Vampire Crusader (The Immortal Knight Chronicles Book 1)

by Dan Davis

  The politics of the realm was of little interest to me. I kept seeing bodies, graves and blood. I had an oath to fulfil. “What of William?”

  The sheriff sighed. “I am afraid that William and his men have ridden south for Dartmouth. One of my bailiffs rode back to me through the night. William and his men were seen on the road, dressed for travel. Armed and armoured. That disgusting beast Rollo was heard by my man bragging about getting away with murder and heading for Dartmouth and there to catch a ship.”

  I had never travelled beyond Derbyshire.

  “Surely that is a ruse? Why would he say such things? Perhaps they will take another road?”

  The sheriff nodded. “My bailiff said Hugh of Havering battered Rollo about the head for speaking where they could be overheard. My man is trustworthy and I believe him.”

  “Why did your bailiff not stop them?” I demanded.

  The sheriff looked at me but did me the favour of not pointing out the foolishness of my question.

  “I must go after them myself,” I said.

  “I mean no offence when I say this,” the sheriff said. “But you will be killed. I doubt you have a chance of besting a single one of any of those men. And together they are seven.”

  “I was unbeaten in practice,” I said. “And I won a melee last summer.”

  The sheriff held up a hand against my protests. “Of course, of course. But William fought the Saracens in the Holy Land. He was one of the few to survive the massacre of Hattin. And his men sound like the vilest brutes in Christendom. Tell me that I am wrong when I say you will die, Richard.”

  I did not want to admit it. “Come with me,” I asked the sheriff. “You have men.”

  “I have no authority beyond this shire,” the sheriff said. “What about your friends? The others fostered by Earl Robert before he died. The Levetts have a reputation. Can they ride with you?”

  Unsure of how to say it, I hesitated. “I was not well liked,” I admitted.

  The sheriff frowned. “Ah,” he said. “The bishop is convinced that you are a great one for chasing girls. That will make you unpopular.”

  “I never chased a girl in my life,” I said, shrugging. “I don’t know why they like me.”

  “Oh dear. That makes it worse, in my experience,” he said, chuckling.

  “I always won in practice bouts. Even though I was almost the youngest,” I said. “They said it wasn’t fair because I was bigger.”

  “You should have gone easier on them,” he said. “That would be the political thing to do. You need allies, Richard. Look at me. I never won a fight in my life and here I am a beloved sheriff.”

  I laughed. “I should have gone easier, yes. But I enjoyed humiliating them, the bloody bastards. They will never help me with anything.”

  The sheriff sighed. “In that case, I suggest you do not throw your life away on a quest that cannot possibly succeed,” he said. “That enormous and disgusting man who now goes by the name the Beast Rollo? One of my bailiffs suspects he is from Caen. He escaped a hanging a few years ago by killing the hangman, hacking his way through the crowd and running to Outremer. He truly is a beast. A devil. He should have been killed years ago and many men have tried. I beg you not to go up against men like him. You are a lord now. Stay here and see to your lands.”

  “I swore an oath to God to avenge them,” I said, seeing Isabella’s blood welling from her mouth and the pleading in her eyes. “I have no choice but to bring William and those six knights to justice. Rollo included. Hugo the Giant included. If God is just he will lend strength to my arm that I might slay the murderers.”

  The sheriff shrugged. As well he might. The killers had fled his shire and were unlikely to return. And if I threw my life away chasing after William and his men, well, who was I to the sheriff? He had done his moral duty in attempting to dissuade me but he made another attempt.

  We stood. “Go home, Richard,” the sheriff said, extending his hand to me in friendship. “Keep swyving Martha in the woods. Take a wife, have some children. Men like William always die by the sword.”

  “There are no men like William,” I said. “But he will die by my sword.”

  The truth, of course, was that the sheriff was right. Those men terrified me.

  No surviving servant could be induced to stay at Ashbury Manor. It was cursed. I paid some serfs from the village to scrub the blood stains from the floors and walls. I stayed to oversee the work. I was the lord of the manor. The proper incomes from the land would be mine but I could find no steward to manage the work of my own land or gather the rents from my tenants. My standards were low; anyone who said yes would do. But everyone knew that the manor house and my family was cursed by God and to take up with me would curse them as well.

  I slept in the wood.

  The night before I set out, I rode to Duffield Castle. The bishop was giving a feast with William’s meat and bread, in William’s hall. The sheriff was there also and I spoke to him at the top table.

  “I need a man to look after my land,” I said to the sheriff, leaning over to him.

  “I will do what I can,” the sheriff said.

  I knew that when I rode away from Ashbury that I would be riding into penury.

  I looked around at the great hall I knew so well. The servants had dutifully served Earl Robert and then served Earl William. They now served Hugh de Nonant, sitting in the Earl’s great dark chair and I suspected they would serve him for a long time. William had left no instructions for the care of Duffield and no man knew when he might return. Indeed, there was no indication that he ever would.

  “Richard of Ashbury,” the bishop slurred. His mouth dribbled William’s good wine and flecks of meat. “Why in God’s name are you still in Derbyshire? I thought you were charging off like a bull at a gate.”

  “I am almost ready to leave, my lord,” I said, fighting to keep the anger from my voice.

  “I shall pray for your success in hunting down those murderous dogs.” He staggered over to me and dumped a heavy purse onto the table.

  “My lord?”

  “Hire yourself a couple of good fighters,” he said, kneading my shoulder and breathing wine into my face. “Or a band of mediocre ones. Give yourself half a chance to be rid of him. If you succeed, I shall give you more.”

  “Thank you, my lord bishop,” I said. He waved a hand over my head and muttered something about God that I suppose was a blessing.

  The sheriff laughed at my expression. “Those men deserve the Lord’s justice, delivered here on earth by your righteous hand.” He held up his wine. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and all the rest of it.”

  I drank heartily to that and then paused. “To apply that principle to William I should have to burst into his home one night and slaughter him, his family and his servants.”

  “That does sound like rather a lot of work,” the sheriff said. “You had better get to it.”

  I packed everything I needed onto my brother’s palfrey – my palfrey now – and went to sleep one last time in the woods.

  Almost everyone in the village had ignored me and it was clear they believed my family cursed. But I got one of the lads to ask Martha to meet me in the woods by the stream. That place was ours. It was where we practised the crossbow. And where we practised pleasuring one another.

  She came at sunrise. The dawn was clear and hot and the light fell upon her face. Martha had a strong face and clear skin and my heart flew when I saw her picking her way through the trees toward me. I took her hands in mine.

  “I have to go away,” I said.

  “Go then,” she said without looking at me.

  “I may never return.”

  That made Martha at least look up. “Who will be lord of Ashbury then?”

  “Some other lord, I suppose,” I said. Strange to think of some other family taking what had been ours for over a hundred years.

  She looked intrigued and then sighed as if she begrudged even speaking to me.
“It were right bad what happened to your family, Richard, weren’t it.”

  “I am sorry about running off like this,” I said. I assumed she was going to be heartbroken because I was abandoning her. “But you always knew that you and I could never have married. This had to end eventually. You will find a good man from Ashbury to marry. Or from Scropton or even Yeaveley.”

  Martha laughed, bitterly, twirling her hair. She looked up at me with her huge green eyes. “What you doing with that crossbow?”

  I nodded, wondering why I had bothered to say farewell to her. It was not that she was simple and ignorant that put me off her. She lacked even a rudimentary capacity for affection.

  “Crossbow? I have no idea what I did with it. If you can find it in the barley near the manor, you are welcome to it, I suppose.”

  “You suppose? Suppose?” She was angry. “After all I done for you under the oak tree. The least you can do is give me that weapon. And you don’t have to be so mean-spirited about giving me what’s owed. My dad reckons that a crossbow will fetch a fine price in Chesterfield on market day and I don’t doubt he’s right.”

  She was just a girl. Just an ignorant girl and I had been an idiot boy up until William de Ferrers had massacred everyone at Ashbury. But Martha had remained Martha.

  “If it’s money you are looking for then you should know that the Bishop of Coventry pays his servants well,” I said. “You should go see him at Duffield Castle.”

  I rode south for Dartmouth. If I caught up with William and his knights, I knew not what I would do.

  Chapter Two - The Chase

  It was a fair few days of riding south and west to get to Dartmouth. I saw more of England in those days that I had in all my previous twenty-one years. The weather turned and once I got drenched, I remained either sodden or damp for a week. At least it was not cold.

  The folk at the roadside inns whispered about the group of men who had ridden through before me. A rich man was the leader. Some knew him for an earl.

  “Fine-looking man, he was,” a stocky old woman said as she slammed a bowl of stew on my table. I was at an inn outside Cirencester and it seemed like she owned the place. “Just like you, my lord.” She winked at me. “Taking the cross, God bless him. But those other men were an evil looking bunch. I have thanked God every night since they passed through that they caused no harm while they were here.”

  “Didn’t you know Edith’s little lad’s gone missing?” a young serving woman said to her, overhearing.

  “That’s not got nothing to do with those men, though,” the older woman said, scoffing. “What would a band of grown men want with a little boy?”

  Others remembered the group passing through at the beginning of spring, heading north. Everyone remembered the giant, Hugo.

  “Tallest man in all the world, he was, my lord.”

  I followed the old road south through hills and across rivers. England was bigger than I had imagined. And everyone was talking about the Crusade. King Richard had spent three years robbing the country to pay for it and he had finally embarked with thousands of knights, mercenaries and most of the great lords of the realm.

  That was why asking drunk men in taverns and inns for tales of knights passing by became tiresome.

  “Bit late, ain’t you, lord?” I was asked about a hundred times. “They left last month.”

  “The King’s in France now, lord. You better hurry or Saladin’s head will be on Jerusalem’s wall before you ever get there.”

  Such is what passes for wit amongst English country folk.

  Still, men remembered William passing and when I was closer to the south coast, I knew his destination port for certain.

  “And you are sure you heard them say they were heading for Dartmouth.”

  “They did. But then, he was a liar,” an old ditcher with gnarled hands said, sitting behind the great cup of beer that I bought for him outside Shepton Mallet. “They was all liars.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “There’s no Earl in his right mind who would ride in the company of men such as them lot.”

  “I agree with you,” I said. “But he truly is an Earl.”

  The old man scoffed. “Probably a bloody Scotchman.” He knocked back the beer.

  I had never ridden so far or for so long and I was saddle sore and weary when I rode along that lovely valley and looked down into that sweet port. My lungs were filled with the salt spray tossed into the wind by the rocky coast.

  Dartmouth nestled against a wide river, surrounded by hills green with trees and grazed grass right down to the water’s edge. The sea beyond the far mouth of the river was slate-grey to one side and blood red from the setting sun to the other. Between the clusters of ships in the river the water was a glassy silver and black. There was a forest of masts and rigging and furled sails. Wharfs dotted with buildings and men carrying things to and from the docked boats and ships. The men there called out to each other and across the still waters to the ships. It smelled of fish and smoke and life.

  I took a room at an inn near the old wooden castle that overlooked the town. After stabling my horse, I descended to the waterside just as the sun fell below the distant horizon. Heart clamouring in my ears I sought out Earl William.

  At the inns and taverns, I met indifference, mistrust and downright hostility. I had left my hauberk, helmet and shield at the inn. Perhaps I was making people nervous with the sword at my hip but I saw other men so armed. Perhaps it was because I was an outsider but then I was in a busy port filled with boatloads of strangers.

  “We know what you did,” one man who was already drunk breathed into my ear in a particularly filthy tavern.

  “I have no idea what you mean,” I said.

  His friends pulled him away from me but their dark looks persuaded me to leave for the next establishment along the dockside, where the welcome was hardly friendlier.

  In the last tavern I finally found a merchant with one eye and a hacking cough. After draining the sixth cup of wine that I bought him he told me that William and his men had taken one of his ships just the day before. I sighed, feeling a profound relief flood through me. A relief that I had the decency to feel ashamed of.

  “Awful gentlemen, so they were,” the merchant said, swaying in his seat. “One of them were a giant. Tall as this room, so help me, God. Threatened me into letting them onto the ship. There weren’t the room for them and all their belongings, I told them. Just weren’t the room and I begged them but they said they knew where my wife lived. I had to unload twenty four barrels of good salt herring to get them on board, the dirty bastards.”

  “To where be the ship bound?”

  “Going all the way to Marseilles and that’s right where your friends wanted to be.” He spat on the floor. “The devil take them.”

  I had heard of the place. “Why would they want to go there?” I asked, almost to myself.

  “You can get anything you could ever want there, if you can pay the price,” he said, licking his lips and squinting at the jug of wine with his eye. “Pilgrims and the crusaders leave off from Marseilles for the Holy Land. That’s where you knights are always heading, ain’t it. Any chance of another cup, my lord? I’m right parched, I am. Right parched, by God.”

  That night I took a room at the inn by the castle. Lying in bed with the stench of the rotten straw mattress filling my nose, I squirmed and itched at the fleabites. As I began finally to drift away, a sobbing came through the walls from somewhere else in the quiet tavern. It betrayed a desperate, inconsolable soul. Instead of sleeping, I listened to that mournful weeping. I resisted shouting for silence.

  In the morning, I went to check on the care of my horse. I knew I would have to sell her soon and after a sleepless night, I was in a foul mood.

  “Someone in the inn was crying all night,” I said to the stable boy, a stocky lad with a dirty face and the stink of horse shit about him.

  “If you got something wrong with the rooms you
got to tell Old Bert,” the lad said, staring at the floor. “My lord.”

  “I am merely curious,” I said. “It sounded like a recent hurt.”

  He looked confused. “That’s just Mags. Joan’s mother. Weeping like a spring tide, she is.”

  “Ah,” I said. “And something happened to Joan, I take it?”

  “What, you ain’t never heard about Joan the Maiden?” the boy said, his face suddenly full of joy.

  “I have not.”

  “She was a girl who works in the inn kitchens. She got found on the banks of the Dart a couple days ago,” the stable boy said, full to bursting with importance. “Up at the castle they saying she got her throat savaged by a dog or a bear or something. But that ain’t what truly happened.”

  I saw Isabella, her blood soaking my clothes.

  My throat was dry. “What truly happened?”

  The boy stopped brushing my horse and lowered his voice. “Folk seen her go off with some rich man that night, lord. But then I heard she went off with a whole group of men. Strangers.”

  “Why would a maiden go off with a group of strangers?”

  “Oh,” the boy said, taken aback. “She weren’t really a maiden, lord. They just call her that. It’s a jest. Because really Joan would lift her skirts for any old—”

  “I understand,” I said. “So you know who did this terrible thing?”

  “No one recognised them,” the boy said in a hushed tone. “Which means only one thing, lord.”

  I assumed he was going to claim they were shape shifters or some form of man-beast because children love such stories. He stared at me so I forced myself to ask. “What does it mean?”

  “Jews,” the stable boy said and lowered his voice to a whisper. “It was the Jews what done it, lord. They can make themselves look like other men. So me and my brothers are going to set a fire under the Jews” houses tonight. Send them all to hell, right and proper.”

  “The men responsible have sailed for the Holy Land,” I told the stable boy. “A group of men led by a great lord from the north and many here noticed them. One of the knights was a giant. You have no cause to burn the homes of the innocent.”