The White Cross (4 page)
It takes an effort to remember what was in your mind when you have changed it since. But when I try to make some sense of what I was and how I acted, I see that I was fated from the cradle to become a soldier.
‘You have to be the strongest man. D’ye hear me, Garon? The bravest and the best. It is expected of you even by the peasants.’
‘But how?’ my childish treble, ‘How must I do it, Father?’
‘We’ll send you to the sergeantry at Lewes to be trained, my boy, that’s how. A knight who isn’t skilled in arms can count for nothing in this world, remember that. It is your destiny to fight.’
I think he only told me once, but I believe I have it word for word.
My father died soon afterwards, before he’d time to teach me any of his skills, before I’d time to know him. I have so little of him even now. His voice in memory seems very loud, and the picture that I have of a red face behind a big moustache might be the real Sir Gervase or merely something from a child’s imagination. Because the truth is that I barely knew him. I only know that from that day his words rang in my memory like verses in a chanson: ‘A knight who isn’t skilled in arms can count for nothing in this world, remember that. It is your destiny to fight.’
Looking back, I see there was no other path to follow. If I’d ever wanted more, or less, I can’t recall it. I needed life to mean something and found the meaning in my father’s words. To say mine was a simple mind would be to state the obvious.
But boyhood? How should I recall it? At Lewes Fortress in a world removed from all the easy freedoms of the Haddertun domain I was set to cleaning harness, trotting at the heels of any squire who’d take the time to show me what to do. Everything around me was so large and strange that I felt crushed. I learned about the casual cruelties men practice on each other, and on boys. Obedience was beaten into me by squires and sergeants who managed to find fault with almost everything I did. I learned to cope with the pain and take the blows without complaint.
But if I felt small and powerless, I knew that some day I would grow, and when I most missed my nurse, Grazilda, and wept into my pallet, I made sure that I did it in the dark and silently so no one else could hear. Soft living was for women not for boys. If ever I felt weakness through those early days in Lewes, I knew that from hard exercise I’d find the strength to make the most of the peak years of manhood when they came. That was the shield I carried to protect me. I ran headlong and fought and played at war with other boys in service to the Earl to gain the skills I needed. My small body was seldom free of half-healed cuts and bruises. But I took pride them and in the scars they left, as I sought ever to be stronger.
Was I more real then in the body of that child than I am here and now? It hardly seems so from this distance and this height above the world, and yet I have to try to understand the difference.
I hung around the castle armourers to watch them work, collecting notched blades, blunted daggers, shattered spears, learning everything there was to know about the management of weapons, my mind set on a narrow path. And when people talked of life beyond the world of arms and warfare, I closed my ears. I couldn’t read or write. But I saw beauty in the sinews of an arm, the true flight of a javelin, the perfect execution of a sword-cut, and if I feared that I would never have the force or courage to become a knight, I hid the fear away. Yes, even from myself.
In due course as a spotty squire I learned to care for what the best knights care for most, their mounts, their arms and armour, and their own oiled bodies. I discovered how to sharpen weapons to so fine an edge they cut a human hair, and all the while I studied to be rigorous and brave, to be the son my father wanted.
‘The four best weapons in a soldier’s armoury are bone an’ sinew, strength of grip, sharpness of eye,’ the fortress arms-master, Guillaume, impressed on all of us who trained for knighthood. ‘Look after them boys, an’ they’ll look after you.’
By then we drilled on horseback with cut-down lances and light shields, to stretch the sinews of our arms and shoulders at the pell. We fed our bones and muscles with red meat and gallons of fresh milk, rode at the ring and quintain, fought hand-to-hand with daggers, quarterstaves, with broad and short swords, with bucklers and with clenched fists until we scarce could stand. I learned a number of sure ways to stop a man, by winding, groining, hamstringing, disabling his sword-arm, and other ways to kill him outright. My every thought and action was of arms or warfare, and when I prayed to God I always prayed for more strength, greater valour, prowess in the field, which I believed was where true honour lay.
In time the other fortress boys came to respect me for achievement, although in truth I wasn’t so much better than the rest. We sparred and wrestled in the outer ward. We played at quoits and football and at horseplay of all kinds, and talked of girls and cunts and viewed each other’s male developments. It was a happy time for me in many ways, all action and bravado. And yes, I see it now, the things that came to count with me when I’d put Haddertun behind me were the approval of my peers and my dead father.
I never learned my letters and had little skill with speech. But one day when I was twelve or thereabouts, I made bid to impress Guillaume. I can’t remember rightly how I put it. But I boasted to him in so many words that more than anything I loved to fight. At which he frowned and taught me something else I kept in mind for years: ‘You eat for pleasure, sing for pleasure, fuck for pleasure,’ he allowed. ‘But ye don’t fight for love of it, you fight to win.’
Adult life began when as a lanky lad of fourteen I took the Sacrament for the first time, and brought my own colt from the Haddertun domain to train. I lost part of an ear that year and bled a pond of blood. But it had healed by the spring following, when I was dubbed a knight. They shut me in the castle chapel for a night of vigil, bathed me, dressed me in my father’s hauberk, buckled on his German broadsword and pushed me forward to assume my right to fight for Church and King. I felt My Lord of Warenne’s blade rest on my shoulder for the accolade. I placed my hands between his palms to swear my solemn oaths of fealty, and took for my knight-motto the single word, ‘Victoire’.
And yet in spite of all, my title of Sir Garon felt like my father’s linkmail hauberk, something I must grow to fit.
At twenty-one I came of age, and through my service to the Earl was granted profits from my mother’s manor. She kissed me formally and handed me the key of Haddertun as its Seigneur, a thing which I confess I valued more for its displacement of her second husband than for the income it would bring me. By then my skill at arms had earned me a reputation with the soldiery, and I enjoyed the fellowship of men whose thoughts and actions were as simple as my own. That’s one side of the story. The other was that I had grown into an oaf to whom the exercise of violence was a natural as the movement of his bowels.
And something else. Soon after my majority the Old King died, and that same year his heir, Duke Richard of Anjou, licensed a trépignée, a tournament of mounted knights, to meet at Lewes on Saint Augustine’s Day to raise funds for his enterprise to save Jerusalem. For me it had to be the perfect chance to show my prowess as a knight.
And something else again. Because if this is Judgement Day, I have to make confession that of all the things that were to change my life that year, my marriage seemed the least important. I didn’t choose the girl. She had been chosen for me, and looking down it isn’t hard to see that at the time my thoughts were elsewhere, with weaponry and preparations for the fray. I had no time to think about the marriage and was content to leave arrangements to my mother. Sir Hugh, she said, would fetch the damsel from the fortress for inspection. All I need do was bid her welcome.
‘And try to look a little pleased while you’re about it,’ she advised.
I see myself inside that tent when I look back. But I don’t see Elise, at least not clearly. What was it that she wore? Something rosy-coloured? I know she had a pink gown for the wedding, that may have been the one. It is so difficult when you look back to separate the things you’ve seen at different times. I’m sure I must have seen that she was small, because she always made me feel a giant beside her. Her hair? I couldn’t say for sure, but seem to think that it was gathered up into some kind of veil arrangement? I would have noticed she was fair, that she was small and fair with ripe breasts and a dairymaid’s complexion. But none of it quite adds up to a picture of her in the tent. ’Though now I come to think, there was something a little odd about the way she stood, a pose, the kind of thing that damsels practice for effect?
No one had taught me how to greet a lady. So maybe it’s as well that I’ve forgotten what I said. Some kind of clumsy welcome prompted by my mother? Or something even more block-headed of my own? I’m not sure that I even smiled when she presented me with that ridiculous and useless saddle.
Can I remember how we parted? Or her return to Lewes? Or whether Hugh escorted them back to the fortress. I fear I can’t. Because the next thing I recall is seeing her up in the Earl of Warenne’s stand when we rode out to take our places on the field of tournament.
Now that I do remember…
Pennons of all colours – sunlight glinting on armour, freshly painted shields, moving figures, horses, bustle. Marvellous!
But here he comes, straight as a candle in the saddle with my green favour on his arm. The black horse is enormous (and we know what’s said of men who ride big horses!). And just look at him – so fierce and proud! So thrilled to play the warrior he’s positively trembling with excitement!
In just a moment, any moment he’ll look up to see if I am watching – the thought I’ve carried with me since I dressed.
‘Lady, I’ll strive for you alone.’ That’s what I’d like him to be thinking – and the thing about a good imagination is that you can take it anywhere you like. (When I was little I pretended sometimes to be Princess Sabra, defended from the dragon by Saint George.) But here’s Sir Hugh again on his big dappled grey, helm off for homage to the Earl.
You’d have to be entirely blind to miss the grace of that man’s figure on a horse.
And now they’re looking up, both looking up at once to see me leaning forward. Both men smiling.
Would it seem ill-bred if I waved?
She was seated in the west stand at the very front, leaning out with one hand on the rail. At least I have that picture clear in mind. On either side of her were our two mothers, a place or two from where the Earl and Countess sat beneath the blazon of Warenne. It was her green scarf around my arm which prompted me to seek her out, and smirk to think where other knights tied married ladies’ favours for good fortune.
She raised a hand and smiled. I thought at me until I heard de Bernay laugh. That’s when I really saw her first, and how I see her now. Her gown was blue.
But I’m already out of order, because the tournament began for me much earlier that day.
By dawn my father’s old campaign tent was wet with condensation. I’d barely slept, but watched the canvas turn from black to grey before I rose and dragged a cloak about my shoulders.
Outside, a track wound through the camp to the defendants’ wooden bar-gate, padlocked to horsemen at this hour but not to barefoot youths. The field of combat lay six hundred paces long and near half as wide, enclosed on all sides by the old town walls, the river and the Priory. In winter-time the place was waterlogged, so damp the Priory monks were said to have webbed feet and sooty balls from hoisting skirts to smoking fires. But by the early dawn of Saint Augustine’s Day the field was fit for action.
White mist blanketed the river and my feet left footprints in the dew. Watching jackdaws flutter like black rags above the Priory roofs, I thought of Raoul in his canvas stall and reached in my imagination to stroke his silky neck. Staring at an empty field I heard the blare of clarions and felt the quake of the first charge, thirty against thirty, war-hardened veterans and untried knights like me, thundering full tilt from North to South and South to North to crash together in sight of those to whom they owed allegiance – defendants for the Earl and throne of England, appellants for Archbishop Baldwin and the Church.
For weeks I’d trained for this one day. You could say all my life. ‘Oh Lord God for whom all things are possible,’ I prayed, ‘help me succeed, to suffer wounds without complaint and be deserving of the victor’s crown. Help me to win more ransoms in the cause of the croisade, than any other knight!’
I didn’t mention Hugh by name, although of course if I’d been God I would have known that’s who I meant. But then again, if I’d been God and heard a young fool praying in a misty field to be the first knight of the tournament, I’d probably have laughed at his effrontery and made a note to teach the fool a lesson.
The Priory bell tolling for prime office roused the camp, and others were abroad when I returned, reviving fires and coaxing horses out into the thoroughfares between the tents. Men strolled about half-naked, making breakfast, shouting through the woodsmoke. Inside my father’s tent Sir Hugh lay face-down on his pallet with the firm hands of his squire, Fremund, working on the muscles of his back and shoulders. He opened one eye as I entered, then the other.
‘Well now, you’ve been to pace the field then have you, boy, to see the way it lies?’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me that you’ve planned the trépignée on our behalf whilst we poor dormice slept?’
‘No point in asking if you know the answer,’ I said rudely, and went on to tell him I had studied where the pitfalls were most like to be, and prayed for victory in the coming fray. Although whatever confidence and depth I tried to put into my voice when I addressed that man, it somehow always managed to sound false, and looking back I see just what a walking invitation I was to de Bernay.