‘My lord!’ I screamed. ‘We saved you.’
He struck me with the sceptre in his hand.
Richard Musard took my reins and hauled my horse around. ‘I do not think we’ll be made knights this day,’ he said quietly. ‘They think we’re the Bourc’s men.’ He thrust out his jaw — something he only did when he was angry.
Our men were lusty and loud as we turned our horses toward Champlay.
We rode back to Champlay and handed all our prisoners to Sir Walter. If I had considered handing the looted gold back to the church — and I did consider it — those thoughts were wiped away.
I remember that night, too. There are few treats as fine as feasting after victory. I tied the Bourc to a chair and then piled the gold coins — English leopards, French ecu, Italian florins and ducats — on the table. We had twenty-seven men-at-arms, four English archers and twenty Gascon mountaineers. We counted the archers as full shares and the Gascon spearmen as half shares, and everyone was satisfied. Some of the Gascons felt we might have done better to take the princes of the church and hold them for ransom, but such things weren’t done. Not yet. Not by us.
Richard and I drew double shares, as it was our aventur. I made 240 florins in cash, with a lot of gold bits, an ivory crucifix, a nice set of black onyx beads and a small reliquary, somewhat knocked about. I won that over dice that night.
Richard had taken the elder Albret bastard. We kept him, and the Bourc, as they were worth money, and we kept their horses and armour. I sold the Bourc’s horse for a hundred Florins the next day, and my own horse for thirty — make your own judgements on their merits — and I spent the whole sum on a single horse, another golden-tawny horse, rising sixteen hands, with clean legs and a pretty head. He wasn’t Goldie, but he was calm and smart, and I called him Jack. I was done giving horses romantic names. I liked Jack. Best of all, Jack liked me.
Young Albret, our prisoner, announced when I returned from a ride over the fields that he didn’t want to go back to serving Camus. His voice trembled when he said it.
Richard called me over. Albret was seated between Sam and John, and he was panting like a man who’d fought in the lists an hour. His eyes were full of tears.
‘You won’t believe this!’ Richard said.
Camus was conscious, and he sat at a table, tied to the chair. He watched us like a snake.
Albret pointed at him. ‘Take him away. He says he is Satan come to earth!’
Camus grinned.
Sam went and hoisted his arm behind him — his broken arm — and hauled him upstairs. He locked the Bourc in a room and left him with two black eyes and a broken right hand. I hadn’t been there to hear what the other men heard, but I gather it was pretty bad.
The Bourc caught boys young and made them monsters, like him. He had boys rape their sisters. He had them fight each other — to the death.
He kept the survivors and made them his own.
The Albret boy was terrified of him, and believed that he really was a servant of Satan come to earth.
Sam returned, sickened. ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. ‘He makes me sick.’
Later in the morning, Sir Walter came and took the Bourc away. He was an important man in some circles, and too important for men-at-arms like us to string him up.
In our inn yard, he turned to me — two black eyes, broken arm, broken hand — and smiled. ‘Don’t let me catch you,’ he said. ‘You know nothing of what I can do to a man. You are weak. I am strong.’ He laughed. ‘You can’t even kill me.’
He was still laughing when he went out the gate.
By my reckoning, I could have saved almost a thousand people by ramming this dagger into his eye.
Sam took his time in leaving us. He stayed for a while because of a girl, and then he stayed because we launched a series of raids on the broken remnants of the Bourc’s band — of course, Knolles’ men weren’t supposed to make war on each other, but that was France in 1359. We took their territory and made it ours, collected their patis from the handful of surviving peasants, and blessed St John, they were a beaten and pitiful lot. One dark night in November, we crept up on the Bourc’s town of Malicorne. We’d build scaling ladders that we could assemble on the spot, and we put them to the wall and stormed the place.
There were about a dozen of his ‘children’ and some other broken men. We put them to the sword and felt better about ourselves. He now held nothing — he would return from his captivity, or wherever he was, to nothing.
I took my ready money to the Italian vultures and paid it toward my sister’s dowry. Maestro Giancarlo was kind enough — and he was much less of a bastard than the others — to point out that I was more than halfway to my goal.
Beyond the Auxerre, the world was moving around us. King Edward landed with a magnificent army and sat down to besiege Reims, which had somehow staved off the Earl of Lancaster in the year after Poitiers. The King of Navarre met with the Dauphin and surrendered to him. To this day, no one knows why. There’s those that say he felt he could hurt the cause of the Dauphin more from inside the government, and there’s those that say the bastard was so steeped in betrayal that he betrayed himself. But while Navarre took himself out of the war, his captains continued to fight in his name, even after he ordered them to cease — like Knolles and his brother Phillip — and the Bourc, who we heard was free and raising another force in Gascony. We never had a mouton for him — Sir Robert Knolles ruled that our capture of the bastard was against the laws of war.
As I’ve said, I should have killed him.
The King of England moved towards Paris in three great columns. The Captain of Troissy, one of Sir Robert’s most trusted men, Nicholas Tamworth, arrived at Chantay to raise a field force for an aventur in Burgundy. He promised fresh fields and untouched country.
He stayed in our inn, drank our wine and slept with our girls. He was a careful planner, and he sent a dozen men north into Burgundy to find a castle that was strong enough to be held, and vulnerable enough to be taken by escalade, without a siege.
He flattered us, me and Richard, a great deal. And he offered to make us corporals — commanders of a dozen lances.
Messieurs, I want you to understand. Richard and I, we wanted something better. We had tried to do something well, to act from conviction. And the cardinal branded us felons and published our names at Avignon as traitors to Mother Church. My name! In a scroll against the ‘criminals who serve Satan’! While the Bourc went free!
By our saviour, messieurs, we had some dark days. Tamworth seemed to offer us salvation. We’d been feasting him for two days when Geoffrey Chaucer rode through the inn yard, dismounted and yelled for wine.
We didn’t kill him. Firstly, we’d shared too many hard times, and second, it was clear from his beautiful boots and his fine cote that he was a man of some importance — and Tamworth treated him like a lord.
Richard spat with indignation. ‘He serves the King! While we fight for scraps!’
As it proved, he served Prince Lionel of Clarence, and we had hundreds of gold florins in bags at our Italian bank. But we both attributed our fall from the Prince’s grace to Chaucer, and he did nothing to dispel our anger. In fact, he pranced about our inn, demanding clean linen and sneering at everything — the girls, the wine, the cleanliness.
He sat with Tamworth for two hours, drawing on the table in wine, and then he slept a few hours, mounted a girl and tossed a few coins to one of the boys. He tried to avoid me, but I caught him in the barn. He was saddling his horse.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘I’m a royal messenger.’
I leaned against the stall. ‘Richard was your friend,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind you treating me like a leper. But Richard?’
He had the good grace to look abashed, but he kept saddling his horse. ‘What was I to do?’ he asked. ‘Lie for you? The Prince’s senechal — one of your regular customers, may I add — blabbed, and you were done.’