As the days passed, the heat of the summer grew. The air was thick with it, a terrible, invisible blanket they were forced to push through. Elaine appeared to be suffering most, emerging from her tent late and unrested, sweating greenly on top of her horse, picking listlessly at her food when they stopped for meals, and offering little by way of conversation. Humphrey worried that she might be ill, but she brushed off his concern.
‘It’s this weather,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand it. I can’t wait for it to break.’ She glowered at the blue sky, which stubbornly refused to produce even one small cloud.
‘We could reduce our hours in the saddle,’ suggested Humphrey. ‘Only ride first thing in the morning and then late evening before it gets dark. Stay in the shade in the heat of the day.’
‘No!’ said Elaine. ‘We’ve got to press on. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’
Humphrey agreed, even though the temperature was driving him mad too. And Conrad and the boy. The only one of the group unaffected was Jemima, who seemed in her element, though when they stopped to drink she’d suck up half a river with her trunk and squirt the rest over her head. Conrad, caught in the spray, didn’t object at all.
Spending time in the infernal heat of the forges interrogating blacksmiths was a particular ordeal. Humphrey found himself plotting routes that, while broadly following Leila’s instructions, avoided villages and towns as much as possible. Devoid of knights in black armour, Elaine turned to Leila more and more, hoping that the sword would be able to tell her where her fiancé was.
‘Where is Sir Alistair?’ she’d ask Leila, but when Martha spun the sword, she just went round and round and round until Martha had to put a boot down to stop her.
After one of these disappointments, Elaine burst into tears. When Humphrey tried to comfort her, she shouted at him, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing. My father was right, I should have got a real knight!’
Humphrey turned and walked away, over to the fire pit where Conrad was peeling carrots, while Jemima loitered nearby, hoping for scraps.
‘I used to be better at this,’ he said to his squire.
Before Conrad could respond, Martha wandered over. ‘Better at what?’
‘Well, the old days were the glory days,’ said Humphrey, perking up at the sight of a receptive audience. ‘You’ve heard of the Questing Beast, I’ll bet? Turned out to be just a big stray cat. You should have seen King Pellinore’s face …’
The pair drifted away from Conrad, who wielded his peeling knife with new irritation.
Later, after the sun had dipped beneath the horizon and the sky was turning from indigo to black, Elaine took Humphrey aside to apologise for her harsh words.
‘I don’t want another knight,’ she said, resting her hand on his shoulder for emphasis.
‘It’s fine, I’d already forgotten about it,’ Humphrey said, shrugging her off, but the ghost of her touch lingered for hours.
The heat barely dropped that night. Martha, wedged between Humphrey and Conrad, stopped even trying to sleep. She missed the way Deborah used to fan her during heatwaves at the castle. Bored and uncomfortable, she slipped out of the tent, onto the expanse of heath where they’d set up camp. The air was a little fresher outside, though there wasn’t so much as the hint of a breeze. She sat on a log next to the embers of the campfire and looked up at the stars scattered in fistfuls across the sky. She could take Silver and run away, she realised. But where would she go? Leila was strapped to Humphrey’s hip even at night. Leaving would mean leaving the sword, leaving Humphrey – though why should this matter? Staying with these people was her best chance of finding Jasper. Whether she liked them or not was irrelevant.
‘You’re still here.’
Martha looked up. Humphrey had followed her out of the tent. He was wearing only the long underwear he slept in. Black hair curled all the way down his broad chest and crept beneath the waistband of his underwear to whatever lay below. Martha found herself thinking of the book she’d looked at the night before her wedding, and felt a renewed surge of disgust, but this time tinged with a strange, slightly frightening curiosity.
‘I was just trying to cool down a bit,’ she said.
‘If you run away, Conrad will devote the rest of his life to finding you, and when he does he will disembowel you and hang you with your own guts.’
‘I couldn’t sleep before,’ said Martha. ‘But I’m sure I’ll have no problem dropping off now.’
Humphrey sat down next to her. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘It’s hotter than a whore’s cunt.’
‘I, um …’ said Martha, her already feminine voice coming out in a distinctly unmanly wobble. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Never been with a whore?’
‘No.’
‘Ever been with anyone?’
‘No.’
‘How old are you?’
For a mad moment, Martha thought to herself, I mustn’t say too young or he won’t be interested in me. Then she reminded herself: He won’t be interested in me because I am a BOY.
‘Fifteen,’ she said.
‘Same age as Conrad, and he’s had plenty,’ said Humphrey.
‘Really?’ said Martha, aghast.
‘Sure,’ said Humphrey. ‘I could take you, if you like.’
‘Take me?’
‘To a whorehouse. There’s one just outside Camelot called Mother Superior’s House of Shame. It specialises in nuns.’
‘Nuns?’
‘Well, the madam says her girls are fallen nuns. None of them could exactly be described as a novice. She reckons she can charge extra to corrupt a virgin who’s dedicated herself to the divine.’
Martha felt she had to say something, and the only thing she could think of was the truth. ‘I don’t know what a whorehouse is.’
‘You’re not joking, are you?’ said Humphrey.
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘No, you don’t joke very much – Conrad’s right about that.’ Humphrey paused. Then he said, ‘A whorehouse is a place where people have sex for money.’
‘Who pays?’ said Martha.
‘Who …? The men pay. Though if you can find somewhere where the women pay, I would like very much to hear about it.’
Martha felt a dry-mouthed panic, half from discussing these things with Humphrey, half at the thought that she might actually end up in a whorehouse with him. It would hardly take long for the whores to find out that she was carrying the wrong equipment.
‘I don’t know what a cunt is either,’ she found herself confessing.
Humphrey laughed in disbelief. ‘Weren’t there any other boys at the castle, when you were growing up?’ he said.
‘I was always in the Princess’s chambers,’ said Martha. ‘The only people I spent any time with were the Princess and her maids.’
‘You don’t have a father? A brother?’
‘They died,’ said Martha. Sensing an explanation was necessary, she added, ‘Smallpox.’
‘I should have guessed. The scars on your face.’
‘Yes,’ Martha made herself agree. ‘Smallpox. I got it too, as a baby, but I survived.’
‘Well, that’s lucky, isn’t it? You’re immune now.’
‘Yes.’ In fact Martha had never had smallpox. She would probably catch it now, and die, and how would she explain that to Humphrey? He would realise that the scars on her face were from acne and it would be so humiliating.
‘And your mother?’ he said.
‘Smallpox too,’ said Martha, for want of a better answer. She was sick of talking about smallpox now. ‘I was raised in the castle, from before I can remember. Queen Martha was amused by children, so I was something of a jester to her, before I became her page.’
‘A jester?’ said Humphrey, amused. ‘You?’
Why did nobody here think she was funny? Everyone at the castle always laughed at her jokes.
‘Only when I was very small,’ she said. ‘They dressed me as a little dog, and I used to toddle around and fall over.’
Humphrey took a moment to picture this, chuckling. Then he said, ‘So I take it nobody bothered to teach you about sex.’
‘I know enough,’ said Martha hurriedly. ‘There is no need to enlighten me further.’
‘And what about the other things a man needs to know? You can ride, at least.’
‘The Princess liked my companionship on horseback.’
‘You’re bloody awful at pitching a tent, though. And you can’t light a fire.’
‘That’s true,’ acknowledged Martha.
‘You have no swordsmanship – we learned that early on. What about archery?’
‘Nope.’
‘That I can teach you. If you like.’
‘Archery? Why on earth do you want to teach me archery?’