XXV

The next day we were all drawn up and instructions on the melee were issued by the Marshal, who knew his stuff even though he did not always enjoy discharging his duties for Eustace. Juliana had told me she would not even peep through a window at the bloody struggle. She had told me I could cry off if I liked. She could get me excused, but of course I could not agree. We had an argument about it, but I would not budge. Even a bastard does not like to be kept. To be honest, I was keen to fight the fight. I was quick and strong and ready for Fulk any time he liked.

‘You will be divided into two armies,’ the Marshal told us. ‘They will be called French and English.’

‘Why not Norman?’ someone asked.

‘Because you are all Norman, and the last thing our Duke wants is to see Normans fighting each other.’

I could see Eustace chewing his beard at this, but he said nothing because he did not want to lose the best marshal in south-east Normandy. There were others who would take him as soon as look at him.

‘You will be armed with a helmet, a stout stick and a shield. Each side will have a standard and a standard-bearer. The object of the exercise is to capture the enemy’s standard. Once someone is down, there must be no further contact with him. Leave him alone. We do not want serious injuries. Anyone seen behaving dangerously will be disciplined. The melee is an exercise designed to show the realities of battle without the use of steel and the spilling of unnecessary blood. It is not an opportunity to settle scores. Is that understood?’

We stood there like oxen in the cold wind.

‘Is that understood?’ he shouted.

‘Answer the Marshal, you dogs,’ called a sergeant.

‘YES, SIR,’ we shouted.

‘We will proceed, French first. The infantry – that is the squires – will be led by the knights who will position themselves at the front of their infantrymen at the left-hand end of the big field outside the castle wall. The English will follow the same procedure at the right-hand end of the field. When I sound the trumpet, the cavalry will charge each other. Foot soldiers may only intervene if the standard is in danger. When I sound the trumpet twice, the cavalry will withdraw. On trumpet call three, the infantry will advance and fall upon each other. On the last trumpet call of four, all fighting will cease completely. Anyone disobeying will be …’

‘Castrated,’ called Eustace.

He thought that a huge joke. The Marshal started to divide us. I was careful to be English when I saw Fulk was French. We passed into the field, preceded by our steaming cavalry.

Some castles, I knew, had recently taken up a much more courtly form of ritual combat, charging at each other on their horses. Armed with bated lances, their object was to knock each other off their steeds. My father’s dangling-iron was a new-fangled auxiliary to the sport. These new, so-called tournaments were all very well, the Marshal had told us, but as training in the matter of real fighting, the hard and shocking, reeking and dismembering actuality of the battlefield, there was nothing to beat the melee.

What would it be like to cut off a man’s arm or his face? And what would it be like to have that done to the face that you thought of as you? It was impossible not to see men with terrible wounds these days: soldiers spewed out by the troubles in Normandy, peg-legs with just one ear or eye or half a mouth, and so on.

I was pondering this as we faced up to the villainous Frenchies on the other side. We started to mutter against them, whipping ourselves up into ferocity and group-courage, and next we were shouting obscenities and insults at people we had regarded as our comrades moments before. When the trumpet sounded, our knights thundered across the ten-acre field towards their adversaries. They were armed with wooden poles with rounded ends and they wore their armour cap-a-pie, but as they clashed together, there were some who fell heavily and lay still for a while, and others who raised triumphant gloved fists into the air. Those who had failed to unhorse their opponents used their wooden staves to beat at the enemy. When the cavalry had fought itself to a standstill, the second trumpet sounded, and the riders withdrew. Servants hurried onto the field to carry the casualties with sore heads and broken bones away to the infirmary. Neither of the standards had been taken yet.

The third trumpet sounded.

The drums started beating. I had forgotten about them. It is a sound to instil both fear in the enemy and courage in the vanguard. It hits a certain nerve in the head and sets off a madness, which one needs on the battlefield. As we neared the French, the insults began to fly again, this time at close quarters, and they the same to us, and then we were upon them, raining blows with our sticks and trying to avoid their assaults. One large Frenchy came at me as I was thwacking a little eely fellow, and he caught me a blow on my helmet which made my ears ring, I turned, quick as lightning, and poked him hard in the midriff which took the breath out of him and then I kicked his knees away as he doubled up. I clouted another fellow who came at me from behind – I pretended not to see him – and then I turned, quick as a flash, and hit him squarely on the earpiece of his helmet. He sat down on his bottom as though his wits were addled. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fulk. He was fighting his way through my band of stout English warriors who were, I could see, beginning to taste victory. We were close to their standard now, but Fulk was having none of it, and was fighting like a wild man of the trees, a man possessed. He really wanted my head on his wall. I could taste blood on my mouth and the blood was hot, though I had no idea where it came from. And then he was upon me.

‘There you are, Fulk,’ I grunted. ‘What took you so long?’

He didn’t wait to reply, but swung his stick low and meanly at my manhood, which I only half escaped and felt a great low sickle of shrieking pain stabbing at my centrepiece. I was not going to let that stop me, though. I swung right and then feinted right again, but I caught him left with a kick to his knee, which he half avoided but which almost brought him down. He threw away his stick and drew a knife, which was strictly against the rules.

‘You are a little fucker, aren’t you, Fulk?’ was all I could say before he was upon me with the blade, swinging it at me dangerously close to my stomach.

I caught him off-balance and thumped him across the top of his back, just below the neck, the place which numbs you and breaks your grasp, and his knife flew from his hand. He bent low to the ground to find it, and I crashed my stick on his helmet, making a noise like a gong, and turning his brain to syllabub, but he had the knife again, and I dropped my stick and closed with him, and we wrestled.

He stabbed me once, but weakly, in the chest, and then I had his arm and we fought over the weapon, twisting and turning as the struggle raged around us and the French standard was won. We rose, we fell and we dropped again. He had the strength of madness on him, and I feared that he would triumph and everything would be lost, so in desperation I used Saul’s guile again, the trick where you fall and drag the opponent with you. Fulk must have forgotten it or at any rate been unprepared. It fooled him, though some instinct told him to drop the knife as he went down. My weight knocked the wind out of him, and he lay there for a while as I struggled up, grabbing the knife as I did so in case he struck again.

The fourth trumpet sounded, almost in my ear.

‘What is this?’ cried the Marshal, sternly.

He had walked over to see that the standard was handed over correctly without any chicanery from the defenders, and had spotted the knife in my hand.

‘It is a knife, sir,’ I said.

‘I can see it’s a bloody knife. But who does it belong to?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ I replied. ‘It was on the ground and I picked it up, thinking to hand it in, sir.’

I could see Fulk sitting up, and looking at me with an expression of surprise. I was surprised at myself, to be honest. But in the abbey I learnt the universal lesson that you don’t sneak on a colleague even if he is your worst enemy. This one wasn’t just my worst enemy, though, he was also Juliana’s and I very much doubted if she would be as lenient as I was. It was too late to retract, though.

‘Well, well, well, what have we here?’ wheezed Eustace, squeezing his shanks over towards us.

‘This man has found a knife, sir.’

‘Found a knife? Used it more like. Filthy coward’s tricks. Who is the man?’

Eustace loved the prospect of a punishment.

‘I found the knife, sir,’ I told him.

The Marshal intervened.

‘He seems to be the wounded party, sir. Look, he bleeds.’

‘It is a scratch, sir,’ I said.

‘I might have guessed it would be the Latiner. Fights like a woman, as you might expect. Who was he fighting with the knife?’

‘It was my fault, sir,’ said Fulk, rising to his feet. ‘The knife was on the ground. I saw him pick it up and start to take it to the Marshal. And in the heat of battle, sir, I attacked him. I don’t know why. You know how it is when the blood’s up. I must have twisted the knife around in the struggle, but I had no intention of stabbing him.’

‘Well, well,’ said the Marshal, ‘no harm done. A melee is a melee.’

‘I disagree, Marshal,’ cried Eustace, his dander well up. ‘The Latiner carried the knife, so he is the guilty party. He must be taught a lesson. I am not sure that taking a knife to a melee is not a capital offence. I will have to consult the rules.’

‘But he did not take the knife to the melee, sir,’ said the Marshal. ‘We have a witness who saw it on the ground. It must have been left by some townsman.’

‘Don’t chop logic with me, Marshal. Have the man arrested and taken to the dungeon to cool his heels. Let him amas amat down there. Then we shall see what our purposes dictate.’

And so I was marched off by two Frenchmen back through the gatehouse, across the drawbridge under the gaze of my little pupils and their mother, and down the stairs into the dungeon where the gaoler put me in an iron cell and locked the gate. I had done what I had always been advised by Juliana not to do, put myself in Eustace’s power. Worse still, Fulk was at large to spread whatever poison he chose about Juliana and me. It was a pretty pickle, but I still felt some exhilaration at having survived an exercise which was as close to a genuine battle as one could get. Every man must wonder sometimes what it feels like to fight at close quarters. I was not at all sure that I wanted to do it again, but to have done it at all was some kind of achievement.

It was cold in my cell, and growing colder, and the straw was none too clean. I tried to sleep and must have succeeded, tired after my exertions on the field.

I was woken sometime later by a voice softly calling my name, and a hand waving at me through the bars. I knew immediately it was not Juliana. The hand was large and hairy, and belonged to Fulk whose face now appeared, illuminated by a single candle.

‘I have brought you some chicken and some bread and a flask of wine. I have been to see the Comtesse and told her it was my fault. But don’t get the idea that I like you.’

I seized the food gratefully, and took a long draught of the wine.

‘Did you tell her about your secret?’ I asked. ‘The one you spoke to me about?’

‘I made an oath to her that I would never breathe another word of it.’

‘So how did you discover it?’

‘I made it my business to watch you. I saw you escaping on Midsummer Night. I hated you for it.’

‘I know that we have not been friends, Fulk.’

‘I hate you, Latiner. You see, I love the Lady Juliana, too, but you are luckier than I am, the son of a poor country priest. I can never be good enough for her.’

‘You really love her?’

‘Don’t sound so surprised. A dog can look at the moon.’

‘Of course it can. And howl.’

There was a faint hint of a smile.

‘She commands me to like you,’ he said.

‘Can you do that?’

He paused for a while before answering.

‘Not easily. I will try. I will speak up about the knife being on the ground. Even to the Comte. I will maintain it. Meanwhile, she commands me to give you this key, and you will know what to do with it. I have already unlocked your cell here. She advises you to absent yourself for two days, by which time the Comte will have gone. Things are astir in Andely. And now I must go before I am missed. I have already been too long.’

I held out my hand to him which he took.

‘I am sorry that we quarrelled, Fulk,’ I said.

‘You fought well,’ he told me. ‘I respect that, Latiner.’

And then I said something that I regretted, both then and later.

‘You know, you should tell the Comtesse how you feel about her. It can do no harm.’

What was I trying to achieve? Was I trying to encourage him or cheer him up? It could only be a source of embarrassment to her, and probably to him. Just occasionally you do something truly idiotic, and this was such a moment, but at the time he seemed to take it well.

‘Maybe I’ll do that,’ he said, in that half-truculent, half-apologetic way.

And so he slipped away into the shadows of the dungeon while the gaoler slept. My heart had lifted. The danger had seemed imminent and my predicament uncomfortable to say the least. Now it seemed there was a way out and Fulk had played Ariadne to my Theseus.

I took the key and the candle Fulk had left me, stole past the snoring gaoler, and unlocked the door of the tunnel that led to the lake. Half an hour later, I was at The Bear, sleeping soundly in an upper room on a moth-eaten pillow.