The Champion (11 page)
The lady Clemence was at least a month before her time. Alexander knew that children born early were capable of surviving – he had been one such himself, according to Hervi – but the odds were never in the infant’s favour, And whatever happened, Clemence would be unfit to face a hard day’s travelling. He and Hervi would have to decide whether to remain with the de Cerizays, or press on to Lavoux without them.
Alexander finished oiling the axe and wrapped it in a strip of waxed linen. Then he set it beside the rest of the weapons, ready for loading on one of the pack ponies come the dawn. Now that he had a moment to himself, he brought out his waxed tablet and a stylus, and sat down to continue composing the song that had been running round in his head all day.
The summer is high, the woods are green,
The skylark takes my heart on her wings,
And I am free above the meadow bright …
He shook his head and crossed out the second line, aware that he was aping the words of other troubadours rather than exploring his own voice.
The skylark flies where my heart cannot reach
? He considered the idea doubtfully, and chewed the end of the stylus. He had no trouble writing scurrilous rhymes and ditties for the camp fire.
My lady’s garter caresses my lance
was a communal favourite, but exposing gentleness was harder because it was more open to ridicule.
Why have a skylark at all?
I am a sparrow who wouldst be a hawk
?
Hervi burst in upon his ruminations, his blond hair plastered to his skull and water darkening the shoulders of his cloak. A bundle of fabric was tucked beneath his arm. ‘Do you know how to shrive the dying?’ he demanded peremptorily.
Alexander stared at him with wide eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Christ, it’s a simple question; do you or don’t you?’
‘I … well, yes, I know the Latin, but I’m not ordained.’
‘You’re all there is, so you’ll have to do. Come on, get up.’ Hervi seized Alexander’s arm and dragged him to his feet. ‘Here, put this on.’ He shook out the bundle and presented his brother with a somewhat stained and tatty Benedictine habit. ‘It’s foul, I know, but it was the best I could do.’
‘Have you run mad?’ Alexander demanded, a blaze of anger and revulsion in his eyes. ‘If there is shriving to be done, then fetch Brother Rousseau.’
‘I tried,’ Hervi snapped, his own eyes full of fire. ‘But the toss-pot was stone drunk on his pallet and I couldn’t rouse him. So I took his spare habit and brought it to you because beggars cannot be choosers. You’re clean, you’re sober, you’ve got a conscience and you’re damned well half trained for the Church. Clemence de Cerizay is
in extremis
, otherwise I would not ask you.’
The fury left Alexander’s eyes. ‘Lady Clemence?’ he said, and wondered why he had not realised it immediately. Perhaps because he didn’t want to. He swallowed and groped for the dirty robe. ‘What is wrong with her?’
‘How should I know, it is a woman’s thing,’ Hervi said irritably, his face puckered in lines of worry. ‘Something to do with bleeding from her womb and the child lying in a difficult position. She desires a priest. I said I would find one.’
The robe stank of wine and sour sweat. Alexander tugged it on over his own clothes and struggled not to retch. It was not just the stench of the habit that filled him with nausea, but the thought of what it represented and the burden being laid across his own shoulders. At his core there was a cold sensation of pure dread. He fumbled down inside his shirt, withdrew the gold and amethyst cross, and laid it openly on his breast. It winked dully in the light, looking totally incongruous against its shabby back-cloth. But at least it made him feel more like a priest. He picked up the small flask of weapon oil, checked the stopper, and with an expression full of misgiving crouched out of the tent into the rainswept night.
The de Cerizay tent was pitched about fifty yards away on a slight rise. Despite Hervi and Arnaud’s partnership on the tourney field, the two men preferred to keep their homes apart. It was less awkward, since one man was committed to a wife and family and the other was still sowing wild oats. Alexander squelched through the mud and paused outside the family’s dwelling. A horn candle-lantern flickered, illuminating the laces on the flaps. Inside he could hear an anxious female voice and a man’s broken murmur.
He thought about running away, and his muscles tightened, preparing him for flight. At his back, Hervi gave him a push. ‘Go on,’ he hissed.
Alexander closed his eyes, swallowed, and plucking open the tent laces, stepped inside. Arnaud de Cerizay was sitting on a camp stool, his head in his hands, and Monday was clinging to him and murmuring words of comfort. From the makeshift hangings beyond there issued a drawn-out moan, followed by a bitten-off cry. He saw Monday’s fingers tighten against her father’s shoulder. ‘She will be all right, Papa, I know she will,’ she murmured over and over again, as if trying to convince herself, and laid her cheek against the top of his head.
In response to the draught from the unlaced flaps she glanced round, and saw Alexander. Her body began to quiver.
‘Hervi said … Hervi said that Lady Clemence had need of a priest,’ he stumbled out.
‘No, she doesn’t … except to baptise the baby when it’s born.’ There was a note of panic in Monday’s voice.
Her father slowly raised his head from his cupped hands, and looked at Alexander with dull eyes. The lines on his face were as deep as ravines. ‘What are you doing here, son? Where’s Father Rousseau?’ His words were slurred, and there was a jug of mead close to his right boot.
‘Hervi couldn’t rouse him, so he fetched me instead. I know … I know the rituals.’
Arnaud gave him a long stare, then his eyes wavered out of focus and he flopped his hand towards the hangings. ‘Go in,’ he said. ‘It is what she wants.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Steeling himself, Alexander went to the hanging and drew it tentatively aside. The midwife drew breath to challenge him, saw the robe he wore and the cross glinting on his breast, and instead beckoned him forward. There was blood on her apron and her hands were shiny with oil.
‘See, Mistress Clemence,’ she said. ‘The priest is here.’
The woman on the pallet opened her eyes. ‘It is too dark,’ she whispered. ‘I cannot see him.’
Alexander squeezed past the midwife and her assistant and knelt down at Clemence’s side. The candle-lantern cast a false golden glow over her features. Her fair hair was dark with sweat and her fingers gripped the coverlet in spasm as she fought not to cry out.
‘I am here,’ Alexander said. He felt inadequate and frightened, but knew that he must not show it. He might not be ordained, but as far as this moment was concerned, he was God’s representative.
Clemence seemed not to recognise him. The cords in her throat were taut with pain, with the struggle to remain lucid in the face of her mortality.
‘I have much to confess,’ she said weakly, ‘and very little time.’
Alexander gestured to the midwives, and the two women made themselves scarce.
‘Save your strength,’ he said to Clemence, knowing that he had no right to be party to her confession. He was no more a priest than the people waiting outside the curtain. And yet, in all mercy, he could not withdraw. Her suffering blue eyes fastened upon the cross at his breast, demanding salvation. ‘There is no need to make a full confession. God sees and knows all.’ His voice choked on the words. ‘Do you repent of your sins?’
She almost smiled, but her pain and need were too great. ‘Not all of them,’ she said.
‘Do you have any mortal ones on your conscience?’
‘No.’
Alexander removed the cross from around his neck and gave it to her to kiss and then hold in her hand. He removed the rag stopper from the flask of weapon oil, and anointing his finger, made the sign of the cross upon her clammy brow, and murmured the appropriate Latin words.
Clemence gave a sigh of relief. Her fingers tightened around the jewel as another spasm racked her body.
‘Shall I summon the midwives again?’ he asked.
She looked at him, and suddenly her eyes focused beyond the habit and absorbed his features. ‘Alexander,’ she whispered.
‘Father Rousseau was … was not able to come.’
‘It makes no matter,’ she said. ‘At least you are sober, and you know the words.’ Clemence swallowed, her lower eyelids glittering with tears. ‘I thought it was too good to be true, the promise of a second chance.’ She bit down on her lower lip, fighting pain, the tendons taut in her throat. ‘The child is lying across my womb with the afterbirth beneath him. There is nothing more that the midwives can do. Summon my husband and my daughter. I have so little time left …’
In the darkness before the hour of dawn, the rain ceased to fall and there was silence. In the glow of the candle-lantern, Monday knelt at her mother’s bedside and stared numbly at the body which she and the midwives had washed and composed. The women had gone now, back to their own beds to snatch what sleep they could before the camp came to life. Monday was alone, and never more aware of it than now. Her father was sprawled on the floor outside the bedchamber in a stupor of drink and grief. Hervi was supposed to be watching over him, but Hervi too was snoring like a bear.
Even now, when she had been so intimately touching the body, she could not believe that her mother was dead. Only a few hours ago they had been packing their belongings in preparation for their new life. There had been no indication that it was to be Clemence’s last day on earth. The midwives said that it happened sometimes; a bloody flux from the womb would carry off the mother-to-be in the month before she was due to give birth. They were compassionate but casual, for death was something they witnessed frequently in their trade.
Monday touched her mother’s lifeless hand. It was smaller than her own, with tiny, almost child-like fingers. Fine bones and translucent skin in cruel contrast to the gross mound of her belly, still filled with the baby that had killed her. The midwives had said there was no point in attempting Caesar’s cut, for the child in such circumstances was always dead. Tears brimmed in
Monday’s eyes, as much of rage as of grief.
The hanging lifted and Alexander slipped quietly into the makeshift bedchamber. He had made himself scarce while the women stripped and washed the body. Now he crouched at Monday’s side, his tawny eyes smudged with weariness. His breath in the enclosed space was clean of drink fumes, and he no longer wore the Benedictine robe, but was clothed in shirt, chausses and a green linen tunic that Clemence had made for him in the spring.
Monday swallowed the lump in her throat, and reaching to the top of the travelling chest beside the pallet, picked up the gold and amethyst cross. ‘Yesterday morn we broke fast together and we talked about sleeping beneath a solid roof,’ she murmured desolately as she returned the jewel to him. ‘She was laughing and full of hope.’
Alexander hung the cord around his neck and tucked the cross down inside his shirt. Then he reached out, and taking Monday’s hand from where it lay upon her mother’s, squeezed it in his warm, living one.
‘Why couldn’t she have had what she wanted? Why did she have to be taken? Is God so jealous?’ Her eyes flashed upon him, demanding an answer.
He shook his head, not having one. He wanted to say that he was not a priest, but after what had befallen earlier, that would have been cruel. Nothing would ease her pain just now. And so he just sat with her while the night passed away into dawn and the first liquid notes of the morning chorus broke over the tourney camp and ushered in a new day.
Dry-eyed, Monday removed her hand from Alexander’s. ‘This life kills and maims all who live it,’ she said bitterly, and her expression hardened into one of grim determination. ‘But it’s not going to kill me.’
Bertran de Lavoux was florid and corpulent, with thinning sandy hair and a pointed chin-end beard. His lands, recently inherited from an elderly uncle who had died without issue, lay on the river Epte, midway between Gournai and Gisors, and Bertran, with the hunger of a man long denied, was set upon expanding his boundaries. His overlord, Richard Coeur de Lion, was a captive at the German court, awaiting a ransom payment that might never arrive. Bertran had taken this heaven-sent opportunity to change his allegiance and pay homage instead to King Philip of France. This gave him the sanction and opportunity to make war on his neighbour, Hamon de Rougon, whose fertile estates and water mills Bertran coveted. Thus the need for soldiers – men of his own choosing, men in their prime who were as hungry for reward as he was for land.
‘We are stirring up trouble for ourselves,’ Alexander said, and removed his hands from the bridle to chaff them with his breath. A raw January dusk was settling around the raiding party. Dull light glimmered on chainmail and helmets, on harness and spear tips. The protesting bellow of driven cattle filled the air, joining the moist steam of their breath. There were twenty cows, most of them heavy with calf, and a magnificent white bull with a heavy dewlap and short, stocky legs. Earlier that day the animals had belonged to Hamon de Rougon; now they were the property of Lavoux.
Hervi gave him a sharp glance. ‘I didn’t notice you having any qualms earlier.’
Alexander flexed his frozen fingers and replaced them on the reins. ‘I was caught up in the heat of the moment,’ he said uncomfortably. He could still feel the exhilaration of the raid fizzing in his veins – the sensation of danger creeping deliciously along his spine and tightening his scrotum. Crossing a forbidden boundary, outwitting the de Rougon patrols and stealing this prize herd from under their noses. It had been pure adventure until he had stopped to think upon the implications of robbing from a former crusader – one of Richard Coeur de Lion’s battle commanders in the Holy Land. What had seemed brave now appeared foolhardy and tainted with dishonour.