The Perfect Sinner. Will Davenport

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СКАЧАТЬ just didn’t seem to realise that all the bodies heaped up were their own countrymen.’ I drained my wine and he refilled it.

      As ever, what was in my mind was the moment when the troops parted for the doomed charge of a blind king, John of Bohemia, lashed between his friends’ horses.

      It was blind John’s fate that drew me to the heaps of dead. I thought I knew where I had seen him fall. A stupid thought. From up on the ridge by the windmill I had marked his passage fairly well, but then chaos hid his end and now, down below in the dark there were hills of dead piled to head-height, horses and men mixed together in heaps which had formed a rising barricade. The French had gone on leaping and clambering over that barricade, taking arrows for their trouble and piling it ever higher in the process.

      I was weary to my bones, barely able to drag myself through the churned earth of the battlefield, stumbling over arrows and helmets and arms and legs, and I turned over a battalion of bodies before I found him. It was only when I saw the lashings around a harness that I finally knew where to look. Pulling the other corpses off the three of them left me sweating and soaked in crusting blood, and I couldn’t get them free, you see? There was a black horse lying across them, a real charger, solid, stiff and utterly dead. In the morning, they were using teams of men with ropes and poles to prise those piles apart, but there in the night, there was just me and the flickering light of the nearest fire. The legs I thought belonged to John were sticking out from under the horse, and I was pulling as hard as I could when I found I was no longer alone. A huge man in a woollen tunic had joined me.

      ‘You take one leg,’ he said, I’ll take the other.’

      ‘I’m not looting,’ I said sharply, because most of the men out on that field were our camp followers, using their knives to dispatch the nearly dead and cut from them whatever they could find of value. I had taken off my mail and I was in a plain jerkin. I could have been anyone and I didn’t need another fight.

      ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you with the King all day, holding up the Standard. You did a good job. I don’t expect you need to loot, I guess you’ve got a castle or two of your own.’ There was nothing subservient about him, but right across that battlefield that night, in the aftermath of the desperate fight, men were talking to other men as equals and no one could be so proud as to mind.

      ‘One castle,’ I said, ‘and it leaks.’

      He laughed harshly. ‘I know why you’re here. You and I saw the same thing,’ he said, ‘or thought we did, and we both need to know, don’t we?’

      ‘I’m Guy de Bryan,’ I said holding out a hand.

      ‘Are you indeed?’ he said as if he knew me. ‘Well now, there’s a fine thing. I am William Batokewaye,’ he squeezed my hand in his own much larger one. In those days he still had both arms. ‘In the service, for the present, of young Lord Montague, which is why I am here rooting around the carrion in the dark.’

      Montague again. The Montagues were always embedded somewhere near the heart of my story. Let me get this right because, looking back, the order of all these events does get a little muddled in my head. That’s because so many of the things that really mattered in my life happened in such a short space of years, and so many of them involved the Montagues. They had given me no great reason for gratitude. Old Montague had harboured the villain Molyns, then imprisoned me, then done all he could to see his daughter, my dear Elizabeth, marry another man. When it came to the precipice of my sin, it was me who plunged over, but it was Montague’s hand that led me to the edge.

      Now we had the new Earl of Salisbury, the younger Montague, and he was a fighter too, just like his wily, warrior father. Would he now set a curve of his own into the passage of my life? Molyns was still in his retinue. Molyns had done the deed that brought the two of us to root among these corpses in the dark.

      I looked at the outline of William Batokewaye against the flaring firelight of the windmill collapsing behind him. ‘You’ll have to explain,’ I said. ‘What business does young Montague have here?’

      ‘His dead father’s business. Don’t you know the story?’ He looked at the leg he was holding, ‘This man saved the old Earl. Six years ago, soon after Sluys?’

      ‘Montague was captured.’ It was a busy time. I had forgotten the details.

      ‘Montague and the Earl of Suffolk, and something went amiss with the ransom,’ said Batokewaye. ‘Phillip of France threatened to kill both of them, and the only thing that stopped him was this man here. John of Bohemia taught young King Phillip a thing or two about chivalry that day, and he shamed him into letting them live. My master wishes to make sure blind John gets a Christian burial before the crows get to him. He deserves it after a death like that.’ He sighed.

      I wasn’t sure if he meant the feathered crows or the human variety which were creeping around us on the edge of the darkness. I let go of my leg for a moment.

      ‘It was magnificent,’ I said and crossed myself.

      ‘Of course it was magnificent, but what did he think he was doing?’

      ‘He was riding to the aid of his men,’ I answered.

      ‘Lashed to his knights? As blind as a mole? What difference could he hope to make?’

      ‘You know the answer to that as well as I do. It’s a question of the spirit.’

      ‘It’s a question of being dead.’

      We were both silent again and I knew we were both thinking about the means of his death.

      ‘If you’re in Montague’s retinue, you will be familiar with Sir John Molyns,’ I suggested.

      He spat.

      I waited, but it seemed that was all the answer I was going to get. It was certainly the sort of answer I most wanted, because I liked this man.

      I pressed him. ‘Were you with Molyns today?’

      ‘Molyns was on his own business today, or perhaps the King’s business but certainly not Montague’s.’

      I wanted to see where he stood.

      ‘What business do you think that was?’

      ‘The devil’s business.’

      We agreed on that.

      ‘Come on then, heave,’ he said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

      We heaved and he came out with a wet slither like a very old baby being born. He had new armour plate around his chest, one-up on chain mail, but it hadn’t done much for him. Batokewaye strode off and pulled a brand out of the nearest fire. By its light we examined the sad remains of King John of all the Bohemians, and it confirmed my very worst fears.

      ‘I’ll find a priest,’ I said. ‘We should say a prayer to see his soul through to daybreak.’

      ‘No need,’ said the big man as he studied the corpse. ‘You’ve found one. I am a priest.’

      He didn’t look like a priest. He looked like a man who’d been on the winning side of many bloody fights, but we said our prayers, the two of us, there in the flickering dark, in a night that was threaded with the moans of the dying, and then we both sat down on the СКАЧАТЬ