Free The Ill-Made Knight by Christian Cameron Page A

had ordered the town be stormed. I was determined to be there.
    Abelard was less interested in the fighting. ‘If we can be among the first into the town,’ he said, ‘we’ll be rich.’
    I liked the idea of that!
    Don’t imagine there was an order given or trumpets blared. It wasn’t like that at all. We followed some of Warwick’s men, and by noon we’d met up with our own Earl, abandoned any notion of camping to the north of the town, and instead were riding at a fast trot along the high road to Issoudun.
    Let me note that while my wound and broken ribs had healed, I had no armour, no helmet and a cheap, badly made sword.
    An hour after the sun was at its height, or perhaps two, our men started storming the town. They made ladders or stole them from farms, and tried them against the walls, but they were all too short. There was no order at all, and groups of men – ten or twelve strong – rode up to different points along the walls and had a go. The walls looked low, but close up they were too steep, recently refaced. The garrison was shit – too small, and cowardly. I could have held the place with fifty men today, but the French were on the defensive, and I’ll wager the castellan didn’t think we were serious. Later we heard the Count of Poitiers had stripped the garrison of all its best men for the field army.
    We were serious, though.
    Abelard and Master Peter met on the road, held a brief conference without the Earl, and suddenly we were galloping to the east, back out into the countryside. It made no sense to me, but as a new boy, nothing ever did, and I was wise enough to put my head down, my heels to my mount and follow them.
    We tore down a narrow road, perhaps thirty of us, and ended up in a farmyard. Peter cursed, and we went through a gate and were moving across the fields; I could see the town wall a bowshot away to my left, and I realized what we were doing.
    We rode hard. I remember that an archer fell from his horse in a lane, struck his head and was killed.
    The rest of us left him and rode on. On and on, around the faubourg (the suburbs), then Abelard stiffened like a hunting dog, turned his horse’s head and rode for the wall.
    There was an apple tree growing in the shade of the town wall, and someone – lazy, or proud of his tree – had left it like a living ladder, right under the wall.
    Now when someone has to climb an apple tree in broad daylight to see if the wall above it is occupied, guess who gets that duty?
    I went, and so did my bitter enemy Tom Amble, as we were the smallest and lightest.
    Abelard shifted my scabbard all the way round so my sword hung like a tail, out of my way for climbing – something any hardened man knows, but I didn’t. Nevertheless, I was first up the tree, and I swayed a branch over to the wall and, without thinking too much about it, jumped.
    I landed on the wall’s catwalk, and it was then I discovered the wall was manned.
    Everything seemed to slow to a crawl. Climbing the tree had been a lark – I was going to be first into the town, or perhaps Amble was. Even the jump – a jump that would have terrified me in London – seemed like an adventure. But once my feet were on the wall, it was too far to jump down and a dozen French sergeants were running at me, I had a great deal of time to consider my own mortality and foolishness – and to wonder where Amble had got to.
    I drew my sword and got my buckler on my left fist.
    Then I had a notion, and I put it into immediate effect. I retreated away from them, all the way to the next tower. That covered my back and caused all of them to pursue me down the catwalk, leaving the area by the apple tree empty.
    Even as the first man – they were in no particular order – ran at me, and his sword slammed into my buckler – the first blow aimed at me in earnest during my whole career as a soldier – I saw Amble, hardly a close friend but in that moment the sweetest sight in all the world, leap onto the