The Table of Less Valued Knights Read online

  ‘You’re a bit short for a giant, aren’t you?’ said another kid.

  ‘Short-arse!’ shouted the first kid.

  ‘Dwarf!’ yelled a third.

  They all started chanting, ‘Dwarf! Dwarf! Dwarf!’

  Then the first one threw a stone. It bounced off Jemima’s rear flank. She responded with a low, grumbling sound.

  ‘On second thoughts, I’ll take my chances with the drawbridge,’ said Conrad.

  ‘Home, sweet home,’ muttered Elaine.

  A Moorish guard in mismatched armour stood by the portcullis, playing a cup and ball game. Every time he jerked the ball up on its string to try to catch it in the cup, the visor of his helmet slammed down and he had to stop playing to open it again. Even so, as they reined in beside him, the guard was visibly annoyed at having to put the toy down.

  ‘What now?’ he said.

  ‘Is that you, Samir?’ said Elaine.

  ‘Might be.’

  ‘It’s me. Lady Elaine. Of here.’

  Samir pulled his visor up and squinted at Elaine. Satisfied, he dropped it down again. ‘And this lot?’ he said.

  ‘They’re with me.’

  ‘All right,’ said Samir, nodding. The visor of his helmet clanged.

  ‘Were you here the day of the tourney?’ Humphrey asked him. ‘The day Sir Alistair Gilbert was kidnapped?’

  ‘Still working in the kitchens then. Frank was on the gate.’

  ‘And where’s Frank?’

  ‘Ran off, didn’t he?’

  Humphrey turned to Elaine. ‘The guard ran off? So he’s our prime suspect.’

  Elaine shook her head. ‘This didn’t have anything to do with Frank,’ she said.

  ‘Because guards are so notoriously incorruptible,’ said Humphrey.

  ‘Oi, watch who you call corrupt, mate,’ said Samir.

  ‘He can call whoever he wants corrupt, and you can call him Sir,’ said Conrad.

  ‘Cool your boots, half-pint,’ said Samir. ‘That’s a bleeding ugly horse you’ve got there.’

  ‘She is an elephant and she could kill you with one kick.’

  ‘With a nose like that, I reckon I could kill her with a cold,’ said Samir.

  ‘Would you please let us through?’ said Elaine. ‘I need to speak with my parents as a matter of urgency.’

  ‘I’m not the one who’s causing trouble,’ said Samir, but he hauled up the portcullis all the same.

  ‘What about this Frank?’ Humphrey said to Elaine as they rode through the gate. ‘What makes you so sure he had nothing to do with Sir Alistair’s disappearance?’

  ‘He’s a good head taller than the Knight in Black,’ said Elaine. ‘Anyway, Frank had another reason for running away. He got a maiden pregnant.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘It’s not a very tolerant castle,’ said Elaine. ‘As you will see.’

  The cobbles of the stable yard were cracked, with moss and weeds growing through them. The stables themselves outnumbered the horses by about five to one. There was a stench of stale horse piss and dried shit. Even the chickens scrabbling around in the dirt looked depressed.

  ‘Reminds me of your bedroom, Conrad,’ said Humphrey.

  ‘Reminds me of your love life,’ Conrad replied.

  They dismounted and waited for someone to take charge of Jemima and the horses. After a while, Samir sauntered up.

  ‘I double as stable hand,’ he explained.

  ‘Who’s guarding the gate?’ said Elaine.

  ‘I gave one of the kids a coin,’ said Samir.

  ‘He’s probably sharpening it to throw at us even as we speak,’ said Conrad.

  They all held out the reins of their mounts to Samir.

  ‘I’m not taking that one,’ Samir said, looking up at Jemima.

  ‘Fine. Jemima, stay,’ commanded Conrad, looking his elephant in the eye.

  Jemima deposited a heap of dung pointedly near Samir’s feet, then found a patch of early morning sun and lay down. Samir took the rest of the horses to the stables.

  Elaine led Humphrey and Conrad along a pathway of cracked and sinking flagstones to a side door into the castle.

  ‘I can see why you’re in a hurry to get married,’ said Humphrey.

  ‘It’s that or the convent,’ said Elaine, ‘or being burned as a witch.’

  As they climbed the stairs to the main hall, they heard feet scurrying behind them and Samir appeared again, slightly out of breath and carrying a rusty bugle.

  ‘I’m also the herald,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

  Thus it was that their entry into the throne room was preceded by a tuneless fanfare and the listless announcement of ‘Sir Herbert Divvol and his squire. And your daughter.’

  Lord and Lady du Mont looked at Humphrey as if their cat had brought in half a chewed ferret and then regurgitated the other half on their shoes.

  ‘Did you find him yet?’ asked Lord du Mont while Humphrey was still mid-bow.

  Humphrey straightened. ‘No,’ he said.

  Lord du Mont sucked unhappily on whatever was left of his teeth.

  The couple were seated in tall wooden chairs on either side of a huge fireplace, under enormous matching fur rugs that were just claws and teeth away from being entire bears. The rugs were necessary because the hugeness of the fireplace was not matched by the hugeness of the fire. Instead a pitiful pile of twigs and fir cones crackled as merrily as anything could under the lord’s disdainful glare. It was so damp in the room that the walls trickled with water, and so cold – far colder indoors than it was out – that it wouldn’t have taken much more for that water to turn to icicles. At least icicles wouldn’t stink of mould, thought Humphrey. He breathed through his mouth to avoid the smell, and watched his exhalation turn to sad little clouds. He was surprised they didn’t immediately start raining.

  ‘Elaine,’ said Lord du Mont, as if he had been trying to remember who she was.

  Elaine curtseyed to her father.

  Lady du Mont screwed up her face. Humphrey took an instinctive step back before deciding that no, it was unlikely that she was preparing to spit. Elaine stepped up to her mother, placed a hand on her bony shoulder and deposited what for want of any other word he would have to call a kiss on her powdery white cheek.

  Lord du Mont squinted at Conrad, who was slouching to avoid grazing his head against the ceiling.

  ‘Are you supposed to be a giant of some kind?’ he said.

  ‘I’m still growing,’ said Conrad.

  ‘Couldn’t you afford to get a full-sized one?’ Lord du Mont asked Humphrey.

  ‘Conrad is an excellent squire,’ said Humphrey. This wasn’t true, exactly, but Humphrey was damned if he was going to watch the kid be insulted by this pair of old prunes.

  ‘Conrad is an excellent squire,’ repeated Lord du Mont. ‘What about you? Are you an excellent knight?’ His tone of voice answered his own question.

  ‘Father, please be nice. He’s here to help me,’ said Elaine.

  ‘If you hadn’t been so careless, you wouldn’t need his help,’ said Lord du Mont.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said Elaine. ‘You can hardly have expected me to fight off Sir Alistair’s kidnapper with my bare hands.’

  ‘If you were a better prize, your fiancé might have made more effort to fight the kidnapper himself.’

  ‘Please could you all keep your voices down,’ said Lady du Mont, holding skeletal fingers to her temples. ‘My humours are out of alignment.’

  ‘I’ll need a list of everyone who attended the tourney,’ said Humphrey, ‘including a breakdown of those who did not go through the melee into the joust round, and what injuries they sustained.’

  ‘Sir Herbert Divoll,’ said Lord du Mont, as if he hadn’t heard him. ‘I don’t know of a Knight of the Round Table by that name.’

  ‘That’s not his name,’ said Elaine.

  Conrad reached out a hand to stop her from talking, but it was too late.

&nb
sp; ‘What is your name, then?’ said Lord du Mont.

  Humphrey paused. ‘Sir Humphrey du Val,’ he said.

  Lady du Mont gasped. ‘Of Castle Maudit?’

  ‘Not of Castle Maudit,’ said Humphrey, ‘but yes, I am the man you are thinking of.’

  Lord du Mont began to laugh.

  ‘Congratulations, Elaine,’ he said. ‘You’ve hired yourself the ladykiller.’

  Elaine’s brow creased with the beginning of recognition. Conrad took a step towards Lord du Mont, his hand reaching for his axe.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Humphrey.

  Conrad stopped.

  ‘I’m sure you’re mistaken,’ said Elaine to her father.

  ‘He murdered his own wife,’ said Lord du Mont.

  Elaine shook her head in disbelief.

  ‘He’s not even a Knight of the Round Table, are you, Humphrey?’ Lord du Mont continued.

  ‘Sir Humphrey,’ said Conrad.

  ‘I am a Knight of the Court of King Arthur,’ said Humphrey.

  ‘And where do you sit, exactly?’ said Lord du Mont.

  Humphrey hesitated, but there was no point lying. ‘At the Table of Less Valued Knights.’

  Humphrey felt his heart sink as Elaine’s disappointed eyes turned towards him, but refused to betray himself with a reaction.

  ‘Does that even exist?’ said Lady du Mont. ‘I thought it was just a myth.’

  ‘Oh, it exists,’ said her husband. ‘It’s Camelot’s dirty little secret. They’re the knights spotless King Arthur would rather you didn’t know about. Well done, Elaine. Of all the champions in Camelot, you bring me this one. I’d expect nothing less of you. Good luck trying to find that fiancé of yours now.’

  Elaine, white-faced, said nothing.

  ‘Samir,’ said Lord du Mont, ‘fetch Sir Humphrey his list, and then they’ll be on their way. And Elaine?’

  ‘Yes, Father?’

  ‘You’re going with him. And if you don’t find Sir Alistair, you needn’t bother coming home.’

  Seven

  Humphrey chose a road almost at random, a deep lane heavily shaded by tall elms, which curved south-eastward away from Elaine’s village and further into Tuft. For a long time the only sound was the steady beat of horses’ hooves and elephant’s feet. They were exhausted from riding all night, but Humphrey wasn’t ready to stop yet; not until the rutted land of their quest had somehow been made smooth again.

  ‘You know the story?’ he said eventually.

  ‘I didn’t know it was you,’ said Elaine. She knew without asking what he was referring to, having thought about little else since leaving her parents’ castle.

  ‘It’s different from what you’ve heard. She tried to kill me first.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ said Elaine.

  ‘She left me,’ Humphrey persisted anyway. ‘But she made it look as though it were a kidnap. I traced her supposed kidnapper to Castle Maudit. He was a giant. His name was – well, it doesn’t really matter what his name was, does it? It was Ulrich, anyway. A group of us assailed the castle. But it was a trap. I wasn’t in the vanguard because it was decided – I decided – that the other knights would disarm the guards while I searched for my wife – who I thought was imprisoned, of course. Her name was …’ Humphrey’s voice cracked.

  ‘Cecily,’ said Conrad, from high above them on Jemima’s back.

  ‘Her name was Cecily,’ said Humphrey, forcing himself to carry on. ‘Ulrich’s forces killed all my companions. All my fellow knights. While I was down in the dungeons. Where Cecily was getting ready to cut my head off with the giant’s sword. It was as big as she was. It was a terrible misjudgement on her part – she was always arrogant. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the blade flash. I was trained to react fast, I was a knight. I thought the swordsman was her captor, and I struck. Just one blow. It was enough.’

  Elaine shook her head, struggling to take it all in.

  ‘How long ago did this happen?’ she said.

  ‘How old are you, Conrad?’ said Humphrey.

  ‘Fifteen,’ said Conrad.

  ‘Fifteen years,’ said Humphrey.

  ‘So Conrad is …’

  ‘Ulrich’s son,’ said Humphrey. ‘He was the only survivor. He and I were the only survivors. I took him back with me to Camelot.’

  ‘You raised him?’ said Elaine.

  ‘He was a baby. I couldn’t leave him there. I couldn’t kill him.’

  ‘Though I think some people would have,’ said Conrad.

  ‘You raised your enemy’s baby,’ said Elaine.

  Humphrey allowed himself to glance at her. She was looking at him with intense curiosity, but equally intense sympathy.

  ‘There’s no such thing as an enemy baby,’ he said, looking ahead again, feeling his shoulders start to unstiffen.

  ‘But you could have given him to someone else to bring up,’ said Elaine. ‘To a woman.’

  ‘Are you saying that a man can’t look after a child?’

  ‘I’m saying that most men don’t want to.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  They rode in silence for a short while, Elaine allowing her understanding of Humphrey to rearrange itself.

  ‘So what makes you different?’ she asked. ‘That you would choose to bring up a child by yourself, a child not your own?’

  ‘Maybe it’s me,’ said Conrad. ‘Maybe it’s because I’m irresistible.’

  Humphrey grinned for a moment. Then his smiled faded as the memories crowded back in.

  ‘It wasn’t as easy as just leaving,’ he told Elaine. ‘After I … after Cecily … I mean, afterwards. I had to fight my way through what remained of Ulrich’s guards. I managed to defeat them all, but I was injured very badly. Then, as I was crawling to my horse, I heard crying. I followed the sound, and there was this baby. This very big baby.’

  ‘Me,’ said Conrad, unnecessarily.

  ‘I don’t remember how we got back to Camelot. But they tell me that when I arrived, I was fallen forward on my horse, close to death, and I was clutching Conrad and wouldn’t let him go. So they let me take him to my room. And I kept him with me while I recovered. At first I wouldn’t speak to anyone other than the baby. After a while, Arthur was so worried he sent Quentin in to see me.’

  ‘Who’s Quentin?’ said Elaine.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Humphrey, ‘Quentin is this cousin of Merlin’s. The King keeps him at court to counsel knights who’ve been on bad quests. Arthur is a big believer in the healing power of conversation, as if drinking and wenches hadn’t been doing a perfectly good job of obliterating painful memories for centuries without help from the likes of Quentin.’

  ‘Quentin wears clothes that he makes himself,’ said Conrad, as if that said it all.

  ‘Yes,’ said Humphrey. ‘He says learning a craft is good for a man, focuses the spirit, calms the mind. That’s the kind of horse-shit thing he’s always saying when he’s not trying to get you to tell him how you feel about things. Every morning for months he’d plonk himself down at the foot of my bed and say, “Hello, Sir Humphrey, how are you feeling today?” ’

  ‘How he was feeling was sick of the sight of Quentin,’ said Conrad.

  Elaine laughed.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Humphrey, ‘Quentin thought that looking after the baby gave me a sense of purpose. That I’d bonded with him because we’d been through the same trauma.’

  ‘And had you bonded with him?’ said Elaine.

  Humphrey shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He’s all right.’ He winked at Conrad. ‘And Arthur agreed that when he was old enough he could be my page, and then my squire. So here he is.’

  Conrad bowed, and Jemima lifted her trunk in salute.

  ‘And the Table of Less Valued Knights?’ said Elaine.

  ‘It was supposed to be a temporary recuperative measure,’ said Humphrey. ‘That’s what Arthur said, anyway. But I think the truth is that nobody wanted me at the Round Table any more,
not when so many of our brothers had died on my behalf. Some of them thought the massacre was my fault. I don’t entirely disagree.’ He shook his head, not wishing to dwell on this. ‘Anyway, time passed. I was busy with Conrad. And the long and the short of it is that Castle Maudit is the last quest I ever went on.’

  ‘Until this one,’ said Elaine.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Humphrey watched his horse’s brown head bob in front of him, the green of the trees above, and beyond that the sky, the washed-out grey of old linen, veiling the weak glow of the sun.

  ‘The problem we have is that your kidnapper knight was in black,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Elaine, who had been lost in her own thoughts.

  ‘You know the story of Gawain and the Green Knight, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Tell it to me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just tell it to me.’

  ‘One Christmas,’ said Elaine hesitantly, repeating the story she’d heard from travelling storytellers from Camelot, ‘a green knight came to the court of King Arthur. The knight offered his neck to whoever was willing to axe it, on condition that he returned to the Green Knight a year later to have his own head axed in turn. Gawain hewed the Green Knight’s head from his body, but the knight did not die. Instead he picked up his head and rode away.’

  ‘I wish I’d been there to see that,’ said Conrad.

  Humphrey laughed. ‘It was my first Christmas at the Round Table. Everyone thought it was hilarious. When Gawain realised he was going to have to go and get his head cut off in return, he turned as green as the knight himself. Poor lad barely touched his goose. Anyway, carry on.’

  ‘A year later, Gawain left on his quest. He searched high and low for the Green Knight,’ Elaine said, ‘but nobody had heard of such a man. He –’

  ‘Stop right there,’ Humphrey interrupted her. ‘Do you see?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Nobody had heard of a green knight. That’s actually helpful. Find your Green Knight, and you know you’ve got your man. Knights in black, though, are two a penny. Every lowlife, every would-be renegade, gets himself a suit of black armour. They think it looks dangerous.’