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VI. The Knight

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The encampment seemed to be for more men, with a semicircle of five lean-tos around a central fire. The only thing missing were walls and a roof. The bread, Sir Richard atte Lee explained, one of those absent men had bought that very morning in Mansfield.

“Not stolen?”

“Where possible we don’t steal from those we know. Certainly not from those on whom we depend. Bread and ale sustain us.” He patted two casks placed side by side against the nearest tree.

“And the occasional King’s deer?”

Lee opened his hands. “Well . . .” he said, and laughed. He collected two glazed cups from among the leafy forest floor. “Who can say how many inhabit the deer park?”

“Isabella Birkin, I imagine.” Thomas watched to see what reaction mention of her brought.

Lee continued filling the earthenware cups, then plugged the first keg again. He handed Thomas a cup of ale, turned to the second cask, slipped a finger into a knothole in its lid, and pulled the lid off. He reached down inside it and came up with a half-eaten boule of bread, which he offered to Thomas, at the same time saying, “So, you know Isabella, then.”

Thomas shook his head. “Only her name. We’ve not met.”

“And dressed in the colors of Robert Hodde, you’d best not.”

He glanced down at himself. “Then you knew Hodde.”

Sir Richard leaned back his head. “You say ‘knew’?”

“Yes, he’s dead this very day.”

“The foresters or the Norman reeve?”

“Neither. He was slain on the King’s Way by two knights dressed, according to him, as for a crusade.”

For a moment Lee pondered, finally giving his head a shake. “The King’s Way tends to invite robbery. But crusading knights, I know of none in these woods save for me.” He plucked at his tunic. “Crusaders’ ghosts more like.”

Thomas gestured at the tunic. “What crusade was that?” he asked. “They seem to have lasted forever.”

“’Twas more than one, or perhaps less. What they call now the Children’s Crusade when I was but fourteen. And from there a late plunge into the Albigensian Crusade, which was truly no crusade at all from my perspective.”

“I know little of either.”

Lee gulped his ale. “Nicholas of Cologne and another, a French boy named Stephen, brought together twenty thousand of us, children and adults, with the intention of retaking Jerusalem, something the papal-backed Crusaders had been trying to do for years. There had been four, you know, by then. The first two were fairly successful in reaching Jerusalem. The third, led by King Richard, reached but did not take the city. The fourth was an utter fiasco. The knights went off and sacked Constantinople instead. Christians murdering Christians.

“Stephen and Nicholas meant well, but they understood nothing of the real world, where their ideals meant less than nothing. We lost hundreds in the Alps on our way to Genoa. Many simply vanished without a trace. There came a point, I confess, where I thought something was stalking us to get its hands on the littlest ones. In that rarefied air of the mountains, you see things, imagine things. Shadow figures and green fire.”

“Green fire?”

“I know, ridiculous.”

“No,” replied Thomas, “not at all.” He imagined the Yvags overjoyed at the opportunity to steal children without the need to leave changeling creatures behind, though he had to admit he knew nothing of how they selected their teinds. Would they have insinuated themselves among the Crusaders in order to choose their prey? Glamoured or skinwalkers? He wondered, as he often had over the years in Barnsdale, how far from a sleeping Yvagvoja the occupied victim could travel before the connection was severed, and whether this king’s forest was far enough away from Melrose. Then again, why assume Melrose to be the only portal?

“We were penniless by the time we arrived in Genoa. The Pope made it clear that he considered us misguided. He told us all to go home. Papal money had funded all the others and was even then funding the Albigensian Crusade; but for the zealous children following Nicholas and Stephen there was to be nothing. Many of them ended up kidnapped by slave traders, I fear. Genoa was not a friendly city for abandoned children. Nicholas was a naive and trusting fool.”

How convenient a group of exhausted, destitute children would have been for the Yvags. Would one of Sir Richard’s company have been a glamoured knight? Thomas asked, “What happened to this Nicholas?”

“I’ve no idea. I left. Joined up with a force on its way to the south of France to fight against the Cathars for Pope Honorius. I boarded a ship and never saw them again.”

Thomas reflected upon all those soldiers he’d fought alongside with Waldroup, many of whom had come to be more than mere acquaintances. They would all be dead now, like everyone else he’d known.

Lee continued. “I escaped from one false crusade by myself attaching to another. We were being lied to. We were supposed to be fighting for God against a heretical sect that rejected Christ and believed in both an evil God and a spiritual God who did not concern Himself with the matters of the world. Already more than four hundred Cathars had been burned as heretics. That was how the crusade had begun, but by the time I joined, it had all become an excuse to steal land, often from people who’d nothing to do with the Cathars. We sacked Avignon, attacked Toulouse, killed more people, and in the end we proved nothing and advanced no cause for God. De Montfort, our leader, was obliterated by a catapult missile that landed on him, crushed him right in front of me. God did nothing to protect him. All of that carnage so that some houses, some property could change hands. There was I, a knight who’d enlisted to fight in the Holy Land for Christ, God, and the Holy Spirit. For all my efforts I’d not found an army engaged to do that anywhere.”

Thomas took the information in. “You remind me of that man who taught me the quarterstaff and the bow.” He was thinking, too, that Sir Richard must be the “new friend” of the riddle he’d babbled at Robert Hodde many years ago: He’d assumed it referred to Hodde’s band being dissolved, but considering the men Sir Richard counted absent from his camp, perhaps not. The riddle had definitely pinpointed Hodde’s treasure in the limewood tree, though.

“Was he a disappointed knight, your mercenary friend Waldroup?” asked Sir Richard.

“In some ways, very much so.”

“And did he also return home to find the land which should have been his had been mortgaged to the abbot of St. Mary’s to pay off debts his family had incurred?”

“Is that what happened?”

Sir Richard atte Lee nodded. “The abbot is also a former knight. When I attempted to assert my birthright, he had me dragged out, beaten, and left in the woods. Such a man of God that he is one of the largest landowners from York to Doncaster and called by some ‘Red Roger.’ It takes little imagination to see why. Nothing and no one stands in his way.”

There was the same old pattern again: influence, power, holdings, property. Ercildoun revisited. He said, “Your abbot sounds as if he might be associated with the killers of Robert Hodde. Or with the prelate Hodde dispensed with at the very least. He was journeying from the north.”

Sir Richard unbunged the keg and poured more ale for them both. Then he sat down beside Thomas, and seemed to dismiss his own travails. “Now you know enough about me. Tell me of yourself, Sir Thomas.”

“I? There’s so little.”

“Oh, I think you lie. You are fashioned of stories. That much even I can see.” He drank some ale.

Fashioned of stories he might be, but there were none he could describe. How was he to compress or make sense of his life? What could he tell about Janet? Or Morven? The true portrayal would be disbelieved by anyone, this disillusioned knight included. To tell the truth was to proclaim “I’ve lived more than a century and hardly aged a day”—a conclusion he’d almost managed to hide even from himself.

In the end he chose to say simply, “I had a wife and a daughter once, but no more.”

“Ah, forgive me. I did not mean to make you relive such loss.”

He shook his head. “No, nothing to apologize for. It is past.”

“As much as anything ever is.”

Thomas drank more of his ale. “True,” he agreed. “We carry it with us into the present.” He drank again, then asked, “And might I ask, what year exactly is this?”

Sir Richard guffawed. “Been in the woods awhile, Sir Thomas?”

“Aye.”

“Well, it is the year of our Lord 1252.”

All Thomas could think to say was, “Oh.”


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