The Ill-Made Knight (32 page)

‘I was to be a goldsmith,’ I said suddenly.

He grinned. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I aim to be a famous knight, meself.’

Well, well.

Groomed and clean, wearing clean clothes and with all the lice out of my arming coat, I went down into the hall. There were no women to be seen. I ate some bread and cheese, and walked across the hall to where the curtain wall steps rose into the smoky heights of the rafters. Since no one challenged me, I climbed the steps and walked out onto the wall.

There I found twenty young women on the wall, watching a fight on the bridge.

Most of them had their hands to their mouths.

One had already fainted.

I leaned out over the wall and saw why.

A dozen young knights – on foot – were trying to hold the main bridge over the river. Two were down.

‘Where are the other knights?’ I snapped at the nearest girl. ‘Where is the Captal?’

My pretty friend from the day before, still wearing her ‘gates of hell’, pointed down the north wall. ‘They have gone across country!’ she shouted.

Sometimes, folly is so rampant it’s hard to credit. But the party from Prussia had elected to probe north and find food, and in the absence of any professional soldiers, a dozen young sprigs had vowed to hold the bridge all day.

I watched for ten breaths.

‘Christ almighty,’ I said aloud.

My pretty friend put her hand on my chest. A very, very affecting gesture.

‘Will you – save them?’ she asked me.

Her eyes were a beautiful hazel-brown. She had a snub nose, and a dress that showed little glimpses of her naked flanks. She was tall, and better born than me, and she was, in effect, asking me to go die for her.

‘Yes,’ I said into her eyes.

I armed as fast as I ever had in my life. I had Perkin to help, and Jean de Grailly’s squire. Tom Folville got my arms on me, laced them to my hauberk and stood back.

‘I could come with you,’ he said.

I thought about it. To be honest, I thought that if he came with me, it might lessen the glory, but there were an awful lot of militia on the bridge, and only the eight knights.

‘Will you run when I say run, and retreat when I say retreat?’ I asked.

He nodded, his eyes huge.

I wondered suddenly if he had been hoping that I would say no.

‘Ever fought before? For real?’ I asked.

‘Every day, in Prussia,’ he said.

That was reassuring. I had my legs laced and Perkin was closing the straps. ‘Get in your harness,’ I said.

He vanished. Perkin finished the buckles on my legs and got my breast and back – opened them on the hinges and closed them again and began buckling me in. ‘This doesn’t really fit you,’ he said.

‘What?’ I asked. I’d worn that harness for more than a year.

‘It’s too big. Too much play at the hips.’ He slapped my back and the backplate moved. ‘Made for a fatter man. Can’t be helped. Hold out your hands.’

He put my gauntlets on, raised my helmet, slipped the aventail over my head and seated the cloth liner with two practiced jerks, one front, one back.

I took my longsword and walked, clanking softly, down the hall and down the steps to the main hall, then out into the bright June sun. There were four crossbowman on the bridge gate. I turned and looked up at the battlement, and there they were: twenty beautiful women.

Well.

Tom came at a run – high boots, a good brigantine, plate arms, and an open-faced basinet. Let me remind you that most men wore them open-faced back then.

‘Stay with me and keep men off my back,’ I said. ‘You’re too lightly armed to step into them. Understand me?’

He nodded soberly.

Perkin appeared with a pottery cup of . . . water. ‘Drink,’ he said.

Sam came across the courtyard in his shirtsleeves and hose. His hair was unbound, and he had his bow and a big quiver of arrows. He shook his head. ‘Lost your wits, lad?’ he asked.

I raised my visor. ‘I won’t be long,’ I said.

‘By St George,’ he began, but a fluttering handkerchief caught his eye. ‘Good Christ,’ he said. ‘Women.’

Perkin collected the cup, refilled it and handed it to Tom.

Sam tossed his hair. ‘If I kill ten men, you think I’ll get one of they?’

Perkin smiled.

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘professionally speaking, yon’s a fine audience. Just don’t die.’

I nodded again.

The sergeants on the gate got it open. Suddenly, there was a great deal of screaming from the ladies on the wall.

I thought it was for me, so I pranced my way out onto the bridge like, well, like a young man performing for young women. This was just like a London square, except that I had a lot more armour.

The rights and wrongs of it meant nothing to me, in case you wonder.

But as soon as I was clear of the gate, I saw what they were screaming about. Two of the young knights were down.

I ran.

Running in plate legs is – not as hard as it sounds, but it requires some practice. Legs are soft. Steel is not soft. Everything has to fit, or the top of your greave pounds into the top of your instep, or the back of your greave slams into your ankle, or your knee gets clamped in the main plates of the articulation . . .

Really, there’s a lot to go wrong.

I ran.

It was about fifty paces to where the two knights were down. They were in full harness, but the nearer of the two had a Jacques on his chest and another towering over him with an axe.

I didn’t save him.

Sam did. His first arrow spitted the lad on the knight’s chest the way a butcher spikes a carcass.

The axe man swung, and buried his axe in the Jacques who’d just swallowed Sam’s arrow. Bad luck.

The axe man could see me coming. He couldn’t take his eyes off me. He got his axe up over his shoulder and stepped back for room to swing.

I cut off his hands. Maybe not ‘off ‘, but I didn’t stop to check.

Then I knocked him flat as his limbs pumped blood onto the cobbles of the bridge.

The man behind him got my pommel in his face. I caught the tip of my sword in my left hand and started using the whole weapon like a two-handed dagger. I ignored blocks and attacks – that’s what you do in armour, when your opponents have no armour. Anything an untrained man can throw one-handed can be ignored.

Maybe not always, but in a crisis.

Some of them had staves and many had spears. A few had axes or pole-hammers. Of all those, the spears are the most dangerous if well-used. Spear blows I had to turn. But some got through. Early on, one came in and hit my faceplate, raised it a fraction and went in under the plate, slicing along my cheek and punching in between my head and the helmet liner.

I killed the bastard.

I was sure I was dead. I had a spear sticking out of my helmet.

It fell out.

There was some blood, but I didn’t seem to be dead.

I made it to the second downed man. Another of the young knights had straddled him and was holding his ground.

I stepped up next to him and roared, ‘Form a line!’

I took a breath, knocked a spear aside with a flick of my blade, turned my whole body – one thing you can’t do well in harness is turn your head – and shouted, ‘Tom, kill everyone
behind
us!’

Then I faced front, made a sweeping two-handed parry and started clearing space. I made wide, sweeping two-handed cuts, and the unarmoured men stepped back.

One of the young French knights stepped up on my left.

Something hit my leg, caught in the butterfly on my right knee, and suddenly my leg was bleeding. I stepped back onto something squishy.

Tom had a man in red and blue up against the bridge railing, and another was crouched over the clothyard shaft in his guts, the red blood running between his fingers. He was praying to the Virgin.

A fourth knight joined our impromptu line, and we filled the bridge.

In front of me, a big sergeant in good mail raised a huge, spiked club – what the Flemings call a ‘Guden Tag’. He called, ‘They are only four! We can—’

One of Sam’s arrows buzzed over my head like a huge wasp and struck him, and dust came off his mail and coat. He looked at the arrow and I thought, You never think it will be you.

‘At them!’ I called, and the four of us charged.

They gave way.

We killed a few. I was already tiring. Armour makes you almost invulnerable, and it’s really very comfortable, but when you fight on foot in armour, you spend your strength like a drunkard in a brothel. And I had not yet learned to save my strength.

Nevertheless, we cleared the bridge all the way to the chapel at the far end – the Meaux bank.

A crossbow bolt hit my breastplate like a punch in the gut and I staggered.

The man next to me took one in his vambrace, and it deformed the metal and broke his arm.

‘Back!’ I shouted. Christ, why hadn’t they just pelted us with crossbows from the first?

The whole thing was insane.

‘We can’t retreat,’ said the man at my right. ‘Ladies are watching.’

‘We cleared the bridge, messieurs. They will have to deem that enough chivalry for one morning. I bid you retreat, messieurs.’

I suited action to word.

Another bolt struck, and this one whanged off my helmet.

The man on my right took a bolt in his thigh, right through his cuisse, which, on examination, proved to be boiled leather over iron splints.

He gave a squawk and fell, and the Jacques came for us in a wave.

  
Paternoster, qui est in caelis.

We were in a lot of trouble.

The knight with the broken arm had already walked back. He was halfway across the bridge, and he was the smartest of the lot.

As the knight on my right went down, he stumbled into me, and by habit I let go my sword with my left hand – I had my right on the hilt and my left near the point – and caught him. I had him from behind and my luck was holding, so I began to back across the bridge, dragging the young scapegrace.

The Jacques wanted him, though, and they bayed like dogs as they ran after us and started stabbing with their spears. These weren’t peasants with pitchforks, but prosperous men in hauberk who probably served in the
Arriere-ban
. But, to be honest, they were mostly stabbing at the man I was dragging, so I kept backing.

The man on my left turned and ran. I won’t say he didn’t choose wisely; I’ll just say that he left me.

I backed another few paces, and Tom ripped into the men on my left like a harrow cutting spring earth, and bounced away like a boy playing ball. He was light on his feet. I had time to admire him.

I made another few steps. There were blows to my feet and blows to the back of my legs, chest and arms. A hail of blows.

Every step became harder. Oddly, it wasn’t the weight of my armour, although that was something, nor the pain of my left leg harness, which was killing me – I didn’t know till later that a chance blow had cut my thigh strap – it was the weight of the French knight, all on one arm. A body is an unwieldy thing at the best of times, and an armoured body is heavy, floppy and very smooth. And I couldn’t quite get my arm all the way around him.

Tom bought me a moment’s respite.

I decided that I had to change grips. I tried to hoist the wounded, or dead, man on my hip, and I lost him and he fell.

He screamed, because he fell on the crossbow bolt, which was firmly wedged in his leg.

On a positive note, he was alive.

There were a dozen adversaries
right there.
In a fight, one thing can lead to another as firmly and logically as one note leads you to sing the next at Mass. I parried a spear-thrust, a half-sword parry that turned my body to the side, left leg forward. A spear shaft slammed into my left side, knocking me off balance, but I stepped with it and snapped a cut up from below. Then I hit something and the spearmen fell away – I swept my sword up over my head and flicked it from side to side, the way a man with a scythe cuts grain.

I thrust one poor bastard though the body, and my sword stuck fast. I took a blow, staggered and got the tip free, rolled my wrist in a little windmill and drew blood.

Tom finished a man I’d wounded, then killed his partner.

I couldn’t breathe. I’d reached a point of fatigue where I couldn’t raise my arms.

I looked back.

Sam was on the bridge. He had four arrows in the fingers of his bow hand, and he ran at us.

The Jacques nearest me flinched away.

I got a deep lungful of air, bent over and passed my sword blade under the French knight’s arms, so I had him from behind, pinned against me, with the blade in front like a deadly embrace. He slumped forward and the blade bent.

If it broke, we were done.

I began to shuffle back as fast as I could go.

Sam’s first arrow picked up the man closest to me and spun him around like a heavy punch.

As I stumbled back, Sam leaped up on a bridge stanchion for a clear shot, balanced a moment and loosed into the next Jacques, who fell noisily. I gained another three paces.

Tom blocked a spear thrust.

Sam feathered a third man.

He had one more arrow, and he showed it to the Jacques. He flicked them two fingers and they cursed and growled, then he drew his great bow all the way to his ear and held it there, in their faces. Tom spiked the boldest fellow in the knee, and we gained five more shuffing paces.

The castle’s crossbowmen loosed a volley, all together – six or seven bolts that felled the front rank of the men on the bridge in a spray of blood – and we were in the gate.

My French knight was alive.

I wasn’t sure I was, and I sat in the dirt and bled for what seemed to me a long time.

Perkin appeared. He handed me a cup of water and I drained it, then another and another. He began to unbuckle things.

My hazel-eyed Venus appeared. I was sitting on a barrel in the yard with Perkin under my arm, unlacing my left arm harness while I drank water with my right hand. She curtseyed.

‘You were brilliant,’ she said. ‘The Dauphine sends you this as a token of her esteem, messire.’