Knight's Acre

by Norah Lofts

  Servants waited with towels. But what towels, so soft and absorbent, so almost furry.

  Sir Ralph said, ‘I retract. Plainly the fellow is rich enough to have brought us here simply for a tourney.

  Juan Enrique de Mendez, Count of Escalona, was indeed rich. Far, far richer than his own King or any other European monarch. His grandfather had taken Escalona with all its accumulated wealth, had demanded vast sums in ransom from those who could pay and sold his poorer captives as slaves. He had been a simple soldier but developed into a shrewd man of business, exploiting every resource of the conquered country, investing his money wisely and luckily.

  His son had married an heiress of whom it was said that she could ride from the border of Portugal to the border of Aragon without even leaving her own land.

  While the knights were enjoying their bathing and the expert attention of barbers, Father Andreas was explaining why he had brought so small a contingent.

  ‘…and of course, my lord, the other ship may yet arrive.’

  ‘She will not,’ the Count said, his voice light, almost merry, his pale eyes glinting with mischief. ‘Don Filipe saw her in his glass, wrecked on a desolate shore, all sand and pine trees. No survivors.’

  The Dominican felt a small chill at the back of his neck but he answered stoutly,

  ‘My lord, you know what I think of such nonsense. Worse than nonsense…’

  ‘That may be. He was able to tell me her name. Mary Clare!’ That slight chill again. ‘However it is of no matter. I have maintained close contact with Hassan ben Hassan. All that is needed is a show of force and that can be provided by twenty-five men. I assume you chose the best.’

  Father Andreas took out his black book, evidence of enormous effort, miles of travel, hours of seductive argument.

  ‘The best available. Even to recruit fifty was no easy task. My lord, something is brewing in England. No open breach, as yet, but an atmosphere like that which precedes a thunderstorm. As a consequence any man with something to defend wishes to be there to defend it. Nobody said so; their excuses were most courteous and, as one would expect of the English, devious. Of those who accepted your invitation about half are young men with their way to make. There is one exception. The rest are considerably older, men of small estate.

  ‘One very lame,’ The Count’s eyes sparkled again.

  ‘I brought no lame man.’

  ‘Ah well, I suppose Don Filipe’s inner eye is capable like all eyes of error. Or perhaps he misled me because I asked. He dislikes to be asked. He likes to tell; but naturally my dear Father Andreas, I was anxious about you and your welfare so I asked and he said that he saw you in a barely furnished hall with a knight who was very lame.

  Father Andreas remembered how Sir Godfrey had limped into the hall at Knight’s Acre and later, seeing him to the door, had limped hardly at all. Without realising that what he said was almost an endorsement of the warlock’s claim to magical power, he said, ‘Sir Godfrey Tallboys is acknowledged the premier knight in England. He had suffered a slight mishap. But he is sound now. And of those here is the best man. Indeed, it is thanks to him, and the young man whom I mentioned as an exception, that all the horses survived.’

  ‘They shall have their reward. Land and resounding titles. You also, Father Andreas, anything you wish—except of course Don Filipe’s head on a charger.’

  Father Andreas ignored the jibe. He and the Count were conspirators, their ambitions interlocked.

  Serious again, the Count said, ‘Soon I must meet them. Tell me what you know.’

  What Father Andreas knew would have amazed—and in cases, annoyed—the men he had so closely observed. He knew which knight drank too much, was a womaniser, a gambler. When he came to Sir Ralph Overton, he said, ‘A good knight, but spendthrift. And the kind of wine-shop gossip who knows all. He even claims to know you, my lord.’

  ‘How could he? I was never in England.’

  ‘Sir Ralph was in Navarre, in Pamplona.’

  Your turn to wince!

  But the Count of Escalona bore the hurt of Navarre and Pamplona as calmly, outwardly, as Father Andreas had borne references to Don Filipe’s magic.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘I find these English names so difficult, so barbarous. I must ask you, Father, to point him out to me. Sir Ralph Overton. Then I can pretend to recognise him—that is always flattering. I should also like my attention to be drawn to the man who was lame and now is not; and to the young man who did not come here for money. What is his name?

  ‘He is Lord Robert Barbury. His father is an earl.’

  ‘I must remember that. May I see the book?’ The names of those with whom Father Andreas had failed were deleted by a firm black line. ‘I will try over the names. My English has not improved during your absence; the young man you left me as substitute tutor was far inferior to yourself.’

  Unflattered, Father Andreas listened and corrected the Count as he named his guests and then practised his little welcoming speech.

  The knights were conducted to a great hall which was dazzling by its decoration as well as the plenitude of lamps. There were not wall-hangings, the walls themselves were the ornamentation, all complicated, symmetrical, geometrical patterns inlaid with ivory, various coloured marbles, silver and glass. The ceiling appeared to be all of silver and from it, on silver chains, hung clusters of silver lamps which shed their light upon a table all aglitter with gold. While they stared in awe and admiration their host, accompanied by Father Andreas, made his entrance.

  ‘He has changed very little,’ Sir Ralph murmured. Escalona had been a very handsome young man and was handsome still, tall, slender, upright, silver hair and pale aquamarine eyes sharply, yet pleasantly in contrast with smooth, sun-tanned skin.

  He addressed the whole gathering first in the slow, careful English he had acquired in the last few years.

  ‘Honoured Sirs, welcome to Escalona. I hope you will have happy times here. I wish to make your visit to be enjoyed. I thank you for coming. Please ask for anything lacking.’ He then made his round, prompted by Father Andreas who murmured the name of each man. His memory was retentive; to Sir Thomas Drury, he said, ‘You have brought your hound. We must find sport for him.’ He told Sir Godfrey that he was glad to know that he had recovered from his hurt. Pausing before Sir Ralph Overton he said, ‘We have met before. In Pamplona was it not?’ But whereas he had looked every over knight straight in the face, with a smile, he avoided Sir Ralph’s eye. When he had passed on, Sir Ralph murmured again, ‘Quite a royal progress, is it not?’ He was nearer the truth than he knew.

  The Count took his place, midway along one side of the table in a chair slightly higher and more ornate than the others and the supper, a veritable feast, began. Dishes of every kind of meat, cooked with no sparing of spices which in England were costly and used carefully, even in rich households. To most of them rice was a novelty and the salads much appreciated. Salads were available in England only in summer and even then in no great plenty unless one had a well-established garden. There had been Salett gardens on the banks of the Thames but the spreading city had encroached upon them. The meal ended with dishes piled high with what looked like outsize jewels, fruits candied into semi-transparency by cooking in sugar—another luxury in the north. There was no lack of it here, for the Moors had brought sugar cane as well as rice and many other things to Europe. The green figs were emeralds, the apricots topazes, the peaches amber and the mulberries amethysts, the cherries rubies. Spiced or sweetened, the food conduced to thirst and the gold cups were filled before they were emptied.

  Lord Robert said, laughing, ‘A few more meals like this and I shall need new armour.’ Sir Stephen Flowerdew, his tongue loosened by wine, said, ‘I will now confess that I thought the number and the size of the prizes rather good to be true; yet I felt bound to take the risk. Now I see. The gold in these cups, platters and dishes would kept the Royal Mint working for ten years.’

  After a few days they w
ere mystified. Partly because their host, such a good organiser, seemed to have done nothing about the tournament to which he had invited them. There was ample room for practice and for exercise but nothing even remotely resembling a tourney ground.

  ‘Is it possible,’ Sir Godfrey asked Sir Stephen, ‘That he does not know how to lay one out?’ After all the Count, for all his wealth, his impressive appearance and personality, was a foreigner.

  ‘Of course he knows,’ Sir Ralph said brusquely. ‘I told you, he was in Navarre.’

  ‘Then I wish he would lay out the ground and begin,’ Sir Stephen said. ‘With you here, Godfrey, I cannot expect to win any great prize but the promised sum… I wish to earn it quickly and get home. My Elizabeth… Waiting does not improve a girl’s looks or her temper…’

  Sir Thomas Drury fondled his hound and then made his contribution to the conversation. ‘What strikes me as extraordinary is that he seems to have no knights of his own. Maybe here in Spain everything is different but I should have thought that a Count would have some obligation to his King.’ It was something that had not struck anyone else but it was true.

  ‘Even the Abbot of Baildon,’ Sir Godfrey said, ‘supports twenty knights. I know because I could have been one of them if I had been content to be hired and sit about kicking my heels.’

  In fact the Count of Escalona supported fifty knights, all well-armed and well-mounted, but they were stationed in one of the fortresses far to the north. He had removed himself from the Court and immured himself in Escalona, dreaming his dreams and making his plans, but he was aware of his legal obligations.

  For most of the knights this was an agreeable holiday. The Count organised deer hunts and boar hunts, expeditions to some of his outlying estates, lavish entertainments to enlighten the evenings. The only women in his household were servants but there were houses in the city, too grand to be dubbed brothels though they served the same purpose.

  Even those who most enjoyed his hospitality considered the Count to be eccentric; he seemed to have no neighbours, no friends. It was with surprise that his guests learned that their host had a six-year-old son who lived in a separate part of the palace and had his own household. ‘As though he were Prince of Wales,’ Sir Stephen remarked when he, one of a favoured few, had been taken to see the peevish child, a tyrant in the making. It was assumed that the Count was a widower who had lost a wife so dearly loved that he had adopted an almost monastic way of life. The happily married men in the company could sympathise and, in part, understand. Sir Godfrey felt that, if Sybilla died, he would never want close contact with a woman again and Sir Stephen agreed with him.

  Sir Ralph, who liked to know everything and was a gossip, rapidly adding to the little Spanish he already knew, in order to be able to gossip, never knew Escalona’s history. How, baulked of his one love, the pretty delightful Princess who could only be allowed to marry a royal person, the young Count had become slightly mad; married—because a man must have an heir—a woman of low birth, likely to bear sons, being the one girl in a family of seven, used her as a tool, sired two daughters, utterly despised, and then a son. The two little girls had been put into a convent on the far away northern border of Escalona; and once the boy was born, the Countess joined her daughters there. She had a peasant’s down-to-earth sense and knew that as a rich woman with a title she would be better off in a worldly convent, where such things counted, than in her husband’s palace where she had never mattered at all except as a breeding animal.

  None of this was known to those who saw the one result of the Count’s marriage but some of them thought his attitude towards his son rather peculiar. There was no sign of fondness; and everybody knew that fondness was the basic reason why boys much be sent away from their own homes to be trained. The fond father, the doting mother were unlikely to provide the necessary discipline; nurses and other servants who had known a child from birth were still inclined to regard him as a baby. But until the boy was sent away from home, affection showed itself in smiles and casual physical contacts. The Count of Escalona treated his son as though he were fully grown, a very important guest whose every wish must be respected but with whom no intimacy was possible.

  Real intimacy was impossible between the Count and the knights, for Father Andreas seemed to have vanished and the Count’s English was unreliable. At the end of ten days, Sir Stephen mentioned the tournament and behind the pale, smiling eyes, a shutter seemed to come down. ‘He looked and acted as though he did not understand,’ Sir Stephen said, ‘and that I do not understand. After all, it is the reason for our being here. Sir Ralph, you must ask him, in Spanish.’

  Happy to display his knowledge, Sir Ralph did so; and gained no satisfaction. ‘He asked were we not happy,’ he reported. ‘And I said, yes, of course were happy, but that some of us were anxious to get home.’

  Neither in Spanish nor in English could the Count explain that he was waiting for two things, willing them to coincide. He must have a final word from Hassan ben Hassan; and a final word from Don Filipe who was busily consulting the stars for a fortunate date.

  Faced with Sir Ralph’s lack of success, Lord Robert offered his explanation of the delay. ‘Of course!’ he exclaimed. ‘He is still waiting for the Marie Clare.’ Everybody said, how stupid, how remiss of them not to have thought of that.

  Then, one evening when they assembled in the great hall, there were differences. Father Andreas was present, attended by a young friar who carried a big golden cross. Against the wall, behind the Count’s chair, a low dais had been placed and fixed to the wall above was… what? A picture? A map?

  Most of them were familiar with maps of a rudimentary kind; this was very elaborate, many coloured, showing buildings, mountains, even trees as they might appear to someone viewing them from an immense height. At the top, in the margin, were two symbols, to the left a painted gold cross, to the right, painted black, the crescent of the Moslems.

  For the first time since their arrival, food was served without wine. The golden cups stood on the table but they remained empty. One or two of the more bibulous knights drew the servers’ attention to this face and were ignored.

  At the end of the meal, all servants withdrawn and the doors closed, the Count mounted the dais and took up a long, slender staff. Father Andreas stepped up and stood beside him and the young friar went to the other side and stood like a statue, holding the cross aloft.

  ‘My friends and honoured guests,’ the Count began his well-rehearsed speech. ‘No wine has been offered this evening because I wished you to make sober decisions. I will explain as well as I can. Father Andreas will answer questions.

  He began by explaining the terrain; the point of the staff travelled. Here, buff, was Escalona and here, in the centre of the largest mass of foreshortened buildings, was the place where they sat. Here were the mountains, at one point not high, little more than hills; and to the west of them, coloured pale purple, the kingdom of Zagelah, Moorish territory. This blue ripple was the river Loja, which had its source in the hills, which ran thought the city of Zagelah and then on.

  Even the least sensitive of his listeners felt the tension. The Count was plainly labouring under some strong emotion, strongly controlled. The hand that held the staff was not quite steady and, having explained the map, the man faltered and turned to Father Andreas who spoke swiftly in Spanish and then prompted him, in English, saying, ‘I will not insult you…’

  ‘I will not insult you,’ Escalona said, ‘by asking you to give your word of honour never to divulge what you are about to hear but I would ask any man not willing to pledge himself to silence please to go away.’

  Nobody stirred; curiosity alone held them rigid and attentive. Even when the sheer fantastic idiocy of his long-concocted plan was revealed to them, they sat almost stunned.

  He told them that Zagelah was ruled by a young king, Abdullah, at twenty-four a monster of depravity; a pederast who kept a harem of young boys, a cruel, extortionate tyrant; and a
bad Moslem. That was the turning point of the argument. All over Zagelah, in the main city, in the smaller towns, in villages, there were good orthodox Moslems and their leader was a lawyer, Hassan ben Hassan, a true follower of all the rules laid down by the Prophet. All these good Moslems had formed a sect—the Hassanites—and were willing to do anything, even make an alliance with the Christians, in order to unseat Abdullah. So what he was now asking of them was to take part in a small Crusade.

  The word still held some kind of faded magic. Most of them had an ancestor linked to an earlier Crusade, a stone effigy in some quiet village church, every link of his chain mail faithfully reproduced and his legs crossed—proof that he had been to the Holy Land, warring against the Infidel. And of all the stories upon which little boys were reared that of the greatest Crusader of all, Richard the First of England, Richard Coeur de Lion, was the most common and the most potent.

  But that was a long time ago. Since Richard’s time—he had actually been in sight of Jerusalem when his so-called allies failed him—there had been other so-called Crusades, all brought to nothing.

  The knights now looked at one another dubiously, questions in their eyes. And presently, questions on their tongues.

  Lord Robert or Sir Godfrey must be spokesman, first as they were by rank and seniority. The young man acceded the right and Sir Godfrey’s simple question rang out loud and clear.

  ‘My lord, why us? Why Englishmen?’

  ‘That I can answer myself, I think,’ Escalona said. ‘They have not lately been fortunate in France but English knights are still the best in the world. There at least we are in agreement, eh?’ There was a little laughter. ‘I have also another reason…’ he signed to Father Andreas to take up the tale in his more ready English.