‘Uncle—’
Whatever Joscelina had been about to say, she was silenced by a slap across the face. The fishmonger let go of her wrist and she gave a cry as she fell awkwardly on to the muddy street.
He turned the pear over in his hand, examining it with disdain. ‘Is this how much you think she’s worth?’ he asked. ‘This worm-ridden thing?’ He tossed it into the gutter where the fish-heads lay.
By then a handful of the other stallholders had come to see what the commotion was about. They were men of all shapes: some tall and wiry; others built like the girl’s uncle, with strong shoulders and swollen guts and weather-worn faces that bore stern expressions.
‘Are you making trouble for Gerbod, lad?’ said one of them as they began to form a ring around me.
What I should have done then was see sense and make my apologies, or else try to run before anything further happened; there was no doubt that I was quicker on my feet than these men. That was what instinct told me was the right course, but something else held me there. My blood had been stirred; it ran hot in my veins as anger swelled inside me. It wasn’t that the fishmonger’s words offended me, for in my life I had been called many worse things than a beggar, and bore such insults lightly. Rather what angered me was the way he’d struck his niece when she had done nothing to deserve it, and even though how he chose to treat her was none of my business, in that moment my head was filled with visions of myself as her stalwart defender, in the manner of the knights of legend, the ones praised by the poets in their songs.
‘What are you waiting for?’ asked the fishmonger, the man they’d called Gerbod. He waved his bloodied fish knife in my direction. ‘Get gone from here before I bury this blade in your gut.’
But I wasn’t listening. Instead I slid my own knife from its sheath and brandished it before me, clutching the hilt so tightly that it hurt my palm as I turned to face each one of them in turn. The weapon had been given to me by Lord Robert when first I’d entered his service, and I treasured it above all my other possessions, often spending long hours by light of sun and moon honing its edge with whetstone and polishing the flat of the steel until my own reflection gazed back at me. Of course I’d been in fights before, both in the training yard and outside of it, but rarely with anyone but the other servant-boys in Lord Robert’s household, and certainly not with full-grown men such as these, who looked as though they had seen more than their share of tussles over the years. Including Gerbod, there were six of them. Even many years later, when my sword-skills were at their sharpest, when for a while my name was among those sung by the poets and my deeds were known far and wide, I would have thought twice about trying to fight so many by myself. To think I could do so then, when I had not even sixteen summers behind me, was the height of folly, but arrogance had blinded me. That, and a desire to prove myself, to show the girl, her uncle and his friends that I was no craven.
A couple of them drew their own weapons; the others simply laughed.
‘Don’t be stupid, boy,’ the fishmonger snarled from the other side of his stall. ‘You can’t fight us.’
Behind him the girl was getting to her feet, rubbing her wrist and elbow, and there were tears in her eyes.
‘Put your blade away and you won’t get hurt,’ said Gerbod. He came around the table where the fish lay in their neat rows, and strode towards me, gutting-knife still in hand.
I glanced about, facing each one of those who were surrounding me and starting to wonder whether this had been such a good idea. With every beat of my heart my confidence and resolve began to ebb away, until, almost without willing it, I found my weapon-hand returning to the sheath at my belt and sliding the steel back into the leather.
Gerbod grinned, displaying a row of broken, yellow teeth. He took another step closer to me so that his ale-reeking breath filled my nose, then, after eyeing me carefully, he laid both his hands upon my shoulders and shoved me. I wasn’t expecting it and stumbled backwards, into the path of one of the fishmonger’s friends, who tried to send me back the way I had come. My feet couldn’t keep up with the rest of me, however, and suddenly I found myself sprawling forward, limbs flailing, landing on my side in a puddle to the laughs and jeers of the men. Before I could even think of getting up, something connected sharply with my ribs, and I yelped.
‘That’s for threatening me,’ I heard the fishmonger say. He kicked me again, closer to my groin this time. ‘No one crosses me and walks away freely.’