Michael JECKS - The Oath

‘No,’ Baldwin said slowly. ‘My thought was that, while you have been enormously lucky so far, and have travelled by curious routes, yet twice you have been discovered and attacked.’

‘I am surely the most unlucky of men.’

‘Or there is a man following you who has pointed you out,’ Baldwin said. ‘Someone so committed to his task that he is prepared to follow you for many leagues to rob you – or to kill you.’

Third Monday after the Feast of St Michael [20] 20 October 1326

Near Hanham

Robert Vyke was woken by a kick to his belly, and he curled into a ball, retching on his empty stomach.

‘Get your arse up, you bladder of piss!’

Forcing himself onto all fours, Vyke managed to lever himself upright, taking tight hold of a metal staple in the wall. The pain in his leg was a fire that seared his soul, and the bruises from last night were sore and throbbing.

‘Let me speak to your Bailiff,’ he managed to croak.

‘Shut your mouth, or I’ll shut it for good,’ the man snarled. He was a big, bull-bodied fellow, short but incredibly strong, with a face that was red from cider, wearing a four-day beard of coarse black stubble. In his hand he held a short length of thick rope, that hurt like a cudgel when he swung it, as he had last night.

Once more Robert Vyke had good cause to curse his miserable fortune.

He had come here, to the nearest house, as soon as he had found the head. It was his duty and his responsibility to call up the posse to discover the perpetrator of this foul murder as soon as he could. The rule was that first finder must go to all the nearest houses, at least three of them, and announce that a body had been found. Then it was up to the local officers to demand that a Coroner be called, and that the jury gather so that the whole matter could be investigated and all pertinent details noted. All too often men who found bodies would run quickly in the opposite direction to avoid being attached, which meant you had to pay a fine to guarantee that you would come back when the Justices convened their court.

‘All I did was–’

‘You came to the wrong place if you thought you could kill a man like that and get away with it,’ the man spat.

‘I didn’t kill anyone!’ Robert said. His belly was a mass of anguish now, both from the beatings he had endured and from the hunger.

‘No one else here could have done it,’ the man said unsympathetically and swung his rope-end.

It caught Robert on the side of his jaw, and he felt blood begin to course down his face as the flesh was slashed open. Wordlessly, he stumbled forward, and almost fell into the hands of the men waiting outside.

Blinking in the sudden sunshine, he tried to grab at something to hold himself upright, but his hand missed the door’s lintel and instead he found himself snatching at thin air. With a cry of despair, he tumbled to the ground again, stifling a scream of agony as his bad leg slammed into a stone.

‘Get up!’ his gaoler said again, poised to kick, but this time a sudden command made him pause.

‘Stop! I know you are as dull-witted as the sheep in the pasture, Halt, but you will not kick that fellow again. It looks as though you’ve been using him for a game of camp-ball as it is, man. Dear God, have you killed him?’

‘I just held him here, sir, until you could come to view him.’

‘You have misused him appallingly. Someone get a bucket of water and wash the poor devil’s face. If you seriously think that this man is a danger, when he has been so badly abused already, you are a bigger fool than I thought.’

‘Coroner, I–’

‘Haven’t fetched the water yet. Get to it, man, or I’ll have you gaoled instead of him. Understood?’

Robert Vyke heard all this, but it was too much of an effort to open his eyes. He remained lying on the ground, his whole soul encompassed by the flames that rose from his wound. He wondered if the pain would cease when the leg finally burned away entirely, or whether the flames of agony would continue up his frame to engulf him.

‘Open your mouth, man. Drink this.’

He did as he was commanded, and a blessed gulp of ale soothed his throat. A second gulp, and his eyes could open again, and take in his surroundings.

There was a circle of faces about him. All scruffy fellows generally, with worn linen shirts and threadbare hosen, apart from the short, tubby clerk with black hair, who stood nearby, an anxious expression in his pale brown eyes. He held a reed in his hands, and was prepared to scribble notes on behalf of Vyke’s rescuer. The latter was a tall, dark-haired man clad in a crimson tunic and heavy brown cloak. He had blue eyes and a perpetual smile on his round, amiable face. He was standing with his legs spaced widely, thumbs stuffed in his war belt, and staring down at Robert.

‘Master, you have suffered a considerable amount in recent days. Did that cretin Halt cut your leg like that?’ he said.

‘No, sir, that was in a pothole.’

‘A hole in the road did that to you?’

‘There was a bent and damaged dagger in the hole, and it caused this cut.’

‘I see,’ the man said, and smiled kindly.

‘It is in my pack. The man Halt took it last night. It’s a good knife, with jewels in the hilt.’

‘Is this true, Halt?’

Reluctantly, the squat man grimaced and went into his hovel to fetch Robert’s belongings. The dagger was separate, and he did not meet Robert’s accusing stare, merely passing it to the Coroner, who turned it over and over with a surprised look about him. ‘This is a valuable knife, masters. The man who lost this would have been seriously discomforted. And you say this was in the hole?’

‘Yes,’ Robert said, and told the story about his falling into the hole and then trying to bend the blade back into a straighter line and finding the body.

‘Where was this head, then, fellow?’

‘In the little shaw over there,’ Robert said. ‘I came here as first finder to report it.’

‘I found him in there, Sir Stephen, and knocked him on the pate to hold him until you could get here,’ Halt said proudly.

‘Yes,’ Robert Vyke said, ‘this fool held me and beat me. He said I must have killed the man myself. I don’t even know who it is!’

‘Halt is a fool of the first order,’ the Coroner said. He turned to Halt and suddenly swung his gloved fist backhanded across the man’s face, hard. ‘That is a lesson to you. If a man comes and reports a crime, it is hardly likely that he is the criminal. The felon will be long gone. And a man who has such a wound as that leg deserves care, not a beating.’ He glared. ‘Besides, if you had a brain, you would have realised that the dead man has been here for days, if this fellow speaks the truth. You beat him before you bothered to go and view the body, didn’t you? That makes you the felon here.’

‘It was growing dark,’ Halt said. His lip was bleeding where it had been smashed into his teeth. ‘I couldn’t go out and–’

‘Shut up. You have nothing to say which can help us in any way. The only saving grace you possess is that you would not have sent for me if you had killed the fellow yourself. Has anyone else seen the body yet?’

No one had, from the way that the people all about suddenly began to shuffle their feet and murmur about their fields, and how busy they all had been.

‘Good, so the vill shall be amerced for that. You do know that you are supposed to send a man to guard the body from the moment of its discovery to the moment your Coroner arrives?’ the man asked the assembled men rhetorically. There was another shuffling of feet.

Robert Vyke eyed the Coroner closely. He wore his dark hair very closely cropped, and with his bright blue eyes, at first glance he looked as though he was smiling all the time, as if genuinely happy and contented. He had crows’ feet at the corners of both, and his mouth seemed formed specifically to grin. But Robert knew enough knights to be aware that any initial impression could easily be false – he didn’t need to look at Halt’s broken nose and bloody lips to remind him that knights obeyed only those laws which appealed to them.