The Champion Read Free Page B

face. The fingers trembled, but he could control them, and although his bones felt hollow, the chills were gone.
    Tentatively he sat up and gazed around his brother’s tent. It was compact enough to be borne by a sturdy pack horse when dismantled, and its size was made even smaller by Hervi’s untidiness. Of Hervi himself there was no sign. The crumbs of a finished meal were strewn on a crude trestle near the tent flap, and Hervi’s jousting helm sat among the debris together with a sheathed long dagger. On the floor beside the pallet was a stone jug of wine, a beaker of milk, and a shallow wooden bowl containing a chunk of bread and two slightly wizened apples.
    His appetite surged fiercely, but there was an underlying sensation of nausea that warned Alexander to be moderate. He drank the milk, ate half the bread and one apple, and leaving the rest for later, gingerly tested the ability of his legs to support him. He wobbled like a newborn lamb, but at least remained upright. His bladder twinged and he glanced around without success. Amongst all the flotsam of Hervi’s life, there did not appear to be a piss-flask.
    Alexander went to the tent flap and pulled aside the mildew-stained canvas. It had ceased raining and a smoky-white sun was poking through the bank of clouds somewhere west of noon. He had been in no condition to take notice of the camp last night, but he was sure that it had increased in size. There seemed to be more tents now, larger and finer, some with coloured stripes. There were carts and wains, there was noise and bustle, and he did not think it was due to the drier weather enticing people from their shelters.
    The hucksters were out in force, the pie-sellers, women with trinkets and lucky sprigs, a man with two trained apes on slender chains. Whores, beggars, a chirurgeon barber with his tooth-puller’s pincers on a cord around his neck. A monk walked into view and Alexander took an involuntary back-step, a cold fist squeezing his entrails. The cleric’s tonsure needed shaving and his habit was old and filthy. The walk was in fact more of a lurch. Disquieted, but not surprised, Alexander realised that the man was drunk.
    Once the monk had blundered from sight, Alexander felt safe to move, but not out into the swarm of activity; his balance was not steady enough for that. Instead he made his way slowly around to the back of the tent which faced open grassland.
    Two bay pack ponies were tethered beside a nondescript gelding. Alexander reasoned that they must belong to Hervi, for grazing with them was his own emaciated black horse. He waded further into the meadow, glanced round and relieved his bladder. Then he approached his mount. The stallion was too busy devouring the lush spring grass to pay him much attention. Alexander ran his hand over the prominent ridges of the ribs beneath the harsh, dull hide, and grimaced to himself.
    Behind him, hooves thudded on the soft ground and he turned to see Hervi draw rein and dismount in one fluid movement from a handsome golden-dun destrier. In contrast to yesterday’s image of a degenerate sot, Hervi was groomed to perfection, his mail shirt glittering beneath a shin-length split surcoat of blue linen, embossed in yellow thread with the de Montroi family device of three spearheads. He wore a richly tooled sword belt from which hung his scabbard, and the hand not controlling the destrier rested confidently on the braided leather sword hilt. Hazel eyes narrowed, fair hair windblown and bright, this was Hervi the warrior knight, and Alexander could only gape in astonishment and not a little disbelief at the transformation.
    ‘Awake at last,’ Hervi said curtly. ‘You’ve missed most of the day.’ Removing his hand from his sword, he tethered the stallion to a wooden stake knocked in the ground and commenced unsaddling him.
    ‘You should have woken me.’
    ‘I tried.’ Hervi flashed him a wry glance: ‘I broke my fast; Arnaud de Cerizay helped me to don