The Ill-Made Knight (41 page)

Young Albret, our prisoner, announced when I returned from a ride over the fields that he didn’t want to go back to serving Camus. His voice trembled when he said it.

Richard called me over. Albret was seated between Sam and John, and he was panting like a man who’d fought in the lists an hour. His eyes were full of tears.

‘You won’t believe this!’ Richard said.

Camus was conscious, and he sat at a table, tied to the chair. He watched us like a snake.

Albret pointed at him. ‘Take him away. He says he is Satan come to earth!’

Camus grinned.

Sam went and hoisted his arm behind him – his broken arm – and hauled him upstairs. He locked the Bourc in a room and left him with two black eyes and a broken right hand. I hadn’t been there to hear what the other men heard, but I gather it was pretty bad.

The Bourc caught boys young and made them monsters, like him. He had boys rape their sisters. He had them fight each other – to the death.

He kept the survivors and made them his own.

The Albret boy was terrified of him, and believed that he really was a servant of Satan come to earth.

Sam returned, sickened. ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. ‘He makes me sick.’

Later in the morning, Sir Walter came and took the Bourc away. He was an important man in some circles, and too important for men-at-arms like us to string him up.

In our inn yard, he turned to me – two black eyes, broken arm, broken hand – and smiled. ‘Don’t let me catch you,’ he said. ‘You know nothing of what I can do to a man. You are weak. I am strong.’ He laughed. ‘You can’t even kill me.’

He was still laughing when he went out the gate.

By my reckoning, I could have saved almost a thousand people by ramming this dagger into his eye.

Sam took his time in leaving us. He stayed for a while because of a girl, and then he stayed because we launched a series of raids on the broken remnants of the Bourc’s band – of course, Knolles’ men weren’t supposed to make war on each other, but that was France in 1359. We took their territory and made it ours, collected their
patis
from the handful of surviving peasants, and blessed St John, they were a beaten and pitiful lot. One dark night in November, we crept up on the Bourc’s town of Malicorne. We’d build scaling ladders that we could assemble on the spot, and we put them to the wall and stormed the place.

There were about a dozen of his ‘children’ and some other broken men. We put them to the sword and felt better about ourselves. He now held nothing – he would return from his captivity, or wherever he was, to nothing.

I took my ready money to the Italian vultures and paid it toward my sister’s dowry. Maestro Giancarlo was kind enough – and he was much less of a bastard than the others – to point out that I was more than halfway to my goal.

Beyond the Auxerre, the world was moving around us. King Edward landed with a magnificent army and sat down to besiege Reims, which had somehow staved off the Earl of Lancaster in the year after Poitiers. The King of Navarre met with the Dauphin and surrendered to him. To this day, no one knows why. There’s those that say he felt he could hurt the cause of the Dauphin more from inside the government, and there’s those that say the bastard was so steeped in betrayal that he betrayed himself. But while Navarre took himself out of the war, his captains continued to fight in his name, even after he ordered them to cease – like Knolles and his brother Phillip – and the Bourc, who we heard was free and raising another force in Gascony. We never had a mouton for him – Sir Robert Knolles ruled that our capture of the bastard was against the laws of war.

As I’ve said, I should have killed him.

The King of England moved towards Paris in three great columns. The Captain of Troissy, one of Sir Robert’s most trusted men, Nicholas Tamworth, arrived at Chantay to raise a field force for an
aventur
in Burgundy. He promised fresh fields and untouched country.

He stayed in our inn, drank our wine and slept with our girls. He was a careful planner, and he sent a dozen men north into Burgundy to find a castle that was strong enough to be held, and vulnerable enough to be taken by escalade, without a siege.

He flattered us, me and Richard, a great deal. And he offered to make us corporals – commanders of a dozen lances.

Messieurs
, I want you to understand. Richard and I, we wanted something better. We had
tried
to do something well, to act from conviction. And the cardinal branded us felons and published our names at Avignon as traitors to Mother Church. My name! In a scroll against the ‘criminals who serve Satan’! While the Bourc went free!

By our saviour, messieurs, we had some dark days. Tamworth seemed to offer us salvation. We’d been feasting him for two days when Geoffrey Chaucer rode through the inn yard, dismounted and yelled for wine.

We didn’t kill him. Firstly, we’d shared too many hard times, and second, it was clear from his beautiful boots and his fine cote that he was a man of some importance – and Tamworth treated him like a lord.

Richard spat with indignation. ‘He serves the King! While we fight for scraps!’

As it proved, he served Prince Lionel of Clarence, and we had hundreds of gold florins in bags at our Italian bank. But we both attributed our fall from the Prince’s grace to Chaucer, and he did nothing to dispel our anger. In fact, he pranced about our inn, demanding clean linen and sneering at everything – the girls, the wine, the cleanliness.

He sat with Tamworth for two hours, drawing on the table in wine, and then he slept a few hours, mounted a girl and tossed a few coins to one of the boys. He tried to avoid me, but I caught him in the barn. He was saddling his horse.

‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘I’m a royal messenger.’

I leaned against the stall. ‘Richard was your friend,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind you treating me like a leper. But Richard?’

He had the good grace to look abashed, but he kept saddling his horse. ‘What was I to do?’ he asked. ‘Lie for you? The Prince’s sénéchal – one of your regular customers, may I add – blabbed, and you were done.’

I grabbed his shoulder.

He cringed away and drew his dagger. ‘I know what men like you do,’ he said. ‘I hate all of you. By God, if you touch me, I’ll see to it the Prince has you quartered.’

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I said. ‘I want to know why you burned us. What have we done to hurt you?’

He spat. ‘You make me feel dirty,’ he said.

‘This from a fucking spy?’ I asked.

‘Spy?’ he asked.

‘Didn’t you just bring Tamworth his orders from the King?’ I asked.

He was pulling his horse out of the stall by the bridle. ‘Not your place to ask,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I don’t have the need to know?’ I asked.

‘Why don’t you go kill some peasants?’ he said.

‘For the King?’ I asked. ‘Or Good Prince Lionel?’

He mounted. ‘Keep your foul mouth shut,’ he spat, and rode out our gate.

The Constable of France picked him up a few hours later and ransomed him. I had nothing to do with it.

We went into Burgundy. We had sixty men-at-arms and as many archers, and Sam was still with us. We had regular lances by then, as I remember, so Sam was my archer and Perkin was my page. He was sixteen now, and still very small, but I had him in a good haubergeon, a fine steel helmet from Milan and steel gloves. He still seemed to know everything.

Richard had his own fighting page – more like a squire – named Gwillam, a Welch boy who’d come with the Cheshire men and somehow washed up with us. And we had a pair of Irish horse-boys, too – also the flotsam of the King’s army. They were Seamus and Kenneth, and they were big, they could ride anything, and they loved to fight – like Gascons, really.

As corporals, we each had a dozen lances – that is, a dozen men-at-arms, a dozen archers and a dozen armed pages or varlets. Each lance shared a fire and a tent. It was becoming a system – the boys entered as servants, grew to be armed pages and then graduated to be men-at-arms. The archers were getting thinner on the ground – there were never really that many of them, and by the winter of ’59, all the good ones were serving the King. All but Sam and John and a few hundred more like them. While we’d held Chantay against the Constable, Knolles had pushed south in Provence and been defeated – aye, it was a complicated year – and most of his good men deserted him.

I’m off my tale. We rode east and north into Burgundy, and we stormed the castle of Courcelles, which our archers had carefully scouted. It was deep inside Burgundy, and perfectly sighted to base raids. We took it in one assault – I was the first man on my ladder, and that was terrifying. I took a dose of hot sand all down my back, and it burned away all the leather straps on my old breast and back, but I got up the ladder, sent one Burgundian to the devil and the rest threw down their weapons.

Over the next three days we spread out like a plague. We took manor houses and small castles by storm, at night, killed the inhabitants and stripped the houses. We moved so fast that the locals couldn’t organize a defence, and twice we caught the local baron’s forces on the road, trying to intercept us, and beat them up. The second time, we took him prisoner – that’s the Count of Semur. I sent him along to the Prince of Wales, whose column was nearest to us, with my compliments. I did it with every sign of chivalry, and I know the count found me a good captor as he said as much.

And then one of the Prince’s squires rode in under a flag of truce and ordered Tamworth to cease making war in Burgundy under the pain of the Prince’s displeasure. King Edward met with the Burgundians at Dijon – an hour away from us, may I add – and they paid him 200,000 moutons for a three-year truce.

We didn’t see one mouton of it, and we’d done all the fighting. And messieurs, in case you’ve missed the point, this was royal war, not brigandage. Everything Tamworth did, he did on direct orders from King Edward. We were soldiers, not brigands – until the King disowned us.

To add to our ire, the Burgundians granted Courcelles – the castle I’d stormed – to Nicholas Tamworth. He kept a few men to hold it, but dismissed the rest of us.

And to crown it all, the Prince of Wales released my prisoner, the Count of Semur. Perhaps it suited his policy, but he stated to his council that the count had been taken ‘by bandits, and not in a regular episode of war’.

As the last straw, the squire who came to order us to desist also informed me, and Richard, that we should not return to court or to England.

As a soldier, my fortunes had never looked better. Tamworth praised me to the skies, and said my exile from the Prince was all politics and that he’d ‘look into it’, but the continuing exile stuck in my craw. Twice in one autumn, I had performed a good feat of arms and been punished for it.

But even then, I might have stayed the course. I might have lasted out the exile.

Richard came into the house we shared and spat on the floor – something he never did. He collapsed onto a stool, stripped his helmet and aventail off his head before his Welshman could help, and hurled it at the walls so hard it broke the plaster and left a broad patch of willow lathe.

‘God’s curse on all of them,’ he said.

Perkin handed him a cup of wine.

He looked at it for a while.

I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t fret, brother,’ I said. ‘Tamworth will see us right.’

He looked at me, and he didn’t look like himself. He had bright colour in his dark cheeks, and his eyes sparkled as if he was mad. His eyes were wide like a young girl’s.

‘Nothing will see this right,’ he spat.

‘We’ve lived through all this before,’ I said. ‘We’re good men-at-arms and they’ll bring us back.’

‘The Prince of Wales has just accepted the homage of the Bourc Camus,’ he said. ‘The Bourc is to be his liege man for Gascony and command part of his army.’ Richard’s eyes met mine. ‘Think it through,
brother
.’

I was pleased when my men chose to come with me. When I went south to find Seguin de Badefol, I took with me ten men-at-arms, including de la Motte, and ten archers and pages, and Richard did just as well. We were moving up in the world – our own twisted world. Mind you, my armour was a patchwork of rust and old leather, and every fight had left its mark – my leg armour was more dirt and horse sweat than leather and iron. My fine basinet was brown.

The King of England moved away from Burgundy with his great army and settled down to the siege of Paris. The end was coming – we all knew it. The Dauphin couldn’t hold Paris for long, and Paris had already survived the Plague, the Commune, Etienne Marcel and the King of Navarre. There were no reserves in Paris.

Then the weather struck. King Edward had campaigned through the winter, and the weather had been merciful; his ‘allies’ in the companies had isolated Paris and Burgundy from the rest of France for the critical time. Even though he’d failed at Reims, he now had Paris under his hand, and he had, in one day of negotiations, knocked Burgundy out of the war.

All England needed was three weeks of decent weather.

Instead, we had three weeks that reminded everyone of the passages in the Bible about the flood that cleansed the earth and floated the ark. The English army was tired, and despite the King’s political victories, men weren’t getting rich and the army was too big to feed itself. When they sat down to the siege of Paris, they were sitting on land that the English and Navarrese companies, the Jacques and the French themselves had devastated for four years. If Paris had no reserves, the Isle de France was a desert.

Seguin de Badefol had offered to take our lances, and he was three days ride from Paris – he had a contract to serve directly under the Prince as Prince of Gascony, and he offered us good rates. We caught up with the Prince’s forces at Gallardon. I saluted de Badefol – we’d been together several times – and bowed to Jean de Grailly, who promised to represent both of us to the Prince.

By my hope of heaven, I swear that the sky was blue. We could just see the towers of Paris, then a black cloud swept in from the north like the hand of God, and in the time it takes a swift man to run a league, it was dark as late afternoon and driving rain fell, and a great wind blew. The road turned instantly to mud and the carts stuck. Then the rain turned to hail, the temperature fell and things froze. Horses died. Men were soaked through their jupons, the heavy garments holding the freezing water against their skin, and night fell.