Future Knight

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  Roland Wright

  #1 Future Knight

  And coming soon

  #2 Brand-New Page

  ONE. Something Special

  TWO. The Forge

  THREE. Sir Gallawood

  FOUR. The Greatest Day

  FIVE. The Decision

  SIX. A Knight’s Advice

  SEVEN. The Big Contest

  EIGHT. Tilting the Quintain

  NINE. The Sword Fight

  TEN. One to the Castle

  One

  Something Special

  These days it is considered rude to chop a man’s arm off with a battle-axe, even when you don’t like him.

  And when someone is really annoying, or is standing in your way and will not move, it is not polite to take a large silver sword and swing it with all your force at eye level, neatly removing the top of that person’s head.

  But it wasn’t always like that.

  Six centuries ago, a boy named Roland Wright turned ten. Well, nearly ten. It was the year 1409, in a period known as the Middle Ages. Almost everything was different from the way it is today.

  For a start, there were no cars. There were no planes either. Television? Not even in black-and-white.

  Books had to be written out by hand because the man who was going to invent printing wasn’t even a teenager yet.

  People went from one place to another by foot or, if they were very lucky, by horse. But even traveling by horse wasn’t easy or comfortable. The roads of the Middle Ages were made of dirt, and the dirt was dirtier than it is today. When it rained the roads turned to mud, and the mud was muddier too.

  Most people lived in the country, not in cities. The houses in Roland’s village had roofs made of straw, and no chimneys. All through winter they were full of smoke because the only way to heat them was to light a fire inside. The only way to cool houses in summer was to open a window, and the windows were made of wood.

  Worse still, many families had to share their house with their animals, particularly when it was cold or wet. Everything would smell of pig and donkey and chicken, except for pigs and donkeys and chickens, which probably smelled of house.

  Life in the Middle Ages wasn’t only tough and a bit pongy, it could also be pretty dangerous. Many arguments, large and small, were sorted out by knights in armor fighting each other with large and terrible weapons.

  Sometimes they used huge broad swords, sharp on both sides and capable of slicing a tree in two. They had big ugly maces too, with a long handle and a metal ball at the end covered with horrible spikes. When the mace was swung hard enough, these spikes could even puncture armor.

  Some knights had long poleaxes, or spears. These were so pointy that they could poke right through someone’s body, causing blood to squirt out both sides like tomato sauce squirts out of those little plastic-and-foil tubs that you turn upside down over a meat pie and bend in half.

  Of course, arguments in 1409 were not always sorted out in such a way.

  Jenny Winterbottom, who lived near Roland Wright in a small white house at the edge of the woods, said that birds could fly because they weighed less than clouds.

  Roland knew this wasn’t right. But he didn’t grab his big, spiky steel mace and hit her over the head so hard that her brain shot out her earholes like lengths of gray rope.

  He simply said, “No, they don’t. You are wrong.”

  “I am not,” Jenny said. Her brown curls swung as she spoke. “And you’re stupid.”

  No boy who is almost ten likes being called stupid, especially by a girl who is only just nine and has curly hair. But Roland still didn’t grab his big, spiky steel mace with both hands and bring it down like a sledgehammer over her forehead.

  This was because Roland quite liked Jenny and was happy to play with her, as long as there was no one else around. It was also because he didn’t have the slightest idea why birds could fly either.

  Roland thought it had something to do with the feathers. However, when he tied a pile of feathers to Nudge, his pet white mouse, Nudge just curled up and looked sad.

  Even throwing Nudge into the air didn’t seem to help him fly. He came down at exactly the same speed as he would have without feathers. And Nudge was very lucky the ground was there to stop him, otherwise he would have kept falling.

  There was one other reason Roland didn’t clout Jenny Winterbottom over the head. Like many people named Jenny, she was a girl.

  In the time of knights and armor, some men could be very nasty and cruel to other men. But they all tried as hard as they could to be nice to women.

  There were lots of stories of men slaying dragons to rescue fair maidens. This sounded very exciting to Roland. But there were also stories of men taking off their coats and laying them over puddles, so women could walk without splashing any yucky mud on their dainty boots. That didn’t sound like nearly as much fun as slaying dragons.

  Behaving like this was called chivalry. Roland thought this might be because if you took off your coat on a cold day you would start chivering. Then again, Roland couldn’t spell.

  Anyway, for all that, Roland didn’t have a spiky steel mace. He had only a small wooden one that he had made himself out of a stick and a round knob of wood from a tree root.

  Roland wasn’t allowed to have a real mace because Roland wasn’t a knight.

  Roland wasn’t even a page, which is what you had to be before you were a squire, which was what you had to be before you were a knight. And a knight was what you had to be if you wanted to carry around a real mace and swing it at people who annoyed you.

  Still, Roland loved fighting with a wooden sword, and Shelby, his older, bigger, stronger brother, had to work harder and harder to beat him.

  When they were swinging their wooden swords a few days earlier, Roland stuck out his bottom lip, like he always did when he was trying hard. He thrust and lunged and swiped, hitting Shelby’s sword so hard it flew out of his hand.

  “Ouch,” shouted Shelby, who could usually move more quickly than Roland. “That’s not fair!”

  “Yes, it is fair,” said Roland. “Now, yield, Sir Shelby. Yield to Roland Wright—future knight.”

  “All right, I yield,” Shelby said, falling to his knees and holding up his hands. “But you know as well as I do that you can never really be a knight. Only the children of the rich and noble become knights.”

  “I’m going to fight so well, they’ll have to make me a knight,” said Roland.

  “What rot!” said Shelby. “That’s not how it works. The only thing certain is that in our family I am the oldest son, so I will take over the family business. You’ll have to work for me, Roland, and I’ll give you the worst job I can find.”

  Roland lifted his sword high above his head.

  “I should cut you in two, Sir Shelby,” Roland said. “Or three, or four, or five. I should slice off your ears and carve up your gizzards. But I am a good knight, so I will show mercy.”

  Just as Roland was speaking, Shelby leapt to his feet and ran for his sword.

  “So,” said Shelby, picking up his wooden broadsword and swinging it wildly, “if you are a good knight, then it’s good night to you.”

  Shelby laughed loudly at his trickery.

  “That’s not right,” yelled Roland. “When a true knight yields, he gives his word. You’ll have to die for that!”

  Straightaway, the whole fight started again.

  Shelby was a year and a half older than Roland, but, like his brother, Shelby couldn’t spell, read or write.

  They couldn’t spell, read or write because there were hardly any schools in the whole country. Anyway, there was no time for sitting in classrooms because in the Middle Ages most children were expected to work.

  Roland and Shelby’s father, Oliver Wright, had been trained as a blacksmith from the time he was a young boy. He could spell out no more than his name. He had never even seen a book other than the handwritten Bible that the priest read from in the village church. And that was in Latin.

  That’s not to say the Wrights weren’t smart. They were very smart indeed. And on one late summer afternoon in 1409, Roland sensed that he and Shelby were about to be given an amazing chance to prove it.

  “Something special is going to happen, Nudge,” Roland said as he sat in the fork of his favorite oak tree. When Roland was excited, Nudge would usually be standing on his rear legs, peering at the horizon with his black eyes, sniffing the air with his twitchy pink nose.

  But since his flying lesson, Nudge had been very quiet and still.

  “Flaming catapults, Nudge, I can just feel it,” Roland said. “When I go to the forge this afternoon I’m going to have my hair brushed and my Sunday clothes on. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something big.”

  “ ,” said Nudge, who couldn’t talk because he was a mouse.

  Even if Nudge had been able to talk, he would have had no wish to do so today. He had a huge headache and blamed Roland.

  Two

  The Forge

  With Nudge’s white face peering out the top of his shirt pocket, Roland walked through the cornfield toward the village square and his father’s forge, or metalworks.

  The path was bumpy and narrow. Roland could smell the heavy corn and knew they would be cutting it any day. He could see Farmer Jones leading a large cow toward him.

  “Morning, Master Roland. Lovely August day, isn’t it?”

  “Yes it is, Mr. Jones,” said Roland as he squeezed sideways past the huge
animal. Roland heard the church bells ring and realized he was late for work. He started to jog.

  Roland had a red tinge to his hair, a rash of freckles across his nose and cheeks, and was small for his age.

  He was thin, too—so skinny he looked as though a decent wind could snap him in two. But Roland could eat more than just about any grown-up. And what he lacked in size he more than made up for in heart.

  Now Roland crossed the cobblestones of the village square and arrived at the forge. His hair was brushed. He had pulled up around his ears the collar of his Sunday tunic, the only spare piece of clothing Roland owned. His leather belt was polished and pulled tight. The metal buckles on his shoes were shining.

  The forge was huge and dark, like a barn. Inside, there was a red glow from the smith’s furnace, the big fire in the middle where the metal was heated.

  The smith’s furnace spat out sparks and smoke as it roared and flickered. On a day like today Roland sweated from the moment he arrived, but when it was snowing outside there was nowhere better to be.

  The forge seemed to be bigger and busier every day. When Roland was younger, his father worked alone in a small shed. He made horseshoes. Then he discovered there was something he could do much better.

  Now, above the main door was a big painted sign that showed a knight in gleaming armor lifting a sword above his head. You didn’t need to be able to read the letters below the sign—W-R-I-G-H-T—to know that this was where Oliver Wright made his famous armor.

  People worked in every corner. Roland stopped and said hello to Old Tobias and his young apprentice, David. Old Tobias ran the furnace and supplied the wrought iron for all the other workers.

  Neither seemed to notice Roland. David blew air onto the fire with large leather bellows, which made it rain sparks all through the forge. When the fire was as hot as it could be, Old Tobias used long tongs to put in a big lump of metal.

  Roland knew Old Tobias would take this lump out when it was so hot it glowed red. Old Tobias and David would then beat it against an iron anvil with large mallets. It was such noisy work that Old Tobias had completely lost his hearing. Already David’s favorite word was “what?”

  In other places there were hammerers beating sheets of steel into shape. There were millmen polishing newly made helmets and breastplates and shields.

  There were locksmiths working on hinges and joints. But one thing was very different from most other places where armor was made: there were no engravers scraping fancy patterns into the metal. Mr. Wright liked his armor very simple.

  Roland stood looking at Mr. Nottingham, the mail-maker. Mr. Nottingham was locking rings of wire together to make a “cloth” of metal. He was counting the rows as if he was knitting a steel jumper.

  “What is that, Mr. Nottingham?” Roland asked above the din of the hammering and pounding and thumping.

  “It’s for an ’orse, Master Roland. A suit of mail to protect an ’orse. We call it a barde. I started yesterday and reckon I’ll have this section finished within six weeks.”

  Roland looked at Mr. Nottingham’s work with wonder. Roland imagined himself in full armor, riding into battle on a magnificent warhorse covered with a shining barde.

  The hammering in the forge became the noise of arrows bouncing off Roland’s suit of steel. The yelling became the sound of the enemy retreating as Roland swung his broadsword and yelled, “Death to the traitors!”

  After a short daydream, Roland returned to the real world, which was a fair bit less interesting. He walked up to see what his brother was doing.

  Now that he was eleven years old, Shelby worked at the forge all of every day except Sunday, because that was the Lord’s day and nobody in the village worked on Sunday. They prayed and went to Mass, then ate a big Sunday meal.

  After that, the girls danced and did boring girl things while the boys kicked around a pig’s bladder filled with air, or fought battles against each other with their wooden weapons.

  This afternoon Shelby was dropping oil onto the hinges of a new suit of armor. The armor glimmered with the flashing firelight, and shone whenever fine rays of sun snuck in through the gaps in the straw roof.

  “Is something important happening today?” whispered Roland.

  “I don’t think so,” said Shelby with a shrug. Shelby was taller than Roland, with a heavier frame and hair so blond it glowed even in the darkness of the forge. “Is this another one of your stupid hunches … is that why you have your Sunday tunic on?”

  “Yes,” said Roland as Shelby turned back to his work. “But I think this hunch is right. All day I’ve had a feeling something very special is going to happen.”

  “What rot!”

  The armor that Shelby was now oiling had taken half the year to finish, even though there were several people working on it. It had 150 separate parts but looked simple and strong, and was beautifully made. Most importantly, it was plate armor.

  Plate armor was a complete suit of hard steel that covered a knight from top to toe. Roland and Shelby’s father was famous in the whole region because he was the first to make it.

  Before, armor had been made of separate pieces of steel connected by mail. Plate armor was stronger and meant a knight could fight in battle without a shield, knowing the suit would protect him. Plate armor could be made only by a tradesman as clever and skillful as Oliver Wright.

  Many people wanted to buy it. People had said Mr. Wright should move his business to the city, but he had simply said: “If they want it, they can come here to get it.”

  There were even stories that the King had ordered a suit, secretly sending a young knight who was exactly the same size so that all the measurements could be taken and the armor made to fit.

  The knight had paid the bill and taken the suit away nearly six months later. But nothing more had been heard.

  That didn’t stop Roland daydreaming about King John setting off to conquer new lands in a suit of Wright plate armor. Roland was by his side to protect the King, slay the enemy and even chop the occasional fire-breathing dragon into little bits.

  As for any fair maidens … well, if they liked climbing trees and hunting with slingshots, he just might rescue them. But he wasn’t putting his Sunday tunic on the muddy ground for anyone.

  Sadly, though, boys such as Roland were almost never trained to be pages, squires or knights. For a start, their families couldn’t afford it. It cost an enormous amount of money to equip a knight, not only with armor but with horses and weapons and a squire to help him.

  It was so unfair. Roland was sure he would be the best knight in the world. For hours on end he threw an acorn against the wall of the village well and slashed at it with his wooden sword when it bounced back.

  An oval-shaped acorn hitting a curved wall could go in any direction, but Roland could hit it almost every time.

  Whenever Shelby saw his younger brother with his sword and acorn, he just laughed. “That’s such a stupid thing to do, Roland. You are either born strong and quick like me, or you are born slow and clumsy like you. And if you are born slow and clumsy, nothing will ever make you a good swordsman. And you look silly with your bottom lip sticking out.”

  Roland shook his head and realized he was daydreaming again. He wasn’t in far-off lands fighting dragons or even outside hitting acorns. He wasn’t arguing with his brother, or fighting him with his sword and shield. He was at his father’s forge, and he was supposed to be working. He heard Shelby talking nearby.

  “Leave me alone, Roland, and attend to your own little jobs. Unlike you, I have important things to do.”

  Roland didn’t move. In his mind he was now using his shield to block the fire coming out of a large green dragon’s mouth. He was waiting until the dragon ran out of breath so he could jump out from behind his shield and stab it in the heart.

  “Stop daydreaming!” yelled Shelby, who was now very angry. “I am going to be your boss one day, Roland, so you should get used to me giving you orders. Here’s one right now: GO AWAY!”

  Roland walked a few paces toward a full suit of armor laid out on a workbench. The helmet was resting on an anvil. It was an old-fashioned suit of armor and very battered. Suddenly Roland realized there was a moaning noise coming from within. The moaning grew louder.