The Champion (5 page)
‘On the tourney circuit, we look after our own.’ She stood up, the water jar overflowing. ‘Hervi and my father have long been friends.’
‘Yes, he told me. Tonight we are to eat at your fire.’ In his own ears, his voice sounded stilted and awkward.
She hefted the jug and splashes of water darkened her gown. ‘I have to go, my mother needs this,’ she said.
Alexander nodded. He was shuddering with cold and could think of nothing else to say. But their eyes held for a long moment, each examining with curiosity something that was new and strange.
Abruptly the girl swung on her heel, water slopping over the neck of the jar, and made her way back to the meadow, her gait one-sided from the weight of the pot.
Alexander waded to the bank. Shivering violently, he dried himself on the old strip of linen Hervi had given him for a towel, his belly churning with a mixture of anticipation, fear and hunger at the thought of the meal to come.
Monday sat at the small portable trestle table, chopping onion and cabbage to add to the meat, barley and spices already simmering in the iron cauldron. Her mother was putting the finishing touches to a surcoat she had promised to have ready for one of the competing knights by dusk. The brass needle flashed in and out of the fabric with a speed and accuracy almost too fast to follow, but Clemence was beginning to squint as the light faded and her eyes grew tired.
‘Shall I light the lantern, Mama?’
‘No, I’ve almost finished. Just this length here to do.’ Clemence shook out the garment and turned it round. One half was blood red, the other a light orangey yellow.
‘Who is it for?’ Monday asked.
Her mother’s lips tightened. ‘Eudo le Boucher,’ she said in a voice cold with distaste.
Monday swept the chopped vegetables into a wooden bowl and carefully tipped them into the cauldron. Eudo le Boucher was a man who not only fought to live, but lived to fight. He was her father’s age, perhaps slightly younger, with a shock of prematurely iron-grey hair, disfiguring battle scars and eyes like black ice. Men avoided him if possible, but no one was foolish enough to make him their enemy.
‘We have to eat,’ Clemence justified, as much to herself as to her silent daughter. ‘In the good times we have to save our silver so that we can weather the bad.’ She bit off the thread on a broken tooth and held up the garment for inspection. ‘I would lief as not sew for the man, but I cannot afford to refuse him.’
Monday stirred the stew with a large carved spoon and glanced at her mother. Clemence had been out of sorts for a couple of weeks now, tense and snappish, swift to find fault, slow to be pacified. Her father had been quietly avoiding his wife, a rueful look in his grey eyes. For Monday it was not so easy. Unless sent on a specific errand, she had no excuse to make herself scarce. It was not safe for a girl of her age to venture too far from her own fire. Even fetching water from the stream had its hazards.
She thought of her encounter with Hervi’s half-brother and the motion of her stirring increased. Alexander de Montroi bore small resemblance to Hervi, who was huge and blond and hearty. There was a brooding quality about the younger man, a hunger of the spirit as much as of the body.
‘Careful!’ Clemence scolded. ‘Watch what you’re doing!’
A cloud of hissing steam billowed from the fire beneath the cauldron and bubbles of stew bounced on the iron sides before vanishing in wafts of burned vapour.
‘Sorry, Mama.’ Monday gave her mother a flushed, apologetic look.
‘Daydreaming again,’ Clemence chided with exasperation. ‘Monday, you must learn to keep your wits about you.’
‘Mama, I didn’t mean to …’ Monday broke off as a powerfully built man wearing a green quilted gambeson arrived at their hearth and commanded their attention. Eudo le Boucher was even taller than Hervi. Once he had been handsome, but the tourney circuit and the battlefield had taken their toll. His nose zigzagged down his face, following the line of successive breaks, and the flesh of his jaw was puckered from mouth corner to missing ear lobe where a sword had sliced him open to the bone.
‘Is it ready?’ he demanded.
‘Of course,’ Clemence said disdainfully, as if she had finished her sewing hours ago. Rising from her stool, she gave him the completed surcoat. Both her spine and her expression were as stiff as wood. Eudo’s black eyes crinkled with amusement.
‘I know that you like me not, Lady Clemence,’ he observed, ‘but you do like my money, and that makes us equals.’
‘You flatter yourself,’ she said coldly.
‘Then that makes us equals too, since you do the same.’ He delved in the money pouch at his belt. Monday watched her mother’s mouth make small chewing motions and stepped up beside her, offering moral support.
Le Boucher assimilated the gesture and his amusement increased. ‘Tell your daughter that she will spoil her face and her fortune scowling like that,’ he said to Clemence.
Clemence drew herself up, her lips parted for a retort, but it went unuttered as her husband arrived at the fire. Le Boucher withdrew from any further confrontation by placing two small silver coins in Clemence’s palm, and turned away, the surcoat draped over his arm.
She closed her fist over the money, her expression one of barely controlled revulsion.
‘Your wife sews a fine seam,’ the knight remarked pleasantly.
Arnaud de Cerizay murmured polite agreement and held out his hands to the warmth of the cooking fire as if at ease, but Monday could sense his tension. Eudo le Boucher never made conversation just to be sociable.
‘I hear that you and Hervi are fighting for Geoffrey Duredent tomorrow?’
Her father gave a guarded nod. ‘What of it?’
‘It is your good fortune. So am I. And I have a new flail to try out. I warrant I can dent a few helms with it, and beggar some high-born striplings into the bargain.’
Arnaud made a noncommittal sound.
Monday wondered why le Boucher was lingering. Surely he could sense that he was unwelcome?
The knight caught her resentful gaze on him and stared her out with a smile. ‘Have you thought about betrothing your girl yet, Cerizay?’ he asked provocatively. ‘She is almost a woman grown.’
Monday went cold and folded her arms across her breasts in a protective gesture.
‘There is time enough,’ Arnaud said repressively. ‘And I shall consider long and hard before I settle her on anyone.’
‘There speaks a wise father.’ Smiling, le Boucher inclined his head and sauntered off in the direction of his own tent.
‘The arrogance of that man,’ Clemence hissed. ‘I wish I had never consented to sew for him. Did you see the way he looked at Monday?’
Arnaud sighed heavily. ‘Yes, I did, but I have to admit he was right. She is indeed almost a woman grown, and he will only be the first of many to look at her thus.’
‘I don’t want a husband!’ Monday burst out, her arms still folded across her breasts, and fear surging at her core.
‘I have no intention of betrothing you anywhere for the nonce.’ Lines of care marred her father’s face. ‘I have encountered no man I consider worthy, and until I do, your honour is mine to the last breath in my body.’
Hearing the bleak note in his voice, Monday felt guilty. Her development into womanhood was the root cause of the problem. Nor was there a remedy unless she became a nun.
Her mother said nothing, but there was a look of utter weariness on her face as she stooped into the tent to put her sewing box away.
Their guests arrived shortly after that, Hervi as hearty and bold as ever and bearing a gift of six fresh duck eggs, their shells a delicate speckled blue. Clemence accepted them with pleasure, a smile returning to her face. Hervi seated himself at their trestle with the ease of familiarity. Alexander was more hesitant, torn between being polite and following his brother’s casual example.
Monday murmured a greeting and busied herself setting out the eating bowls and a basket of small loaves in the centre of the trestle. She flickered a circumspect glance at Alexander and met his eyes on her in similar scrutiny. Both of them immediately looked away, but not before Monday had noticed that Hervi’s rumpled spare clothes swamped the youth’s gaunt frame. Her head was filled with questions, but none that she could ask without appearing rude or forward.
Indeed, the conversation during the meal that followed was carried almost entirely by Hervi and her father as they discussed their tactics for the morrow’s tourney. Alexander ate in silence, but was obviously listening hard, absorbing every word like a young plant putting out roots in search of nourishment. Monday eyed his slender fingers gripping the handle of his spoon, contrasted them with the ham-like ugliness of Hervi’s and her father’s and found it difficult to imagine Alexander joining the two older men on the battlefield. It was much easier to see him as a monk. And he spoke so little that she half wondered if he had taken a vow of silence.
The repast was completed by a dish of raisins and slivers of dried apple. Alexander took only a small handful of the fruits and ate them slowly, declaring ruefully that he had lived so long without proper food that he had yet to adjust to eating a full meal again.
‘You are young,’ Arnaud said comfortably. ‘You’ll mend fast.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Alexander slowly chewed another sliver of apple, the taste sharp on his palate, and raised his eyes to Cerizay’s shrewd grey ones. ‘I want to earn my way in the world, not be a burden.’
‘Oh, you’ll earn your way all right,’ Hervi declared, ‘every penny of it.’ He spoke brusquely, his words a shield against revealing tender emotions.
Arnaud considered the younger man thoughtfully. ‘Can you fight?’
‘A little. I learned to use a spear and shield before I was sent away to Cranwell, and before he died, my father had begun to teach me the rudiments of swordplay, and how to ride like a knight.’
‘Aye, you weren’t a bad little horseman for a ten-year-old,’ Hervi acknowledged. ‘Of course, it depends how much you have remembered, and if you have any talent for the other skills.’
Arnaud finished his dried fruit and continued to study Alexander with slightly narrowed eyes. ‘Show me your hands,’ he said suddenly.
Obedient but mystified, Alexander held them out to him, palms upwards. There was scarcely a tremor now. A line of tough, blistered skin marked the labour of gripping a hoe and rake in the priory’s fields. His fingers too bore the rough texture of hard toil, but nothing could detract from their elegant symmetry. Arnaud took them in his, turned them over, pushed back the oversleeves and examined the long, scarred wrist-bones.
‘Takes after his mother,’ Hervi said. ‘There’ll never be any meat on him.’
‘He’s got time, and he is not as dainty as he looks,’ Arnaud answered judiciously. ‘See the strength of the bones here?’ He raised Alexander’s right wrist and presented it to Hervi like a horse-coper selling the points of a thoroughbred colt. ‘See the span here? Add some weight and experience, and here sits a competent soldier.’ He released the wrist. ‘How old are you, lad?’
‘He’ll be eighteen at the feast of St John,’ Hervi said.
‘So he will likely not grow any taller.’ Arnaud nodded.
‘He stands need to. His head’s already in the clouds!’
A faint smile crossed the older man’s face and he turned to his daughter. ‘Where are your knucklebones, child?’
As mystified as Alexander, Monday opened the small drawstring pouch at her waist, drew out the polished pig’s-foot knuckles with which she sometimes gamed of an evening, and handed them to her father.
‘Do you know how to play?’
Alexander nodded, his puzzlement deepening. Knucklebones was a game of speed, skill and manual dexterity. The bones were held loosely in the fist and then tossed in the air. The object was to catch them again on the back of the hand without dropping any.
‘Show me.’
Alexander glanced at Hervi, then back at Arnaud de Cerizay. With a shrug he took the bow-shaped pieces of bone and closed his fingers over them. If this was some strange form of initiation ceremony, then it was a simple enough test to pass.
Drawing a steady breath, he tossed the knucklebones lightly in the air and shot out his hand to catch. The sequence of movements was almost too swift for the eye to follow. Two knucklebones landed squarely. A third rocked on the edge of his hand but did not fall. Alexander tossed them again, this time centring them precisely, and then once more with the same result.
‘Go on.’ Arnaud gestured when he hesitated. ‘I will tell you when to stop.’
Time and again Alexander tossed and caught the bones, only dropping them once when Hervi moved on his stool and cast a sudden shadow over the play. At last Arnaud declared he had seen enough, and there was approval in his eyes as Alexander cupped the bones in his palm and returned them to Monday.
‘You have good coordination, lad,’ he commented, and smiled at Hervi. ‘Perhaps even better than your brother’s.’
‘Anyone can play knucklebones,’ Hervi growled. ‘Lance and sword and mace are different matters entirely.’
‘Oh, indeed they are, which is why he will have to practise until he weeps tears of blood,’ Arnaud replied. ‘What I am saying is that he has the potential to become skilled.’
Alexander flushed with pleasure. His mind’s eye was filled with the image of himself dressed as Hervi had been that afternoon, a sword at his hip and a mail coat meshing his body. ‘It is what I want to do,’ he said fervently.
Hervi bestowed him a brooding look but made no more adverse remarks. Clemence de Cerizay rose abruptly and began clearing away the empty bowls and bread basket. Glancing at her, Alexander saw that her lips were pursed and her eyelids tense. He could sense her irritation, but did not know what was wrong. There was a rueful expression on Arnaud’s face. Hervi examined his fingernails.
‘Some of us are here by necessity,’ Arnaud said. ‘God grant you peace of soul, the gift of wise choice and the wherewithal not to squander your life. You will need more than prowess in battle to survive.’