The Ill-Made Knight Read online

  The other archer was a Gascon – not a big man, but an old, canny one. He didn’t waste any time. He drew his sword.

  I whirled so I could see all three of them. ‘So, Master Richard, this is your gentility? Killing our own peasants and raping their wives?’

  Until I opened my mouth, I doubt the archers even knew I was English. They probably thought I was the son of the house, or some such.

  Beauchamp swallowed a mouthful of ham. ‘Look who it is? The Judas thief.’ He laughed. ‘Look, we have ham and a cook to make it for us – and no priest to come and save his worthless arse.’

  I watched the Gascon archer. I was canny enough to know that he was the most dangerous of the lot of them.

  Richard drew his sword.

  Tom Amble was one of the oldest squires. He’d tripped me once or twice and had laughed when I was the butt end of a prank, but he’d never hurt me, and the look on his face betrayed his intense confusion. ‘He’s English,’ he said, as if that made my person sacrosanct.

  ‘Don’t be a half-wit, Tom. If he blabs, we could swing for it.’ Richard didn’t seem unduly moved by the murder he was about to commit, and he wasn’t about to charge me. In fact, he was circling quickly to get between me and the farm gate.

  I retraced two steps until I had a wall at my back, then drew my sword.

  Tom, bless him, just stood there.

  The Gascon’s eyes narrowed. ‘We will have to get rid of the body,’ he said, with Gascon practicality.

  Then he started to edge to my right. As he passed the corner of the house he gave a little jump and went down. Just like that.

  Abelard emerged from the shadow of the stone barn.

  Richard Beauchamp went white. Abelard was a low-born man and not a man-at-arms, but everyone knew him and he had the ear of the Earl. Nor was he the kind of man to allow himself to be killed in a fight at a barn.

  ‘Cover the poor woman,’ Abelard said. ‘Sweet Christ, masters, do none of you care a shit for your souls?’ He smiled and took a step forward. He smiled because he didn’t care a fig seed for his own soul. Or for women.

  Amble went to throw his cloak over the woman, and Abelard waited until he’d done it, then placed a knife at his throat as he rose.

  ‘Now, gentles,’ he said.

  The Gascon said, ‘Fuck,’ quite clearly in English. He could see how the whole thing was going wrong. He was a veteran and he didn’t want to die in a farmyard, so he threw his sword down in the manure heap.

  Amble was protesting his innocence.

  Abelard the Deacon shrugged. ‘Put up, or take what I have to give,’ he said to Master Richard.

  ‘You always seem to have these men to save you,’ Richard said. ‘The priest, the cook. One day, you won’t have one of your lovers around.’

  I stood away from the wall. I’d had a minute to compose my speech. ‘We could just fight,’ I said. ‘Just you and me. With all these men watching. Or don’t you want to face me unless other men knock me down first?’

  Richard shrugged. ‘You’re a thief and a man-whore. I’m a gentleman. It makes me dirty even to touch you with my fists.’

  I was trembling – with fear, shock, anger, who knows? I remember that I could smell the manure in the sun, and the roses; hear the sound of flies on the manure and the woman crying.

  ‘I think you are just afraid to face me,’ I said.

  He shrugged again and turned to walk away.

  Abelard cleared his throat. ‘I have a suggestion,’ he said. ‘You come back and fight him, man to man.’ He laughed. ‘Or I just take this man under my knife to see the Prince.’

  Richard stopped. ‘You wouldn’t.’ He shook his head.

  Abelard laughed. ‘I’m tempted just to kill this one, to show you what life is like in France. Eh, boy?’ He rotated the older squire on his shoulder and the young man screamed as his shoulder popped.

  Richard Beauchamp frowned and sheathed his sword. ‘And when I beat the Judas into a pulp?’

  Abelard nodded. ‘Then we’re all done. You may go and I’ll keep my mouth shut.’ He rotated the other young man’s shoulder and the man squealed. ‘But you’d best hurry, if you want to save your friend’s shoulder.’

  Beauchamp looked at me and shed his swordbelt.

  Then he shed his arming coat, and I shed mine.

  Abelard let Amble go, and he crawled a few feet, lay by the barn and wretched up his last meal. He was a good fighter and he wasn’t injured.

  I would love to tell you of how well we fought and how I held him, but he almost had me at the outset. We went for counter holds, as wrestlers do, and in a flash he had my left arm, and he locked it and went to break it.

  I didn’t know the hold or the lock, and I was desperate, so instead of giving in under his grab, I slammed my right hand into his hated face, palm flat, and broke his nose. Then, because I was a moment from having my arm broken, my filthy fingernails searched for his eyes.

  He let go my arm, slammed a short punch into my broken ribs, and we stumbled apart.

  Remember that the priest had broken his jaw?

  I pounced, despite the pain, stepped in close, took a blow on my shoulder and another on my cheek and punched over his arms into his jaw, using the advantage of my size. I broke it, and he stumbled and threw a clumsy right-handed punch to back me off.

  I had fought other boys all my life.

  I caught his right arm in my right hand at the wrist and pulled, jerking him off balance so that he stumbled half a step towards me, then I got my left hand up on his elbow and broke his arm with a snap.

  He screamed like a cow giving birth, and I dragged him by his broken arm.

  Abelard pulled me off him. I hit Beauchamp more than a few times after he was helpless. Now, I’m ashamed of that, but then . . .

  Then it was as sweet as a girl’s kiss.

  We rode back to the army, leaving a dead man and a desperately injured woman in a looted house.

  That’s the way it was.

  We never mentioned what had happened in the yard again.

  While I heard the truth said many times – that the Prince was waiting for word from Lancaster up in Brittany – I didn’t believe it, because I didn’t know enough about France to realize how close we were to the Duke and his army. Because the plan – in as much as the Prince had a plan – was that the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Lancaster would march towards each other, join forces and face the King of France, or, if he refused battle, devastate his lands.

  Take it as you will, in early August, the Prince held a great council, and there he divided his army. He gave the Lord of Albret – a right bastard, and one of the hardest men and worst knights I’ve ever known, though I didn’t know that then – about 2,000 men, most of the arrayed archers and some of the English men-at-arms and many Gascons. They were to hold Gascony against Armagnac and raid his demesne lands if they could.

  The mounted men – the Prince would have no man who was not well-mounted – were to go with the Prince. Nothing was said about leaving cooks behind, or boys. A farrier looked at my little horse and pronounced him fit and ready for war, so I was going to war with my Prince.

  It still makes me smile.

  We marched the next day. We marched fast – faster, if anything, than we had on the way to Bergerac. I stuck by Abelard, because the looks I got from some of the squires were not just vengeful, but murderous, and we went north to Périgueux, a rich town, part of which was still French, but in territories we considered part of Gascony, and hence ours. We were not allowed to loot, and we paid hard silver for wine, which was growing harder, as no one had been paid for some time.

  When we left Perigueux after a day of rest, we moved even faster. I was in the saddle all day, and I remember little except the morning, when I found I had fallen asleep by my horse without taking his saddle off. He was none too fond of me that day, and I felt bad – as bad as being beaten by squires.

  We raced across south-western France, and it was al
l wonderful to me – steep hills, rich farms, often overgrown. A generation of farmers had been destroyed by a generation of war. You could hear wolves at night, and of course the plague had been through not ten years before.

  Indeed, as I’ve heard peasants say a hundred times, you’d be hard put to decide which was worse if you were a Frenchman: the English or the plague.

  We emerged from this near-wilderness at the great abbey of La Péruse, a few leagues from Limoges. I won’t weary you with details, except to say that when we left Bordeaux I was a raw boy, and by Limoges I was a seasoned campaigner. I could find food and I could make a fire. I could help Abelard choose a campsite, based on local fresh water, wind protection, security and having a place to tether horses – there are a hundred factors that made one campsite better than another. Sometimes the pickings were slim and we all slept on rocks – 7,000 men is a great number, and if they have 15,000 horses, you have a fair number of bodies to feed, water and sleep.

  At the abbey, the Prince held a ceremony I had never seen before. He unfurled his banner. It was a formal, chivalric declaration of war, and Sir John Chandos, his standard bearer, held it forth, snapping like three angry leopards over his head. The Prince made a speech about his rights and how just our campaign was.

  I felt as if I was going to cry, I was so proud to be there, on horseback, with a sword at my side. Even as a cook’s boy. In an army that murdered and raped peasants.

  There was nothing chivalrous about what followed. We were now formally at war, in the domain of the King of France. We proceeded with banners unfurled, burning everything as we went. Abbeys, great houses and farms – all were sacked and burned.

  It was stunning. I was, to be frank, horrified at first. I watched a dozen archers rape a pair of sisters and leave them weeping – later one of the men told me they were lucky not to have been killed. I saw children cut down for screaming too loudly; older men butchered by laughing Gascon brigands, and nuns stripped naked and sold to a pimp as whores.

  Because that’s what war is, friends, and everyone here knows what I’m saying.

  It was an orgy. The land was rich and untouched, and old soldiers, archers who’d been at Crécy or Sluys, laughed and said they’d never seen the like. We took so much money as we went that when we were ordered to leave the farms and great houses of the Countess of Pembroke – an Englishwoman with holdings in France – we did. We went around them.

  We spread across the country like a swarm of locusts, and with us went fire and sword, cutting and burning like a farmer clearing land. We ate what we liked, drank free wine, and forced the women to our will, killing the men. This was the land of the King of France, and the message we left was that he was too weak to protect his own.

  Mind you, French peasants are no more foolish than English peasants, and most of them, when they had even a little warning, burned their crops, took their womenfolk and ran for the strong walled towns. But they left their sausages hanging from their roof beams, and we burned their cottages and made our meals from their hoarded savings of food, cooked on their carefully built homes.

  When we took them by surprise, with our horses and rapid marching, we got everything.

  I’d like to say that I neither stole nor burned, but the only sin from which I was free was rape, and that was only because of my sister.

  A boy of fifteen does what the men he’s with do. I took what I wanted, and that included Marie, a girl of my age or perhaps a little less. She’d been raped and hurt, and I took her in, carried her on my horse, cleaned her up and then used her myself.

  The only difference I can offer is that I fed and kept her.

  We were deep in the heart of France by this time. We were shadowed by French knights on horseback – in fact, several times the Earl of Oxford rode out to make them fight, but they slipped away like Turks. We were almost at the Loire – the famous Loire, a name even a boy like me knew – when we sacked a town for the first time.

  Here’s how we got in. I was far across the fields, looking for a spot to set up camp for the Earl, when I saw dust, which I knew signalled horsemen moving fast. By mid-morning, we learned from some of Warwick’s men moving from our right towards the town that the Prince had ordered the town be stormed. I was determined to be there.

  Abelard was less interested in the fighting. ‘If we can be among the first into the town,’ he said, ‘we’ll be rich.’

  I liked the idea of that!

  Don’t imagine there was an order given or trumpets blared. It wasn’t like that at all. We followed some of Warwick’s men, and by noon we’d met up with our own Earl, abandoned any notion of camping to the north of the town, and instead were riding at a fast trot along the high road to Issoudun.

  Let me note that while my wound and broken ribs had healed, I had no armour, no helmet and a cheap, badly made sword.

  An hour after the sun was at its height, or perhaps two, our men started storming the town. They made ladders or stole them from farms, and tried them against the walls, but they were all too short. There was no order at all, and groups of men – ten or twelve strong – rode up to different points along the walls and had a go. The walls looked low, but close up they were too steep, recently refaced. The garrison was shit – too small, and cowardly. I could have held the place with fifty men today, but the French were on the defensive, and I’ll wager the castellan didn’t think we were serious. Later we heard the Count of Poitiers had stripped the garrison of all its best men for the field army.

  We were serious, though.

  Abelard and Master Peter met on the road, held a brief conference without the Earl, and suddenly we were galloping to the east, back out into the countryside. It made no sense to me, but as a new boy, nothing ever did, and I was wise enough to put my head down, my heels to my mount and follow them.

  We tore down a narrow road, perhaps thirty of us, and ended up in a farmyard. Peter cursed, and we went through a gate and were moving across the fields; I could see the town wall a bowshot away to my left, and I realized what we were doing.

  We rode hard. I remember that an archer fell from his horse in a lane, struck his head and was killed.

  The rest of us left him and rode on. On and on, around the faubourg (the suburbs), then Abelard stiffened like a hunting dog, turned his horse’s head and rode for the wall.

  There was an apple tree growing in the shade of the town wall, and someone – lazy, or proud of his tree – had left it like a living ladder, right under the wall.

  Now when someone has to climb an apple tree in broad daylight to see if the wall above it is occupied, guess who gets that duty?

  I went, and so did my bitter enemy Tom Amble, as we were the smallest and lightest.

  Abelard shifted my scabbard all the way round so my sword hung like a tail, out of my way for climbing – something any hardened man knows, but I didn’t. Nevertheless, I was first up the tree, and I swayed a branch over to the wall and, without thinking too much about it, jumped.

  I landed on the wall’s catwalk, and it was then I discovered the wall was manned.

  Everything seemed to slow to a crawl. Climbing the tree had been a lark – I was going to be first into the town, or perhaps Amble was. Even the jump – a jump that would have terrified me in London – seemed like an adventure. But once my feet were on the wall, it was too far to jump down and a dozen French sergeants were running at me, I had a great deal of time to consider my own mortality and foolishness – and to wonder where Amble had got to.

  I drew my sword and got my buckler on my left fist.

  Then I had a notion, and I put it into immediate effect. I retreated away from them, all the way to the next tower. That covered my back and caused all of them to pursue me down the catwalk, leaving the area by the apple tree empty.

  Even as the first man – they were in no particular order – ran at me, and his sword slammed into my buckler – the first blow aimed at me in earnest during my whole career as a soldier – I saw Amble, hardl
y a close friend but in that moment the sweetest sight in all the world, leap onto the wall.

  Then I was fighting for my life. For the first time.

  It never crossed my mind to try and kill any of them. I fought purely defensively for long heartbeats. The wall was only really wide enough for two men, and my back was covered. And from the first, they were looking over their shoulders, because Abelard was the next man on the wall after Amble, and Master Peter followed.

  I did well enough, if I may say so. After a long ten heartbeats or so, I chanced a counter-cut at the bolder of my two adversaries. I stepped back and avoided his blow easily, but suddenly I was in the fight, not just defending myself. Remember, I was big – bigger than these men.

  I slammed my buckler into the smaller Frenchman’s shield, and I probably broke his hand. It’s not in the books, but it’s a very effective blow, as any London boy knows.

  He dropped his guard, and my back-cut caught him in the jaw.

  Christ, how he screamed. I was appalled. He seemed to come apart under my blade.

  The other man looked over his shoulder, then back at me. He wasn’t being backed up by his mates – they were all throwing down their weapons, because Peter, the master archer, had put three feet of ash through one of them with his great war bow, and that was the end of them. My fellow flopped about a bit – I had severed most of his lower jaw.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He screamed and tried to put his jaw back with his good hand.

  Ever seen a kitten dying in the street? Abandoned by its mother, mewing and mewing its pitiful way to death? Why is that so heartbreaking, when a jawless man you’ve cut down yourself is just a wretched sight?

  I didn’t wait for help. I cut his throat, and only then discovered I’d bent my worthless sword.

  That was all right, though, because now I had a dozen French swords to choose from.

  And a town to sack.

  We took so much coin out of that town that some of the professional soldiers openly suggested we turn about and march home. I got almost a hundred ecus. For a boy who’d never had three silver coins, it was a staggering amount.