Revenge of the Rose (20 page)

It was a golden banner emblazoned with a black eagle.

Willem gasped in astonishment and realized he could not possibly decline the honor of bearing the imperial standard, however staggering it was, in front of so many of His Majesty’s subjects.

“Sire,” he said hoarsely, receiving it, “I shall strive to be worthy of it.”

Konrad turned his horse about and they all rode together out of the northern gate, Willem’s small party subsumed into the emperor’s large one. Jouglet was riding behind Marcus, wearing a new extravagant mantle from Konrad (this one nearly rainbow-colored), and deftly avoided greeting Willem. Willem had not spoken a word to either of his companions when they returned from the whores last night, and he had not invited Jouglet back to the inn; the minstrel was keeping a respectful distance but did exchange hearty good mornings with Erec. Otherwise, Jouglet seemed content to jabber on to Nicholas.

Marcus tried to hide his dismay at Alphonse’s behavior: the count did not take his eyes off Willem once. He nearly rode into a linden branch as they left the town walls for the tourney field. It was as if he were trying to ensnare the young knight with his eyes.

Over the past week, Willem had examined the tourney field in detail, though
field
was hardly the word for this broad swath of land between the town, the foot of the castle-mount, and the fief of Orschwiller. Most of it lay wide open, long fallow; parts were wooded, especially up on the slope. At an elevated spot in the center rose the open-sided royal pavilion, built to hold several dozen spectators. Three or four smaller platforms lined the edges of the fighting area, and one far boundary was the town wall itself, atop and below which hundreds of townspeople, villagers, and serfs had gathered to watch.

The day continued overcast and cool. Summer saw few tournaments because of the heat, but Konrad insisted annually on sponsoring royal games. He liked anything that threatened the power of his higher aristocracy, and promoting the lower aristocracy— the knights— did that stylishly, and much to the delight of the rabble.

Most of Konrad’s knights would fight under Willem. A leader in a tourney had to be able not only to fight one-on-one, but also to plan attacks for many riders altogether, making the most of opportunities to take down opponents. This was a contest for gain, for ransom and booty— despite his general idealism about the honor of knighthood, Willem had always been clear that the purpose of a tourney was to get a lot of money or its equivalent.

The tourney was a huge one— Marcus estimated there would be five hundred knights here. It took a very long time, but by late morning the logistical sorting out had been taken care of, knights had hailed and greeted one another, shown off their newest lances and shields and battle scars and lovers’ kerchiefs, expressed amazement at how friends’ squires had shot up. Those not yet in arms finished preparation. The countryside resembled a military encampment, save for the incongruously cheerful atmosphere. The breezy morning wore on cool and fresh, the sun just hidden behind a gauze of clouds.

The steward, as Konrad’s representative, had established teams. To begin with, he adhered to tradition and honored preexisting loyalties, so Willem had his men from his own county and many from Konrad’s court, for a total of fifty riders. He was partnered with a dozen other knights leading groups from Swabia, Hainaut, and Lorraine. His was one of three teams, grouped by geography: the Empire (which Willem found himself heading), Flanders to the northwest of the Empire, and France. Marcus directed them to stations around the field, and there ensued a protracted period of hurrying about to place everybody’s squires and servants in the correct safe areas. During this shuffle, the town gate reopened, and commoners of all shapes and sizes, serfs to wealthy burghers, hurried to climb trees and outbuildings, crowding into the few spaces left open to them. A mass of people two paces deep surrounded Konrad’s viewing pavilion, shrewdly assuming the fighting would come near, but not too near, the emperor.

Konrad’s senior herald blew a trumpet and another flashed a flag at His Majesty’s wave. For a fraction of a breath nothing happened, then the three groups, hooves thudding in a canter, advanced on the center of the broad, green space. All of them slowed. The lord of Mauléon cried out a challenge to Richard of Mainz; the two seasoned champions ran at each other, ashwood lances couched against their shields, and five hundred voices screamed with bloodthirsty exuberance at once. The tournament had begun.

A contingent of knights from Artois and Valecourt challenged Willem’s immediate party, and Willem headed toward them over the field grass. Their leader was a man he didn’t recognize— a large fellow with an ominous surcoat of black and red. Willem tucked his lance tighter under his right arm and with his left hand reined his horse toward the armored stranger. He felt Atlas pick up speed under him, anticipating the joust.

“Look at Willem, sire!” Jouglet said at the emperor’s elbow. “He’s taking down his first man!”

“Technically, he’s merely
fighting
his first man,” Marcus said from the other side of the throne. A pause. Marcus grimaced, tried to make it seem like a grin. “Ah. Now he has taken down his first man.” This, he was certain, was the beginning of the end for him.

Unhorsing was easy, dismounting was not, but Willem insisted the felled soldier was his to take alone, and over the din of warfare, he signaled his fellow knights not to assist. He landed on his feet heavily in sixty pounds of chain mail and, grunting, drew his sword and grasped it two-handed, breathing hard. His unhorsed opponent was struggling like an upended insect, trying to get to his feet; Willem was on him in a moment and rested the tip of his sword in the one place the armor left the man most vulnerable— directly at his crotch.

Jouglet watched as Willem helped the vanquished man to rise. Then Willem beckoned Erec and one of his pages out onto the field. Erec took custody of the knight; the younger boy took the horse, a Castilian, and led him after Erec. Jouglet slipped off the dais and skirted skirmishes to reach the retreating boy. “Where are you going with the booty?” the minstrel asked.

Erec gestured to his bruised and limping captive. “Willem wants this fellow to pay ransom directly to the innkeeper, since we’re staying there on credit.”

Jouglet chuckled approvingly. “And the horse is for his supplier from Montbéliard, isn’t it?”

Erec nodded, smiling, and continued toward the edge of the field.

Marcus wanted to freeze time, he wanted to stop everything that was happening, because he felt so foolishly impotent to prevent it. Between sext and nones, Willem fought eight jousts and won seven of them (one for each deadly sin, Marcus thought wretchedly); the eighth was a draw. He had captured men from Perche, Champagne, Amiens, Blois, and Poitou. Marcus realized what the knight was doing: he had challenged or accepted challenges only when he was on the outskirt of the field near the audience pavilion, where the joust could easily be seen by Konrad, without becoming part of the general melee. Jouglet had no doubt coached him to that, Marcus thought bitterly. Willem was bruised, bloodied, clearly exhausted, and his shield was literally falling apart, but he had sent seven horses to the inn for safekeeping— a small Welsh-Arab mix, four Danish stallions, a Hungarian, and the Castilian— and even made a wedding gift of one to the lance merchant, which Jouglet made sure the emperor and everyone within a half-league of the pavilion heard about.

The episode that sealed Marcus’s fate— as Marcus would see it, later, with rueful clarity— began with Erec’s running onto the field with a new ashwood lance and another shield for his master. Michel of Harnes, the leader of the French team and possibly the greatest living tournament rider after the aging William Marshall of England, challenged Willem. Willem recognized the man’s colors; he had fallen to Harnes several times during his first year riding in tourneys. For the first time all day Willem felt serious doubt. He was exhausted and aware that Harnes had not himself been working very hard; his shield was hardly knicked. Waiting until late in the day and then taking down the reigning champion was a strategy for which Harnes was infamous. That accounted for every previous defeat Willem had suffered at his hands.

Willem grabbed the new shield and lance from Erec and spurred Atlas on, fixing the shield in front of him and couching the lance for attack. Harnes had a longer lance, and it struck Willem a fraction of a heartbeat earlier than Willem was expecting. The upper half of his shield took the force and it tilted back harshly toward his body, winding him and almost smashing into the lower part of his helmet— but Harnes’s lance snapped in half just as Willem’s own lance struck Harnes’s shield, struck with such force and so squarely that the famous knight was jolted hard— and then to a cry of amazement from the crowd, he slid backward over his horse’s rump, stuck in his high-back saddle, looking as if he were yanked from behind. Hundreds of wagging hands pointed excitedly: the jolt had been so hard that both of the saddle’s girth-straps had snapped. Harnes smashed to the earth behind his mount, saddle still clenched between his knees, and lay awkwardly prone, too stunned to do anything. Willem, his body moving faster than his mind could account for, wheeled Atlas around and chased after Harnes’s horse, which had slowed to remain near its master.

From the pavilion there was hysterical cheering. It had been many years since anyone had taken down the great Michel of Harnes, and Willem’s attack had been magnificent, and his catching the horse immediately was a flourish not even Jouglet could have dreamed up. The jongleur was thrilled, leaping about and making sure everybody knew exactly what had happened. The sun itself, Jouglet was later to report, had peeked out from behind its cooling veil of clouds, to witness the victory. Willem’s springing fully formed from Jouglet’s head could not have given the minstrel a more proprietary air of satisfaction.

Willem, on horseback, led the French knight away from the center of the field. Harnes walked heavily, panting under the burden of his mail, and kept his helmet on so that nobody could see his face in defeat. On Willem’s other flank walked Harnes’s horse, a gorgeous grey Hungarian charger. Everybody knew it was named Vairon; half a dozen ballads about Harnes had been making the rounds for the past three or four years, and a famous knight’s horse was almost as famous as the knight himself. Vairon was less winded than Atlas, and the thousands of eyes upon Willem collectively assumed that he would take his prizes to a safety section on the edge of the field and switch mounts.

But Erec realized his cousin was heading instead toward the royal viewing platform, and rushed to meet him there. He grabbed the high cantle of Atlas’s saddle and pulled himself up onto the horse’s rump, then unlaced the Senlis helmet from Willem’s metal coif so that the knight could speak directly to his emperor. Although the day was cool, the coif was almost hot to the touch.

Willem was a mess— his face was bruised and scraped all over, despite the protection of the face guard, and his brown hair was plastered to his forehead and around his face from prodigious sweating under the leather cap and chain mail coif. The few ladies present murmured nervously, thrilled and slightly repulsed at the same time. Willem ignored them. “Sire,” he said hoarsely, exhausted, still trying to catch his breath, and bowed to the throne. He blinked to keep the sweat from his eyes. Konrad nodded in acknowledgment, smiling but bemused that he was being drawn into the action. “Sire, I would be honored if you would accept this splendid charger from me as a gift to you.”

The pavilion exploded with applause, and Konrad sat back, smiling. Marcus, seeing the appraising expression on the Count of Burgundy’s face in response to this calculated gallantry, wanted to hit something.

When the noise had died down, the emperor announced, “I accept,” and the noise started up again ebulliently, as one of his guards left the platform to retrieve the horse. Konrad held up his hand. “But what about the knight himself? I want to know what ransom you’ll extract from this most important hostage.”

“Well, sire,” Willem said soberly, “I would not know how to put a price on such a knight, and so I think it would be best to simply let him go without ransom.”

Jouglet almost fainted with pride. Konrad and the helmeted prisoner both did double takes, and Konrad himself started to applaud, at which point everybody on the platform followed suit, especially Alphonse— and Marcus, for whom it was an onerous effort.

Willem set Michel of Harnes free and finally took a moment to rest in a safety area. Konrad chose that moment to have Marcus summon a clerk to the viewing dais, with parchment and ink.

You are writing my death certificate, Marcus thought, but bowed and sent a page boy into town. “May I ask what Your Majesty feels the need to compose, in the middle of a tourney?” he asked, hoping he was wrong.

“Willem of Dole is champion, and the day is not half over,” Konrad answered with satisfaction— as if that in itself were an answer. Then he added, slyly, “I think his sister should be informed of his successes, and the effect they might have upon her circumstances.”

There was a pause, and then Marcus blurted out, “If she becomes your empress, sire, then Alphonse will— “

Konrad made an angry, dismissive gesture. “Marcus, it is a
tournament.
Allow me one afternoon’s freedom from politics, for the love of Christ. You of all people should know how much I need that.”

“Sire, please, as a favor to me— “

Konrad gave him an incredulous glare. “Marcus,” he said pointedly. “
Fetch the scribe.
If you won’t obey it as a command, then do it as a favor to me, and once you have done so,
then,
not before, I shall entertain the possibility of doing you a favor in return.” He looked at Marcus expectantly; the steward stared back, frozen. “Marcus,” the emperor repeated sharply. “You are delaying the one moment of genuine unfettered glee I’ve had in months.”