Chapter 4
Sir Tancred’s armor was hotter than his
own, and lighter. As his squire buckled on the older knight’s
sword, Ranulf felt as if he was wearing a burning
eggshell.
The man had kept his word, though; he
had swapped armor and horse for the day. As the black knight, Sir
Tancred had retired to Ranulf’s tent, giving out that he was
unwell. In these days of pestilence, such a message ensured he
would have no visitors.
“I will sleep,” Sir Tancred had said,
shaking Ranulf’s hand. “There is sure to be feasting and dancing at
the castle later, and I would be fresh for that.”
Ranulf, a trickle of sweat already
dripping down his back, now ran his ungloved hand over the neck and
back of Sir Tancred’s gray charger, allowing the horse to smell and
feel and become accustomed to him. The horse, which Sir Tancred
said was called Hector, was rather better than the nags Ranulf had
seen with the knight at previous tournaments. When he remarked on
Hector’s good looks, Sir Tancred had been quite open and unabashed
about how he had acquired the beast.
“Yes, I know he is fine, and it is all
down to my Lady of Lilies. She brought me Hector.”
“And from where had she such a horse?”
Ranulf had asked, but he was given no answer. Sir Tancred had been
keen to praise the princess and nothing else.
“Easy, lad, easy, great Hector.” Ranulf
coaxed the horse, stroking him over, lifting and checking each of
the charger’s huge hooves in turn. Hector had put his ears back
once and then settled; in spirit he seemed as easygoing as his
master.
“Which is why that Princess can wind
him like a ribbon round her finger,” Ranulf grunted into the
horse’s chest. He was boiling in this wretched plate and mail suit,
though the mail was a little loose on him. The plate armor was a
new thing and he was surprised Tancred had some.
“No doubt due to our Lady of Lilies
again, but how does a princess from Cathay know of these
things?”
Hector whickered softly, as if in
agreement.
“And that sword of his, my lad—it has a
wicked point. I have not seen such a blade before today. ’Twill be
most deadly earnest in combat: a sharp tip to stab through slits in
armor. I wager that is our lady’s influence, also.”
Ranulf patted Hector’s flank and began
to groom his haunches, motioning to his squire to groom the horse’s
other side. Questions bit at him like fleas: Was she truly from
China? Did women really dress that way there? How did she know of
metal and swords? Why was she not at the court of the
king?
Lady Blanche was a true and sprightly
lady but the castle of Fitneyclare was, in brute terms, small and
old. Lady Blanche and Lord Richard were not swimming in wealth: the
joust was here because London was filled with pestilence and the
nobility scattered. He himself would not have come had it not been
that the tourney, any tourney, was his life these days. He knew
that the prizes would be small.
Why, then, would a princess of the East
come here?
Deep in thought, he placed his own helm
on his head—he would not ever fight in another knight’s helmet—and
covered it with the trinkets Sir Tancred had used in his costume.
It gave him particular pleasure to thread and pin the princess’s
tokens to his chest where she would be certain to see them. Why
not? Today he fought as an unknown knight, and Olwen would have
understood.
Even so, he tucked one of Olwen’s seed
pearls into his glove, feeling less disloyal as the smooth bead
settled into the hollow of his palm. He was used to fighting with
something of his wife’s snug against his skin.
A memory of them cuddling scorched
through him, twisting in his heart. Longing to blot out the pain,
he mounted Hector and straightened in the saddle, desperate to
begin. Any challenge would do, and as proxy to Sir Tancred—no, Sir
Dew of the Moon—he had plenty.
“Stay here. I will carry the spare
lances,” he had told Edmund, knowing that otherwise he would be
recognized by his lanky squire. He wound a cloth about his helm,
hiding his face, and spurred his borrowed horse to gallop to the
place of battle.
Beneath him Hector caught his mood and
snorted, racing smoothly now as Ranulf gave him his
head.
Let it be that knight
with the badge of white and red fist. Let me know him again, even
if he fights in the costume of a nun. Let it be
him.
Edith touched her gloves, ensuring that
they were snug and covered her hands. She knew this was a nervous
habit, but after months of artifice and pretense, she was still
fretful in the company of ladies.
Men held no fear for her. She had made
her costumes to distract men. The silks and rarer cottons she and
those of her company wore were truly from the East, brought back by
her sailor grandfather and hidden by his wife, who had considered
them too exotic. Edith, aware she had a gift for seeing shape and
lines, the whole appearance and function of a thing, had imagined
her princess costumes as she might have done a sword or a mace—as a
vital weapon. She had conceived them in the same deadly serious
manner as she would have created a dagger.
“You have a knack for it,” Teodwin had
remarked once, “as I have for tents and garlands, it
seems.”
Teodwin, the former grumbler and
loudmouth, was right. Cutting a gaudy figure in purple silk, he was
more active, agile, and happy than Edith had ever seen
him.
Even his weeping sores had cleared up.
But then, leaving the serfdom of the fields had released something
in each of the former villagers, and all her people had discovered
new talents. The world of chivalry was an enchantment to them: “It
is as if we are living in a story,” as Maria had said.
But the damsels of these tournaments
were dangerous. Even the “Brides of the Joust”—the women who
followed the knights and squires from tourney to tourney—were a
risk. They were more observant than men, more keen on the forms of
manners, more likely to notice if she made a mistake in how she ate
or drank or conversed. She always exaggerated her “Eastern” accent
amidst womenfolk, and spoke as little as possible.
“You are comfortable, Princess?” Lady
Blanche asked at once, noticing her slight movement. “This English
sun is not too strong for you?”
“It is not, madam,” Edith answered
slowly.
“The color of your veil today is very
pretty,” said Lady Blanche, screwing up her slight pop-eyes as if
trying to look behind her veil.
“Thank you, madam. Yellow is considered
to be a lucky color in my land.” I should have
complimented her on some part of her costume, Edith thought
too late. Talking over trifles was a strange thing to her; in the
village there had been no time for such matters.
“Yellow is my color today,” said
another woman eagerly. She was standing close to the seats,
sheltering from the afternoon sun beneath the awning, although
Edith knew she was no maid or lady. She was not a trader, either,
and by custom Edith knew she should not speak to her.
“The tunic looks very fine on you,” she
remarked, while beside her Lady Blanche was stiff and horse-faced
with disapproval.
The young redheaded woman—scarcely more
than a girl—sniffed in surprise, grinned, and then whirled off in a
gaudy spiral of yellow, the pendants round her neck clashing as she
sped away.
“You must not encourage the
dagger-girls, Princess,” said Lady Blanche at once. “Women aping
men are best not spoken to.”
“In my land, all speak to all,” Edith
replied, wishing she might be braver. The girls who chose to follow
the joust and come to tourneys dressed as young men, displaying
their legs and figures in male tunics and sporting the daggers that
gave such girls their nickname, were more akin to her than they
knew. But even with dagger-girls, even with indulgent Sir Tancred,
she dared say nothing of her true state.
The dagger-girl who
thinks she has won some words of praise from a princess would be
less pleased if she knew I am a peasant.
Arrogance was the way of the world, but
since it gained her and her folk food, shelter, fine clothes,
flowers, music, and the spectacle of men-at-arms who fought in play
and not in lethal intent, Edith had chosen to be as proud as the
rest. She nodded now, as if in thanks, to Lady Blanche, and hearing
the familiar rumble of hooves, turned her attention to the
approaching knights.
She saw Sir Tancred mounted on Hector,
the war horse she and her people had discovered slowly starving in
a barn where Hector’s master had crawled away to die. She smiled at
the pearls and billowing gray cloak: Sir Tancred always entered
enthusiastically into the festive parts of the joust. It was his
fighting skills that were less than lethal.
“Poor Sir T,” she murmured softly, then
suddenly, seeing the two lances he carried, she straightened,
sitting stiff-backed on her cushion.
Sir Tancred never carried more than one
lance!
So who was this knight fighting in his
place?
A wave of heat flooded up her throat
and she swallowed a mouthful of bitter bile. Sir Tancred had done
this without her knowledge, and any change she did not know of was
alarming because it could be a threat to her and her
people.
“He sits well in the saddle, Sir Dew of
the Moon,” remarked Lady Blanche beside her. Her ladies agreed,
whispering and pointing, some giggling behind their hands, and
Edith nodded, swallowing a second time. She knew who it would be,
and seeing her own favors littered across his broad chest, she
suspected why he had done this.
I refused him a favor
and he has gained many, by way of deceit. He
has lied! He is no true knight!
As you are no true
princess, Gregory-in-her-memory reminded her. Edith thrust
this disconcerting thought aside and leaned forward, squinting
through the dazzling sun. She was glad his head was covered; she
did not have to look at his smug, victorious face. Deep in her
chest came an old ache, one of disappointment.
Why must men be so
petty? He looks like King Arthur returned, grand as a bear and
moving with the horse as if he is a centaur. The sun gilds his
armor, he carries his sword and lances as easily as if they were
flowers. He stands in his stirrups, bowing his head in polite
acknowledgment of the cheering crowd and damsels. And all the time
he holds my things and clutches them in spiteful
glee.
She had known other men like that. Men
who would not accept “no” as an answer. . . .
“Do not judge,” she murmured, failing
to suppress a shiver as other memories roosted in her mind like
rooks in a tree. “Adam was, in the end, a good man, and Peter may
have been, had he lived.”
But was this nameless
knight?
Who is he? She
would have asked Sir Tancred, but he was no doubt taking his ease
in the stranger’s tent and, she hoped, avoiding the sellers of
day-old herring pies. Her middling knight was middling for several
reasons, one being that he preferred song and poetry to
fighting.
As do I, but this
knight of the stream is different.
He rode with an intent that made her
tremble, now without acknowledging others on the field or the good
wishes of the spectators but speeding by all, as if he was
searching for someone. His intensity, the way he was locked within
himself, made her tremble afresh, the more so when she realized he
also had Sir Tancred’s new sword, the one she had devised after
many hours of careful tourney watching, putting her smithying
skills to use for a week in a deserted hamlet where even the
animals had fled.
He has not drawn it
yet, but what if he uses it as intended, to drive between a
knight’s chain mail? I could give this sword to Tancred, for he is
no killer, but this stranger knight is far
harder.
“Princess? Pardon, I mean, my Lady
Jade?” Lady Blanche touched her arm, but Edith, rising to her feet
so swiftly that her stool and cushion both overturned, scarcely
heard or felt anything. She kicked off her shoes, the better to
run.
“He is making for someone,” she
breathed, as the knight stood up on his stirrups again and roared
out an unintelligible challenge, flinging aside a lance and
couching the other, spurring Hector to a speed the warhorse had
never tried before.
“A doughty call to arms,” remarked Lady
Blanche, while her ladies burst into applause, but Edith was
already hastening for the steps out of the wooden stand. At the far
end of the jousting field, scrambling to be ready, she could see a
knight dressed as a monk, with a brown cassock over his armor. He
was hefting a white shield with a red fist blazoned upon it,
raising it desperately to his face as the unknown knight thrust his
own lance directly at his opponent’s eyes. Edith was too far away
to see, but she could imagine the stark horror on Sir Henry’s
face—he carried a white shield with a red fist. Sir Henry, who had
been injured and was only now recovered—
She ran out onto the jousting ground,
heedless of the shouts, deftly avoiding the squires who tried to
stop her. “Murder!” The word and fear burst from her lips as, at
the last moment, the unknown knight lowered his lance, smashing it
against Sir Henry’s middle, knocking him off his mount into the
dust.
“Stop, stop!” Edith called out, hearing
Sir Henry’s wild cries of “I yield, sir! Mercy, I yield! God’s
bones, Sir Tancred—”
The rest of Sir Henry’s complaint was
stopped as the unknown knight launched himself off Hector and
kicked Sir Henry savagely in the crotch. While he whimpered and
writhed, the stranger knight tore the shield from his twitching arm
and began to beat him with it.
“Like this, do you?” he was roaring.
“Like to see how it feels?”
Edith, closing fast, and skidding aside
from a second yelling squire, shouted, “No!” The knight was drawing
the sword. She feared the worst. “No!”
Amazingly, he heard. Looming over the
stricken, moaning Sir Henry, the knight stopped and turned his
head.
“Get back, woman.”
“Stop. Please, stop,” Edith gasped,
checking herself within a long-sword’s length of him. She had run
so hard she could see lights swimming before her eyes, but the
stranger’s face, half hidden by the swathes of gray cloths and his
helm, was altogether dark and his eyes were black with
rage.
“One of yours, is he?”
Edith could hear the contempt in his
voice, while at their feet, Sir Henry now coiled onto his side and
was copiously sick on the grass. It was worse than a barney on the
village green at Warren Hemlet, and as inglorious. She felt ashamed
to have witnessed it. “Please,” she said again, hating the way her
voice was cracked and her throat as dry as a grave. “As a favor to
me, Sir Jade.”
“You claim me as your husband, do you,
Lady Jade?”
Edith sank to her knees in exhaustion
and shock. Scraps of what Sir Tancred had told her in the tent that
morning came back to her with the force of hammer blows. She knew
who this knight was now. Sir Ranulf of Fredenwyke, who fought in
honor of his dead wife.
“Where is your black armor?” she
whispered.
He scowled, flinging aside the cloth
from his helmet, his handsome face revealed to be as dark as his
armor.
“Mercy, for the sake of your wife?” she
asked, her head feeling as if it would explode, her heart was
beating so hard and fast. “Sir Ranulf?”
He glared at her as if she had struck
him with dung.
“For that piece of cleverness, madam,
and to stop your lips from mentioning my dear wife ever again, I
give you this noble knight.” He kicked the
pallid Sir Henry on the knee, so harshly that Edith heard the bone
beneath grind. The stricken, unfortunate Henry yelled out
again.
“You should spare some of your Eastern
care on his page, also,” Sir Ranulf spat out as he strode toward
her. “That is, if you can spare the time between your own wanton
amusements and sports.”
“What page is this?” Part of her was
furious at the rest of his accusations but she kept that down,
stamped on it and hammered it down in her mind, keen to learn about
the child. She had not known Sir Henry had any pages in his
retinue.
“One I will take now as my own. Some
brutes are not fit to keep a dog, but then, what do you care?
Clearly, you judge men by other means.”
His free hand was in a tight fist, as
if he wanted to strike her, but now he straightened his fingers,
jabbing toward her bare middle, dismissing her and the costume with
that single gesture. He stalked by, passing so close that one of
his borrowed ropes of pearls struck her across her face. She
flinched at the shock but he kept going, keeping her favors and
ignoring the gasps of the spectators as he moved to mount his
borrowed horse and to take Sir Henry’s for his own, as a
prize.
“She did not know about the page,” Offa
said again. “And she sent her own healer to tend him. The one you
sent away.”
“Leave it, man.” Ranulf had heard
enough. Offa had been whining at his ungentle treatment of the
princess for the rest of the day’s joust. “Get some rest in the
wagon. You have an early start and a long journey ahead of you
tomorrow.”
His steward instantly turned and
marched out of his tent without any kind of bow and Ranulf cursed
long and heartily. In one corner, Edmund his squire was teaching
chess to the new page Gawain, who crouched over the pieces like a
shivering little animal. No doubt the poor little lad was convinced
that he had come to a worse master.
“Play well, you two, and do not sit up
too late.” Ranulf nodded to the pair and left.
Knowing he was fit for no one’s
company, he did not leave the camp for the castle but took a cold
bath in the stream. Once he thought he heard a gasp, issuing from
the tree where the little brown maid had been, but only a cat
stared back at him from the bushes, and when he lay back in the
river the evening was fine and still. He floated on his back,
thinking of the cosmos and the wonder of God, of worlds, perhaps,
beyond this one, of a time without pestilence, and told himself it
was enough.
Edith draped the clean, dripping
washing over the bushes beside her camp in order to dry it. Ranulf
of Fredenwyke had almost caught her again by the river. She had
thought he would be dancing with the damsels at the castle, not
bathing. He had a splendid shape, a handsome body, but watching him
lolling in the water, she told herself she had no more desire for
him.
He is a dreamer,
besides, and that is nonsense. The world is as it is and we know of
nothing else, nothing beyond it. There may be nothing beyond it.
Only an idle knight and a simpering damsel can be dreamers; the
rest of us must work.
She had pounded the washing on the
stones farther up the river, away from him. It was the wrong time
of day for such work, but she had been compelled to do something;
she was so annoyed with that man. Now her arms ached and her chest
ached and her rough tunic—she had changed to do the washing—was as
wet as a fish. She had not gone to the castle because of
manners—she always dreaded being seated and trapped at a feast,
where the women would see she did not know how to
behave.
But I do not throw
kindness in another’s face. He could have accepted my healer for
the little lad, if little lad there is. She had not been
able to ask Sir Henry and would not: she knew she would get no true
answers.
Still, I can do
something. He calls me wanton. He shall know what wanton
is.
She smiled as she pinned the last of
the sheet onto the hawthorn, scarcely feeling the prickle of the
thorns, she was so deep in thought and planning.