The knight was from the Priory of St John at Clerkenwell, near London. That’s where I’d seen him. He was a brother-knight of the Order of the Hospital. The same order that protected my sister.
God had spoken, indeed.
Still, I wondered what he was doing escorting two nuns and two monks across war-torn France. The nuns held him in high esteem and the monks leaped to obey him.
The man had not said anything, but it appeared, from what the monks said, that he had single handedly held off six routiers in an ambush that had killed their men-at-arms. I was used to men who bragged all day — bragged about the women they bedded, bragged about knife fights in taverns — yet this man didn’t even show his weapons. He seldom smiled, and he never, that I saw, displayed temper. He was courteous to every soul he met, ready with a blessing, and he never cursed or blasphemed.
He was like a paladin from the chansons.
I worked very hard to please him.
We left the Angel an hour before first light. My Hainaulters were good men with good armour, and I took Sam Bibbo and John Hughes to scout and keep me alive. After the nuns were mounted, I led Fra Peter aside.
‘My lord,’ I began, and he put a steel-clad hand on my arm.
‘Fra!’ he said. ‘Brother. I am not a party to human lordship.’ Those words might have been said with false humility, but instead, they were said with something like humour. As if he found his own views amusing.
I bowed in the saddle. ‘My, er, Fra. We have to cross territory held by a man — a man whom even the brigands hold to be evil. I intend to take you north-’
‘We came from the north,’ he said quietly.
I nodded. ‘Yes, my lord. That is, Fra Peter. But there is, from here, but one road south, and the Bourc Camus lies astride it, with armed men on every river crossing. We need to go east along the great river first, and then we can pass through the eastern fringes of his territory with less risk.’
He had a short beard, and he ran his fingers through it and pursed his lips. ‘Good,’ he said.
‘Fra, if the Bourc attacks us in force. .’ I turned and looked at the two women. ‘None of us should allow ourselves to be captured.’
‘That is in God’s hands, not mine,’ he said. ‘We must do our best. Beyond that — Inshallah.’ He smiled, his dark eyes far away.
‘He is a horrible, brutal man,’ I insisted.
‘When you say, “man”, you include the horrible and the brutal,’ Fra Peter said. ‘We all bear the mark of sin.’ He looked at me, and I felt myself judged. ‘Will you ask about your sister, or have you forgotten her?’ he asked suddenly.
Sweet Jesu, I’d been with them for half a day and a night and I hadn’t asked. ‘How. . how is she?’
Fra Peter smiled. It was a slow smile, full of grace, and it lit his face. ‘She is a remarkable woman,’ he said. ‘Blessed by God.’ He looked at me with his hard, soldier’s eyes, and I was judged again.
He was starting to make me angry, pious bastard.
I led us north at a rapid pace. We turned along the lower Marne and crossed the river that marked the Bourc’s boundary about eight leagues from his precious bridge.
The knight of the Order came and rode next to me. ‘Tell me more about this Bourc,’ he said.
‘The Bourc Camus,’ I said. ‘He makes children into killers. He openly proclaims himself to be Satan’s son come to earth. He brags of it.’ I met the knight’s eye. ‘Nothing would please him more than to take a pair of nuns.’
The knight nodded. ‘He won’t take them,’ he said. ‘I chose you for a reason.’
Those words sat with me all day, I can tell you.
That night, under an autumn moon, and with a hard frost burning like white fire along the ground, I kept them moving. The English nuns were fine horsewomen, and too brave to grumble, but the monks were not. Despite which, we trotted across barren, burned fields with the cold orb of the moon high in the sky above us.
Sometime after the moon set, we saw movement to our right, in the high ground, where there were two fires. But I caught no sounds and saw no glint of reflected light, so we rode on in silence punctuated only by the rattle of armour and the jingle of horse harness.
I was very afraid, and I saw my fear as a penance and I revelled in it.
I have known drunkards who have stopped drinking and thieves who have stopped stealing. I’ve listened to their stories in convents and monastaries, and we all share this. You do not know what the bottom is until you have started to climb out of it.
It was a long dark night, and I didn’t lose my nerve, even when the first crossbow bolt snapped across the frozen air in front of Alexander.
Two years of petty war had taught me that, in a small party, the only possible response to ambush is to attack the ambush. I’m sure that this habit would eventually have seen me dead, but as a doctrine, it was as good as anything produced by the scholars at the University of Paris.
I flipped the visor on my basinet down and put spurs to Alexander. I got my lance couched, identified a crossbowman kneeling in the ditch by the road and went for him.
He decided he could get his weapon spanned. He was brave and determined, and so were his fellows — four more brigands in black and white. They were in the ditch on a long curve, so that they had 300 paces of clear shot.
I had almost 200 paces to ride, and my brute of a horse wasn’t very fast.
The Hospitaller knight was coming up on my shield side. I couldn’t see the Hainaulters and had to hope they were covering the nuns and monks, because ambushes usually had two parts.
One of the crossbowmen got spanned. He hesitated a moment, his eyes wild, his head jerking back and forth between me and the Hospitaller. I was in armour, however poor, while the Hospitaller was in a long brown gown.
The boy shot the brown gown.
He missed.
Fra Peter struck the four of them the way a hammer strikes an anvil. In two breaths, he had landed blows on each of them and they lay in their blood. His horse kicked in two directions.
I reined in, my sword unbloodied.
The Hospitaller dismounted. He knelt by each corpse and prayed. The third man moved and the knight pinned him gently and opened his clothes, after checking and shriving the fourth.
‘He’s alive,’ Fra Peter said and began to explore the man’s wounds.
The man. The boy. The brigand was perhaps fifteen.
I watched him carefully — the boy — and when he went for the basilard at his belt, I stepped ungently on his hand.
Fra Peter looked at the hand, took the dagger and shook his head.
‘You may as well just kill him,’ I said. ‘He won’t talk. He’s old enough that he’s been one of the Bourc’s killers for two or three years.’
‘He has a soul, and free will,’ Fra Peter said. ‘As do you.’
He was bandaged, tied and then tied to a saddle. I stood in angry silence. I was intelligent enough to know that Fra Peter had just equated me with one of the Bourc’s child-brigands.
A day’s ride saw us south of the Bourc’s territory. At each halt, the knight fed the boy and paid him no more heed. He took him away to defecate and brought him back, red with shame.
He was good, but he was also a clever, dangerous man. I saw what he was doing to the boy. He gave the boy nothing. The boy had nowhere to perform. No torture to resist. No statement to ignore. The knight’s complete disinterest was very clever.
We camped that night by a rushing torrent that was, thankfully, only ten paces wide. I crossed with John Hughes and we built a good fire and dried our clothes, then built a pair of brush shelters facing the fire, and hiding most of it, a tactic we’d learned from the bloody Gascons. By the time the main party rode up, we had hot water in kettles and Sam Bibbo was already high on the ridge above us, signalling the all-clear with a mirror.
Fra Peter dismounted, and very carefully picketed and curried his horse. His war sword, which he mostly carried on his saddle and not on his belt, was more than four feet long. I hadn’t seen many swords as long or as sharp. The point was elongated, like a cook’s skewer, and fatter at the point — reinforced for piercing armour. He allowed me to examine it with an amused raise of the eyebrows.