The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  Men laughed.

  ‘As long as we have employment in France,’ I said, ‘we are here, ready to hand. And by fighting here, we make France weaker.’

  Amory grinned. ‘Aye!’ he said.

  ‘But Provence? An’ the Pope?’ asked Jack Sumner. ‘The Pope’s gathering the King o’ France’s ransom.’

  ‘And if he never pays it?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Sweet virgin,’ Amory said. ‘We keep France.’

  I shrugged. ‘We keep France, and we keep the Pope’s money, and the King of France is a broken shutter, banging against an empty barn.’

  The archers grinned. Easy money. And service to the crown.

  It didn’t sound like glory, a better repute and a fortune to me. Nor did I hate the French so much.

  When we speculated to Sir John, he told us to keep our views to ourselves.

  And the last incident I remember before we marched was the brothers – the Ashleys, Hugh and Steven, who joined us that week. They were a pair of Englishmen, both knights, both well born and both attainted in England. Sir Hugh was attainted for multiple murders, and he was quite proud of them. He’d killed men who, as he said, ‘Got in his way,’ in his home county in the north of England.

  They were big men and they, literally, threw their weight around. They’d never fought in France, but both had fought against the Scots, and against the French at Winchelsea.

  They were determined to make names for themselves in France and get pardons, which had certainly worked before. But the end of the war and the Treaty of Brétigny, as it was being called, were flies in their very personal ointment.

  I think it was a day or two after Richard and I talked of Avignon – again, I can place it because I was comfortably on a well-lit settle in the common room of an inn, drinking good wine and not swill – that Sir Hugh came in and stood by the fire – it was late autumn – and cut me off from my light.

  I was sewing. What do you think soldiers do in their spare time?

  ‘I’m sewing,’ I said.

  ‘Proper in a young maid like yourself,’ Sir Hugh said.

  ‘You are in my light,’ I said.

  ‘My light now,’ he said.

  I sighed, because I’d had two days to prepare for this. Sir Hugh was no bigger than me. No smaller, either.

  I put three stitches through my lining to seal it off, bit my thread and put my needle in its case.

  ‘I’d rather beat the piss out of you outside,’ I said loudly. ‘But if you insist, I’ll do it right here.’

  Every head turned.

  ‘And I thought you was just a blushing virgin,’ Sir Hugh said, and his right hand shot out.

  He was a good fighter, but he couldn’t school me, and he barked his shin on the bench early in our bout and I got him on one knee and banged his head on the chimney despite the heat.

  He roared like a bull and tried to throw me off. His left hand slammed into my temple and I saw stars, then my right punched him in the forehead and snapped his head back against the chimney, again, and down he went.

  I didn’t kick him when he was in the rushes, and he turned and threw up, then got slowly to his feet, holding one hand between us. ‘Fair enough, sprig,’ he said. ‘Sew all you like.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I responded.

  I won’t say we were friends after that. He and his brother were hard men, and they were happy to take things that weren’t offered. But after that fight, they let us alone.

  We then we marched south, for Provence, with almost forty lances in our company, and on the road we merged with other companions, until there were thousands of us. The Bascot de Mauléon told me later that there were 10,000 of us that winter, headed for Provence. Perhaps.

  We didn’t celebrate Christmas. I missed it – I love Christmas. But Christmas means a church that isn’t burned, a priest who hasn’t been killed and an abundance of bread and sweets and meat. And children. There’s no Christmas without children.

  In 1360, in southern Auvergne, as we came down the passes, we had 10,000 professional soldiers and another 8,000 desperate men and women. We had war horses and armour and weapons, baggage carts, banners, the glitter of spear points like a thousand stars, the weight of mail like lost love tugging at your heart, the stirring song of serried companies singing.

  But we didn’t have an abundance of anything except rain, and we had no children and no priests.

  I did get a present for Yule. Richard called me down to the yard, where a royal messenger was riding away with his bodyguard archers. He tossed me a silk envelope and I opened it.

  Master William Gold,

  I have reached London, by the grace of our lord, and found your sister with ease. I have enclosed a few words in her own hand. I send my assurance she is well-housed and well-considered, although her house for the most part keeps silence, and I only saw her for as long as it took to push your letter through a grate. Hers arrived a day later, and now, I hope my friends in the Prince’s household will see it to you.

  Send my best regard to Richard Musard, with my deepest wish that both of you may find a way clear of France. London is better.

  Your servant,

  Inside, a single parchment sheet folded very small.

  Dear Brother,

  Fra Peter told me that you lived, and indeed thrived, as it were, in service of our Prince. And bless you, the sisters are very kind to me, and treat me as if I was a novice and not a serving woman. The Commander has twice stopped me to tell me you sent money for my dowry. Good brother, no woman ever had better.

  Let me say also that the Plague came here again, but I am salted, as you are, so I went out to the sick, and the good lord worked through me. I am very happy here.

  Be safe. And may the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with you always.

  I wept.

  For me, the battle of Brignais started under the walls of Pont-Saint-Espirit. It was a day or two after Christmas, and we had marched south with the speed that only routiers could march – thirty and forty miles a day, despite rain and snow. We were hard men, and we could move quickly. We didn’t have servants to shave us, and farriers to look after our mounts. We went unshaven, and when a horse threw a shoe, we left him behind – and stole another.

  We outran news of our coming.

  Pont-Saint-Espirit was a bridge town on the Rhône, just twenty miles north of Avignon. Sir John Hawkwood said that Seguin de Badefol had spies in the town, and that we could take it by escalade, despite it being one of the strongest fortified bridge towns in all of France. Except, of course, that Pont-Saint-Esprit isn’t in France. It’s in Provence.

  At any rate, the whole host pillaged Roquemaure and Codolet, in both cases we took the inhabitants by surprise, and we took everything.

  Sir John came to us that night, and proposed that if we took a path over the mountains, with guides he trusted, we could take the richest prize – a whole city.

  By then, I knew Sir John well enough to know when he was hiding something. He whipped his men into a fury at the thought of a whole town – a rich town – to take. He sounded disinterested in the ransoms and the money, and I smelled a rat, but I had no idea the scale of the rat I was taking on. Richard felt the same, and he tugged his beard and stared at the first stars.

  ‘What do you think this is about?’ he said.

  We’d both seen the royal messenger. But we didn’t know anything, and that rankled.

  Richard and I led the English vanguard. We climbed the steep pass, and at the top, we found piles of brushwood that Hawkwood had paid peasants to drag there. We made huge fires, and warmed ourselves, and then, at about the first hour of the morning, we went down the mountain on the other side.

  The moonlight was pale and cold. The moon was full.

  We assembled our ladders in the ditch, and detachments of archers stood directing us, like men unsorting a jam of wagons in Cheapside. I moved to the head of a ladder by right, and when Hawkwood gave the w
ord, up I went. First man on a ladder, into a town with a heavy garrison.

  I don’t remember a single fight from the storming. The garrison was unready and easily terrified. Most of the citizens surrendered abjectly, but the fifty richest families barricaded themselves in a church that had a strong stone tower in the north of the city. They took their jewels and their daughters, barricaded the doors, and swore they’d hold the church until rescued by the papal army, which was just twenty miles away.

  Hawkwood came in on horseback, by a gate we’d opened after we butchered its defenders, and he rode to the church with twenty men-at-arms, looked at it and gave it over as a bad job. He swept through the town like a blade through butter, and I could see from the way his mounted company moved that they were looking for something.

  By nones the next day, the Bourc Camus arrived with another company. Richard and I avoided his black and white clad men. Houses were burned, but Hawkwood’s archers kept the mercenaries under control, and he began to negotiate a ransom for the whole town with several of the town’s magnates, who he already had in hand.

  The papal army didn’t move.

  It was the second day after the storming when the situation exploded. Richard and I were counting our winnings; we’d taken over a house, and if we roughed up the inhabitants, I swear to you we were the gentlest tenants in that place. We had coins and some gold objects, and Richard had acquired a squire named Robert and a pair of servants, two likely French lads named Belier and Arnaud. John had found himself another senior archer as a companion, Ned Candleman, and we had another eight archers. So we had mouths to feed and the loot had to be shared. We were already planning to start our own company, even then.

  John Thornbury appeared in the street, shouting for us. I remember going to the window, my brigantine unbuckled – my armour was in a sorry state by then – and all I could think was that the papal army was going to attack us.

  I leaned out into the street. ‘What ails you, John?’ I asked.

  He was looking north. ‘Gather your lance. There’s going to be trouble with the Gascons.’

  Nothing would please me better. A fight with Camus?

  Richard and I had our men together and moving before you could say five paternosters. We pounded through the narrow streets and terrified locals cowered in doorways or slammed their doors shut.

  We were late to the party.

  We came to the square in front of the church, and it took me a moment to determine what was happening, because I came expecting a fight, not a massacre.

  The Bourc had grown bored of laying siege to the church, so he offered them their lives and freedom in exchange for surrender – if they gave up the church and left the town, he’d let them take everything they could carry. It was a common enough solution to strongly held houses in the countryside.

  Remember that these were the fifty richest and most noble families in the town. Remember, too, that Hawkwood was looking for something. The truth is, he’d encouraged Camus to get the little siege over with. Whatever Hawkwood was trying to find, it had become obvious that it was in the church.

  As we came up to the square, the oath had been sworn, the Bible kissed, and the great nail-studded oak doors of the church were opening.

  The Bourc Camus sat on his great black war horse in the middle of the square in front of the church, watching as the doors to the nave were thrown back. About forty men stood there, with their swords in their scabbards. Behind them cowered a hundred women. Most of the men and women were richly dressed, and all of them had bundles, like peasants.

  The men began to file out the cathedral doors, led by a priest with a cross.

  Camus spat on the ground in sheer disgust.

  I was watching Hawkwood. He was looking at the newly surrendered refugees the way a man buying a horse watches the horse – eyes narrowed, nostrils flared. He touched his horse with his spurs and rode past Camus into the square. ‘Which of you,’ he said, ‘is Pierre Scatisse?’

  The man at the head of the column was a nobleman. You could tell – straight back, unbowed head, angry eyes. A young woman clutched his arm. She glared at Hawkwood with the same look of contempt as her father.

  The man stopped. ‘By what right do you ask anything of us?’ asked the man. ‘And where is our escort?’

  ‘Which of you is Pierre Scatisse?’ asked Hawkwood again.

  The little column began to shuffle past him.

  ‘By God!’ he shouted. ‘Produce Monsieur Scatisse or take the consequences!’

  The nobleman stopped. ‘None of us is Monsieur Scatisse,’ he said. ‘I live here. I would know.’

  Hawkwood trembled with frustration. I could see his anger, and it transmitted to his horse, who began to fret. Later – much later – I learned that Scatisse was the man who was taking a convoy with the Pope’s contribution to the French King’s ransom.

  And he wasn’t there.

  Camus laughed. He rode his horse along the column, his horse’s hooves ringing on the square’s cobblestones in the cold air. He passed the nobleman, drew his sword and cut down at the priest, severing the man’s cross and cutting into his neck.

  ‘Kill them all,’ he called.

  The nobleman whirled, drawing his sword. He cut down the first brigand to come for him, and the second, but Camus towered above him, hammered through his guard and split his head.

  Every mercenary in the square fell on those folk. Except two.

  The men were killed.

  The women were raped.

  The nobleman’s daughter took her father’s sword, stood over his corpse and fought. She didn’t last long before a pair of Gascons threw her down and took her.

  And that was the end of me.

  I gather that I stood there for a long moment, watching the massacre unfold, neither helping nor harming. I have no memory of that time.

  But when the two Gascons threw the girl down, something snapped.

  I killed them.

  I don’t remember it.

  But I remember Camus. He was sitting on his horse, watching the rape and murder like Satan, with a gleam of savage satisfaction. This was his world. This was all he wanted of it – that men humiliate each other; that men suffer degradation whether they are victims or criminals.

  I rammed my longsword’s point into the soft back of his thigh before he even knew I was there, and then I slammed an armoured fist into his hip and hammered him out of the saddle. His head hit the pavement with a hollow sound, like an empty gourd, and I raised my blade—

  And John Thornbury took my sword arm from behind.

  Both of the Ashleys had my arms, and Richard Musard stood between me and my prey. Camus lay on the stones and his eyes wouldn’t focus. Behind him, the French girl who’d used the sword tried to cover herself. She was bleeding and weeping.

  Sir John planted himself in front of me. ‘William,’ he said, as if I was a fool. ‘What am I going to do with you? This is no place for a private quarrel.’ He spoke to me as if I was a small child.

  ‘Sir John, we swore to protect these people. To escort them to Avignon. We swore!’ I think I was sobbing. The French girl got a dagger from her father’s corpse.

  Sir John shook his head. ‘You don’t know what this is about, lad. It’s not on your head. Now, be a good lad, take your men and walk away.’

  John Hughes saw what the girl was about, bless him. She put the dagger to her throat, but before she could do it, he had the dagger. She raked her nails across his face, and he slugged her hard enough to put her down.

  Then he picked her up and threw her across his shoulder, and we left the square.

  The next day, John Thornbury brought me thirty day’s pay and told me that I had to go. He sat at my table, had a cup of French cider and apologized for Sir John.

  I knew what was coming. It had been happening my whole life.

  ‘Sir John asks that you go away until the Bourc is somewhat calmer,’ he said. ‘We need the Bourc’s men, and his allies.’ He
shrugged. ‘He’s a monster, and that’s the saviour’s own truth, but we can’t be too picky just now.’

  I drew a deep breath and said nothing.

  He went on, as embarrassed men do, speaking to hide silence. ‘If we’d found the ransom money here,’ he began.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Richard.

  Thornbury looked at both of us, his eyes narrow, then he looked away. ‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ he said.

  But Richard started to stand up. ‘You mean all of this was about the King of France’s ransom,’ he said quietly.

  Thornbury got to his feet. ‘Come back in a few days,’ he said. ‘Send Perkin or Robert to make sure of your welcome.’

  We were all on our feet.

  ‘You mean to say,’ said Richard, ‘that the King of England, having made a treaty with the King of France based on his ransom, tipped you off to come and steal that ransom? So he could abrogate the treaty?’

  ‘And beggar France?’ I put in.

  Thornbury spat. ‘You two children need to go to school. This is the world. We’re not knights of spotless renkown. We’re soldiers. We kill and maim. That’s what we do. If the King orders us to do something and it will make us all rich, who are we to question it? We should have picked up 400,000 florins when we took this town. Think of that, you two pious fucks – 400,000 florins. Your share would have been between 400 and 800 florins each. Enough to buy all the French girls in the world. Buy masses, if you want. Buy an indulgence from the Pope, if that’s what your pretty little conscience needs.’ He glared at Richard. ‘Don’t come back until you’ve mastered your tender soul, Monsieur. It’ll get you killed. Until you do, you are not welcome in this company.’

  He pushed past me and left.

  I stood there, breathing hard, then I looked at Richard. He was nearly red, he was so furious. ‘I will never come back,’ he shouted at John Thornbury. ‘Tell Sir John Hawkwood that I spit on him.

  ‘I doubt he cares,’ Thornbury shouted back.

  I suppose we should have been worried that the Gascons would attack us, or that Hawkwood would take some revenge, but it didn’t happen like that. We collected our loot and summoned our people – Ned and John; Perkin and Robert; Arnaud and Belier; Amory and Jack and the other six. And the girl, whose name I didn’t know, who stared in stony silence. She’d eat and dress herself, but she hadn’t said one word since she came along with us.