The Ill-Made Knight (28 page)

Most of the lesser men thought they were fighting for England. Even more of them thought of France as an enemy country to be mined of silver.

To be frank, none of that bothered me unduly, but it was starting to trouble Richard. Twenty leagues west of Paris, we almost had to fight for our lives when Richard accused a tiny garrison – just six men, all drunk as lords – of being ‘thieves and rapists’. Unsurprisingly, free – born Englishmen, even when they
are
thieves and rapists, resent the term.

Not that criminal behaviour was limited to Englishmen. The Gascons were unbelievably bad, and the Breton and Norman French were, if anything, worse. The whole countryside from Rennes east to Meaux had become a carpet of fire and smoke, and a generation of prosperous Frenchmen watched their carefully horded surplus destroyed in two hideous summers.

It is my observation that beaten men do not revolt. Beaten men lie under the lash and abandon hope.

But men who have had hope, men who have seen a way out of grinding poverty and injustice, men who have the wherewithal to own weapons and use them, they revolt.

Our party was camping in a small hunting lodge – ruined, of course – in a patch of woods close enough to Paris that we could see the haze of smoke Paris cast into the air. Sam said that from the rooftrees he could see spires.

We were there, of course, because Richard had made the ‘garrison’ of the local manor house so angry.

During the middle watch of morning, I was shaken awake by Rob, my page.

‘Fighting, Master Will.’

I was up and out of my cloak. I climbed the old ladder to the roof – or rather the remnants of the roof.

The manor house was on fire. Someone like du Guesclin had just taken out an English garrison less than a mile away.

‘To arms,’ I said.

Rob woke everyone. John and Sam came up, stringing their bows, both still naked from the waist down and looking like frowzled satyrs.

The screams started almost immediately. Richard was arming, but he kept looking up at me – he wanted to ‘do something’. A man was being killed very slowly, perhaps two men.

In the summer of 1358, raids were mostly a matter of a few men – twenty men-at-arms was a big force. Charles of Navarre’s ‘army’ never mustered more than a thousand men, and the Dauphin had about the same. I say this to justify our actions as we therefore assumed that our party would be roughly the size of any enemy we encountered.

Perhaps we should have been warned by the screams.

It took us an hour to arm everyone and pack the camp in the dark. We left a very scared Rob with six pack horses and all our spare gear, and the rest of us struck out cross country, which is difficult at night, and it took us
another
half an hour to cross the half-mile of farmland that separated us from the manor house.

The two voices kept screaming.

On and on.

You don’t think a man can scream that way for long.

He can.

There was the first light in the sky – the so-called false dawn – when we emerged from the hedgerows to a small, ditched farm road hard by the manor house.

It was
crammed
with men. Armed men. Perhaps 200 men, perhaps 500.

‘Back!’ I roared. The hedges must have blocked the sound.

They were as shocked as we.

In a glance, I saw the fields around the manor teaming with men, most of them in jacks, or mail, with helmets, but some in smocks, with farm implements. The manor house was burning, and there were two men crucified like our saviour on roof beams, being roasted alive.

I was backing Goldie.

For once, the mad man was Sam. He had his bow strung, and suddenly it was in his hand. He nocked an arrow, and loosed. Nocked again – now the crowd had seen us, and there were shouts, a growing wave of shouts.

He loosed again.

I realized he was killing the men on the crosses.

He feathered one man in mail who was running at us, and then I had to cut down into a crowd, because I’d waited too long and they were coming out of the field to my right.

Goldie was a war horse, and he knew his business. I gave him the touch of the spurs that told him to clear me a space, and his iron-shod hooves went into action like four immensely strong knights wielding maces. He whirled and I hung on. I hit one carl – he had a jack and a skullcap, and my blade bounced off his skullcap, but he went down like a slaughtered pig anyway.

And then I started clearing them off Sam Bibbo, who was trying to put men down with his bowstave. He’d tried to keep loosing arrows, and he, too, had missed the tide of men coming out of the fields.

I couldn’t leave him.

His horse panicked. There were too many men with too many agricultural implements in the dark, and the rouncey reared.

One of our assailants put a pitchfork into the animal, and she screamed and threw Sam – he flew a good horse’s length and hit the ground hard enough to make a noise.

If you want a good idea of your fighting skills, try fighting an endless tide of men in the dark for possession of the unconscious body of a friend.

You want me to talk to you of chivalry and knighthood?

I did not run and leave my friend.

I didn’t know just where he was, but I gave Goldie the spurs again and we leaped forward; he shot out hooves in all directions, and I cut and thrust into the mob. It seemed to go on for ever, but in fact took less time than saying three paternosters, according to Richard.

Who, thanks be to Christ, now appeared, also fully armed and also on a warhorse.

The two of us cleared the space of a small Parish churchyard. And John Hughes, bless him, came up, dismounted between us, and found Sam. Sam’s horse was down and dead. So were ten other men, or more.

We put Sam over John’s saddle, John held my stirrup leather and we rode off into the darkness.

We picked up Rob and our pack animals, and moved from cover to cover all day. We could see the roads full of men – armed men.

Sam was unconscious, and for the first time, Richard and I realized how much we relied on the old archer. We both kept wanting to ask him things.

Like, ‘Who the fuck are those men?’

Richard watched them from a tree. He was still in all his harness. ‘If the Dauphin has this many men, why hasn’t he driven us back to Calais?’ he asked.

I watched them too. ‘They look like Paris militia,’ I said. ‘But they are twenty miles from Paris and there isn’t a hood to be seen.’

‘No cavalry; no knights.’ Richard shook his head.

We climbed a low, wooded ridge and followed it for a few miles.

At evening, we halted. We had no idea where we were. We had moved across France by asking our way – there were no signs and the roads were appalling. Usually Sam knew the way, and when he was wrong, we didn’t comment.

Now, on our own, all ways appeared the same.

However, after a restless night – Richard and I never took off our harnesses – we woke to a beautiful spring day. In the distance, we could see a church tower. The bell was ringing. It was unreal.

Richard and I left the rest with Sam, who seemed better – his colour had improved and he was muttering, whilst his eyes were moving beneath the lids. We cantered along the paths towards the steeple we could see.

There was a town. It wasn’t a big town, but prosperous enough.

It was, in fact, a village of the dead.

They had died a while before – perhaps the October or November of 1357. There were corpses in the door yards, and corpses in the streets. The women mostly still had their hair, and some of the people wore the remnants of clothes. There were children.

The bell continued to ring.

I rode to the tower.

Richard reined in, and then started to back his bay. ‘Are you mad?’ he asked. I want no more of this. They look like they could rise in the dance macabre!’

‘I want a look from the tower,’ I said.

The truth is that the sights of that town are with me yet, but I needed some sense of where I was, and I knew I’d get that in the tower.

I dismounted at the church door and left Goldie with Richard. I’d never seen him so jumpy.

I assumed that the wind was ringing the bell.

Wrong.

It was a young man. At least, I guess he had been a man. Someone had flayed all the skin from one side of his face, very neatly, and it had scabbed over, while the other side of his face sagged.

I think I gave a shout. I may even have shrieked like a maiden.

He put his hands over his head. He had no thumbs. They’d been severed and healed.

He had one eye.

I think you lads are getting the message.

It took me twenty breaths to get over the shock. I’ve never seen a man so disfigured and yet alive, and the wonder of it was that he was so terrifying – he, who could not have hurt a small child. The wreck of a man – why is the wreckage so full of fear? Is it just that we all of us fear death? Christ, I fear
that
death – unmanned. Made hideous. The Lord be with him.

I was tempted to kill him. Yes, I was.

Instead, I walked around him, as if he might do
me
harm, and climbed the bell tower.

In the room above the bell pulls, I found a corpse. Not so old. Bloated. A woman. And the thing below me began to bellow like a bull.

I was paying a high price for a look from a church tower, I can tell you. There’s more wounds than those you take from swords. The dead woman – his mother? His sister? – and the monster himself – they people my dreams, some nights.

Who was he?

Who was she?

I climbed.

In the belfry were half a dozen men, strung up in the rafters like sausages being kept for winter.

Richard says I roared my war cry. Bless him, I think he lies. I think I burst into tears, but I truly don’t remember.

I do remember looking out from between the rotting legs of one poor bastard and seeing Paris, and in another direction, the Seine, clear as the shoe’d foot that had fallen away from the corpse by the eastern arch.

I fled. I’d like to say I cut the men down and saw them buried, but I fled. I almost fell down one of the ladders, and I tried not to look at the bloated corpse of the woman, and would have passed the wreck of a man, but he was on his knees.

‘Kill me,’ he said. His lips were ruined and it was difficult to understand him, but he was obvious enough. ‘Why not kill me? Why leave me alive? Kill me!’

I backed away from him.

‘Kill me!’ he shrieked. ‘Was I not good enough to be killed?’

I fled.

I vaulted onto my horse, and Richard and I rode through the streets so fast our horses’ hooves threw sparks, and we didn’t stop until we were in our little rock fall camp.

‘Sam’s awake!’ John called. ‘St Michael, you two look like you’ve seen ghosts.’

We moved north cautiously. The bell was ringing again, but we avoided the town and came down out of the low hills onto the flat by the river. To the east, we could see men – perhaps thousands of men – on the road.

‘Who killed them?’ Richard asked. He was almost grey under his dark skin. ‘Who would do that?

I shrugged. We both knew that any of the bands hunting the Isle de France might have massacred a town – French, Gascon, English.

It had happened six months earlier.

We rode on.

Sam was off his head – awake, but raving, calling out to men who weren’t there – and in the mid-afternoon, John started puking his guts out.

Rob’s armpits had swelling in them. He had a high fever and he fell from his horse, which was the first I knew he was sick.

Christopher spat and backed his horse away from Rob, who was lying in the road where he’d fallen from his horse.

‘Plague,’ he said.

Peter – silent, morose Peter – turned his horse, threw his cloak over his head, and rode away. I could hear the sound of his hoof beats for a long time in the early summer evening. He galloped.

Christopher dismounted under a spreading oak tree that was a thousand years old. ‘I’ll find a camp site and I’ll make a fire, but I won’t tend him and I won’t breathe the same air. The miasma.’

I was already touching the boy. Besides, I’d spent a day with the corpses of my parents, and the Plague, which had hit London again and again, had never troubled me or my sister. We were hardened, like good steel. Or perhaps just pickled.

Richard dismounted. ‘I thought it was that town,’ he said. ‘I’ve had trouble breathing. All. Day.’

Then I became afraid. Plague isn’t an enemy you can fight, and who it touches, it kills. Not five in a hundred walk away.

In a way, I was lucky, because there was so much to do.

Christopher was as good as his word. He found a camp site 200 paces off the road, where four oaks made a clearing by the stream that ran down to the Seine. He got the tents up, saving one for himself, which he set at the top of a small rise, about fifty feet away.

We set to gathering firewood. We only had one axe, but with the peasants cleared out of the surrounding country, there was a staggering amount of good oak just lying on the ground. We collected ten armloads or so, and broke it up in a forked tree – quicker than using an axe. I put our two pots on, full of water.

‘I’ll get some food,’ Christopher said. ‘Listen, cap’n – I want to help. I just don’t want to die.’

I managed a leaderly smile. ‘You didn’t just ride off, and that’s something.’

He nodded at Sam, who was muttering in a tent. ‘He’s got it, too. Bet ya.’

I hadn’t even considered that.

Christopher rode off to forage, and left me alone with three very sick men. I hoped he’d come back. Richard struggled against the sickness for a few hours, then suddenly he was in the heart of it, silent, sweating, with swellings on his groin and armpits as big as eggs. Bibbo was slower, but he was raving. He thrashed, and I considered tying him down. But I got a tisane of herbs into both of them.

I could do nothing with Rob. He was burning hot, dry as a bone, and had trouble swallowing, and before Christopher returned, Rob was dead. I wrapped him in his cloak and carried him a hundred paces or so into the woods.