The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  As the sun rose toward nones, my men reached their positions. The looters were like vultures and raven on a kill – gorging, with no notion of danger.

  I looked at Richard, and he smiled and slammed down his visor.

  We both raised our hands.

  Our men-at-arms came forward at a canter. The bidets rose as one from their ambush and threw their darts at the horses of the Bourc’s men-at-arms, and my four English archers – all four of them at widely different points, standing in good cover with their arrows laid out before them – began to rain shafts on Camus’ troopers.

  I hadn’t made a detailed plan of attack, but Richard and I knew our business; the archers were veterans of a hundred fights and as many hunts, and the Gascons, as far as I could tell, made war for sport.

  Which meant, unfortunately, that the enemy Gascons knew what to do when ambushed.

  The Bourc didn’t hesitate. His banner dipped once, and his men dropped the loot in their hands or scooped one more chalice into the leather bags they all carried, then they were charging down the road, low on their horses, with the lesser armed men behind. There were three or four horses down, and the javelin men were gathering in clumps to finish the dismounted riders or take them for ransom. The longbow arrows continued to reap horses. At least one shaft – probably one of Sam’s – caught a poorer man-at-arms in the unarmoured back and plucked him from the saddle.

  Richard led our men-at-arms at his men-at-arms. I was already half a league off to the right, behind the fight as it developed below me, but I pressed my brute of a horse to a heavy gallop and rumbled along through a meadow of drying flowers that had recently been a monastery’s largest ploughed field. The Bourc was an evil bastard and I suspected he’d have another force. Perkin and I were all the reserve I had.

  Camus saw Richard and turned towards him and his men followed. The two bands of men-at-arms were nearly equal in size, but Richard had the hill behind him. I thought it was all going well until a troop of horsemen in armour emerged from the road to the south. They were as far behind me as I was behind the fight. I stood in my stirrups, annoying my horse by trying to gallop while looking back over my cantle.

  There they were, confirming my fears.

  Gascons or Navaresse. A reserve – a blocking force behind the convoy, in case any of the rich priests tried to run.

  It’s quite hard to count from the back of a galloping horse, but my impression was that there were as many armoured men coming up behind me as were ahead of me.

  Gascons. They have no compunction about killing each other.

  I knew where one of the archers was and I was going to pass his lair, so I rode down the meadow to the low stone wall and put my horse at it – not out of any desire to show my riding, but because I had no time to find a gate.

  He tried to baulk.

  I pricked him with both spurs. I wasn’t losing the Bourc this time.

  He rose like an old cat and his hooves struck the wall – a wall no higher than my knees. We were over, and I was on the road. I knew arrows had come from here. I pulled on my reins and saw an apiary – abandoned, of course. ‘John!’ I roared.

  It wasn’t John it was Sam. He appeared from the trees.

  ‘More men – behind me on the road. Slow them!’ I called. I had a moment’s hesitation – it was Sam’s last fight and I was ordering him to cover our rear.

  He waved and went back to the trees.

  I got my horse back to a massive canter and headed north along the riverbank.

  The fight on the hillside was about 200 heartbeats old by the time I rode around the woods – a mêlée that was already spreading across the hillside. The Bourc’s men were holding – I assumed they were so bold because they knew they had reinforcements coming.

  And a fortune in gold hanging in bags from their saddles.

  I put my horse’s head at the Bourc’s banner and lowered my lance. Getting the lance into the rest was no longer the struggle it had been for me in the early days. Nobly born boys did this from age eight or nine, and I hadn’t started until fifteen or sixteen, but I was improving. I got my lance down, flipped my visor down with my left hand and tried to line my lance point up with the Bourc’s banner-bearer. I couldn’t find the bastard himself.

  It is hard to see from inside a basinet. Until I closed my visor, I had some appreciation of the battlefield. Once I closed it, I could see one opponent. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

  The strictest interpretation of the rules of war would have said I should have shouted or announced myself, as I was riding into the Gascons from behind, but I made a different choice. I hit the banner-bearer in the middle of his back and probably killed him instantly – my lance broke under his weight as he went off his mount – and the Bourc’s black and white standard went down.

  There was an immediate reaction.

  I got my longsword out of the scabbard and looked again for the Bourc. He was nowhere to be seen. I could see Richard, locked in mounted combat with one of the Albret bastards, and I could see several coats of arms I knew, but most of the Bourc’s men wore his black and white, and any of them could have been the man himself.

  The fight came to me. I felt the thunder of my opponent’s approach in time to duck, almost to my horse’s neck, and his sword cut just touched my helmet – I had a glimpse of his black and white cote, and then I was sawing at the reins left handed, trying to get around. My brute of a horse didn’t like my idea and was, in fact, turning the opposite way, so that my opponent got a free cut at my back. I swear I felt the blow before it hit – I knew where it was and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it, and all because I had a poor horse.

  He cut when he should have stabbed, so my backplate took the blow low, near the kidney – I pissed blood for days – and he must have taken a bit off the high back of my saddle, then I was around and our horses were flank to flank. I got my blade up and caught his – our cross guards locked. He had no visor, and I backhanded him in the face with my left gauntlet. Blood sprayed, and he fell back – his sword fell away from mine, and I stabbed twice, in rapid succession, as he tried to back his horse. My first stab caught his helmet and slid off, but the second went into his cheek and through the roof of his mouth, and he was done.

  Then I was in the thick of a mounted mêlée. I’d never been in one before. Blows fell on my head and shoulders – my head was snapped around by a heavy blow, and I was shoved forward over the front of my saddle. I had just enough courage and spirit to snap back with my sword – short stabs with the point. I buried my blade in a horse’s unprotected neck, and horse and rider fell, and I thought, Jesu, I’ve put three of them down! Where is everyone?’

  I leaned back against my saddle – my back shrieked in pain and I got my blade over my head and caught a mace coming in. My new opponent pressed, and I hammered him with the pommel of my sword – he drove the butt of his mace into my throat, and I got my left hand onto his visor and forced it up. I lost the visor.

  We both fell from our horses together. I assume the two horses separated, leaving their human cargoes to fall, but before I even felt my brute’s change of weight, I was down and lost my sword.

  He didn’t lose his mace, he swung it at me.

  I got my dagger free – got it in both hands and parried.

  See? De Charny’s dagger. I knew you gentlemen would want to see it. Three sided-solid steel, forged from a single piece. I’ve stopped a poleaxe with this; I’ve used it as a crow-bar in a burning building. It’s not so much a blade as a bar of steel with a point.

  I got it in both hands, and he swung and I stopped the mace, then I got his wrist in my own left hand. He let go with his right and slammed me in the head, rocking me back, then he was trying to get atop me, but I had his right arm, now, in my left. He tried to pound at me with his left hand – my visor saved me and the dagger started searching his armour for a weak point. I rammed it up under his arm and his mail held – my point skidded off the cuisse protecting
the top of his thigh.

  He was still trying to get on top of me, to pin my arms with his knees. His steel-clad limbs looking for anything soft – between my legs, under my arms.

  But I had his right arm, and my left hand made it to his neck – a basic wrestling lock that any English boy knows.

  I rolled him and broke his arm.

  He sagged immediately. The pain must have been like the kick of a mule, and I had him off me while he screamed. I knelt on his broken arm and pushed his visor up, and . . .

  . . . It was the Bourc.

  I won’t say it was the finest moment of my young life – it doesn’t quite rival Emile pulling her kirtle over her head – but by Christ it was good.

  In retrospect, I should have killed him. But – here’s the irony – I had begun to see myself, as it were, reflected in this evil man. He was beaten and wounded. Screaming in pain.

  I didn’t kill him.

  Sometimes, the most moral decisions are the ones that cause everyone the most pain. Fra Peter taught me that, later.

  I put him over his horse – what a struggle that was, and only Perkin’s appearance, like the miracle machine in a passion play, saved me from dumping him on the ground as a bad job. Perkin got under him and pushed, then roped him to his fancy saddle. I managed to get back into my own saddle – some horses don’t run away when you want them to.

  Richard had just taken the older Albret boy.

  Gaillard de la Motte – a good man, but at the time I barely knew him – was killing Camus’ men who’d been dismounted. He rode over, waving a lance head covered in gore. ‘They’re not gentlemen,’ he said, as if shocked. ‘They’re peasant boys dressed up like knights.’

  So am I, I thought. Though I wasn’t precisely a peasant, I still felt some sympathy for those boys.

  Who were dying. Every one. My men were offering them no quarter, and now the survivors of the cardinal’s men-at-arms were rallying and joining us, and they weren’t offering quarter either.

  I got my men-at-arms together by raising the Bourc’s black and white banner and waving it. Richard roared his war cry, ‘The Black Squire, the Black Squire!’ Until we had a dozen mounted men, then we went back down the road. We left our squires and valets to plunder the enemy and find the gold.

  We met the second force near the apiary. They had horses down, and they’d stopped to cover their wounded against the archers.

  We blew right through them like falcons through a flock of songbirds, and they scattered. The fighting spread across the hillside, and then it was over – I don’t think I went sword to sword with a single man.

  I was focused on Sam Bibbo, who was standing in the road, losing shaft after shaft at the Bourc’s men-at-arms as if he was in some personal Crécy or Poitiers. I positioned my horse just behind him, sword in hand. I was sure – as sure as I’d ever been – that he would die, and I was determined to keep him alive. I even prayed.

  I’m guessing that God had a chuckle at our expense. Sam didn’t die. By the time the day was another hour older, we had a small fortune in gold, a dozen men-at-arms to ransom and only one man dead: a Gascon knight.

  Late in the fight, as my Gascon mountaineers charged into the back of the mêlée on the hillside and started killing horses, I found that we’d migrated far enough west that we were in among the convoy. As de la Motte, his Hainaulters and our Gascons began to eliminate the last resistance, I found myself facing a cardinal. He had a long, ascetic face and a princely air, somewhat marred by a shrill voice.

  ‘Child of Belial! Thou creature of hell!’ he spat at me. ‘To rob the church! What is thy name, creature, that I may curse thee to the base of the pit of hell?’

  I reined in and raised my visor. ‘Eminence,’ I said. ‘I believe our timely appearance has—’

  ‘Curse you and your kind!’ he screamed.

  He was the Cardinal of Périgueux – Tallyrand. The most powerful man in Avignon. I met him again, as you’ll hear if you keep my cup filled.

  He was not afraid. By God, he should have been, but his sense of his own power was absolute, and I could not get through to him. He began to say aloud the words of the sentence of excommunication.

  ‘My lord!’ I screamed. ‘We saved you.’

  He struck me with the sceptre in his hand.

  Richard Musard took my reins and hauled my horse around. ‘I do not think we’ll be made knights this day,’ he said quietly. ‘They think we’re the Bourc’s men.’ He thrust out his jaw – something he only did when he was angry.

  Our men were lusty and loud as we turned our horses toward Champlay.

  We rode back to Champlay and handed all our prisoners to Sir Walter. If I had considered handing the looted gold back to the church – and I did consider it – those thoughts were wiped away.

  I remember that night, too. There are few treats as fine as feasting after victory. I tied the Bourc to a chair and then piled the gold coins – English leopards, French ecu, Italian florins and ducats – on the table. We had twenty-seven men-at-arms, four English archers and twenty Gascon mountaineers. We counted the archers as full shares and the Gascon spearmen as half shares, and everyone was satisfied. Some of the Gascons felt we might have done better to take the princes of the church and hold them for ransom, but such things weren’t done. Not yet. Not by us.

  Richard and I drew double shares, as it was our aventur. I made 240 florins in cash, with a lot of gold bits, an ivory crucifix, a nice set of black onyx beads and a small reliquary, somewhat knocked about. I won that over dice that night.

  Richard had taken the elder Albret bastard. We kept him, and the Bourc, as they were worth money, and we kept their horses and armour. I sold the Bourc’s horse for a hundred Florins the next day, and my own horse for thirty – make your own judgements on their merits – and I spent the whole sum on a single horse, another golden-tawny horse, rising sixteen hands, with clean legs and a pretty head. He wasn’t Goldie, but he was calm and smart, and I called him Jack. I was done giving horses romantic names. I liked Jack. Best of all, Jack liked me.

  Young Albret, our prisoner, announced when I returned from a ride over the fields that he didn’t want to go back to serving Camus. His voice trembled when he said it.

  Richard called me over. Albret was seated between Sam and John, and he was panting like a man who’d fought in the lists an hour. His eyes were full of tears.

  ‘You won’t believe this!’ Richard said.

  Camus was conscious, and he sat at a table, tied to the chair. He watched us like a snake.

  Albret pointed at him. ‘Take him away. He says he is Satan come to earth!’

  Camus grinned.

  Sam went and hoisted his arm behind him – his broken arm – and hauled him upstairs. He locked the Bourc in a room and left him with two black eyes and a broken right hand. I hadn’t been there to hear what the other men heard, but I gather it was pretty bad.

  The Bourc caught boys young and made them monsters, like him. He had boys rape their sisters. He had them fight each other – to the death.

  He kept the survivors and made them his own.

  The Albret boy was terrified of him, and believed that he really was a servant of Satan come to earth.

  Sam returned, sickened. ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. ‘He makes me sick.’

  Later in the morning, Sir Walter came and took the Bourc away. He was an important man in some circles, and too important for men-at-arms like us to string him up.

  In our inn yard, he turned to me – two black eyes, broken arm, broken hand – and smiled. ‘Don’t let me catch you,’ he said. ‘You know nothing of what I can do to a man. You are weak. I am strong.’ He laughed. ‘You can’t even kill me.’

  He was still laughing when he went out the gate.

  By my reckoning, I could have saved almost a thousand people by ramming this dagger into his eye.

  Sam took his time in leaving us. He stayed for a while because of a girl, and then he stayed
because we launched a series of raids on the broken remnants of the Bourc’s band – of course, Knolles’ men weren’t supposed to make war on each other, but that was France in 1359. We took their territory and made it ours, collected their patis from the handful of surviving peasants, and blessed St John, they were a beaten and pitiful lot. One dark night in November, we crept up on the Bourc’s town of Malicorne. We’d build scaling ladders that we could assemble on the spot, and we put them to the wall and stormed the place.

  There were about a dozen of his ‘children’ and some other broken men. We put them to the sword and felt better about ourselves. He now held nothing – he would return from his captivity, or wherever he was, to nothing.

  I took my ready money to the Italian vultures and paid it toward my sister’s dowry. Maestro Giancarlo was kind enough – and he was much less of a bastard than the others – to point out that I was more than halfway to my goal.

  Beyond the Auxerre, the world was moving around us. King Edward landed with a magnificent army and sat down to besiege Reims, which had somehow staved off the Earl of Lancaster in the year after Poitiers. The King of Navarre met with the Dauphin and surrendered to him. To this day, no one knows why. There’s those that say he felt he could hurt the cause of the Dauphin more from inside the government, and there’s those that say the bastard was so steeped in betrayal that he betrayed himself. But while Navarre took himself out of the war, his captains continued to fight in his name, even after he ordered them to cease – like Knolles and his brother Phillip – and the Bourc, who we heard was free and raising another force in Gascony. We never had a mouton for him – Sir Robert Knolles ruled that our capture of the bastard was against the laws of war.

  As I’ve said, I should have killed him.

  The King of England moved towards Paris in three great columns. The Captain of Troissy, one of Sir Robert’s most trusted men, Nicholas Tamworth, arrived at Chantay to raise a field force for an aventur in Burgundy. He promised fresh fields and untouched country.

  He stayed in our inn, drank our wine and slept with our girls. He was a careful planner, and he sent a dozen men north into Burgundy to find a castle that was strong enough to be held, and vulnerable enough to be taken by escalade, without a siege.