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 youwould 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: nogive me my landsand nolook 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 towork 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.
