Chapter 6 You
You
The hunt is continuity: youth, exile, kingship, all of them joined by this bright thread of the horse beneath you and the call of the horns and the fierce joy of the hounds as they run, chasing down the boar as it crashes through the undergrowth.
Your swirling thoughts settle, the winds that stirred them dropping to stillness, all your fears of inadequacy slipping away.
You’re awake to every detail around you: each shaking leaf, each shrilling bird, everything a fearful mind tunes out.
Even the knowledge that it’s a test can’t erase the thrill of it.
So you are being watched, measured, judged by your father’s standards and the standards of his men – what of it?
They will not find you wanting. Not here in the woods, which are not so different, after all, from the woods of your exile.
The company, though, is better.
Bisclavret is here. You catch sight of him, now and again, out of the corner of your eye, and your heart lifts in triumph.
He’s here. He rides well, even on an unfamiliar horse, and when you dare turn your head to look at him, you see a vicious smile lifting the corners of his mouth, a new light in his eyes.
alive alive alive alive alive
The woods shake under the thunder of hooves, the beaters driving the boar ever forward, the well-trained hounds never forgetting their quarry no matter how many smaller beasts cross their path.
The huntsmen were right: the boar is a strong one.
He keeps his speed, though his low, heavy body has to fight through the undergrowth that the hounds leap over.
He knows these woods, in the way that you intruders do not.
Perhaps he thinks there’s safety somewhere for him, if he can only run for long enough.
But even the strongest beast tires eventually.
The dogs have caught up with him; he turns to face them, tusks at the ready, sword-sharp.
There’s a risk he’ll gore them, if he’s not gored first, and you pull back your horse and reach for your spear, but the animal is already moving again, path erratic, and you can’t judge the angle. If you miss, and anger the boar—
He charges forward, snarling. Behind you, somebody mutters an oath, and you hear them turn their horse’s head away, preparing to flee.
You cannot think of doing so yourself. You’re frozen in the face of violence and danger, unable to remember how to loosen your hand around the spear you’re gripping so tightly you feel it might splinter into pieces at any moment.
He is heading straight for you, for your horse, and you cannot move, the delight of the chase dissipating in an instant.
This is not like the deer-hunts of your youth, nor yet the pursuits of your exile, where few eyes marked your progress and even fewer passed judgment on you.
The crown is yours – the laws are yours – the kingdom is yours – but this, this test will affirm you as king in the eyes of all your barons or it will mark you as a weakling and a failure, unguided by God’s hand, and the echo of your father’s disappointment resounds in your ears like the hunting horns.
A thin film of cold sweat coats your skin beneath your clothes.
You try, again, to raise the spear to strike, and your panic-locked fingers fumble, such that you’re lucky not to drop it.
What an ignoble way to die, before your reign has even truly begun, and how feeble the human will is, to hesitate now when you have never before hesitated to hunt.
Some king you will make, flinching from the blow, without even a knight or favourite beside you to strike true in your place.
The boar is getting closer. It is too large, too fierce – the huntsmen shouldn’t have chosen this target.
But of course they wanted to test you against an enemy anyone with a shred of sense would fear.
Wanted to know if exile had hardened you, but now, in this moment, all you see is death advancing towards you, and violence turned upon you, and your heart is as soft and weak as it ever was.
You are afraid. You are afraid to die. You take a breath to better speak your prayers, and—
A spear flies from somewhere to your left and strikes the boar unerringly, burying itself deep, all the way to the guard.
He roars, furious, injured, as the hounds dive towards him.
One falls back, stomach torn by a tusk; another takes its place, the smell of blood hot in the air.
Only a brave man would dare get close enough to finish the job, and risk being gored himself.
The kind of man who could make a throw like that, and hit a boar in motion from horseback, perhaps.
You keep your horse very still and turn your head, knowing already who you’ll see at your side.
Bisclavret.
The boar holds his complete attention, as though the rest of the world has ceased to exist. You know how he feels – your own gaze drawn to him, the rest of the court fading in your awareness.
He is already slipping down from his horse with the long dagger in his hand, seemingly unconcerned by the bellowing beast that longs to savage him.
The dogs are blood-drunk and hunt-sharpened, and another man might have balked at getting among them, wary of their teeth or hesitant to cause them harm.
But Bisclavret moves among them fearlessly, part of the pack, a hunter among hunters.
He gets behind the creature – good, he knows that much at least, you should have checked – and the unsheathed dagger is a fierce one, a sharp one, one of your father’s finest, but it looks very small in his hand, shorter than the tusks of the animal, and he has never hunted a boar before, he may not know to keep clear, he may not—
You want to look away. You can’t bear to see the moment blood blooms across those borrowed clothes of his and his blush fades to deathly pallor.
But you’re transfixed by him, by the strands of hair that fall in his face – still he wears his head uncovered, his hair long – and by the unyielding strength of his intent.
Somewhere behind you: ‘Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum—’
His cousin. Afraid for him. You are afraid too; you feel that fear all the way through your thighs as they keep the destrier beneath you from shying away from the slavering boar.
Even the best-trained warhorse still fears death.
And this animal – enormous! Twice the size a boar should be, at this time of year, you’re sure of it – has the air of death about it, teeth bared.
The dagger falls.
The boar, silenced, collapses in gore.
Blood fringes Bisclavret’s sleeves. He remains there a moment, still, as though waiting to be certain, but you know the boar is dead. A fine, clean blow like that will have pierced straight through to its heart, heedless of the creature’s armoured back. Even a seasoned hunter would be proud of it.
Finally, Bisclavret looks up. Something in his expression is vicious and bright.
Another man might have apologised for robbing his king of the kill at the first boar hunt of the season, the first hunt of his reign, the day after his coronation – and you would have respected him less for it.
But Bisclavret only withdraws the dagger and steps back to let the huntsmen unmake the fallen beast and give the hounds their reward.
He crosses to you, and offers you the dagger, hilt-first.
‘Sire,’ he says, ‘my blade and my fealty are yours.’
Oh, he’s a clever man, a cunning man. Framing his request like that.
No begging and no bragging: no give me my lands and no look at what I can do.
But it’s there, anyway, unspoken. Look at what he can do!
Unscratched, unharmed, untouched but for the blood on his sleeve, and a boar dead at his feet after a throw you wouldn’t have been able to make yourself.
If the art of the chase is the art of war in miniature, then he is a warrior his enemies should fear.
And this, too, is clever: to give himself to you, to make his victory yours, no shame and no condescension. A true king has men like this to fight for him.
‘You have a deft hand with a spear,’ you say carefully, taking the bloodied knife from him, ‘and a precise one with a dagger.’
He inclines his head. ‘Thank you, sire.’
‘I would be curious to know how you fare with another weapon. A sword, perhaps.’
He glances at his cousin as though seeking reassurance, and then back at you. For a moment, you fear he’ll say his exile offered him no opportunity to learn, for that will make it more difficult to convince your men to welcome him among them, if they must first serve as tutors.
But he says, ‘I am a fair enough fighter, though perhaps I lack the polish of the court.’
A diplomatic answer. Acknowledging his failings and leaving the next steps in your hands.
‘Polish can be acquired,’ you say, ‘if the metal is good. You will have to show me.’
He has a hunter’s smile, fierce as the boar he killed. ‘Are you challenging me to combat, sire?’ he says, with a hint of humour.
You cannot hide your own smile, joyous and broad.
‘Bisclavret,’ you say, revelling in his name, ‘I am planning to make you a knight.’
Exile brought you few friends of the sort your father might have hoped you would make – warlike princes with armies ready to ride to your defence in case of invasion, measured kings who might keep your borders from ever being harried in the first place.
It brought you, instead, quieter and stranger men: clerics and abbots and scholars.
And, most of all, a travelling scribe, lately a novice of the Cistercian order, seeking a place for himself at a court that would welcome his foreigner’s hand and irreverent smile.
He’d made a poor monk, he told you, but he still lived by the rhythms of it, the prayers shaping his days.
He’s lived the life of a scholar too, and of a merchant and a warrior and a dozen other things besides, though he doesn’t look old enough to trail so many stories, perhaps eight and twenty.
You stopped asking him about his past after the first weeks of your acquaintance, for you suspect he spins his yarns from figments and dreams. Maybe if they were all stirred together in a melting pot until the embellishments boiled away, you’d be left with a glimmer of truth, but it was always his mysteries that drew you to him.
That, and the fact that he, too, was alone and foreign and an outsider, though he had better the knack of making himself liked and certainly of making himself useful.
When you returned, you brought him with you.
Now he is your scribe, your record-keeper, and he has set to work repairing the damage wrought by your father’s neglect of his books and charters.
You have found him a drier chamber, away from the dank, damp corner where your father left his documents to the ravages of mould, and whenever you call by, he has found some new story worth copying in a crumbling codex, or a land charter that needs honouring.
Your seneschal would prefer you leave such work to the chaplain and his clerks, rather than entrust it to a stranger, but the chaplain has little time for ancient stories, and in any case, your scribe is one of the only men in this castle who is not a stranger to you.
If anyone can discover the fate of Bisclavret’s father’s lands, a quarter-century after they slipped from memory, it will be him. And if the lands are gone, bestowed upon somebody from whom you cannot take them back, then he will know, too, what other inheritance you might give a knight.
He is hard at work when you arrive, scoring new parchment with lines for writing. He doesn’t glance up, but his mouth curls into an insouciant smile as though he knows you by your walk.
‘I did not know your father,’ he says, ‘but by the state of these books I suspect it would be reasonable to assume you have visited them more in the past month than he did in twenty years. The question that remains is whether you are here to see them, or to see me.’
‘Both, on this occasion,’ you admit.
‘I’m honoured. Are you here to tell me you intend to commission a beautiful illuminated gospel-book?
That you have convinced your seneschal to be less grudging with his purse-strings when I beg for parchment that isn’t coarse and full of so many holes you’d think the poor sheep met its death in a thorn bush?
That I am to have better ink, so that I might not spend my days rescuing each page from its spots and spattering? ’
‘Not today,’ you say, regretfully, though you really must speak to your seneschal about the matter. ‘I have a question of inheritance that needs answering.’
He puts down his stylus and rule. ‘Do I sense a story? A fair unknown come questing in search of his father’s place and a sword of his own?’
You narrow your eyes. He has a faint look of dishevelment, as always, his modest sleeves pushed back to save them from the ink that stains his fingers, and his dark hair loose and tangled around his face. ‘Who told you?’
‘You mean there is a fair unknown?’ he says, a gleam of interest in his eye. ‘How exciting. I had rather thought they were the stuff of stories, but if stories are living at your court, well, then, you will be a fine king.’
He is likely the only person who believes as much. ‘Neither unknown nor fair,’ you admit, ‘but yes, a young man seeking his father’s inheritance. Bisclavret. A posthumous birth. His father died in service of mine some twenty-five years gone.’
‘Bisclavret,’ echoes the scribe, considering the name, and gives you a smile. ‘And he has impressed you, has he, this stranger of yours?’
Your cheeks grow hot. ‘He excelled himself in the hunt.’
‘Ah,’ he says, a little too knowingly. ‘Well, then, I shall endeavour to determine what was done with his lands, and will report to you when I find it, if the worms haven’t eaten the charter in question. Was there anything else you needed, my lord?’
There is a gentle mockery in his deference, a mischievous edge to his smile.
You did not only bring him here because you had need of a court scribe.
You brought him because you were lonely, and he was there; because he is a storyteller, and you felt your own threads unravelling; because when the nights of your exile were coldest and hardest, he was the one who warmed them.
It would be wise to forget this.
You have not yet succeeded.
‘Only this, for now,’ you tell him. ‘If his lands cannot be returned, find some other estate of equal value. Bring word to me when you have succeeded, or have me fetched.’
He inclines his head in acknowledgement. ‘As you command,’ he says, drily, and takes up his work again.