The Lazarus Vault

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I lie on my mattress and listen to the night. I hurt all over. My arm aches from practising my sword strokes, and my chest and shoulders from being practised upon. My hands are raw from cleaning other men’s armour, working the bristles of my brush into the thin holes between the rings. I smell of sweat, oil, blood and straw.

It’s been three years since I crossed the sea, puking into the bilge as the storm battered us. I’ve taken service as a squire in the household of Guy de Hautfort. He’s my uncle’s cousin: my uncle arranged that I should come here to learn the skills of a knight. There are half a dozen of us, some from England, some from Normandy. I think Guy is a good man, but he has little concern for us. We’re thrown together like a litter of whelps, to snarl and chase and bite each other until we’ve found our places.

I’m not happy here. When I arrived, the other boys teased me for my accent and my tonsure. They called me ‘monk’ and ‘Welshman’; they stole my food and threw my clothes in the latrine. 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 has strung 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, the same 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 night he hid a rat in my bed. Another time, when I’d spent two hours painting a boar on one of Guy’s shields, he walked by and tipped the bowl of paint across it so that my work was ruined. If I achieve anything, a few words from him can make it feel worthless. If I fail, which I do often, I never hear the end of it.

I hate all the other boys, but I hate Jocelin the most.

My one solace, in my few spare moments, is reading. It’s something else they tease me for. Guy’s chaplain is supposed to instruct us in the rudiments of reading and writing: most of the boys ignore him, or threaten to practise their swordplay on him. I have no need of him — I’m already more literate than I’ll ever need to be as a knight — but I still seek him out. He gives me books. Not prayer books and breviaries, but proper stories. One day, when I’ve saved him from a cruel prank that Jocelin was planning to play, he rewards me with a particularly rare book. The pages have been worn thin by many hands, the binding’s frayed and one of the gatherings has come unstitched, but the words are like honey on my tongue. The author is called Ovid, and the stories are fantastic concoctions of myth and wonder. I wonder how I have lived this long and never heard them, why they are not as common as water. I think even my mother didn’t know them.

One afternoon, I’m lying on my mattress reading when Jocelin comes in. The story’s captivated me: I don’t notice him enter until suddenly the book is snatched out of my hands, tearing the corner of the page. I leap up, outraged, but Jocelin’s already running out the door. If I let him get away, he’ll throw the book down a cesspit or into the moat for sure. I race after him, brandishing my wooden sword: along the corridor, down the twisting stair and across the courtyard. A flock of geese squawk in alarm as I push through the door into the great hall — straight into the back of someone.

He’s too big to be Jocelin. It might be a servant laying fresh rushes on the floor, but servants don’t wear camelin coats trimmed with fur. He turns angrily. He’s used to collisions on the battlefield, but not in his own hall.

I stammer an apology. ‘Jocelin stole my book.’

Guy’s eyes switch to his son. ‘Did you?’

Jocelin, standing by the hearth, shuffles in his place and flushes. He’s embarrassed his father has not immediately taken his side — and angry. He opts for defiance.

‘Perhaps you want me to kneel down, put my hands between his and swear fealty. Become his liegeman.’

‘I want you to give back his book.’

‘If he wants it, he can fight me for it.’

He’s six inches taller than me, broader and stronger. Whenever we spar, he beats me. But on a battlefield, you can’t choose your adversary. I put up my wooden sword.

Jocelin grabs the blade and twists it out of my hand. He throws it into the fireplace. ‘If you want to fight me, fight like a man.’

Gornemant goes to the armoury and fetches two small bucklers and two old swords. They’re iron, immensely heavy: their point and edges have been made blunt, but the weight alone could break someone’s neck. The other boys push back the tables and stand on them, an impromptu grandstand. The servants forget their chores and gather at the back of the hall. One of them tries to take wagers, but he doesn’t get any offers. The result isn’t in doubt.

We face each other down the length of the hall. Jocelin swings first; I block the blow with my shield and my arm goes numb. It leaves me too dizzy to counter-attack. I step backwards and Jocelin advances. I see the smirk on his face and wish so desperately I could wipe it off. I sway to my left then drive forward. He thinks I’m going for his sword-arm and turns; instead, I swing the flat of the blade like a club, right across his face.

Blood swells from his cut lip. I wanted to break his nose, but perhaps I’ve dislodged a tooth. Some of the crowd gasp. Gornemant scowls: if I’d done it on the training ground, he’d call me a Welsh savage and hit me.

Jocelin spits out a gob of blood. His eyes are wild, but he knows how to control himself. With terrifying force, he gets his shield rim inside my guard and pushes my sword out of the way. It opens me up: he batters my ribs with three hammer blows, then punches me in the gut with the pommel.

There’s no point resisting — it’ll just hurt more. I let my legs go and fall to the floor. Jocelin’s poised for another blow. He looks as if he’s ready to break my neck, but his father steps in and puts his hand on the blade.

‘That’s enough.’

Give me a javelin, I think, and I would make you regret it.

It’s not the last time Jocelin and I fight. But later, the swords are sharper — and the consequences catastrophic.