‘By God, Beaumont,’ Deyncourt burst out, his own face raging. ‘That is mean – this is the man you owe for being here at all.’
That did not help. Deyncourt, as Beaumont hissed out, was nothing at all and should mind his station when addressing an earl. That drew a sharp seal-bark of laughter from the furious Deyncourt and his brother, Reginald, came scowling up to make his presence felt.
‘Earl? You may style yourself Earl of Buchan, Beaumont,’ Deyncourt bawled, ‘but when you have more than a wife’s portion and a parchment to show for it, then you may have your due from me.’
‘Gentilhommes,’ Clifford shouted. He had three hundred mounted men on plunging horses which – already highly strung – not only sensed action but the nervousness of their riders; it meant that men were cavorting in circles to keep them from bolting; Clifford needed calm and did not get it.
‘Be damned to you, Beaumont. I never ran from a fight and none should know that better than yourself.’
Gray spat it out with all the venom he could make, wrenched savagely at the reins, dragging the squealing warhorse round. Before anyone could understand what he was doing, he had turned, couched his lance, set his shield and was trotting out, breaking into a canter. Behind him, like a grim shadow, trailed the Deyncourts, fumbling helms on as they went; young Reginald whooped with mad delight.
Alone, they thundered down on the hundreds of men forming into a bristling circle of spears.
In the circle it was blazing. Hot, Will thought. I hate the heat. I have always hated the heat, the way it prickled the skin and turned it dark as a saddle, as a Moorish heathen. When the rest of the bairns longed for the endless days of summer, when barefoot did not mean cold blisters, when they needed to swim in the river to cool off rather than get the dirt and shite off, I knew what it was doing to Da’s stock.
My da would be fretting now, Will thought. Down in the undercroft, wondering if it was cool enough and fretting mad. This was more fiery than any heat Da had known, mark you, made worse because I am pressed fore and aft, shoulder to shoulder with men as boiled as me, sweating fear out in a nose-pinching stink. Smelling rank in ranks, he thought and nearly laughed.
Yet my da is to blame for me being here, squashed and melting like mutton tallow in a roaring ring, waiting for Hell to fall on me.
It’s not our fight, I told him. What do we care who wears the crown – would the priory not need candles under an English king? And my da put me right on it, as he always did, as he did when he taught me how to measure to the last drop the tallow needed for a candle clock – a proper one, not the thin streaks of piss stuck in a graded pewter sconce that some folk affect.
‘Who do we pay rent to?’ my da demanded and there it was, perfect as coloured wax; the priory owned us and the rent, though I had never known this before, included service as a man-at-arms. My da had gone before, back in ’07 and again in ’10 and was lucky to escape with his life both times.
I was nine when he first went, Will thought, and understood nothing. Now I am sixteen and since Da is too old, it is me chosen – so here I am, dripping as if rained on, in Da’s rusting rimmed iron hat, patched old gambeson, rattle-hilted sword and a long pike-spear given me by the King.
Yet the hands that hold that spear are mine, the cunning of bone and joint and broken nails was made to answer my order and no one else’s, just as were the sweating, stinking feet in the battered shoes and the legs atop them.
He was Will the chandler’s boy and he was sixteen and lived in himself, somewhere under the ribs or inside his skull, thinking thoughts that had never been thought, feeling things that were so big and full no one had ever experienced them.
Will the chandler’s boy, melting like wax and waiting to be smeared like old grease. No chance now to make a name as great as Master Overhill, who had invented the candle clock. No chance to find some cleverness to combat the creeping horror of steel cogs and wheels that was the fancy Frenchified horologe, no chance to raise himself from dipping wick in tallow to make nothing better than poor light the rest of his life.
No place for candles this, he thought, hearing the booming roar of the vintenars to keep close – charge your pikes. Behind him, in the thinned centre of the ring, barely enough room for him alone, he knew the lord Randolph stood. How he stayed upright in this heat, with maille and plate and padding all over him, was something approaching magic, part of the mystery of the nobiles and what they did.