The Red Knight (10 page)

Mary burst into tears. ‘I protest, madame.’

The Queen gave her a small embrace. ‘I relent. He is a good man-at-arms. Let him go prove it to the king. And prove himself worthy of you.’

Mary curtsied.

The Queen nodded, and rose to her feet. ‘I go to attend the king. Think of this. It is our duty. Love – our love – is no light thing. It is be the crown of glory, available to
the best and only the best. It should be hard won. Think on it.’

She listened to them she went up the stairs – broad marble stairs of that the Old Men had wrought. They didn’t giggle, which pleased her.

The king was in the Arming Room, with two squires – Simon and Oggbert, as like as two peas in a pod, with matching freckles and matching pimples. He was down to his shirt and his hose and
his braes. His leg harnesses still lay on the floor having been removed, and each squire held a vambrace, wiping them down with chamois.

She smiled radiantly at them. ‘Begone,’ she said.

They fled, as adolescent boys do when faced with beautiful women.

The king sat back on his bench. ‘Ah! I see I have won your esteem!’ he grinned, and for a moment he was twenty years younger.

She knelt and undid a garter. ‘You are the king. You, and you alone, need never
win
my esteem.’

He watched her unbuckle the other garter. She buckled the two of them together and placed his leg harnesses together on a table behind her, and then, without hurry, she sat in his lap and put
her arms around his neck and kissed him until she felt him stir.

And then she rose to her feet and unlaced her gown. She did it methodically, carefully, without taking her eyes off him.

He watched her the way a wolf watches a lamb.

The gown fell away leaving her kirtle – a sheath of tight silk from ankle to neck.

The king rose. ‘Anyone might come in here,’ he said into her hair.

She laughed. ‘What care I?’

‘On your head be it, lady,’ he said, and produced a knife. He pressed the flat of the point against the skin of her neck and kissed her, and then cut the lace of her kirtle from neck
to waist, the knife so sharp that the laces seemed to fall away, and his cut so careful that the blade never touched her skin through the linen shift beneath it.

She laughed into his kiss. ‘I love it when you do that,’ she said. ‘You owe me a lace. A silk one.’ Her long fingers took the knife from him. She stepped back and cut the
straps of her shift at her shoulders and it fell away and she stabbed the knife into the top of the table so that it stuck.

He rid himself of his shirt and braes with more effort and far less elegance, and she laughed at him. And then they were together.

When they were done, she lay on his chest. Some of his hair was grey. She played with it.

‘I am old,’ he said.

She wriggled atop him. ‘Not so very old,’ she said.

‘I owe you more than a kirtle lace of silk,’ he said.

‘Really?’ she asked, and rose above him. ‘Never mind the shift, love – Mary will replace the straps in an hour.’

‘I was not being so literal. I owe you my life. I owe you – my continued interest in this endless hell that is kingship.’ He grunted.

She looked down. ‘Endless hell – but you love it. You
love
it.’

The king pulled her down and hid his face in her hair. ‘Not as much as I love you.’

‘What is it?’ she asked, playing with his beard. ‘You are plagued by something . . . ?’

He sighed. ‘One of my favourite men left me today. Ranald Lachlan. Because he has to make himself a fortune in order to wed your Lady Almspend.’

She smiled. ‘
He
is a worthy man, and he will prove himself or die trying.’

The king sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But by God, woman, I was tempted to give him a bag of gold and a knighthood to keep him by me.’

‘And you would have deprived him of the glory of earning his way,’ she said.

He shrugged and said, ‘It is good that one of us is an idealist.’

‘If you are in a giving mood,’ she said, ‘might we have a tournament?’

The king was a strong man with a fighter’s muscles, and he sat up despite her weight on his chest. ‘A tournament. By God, lady – is that what this was in aid of?’

She grinned at him. ‘Was it so bad?’

He shook his head. ‘I should be very afraid, were you to decide to do something I didn’t fancy, inside that pretty head. Yes, of course we can have a tournament. But the wrong men
always win, and the town’s a riot for a week, and the castle’s a mess, you, my dear, are a mess, and I have to arrest men whose only crime was to drink too much. All that, for your
whim?’ He laughed.

Desiderata laughed, throwing her head back, and she read his desire in his eyes. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘All that for my whim.’

He laughed with her. And then frowned. ‘And there are the rumours from the north,’ he said.

‘Rumours?’ she asked. Knowing full well what they were – war and worse in the northlands, and incursions from the Wild. It was her business to know them.

The king shrugged. ‘Never mind, love. We shall have a tournament, but it may have to wait until after the spring campaign.’

She clapped her hands. Spring was, at last, upon them.

The Red Knight

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

A
my’s Hob managed to get his nag to a gallop for long enough to reach the Captain in good time. The company was stretched out along the
road in march order – no wagons, no baggage, no followers. Those were in camp with a dozen lances as guards.

‘Lord – Gelfred says he’s found its earth. Away in the forest. Trail and hole.’ Amy’s Hob was a little man with a nose that had been broken as often as he’d
been outlawed.

The scout held up his hunting horn, and in it was a clod of excrement.

The fewmets
, thought the captain, wrinkling his nose in distaste. Gelfred’s revenge for his impiety – sometimes close adherence to the laws of venery could constitute their
own revenge. He gave the scout a sharp nod. ‘I’ll just take Gelfred’s word for it, shall I?’ he said. He stood in his stirrups and bellowed ‘Armour up,
people!’

Word moved down the column faster than a galloping horse. Men and women laced their arming caps and donned their helmets – tall bassinets, practical kettle hats, or sturdy barbutes.
Soldiers always rode out armed from head to foot – but only a novice or an overeager squire rode in his helmet or gauntlets. Most knights didn’t don their helmets until they were in the
face of the enemy.

Michael brought the captain’s high-peaked helmet and held it high over his head to slide the mail aventail, the cape that protected the neck and depended from the lower rim of the helmet,
over his shoulders. Then he seated the helmet firmly on the padded arming cap, visor pinned up.

The captain motioned for his squire to pause and reached up to pull the ends of his moustache clear of the mail. He was very proud of his moustache. It did a great deal to hide his age –
or lack of it.

Then Michael adjusted the fall of the aventail over his breastplate, checked the buckles under his arms, and pushed the gauntlets on to his master’s hands, one at a time, while the captain
watched the road to the north.

‘How far up the road?’ he asked Hob.

‘A little farther. We’ll cross the burn and then follow it west into the trees.’

He had the second gauntlet on, and Michael unbuckled the captain’s riding sword and took his long war sword from Toby, who was standing between them on foot, holding it out, a look of
excitement on his plain face and a biscuit in his free hand.

Michael handed the shorter riding sword down to Toby, and girded him with the sword of war. Three and a half pounds of sharp steel, almost four feet long.

The weight always affected the captain – that weight at his side meant business.

He looked back, standing a little in his stirrups, feeling the increased weight of his armour.

The column had tightened up.

‘How far?’ he asked Hob.

‘A league. Less. Not an hour’s walk.’ Hob shrugged. His hands were shaking.

‘Standard front, then. At my word – Walk!’ called the captain. He turned to his squire. ‘Whistle. Not the trumpet.’

Michael understood. He had a silver whistle around his neck. Carlus, the giant trumpeter and company armourer, shrugged and fell back.

The column shifted forward, into a walk, the horses suddenly eager, ears pricked forward and heads up. The chargers quivered with excitement – the lighter ronceys ridden by the archers
caught the bug from the bigger horses. Along the column, the less able riders struggled to control their mounts.

Up a long hill they went, and then back down – to a burn running fast with the water of two days’ rain. Hob led them west into the trees.

Now that they were at the edge of the Wild, the captain had time to note that the trees were still nearly bare. Buds showed here and there, but the north country was not yet in spring, and snow
lay in the lee of the larger rocks.

He could see a long way in these woods.

And that meant other things could see him, especially when he was resplendent in mirror-white armour, scarlet and gilt.

He led them on for another third of a league, the column snaking along behind him, two abreast, easily negotiating the sparse undergrowth. The trees were enormous, their branches thick and long,
but stretching out high above even Bad Tom’s head.

But when an inner sense said that he was courting disaster –
imagine that taloned monster in among this column before we were off our horses and ready
– he raised his right
fist to signal a halt and then spread his arms – always good exercise, in armour – and waved them downwards, once.
Dismount.

He dismounted carefully, to Grendel’s disgust. Grendel liked a fight. Liked to feel the hot squirt of blood in his mouth.

Not this time
, the captain thought, and patted his destrier’s shoulder.

Toby came and took his head.

‘Don’t go wandering off, young Toby,’ the captain said cheerfully. ‘All officers.’

Michael, already off his horse and collected, blew a whistle blast. Then handed the captain a short spear with a blade as long as a grown man’s arm at one end and a sharp spike at the
other.

Jehannes and Hugo and Milus walked up, their armour almost silent.

‘Gelfred has the beast under observation. Less than a league away. I want a spread line, heavy on the wings, light in the loins, and every man-at-arms with an archer tight to his
back.’ The captain glanced about.

‘The usual, then,’ said Jehannes. His tone suggested that the captain should have said as much.

‘The usual. Fill the thing full of arrows and get this done.’ This was not the right moment to spar with Jehannes, who was his best officer, and disapproved of him nonetheless. He
looked around for inspiration.

‘Thick woods,’ Jehannes said. ‘Not good for the archers.’

The captain raised his hand. ‘Don’t forget that Gelfred and two of our huntsmen are out there,’ he said. ‘Don’t let’s shoot them full of arrows,
too.’

The rear two-thirds of the column came forward in an orderly mob and rolled out to the north and south, forming a rough crescent two hundred ells long, in three rough ranks – knights in
the front rank, squires in the middle, both men covering an archer to the rear. Some of the archers carried six-foot bows of a single stave, and some carried heavy crossbows, and a few carried
eastern horn bows.

The captain looked at his skirmish line and nodded. His men really were good. He could see Sauce, off to the north, and Bad Tom beyond her. What else could they do? Be outlaws? He gave them
purpose.

I like them
, he thought.
All of them. Even Shortnose and Wilful Murder.

He grinned, and wondered who he would be, if he had not found this.

‘Let’s get this done,’ he said aloud. Michael blew two sharp blasts, and they were moving.

He’d counted two hundred paces when Gelfred appeared off to his left. He waved both arms, and the captain lifted a fist, and the line shuffled to a halt. A single shaft, released by a
nervous archer, rattled through the underbrush and missed the huntsman by an ell. Gelfred glared.

Milus spat. ‘Get his name,’ he growled. ‘Fucking new fuck.’

Gelfred ran to the captain. ‘It’s big,’ he said. ‘But not, I think, our quarry. It is – I don’t know how to describe it. It’s different. It’s
bigger.’ He shrugged. ‘I may be wrong.’

The captain weighed this. Looked into the endless trees. Stands of evergreen and alder stood denser than the big, older oaks and ashes.

He could feel it. It knew they were there.

‘It’s going to charge us,’ the captain said. He spoke as flatly as he could, so as not to panic his men. ‘Stand ready,’ he called.
To hell with silence
.

Behind him, Michael’s breathing grew louder.