We killed them all. Four of them were, as I say, Breton mercenaries, but the other two were young boys of twelve or thirteen.
I had been to Mass the day before – I was learning to pray again. I stood there with the blood of a twelve-year-old boy dripping down my longsword to form a puddle on the tiled floor and I prayed. Good Christ, how I prayed.
I prayed that there might be a God. That’s all I could manage.
I tell you true, monsieur. It took less than a week for God to answer.
Richard and I were sitting in the inn. In fact, we were discussing leaving Knolles and running for the coast – to see if the Prince, or Prince Lionel, would take us.
‘We have nothing to lose,’ Richard said.
‘They might hang us, or publicly degrade us,’ I argued.
Richard spread his hands, which were long-fingered and delicate compared to mine. ‘If I stay here much longer,’ he said, ‘I will be nothing but a criminal. A felon.’ He looked away.
We had probably had far too much to drink already when a party came in – probably the last party to get through the gate that day. There was a priest, a pair of monks and two nuns. The girls had a go at them because the church provided us with some ready customers, but the nuns didn’t even unveil and the monks were silent.
At some point I became suspicious of them, and I ordered Helen, one of the older girls, to see if the nuns were women at all. She took them a flagon of wine, leaned over the table and put a hand on a nun’s gown. The nun gave a very nun-like screech and backed into a corner.
Better safe than sorry, thought I, and gave Helen a moulin of silver for her trouble.
The priest ordered wine for all of them and they kept to themselves. He was a nondescript man in a brown gown that reached to the ground – what we used to call a long gown – but under the gown, he wore boots with spurs, like a knight. That made me suspicious.
The two nuns made me suspicious, too. As soon as they relaxed a little, they were too loud, too free, and they gave the man orders. Something about them wasn’t right.
After they had eaten, the priest asked Helen to speak to the innkeeper, and she sent for me. I went over to the table with Richard at my back. He was limping. I was ready to draw, my blade oiled and loosened in my scabbard.
The nuns sensed my alarmed hostility and became silent. More, the younger one cowered against the back of their snug. The monks glared with that mixture of fear and anger that characterizes the man with no fighting skills.
The priest, on the other hand, appeared very calm. He indicated empty places. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘join us and share a cup of wine.’
I sat, and Richard watched my back. That’s how it was.
‘I need to get to Avignon,’ he said carefully. His eyes flicked up to Richard. ‘You may sit. I confess that I have several weapons, but none of them to hand.’ He smiled.
I turned in time to see Richard return the smile.
I nodded. It was possible he really was going to Avignon. It didn’t add up, but it was possible. And the man himself looked familiar. The hood on his gown made his face difficult to see and read, and he wore a white linen cap, like a scholar – or a soldier, except that his was a clean, sparkling white despite days on the road.
‘Whom do I pay?’ he asked. ‘For passage?’
I glanced at Richard. ‘You want an escort?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘I had six men-at-arms and a dozen crossbowmen,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost all of them. I need to get to Avignon. With both of my brothers and both sisters. Intact.’ He nodded. ‘Alive.’
Again, he seemed familiar to me. But I couldn’t place him, and I didn’t know any priests, so I stopped staring at him and turned to Richard.
Richard sat. ‘I’m willing to discuss it,’ he said. ‘Messire.’
Richard and I still wanted to be great knights. We were more eager to do good deeds than farm boys safe at home. We had a great deal of sin to expiate.
‘It would be a bold adventure,’ I said.
But Richard shook his head. ‘Auxerre is packed with brigands,’ he said. ‘You are foolish to come this way.’
The priest shrugged. ‘I go where the good Lord sends me,’ he said. ‘I was with the convoy—’
‘What convoy?’ Richard asked.
‘The cardinals who went to make the peace treaty. We were with them on the road – they are too slow. And too rich.’ The priest smiled. ‘Everything about the church that I despise in that convoy. Arrogance. Worldly power. Pomp and display. Wanton sin.’ He shrugged. ‘My sisters are safer in an inn run by professional killers.’ He met my eyes. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘I ask for your help.’
His eyes were not soft. Damn, I knew him from somewhere. His words – I know you – struck me like sword blows. He knew my kind? Or he knew me, personally?
I smiled, the way you smile when you think you may have to fight. ‘How far behind you is this convoy?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I will not be the agent of its destruction,’ he said, and I swear he knew exactly what he’d just revealed.
‘You are English,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I am a servant of God,’ he said. ‘Will you help us?’ He flipped back the hood on his gown. ‘Will you help us, William Gold?’
His face had a scar from the corner of his mouth to one eye. And a new scar – he was wearing a clean cap to cover a bandage.
I knew him then. He was the Hospitaller knight I’d met when I was about to flee London.
Richard was still hesitant. I wasn’t. I had prayed, and this was what God offered me.
‘I’ll take you past the worst of it,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you clear of the Auxerre.’
The priest – my eyes went to his right hand, and on it burned a ring – a red jewel with an eight-pointed cross, and the ring was on a hand with the swollen knuckles and scarred fingers of a swordsman. He wasn’t just a priest. But I knew that now.
He nodded. ‘God bless you,’ he said. ‘I am Fra Peter.’
That’s what comes of praying.
Richard was adamant. ‘You go,’ he said. ‘I’m going to take the convoy.’
We looked at each other for a moment, having switched roles too dramatically not to notice the change. Richard was going to raise a company of adventure to sack a church convoy, and I was going to escort nuns.
‘Why?’ I asked.
Richard shrugged. ‘The church has always been against the Prince,’ he said. ‘And they’re rich. They’re blood suckers, William. We can be rich.’
‘Come with me,’ I said.
Richard shook his head and wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘I misdoubt we can do both. Your man asked for you.’
I took his shoulder in my right hand. ‘Richard, we talk about being better men . . .’
Richard looked away, and then back into my eyes. ‘You go do what’s right for your sister,’ he said. ‘And so will I. I’ll split whatever I take with you. If you want to turn the money down, fine, but this is our chance to be free of this crap. This endless shit.’
I thought about it for half an hour. Then went and found him at a table with two of the Hainaulters we preferred, because they had no ties to the Gascons. ‘A word, Richard,’ I said.
Musard rose and followed me.
‘Better if I attack the convoy and you escort the nuns?’ I asked.
Musard shook his head. ‘No.’ He smiled. ‘But a damn courteous offer, brother.’
He didn’t call me brother often. Nor embrace – he didn’t like to be touched – but he threw his arms around me then.
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. N
o 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?’
The Ill-Made Knight Page 29