The Ill-Made Knight (10 page)

Mind you, I was richer than I’d ever been, and I had a woman of my own as pretty as a picture of the Virgin, and a fine sword and a horse, so I wasn’t complaining. Just trying to learn the rules. Trying to keep a little for myself.

But in some way that is not utterly base, I liked Mary for more than her slender body, her breasts, her soft stomach and what lay under it – or maybe I liked my image of myself as a knight too much. So after everyone snored, I woke her, stole one of Abelard’s mules and led her out into the countryside. I got her clear of our picket posts and gave her the mule and a sharp knife.

I’d like to think she made it to Orléans and lives yet, a grandmother who says prayers for my soul. Or perhaps she curses me to hell every night. Perhaps she died a day later, taken by Gascons on the road.

Christ, I hope not. I pray for her still.

The next morning the Earl came and asked for volunteers to storm the tower. I’d been up late, but I volunteered.

He looked at me for as long as a calm man’s heart beats three times, and then I knew he’d take me.

Abelard said, ‘You’re a fool.’

It was my second storming action. If storming Vierzon, with a small, badly led garrison was dangerous, storming Romorantin was insane. The donjon walls were forty-feet high, and every yard there was a French soldier or a French knight, in good, modern armour, carrying a crossbow or a bill.

The knights went up the ladders first. Say what you will about knights, and many hate us, we’re not shy. The best-armoured, youngest men went up the ladders first. No one said aloud that we were only a feint. In fact, during the night the walls had been mined, and the Prince thought the mine would collapse one of the towers.

It didn’t.

We had two siege towers of our own, full of the best archers in the army. Without them, the whole attempt would have been suicidal. Even so, with thirty ladders going up against thirty different points, and the flower of English archery sweeping the catwalk it was still horrible.

I was perhaps the fifteenth or twentieth man on my ladder. Other men carried it forward and put it up against the wall – it had massive supports, and was very difficult to overturn. We stood in a neat file behind the ladder, waiting for the word to go, while the crossbow bolts and rocks from the walls clanged off men’s helmets or killed them stone dead.

I didn’t know where to look. For the first time in my life, I thought of running away. One of the Earl’s hobilars died at my feet, having received an unlucky bolt
down
through the crown of his kettle helmet. Blood came out of every opening in his body, and he thrashed like a bug on a pin. I raised my eyes and stepped back so as not to see him, and instead I saw an archer fall right off the siege tower behind me, and his head hit a rock in the road and split open like a melon. Bits of him decorated my brigantine.

Just beyond the corpse, I saw Richard Beauchamp, whose elbow couldn’t yet be healed, Tom Amble and half a dozen of my former tormenters. Out here in the open at the base of the wall, we exchanged a glance that said it all.

Here, the only enemy was the wall.

Richard shrugged, dismissing me, and went back to watching the wall.

Back behind the siege towers stood the Earl, surrounded by his best men. They weren’t hanging back. Far from it. They were waiting for a lodgement – for one of the ladders to score a success.

Then we heard a shout. I turned and saw the first knight on our ladder. He was about twenty-five, in fine armour, a heavy brigantine over good mail, with plate legs and arms and a basinet with a pig’s snout, all shining steel from Italy, and over his red velvet brigantine he had a lady’s gown. Probably his fiancée’s. Such chivalric games were, and are, as much a part of war as raping French farm girls. He wore the gown to show his courage, to flaunt her beauty.

He ran to the ladder. I’d seen him before, but in that moment I realized that he was my de Vere cousin.

He ran to the foot of the ladder and past it.

He got
under
the ladder and began to climb the underside, hand over hand. In full armour. By God, he was strong, and noble. And fast.

It had never occurred to me until that moment to climb the underside of a ladder.

A man-at-arms a few men ahead of me ran to the underside and joined him, and before my head could take control, I was with them. He was, in that moment, my new hero. He was the man I wanted to be.

The first five rungs were easy.

The thing is that on the underside of a ladder, you cannot rest, you have to keep climbing, and in a brigantine and helmet, all your weight is in the wrong places. Everything hangs from your arms. Your legs don’t take as much of your weight as they do on top of the ladder.

The strangest thing happened to me about ten rungs up. I suddenly wondered how the hell I was going to get over the wall at the top, since I was under the ladder. It almost panicked me. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to do it, and I was now halfway up.

Down on the ground, men were starting up the front of the ladder.

A big stone came and plucked the first two men off, sending them crashing to the ground. That would have been me if I wasn’t on the underside. Even as it was, the stone made the ladder bounce.

Another rung.

Another.

How was I going to get around the ladder to go up the wall?

Above me, my cousin, the knight in the lady’s gown, and the other climber were faster than I. I watched the young knight.

God, he was good.

Just short of the base of the crenellations, he threw a leg out from behind the ladder, swarmed around it and vanished up it.

The hobilar followed him.

I was ten rungs behind. I didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. I don’t remember any sound, just the pure fear. The pain in the muscles of my arms. The way my smooth leather soles slipped on the rungs of the new ladder. The sheer distance to the ground.

I couldn’t breathe.

And when I looked down, there was no one else on the ladder.

The ladder was resting on wooden hoardings – a sort of wooden catwalk that stuck out from the wall and allowed the enemy to shoot straight down at our assault parties. Most castles had hoardings stored in the donjons, waiting for this day. I was now level with the base of the hoardings – massive timbers that ran from the lower crenellations to the new wooden walls.

In front of me – remember, I was climbing backwards – our archers were visible on the siege towers, loosing onto the French-held wall. It gradually penetrated my head that a man was shouting at me.

He pointed.

I was running out of courage, so I did what you do when you are desperate: I attacked my fear. Remember, it is my blessing and my curse that I go forwards when I am afraid.

I threw one leg around the ladder, the way I’d seen the knight do, got my smooth sole on the outer side of the rung and started to change my weight.

Suddenly I felt the ladder begin to move.

Good Christ.

There was a French sergeant just above me, trying to throw the ladder down. He’d hooked it with some kind of pike, and he was pushing.

I don’t remember how I got onto the wall, but I did. He was at my feet, dead, and I was standing on the wall. I must have climbed the last two rungs and jumped, and I still can’t muster any recollection of the deed.

He fell on top of the hobilar.

But my heroic, well-armoured cousin had a longsword, four feet long, and he had swept an eight-foot space on the wall and was holding it. His eyes flicked over to me – even through his visor I could see their fierce glitter – and the moment he saw me, he stepped toward me and cut twice, fast as an adder, giving me a clear space. Then I was down on the wall and got my sword in my right hand and my buckler in my left.

Somewhere in the next minute, I took my first real wound. My legs were unarmoured, and someone got in a cut to my right shin. I never felt it. I got one man and threw him off the wall, and I kept Sir Edward’s side safe for that minute. There was shouting – cheering – and suddenly the air around us was full of clothyard shafts.

In fact, Master Peter saw me go onto the catwalk, and only then saw that Sir Edward was alive. He shouted the news to one of the Earl’s men-at-arms.

This is what it is to be a knight.

The Earl ran, in armour, at the head of his household to the base of our ladder, which men steadied and reset. Then they ran up the ladder – in eighty pounds of plate and mail.

The archers kept us alive. They
poured
arrows into the wall on either side of us, wasting precious shafts that we would need later in the campaign, but the French didn’t fancy running that gauntlet just for a taste of Sir Thomas’s longsword. We were hard pressed, but never by more than two men at a time.

A minute is a long time under such conditions.

There are many forms of courage. We’d both taken wounds, and suddenly Sir Edward stumbled – a chance spear blow to the foot, it proved. He fell to one knee, and the French knight he was facing raised his sword to finish him – I was a heartbeat too far away – and the hobilar, already lying in a pool of his own blood, slammed his dagger hand into the French knight’s groin from out of the pile of dead and wounded. The French hacked him to death, but he’d saved my cousin, who got back to his feet.

They prepared a rush.

And the Earl leaped in through the hoarding, his standard bearer right behind him, and speared a sergeant with his poleaxe, roaring his war cry.

I’m not ashamed to say I fell to my knees.

I couldn’t believe it.

I almost died, because a Frenchmen couldn’t believe it either, and instead of surrendering, he smashed his axe at me. I got my buckler up, pushed to my feet under his blow, and his haft smashed into my helmet. I was stunned, and I made the mistake of throwing my arm around him. He punched me three times as fast as a dog would bite, but even his steel gauntlet made no progress against my coat of plates. I tried to hook his leg.

I could smell his breath, and feel it on my face, because he had no visor.

He kneed me in the crotch.

The Earl’s poleaxe slammed into the French knight’s helmet.

Both of us fell to the ground, entangled.

It should have been over then, but it wasn’t.

The Earl’s men-at-arms came up the ladder and cleared the catwalk, and in the time it takes a nun to say ‘Ave Maria’, we held two towers and fifty feet of wall. But then young Boucicault led a counter-attack.

I was still breathing like a bull who scents a cow. I had my helmet off, and I was crouching there, bleeding like a stuck pig and panting. One of the men-at-arms shouted, and John – the man who’d served me wine, and who I now saw to have three scallop shells on a black chevron as his arms – ran by, paused and said, ‘Get up, William Gold.’

Good Christ. He knew my name.

I followed him. We ran along the wall, which is to say, I hobbled after him, and there were a dozen French knights in excellent harness fighting against the Earl and four of our knights. The catwalk was, as I said, only wide enough for two.

Boucicault was everywhere. I had seldom seen a man fight so well, and I watched him drive the Earl back, blow after blow, thrown so fast that the Earl had trouble getting in a counter-cut. He was bigger and faster than our Earl and, frankly, better.

Oxford fell back, and fell back again, until he was driven onto the hoardings of a small tower, where the flat area widened and all of us could join the fight. Now it was six men-at-arms – and one unhelmeted fifteen-year-old – against two French knights.

Boucicault didn’t care. He leaped forward and hacked the Earl down with a great blow of his poleaxe, then stepped forward and blocked John’s cut, occupying the space. Another French knight pressed in, and another – we were going to lose the tower.

John was suddenly toe-to-toe with Boucicault. He parried a blow of the poleaxe with his sword held in both hands, and then another, then he pushed in close to wrestle the French knight, and I took the opportunity to ring a heavy blow against the French knight’s helmet. He staggered, and John got a hand under the Earl’s armpit and dragged him out of the mêlée . . .

Leaving me with the French knights.

That was my first fight with Boucicault. I had a good sword and we were the same size, but he was fully armoured and I didn’t even have a helmet. He was dazed, and I had a leg wound.

He was trying to regain his balance and I cut at him two handed. He caught my blow high, kicked me between the legs and down I went.

That’s what happens when you fight a knight.

You lose.

I rolled on the ground, trying to master my pain, and got my dagger off my hip and blocked an attempt to kill me from above – I had no idea who threw that blow – then I felt a strong hand under my armpits, and I was dragged bodily from the fight.

Behind me, Master Peter was setting the hoardings on fire. It had rained hard for a few days, but that had been a week ago, and now the wood was as dry as kindling. He’d smashed a railing to make splinters, and they caught, and that fire ran across the platforms like a living thing.

The French grabbed their gallant captain and backed away, and the Earl’s man-at-arms carried me through the blaze.

In later years, men in Italy asked me why I stayed so utterly loyal. John Hawkwood saved my life – that day and fifty other times. He was a right bastard – the coldest man I ever met, and bound for hell if he doesn’t rule it – but he was always good to me, and that day I would have died horribly had he not carried me out of the fire.

While I was failing to beat one of the best knights in France, Peter had decided, like the professional archer he was, that we weren’t winning. He set the hoardings on fire to cover our retreat, and we retired from our dear-bought towers and climbed down the ladders, step by step.

The hoardings burned – first where we lit them, then it all caught, and then one of the tower roofs caught fire . . .

And by nightfall, Boucicault had to surrender: his hall was burning over his head. We took him and all his knights and soldiers. We treated them well and ransomed the lot. In fact, we fed the lords a fine dinner that night, in the best traditions of chivalry. I helped cook it, despite two wounds and aching balls. Abelard didn’t give a shit that I was injured, and said that if I volunteered for foolishness, I could pay the price. I hobbled about all evening in a daze, and went back to my empty blankets to lie down.