly thankful to receive from me the looted goods of another French family, because that’s how it was in France that summer. I had good shoes, handsome ones that fit, which I lifted off the corpse of a baker that Abelard killed in the door of his shop. I should have been warned by that incident. The man was protesting – and not very hard – as Abelard stripped him of white flour and fresh bread, so Abelard just cut him down rather than listen to him – if you take my meaning.

  Anyway, I took his shoes.

  The next day we rode hard, and then we sacked another town. Now men were dropping loot they’d taken earlier to carry better loot.

  Peter, my master archer, gave me the best advice of my professional life at Vierzon. We’d just broken into the town – abandoned by the populace, who were cowering in the nearby royal fortress. I had a feather mattress on my back and I was eyeing an ivory inlaid chair I’d just dragged down from the second floor of a burgher’s house.

  Peter laughed. ‘Listen to me, Judas,’ he said.

  Christ, I hated that name.

  I paused. ‘Yes, Master?’

  ‘Coin. Only take coin. Best of all, gold. Nothing else is worth carrying.’ He smiled.

  I went back into the house and found a gold cross, a small gold cup and six more silver ecus. I left the rest.

  Listen, some men have fine memories for fights. I myself can remember most of my best passages of arms, and I’ll make the rest up if you keep the wine coming – hah! But I remember loot. I remember the Book of Hours I had at the taking of Sienna—

  Ah, you fine gentlemen don’t care about filthy loot.

  But looting is what we do. That, and feats of arms. Listen. If you are born a rich man, you can perform your feats of arms on your family’s money. But if you are born poor –and I started my career of arms with no more than the clothes on my back – war can enrich you. Let us not mince words.

  At any rate, after Vierzon, we knew the French royal army was close, and we were racing for the crossings of the Loire. My hero, Sir John Chandos, and another captain, Sir James Audley, made a dash for the bridge at Aubigny and met with a detachment of French troops. They won the fight, but lost the race for the bridge. It was a great fight, or so I’m told. A passage of arms. But, militarily, it got us nothing.

  The next day we turned east, heading for the coast and a rendezvous with the Duke of Lancaster, or so we hoped, because the new rumour was that the King of France had 15,000 men.

  The following day – perhaps two – we made good progress, then a brave French captain threw a garrison into a small castle right on our marching route, forcing us to take it. The man who commanded the enemy was a famous knight, Boucicault, and he had seventy more knights and 400 professional infantry, so we couldn’t march around. Mind you, I didn’t know that then, although I suppose I parroted the phrase. We couldn’t leave them behind us because they’d have devastated our line of march and killed our stragglers and wounded, stopping us from robbing and burning.

  They were the first organized opposition we’d met, and suddenly we became an army, rather than a horde of locusts. Within hours, every man was in the ranks with his own retinue, under the banner of his lord. The Prince formed us in a tight array, and we stormed the town – not in disorganized drabbles, the way we’d taken the last town, but in one overwhelming rush. The walls of Romorantin were in poor repair, and they fell at the first assault, but Boucicault, who wasn’t much older than me and had been a fighting knight since he was fourteen, gathered his men into the citadel.

  I cooked.

  I mention this because I went up a ladder with Master Peter. I don’t think I fought anyone, although I remember being afraid when the crossbow bolts started to hit men around me, and fear is very tiring. But after the assault, I got a good ivory, and then Abelard found me and ordered me to go get the fires lit.

  Cooking on a hot day in the Loire Valley when insects fill the air, after storming a wall and looting, is truly miserable. And we failed to take the citadel, so that the men who came to eat the food I’d prepared – mutton, a whole pig and a pair of chickens for my lord de Vere – were surly. Several were wounded. The French were no cowards.

  I was cursed for undercooked meat and for not having enough wine. Probably for having red hair, as well. Fatigue is the greatest cause of men’s anger – fatigue and fear – and any captain knows that the two are the same.

  That was a bad night. John came and ate – I’d saved the best for him, and he sneered at it. I even gave him my wine – I saw him as my mentor.

  After he’d eaten, he pointed at Mary. ‘Bring her here,’ he said. ‘I want a ride.’

  I thought I must have misheard. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Give me your woman,’ he said. ‘She’s too handsome for you. You’re just a boy; she wants a man.’

  Mary didn’t speak any English, but she backed away. It had taken a week for her to start showing herself in camp at all.

  The Gascon archer from the affair at the farmyard, a snaggle-tooth villain named Markus, grabbed her. He gave her a squeeze. ‘Plenty here for all of us, boy,’ he said.

  I couldn’t think.

  I looked around for Abelard.

  He wasn’t there.

  John walked over, grabbed her skirts and hiked them over her hips in one movement, exposing her.

  It hit me then.

  A few of you know what I mean. For those that don’t, you have choices sometimes. Once you make them, they are made. If I let them rape her – fifteen or so men – that was a decision. If I didn’t let them, that was another.

  I’d like to say to a priest that I couldn’t let her be hurt again, but that’s not it at all.

  The reason was that I wanted to be a knight, not a looter.

  And the other reason was that she was mine, not theirs.

  I turned, made my decision and acted. I wore my sword, even to cook – think about all the boys you’ve known. Of course I wore my sword to cook.

  I didn’t go for John. I went for Markus, who didn’t expect me.

  I drew it back and slammed the round-wheeled pommel into Markus’s mouth as hard as I could, which was pretty hard even then.

  I made him spit at least four teeth.

  He fell to his knees, and I kicked him as hard as I could.

  I’d finished the sergeant in Vierzon. My uncle had left me pretty hard. Perhaps not hard enough to let a fourteen-year-old French whore get gang-raped to death, but hard enough for this.

  Markus went down and was silent, and Mary got behind me.

  John was looking at the point of my sword.

  ‘Walk away,’ I said.

  And he did.

  I was fifteen and he was twenty-five, and we were no longer friends. Nor was he my mentor any more.

  And we both knew which one of us was the cock of the yard, and which one had backed down.

  That was a bad night. The next day was worse. The Earl came and asked for volunteers to storm the keep. I volunteered and he turned me down. They went up the ladders three times and failed. We lost good men that day. Our archers swept the walls with their longbows, and the French – brave men, every one of them – came out just as our men reached the tops of the ladders, and threw rocks, shot crossbows and swept the walls clear with partisans and poleaxes.

  Abelard was back from wherever he’d been. I told him the tale of the night before and he snorted.

  ‘Listen, boy. These are soldiers. If you keep a pretty piece like that in camp . . .’ He shrugged. ‘If you like her so much, let he
r go.’ He looked away. ‘If the Earl had taken you to the tower today, they’d have done her while you were gone. Eh bien?’

  ‘She’ll be done in ten steps if I let her go!’ I protested.

  He smiled a nasty smile. He looked away and started unloading the two mules he’d acquired, full of sausages and hams and bread. ‘If we don’t take that keep today,’ he said, ‘it’ll be worse tonight. The boys don’t exactly love you, Judas. Why are you making your life so difficult?’

  That’s not what I wanted Abelard to say, but the truth was that now that we were in France, he was like a different man – a much more dangerous, criminal man. Indeed, I had begun to think of France as a different world, like purgatory, or hell. The world of war.

  Mind you, I was richer than I’d ever been, and I had a woman of my own as pretty as a picture of the Virgin, and a fine sword and a horse, so I wasn’t complaining. Just trying to learn the rules. Trying to keep a little for myself.

  But in some way that is not utterly base, I liked Mary for more than her slender body, her breasts, her soft stomach and what lay under it – or maybe I liked my image of myself as a knight too much. So after everyone snored, I woke her, stole one of Abelard’s mules and led her out into the countryside. I got her clear of our picket posts and gave her the mule and a sharp knife.

  I’d like to think she made it to Orléans and lives yet, a grandmother who says prayers for my soul. Or perhaps she curses me to hell every night. Perhaps she died a day later, taken by Gascons on the road.

  Christ, I hope not. I pray for her still.

  The next morning the Earl came and asked for volunteers to storm the tower. I’d been up late, but I volunteered.

  He looked at me for as long as a calm man’s heart beats three times, and then I knew he’d take me.

  Abelard said, ‘You’re a fool.’

  It was my second storming action. If storming Vierzon, with a small, badly led garrison was dangerous, storming Romorantin was insane. The donjon walls were forty-feet high, and every yard there was a French soldier or a French knight, in good, modern armour, carrying a crossbow or a bill.

  The knights went up the ladders first. Say what you will about knights, and many hate us, we’re not shy. The best-armoured, youngest men went up the ladders first. No one said aloud that we were only a feint. In fact, during the night the walls had been mined, and the Prince thought the mine would collapse one of the towers.

  It didn’t.

  We had two siege towers of our own, full of the best archers in the army. Without them, the whole attempt would have been suicidal. Even so, with thirty ladders going up against thirty different points, and the flower of English archery sweeping the catwalk it was still horrible.

  I was perhaps the fifteenth or twentieth man on my ladder. Other men carried it forward and put it up against the wall – it had massive supports, and was very difficult to overturn. We stood in a neat file behind the ladder, waiting for the word to go, while the crossbow bolts and rocks from the walls clanged off men’s helmets or killed them stone dead.

  I didn’t know where to look. For the first time in my life, I thought of running away. One of the Earl’s hobilars died at my feet, having received an unlucky bolt down through the crown of his kettle helmet. Blood came out of every opening in his body, and he thrashed like a bug on a pin. I raised my eyes and stepped back so as not to see him, and instead I saw an archer fall right off the siege tower behind me, and his head hit a rock in the road and split open like a melon. Bits of him decorated my brigantine.

  Just beyond the corpse, I saw Richard Beauchamp, whose elbow couldn’t yet be healed, Tom Amble and half a dozen of my former tormenters. Out here in the open at the base of the wall, we exchanged a glance that said it all.

  Here, the only enemy was the wall.

  Richard shrugged, dismissing me, and went back to watching the wall.

  Back behind the siege towers stood the Earl, surrounded by his best men. They weren’t hanging back. Far from it. They were waiting for a lodgement – for one of the ladders to score a success.

  Then we heard a shout. I turned and saw the first knight on our ladder. He was about twenty-five, in fine armour, a heavy brigantine over good mail, with plate legs and arms and a basinet with a pig’s snout, all shining steel from Italy, and over his red velvet brigantine he had a lady’s gown. Probably his fiancée’s. Such chivalric games were, and are, as much a part of war as raping French farm girls. He wore the gown to show his courage, to flaunt her beauty.

  He ran to the ladder. I’d seen him before, but in that moment I realized that he was my de Vere cousin.

  He ran to the foot of the ladder and past it.

  He got under the ladder and began to climb the underside, hand over hand. In full armour. By God, he was strong, and noble. And fast.

  It had never occurred to me until that moment to climb the underside of a ladder.

  A man-at-arms a few men ahead of me ran to the underside and joined him, and before my head could take control, I was with them. He was, in that moment, my new hero. He was the man I wanted to be.

  The first five rungs were easy.

  The thing is that on the underside of a ladder, you cannot rest, you have to keep climbing, and in a brigantine and helmet, all your weight is in the wrong places. Everything hangs from your arms. Your legs don’t take as much of your weight as they do on top of the ladder.

  The strangest thing happened to me about ten rungs up. I suddenly wondered how the hell I was going to get over the wall at the top, since I was under the ladder. It almost panicked me. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to do it, and I was now halfway up.

  Down on the ground, men were starting up the front of the ladder.

  A big stone came and plucked the first two men off, sending them crashing to the ground. That would have been me if I wasn’t on the underside. Even as it was, the stone made the ladder bounce.

  Another rung.

  Another.

  How was I going to get around the ladder to go up the wall?

  Above me, my cousin, the knight in the lady’s gown, and the other climber were faster than I. I watched the young knight.

  God, he was good.

  Just short of the base of the crenellations, he threw a leg out from behind the ladder, swarmed around it and vanished up it.

  The hobilar followed him.

  I was ten rungs behind. I didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. I don’t remember any sound, just the pure fear. The pain in the muscles of my arms. The way my smooth leather soles slipped on the rungs of the new ladder. The sheer distance to the ground.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  And when I looked down, there was no one else on the ladder.

  The ladder was resting on wooden hoardings – a sort of wooden catwalk that stuck out from the wall and allowed the enemy to shoot straight down at our assault parties. Most castles had hoardings stored in the donjons, waiting for this day. I was now level with the base of the hoardings – massive timbers that ran from the lower crenellations to the new wooden walls.

  In front of me – remember, I was climbing backwards – our archers were visible on the siege towers, loosing onto the French-held wall. It gradually penetrated my head that a man was shouting at me.

  He pointed.

  I was running out of courage, so I did what you do when you are desperate: I attacked my fear. Remember, it is my blessing and my curse that I go forwards when I am afraid.

  I threw one leg around the ladder, the way I’d seen the knight do, got my smooth sole on the outer side of the rung and started to change my weight.

  Suddenly I felt the ladder begin to move.

  Good Christ.

  There was a French sergeant just above me, trying to throw the ladder down. He’d hooked it with some kind of pike, and he was pushing.

  I don’t remember how I got onto the wall, but I did. He was at my feet, dead, and I was standing on the wall. I must have climbed the last two run
gs and jumped, and I still can’t muster any recollection of the deed.

  He fell on top of the hobilar.

  But my heroic, well-armoured cousin had a longsword, four feet long, and he had swept an eight-foot space on the wall and was holding it. His eyes flicked over to me – even through his visor I could see their fierce glitter – and the moment he saw me, he stepped toward me and cut twice, fast as an adder, giving me a clear space. Then I was down on the wall and got my sword in my right hand and my buckler in my left.

  Somewhere in the next minute, I took my first real wound. My legs were unarmoured, and someone got in a cut to my right shin. I never felt it. I got one man and threw him off the wall, and I kept Sir Edward’s side safe for that minute. There was shouting – cheering – and suddenly the air around us was full of clothyard shafts.

  In fact, Master Peter saw me go onto the catwalk, and only then saw that Sir Edward was alive. He shouted the news to one of the Earl’s men-at-arms.

  This is what it is to be a knight.

  The Earl ran, in armour, at the head of his household to the base of our ladder, which men steadied and reset. Then they ran up the ladder – in eighty pounds of plate and mail.

  The archers kept us alive. They poured arrows into the wall on either side of us, wasting precious shafts that we would need later in the campaign, but the French didn’t fancy running that gauntlet just for a taste of Sir Thomas’s longsword. We were hard pressed, but never by more than two men at a time.

  A minute is a long time under such conditions.

  There are many forms of courage. We’d both taken wounds, and suddenly Sir Edward stumbled – a chance spear blow to the foot, it proved. He fell to one knee, and the French knight he was facing raised his sword to finish him – I was a heartbeat too far away – and the hobilar, already lying in a pool of his own blood, slammed his dagger hand into the French knight’s groin from out of the pile of dead and wounded. The French hacked him to death, but he’d saved my cousin, who got back to his feet.

  They prepared a rush.

  And the Earl leaped in through the hoarding, his standard bearer right behind him, and speared a sergeant with his poleaxe, roaring his war cry.