‘What did you see?’ hissed Thangbrand. The stench of his rotting teeth filled my nostrils. His yellowed eyes searched my face. ‘Nothing,’ I squeaked. ‘Nothing, sir.’
‘You lie,’ he said, his blotched face working with rage. ‘You lie. .’ There was a momentary increase in the pressure on my neck. Then, praise God, he pulled back his face a few inches, considering me, and then more calmly he said again: ‘You lie, but, as you are under Lord Robert’s protection, you shall live, for now. .’ He released me and stepped back. We stared at each other for a few heartbeats. Freya was frozen on her knees in the corner. ‘Listen to me, boy,’ said Thangbrand, ‘listen to me if you want to live. You did see nothing, nothing at all. But if, by any chance, you were to talk to anybody about the nothing that you saw here tonight, Will, Wolfram, anybody at all, then I will slit your weasand from ear to ear while you sleep, drag you out into the forest for the wolves, and no one will say a word. Do you hear me?’
‘I will be silent, sir, I vow it,’ I said, trying to still my shaking limbs.
‘Yes,’ he growled, ‘be silent, and be gone.’
I felt more respect for Thangbrand after that night. He might be a dull sword instructor but he was still a fearsome man despite his age. So I tried to put what I had seen from my mind. The next day it was as if nothing had ever happened and Thangbrand treated me with the same rough affection as he had previously.
Life rolled on, spring turned into summer, and in these months my routine changed little: a round of work, meals, lessons, sleep, work. . It would have been quite pleasant were it not for the taunts and blows from Guy, and the behaviour of his irritating shadow Will. As I’ve said, there was absolutely no need for William to steal from my plate, but he continued to do it anyway; I suppose he thought it was a challenge of some kind. But watching Will’s chewing, bulging mouth, stuffed with my food, leering at me across the table, while he sat next to his protector Guy and dared me to say something, well, it didn’t make me feel challenged — just slightly ill.
I had to do something about it, though, if only for my honour’s sake. One day, palming a crust of bread, I inserted a sharp but rusty iron nail that I had found in the yard that morning, making sure it was completely hidden from view. Casually leaving the piece of bread on the edge of my plate nearest to Will, I turned away from the table to ask Thangbrand about something and when I turned back the little red-haired bastard was cursing and spitting blood. He’d bitten down hard on the nail and broken one of his teeth. Of course, he could say nothing about my part in the incident, and it stopped him filching from my plate, but it didn’t exactly make us friends.
I did make one friend at Thangbrand’s: the skinny little yellow-haired girl Godifa. I was trying to stay out of Guy’s way after a particularly dreary Latin lesson — Guy had no ear for the language at all and to make matters worse he was badly hung-over after drinking heavily the night before with the men-at-arms. As he stumbled and stuttered his way through a passage of the Bible, I could feel Hugh’s impatience growing. He loved the Word of God with all his heart and it offended him to hear it mangled so. Finally, he asked me to translate the passage correctly and I did so, fluently but with a growing realisation that this display of prowess would cost me dearly. Sure enough, once Hugh’s back was turned, Guy kneed me hard in the thigh, causing my leg to go numb. After the lesson, I’m ashamed to say, I fled to avoid the inevitable beating from Guy. He stood a good head taller than me and, as I had discovered many times before, I stood no chance against him in any kind of combat.
So I had left the farmstead — it was a beautiful, warm day — and gone into the woodland to lose myself in the calm of the great trees for a while, when I came across Godifa standing by a huge old oak tree and crying her little heart out. She had adopted a kitten, which had grown into a young and daring little beast, and it was stuck up the tree. As she sobbed, it peered down at us from a low branch, miaowing piteously. It took me a dozen heartbeats to scramble up the tree and stuff the cat into my tunic before swinging down and presenting it to Godifa with a little bow and a flourish. There was an instant transformation on her face — from rain to sunshine. Beaming and cuffing away her tears she grabbed my hand and kissed it before running away, skipping with happiness. I thought little of it but, for weeks afterwards, I began to notice her following me around as I did my chores. She was very shy and would not speak to me and, if I caught her eye and smiled at her, she would immediately blush and run away.
About six months after my arrival at Thangbrand’s, there was an evening feast: a saint’s day, I think, though I cannot remember which one. At great feasts, my duty was to go around the table with a huge ewer of water, pour it over the outstretched hands of the guests into a salver held by Will. Then Guy would offer a clean towel. When all the guests had washed, I would help the servants bringing food from the cookhouse: we had roast boar; great haunches of venison, of course; boiled capons; pigeon pie; pease pudding; cheese and fruit. Each guest had a trencher: a wide, flat platter of baked bread on which they would eat their meat; the bread soaking up the juices. Will and I circled the great table pouring wine, removing dishes when empty, bringing in more courses from the cookhouse. We took turns to snatch a few mouthfuls in a dark corner of the hall, whenever we could.
On this occasion, when everyone had fed to their hearts’ content, and we had removed all but the fruit and jugs of wine, a man I had not seen before walked to the end of the hall. He was holding a vielle, a beautifully polished wooden musical instrument with five strings, a big round belly and a tall, thin neck. Holding the vielle to his shoulder with his left hand, with a sweep of the horsehair bow in his right, he struck a single long, golden chord and gradually silence descended on the boisterous gathering.
‘My friends,’ he said, as bitter-sweet sound still hummed around our head, its delicious reverberations quickening my soul, ‘this is a song about love. .’
And he began:
‘I love to sing, as singing is fed by joy. .’
As I write this line of poetry in my own language, English — he was, of course, singing in French — it seems a paltry thing, a commonplace utterance. But, then, in that ramshackle hall, deep in the ancient greenwood, it cast a shiver down my spine. It was sung with such beauty, and accompanied by the angelic notes of the vielle, that it lifted the hearts of everyone in the hall. I saw Guy’s mouth drop open, exposing a mash of half-chewed meat. Hugh, who had been about to drink from his goblet, stopped with the vessel held halfway up to his face. Then the musician swept the bow smoothly across the strings, releasing another chord, and sang:
‘But no one should force themselves to make a song,
When the pleasure has left a true heart.
The work is too hard, the labour is joyless.’
He was a youngish man; medium height and slender, with dark blond hair that adorned his head like a smooth, glossy helmet and a handsome open face. He was clean-shaven, a rarity in our community, and his face seemed flushed with goodness in the flickering firelight. Everything about him was strangely clean and neat, exact, from his spotless tunic of dark blue satin, with jewelled belt and knife, to his smooth green and white striped hose and kidskin boots. He stood out in the hall filled with muddy ruffians dressed in lumpy homespun like a proud, iridescent cockerel among dowdy brown chickens. The chickens were silent now, entranced.
‘He whom love and desire compel to sing,