The Red Knight

‘I see,’ Peter said. He packed everything back into the basket. The woman came and stood next to him, and he put a hand under her skirt and ran it up her leg to her thigh, and then around her thigh, and she made a sound, and soon enough, they were back where they had been when the dead man kicked him in the head.

At some point she moaned, and later he laughed aloud at the absurdity of it all. He wanted Ota Qwan to translate his thoughts to her, but of course, the man was gone.

Why is he helping me? Peter thought, and then he was asleep.

And in the morning, all the painted men rose, took only the equipment they needed for violence, and followed Skadai. Peter took the bow and the best knife, and his paint and a single red wool blanket and strode naked, after Ota Qwan. He found it surprisingly easy to ask no questions, simply follow.

Later, he asked Ota Qwan how to get arrows, and the man silently gave him a dozen.

‘Why?’ Peter asked. ‘Is it not every man against every other man?’

Ota Qwan laughed. ‘You know nothing,’ he said. ‘Do you not follow me? Will you do my bidding when the arrows fly and the steel fills the air?’

Peter thought about it. ‘I suppose I will.’

Ota Qwan laughed. ‘Come. Let’s go find your name.’

South of Albinkirk – de Vrailly

Jean de Vrailly clamped down on his impatience and it turned, as it always did, to anger. The blossoming of his rage always made him feel sinful, dirty, and less of a man and a knight, and so, while riding easily through the high ridges and spring flowers of Alba’s fertile heartland, he reined up his second charger and dismounted, to the confusion of his brothers in arms, and knelt in the dirt beside the road to pray.

The mild pain of kneeling for prolonged periods always steadied him.

Images floated to the surface of his thoughts as he imagined the crucifixion of the Christ; as he pictured himself as a knight riding to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, or inserted himself in meditation into the adoration of the Magi, a lowly caravan guard sitting on his charger behind the princes who adored the newborn lamb.

Contempt broke through his reverie. He despised the King of Alba, who stopped in each town to play to his peasants, win their sighs and their raucous laughter, still their fears and give them law. It was done with too much drama and it took too much time, and it was obvious – obvious to a child – that something was happening in the north that required the instant application of the kingdom’s mailed fist.

Disgust. The knights of Alba were slow, slothful, full of vice and barbarity. They drank, they ate too much, belched and farted at table, and never, ever exercised in arms. Jean de Vrailly and his retinue rode from town to town in full armour, cap à pied, with heavy quilted cotes under hauberks of ring mail surmounted by shining steel plate – three layers of protection, which every knight in the East wore every day of his life – to town, to church or to ride out with his lady.

The Wild had not made a major incursion in the East in a century, yet their knighthood stood ready to fight at every moment.

Here, where stands of unkempt trees stood on every ridge, and where an incursion of the Wild threatened a major city just over the horizon – the knights rode abroad in colourful tunics with fashionable, long trailing sleeves, pointed shoes and carefully wrapped hats like the turbans of the far East, with their armour stored in wicker baskets and oak barrels.

Right now, four days from Albinkirk, a party of the king’s younger knights and squires were hawking, riding their palfreys along the ridge tops to the west, and he wanted to punish them for their light-hearted foolishness. These effete barbarians needed to be taught what war was. They needed to learn to take off their chamois gloves and feel the cold weight of steel on their soft hands.

He prayed, and praying made him better. He was able to smile to the king, and nod to a young squire who ill-manneredly galloped down the column raising a cloud of dust, mounted on a hot-blooded Eastern mare worth a hundred leopards as a racehorse and worthless in a fight.

But when the army, which grew every day as contingents of knights, men-at-arms, and archers joined from each town, each county, each manor, settled for the night, de Vrailly ordered his squires to set his pavilion as far from the rest of the army as could be managed – out in the horse lines, surrounded by beasts. He dined simply on soldiers’ rations with his cousin, summoned his chaplain, Father Hugh, to hear Mass and confession of his sins of passion, and then, shriven and spiritually clean, he bathed in water from the Albin, the mighty river that rolled by the door of his tent, dismissed his squires and his slaves, and towelled himself dry, listening to the sound of three thousand horses cropping grass on a beautiful spring evening. The smell of the wildflowers overpowered even the smell of the horses.