* * *
34:25:54
The horses clattered across the drawbridge. The Professor stared straight ahead, ignoring the soldiers who escorted him. The guards at the castle gate barely glanced up as the riders entered the castle. Then the Professor was gone from sight.
Standing near the drawbridge, Kate said, “What do we do now? Do we follow him?”
Marek didn’t answer her. Looking back, she saw that he was staring fixedly at two knights on horseback, fighting with broadswords on the field outside the castle. It appeared to be some kind of demonstration or practice; the knights were surrounded by a circle of young men in livery — some wearing bright green, the others in yellow and gold, apparently the colors of the two knights. And a large crowd of spectators had gathered, laughing and shouting insults and encouragement to one knight or the other. The horses turned in tight circles, almost touching each other, bringing their armored riders face to face. The swords clanged again and again in the morning air.
Marek stared, without moving.
She tapped him on the shoulder. “Listen, André, the Professor—”
“In a minute.”
“But—”
“In a minute.”
:
For the first time, Marek felt a twinge of uncertainty. Until now, nothing he had seen in this world had seemed out of place, or unexpected. The monastery was just as he had expected. The peasants in the fields were as he had expected. The tournament being set up was as he had pictured it. And when he entered the town of Castelgard, he again found it exactly as he had thought it would be. Kate had been appalled by the butcher on the cobblestones, and the stench of the tanner’s vats, but Marek was not. It was all as he had imagined it, years ago.
But not this, he thought, watching the knights fight.
It was so fast! The swordplay was so swift and continuous, attempting to slash with both downswing and backswing, so that it looked more like fencing than sword fighting. The clangs of impact came only a second or two apart. And the fight proceeded without hesitation or pause.
Marek had always imagined these fights as taking place in slow motion: ungainly armored men wielding swords so heavy that each swing was an effort, carrying dangerous momentum and requiring time to recover and reset before the next swing. He had read accounts of how exhausted men were after battle, and he had assumed it was the result of the extended effort of slow fights, encased in steel.
These warriors were big and powerful in every way. Their horses were enormous, and they themselves appeared to be six feet or more, and extremely strong.
Marek had never been fooled by the small size of the armor in museum display cases — he knew that any armor that found its way into a museum was ceremonial and had never been worn in anything more hazardous than a medieval parade. Marek also suspected, though he could not prove it, that much of the surviving armor — highly decorated, chiseled and chased — was intended only for display, and had been made at three-quarter scale, the better to show the delicacy of the craftsmen’s designs.
Genuine battle armor never survived. And he had read enough accounts to know that the most celebrated warriors of medieval times were invariably big men — tall, muscular and unusually strong. They were from the nobility; they were better fed; and they were big. He had read how they trained, and how they delighted in performing feats of strength for the amusement of the ladies.
And yet, somehow, he had never imagined anything remotely like this. These men fought furiously, swiftly and continuously — and it looked as if they could go all day. Neither gave the least indication of fatigue; if anything, they seemed to be enjoying their exertions.
As he watched their aggressiveness and speed, Marek realized that left to his own devices, this was exactly the way he himself would choose to fight — quickly, with the conditioning and reserves of stamina to wear down an opponent. He had only imagined a slower fighting style from an unconscious assumption that men in the past were weaker or slower or less imaginative than he was, as a modern man.
Marek knew this assumption of superiority was a difficulty faced by every historian. He just hadn’t thought he was guilty of it.
But clearly, he was.
It took him a while to realize, through the shouting of the crowd, that the combatants were in such superb physical condition that they could expend breath shouting as they fought; they hurled a stream of taunts and insults at each other between blows.
And then he saw that their swords were not blunted, that they were swinging real battle swords, with razor-sharp edges. Yet they clearly intended each other no harm; this was just an amusing warm-up to the coming tournament. Their cheerful, casual approach to deadly hazard was almost as unnerving as the speed and intensity with which they fought.
The battle continued for another ten minutes, until one mighty swing unhorsed one knight. He fell to the ground but immediately jumped up laughing, as easily as if he were wearing no armor. Money changed hands. There were cries of “Again! Again!” A fistfight broke out among the liveried boys. The two knights walked off, arm in arm, toward the inn.
Marek heard Kate say, “André. . . .”
He turned slowly toward her.
“André, is everything all right?”
“Everything is fine,” he said. “But I have a lot to learn.”
:
They walked down the castle drawbridge, approaching the guards. He felt Kate tense alongside him. “What do we do? What do we say?”
“Don’t worry. I speak Occitan.”
But as they came closer, another fight broke out on the field beyond the moat, and the guards watched it. They were entirely preoccupied as Marek and Kate passed through the stone arch and entered the castle courtyard.
“We just walked in,” Kate said, surprised. She looked around the courtyard. “Now what?”
:
It was freezing, Chris thought. He sat naked, except for his undershorts, on a stool in Sir Daniel’s small apartment. Beside him was a basin of steaming water, and a hand cloth for washing. The boy had brought the basin of water up from the kitchen, carrying it as if it were gold; his manner indicated that it was a sign of favor to be treated to hot water.
Chris had dutifully scrubbed himself, refusing the boy’s offers of assistance. The bowl was small, and the water soon black. But eventually he’d managed to scrape the mud from beneath his fingernails, off his body and even off his face, with the aid of a tiny metal mirror the boy handed him.
Finally, he pronounced himself satisfied. But the boy, with a look of distress, said, “Master Christopher, you are not clean.” And he insisted on doing the rest.
So Chris sat shivering on his wooden stool while the boy scrubbed him for what seemed like an hour. Chris was perplexed; he’d always thought that medieval people were dirty and smelly, immersed in the filth of the age. Yet these people seemed to make a fetish of cleanliness. Everyone he saw in the castle was clean, and there were no odors.
Even the toilet, which the boy insisted he use before bathing, was not as awful as Chris had expected. Located behind a wooden door in the bedroom, it was a narrow closet, fitted with a stone seat above a basin that drained into a pipe. Apparently, waste flowed down to the ground floor of the castle, where it was removed daily. The boy explained that each morning a servant flushed the pipe with scented water, then placed a fresh bouquet of sweet-smelling herbs in a clip on the wall. So the odor was not objectionable. In fact, he thought ruefully, he’d smelled much worse in airplane toilets.
And to top it all, these people wiped themselves with strips of white linen! No, he thought, things were not as he had expected.
One advantage of being forced to sit there was that he was able to try speaking to the boy. The boy was tolerant, and replied slowly to Chris, as if to an idiot. But this enabled Chris to hear him before the earpiece translation, and he quickly discovered that imitation helped; if he overcame his embarrassment and employed the archaic phrases he had read in texts — many of which the young boy himself used — then the boy understood him much more easily. So Chris gradually fell to saying “Methinks” instead of “I think,” and “an” instead of “if,” and “for sooth” instead of “in truth.” And with each small change, the boy seemed to understand him better.
Chris was still sitting on the stool when Sir Daniel entered the room. He brought neatly folded clothes, rich and expensive-looking. He placed them on the bed.