Chaucer bowed. ‘I had that honour, monsieur. At a tournament in Westminster, not two weeks ago.’
The castellan, who had ignored Chaucer as a servant, now looked down his nose at the boy. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, monsieur. I give you my word. I received this and other safe-conducts into my own hand. Indeed,’ he smiled winningly, ‘I wrote them out.’
The castellan leaned forward, called for wine and treated us with more consideration. After we’d been served wine, he asked, as if by chance, ‘Is it peace, gentlemen?’
I looked away. The dissimulation of a seventeen-year-old is not something on which to depend. He grinned and Chaucer grinned back.
‘Please, my lord. You didn’t hear it from us.’ He bowed.
He had a way with him, that imp of Satan. Master Hoo glared at him, but said nothing.
The castellan poured more wine. ‘Ordinarily, I hate the English,’ he said, ‘but tonight, I will make an exception. To peace!’
We drank to peace.
I made the avert sign under the table.
North of Tours, there was war everywhere, and we rode through a wasteland of burned farms, ruined crops, weed-choked fields and rotting corpses. Some of them were very small.
‘Ah, chivalry!’ Chaucer spat when we found a mother and three children dead at a crossroads.
‘Leave off, by St Mary, you foul-mouthed clerk!’ I said. ‘You talk of what you do not know. This is not chivalry, but foul murder.’
‘Oh, aye, keeping maidens as whores in a brothel — that’s chivalry,’ he said.
‘Not a maiden among ’em,’ Richard said. ‘Leave off, Geoffrey. It’s our trade.’
‘That’s just my meaning,’ Chaucer said. ‘Take it at its best, your chivalry is nothing but strong men running a brothel. You protect the weak in return for exploiting them. When they mislike you, you kill them. When they are in the way, you kill them. When you need to punish another knight, you kill his weak people. Pimps and whores!’
I was stung. ‘The life of arms is a life of honour,’ I said. ‘Without men of arms-’
‘Murder, rape and thievery is not a trade,’ he said. ‘Dress it up in pretty armour and fine silk, it’s still crime.’
I punched him so hard he fell off his horse.
‘I didn’t kill these children,’ I said. In truth, the sight sickened me, and in my heart I suspected he was right — and hated him the more for it.
He sat in the horse manure on the road, rubbing his jaw. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.
Richard reached down a hand.
‘Fuck him. He hit me!’ Chaucer said. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’
Sam watched impassively.
Christopher watched the hills around us.
Master Hoo whistled between his teeth. I realized he was laughing.
Richard smiled. ‘Sure, I’ll say something, master page. You had that coming. Watch your mouth.’ He reached down his hand again. ‘Care to get back on your horse?’
Chaucer didn’t speak again that day.
I don’t regret the blow. I understood his point — then and now. Remember, good sir, that we were children, all of us. Angry, violent children.
We had passes and sauvegardes to the Lieutenant of Brittany. His name was William Latimer, and he was no one’s idea of a paragon of chivalry, but that’s not part of my story. He and all his troops were with Lancaster before the walls of Rennes, and we rode in through the heaviest rain I’d ever seen. The siege was months old even then, and not likely to succeed — the walls were bad, but the French holding them were the best that France still had in the field.
Master Hoo had an audience with the Duke of Lancaster, and Chaucer saw some clerks he knew, and the news was the same: Sir John Hawkwood and his routiers were not in the field with the Duke’s army, where they were supposed to be. They were up country, serving under Sir James Pipe, who was supposed to be Lancaster’s lieutenant in Normandy. In despite of King Edward’s orders, Pipe and a dozen sub-contractors were seizing French garrison towns in Normandy, not towns turned over by supporters of Charles and Philippe of Navarre, but towns held by royal garrisons of the King of France.
Whatever Master Hoo said to my lord of Lancaster, he didn’t like it, and he made that clear in a hundred ways. We were all very glad to see the last of that camp.
As we rode north and east from Rennes, we entered what I can only describe as the world of war. If there had been burned fields and dead children in southern Brittany, Normandy was hell come to earth. Villages were blackened rubble. Whole forests had been burned to black sticks. In one field, I still remember an entire herd of sheep had been massacred, with the shepherd, his wife and their bairn all dead among their sheep. Not one sheep had had its hide lifted and no meat had been taken. They were blown up with gas — ten days dead, or more, bloated and horrible.
Chaucer looked at it all and said very little. But from time to time, he’d smile at me.
Sam Bibbo looked at it and spat. ‘Vermin,’ he said.
He didn’t speak a great deal, so I was interested. I rode up next to him. ‘You were a bandit,’ I said.
He looked at me and made a smacking noise, like a man blowing a kiss at his sister. He flushed red, and I thought I’d gone very wrong.
But then he looked at the ground. ‘Taking armed folk to ransom,’ he shrugged. ‘It ain’t pretty, but it ain’t the same as this, is it. Eh?’
It was late October by the time we found Hawkwood. He was holding Le Neubourg, a prosperous and very strategic town at the crossroads of southern Normandy. He had a dozen lances under him, and he’d laid the whole country around under his obedience, collecting patis far and wide — that’s a sort of informal tax that English garrisons collected from French peasants. Like protection money, only a little more feudal.
Anyway, he gave us a royal welcome.
I dismounted in the yard of the citadel, and John of Boston held my horse.
The gate guards sent for Hawkwood, and he came down, booted and spurred, to meet me. We embraced like old companions. I introduced him to Richard and to Master Chaucer, who was, for once, on his best behaviour, and to Master Hoo.
Hoo had been silent — ill, in fact — since Rennes. But now he fairly bounced with enthusiasm. ‘We have an answer to your query, Sir Knight,’ he said.
‘That was speedy,’ Hawkwood said.
‘From which you might deduce the Prince’s interest,’ Master Hoo said.
I looked at Richard. I thought we were the principals. Master Hoo smiled at me. ‘You can go — your work is done,’ he said, as if dismissing a servant.
I’d ridden across half of France, but it had never really occurred to me why we’d brought the notary and the page. They both spoke beautiful French, and Chaucer was good at buying things and making the locals like him — he had beautiful manners when he bothered, and I was learning a great deal of courtly behaviour from him, to be honest — but I’d assumed he was along for experience with us, the professionals.
Until that moment, when John Hawkwood squeezed my shoulder. ‘We’ll talk later,’ he said.
Leaving me and Richard standing in the courtyard with our men.
I glared at young Chaucer’s back, as he followed the Prince’s notary into the keep. ‘It’s as if we were carters, and having gotten the wagon to market, the merchants no longer need us,’ I spat.
‘I think you got it in one,’ Richard said. ‘Let’s get a cup of wine.’
A day later, Hawkwood found me in the local wine shop and sat down. He nodded to Richard and to Sam, who was drinking with us.
‘Are you gentlemen at leisure to do a little fighting?’ he asked. ‘There’s a French knight troubling my garrisons and I plan to ambush him. I could use a few more swords.’
Sam shrugged. I remember grinning.
‘What’s with the secrecy?’ I asked. ‘Where’s Master Hoo and his boy?’
‘In the keep, where I can protect them,’ Hawkwood said. ‘This is Normandy, not London. I assume you lads can protect yourselves. Master Hoo is too valuable to risk outside the keep.’ He fingered his beard. ‘Mounted and ready to fight at sunset, after vespers.’