‘This old fool wanted more to drink, but you know what he’s like,’ the innkeeper said, holding a damp cloth to his temple. ‘I told him to bugger off, and he clobbered me, the git. He’s never getting served in here again, that I’ll swear! I won’t have him in my hall again. If he tries it, I’ll have the sod served as he deserves!’
‘Shut up!’ Daniel snapped. ‘Ham, you finished? Because in God’s name, if you want more trouble, I’ll be happy to give it to you.’
Ham was wild-eyed at the best of times. He’d always liked his drink, but recently he’d taken to starting on strong ale in the morning and continuing with it all day. It was too easy for a man with little occupation. Ham was a freeman who had worked as ostler in an inn but he had been fortunate enough to be granted a sum of money on the death of his master a year ago. With no wife, for she’d died some while before, he had no one to spend his money on but himself, and for an old man with few friends or interests, that meant wine and ale. There was nothing else for him.
This was not the first fight Daniel had witnessed. Ham had been before the city’s courts often enough charged with breaking the King’s Peace, and Daniel himself had been responsible for bringing him in on several occasions. Usually, it was a case of the poor old fool getting too drunk to be able to conduct himself sensibly, for after all, most people quite liked him. He was an amiable old devil when sober. The trouble was, when he had too much to drink, he could become a monster.
‘Put it down, Ham,’ Daniel said now.
Ham swore something — his speech was too indistinct to be comprehensible now he was drunk; it was bad enough when he was sober since the day Peter of Ide had knocked out his front teeth a month and a half ago — and lunged. In his hand he had a long-bladed, single-edged knife, and it swept past Daniel’s belly alarmingly quickly.
All Daniel’s frustration erupted. He lifted his iron-shod staff and swung it heavily. It cracked across Ham’s forearm with a dry sound, like an ancient twig being snapped. Then, almost before he knew what he was doing, he had reversed the stave, and brought it back smartly. While Ham’s face fractured from evil aggression into alarm and agony the iron tip was hurtling back, and Daniel watched dispassionately, as though this was another man’s doing, as it crunched into Ham’s temple. He saw the eruption of blood, the eyeball leaping out of its socket, the snap of the head upon its neck, and the sudden tottering step to one side, as though Ham was considering jumping to safety a moment too late. His broken forearm flailed in the air, the wrist and lower part wild and disjointed, and then the man fell, his eyeball plopping onto his cheek a moment after his head hit the cobbled roadway.
That was when he started to scream, a shrill noise that spoke of excruciating pain and terror, like a horse with a broken leg.
And while Daniel stood panting, appalled at what he had done, he gradually grew aware of the people in the crowd drawing away from him, as men would from a felon caught in the act.
As he watched the sergeant walking to the crumpled figure, Reginald swallowed. He was not a strong man, and the sight made him compare himself again with the like of the sergeant. It was not a favourable comparison. Yet Jordan wanted him to kill the man, a man who could hit out like that, carelessly, mindlessly, as though a mere drunkard didn’t matter.
It made him wonder again about his companion. There was something uniquely terrifying about Jordan le Bolle. He was like that sergeant in many ways, not that Reg would ever dare say so. The two men detested each other with a loathing that was poisonous to both. Although both enjoyed the thrill of violence, the rush that wounding another man gave them, still there was a difference between them: Daniel had always seemed in control of his anger. The sight of the sergeant knocking down a defenceless old piss-head — he may have had a knife, but he was pretty incapable of using it against a man with a staff — was oddly shocking, as though the foundations of Exeter had actually shivered with the sudden eruption of blood from Ham’s head.
That sort of behaviour would have been far less surprising in Jordan. Jordan had learned his skills in the hard years of the famine. Back then, it was take what you could or die. If men stood up against Jordan, they died. He had a knack of leaping straight from joking banter into pure violence, wielding his long knife like a berserker of old. No one was safe when the red mist came down over him. There was something foul, repellent, in the way that he seemed to enjoy inflicting pain on those he caught. Towards others, he was a mixture of extreme contradictions. As a father, he was besotted, doting on his little ‘sweeting’, his Jane; as a husband he was moderately patient, but a brute when he felt his wife had upbraided or insulted him. Either was an offence punishable by a whipping or worse. Yet hearing of his latest lover was enough to send her into another man’s bed: Reg’s. Christ, what a sodding mess! How had he ever got into this?
When they had first met, life had been very different. Jordan had reminded him about that only yesterday, on their way to … the job.
‘You remember how things were when we met, Reg? Times have changed, haven’t they? We were two wild lads in those days, and now look at us! Rich men, thought of as careful investors, successful merchants, and here we are, fleecing any who come in our way! When we met we had nothing, did we?’
‘Those days were evil, right enough,’ Reg said moodily. ‘No food, no money, not even a bed. I’d been sleeping in the hedge for weeks.’
‘I remember. I found you in a hedge, didn’t I? And I showed you how we could win a little food. We started off small, didn’t we? And then we got lucky.’
They were nearly there, and lapsed into silence as they approached the buildings, and Jordan slipped off and away. He had a knack of silent movement. With his russet and grey clothing, he could disappear even in a street of limewashed houses. Somehow he could blend into the background, no matter where he was. Now he was moving up the alley ahead of Reg. Although it was like watching a shadow, Reg had been with his companion for long enough to know the way he worked. Now there was a flash, and Reg knew Jordan was at the window. The gleam was from his knife as he peered in. A moment or two later, Jordan was hurrying back along the alley, teeth showing brightly in a grin. ‘Yeah, we got him!’
Reg’s heart sank.
At first their winnings had been paltry: a few coins here, a little meat there. Not much. They’d robbed a few solitary travellers, the poor fools, and then occasional small parties, but never anything too dramatic. They didn’t want the attention that a serious attack might cause. Better by far that they should strike quickly, steal what they could carry, and be off again. It wasn’t only them, in God’s name! Everyone had to do something, and when the price of grain rose to unprecedented heights it was clear that all would starve unless they did something to save themselves. Sadly, the only assets youths like Reg and Jordan had were their native cunning and strength.
Then came the day when they hit on a new target, and suddenly they had a good income — all because of one break in the ninth year of the King’s reign, some seven years ago now.
A pair of them, there were. One was a slim, oily little fellow of five-and-twenty, bent at the neck and with a way of holding his head low as though to peer around and snatch any opportunity before his body could catch up with him; he was the sandy-haired one with the greasy locks dangling almost to his shoulders under his wide-brimmed pilgrim’s hat. Beside him was the heavy: a broad-shouldered man in his early thirties with a somewhat long face that showed little intelligence, only brooding malevolence as he surveyed the way ahead for them both.
Unprepossessing, the pair of them. They strolled along leading a donkey on a short rein, both holding iron-shod staffs for their protection. They had no other obvious weapons, though, and Jordan had eyed them contemplatively. Neither he nor Reg had eaten enough to fill their bellies properly in a week, and there was an attractive package on the donkey that seemed to call to them.