The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  I couldn’t find her. Simple calling wasn’t working, for whatever reason. I decided to reason it out. The Green Count himself wasn’t in the field, but Richard was. On the battlefield, he’d been near the Marshal of Savoy. I found the Marshal’s arms on a tent off to my left and rode to it.

  One street away, two Gascon spearmen were taking turns stabbing a priest. They roared and he screamed.

  Hell.

  I rode off to the right. Two tents past the marshal’s pavilion was a long, low tent of simple white linen, but the third tent in had a green pole striped black. I rode for it.

  A woman screamed.

  A man came out of the tent clutching his side. As I watched, he fell to his knees, blood flooding under his brigantine.

  I heard the woman scream again and I was sure it was Milady.

  Still mounted, I used my sword to cut through the side of the tent.

  He had her hair. She had a wicked, long dagger, but he was wrenching her back and forth by the hair while using his other hand to raise her kirtle. He was laughing at her efforts to kill him.

  I put the point of my sword into his laugh.

  I reached down, caught her and boosted her across my saddle. In the same motion, I stripped the long dagger out of her hand.

  ‘Milady!’ I shouted at her. I couldn’t slap her – in gauntlets, you can kill a person with a slap – I just backed my horse through the slit.

  My Burgundian had his sword across his saddle-bow and was covering me. The other knight I’d taken was nowhere to be seen. He’d ridden away.

  I wonder what de Charny would have said about the situation. Eh, messieurs?

  We rode north to get free of the looters. In fact, we made a great loop – almost five leagues – to stay well free of anyone who could hurt us, and by the time we capped the ridge Milady knew who I was. She was shaken. In fact, she was silent.

  But as I set her down by my old wreck of a tent, she smiled. ‘I’m going to be a man again, if that’s all right,’ she said, very quietly. ‘I want to be a knight,’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘Me, too,’ I said.

  There’s a particular exhaustion that smashes you down after a day of fighting in harness. It’s not just fatigue – the mind can only handle so much violence, in my experience. Add the stress of leadership, the quest for a woman who is about to be hurt, and hurt badly, and the likelihood of defeat . . .

  After Brignais, I lay down on my pallet in my squalid tent and went to sleep, still wearing all my harness. Other men seized ransoms or pursued the beaten French. I was asleep.

  I came to with that confusion that comes with fatigue, sleep and darkness. Night was falling and our camp was in a state of near riot.

  Milady was shaking me. ‘Hello?’ she said, over and over, with a certain brittle cheerfulness.

  I didn’t know who she was or where I was for long heartbeats. I thought for some reason that I was in the Castle of Meaux, with Emile.

  Perkin cured my confusion by leaning into the tent. ‘Sir? he asked. ‘I have all your prisoners, but it’s getting pretty bad out here.’

  It was, too. Never, even in storming a town, did I see a lawless riot like the night after Brignais. The men were exhausted and elevated at the same time. Men of low birth, men who had, until a few months earlier, tilled the earth, suddenly had captured lords worth the value of a hundred farms or more.

  Men were killing each other for their prisoners, or gambling a dozen fortunes away at dice, while friends gathered around them with weapons drawn. A young woman – whore or not, she was young and pretty – came past us dressed only in a kirtle, and she had two French knights on a rope. I have no idea how she came to have them, but they were her prisoners.

  Armoured as I still was, it was all I could do to get to my feet, and my muscles protested – the skin at my hips where the weight of my awful coat of plates rested was rubbed raw, and under my arms, at the top of the muscles that rest where a woman has breasts, it hurt like the lash of a whip every time I raised my arm.

  Stooping to exit the tent required an act of will.

  Perkin had Richard Musard and my brave Burgundian, whose name I didn’t know, and two more knights. They were stripped to their arming clothes, and they were sitting at a small fire.

  Musard was lying on a pallet. The Burgundian had a drawn sword in his hand.

  I leaned over Richard, who winced. ‘You broke my fucking arm,’ he said.

  ‘I could have spent the time capturing someone worth money,’ I said.

  Richard managed a small smile. ‘I’m worth a ransom, Will. Never doubt it.’

  I shrugged. ‘Listen, brother, there is no ransom between us. I’m sorry about your arm, but when the coast is clear, you are free to go.’

  ‘How like a trained ape he is, your black man,’ said a familiar voice. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll do the same favour for me? I’m almost family, am I not?’

  Firelight and muzzy-headedness didn’t help. It took me a moment to know him.

  ‘You don’t remember me? Oh, you knew my wife so much better, I think.’ His sneer was palpable, like a blow.

  ‘The Count d’Herblay,’ I croaked, with a bow.

  ‘I won’t rise,’ he said.

  Perhaps foolishly, I looked at Perkin. ‘Whose capture is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Yours, sir,’ he said. ‘You put him down, man and horse together. I reined in to take him before the other jackals had him.’ He grinned.

  I grinned back. But then all of d’Herblays’ barbs made sense.

  I ignored him. I was sad, and afraid, that he knew too much and would punish Emile. And I wanted to kill him. I very much wanted to kill him.

  My Burgundian bowed. ‘You let me keep my sword,’ he said, ‘and your squire chose to allow me to help him defend us against—’ he coughed delicately into his fist, ‘marauders.’

  ‘Your brothers and sisters in arms,’ said the Count d’Herblay. ‘I didn’t know that there were so many criminals in the world. And whores to service them.’ He nodded with apparent amicability at Milady as she emerged from the tent.

  ‘Better men-at-arms than you, it would appear,’ I said. He made me angry very easily. Why not? He had what I most wanted in the world, and he didn’t seem to place any value on her. But then I thought of everything Milady had taught me – and other men. I thought of how well it had worked, to show nothing to the Bourc. So I showed d’Herblay nothing, either. Nothing but courtesy.

  He shrugged. ‘Any thug can swing a sword or wield a lance,’ he said. ‘That’s all knights are, thugs in fancy dress. You and your companions prove it.’

  The Burgundian whirled on him. ‘Do not allow despair and defeat to rob you of your honour, monsieur. These gentlemen have taken us today. That is the fortune of war, which may turn in our favour another day. Fortune does not rob chivalry of its power.’

  ‘Chivalry is a myth for ignorant little men,’ d’Herblay said with a superior air. ‘To gull the small-minded into fighting.’ He looked at me. ‘Or to excuse the tyranny of raw force.’

  I bowed to my Burgundian. ‘William Gold,’ I said.

  ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I know of you. You don’t appear so very like Satan as you are described, monsieur. However, you will want my name and style, and I’m afraid I will prove a disappointment. I am merely a squire, Anglic de Grimard, and I doubt I’m worth 500 florins. Indeed, even that would beggar me.’

  D’Herblay laughed nastily. ‘Why, then, you should have stayed home!’ he said. You are like a man who wagers on a game of dice and then announces he has no money to pay.’

  De Grimard whirled on him. ‘I obeyed the summons of my lord,’ he said.

  D’Herblay shrugged. ‘The more fool you,’ he said.

  You can imagine that by this time I wished with all my heart that I’d killed the noble bastard ten times, but that was who he was: an endless drip of caustic commentary. It is a commonplace to say that such people hate themselves most of all – it doesn’t really help
to know it.

  I’ll add that all around us that night, men were being murdered for no better reason than that they were not worth a ransom. I could have killed him. My life might have been very different if I had killed him.

  I never thought of it, though. He was Emile’s husband. I’d saved his life at the Bridge of Meaux, and I wasn’t going to ruin that now.

  The last knight was really John Hughes’ capture – a knight from Tancraville’s retinue, A member of the Rohan lineage named Jean de Meung. He rose and bowed.

  ‘I am most pleased to find that I am the prisoner of a gentleman,’ he said, a little stiffly.

  ‘Don’t believe it!’ said d’Herblay. ‘He’s a branded thief, a traitor to his sworn lord and an excommunicate.’ He smiled at me. ‘Aren’t you, my dear?’

  At any rate, men came out of the darkness – twice in the next fire-lit hour – and tried to take my captives. They were all Gascons, and they were . . . wanton. Feral.

  One group we chased away with a display of arms – we faced them down like you face down a pack of wild dogs, with shouts and gestures, and they slunk away.

  The second group did the same, but again, like feral dogs, they turned at the edge of the firelight and threw themselves on us. They had little armour and a wretched array of weapons. I don’t even know if they were Gascon routiers or merely desperate men who had joined for plunder. They attacked us by firelight and we killed them. Richard held a dagger and did his best; de Grimard and I fought back to back at one point; de Meung stood by the Count d’Herblay and put men down with a great two-handed axe. John Hughes emerged from the darkness with Ned Candleman and Jack Sumner and our two servants, both of whom had good mail shirts and pole-arms. They were all drunk, but they were all alive, and after they came back to us, our little camp was secure and our prisoners could stop defending themselves.

  Sometime after midnight, the tumult died away. Perkin helped me disarm, and we rolled dice for watches. I drew the very last watch before cock-crow – the best watch of all – and I fell onto my pallet and darkness came down.

  The morning after Brignais was the beginning of the end of the Great Company. Who would have predicted that victory would destroy as effectively as defeat? We smashed the remaining armed power of France and took a fortune in ransoms, but we were not really an army. We had no King. We served no legitimate authority. We were under ban of excommunication. We didn’t really have a single commander, or if we did, Petit Mechin was interested in money and glory, not in, for example, making himself the King of France. We’d won a victory that, in a proper war, would have ended in a major concession of territory, but we were routiers, and we held no ground.

  The truth was that by the morning after Brignais, most of the footmen were already hungry. We’d picked the district clean before the battle happened. There wasn’t enough forage for the horses. There wasn’t enough food for the men. The Army of Thieves, as the French called us, had 20,000 human mouths to feed, and we didn’t have a supply train. We lived like animals, from day to day.

  Not that our victory was useless. After all, had we lost, we’d all have been executed – our captives were remarkably truthful about that. And we had a great many captives – most of the high and middle nobility of Northern France, and a few from the south as well.

  Hawkwood immediately formed a company for the purpose of getting our ransoms paid. He enlisted two Genoese bankers and Petit Mechin, who, as a Frenchman, knew what men were worth and where they lived. I joined his company immediately and handed over the Count d’Herblay and the Frenchman, de Meung. Camus, who had taken a dozen ransoms, also joined the enterprise, and I spent a morning – a damp, dull morning – standing too close to the mad bastard while he glowered at me.

  Twice I saw him talking to d’Herblay.

  That should have troubled me, but I was having difficulty – exhaustion, combat and too much wine had left me less than half a man. My body ached, my head ached and my spirit hurt. I became disgusted with the whole proceeding – an essential part of the management of war, but a tedious and bureaucratic one, whereby each prisoner was entered into the accounts of the enterprise with his home and his potential value, and negotiations began as to his ability to pay. A single man-at-arms couldn’t hope to force a noble prisoner to pay a ransom, although sometimes we could resort to the courts – the very courts of the defeated country. I do not jest – Richard Musard sued a French lord in the court of Paris and won, for cheating on his ransom! But by then, Richard had the support of the Green Count and all his ‘interest’ in Paris. A small man like me had nothing. We needed to band together and purchase the interest of the great banks. Messieurs, have I said how much I hate banks? They made such a profit from all our fighting.

  Hawkwood stopped me at the slanted door of the Genoese pavilion. ‘I’m off to Italy in a week,’ he said. ‘Thornbury and I all but deserted our company to come here.’ He smiled – one of his rare, genuine smiles; not the smile of the fox, but the smile of the friend. ‘I’d like to recruit you, William. Italy is rich and the contracts are regular. It is not banditry.’ His face registered some emotion: disgust? He was a hard man to read. ‘You deserve better than this,’ he said.

  I assumed he meant my clothes. In truth, I looked like a rag-picker.

  I don’t remember what I said. I probably shrugged; I may even have blushed.

  Sir John put an arm around my shoulder. ‘D’Herblay is worth three or four thousand Florins,’ he said. ‘Perhaps more. Meung is worth eight hundred. For that much, you can purchase a fine harness, a couple of good mounts and raise the service of a dozen more men-at-arms.’ He hugged me tight. ‘It’s business, William. Come to Italy and make your fortune. If you still want it, in Italy you can be a knight. But don’t come a pauper. Come with a dozen lances and you’ll make your way.’

  I embraced him. He told me that the rendezvous was at Romangnano, in Savoy.

  ‘Savoy?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘We’re making war on the Green Count,’ he said. ‘Well, in the spring, anyway.’

  I went and wandered the camp. I think that I wanted a woman, but I couldn’t find one. What I found was exhausted chaos, in-fighting and desertion. Many of the Gascon lords were already packing – the Albrets were among the first to go. They had a fortune in ransoms, and they didn’t need to form a league with the Italian bankers to get their money.

  I was drawn by a man and a woman’s voices shouting, and as I came closer, I realized it was Richard and Janet. I ran the last few steps to find that he had her arms, and she was dressed in my clothes – my worst arming cote, with laced-on sleeves, over a shirt of very dubious origins. He was trying to pull at her arms, and even as I rounded the pavilion behind mine, she snap-kicked him in the groin. He blocked the kick with his knee, and she, with breathtaking fluidity, predicted his defence and threw him over her hip – on his broken arm. He fell with his broken arm flapping like a wing, and I confess that I ran to his side, not hers.

  ‘His fucking arm is broken!’ I shouted at her.

  She spat. ‘He treats me like a woman.’

  Richard was writhing on the ground. The pain must have been incredible. ‘I’m trying to get her to pack!’ he spat.

  ‘I’m not leaving!’ she shouted. ‘I will not go back to being a lap-dog!’

  ‘Perkin!’ I roared. The poor lad ran up, my dented basinet in one hand and a rag of kirtle smeared with ash in the other. It was almost funny – trying to polish that old basinet was a little like trying to make a real knight of me.

  ‘Sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Perkin, get me a surgeon,’ I said. I turned to Milady. ‘We’re all leaving,’ I said. ‘There is no more Great Company. Petit Mechin is going to Burgundy. Sir John Creswell has said he’s going to Brittany.’ I forced myself to smile for her. In fact, she looked like a vicious shrew when she was angry: eyes narrow set, cheeks hard with rage and stubbornness.

  She glared like a cat at Richard and then gave me the false
smile women use when they are angry. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  John Hughes had been sharpening his long knife, and he stopped. Ned Candlewood was engaged in his usual off-duty pursuit: drinking hard at a bottle of wine. He put the glass bottle carefully on the ground. The brothers Arnaud and Belier – now fully armed and no longer servants – stopped fighting over a good basket and turned to look at me. Jack Sumner and Amory – no longer young Amory, either – stopped playing dice.

  For good or ill, I was the captain of my own little band.

  I propped Richard up against one of the ash-splint baskets that held my harness – when I had a good harness. ‘Richard? Would you care to come to Lombardy?’ I asked. ‘Sir John made me an offer. He wants me to use my money from the ransoms to raise a dozen lances to fight in Italy.’

  ‘Oh,’ Milady said. Her exhalation had some of the sound of a woman in the release of love. ‘Oh, Italy.’

  Richard’s face darkened with blood. ‘I will never fight for that bastard again,’ he said. ‘I have a lord – the Count of Savoy. He will pay our ransom, and we will return to his court and fight John Hawkwood and his lawless brigands, thieves and rapists.’

  I squatted down by him. ‘Richard, I’m not ransoming you. You are free to go. I told you so.’ I put a hand on his shoulder.

  He shook it off. ‘You have seduced her!’ he spat.

  For too damn long, I had no idea what he meant. I said something stupid, like, ‘What?’

  Milady said, ‘Don’t be a fool, Richard.’ She said it with a certain bored lassitude.

  Finally I understood. ‘No, by the saviour, Richard. There’s nothing between me and Janet.’

  ‘Why does she want to go to Italy? Why is she against going to the Count’s court?’ he spat. ‘I have bought her all the pretty dresses a woman could want.’

  Now, before you say he’s a fool, remember that we were all twenty years old or so, and our blood was hot. He loved her.