Timeline

34:25:54

The horses clattered across the drawbridge. The Professor stared straight ahead, ignoring the soldiers who escorted him. The guards at the castle gate barely glanced up as the riders entered the castle. Then the Professor was gone from sight.

Standing near the drawbridge, Kate said, "What do we do now? Do we follow him?"

Marek didn't answer her. Looking back, she saw that he was staring fixedly at two knights on horseback, fighting with broadswords on the field outside the castle. It appeared to be some kind of demonstration or practice; the knights were surrounded by a circle of young men in livery - some wearing bright green, the others in yellow and gold, apparently the colors of the two knights. And a large crowd of spectators had gathered, laughing and shouting insults and encouragement to one knight or the other. The horses turned in tight circles, almost touching each other, bringing their armored riders face to face. The swords clanged again and again in the morning air.

Marek stared, without moving.

She tapped him on the shoulder. "Listen, André, the Professor-"

"In a minute."

"But-"

"In a minute."

For the first time, Marek felt a twinge of uncertainty. Until now, nothing he had seen in this world had seemed out of place, or unexpected. The monastery was just as he had expected. The peasants in the fields were as he had expected. The tournament being set up was as he had pictured it. And when he entered the town of Castelgard, he again found it exactly as he had thought it would be. Kate had been appalled by the butcher on the cobblestones, and the stench of the tanner's vats, but Marek was not. It was all as he had imagined it, years ago.

But not this, he thought, watching the knights fight.

It was so fast! The swordplay was so swift and continuous, attempting to slash with both downswing and backswing, so that it looked more like fencing than sword fighting. The clangs of impact came only a second or two apart. And the fight proceeded without hesitation or pause.

Marek had always imagined these fights as taking place in slow motion: ungainly armored men wielding swords so heavy that each swing was an effort, carrying dangerous momentum and requiring time to recover and reset before the next swing. He had read accounts of how exhausted men were after battle, and he had assumed it was the result of the extended effort of slow fights, encased in steel.

These warriors were big and powerful in every way. Their horses were enormous, and they themselves appeared to be six feet or more, and extremely strong.

Marek had never been fooled by the small size of the armor in museum display cases - he knew that any armor that found its way into a museum was ceremonial and had never been worn in anything more hazardous hazardous than a medieval parade. Marek also suspected, though he could not prove it, that much of the surviving armor - highly decorated, chiseled and chased - was intended only for display, and had been made at three-quarter scale, the better to show the delicacy of the craftsmen's designs.

Genuine battle armor never survived. And he had read enough accounts to know that the most celebrated warriors of medieval times were invariably big men - tall, muscular and unusually strong. They were from the nobility; they were better fed; and they were big. He had read how they trained, and how they delighted in performing feats of strength for the amusement of the ladies.

And yet, somehow, he had never imagined anything remotely like this. These men fought furiously, swiftly and continuously - and it looked as if they could go all day. Neither gave the least indication of fatigue; if anything, they seemed to be enjoying their exertions.

As he watched their aggressiveness and speed, Marek realized that left to his own devices, this was exactly the way he himself would choose to fight - quickly, with the conditioning and reserves of stamina to wear down an opponent. He had only imagined a slower fighting style from an unconscious assumption that men in the past were weaker or slower or less imaginative than he was, as a modern man.

Marek knew this assumption of superiority was a difficulty faced by every historian. He just hadn't thought he was guilty of it.

But clearly, he was.

It took him a while to realize, through the shouting of the crowd, that the combatants were in such superb physical condition that they could expend breath shouting as they fought; they hurled a stream of taunts and insults at each other between blows.

And then he saw that their swords were not blunted, that they were swinging real battle swords, with razor-sharp edges. Yet they clearly intended each other no harm; this was just an amusing warm-up to the coming tournament. Their cheerful, casual approach to deadly hazard was almost as unnerving as the speed and intensity with which they fought.

The battle continued for another ten minutes, until one mighty swing unhorsed one knight. He fell to the ground but immediately jumped up laughing, as easily as if he were wearing no armor. Money changed hands. There were cries of "Again! Again!" A fistfight broke out among the liveried boys. The two knights walked off, arm in arm, toward the inn.

Marek heard Kate say, "André…"

He turned slowly toward her.

"André, is everything all right?"

"Everything is fine," he said. "But I have a lot to learn."

They walked down the castle drawbridge, approaching the guards. He felt Kate tense alongside him. "What do we do? What do we say?"

"Don't worry. I speak Occitan."

But as they came closer, another fight broke out on the field beyond the moat, and the guards watched it. They were entirely preoccupied as Marek and Kate passed through the stone arch and entered the castle courtyard.

"We just walked in," Kate said, surprised. She looked around the courtyard. "Now what?"

It was freezing, Chris thought. He sat naked, except for his undershorts, on a stool in Sir Daniel's small apartment. Beside him was a basin of steaming water, and a hand cloth for washing. The boy had brought the basin of water up from the kitchen, carrying it as if it were gold; his manner indicated that it was a sign of favor to be treated to hot water.

Chris had dutifully scrubbed himself, refusing the boy's offers of assistance. The bowl was small, and the water soon black. But eventually he'd managed to scrape the mud from beneath his fingernails, off his body and even off his face, with the aid of a tiny metal mirror the boy handed him.

Finally, he pronounced himself satisfied. But the boy, with a look of distress, said, "Master Christopher, you are not clean." And he insisted on doing the rest.

So Chris sat shivering on his wooden stool while the boy scrubbed him for what seemed like an hour. Chris was perplexed; he'd always thought that medieval people were dirty and smelly, immersed in the filth of the age. Yet these people seemed to make a fetish of cleanliness. Everyone he saw in the castle was clean, and there were no odors.

Even the toilet, which the boy insisted he use before bathing, was not as awful as Chris had expected. Located behind a wooden door in the bedroom, it was a narrow closet, fitted with a stone seat above a basin that drained into a pipe. Apparently, waste flowed down to the ground floor of the castle, where it was removed daily. The boy explained that each morning a servant flushed the pipe with scented water, then placed a fresh bouquet of sweet-smelling herbs in a clip on the wall. So the odor was not objectionable. In fact, he thought ruefully, he'd smelled much worse in airplane toilets.

And to top it all, these people wiped themselves with strips of white linen! No, he thought, things were not as he had expected.

One advantage of being forced to sit there was that he was able to try speaking to the boy. The boy was tolerant, and replied slowly to Chris, as if to an idiot. But this enabled Chris to hear him before the earpiece translation, and he quickly discovered that imitation helped; if he overcame his embarrassment and employed the archaic phrases he had read in texts - many of which the young boy himself used - then the boy understood him much more easily. So Chris gradually fell to saying "Methinks" instead of "I think," and "an" instead of "if," and "for sooth" instead of "in truth." And with each small change, the boy seemed to understand him better.

Chris was still sitting on the stool when Sir Daniel entered the room. He brought neatly folded clothes, rich and expensive-looking. He placed them on the bed.

"So, Christopher of Hewes. You have involved yourself with our clever beauty."

"She hath saved mine life." He pronounced it say-ved. And Sir Daniel seemed to understand.

"I hope it will not cause you trouble."

"Trouble?"

Sir Daniel sighed. "She tells me, friend Chris, that you are gentle, yet not a knight. You are a squire?"

"In sooth, yes."

"A very old squire," Sir Daniel said. "What is your training at arms?"

"My training at arms.. ." Chris frowned. "Well, I have, uh-"

"Have you any at all? Speak plain: What is your training?"

Chris decided he had better tell the truth. "In sooth, I am - I mean, trained - in my studies - as a scholar."

"A scholar?" The old man shook his head, incomprehending. "Escolie? Esne discipulus? Studesne sub magistro?" You study under a master?

"Ita est." Even so.

"Ubi?" Where?

"Uh… at, uh, Oxford."

"Oxford?" Sir Daniel snorted. "Then you have no business here, with such as my Lady. Believe me when I say this is no place for a scolere. Let me tell you how your circumstances now lie."

"Lord Oliver needs money to pay his soldiers, and he has plundered all he can from the nearby towns. So now he presses Claire to marry, that he may gain his fee. Guy de Malegant has tendered a handsome offer, very pleasing to Lord Oliver. But Guy is not wealthy, and he cannot make good on his fee unless he mortgages part of my Lady's holdings. To this she will not accede. Many believe that Lord Oliver and Guy have long since made a private agreement - one to sell the Lady Claire, the other to sell her lands."

Chris said nothing.

"There is a further impediment to the match. Claire despises Malegant, whom she suspects had a hand in her husband's death. Guy was in attendance of Geoffrey at the time of his death. Everyone was surprised by the suddenness of his departure from this world. Geoffrey was a young and vigorous knight. Although his wounds were serious, he made steady recovery. No one knows the truth of that day, yet there are rumors - many rumors - of poison."

"I see," Chris said.

"Do you? I doubt it. For consider: my Lady might as well be a prisoner of Lord Oliver in this castle. She may herself slip out, but she cannot secretly remove her entire retinue. If she secretly departs and returns to England - which is her wish - Lord Oliver will take his revenge against me, and others of her household. She knows this, and so she must stay.

"Lord Oliver wishes her to marry, and my Lady devises stratagems to postpone it. It is true she is clever. But Lord Oliver is not a patient man, and he will force the matter soon. Now, her only hope lies there." Sir Daniel walked over and pointed out the window.

Chris came to the window and looked.

From this high window, he saw a view over the courtyard, and the battlements of the outer castle wall. Beyond he saw the roofs of the town, then the town wall, with guards walking the parapets. Then fields and countryside stretching off into the distance.

Chris looked at Sir Daniel questioningly.

Sir Daniel said, "There, my scolere. The fires."

He was pointing in the far distance. Squinting, Chris could just make out faint columns of smoke disappearing into the blue haze. It was at the limit of what he could see.

"That is the company of Arnaut de Cervole," Sir Daniel said. "They are encamped no more than fifteen miles distant. They will reach here in a day - two days at most. All know it."

"And Sir Oliver?"

"He knows his battle with Arnaut will be fierce."

"And yet he holds a tournament-"

"That is a matter of his honor," Sir Daniel said. "His prickly honor. Certes, he would disband it, if he could. But he does not dare. And herein lies your hazard."

"My hazard?"

Sir Daniel sighed. He began pacing. "Dress you now, to meet my Lord Oliver in proper fashion. I shall try to avert the coming disaster."

The old man turned and walked out of the room. Chris looked at the boy. He had stopped scrubbing.

"What disaster?" he said.