William Napier - The Great Siege

‘ Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit? ’ snapped the great traveller.

Stanley replied in French, ‘You didn’t hear?’

The traveller shook his head impatiently.

‘Oh, it was nothing,’ said Stanley, looking beseechingly up at him. ‘Really, nothing. I mean, not so terrible as it sounds.’

‘ Qu-est-ce qu’il a dit? ’ demanded the braggard violently, slamming his hand down on the table. Smith and Stanley both quailed abjectly before him. Nothing like fear to encourage a bully.

‘He said,’ Stanley murmured sorrowfully. ‘My profoundest apologies for the discourtesy of my passing acquaintance out there, but … he is young, and a little drunk.’

Nicholas was weaving his way back from the quayside, grinning foolishly, thinking of the lovely young barmaid.

The Frenchman drew his sword a few inches from the scabbard.

‘He said, he said,’ babbled Stanley in a high-pitched, whimpering voice, he and Smith both rising from the bench. ‘He said, oh mon Dieu , he said … that your mother was a filthy French whore, and you yourself were nothing but a fart-filled son of Sodom.’

With a great roar the Frenchman seized the edge of the table and overturned it. Nicholas halted and stared. Hodge remained seated, looking bewildered, Stanley and Smith both vanished abruptly, and there was the great traveller panting and staring at him with a very angry look in his eye.

‘What?’ said Nicholas. ‘Wha-’

Racing up the cobbled side street, Stanley and Smith passed by three fellows talking French, and immediately accosted them.

‘ Votre ami est là, dans la bodega là-bas? ’

‘ Matthieu, oui, qu’est-ce qu’il y a? ’

‘ Vite, vite! Une bagarre! ’

‘ Et un salaud Anglais! ’

‘ Ah, merde, allons-y! ’ roared the Frenchmen, breaking into a run. ‘ A bas les Anglais! ’

‘Four against two,’ said Stanley thoughtfully, looking after them. ‘I think that’s fair.’

‘Very fair,’ said Smith. ‘Very fair indeed.’

‘Two minutes?’

‘Five minutes. Time for a drink.’

‘A celebratory potation. Excellent.’

Thumps, crashes and yells could be heard from the tavern below. Something burst suddenly through the thatch roof. A table leg, perhaps.

‘A shame to pick on the fellow, in some ways,’ said Stanley.

‘Well,’ said Smith. ‘He was French.’

Coming down to the cobbled quayside again, Smith nudged Stanley. He looked along towards the town. Walking away from them was a slow quartet, arm in arm. Two had rough bandages round their heads, another’s arm hung down motionless at his side, and a fourth was using a table leg for a crutch.

‘They’ll live,’ grunted Smith. ‘What of our comrades-in-arms?’

The tavern was deserted but for the pretty young barmaid and two forlorn figures, Hodge and Nicholas, sitting silently on a bench. The latter was being tended by the girl, no older than Nicholas himself. He had a badly bruised eye and a long cut across his skull. The girl scowled ferociously at the two troublemakers, and then Hodge was on his feet, shouting at them. He seemed to have suffered little damage.

‘How dare you come back here, you pigeon-livered villains! Knights of St John, my arse you are, you’re nothing but a couple of born cowards with no more fight in you than a peevish dove!’ He was red-faced and bellowing and magnficently unafraid. He stood blocking Smith’s way and shoved him angrily in the chest, shouting in his face. Smith stepped back and did not retaliate. This servant boy was a prince among scullions. He could have clapped him on the shoulder, but needed his fists free to block any incoming blows.

‘Now get out of this alehouse and back in the shitten gutter with you, you leprous scum-sucking churls, or I’ll kick your lubbardly arses from here to Bristol and beyond, so I will! I mean it, you shit-begotten worms! Step back now!’

Hodge’s fist flew out hard and straight, and it was only with his best-judged step that Smith evaded it. A moment later he and Stanley each had an unbreakable grip on Hodge’s arms, and pinned him up against the wall. The boy struggled so wildly that they thought he might dislocate his own shoulderbones. Damn it. He was in a devil of a temper. They might have to knock him cold after all, valiant though he was.

‘What did I say about never using your fists?’ said Smith.

Hodge cursed him obscenely.

Then a voice spoke quietly behind them.

‘Set him down.’

And Smith and Stanley each felt a hard jab over their kidneys. They glanced down. The Ingoldsby lad had come behind them and filched both their daggers from their belts simultaneously.

The daggers remained as steady as the voice. ‘Do not doubt I mean it. Set him down now .’

They set him down.

‘Step past ’em, Hodge.’

Hodge came round and stood alongside Nicholas.

Stanley began to turn, but the dagger point thrust so hard into him that he gasped. The lad might even have punctured his flesh through his doublet, damn him and praise him.

‘I said do not move,’ said Nicholas. ‘Talk.’

‘If you give us space.’

‘I’m not moving, nor are these daggers, till you talk.’

The boy had them pressed so hard against the wooden walls of the tavern that they truly could not move, slide nor turn on him no matter how fast they tried. Their own daggers had them pinned, and the boy’s voice was filled with that cold determination which told them not to attempt it. Once before they had got themselves trapped like this, pressed to a wineshop wall by half a dozen daggers, in an old town in Germany. On that memorable occasion, feeling the thin wall sway distinctly, they had both pushed with all their might and collapsed the planks forwards before them, rolling back on their feet in a trice to face their foe, with satisfactory consequences. But that was another time.

Stanley said, ‘We caused you to be caught in a fight, it is true. That you might profit by it. We did not believe you would come to serious harm. We did not flee to save our skins, we stayed near. When we come to Malta, you will face far worse skirmishes than this, with a far deadlier foe. Then you will find the lessons of today useful.’

It was a long time before they felt the daggers’ points soften.

They turned at last and leaned back against the wall. Stanley was not ashamed to feel his heart beating hard. The boy had truly meant business. He slipped his hand under his doublet and withdrew it. A small spot of blood.

The boy contemptuously dropped the two daggers on the earth floor at their feet and turned his back on them.

Now the knights could see better in the gloom of the tavern. Hodge was dusty and doubtless well-bruised beneath his clothes, but otherwise seemed hale. Nicholas’s eye was already bulging like a Cyclops’s, and would boast many colours before long. That must have hurt. The cut across his skull looked worse, still leaking blood down over his pale forehead and puffed eye. He also stood unevenly. It had been a serious thing, this brawl. To his dismay, Stanley also saw that the young girl had a short, deep cut on her chin.

‘Maid,’ he said, and knelt before her. ‘Forgive us.’

She eyed him coldly and turned away, wringing out a cloth and then sponging Nicholas’s skull again. The boy’s face was white.

‘On your feet, brother,’ said Smith. ‘You’ll get no forgiveness here today.’

Stanley rose and set upright a fallen table. One leg was loose. He opened his wallet and laid down a handsome gold ducat with a heavy clunk. The girl sneered. She bathed Nicholas’s wound one last time, and then pressed a clean linen bandage over it.