I was angry, and I wanted to stay angry, but his words went home.
We rode into Bordeaux just before the gate was closed the next day, and I had begun to feel a little better. England would save me. I allowed myself to think about my sister. To think that my outstanding ransom from Poitiers might be paid. That and the pay from a year in the saddle for the Prince.
I began to see another life.
We rode in, an hour before sunset, just after the feast of the birth of St John the Baptist. The guards at the gate stopped us, despite our arms.
One of the gate guards was a northern retinue archer. He knew Sam, and he beckoned to him and they exchanged words. Sam came back to us and shook his head.
‘I know you gentlemen won’t do as I ask, but I aim to ask anyway. I’d like the four of us to ride away, now. Just turn your horses and ride.’ Sam shrugged. ‘The Three Foxes is no longer ours.’
I grew hot. I wanted a fight. ‘I’ll kill all of them!’ I said.
Sam put a hand on my bridle. ‘No. Things have changed, here. That’s what Harry was telling me. The Prince is back, and there’s good law here. And the Prince’s men-at-arms do not run brothels.’ He looked at the two of us. ‘The Prince knows.’
‘Fucking Chaucer,’ said Richard. His lips were tight.
Sam shrugged.
‘But we have the safe guards!’ I said.
Sam raised an eyebrow. ‘If Sir John Cheverston ever really wanted them, he still does. He’s in the field. I propose we go and take him the sauvegardes – and send them via Perkin. See if we can collect our pay without being arrested.’
Richard whistled. ‘Arrested!’
The word was like a bolt of levin going to my heart.
Sam nodded. ‘I’m guessing that they intend to declare you outlaws and degrade you from the rank of squires.’
Richard sat silently on his horse.
I thought about the French. ‘To hell with them,’ I said.
Richard met my eye. He was crying. ‘God damn them all to hell,’ he said. It was the first time I’d ever heard him speak openly against the Prince, whom he loved.
Two days later we fell in with the Captal and headed to his own estates in the south. Richard poured his heart out to the Gascon lord while I just sat on my horse and hated everyone.
By the time Richard was done telling our tale, we were sitting on stools around a fire – the Captal had a pavilion and had invited us to dine with him, which was lucky, as we were penniless as well as friendless.
He rubbed his chin and watched the fire. ‘You two wastrels ran the Three Foxes?’ he asked. He grinned. ‘You sound very Gascon to me. Have I said this before? Listen, the Prince will not forgive such a thing. No shadow must touch his honour – he sees himself as the greatest knight in the world, the very pinnacle of chivalry.’ De Grailly made a face. ‘In truth, I think perhaps he is, and it is a very difficult rank to hold. Men gossip. You must not only be a great knight, but you must keep men from hating you for it.’ De Grailly watched the fire. ‘May I loan you two a little silver? I would not recommend that you visit Sir John Cheverston. He won’t want to arrest you, but he will. He is the Prince’s man, and whatever he thinks privately, he will degrade you.’
For the first time in years, I thought of my branding as a thief. Of how men who knew perfectly well I was innocent stood by and watched. I sat by the fire and hated. Now there would be no money. Nothing for my sister. Nothing for me.
But to tell the truth, messieurs, it sat easier on me than on Richard. I’d had my doubts about princes. I had tasted the bile before. Richard, despite slavery, believed that if he served loyally, he would be rewarded, and he took it very hard.
Richard shook his head. ‘It’s not fair,’ he said, with the tone of every young man who makes this discovery. ‘We have spent a year – your pardon, my lord – but a year in the saddle for the Prince.’
Jean de Grailly shook his head. ‘You did run a brothel,’ he said. ‘Save your protests! I’m not against you. Listen, if you don’t ride to Sir John Cheverston, he can’t arrest you and you won’t be degraded. I’ll see to this, I give you my word. Give me your sauvegardes and I’ll pass them to Sir John. I have influence with the Prince. In time . . .’
‘By God, we don’t have time!’ I said. ‘We beggared ourselves to make this trip. What are we to do, my lord?’
De Grailly spread his hands. ‘I say you remind me of Gascons,’ he said. ‘Go be Gascons. Join the companies.’
The companies. The men who raped and murdered for money. Like organized brigands or pirates under a false flag.
‘Seguin de Badefol is recruiting,’ De Grailly said. ‘I can give you lads a letter.’
Richard spat. ‘I will be the Black squire indeed,’ he said. ‘God’s curse on them all.’
Brignais, 1362
Taken by surprise, and frightened by the terrible cries, the French lost heart, and although they ran for their arms, the companies already pressed so hard upon them that they gave them no time to arm themselves. An army which included so many barons and valiant knights thus had the misfortune to be routed and put to flight, and many were killed and wounded. Those who were able to mount their horses and don their armour nearly all fell into the hands of that vassal of the King of France, Petit Meschin. So great were the ransoms and the booty that all the Companions became rich. Their victory made them so confident and daring that the court of the Pope of Rome, which had experience of being fleeced by the companies, feared that it would see them arrive in Avignon.
Villani, Istorie
Aye, messieurs, I was at Brignais, although there were damned few English left with the routiers by then. It was a fine fight, and a rich day for most of us.
Richard and I had ridden away from Bordeaux in the late winter of 1358. Sam Bibbo thought for three days about leaving us – he said he was done fighting – but in the end he came, and John Hughes came with him. Perkin had nowhere else to go, but he made no secret of his dissatisfaction at my being reduced to what he called, with some accuracy, banditry. By then, Charles of Navarre had tried, and failed, to make himself King of France. He would continue trying for some years, but by the summer of 1358, the banner of Navarre was nothing but a flag of convenience for every brigand, bandit and rapist from the Loire to Provence. Sir John Hawkwood was there, in the Auxerre, and so was Sir Robert Knolles and Jean de Grailly and the Bourc Camus and a great many other professional men-at-arms.
Richard didn’t want to go to Sir John Hawkwood. It was never stated between us, but I think we both felt that if we were going to be bandits, we’d be bandits where John Hawkwood couldn’t see us. Auxerre was big, and we were small men.
Those were the days in which the companies formed. The first ‘Great Company’ was that of the archpriest, Arnaud de Cervole. He grouped many of the Breton and Gascon mercenaries into one mass of killers in 1358 and tried to take Marseille. Richard and I were there. We failed, but we made some gold, covered our debts and drank a great deal. Jamais sold me a new war horse, who was never a patch on Goldie. He was a big brute and I called him Alexander. Mostly he liked to bite other horses and make trouble; he didn’t know the hundred fighting tricks that Goldie had known, and he was brutal to ride in a joust as he’d flinch from the spear point.
Not that I did a lot of jousting in those years. We rode, but seldom fought. When we did fight, it was to raid and counter-raid – a war of ambush and nerves, of convoys on roads and sudden descents.
In 1359, we went north with Sir Robert Knolles. There was a rumour that the King’s peace was falling apart and that the King would make a campaign in person. By one of the ironies of the profession of arms, my captain from the year before was now my adversary; we faced the archpriest as we skirmished among the ruined crops and devastated country of the upper Loire Valley. He was as incompetent facing us as he had been leading us, and Knolles took us to good booty.
It was brutal. Mostly we plundered peasants. We’d form a company of ad
venture – a group of men who made an oath about sharing plunder and standing by each other – these agreements were usually made between wolves at inns. The better captains employed spies to watch the roads and to visit towns that might have a weak wall or an undefended gate. The less professional, or simply temporary, companies were formed for a single ‘adventure’ based on the whim of the most famous ‘knight’. Oh, my friends, the language of chivalry was maintained at all times. We fought a ‘passage of arms’ with the desperate defenders of small towns, and then we ‘took them by storm’ in a ‘feat of arms’ that left a lot of peasants dead and their wives and daughters raped and sold. When we took a town, we plundered it down to the plate on the altars and the coins in old women’s money-boxes. Only after we’d sacked a town for a few days would we rally the surviving principal citizens and inform them of the patis they owed us – sometimes with individual ransoms for the richer men. If we chose to stay, we charged tolls on the road and exacted taxes from the same peasants we’d brutalized in the sack, and when the French sent an army against us, we faded away, split into small parties and ran for the safety of Gascony or Normandy, where we met up again – to plan the next raid.
Richard and I served with Knolles in the hope of being reinstated with the Prince’s household. We were never formally humiliated, but my reputation was very dark – a pimp, a thief and perhaps an unchivalrous lover. I led a lance, and Richard led another, but neither of us was trusted with a command, and as the campaign wore on, it seemed less and less likely that Knolles intended to unite with the King’s army landing at Calais, than that he was plundering France for his own benefit. I ended up in the garrison of Champlay in the Auxerre, bored, mildly prosperous and no closer to serving my Prince or cleansing my reputation, and every town from which I exacted patis made me dream of the ringing bell and the village of the dead.
I drank a lot.
I had found one way to salve my conscience. The Italian bankers followed us like vultures and wolves, and I put my money into their books and began to purchase my sister’s elevation. I wrote a letter on her behalf.
It was late in 1359 – September or October.
I sat on a well-built oak stool that had once belonged to a prosperous peasant, and I penned the letter by the light of his burning farm. I wrote to the prior of the commandery at Clerkenwell. I styled myself ‘William Gold, Squire’ and requested that the money go to a religious dowry for my sister.
I paid in almost everything I took. My sister probably needed 1,000 ducats. After I paid my lance and fed my horse and paid Perkin, I had perhaps forty ducats a month – for a life of utmost violence. But I paid it out, and every payment seemed to make me a little less black. I began to go to Mass for the first time in years.
And I began to look for ways to be a knight. Amidst the moral sewer that was war in the Auxerre.
In late October, our little garrison stormed a nearby manor house held by one of the Dauphin’s supporters. It was a fair bit of fighting. I was the first man into the house, through a shutter I caved in with my poleaxe, and Richard came in on my heels.
We penned all the women – high born and low – in the chapel, and protected them until all of our own men were gone. It was the beginning of something.
Richard and I didn’t talk of it, but when our eyes met . . .
We knew.
About the same time, the King was landing at Calais, and with him was the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Clarence, Lionel and all the best English captains. Richard and I sat in a mercenary garrison and writhed with anger. We drank. It is a tribute to our friendship that we didn’t go for each other.
Richard and I were not captains of the town, by any means – that job went to a rising star in the companies, a Scotsman named Sir Walter Leslie – but we were captains of smaller companies, and if men thought us hard, that was all to the good. We staked out the Angel, the best inn left standing in the Auxerre, which had thirty girls and six good cooks. It was a fine inn, three storeys of whitewashed plaster and heavy dark beams, with good red wine and terrible ale.
Have I told you that inns are to soldiers as paradise is to priests?
My enemy, the Bourc Camus, held the next castle-town for Knolles. He raided the countryside that belonged to my town, as if we were enemies. Even among criminals and murderers, he was a byword for evil. He struck the weak whenever he could, and his special provenance was taking women and turning them into whores, whom he sold to traders like chattels.
My friends, we were hard men. We did many bad things, and our sins piled up like gold in a money-changer’s booth, but the Bourc was a different kind of evil. He pleasured himself in the abject humiliation of the weak.
We had a skirmish at night – we caught his retinue raiding our sheepfolds, and we drove them off. I tried to get to him, but my horse was too shy of the dark and wouldn’t cross a wall. The Bourc escaped, but we rounded up half a dozen of his brigands – peasant boys he’d turned into spearmen.
Of the six we cut off, three fought to the death.
Listen. In our kind of war, no one fights to the death except the peasants on whom we preyed. I confess that if one of the French lords were to capture men like this, they’d be hanged – not for nothing were they called brigands – but between ourselves, we’d sell them back. We had our own infantry by then: Gascon mountaineers. They carried small bucklers and a pair of wicked javelins, and they could fight in any terrain.
These boys were different. They weren’t Gascons at all; they were locals. There were men and women in Champlay who knew them, yet they were fighting devils.
The other three had to be beaten to the ground with spear-staves. It’s not that they were particularly good fighters, merely that they kept fighting.
When we tried to talk to them, they sat like sullen animals and said nothing. Even when John used a little rough persuasion.
I’d never seen the look those peasant boys had, except on broken men going to be hanged in London. Their eyes were dead somehow, and yet they burned with hate.
Three days later, the Captain of Champlay (as he called himself) had a parley with the Bourc at a stone bridge. The bastard sat on his horse with his black and white banner, and most of his followers in his own motley. He had two of the Albret bastards in their father’s arms, and a couple of Englishmen, but all the rest of his ‘knights’ wore his colours.
I sat on my bad war horse and watched him through my lowered visor. Neither my commander, Sir Walter Leslie, my friend Richard, nor I, trusted the Bourc a whit.
As Sir Walter parleyed with him, I watched his knights. They had miserable armour and one was mounted on a plough horse. The ones with open-faced helmet looked shockingly young.
Sir Walter released our three captives, and they stood, abject, by our servants. Finally, one of the archers pressed them forward at spear point, and they walked, like condemned men, across to the middle of the span.
The Bourc looked down at them. ‘You surrendered?’ he asked, laughing.
All three flinched.
‘Please, my lord, we were beaten to the ground,’ one boy whined. They were the first words I’d heard him speak, even when John Hughes broke one of his fingers.
The Bourc drew his sword and killed the boy with a single snap of his wrist.
The other two didn’t run. They just stood in the centre of the span until the Bourc’s sword took their souls.
Then he looked at Sir Walter. ‘Don’t bother bringing me any more trash,’ he said. He turned his horse and his eye caught mine.
He laughed. ‘Hello, Butt Boy.’
I was growing up. I didn’t flush or stammer. I rode forward and raised my visor. ‘Wounds all healed?’ I asked. ‘Or shall I kick your arse again to remind you which of us—’
He snarled. He had a sword in his hand, still dripping from the cold murder of three brigands, and he swung at me. Under a flag of truce.
Sir Walter raised his hand, even as the Bourc’s blow missed me by a finger�
�s breadth as I leaned back in the saddle. Our archers sprung forward, arrows to bows, and the Bourc raised his sword. He laughed. ‘You’re a dead man,’ he said.
‘I’ve heard all this before,’ I said. ‘And here I am.’
Richard had my bridle.
I pushed my big horse forward. The deaths of the boys penetrated my armour of vice. Many things did that autumn. Why? Because they were like me, those boys? Because I was not utterly lost to sin?
‘You are a coward and a caitiff, Camus, and I challenge you. I will prove on your body that you are nothing but a terror to boys and virgins.’
My words hit him like a flight of heavy arrows. Hah! I was growing up.
He turned. ‘Easy to challenge me when you have all these war bows at your back, Butt Boy.’ He spat. ‘Someday I’ll catch you alone and use you like a woman.’
‘Does that thought excite you?’ Richard called out.
The Bourc froze and his face grew as red as new blood.
We laughed.
‘Dead! Both of you! I will destroy your souls and send you to an eternity in the abyss!’ he hissed and rode away, and his retinue fell in behind him.
The peasants called him ‘the demon’.
I rode back into our little town as filled with emotion as if I had just fought a battle, and Richard and I laughed and embraced over it. A war of words, yes. But we won. There comes a point in every man’s life – perhaps in every woman’s, too – where you learn how to turn the words of your adversary. To fight word to word, like sword to sword. Some never learn. Some become word-bullies.
A few days later a party of Bretons tried to kill us and take the inn. Richard took a nasty wound in the thigh, and I might have died if Sam hadn’t put arrows into three men. They attacked without warning, but by then I slept with a dagger in my hand, and when I slept alone, I wore mail. There were loaded and cocked crossbows in three places about the inn, and we were wary when we went out.
The Ill-Made Knight Page 28