At the Joust Page 2

  “And,” added Morris, “there will be thousands of knights who’ll have a real battle and hundreds of them will be cut into tiny pieces.”

  Roland wasn’t sure about any of it, yet there often seemed to be at least something true in Morris’s stories. He had a way of finding things out.

  “That’s so exciting, Morris. The only tourney I’ve seen was a small practice one outside Sir Gallawood’s castle. That was hand combat with just one joust at the end. And nobody had their head cut off or was run through with pikes.”

  “Well, you’ll see all that here,” Morris said as he ran his hand through his straight black hair. “This is the biggest tournament in the world.”

  The next day, Roland made his way toward the magnificent beast that lived in a wooden pen near the castle’s western tower.

  “How are you today, Mr. Elephant?” he said, looking over the top of the pen and into those big eyes. The elephant was a gift to the King from his brother, Notjohn—and had played a big part in Roland’s short time at the castle. “Are you missing your family as much as I’m missing mine?”

  While Nudge sniffed the air with his twitchy pink nose, Roland explained to the elephant—yet again—about his father, his older brother, Shelby, and his favorite oak tree back in the village. Roland didn’t want to give up his new life. He just wished he could go home each night. Better still, he wished his father and brother could live at Twofold Castle and make the famous Wright Armor right here. And maybe bring the oak tree with them too.

  “There’s Sir Gallawood as well, Mr. Elephant. I miss his wise words, though I don’t miss his punches in the shoulder. They’re not nearly as funny as he thinks they are. I even miss Jenny Winterbottom a bit. She was the only person in the village the same age as me. I suppose I’ve already told you that.”

  Roland went quiet and thought about Jenny. She skipped a lot, and tra-la-la’d, and could be rather rude. And she thought she was so clever. But she was at least a little bit clever, and all right to play with when there were no boys around.

  “Hmmm, Roland!” A nearby voice interrupted the daydream. It was Sir Lucas, who was talking to two other knights. They were Sir Geoffrey and Sir Tobias, the long and the short of it, so to speak. The knights of Twofold Castle had returned with the Queen from a distant tournament two weeks ago, and the jester had announced each of them in turn.

  Roland remembered how the jester had called Sir Geoffrey a one-man army. He was by far the biggest knight in the castle. Even Sir Lucas came up only to his chin.

  “Welcome home too, Sir Tobias,” the jester had also said, shaking the bells on his shoes. “He’s short, but a fine musician. Later he’ll play you a Little Knight Music.”

  Sir Geoffrey had bright red hair, a big red mustache and a long scar down the side of his face. His shoulders were so wide that when Roland first saw him, he imagined his armor must have cost twice as much as anybody else’s, since it had so much metal in it.

  There would need to be lots of metal in his visor, too, because he had the longest, straightest nose Roland had ever seen.

  Now Sir Lucas adjusted the crisp white scarf around his neck. “How are you, Nudge?”

  “He’s very well, thank you, sir,” said Roland, while Nudge shook his head as if to say the complete opposite.

  “I was just saying to these good men, Roland, that I’ve been looking at the King’s Wright Armor—the very suit that saved his life. It’s strong, and stylish, too. Perhaps I’ll order some after the tourney.”

  “The tournament!” shrieked Roland. “It’s true! Will there be jousting … real knights on real horses charging at each other with real lances? Will I be allowed to go?”

  “There certainly will be jousting, and the horses and knights and lances will be real,” said Sir Lucas. “But who goes is not a decision for me.”

  “I hear there’s going to be a tame dragon,” said Roland, “and a big knight named Little Douglas and a real battle in which hundreds of knights are going to have their gizzards sliced out.”

  Sir Lucas smiled. “I’m not sure about the dragon, or the exact size of Little Douglas. But I hope there aren’t hundreds of knights left with their gizzards hanging out.”

  Sir Geoffrey nodded and pulled on the end of his long nose. Although a nod isn’t a word, it was still as much as Roland had ever heard Sir Geoffrey say. The jester sometimes called him the Silent Knight.

  “A tourney is about skill and bravery and horsemanship,” Sir Lucas continued, twirling the end of his mustache. “And impressing the ladies, of course.

  “It’s more important to be the best than to kill people. Even at the melee, the mock battle at the end, I hope nobody is seriously injured.”

  Roland wasn’t sure whether to be happy or sad at this information. But he knew, as Nudge squeaked and chewed his collar, that he had more questions than he could ever ask. “Have you ever been unhorsed in a joust?” was the one that came straight out.

  “Never,” said Sir Lucas, with a rise of his shoulders. Sir Geoffrey merely shook his head and pulled on the end of his nose.

  They both looked at Sir Tobias.

  “Well, yes, I’ve been unhorsed.” Sir Tobias’s face was as scarred as Sir Geoffrey’s. He had thick, curly white hair and wasn’t a lot taller than Roland. But he was very wide and very strong. His shape reminded Roland of one of the sideboards in the Great Hall. Everyone seemed to like Sir Tobias. He moved slowly and gently but spoke more quickly than anyone Roland had ever heard. “It’s happened three times, in fact. I’m not quite the champion that these men are. Nor as good-looking, for that matter.”

  “What’s it like?” gulped Roland.

  “Being unhorsed, or being ugly?” said the galloping voice of Sir Tobias. “Neither is very pleasant, but being unhorsed hurts more. The first thing you feel is an enormous thump, like you’ve been hit by a rock thrown from a catapult. You see nothing through your visor but blue sky.

  “There’s a second big thump when you hit the ground. Then all you see through your visor is grass. It takes quite a few moments before you know whether you’ve been badly hurt. Once a splinter from the other knight’s broken lance went through my visor and stopped this far from my eye.” Sir Tobias held up two short, thick fingers to show just how small the distance was. “I was very lucky.

  “Though come to think of it,” Sir Tobias added with a cheerful splutter, “it would have been luckier to have been born with talent, and to have won the joust in the first place.”

  Roland realized he should let the knights return to their knightly conversations. He excused himself and walked across the bailey with Nudge on his shoulder. “Imagine a splinter through the visor, Nudge! Imagine if I really did go to the tournament. Imagine if you came with me … and we met the dragon. Maybe he’d be scared of mice. The elephant certainly isn’t.”

  Nudge was now a little happier. He stood high on his rear legs and his black eyes scanned the bailey.

  “Imagine if we took part in the melee, Nudge, imagine if … Oh, look, they’re reopening the drawbridge.”

  Roland often had hunches about things. But he didn’t suspect that what was going to happen next was going to happen next.

  The noisy drawbridge slowly cranked down and reached the land on the other side of the green moat. Roland froze. He rubbed his eyes. Then he rubbed them again.

  Nudge twitched his whiskers and rubbed his eyes too.

  Three

  The Next King

  Roland and Nudge were staring straight at Sir Gallawood and Jenny Winterbottom.

  Sir Gallawood was holding the reins of his horse in one hand and his helmet in the other. He saw Roland, but didn’t smile. He looked hot and tired and very, very serious.

  Jenny was thinner than Roland remembered, and paler. Her brown curls, which normally sprang out, hung limp. She walked with her shoulders slumped.

  Roland pushed Nudge into his pocket and nervously ran up to meet them halfway along the drawbridge. “Hello, is
everything all right?”

  Sir Gallawood’s voice was low and flat.

  “Everything’s fine with your family, Roland. Sadly, though, all’s not so well elsewhere.”

  And with that, Jenny started sobbing. Sir Gallawood put his hand on her shoulder. “Jenny’s mother choked on a fishbone. Everyone did what they could. I sent my own barber-surgeon, yet nothing could save her.”

  Sir Gallawood was dressed in his long green tunic with a coat of mail underneath. He had a sword in his belt and an arming cap on his head. His pointy black beard was filled with dust and dirt from the long trip.

  “I feel a responsibility toward the people in the village below my residence,” Sir Gallawood said. “I have no lady of my castle, so I have come to ask the King to take Jenny to be trained as a maid with one of the ladies here. I feel Jenny would be better off where she knows at least one person—a good person like you, Roland. We shall wait and see what His Majesty says.”

  Roland was still in shock that afternoon when he had his first music lesson. He thought he would be taught the lute, but instead he was handed a long stick and a stringed instrument with a straight neck and a polished wooden body the shape of half a pear.

  “What is this, Lady Mary?”

  “It’s a rebec, Roland,” she said, smiling from beneath the pointed wimple that sat on her head. Roland was her “special page,” and it was her job to teach him culture and manners and music. “You play it with the long wand, the bow. I chose it for you because I think it sounds beautiful.”

  The rebec’s neck felt slippery in Roland’s hand. It had three thick strings made from the gut of an animal, and they hurt Roland’s fingers when he pressed them against the fingerboard.

  The bow was strung with horsehair and sometimes it hissed on the strings. S-s-s-s! It reminded Roland of a certain page with a big mouth and a sharply sloping forehead. S-s-s-s. Roland couldn’t help but pull an ugly face whenever he heard the noise.

  Lady Mary had a beautiful speaking voice, and bone-colored skin. She was a real lady, and Roland knew she deserved better than to see him pull ugly faces, or to hear him make an unholy racket.

  “Playing an instrument well takes a great deal of practice,” said Lady Mary softly as Roland squeaked and hissed and clunked and Nudge put his paws over his ears. “In that sense, it’s just like swordsmanship.”

  “But swordsmanship is fun.”

  “Playing the rebec will also be fun in time. Already you are improving a little.”

  Roland was reminded how kind Lady Mary was. He knew if he had improved at all during his first lesson, he had merely gone from making the rebec sound like an animal in pain to making it sound like an animal in slightly less pain.

  Still, a short time later, with Lady Mary urging him on, Roland managed to produce one perfect note. It was clean and sweet and seemed to hang in the air and make Roland think, all at once, of his family and friends, his sadness and good fortune, and of Jenny, now all alone in the world.

  With that one long, beautiful note amid all the noise, Roland decided that maybe, just maybe, music could be worth learning. Though, of course, it could never be as much fun as fighting.

  After the lesson, Roland sprinted to the meadow. He had agreed to practice swords with Humphrey and Morris. When Roland arrived, Morris was facing a page with brown hair that curved up at the bottom like a helmet. Every time they looked ready to start fighting, Morris had one more thing to say.

  Roland wasn’t going to stand around. He ran straight toward Humphrey, wooden sword on high. “You will die, Sir Humphrey. You’re no match for Sir Roland.”

  Humphrey cleverly blocked the downward thrust. “Maybe so, but you can’t kill me until we make it to the end of our alphabet, to the end of our alphabet.”

  Roland wound his sword free, then held up his hand to stop the fight. Roland, after all, wasn’t as good as Humphrey at fighting and rhyming at the same time, and he had a lot else on his mind.

  “I is for iron, the stuff of chain mail,” he said, “and J is for … J is for … Jenny … Jenny Winterbottom, who arrived at the drawbridge earlier today.”

  “That doesn’t rhyme,” said Humphrey. “And the J should be about jousting or something exciting, something exciting. Not about some person named Jenny.”

  “I know, Humphrey, but this is such a big surprise. My old neighbor just arrived at the drawbridge, along with the knight who lived closest to my village.”

  “Oh,” said Humphrey, looking far more interested in a witty couplet than in Roland’s old neighbor or closest knight. “I’ll try it myself, try it myself:

  “I is for iron—to make a mail vest, and J is for jousting, the ultimate test.”

  Roland stuck out his bottom lip and tried to come up with something to follow. But his mind was as tangled as a bucket of worms. Would Jenny be able to stay? Would that be a good thing? If she stayed, could others from his village come too? Would Roland see more of Sir Gallawood before he left for Gallawood Castle? And why did he keep asking himself questions?

  Suddenly a rhyme just tumbled out of Roland’s mouth. “K is for knight, though it should start with N, L’s for Sir Lucas, who’ll outfight ten men.”

  “That’s a cheat!” Humphrey said with a smile—and a wild swipe of his sword that Roland only just managed to duck under. “The L should be something like lance, something like lance. Anyway, Sir Lucas starts with an S.…”

  “I meant the Lucas, not the Sir,” said Roland as he advanced, then stabbed his opponent’s shield, “and I really admire him.”

  The two roommates continued to chase each other up and down the meadow. Humphrey tried everything to get past Roland’s speedy sword but without success. After a while Roland yelled out. “How about this one instead:

  “K is for king: a man strong, brave and wise …”

  Roland paused for a moment or two, trying to think of the follow-up. Suddenly he felt a long stick jabbing him right between the ribs. It was Hector, who had appeared out of nowhere.

  “And L’s for a longsword, s-s-s-s, to poke through your eyes!”

  Four

  Hector’s Surprise

  “Your lesson today will have no letters or numbers,” croaked the impossibly old gray-haired chaplain. “Instead we have a special guest who has something important to tell you.”

  With that, the door burst open and a short man with a huge stomach strutted in. He was dressed in a bright blue coat with gold braiding and wore brown shoes with buckles so shiny the reflections made patterns on the ceiling. The sword in his belt rubbed on the ground as he walked. The pages might have laughed if he didn’t look so serious.

  “My name is Urbunkum, Lord Urbunkum,” the man said in a high-pitched, echoing voice. “But, boys, please feel free to call me Your Most Gracious and Worthy Honor.

  “As you might know—as you should know—I’m the King’s expert.”

  Lord Urbunkum seemed to puff up to twice his normal size when talking about himself. “I train the knights in warcraft, jousting, chivalry, sword fighting and, above all, in achieving excellence. Which is to say, I help them be better in every part of their lives.”

  With those words, his blotchy red face glowed and the small clumps of hair on his forehead and above each ear stood at attention. “I’m a Very Important Person at Twofold Castle, and very busy. But if you ever need advice on anything at all, you’d be best to ask me.”

  When he wasn’t talking, the Very Important Person coughed every few seconds, as if to draw notice to himself. “Today I’m not here to tell you how to make your own small lives better, but to talk about a tournament the pages will attend.”

  “Yes!” shrieked Roland above the cheers of Morris, Humphrey and the other boys in the class. “It’s true, we’re going to a tourney!”

  The chaplain looked at Roland sternly. Lord Urbunkum produced a few more small coughs before saying, “And, boys, this will be history in the making. For the first time ever, a tournament will be used to c
hoose the next King.”

  The room went silent while the boys tried to work out what this meant. Again, it was Roland who spoke first.

  “But when the King dies, doesn’t the throne just go to his oldest son, Prince Daniel?”

  The chaplain looked at Roland even more sternly, but the King’s expert smiled.

  “That certainly was the case,” Urbunkum said, placing his hands on his massive stomach and looking terribly proud of himself. “However, a short while ago I humbly suggested to His Majesty that the position of heir should go to whoever is best for the job.

  “His Majesty agreed. Therefore, the King’s twenty-four senior knights will compete in a series of jousts. Only when all the combat is complete and everyone’s performance has been carefully measured, only then will we select the King’s oldest son, Prince Daniel.”

  “Oh,” said Roland, scratching his head. “That doesn’t seem right.”

  The chaplain gave Roland yet another severe glance. Lord Urbunkum looked at Roland as if he was the stupidest person in the world.

  “Do you think, young man, that we should just appoint the King’s firstborn son without at least making it look fair? It’s that that wouldn’t seem right.”

  The Very Important Person explained that the pages would attend the tournament at his suggestion. They would help the squires, watch, learn—and listen to Lord Urbunkum address the knights.

  “I will be an inspiration to you all,” he said.

  As they walked from the classroom, Morris smiled his big dimply smile. “I told you we were going. What I didn’t tell you is that the tame dragon will fight the elephant, and the loser will be served up as part of the feast they have at the end of every tournament.”

  Roland was shocked and hoped it wasn’t true. But he didn’t have long to think about it. As soon as they reached a grassy part of the bailey, Humphrey ran up to Roland with his wooden sword on high. Roland was ready not just with a blocking move, but with a couplet he had already worked out: