The Champion (64 page)

‘Oh, nothing. I know him from the English tourney circuit. He’s not the most endearing of characters, but there is no one to better his work. I have invited him to spend the winter months at Abermon.’

‘Then why are you frowning?’

‘I’m not. The sun’s in my eyes.’

She gave him a look which said that she was not convinced.

Alexander did not even attempt to persuade her otherwise. He had learned from experience that a change of direction was by far the wiser ploy. ‘What’s that for?’ He pointed to the folds of gold linen in the basket.

‘We’ll be needing a banner to fly from Abermon’s battlements beside the Marshal lion,’ she said. ‘If I begin sewing now, it will be ready for Whitsuntide.’

That deserved a kiss. And hearing her speak so practically of the future made him believe above Jankin’s caution that he had one. Florian pushed between his parents, demanding attention, demanding that Alexander come and see the man who could swallow swords. Alexander ruffled the unruly feather-layers of his son’s hair. ‘Come on then, sprogling,’ he said with a smile, and pushed the warning to the back of his mind, determined to enjoy the day.

*

Eudo le Boucher was enjoying the day too. News of the tourney had spread like wildfire, and as a seasoned jouster, his services had been widely courted, enabling him to name his price. William Marshal was to lead one team. His counterpart was William of Salisbury, the King’s own bastard-born half-brother, and both men were the best of friends. The tourney was for display only, an amusement for the Queen and a chance for fighting men to vent a little pent-up energy in feats of arms. The thought amused le Boucher, who did not know how to play gently. Strike and be damned. He intended to take as many ransoms as he could on the morrow. And the richer his victims’ blood, the better.

‘So whose side do I choose?’ he enquired of the tawny-haired young woman sprawled naked across his body in the aftermath of lust. She had been expensive, but the price was warranted by her skills and her looks. And it was not as if he was lacking for funds. ‘Pembroke, or Salisbury?’

‘Toss a coin,’ she murmured, and wove her fingers through his thick chest hair. ‘Is not Pembroke reputed to be the greatest jouster who has ever lived?’

‘In his youth, perhaps. He is past fifty years old now.’

‘Who will pay you the most?’ She shifted along his body, arching her silken thigh over his genitals.

Le Boucher thrust against her flesh. The smell of attar of roses filled his nostrils. Her mouth and her nipples were reddened with cosmetics, and she had plucked her cunny hair, leaving her slit exposed.

‘That remains to be seen.’ His voice thickened with lust, even as his manhood was thickening with new arousal. He lifted her hips, positioned her, and impaled himself. She gasped, and tightened around his flesh, her muscles playing up and down his length like a musician on a bone flute. His jaw clenched, he began to ram.

The second coupling, hot and hard on the heels of the first, left him almost senseless, and he drifted into a semi-conscious dream state, sweat beading his body, and his heart thundering against his scarred ribs. He could hear the slosh of water and giggle of women from the bathhouse below; the moan of another client in a room beyond. The sounds drifted and became woven into the fabric of his waking dream. The water turned to a sunlit river bank, and he rode along the water’s edge on a destrier and saw a young couple seated in the shade of a willow tree. The girl had a tumble of bronze-brown hair and lucent grey eyes. Her companion was limber and dark, and as he turned, Eudo’s eyes were drawn to the gold cross glinting in the opening of his unlaced tunic. Not a scar in sight, taut and slender with youth, Alexander de Montroi filled Eudo with bitter envy. Swinging down from the horse, he drew his sword and struck a mighty blow, only to have the weapon recoil off the sun’s rays flashing through the purple stones in the cross. The youth stared at him with contempt, and Eudo was powerless to prevent de Montroi from taking the sword and laying its edge against his throat. He felt the pressure against his skin, and on a ragged sob of breath, his eyes burst open.

The girl was holding the gold and amethyst cross on her palm. In her other hand was a tiny pair of sewing clippers, the kind that women carried in their belt pouches, and she was just about to sever the leather cord that fastened the jewel around his neck.

‘Thieving bitch!’ he roared, and seizing her by the hair, threw her across the chamber. Her head cracked against the wall. She screamed and tried to scramble away from him, blood running into one eye from a cut on her eyebrow.

‘I’ll mark you for life!’ he swore. Frightened because of the dream, because he had let down his guard, he reached across the disordered bedclothes and tugged his long knife from its sheath on his belt.

She screamed all the louder and cowered, covering her face with her hands. ‘It was pretty!’ she sobbed through her fingers. ‘I meant no harm!’

‘Lying whore!’ He seized a fistful of her amber hair and jerked her head back. ‘So pretty that you wanted to have it for yourself!’ He laid the knife slantwise against her cheek.

Footsteps stamped up the stairs, with deliberation rather than the haste of someone haring to the rescue. Le Boucher kept tight hold of the woman, but raised the knife, and stared at the door. ‘Quiet,’ he growled.

The latch rattled. ‘Le Boucher, open up. I want a word, and I haven’t got all day, even if you have.’ The voice was gravelly and ill-at-ease, and le Boucher recognised it immediately.

‘Go swive a sheep!’ the soldier snarled as a matter of habit, but his dark eyes were narrow with calculation. What in the name of Christ’s ten toes did Thomas of Stafford want with him so badly that he was willing to seek him in a brothel? After Pembroke, they had not parted on the best of terms. Stafford had been looking to foist his rage on a scapegoat and le Boucher had refused to be it.

Stafford rattled the latch again. ‘I have employment for you. Open up, I’ll make it worth your while.’

The woman whimpered. Winding her dull-gold hair more firmly around his fist, he used the knife to slice it short to her skull in a single swipe of the blade, and kicked her away from him. Then, still naked except for the cross around his neck and the knife in his hand, he raised the bar and yanked open the door.

Thomas of Stafford walked past him into the room. He wore a dark, shin-length cloak with a deep hood pulled up around his face. In its shadows, his eyes glittered and his nose was a bony stripe of light. ‘Put some clothes on and throw the woman out,’ he commanded with a glance at the weeping, scalped whore. Without noticing, he stood upon the thick hank of hair that le Boucher had chopped off.

‘I am not your servant to command,’ le Boucher said, and shoving past Stafford, sat down on the rumpled bed. A heavy scowl drew his brows together. ‘How much is worth my while?’

‘Open to negotiation. Get rid of the girl.’ The older man glanced around with distaste, and his look did not change as he fixed it on le Boucher’s nakedness.

‘No,’ le Boucher said, ‘we’ll go elsewhere.’ He leaned across the bed and picked up his shirt, the armpits stained yellow and the laces grubby. ‘Have you come alone?’

‘I have two squires waiting in the street outside.’

Rising from the bed, le Boucher went to the shutters and threw them wide. Leaning out, his penis in his hand, he took a long, luxurious piss. Beneath him, there were shouts of outrage. Grinning, he shook off the drops and turned back into the room.

‘The Cock Inn is just round the corner,’ he said. ‘It’s as appropriate as any, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Just get dressed,’ Stafford said. ‘I’ll meet you below.’

‘Not scared that I might take a shit out of the window too?’

‘Do it and you are dead.’ The old man stalked from the room, kicking up the whore’s hair in a shower of spun silk.

First le Boucher grinned, then he looked thoughtful. Stafford must want him badly indeed to tolerate such foul behaviour. ‘I’m going to be rich,’ he said to the cowering girl. ‘What a pity you couldn’t keep your hands to yourself.’

The Cock Inn was not one of Canterbury’s most salubrious alehouses, but it was one of its busiest. By and large its clientele were of the kind that thought nothing of pissing out of windows on passers-by. There were cut-purses, whores and pimps, beggars with their day’s takings to swill down their throats or gamble away, and there were members of the general population who dwelt in the vicinity of the inn. Everyone came here for the cock-fights that gave the inn its name and which took place twice a week in the back yard with prize birds from miles around.

The crowing of the birds, and the raucous conversation of the men who had come to gamble, made the Cock seem even fuller than it was, but le Boucher’s bulk, his ugly, scarred face and the war sword at his hip, ensured that he and Stafford were granted a space at a trestle table squeezed into the back of the main room. Stafford himself made no attempt to exert his authority, and kept the hood of his cloak pulled around his ears.

‘You move in exalted company, my lord,’ le Boucher mocked, as a jug of ale was slopped down in front of them, together with two leather tankards. No one in the Cock drank wine. That was for the élite establishments near the bishop’s palace.

‘Not for long. I’m returning to Stafford as soon as the court leaves Canterbury.’

‘Then what do you want of me that is so urgent it brings you to seek me in a brothel?’ Le Boucher poured ale into his tankard and was not surprised when Stafford grimaced and covered his own empty cup with the palm of his hand.

‘I want to hire you to compete in the court tourney tomorrow.’

‘Hah, you and half a dozen others. William de Braose has offered me a new horse and armour to return to him, and a payment of half a mark for every ransom I take.’ He drank down the ale, which was quite reasonable all things considered, and wiped the froth from his moustache. ‘Why the sudden interest in the tourney? I thought you hated them on principle?’

Stafford clenched his fist on the stained board, and looked down at the gold seal ring on his curled-under thumb. ‘Men die in tourneys,’ he said.

‘Is that why you hate them?’

‘No, of course not. The more that are killed, the better,’ Stafford snapped. ‘I wish the damned lot of you to perdition. De Braose you say. Whose side is he on – the Marshal’s, or Salisbury’s?’

‘The Marshal’s. They both have lands in Wales.’ Le Boucher wondered if Thomas of Stafford was turning senile. A wrinkled face and a wrinkled brain. He poured another cup of ale.

Stafford pursed his lips, then, coming to a decision, inhaled deeply. ‘I will pay you your sword’s weight in silver if there is a fatal accident involving Alexander de Montroi.’

‘You want me to kill Alexander de Montroi?’ Le Boucher stared at the old man. There was no senility in the flint-coloured eyes. They were hard and shrewd and ruthless.

‘Yes.’

‘For a sword’s weight in silver?’

‘Will you do it?’

Le Boucher raised the cup to his lips and drank deeply. Christ, the old bugger was actually going to pay him to fulfil his dearest wish. On a sword’s weight of silver he could retire, need never fight again unless he wished. ‘It is a reasonable price for a man’s life,’ he said slowly, ‘but it is not enough.’

‘Then name your fee.’

The sound of a cock-fight surged from the yard beyond; the excited yelling of men, the squawk and crow of the birds.

‘The weight of my sword and shield in silver,’ he said after a pause for deliberation. ‘And paid into my hands by tomorrow noon.’

The flinty eyes narrowed. ‘No. Half then, half when de Montroi is dead.’

‘Then find someone else. I work for coin, not promises.’ He pushed away from the trestle and stood up.

Stafford watched him. ‘Sit down,’ he said scornfully. ‘No man walks out on a fortune.’

‘One that he might never receive,’ le Boucher grunted, and remained standing, but made no attempt to leave. ‘I want it all.’

‘And so you shall, but not before he is dead.’ Stafford gestured once more at the trestle. ‘I pay for results, not promises.’

They stared at each other. Le Boucher knew that Stafford was right. He could not walk away, and Alexander de Montroi had long been a thorn in his side. But although he was willing to be employed, he would let no man be his master. Slowly he stepped over the bench, and reseating himself, rested his elbows on the trestle.

Outside there was a crescendo of shouts, followed by a ragged silence. Into it, a single cockerel crowed victory.

‘You asked me to name my fee,’ le Boucher said. ‘Now we negotiate.’

Alexander too was drinking with company that afternoon, but in the open around a crackling fire; the smell of onion pottage wafting from the cauldron set over the flames. Strolling the tourney camp with Monday and Florian, he had come across a familiar patched red and green tent, although the red had faded to a dull orangey-pink. Osgar had been sitting outside it, mending a piece of harness, his appearance more portly and ruddy than ever. His hair had receded, and what remained was cropped close to his skull, so that he resembled an apple dumpling. There were effusive greetings to be made, past years to be brought into the present, old times to reminisce. The first jug of wine vanished in short order – most of it into Osgar’s belly. He had always had a prodigious thirst.

‘Alys wouldn’t come with me,’ Osgar mourned, pinching wine out of his moustaches, which had grown in length as the hair on his head diminished. ‘Stupid wench refused to get on the boat. I’ve had horses do it to me before, but never a woman. I gave her a bag of silver and my spare pack pony – left her at a tavern in le Havre. I miss her, though.’

‘Why come to England?’ Monday asked, and dissuaded Florian from poking a kindling twig into the fire.

‘Tourneys are licensed here. John used to be my paymaster in Normandy. Thought I’d have a look at somewhere new, and hire myself out.’ He touched the soft blue wool of Alexander’s tunic sleeve. ‘You’ve done well enough here.’ He spoke with pride rather than envy, as though at the progress of a protégé. ‘I remember the first day you came to Hervi, sick with starvation, clad in rags. Who would have thought that within ten years you’d be one of the lord Marshal’s knights?’