Free The Lazarus Vault by Tom Harper Page B

boys teased me for my accent and my tonsure. They called me ‘monk’ and ‘Welshman’; they stole my food and threw my clothes in thelatrine. I cried a lot in those first months. Now I’ve learned to hide my feelings. Even when I’m naked, I have my armour.
    I knew the history of the Normans before I came here: how they conquer everywhere they go like a plague. First their own duchy, then Sicily, England, Antioch. Now that I’m in their heartland, I understand why. There are no safe havens in Normandy: their entire kingdom is a frontier. There are Bretons to the west, Angevins and Poitevins to the south, French to the east and Flemings in the north. Hautfort is in the north, a particularly troublesome region near Flanders. It breeds hard men. Guy de Hautfort is a squat, barrel-chested man, a flint protruding from the chalky Norman soil. He sparks easily if struck.
    Guy’s seneschal is called Gornemant. His arms are a quartered shield, each a different colour, like a fool’s coat, so we call him the jester. It’s ironic: he’s a grim, stern man who never smiles. His beard is grey as steel, and his eyes as hard. He rode with Duke Robert and the Army of God on crusade; he was there when Jerusalem fell. We often beg him to tell us those stories, but he never does. His face stiffens and he blinks, as if a speck of that desert dust is still lodged in his eye.
    Gornemant takes charge of our instruction. Day after day, he teaches us when to rein in the horse and when to prick him with our spurs; how to hold the shield so that it rests on the horse’s neck and how to fewter a lance so that it doesn’t glance off the enemy. He watches our swordplay and tells us how we would have fared with real weapons: this blow would barely have scratched his arm, that one would have stuck him through or taken off his head. Very rarely, he lets us gallop through the orchard and tilt at the bladders he hasstrung from the apple trees, or crouch in the branches and try to leap on to a passing horse. These are my favourite days. For the rest, we practise on each other. We wear quilted cloth armour, but I think its only benefit is to mimic the cramping effect of chain mail.
    If it were only practice at arms, I might enjoy it more. But there are other duties. My lord Guy must be dressed and undressed, armed and disarmed; he needs his food served, his meat sliced, his cup filled. I have to fight even to win the right to perform these chores – all the squires want the privilege, to attract his attention. You must be first outside his bedroom door in the morning, the first to his stirrup when he rides in, last to leave the great hall at night. Then you must attend to your own chores: sew up the tears in the cloth armour and try and stuff more rags inside, hoping it will hurt less tomorrow; wash clothes; sweep the grate. The other squires have servants of their own, but my uncle says there is no money for servants for me. He has my father’s castle to rebuild, after all. I think he means to build it in stone.
    When I lie in my bed, I tell myself stories to get to sleep. My adversary is always the same – the black knight as tall as a house. In my stories I meet him in a glade, in a waste forest, a withered heath: I shatter his lance, break his shield, dent his armour and finally cut off his head with a single blow and mount it on a stake.
    I always defeat him. But he returns in my dreams, and there he has the upper hand.
    Guy has a son called Jocelin, two years older than me. If he wasn’t there, I’d be less unhappy. Guy may be as cold and hard as quenched steel, but his son is still in the crucible, hot as the fire that surrounds him. His mood changes with the wind, thesame way iron flushes and pales under the bellows. You touch him at your peril.
    Indisputably, Jocelin is the leader of our pack of dogs. Like all leaders, he affirms his power by exercising it on the weakest – me. He encourages the other boys to play pranks on me. One