And I began to look for ways to be a knight. Amidst the moral sewer that was war in the Auxerre.
In late October, our little garrison stormed a nearby manor house held by one of the Dauphin’s supporters. It was a fair bit of fighting. I was the first man into the house, through a shutter I caved in with my poleaxe, and Richard came in on my heels.
We penned all the women — high born and low — in the chapel, and protected them until all of our own men were gone. It was the beginning of something.
Richard and I didn’t talk of it, but when our eyes met. .
We knew.
About the same time, the King was landing at Calais, and with him was the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Clarence, Lionel and all the best English captains. Richard and I sat in a mercenary garrison and writhed with anger. We drank. It is a tribute to our friendship that we didn’t go for each other.
Richard and I were not captains of the town, by any means — that job went to a rising star in the companies, a Scotsman named Sir Walter Leslie — but we were captains of smaller companies, and if men thought us hard, that was all to the good. We staked out the Angel, the best inn left standing in the Auxerre, which had thirty girls and six good cooks. It was a fine inn, three storeys of whitewashed plaster and heavy dark beams, with good red wine and terrible ale.
Have I told you that inns are to soldiers as paradise is to priests?
My enemy, the Bourc Camus, held the next castle-town for Knolles. He raided the countryside that belonged to my town, as if we were enemies. Even among criminals and murderers, he was a byword for evil. He struck the weak whenever he could, and his special provenance was taking women and turning them into whores, whom he sold to traders like chattels.
My friends, we were hard men. We did many bad things, and our sins piled up like gold in a money-changer’s booth, but the Bourc was a different kind of evil. He pleasured himself in the abject humiliation of the weak.
We had a skirmish at night — we caught his retinue raiding our sheepfolds, and we drove them off. I tried to get to him, but my horse was too shy of the dark and wouldn’t cross a wall. The Bourc escaped, but we rounded up half a dozen of his brigands — peasant boys he’d turned into spearmen.
Of the six we cut off, three fought to the death.
Listen. In our kind of war, no one fights to the death except the peasants on whom we preyed. I confess that if one of the French lords were to capture men like this, they’d be hanged — not for nothing were they called brigands — but between ourselves, we’d sell them back. We had our own infantry by then: Gascon mountaineers. They carried small bucklers and a pair of wicked javelins, and they could fight in any terrain.
These boys were different. They weren’t Gascons at all; they were locals. There were men and women in Champlay who knew them, yet they were fighting devils.
The other three had to be beaten to the ground with spear-staves. It’s not that they were particularly good fighters, merely that they kept fighting.
When we tried to talk to them, they sat like sullen animals and said nothing. Even when John used a little rough persuasion.
I’d never seen the look those peasant boys had, except on broken men going to be hanged in London. Their eyes were dead somehow, and yet they burned with hate.
Three days later, the Captain of Champlay (as he called himself) had a parley with the Bourc at a stone bridge. The bastard sat on his horse with his black and white banner, and most of his followers in his own motley. He had two of the Albret bastards in their father’s arms, and a couple of Englishmen, but all the rest of his ‘knights’ wore his colours.
I sat on my bad war horse and watched him through my lowered visor. Neither my commander, Sir Walter Leslie, my friend Richard, nor I, trusted the Bourc a whit.
As Sir Walter parleyed with him, I watched his knights. They had miserable armour and one was mounted on a plough horse. The ones with open-faced helmet looked shockingly young.
Sir Walter released our three captives, and they stood, abject, by our servants. Finally, one of the archers pressed them forward at spear point, and they walked, like condemned men, across to the middle of the span.
The Bourc looked down at them. ‘You surrendered?’ he asked, laughing.
All three flinched.
‘Please, my lord, we were beaten to the ground,’ one boy whined. They were the first words I’d heard him speak, even when John Hughes broke one of his fingers.
The Bourc drew his sword and killed the boy with a single snap of his wrist.
The other two didn’t run. They just stood in the centre of the span until the Bourc’s sword took their souls.
Then he looked at Sir Walter. ‘Don’t bother bringing me any more trash,’ he said. He turned his horse and his eye caught mine.
He laughed. ‘Hello, Butt Boy.’
I was growing up. I didn’t flush or stammer. I rode forward and raised my visor. ‘Wounds all healed?’ I asked. ‘Or shall I kick your arse again to remind you which of us-’
He snarled. He had a sword in his hand, still dripping from the cold murder of three brigands, and he swung at me. Under a flag of truce.
Sir Walter raised his hand, even as the Bourc’s blow missed me by a finger’s breadth as I leaned back in the saddle. Our archers sprung forward, arrows to bows, and the Bourc raised his sword. He laughed. ‘You’re a dead man,’ he said.
‘I’ve heard all this before,’ I said. ‘And here I am.’
Richard had my bridle.
I pushed my big horse forward. The deaths of the boys penetrated my armour of vice. Many things did that autumn. Why? Because they were like me, those boys? Because I was not utterly lost to sin?
‘You are a coward and a caitiff, Camus, and I challenge you. I will prove on your body that you are nothing but a terror to boys and virgins.’
My words hit him like a flight of heavy arrows. Hah! I was growing up.
He turned. ‘Easy to challenge me when you have all these war bows at your back, Butt Boy.’ He spat. ‘Someday I’ll catch you alone and use you like a woman.’
‘Does that thought excite you?’ Richard called out.
The Bourc froze and his face grew as red as new blood.
We laughed.
‘Dead! Both of you! I will destroy your souls and send you to an eternity in the abyss!’ he hissed and rode away, and his retinue fell in behind him.
The peasants called him ‘the demon’.
I rode back into our little town as filled with emotion as if I had just fought a battle, and Richard and I laughed and embraced over it. A war of words, yes. But we won. There comes a point in every man’s life — perhaps in every woman’s, too — where you learn how to turn the words of your adversary. To fight word to word, like sword to sword. Some never learn. Some become word-bullies.
A few days later a party of Bretons tried to kill us and take the inn. Richard took a nasty wound in the thigh, and I might have died if Sam hadn’t put arrows into three men. They attacked without warning, but by then I slept with a dagger in my hand, and when I slept alone, I wore mail. There were loaded and cocked crossbows in three places about the inn, and we were wary when we went out.
We killed them all. Four of them were, as I say, Breton mercenaries, but the other two were young boys of twelve or thirteen.
I had been to Mass the day before — I was learning to pray again. I stood there with the blood of a twelve-year-old boy dripping down my longsword to form a puddle on the tiled floor and I prayed. Good Christ, how I prayed.
I prayed that there might be a God. That’s all I could manage.
I tell you true, monsieur. It took less than a week for God to answer.