The Perfect Sinner. Will Davenport

which was a hungry business. For days that stretched out into weeks, we patrolled those hills with absolutely no idea where the Scots were. I had time to set my old chain mail to rights and get something like an edge put on my sword, though it wavered in and out as you looked along it and would just as easily have sawn wood as sliced flesh. The Earl of Lancaster, the old Earl that is, was in command, and he was a fine man, but on my fourth day there, I saw young Edward, the new king, for the first time, and there was an even finer man. He was five years younger than me, but he was already bigger.

      Those Scots had us looking like fools from the very first. They were light on their feet. They brought no baggage trains like we did. Each man carried a little bag of oatmeal, I heard, which they would mix into a paste and cook on a stone. We drank wine which the carts brought and they drank water which the rivers brought. How could we catch them? Rivers go faster than carts. We followed them, slogging through the thick country while they danced ahead in their own natural element, taunting us with smoke from the villages they burnt. I craned for another glimpse of the King and, as our numbers thinned, the footmen left trailing and lost as we who had horses did our best to keep going, I saw more and more of him. It got worse and then it got still worse again. Our rations grew shorter and shorter, our horses were going lame, and then the biting flies of summer were driven away by even worse downpours of driving rain. Rain gets into armour and rusts it and rubs your skin raw if you’re stuck in that armour all day and all night. Mine had been made for someone else long ago and it fitted only where it touched.

      So far, it was a contest only with hunger and the weather, and I could stand up to that, but I needed more. I was desperate to test myself against an enemy, to know what it really was to stand up to another man in a real fight. It wasn’t that I wanted to spill another man’s blood, more that I needed to know how I would be. The strain of fearing that I might turn out a coward in the company of all these tough, quiet men was getting too much for me. I knew the rules of chivalry. I knew what was considered a fine way to fight and what was not. The Scottish knights had a brave reputation.

      We found them in the end, mostly by luck. We crossed a river in a barren land and saw them on top of a hill ahead of us, in a well-prepared position with no way to attack except slowly and uphill into waiting steel, and we weren’t in a hurry to do that. Instead, we faced them for three days from our own side of the valley. They looked as though they grew from the landscape and belonged in it, in their rough cloth, while we, though the shine had long gone from our metal, seemed entirely out of place. I could not imagine what it would be like to attack them, to climb that hill and face those deadly men, but the moment of finding out was postponed. After the third night we woke to see the far hill was bare. They had slipped away.

      I felt frustration but I also felt relief, a little song in my soul that my death had stepped a few paces back. Then our scouts returned and the word spread that the enemy had not gone far. They had found an even better protected hill and the stalemate set in all over again.

      It was three days later that I met the King face to face and in the oddest manner. My wish had come partly true. I had experienced battle, but not in any ordered way, not in a way covered by the rules. My first taste of combat consisted of waking abruptly, confused as men rushed over my legs in the night, shouting ‘Raiders! To arms!’ Searching desperately in the dark for my sword, I found it with the scabbard all caught up in the tent ropes and got it out, cutting my other hand in the process, just in time to take a wild slash at a man who appeared out of the darkness in front of me with an axe. I missed him completely and that was just as well as he turned out to be one of ours. We beat them off, or they chose to leave – a bold party barely three hundred strong, who left mounds of our men behind them. The next night had us all wide awake and jumpy, peering into the mist fearing a repeat, but when day dawned, we found we were looking up at what seemed once again to be an empty hillside. Had they gone? As I looked, a band of our men rode up from behind me on horses.

      ‘Are you armed and ready?’ said the nearest. ‘If you are, come with us and let’s see what’s up there.’

      I was about to question the man’s right to command me in that way when he half turned and I saw that he had every right. I had taken him for a full-grown man, because he was big but the face I now saw was younger than the body. My king, Edward, aged just fifteen, was a fine man and his face had a smile on it which would have inspired loyalty in a piece of solid rock. I climbed into my saddle to follow him, thrilled, repeating his words to myself so that I had them by heart, the first words my king spoke directly to me. Ten of us went carefully up that hill, all in plain armour with no surcoats, no crests. There were three riding ahead in case all was not what it seemed. I had spurred forward to join them, but was waved back to my proper place. They were hard men, those others, men you wouldn’t want to tangle with, and as I looked around, I saw that only Edward and myself did not yet fully fit that description, though it was plain from the look on his face and the way he held himself in the saddle that for him, it was only a matter of time.

      What a strange sight we found at the top. We rode through a band of mist which had us staring hard again and drawing swords, then it dispersed as we reached the summit so that we seemed to climb up into a place all of itself, remote from anything else I knew, floating in its own world. For a moment I thought we were the only living beings present, but then I heard a groan and saw ahead of me a slumped body, lashed to the trunk of a tree.

      ‘See to him,’ said the man next to me.

      ‘Who is he?’

      ‘He’s one of ours, snatched on a raid. Look to him.’

      At that stage of my life, I was no good at tending the wounded, scared to face the pain of others without the knowledge to ease it. This man hung from the ropes, naked, and his face was somewhere behind the blood which ran in crusted streaks down his body. Both his legs were splayed out at an angle which showed the bones were smashed, and he whimpered when I tried to support him while I cut him down.

      I gave him water and did what I could to wash the blood from his eyes.

      I’m Guy,’ I said. ‘Help is coming.’

      He croaked something in reply but it sounded more like a curse than a name. Laying him on the ground, with no idea what else to do I saw that beyond him there were four more, each lashed to another of the twisted mountain oaks. Three of them looked dead, but the fourth was tugging hard at his bonds as he saw us coming. Then he heard our voices and knew we were English and calmed down.

      I did all I could for my man, and as I cleaned him I realised the extent of his wounds was worse than I could ever have imagined. He stared at me with gratitude as I mopped away the blood, but my kerchief was soon so drenched that it could take no more. I was kneeling over him, calming him with a hand on his forehead, talking to him in his pain so that he would know he was not alone, when a hand came from behind me and roughly thrust me to one side. I overbalanced backwards and saw the man who had led the way up the hill. He was perhaps approaching thirty with sandy hair and small, reddened eyes, close together. For just a moment, I felt sharp relief that he had come to help me, then I saw the knife in his hand. He held the knife out so that the poor soul on the ground would see it and the injured man began to shake his head from side to side, trying to raise his arms to protect himself.

      ‘Don’t do…’ that, I was about to say, but before the word was out, the knife had slit his throat and the rest of his life was bubbling and spurting out into the grass.

      ‘Why did you do that?’ I said to the sandy-haired man, and he turned his head to look at me with a grin on his face.

      ‘To spare his pain.’ His voice was shriller than you would expect from a soldier.

      ‘If that was the reason, why did you show him the knife?’

      ‘Every man should have the chance to prepare himself for death.’

      ‘That wasn’t it. You enjoyed…’

      The next thing I knew, his left hand was clutching my throat and the knife in his right hand was pricking the skin just above my eyelid.

      He shot a quick look around, but there was nobody near us to see.

      ‘I am