Hard Day's Knight

CHAPTER TWO-3

“Give them out to people you want to kiss, stupid!” CJ rolled her eyes as a thin, small woman with shocking pink short-cropped hair strolled over. She was dressed in a knee-length forest-green leather jerkin, cream linen shirt, black leggings with green cross garters, and fringed ankle boots. Strung over her shoulder was a beautiful oak bow and a leather quiver filled with green-tipped arrows. “Hullo, CJ. Glad to see you again. Have you seen Patrick anywhere? Little rotter disappeared on me when I wanted him to mend my mail.”

“Vandal?” CJ shook her head. “He was here, but he ran off after one of the ale girls. This is Pepper Marsh, my cousin from the States. Pepper, this is Fenice Carson. She’s part of Three Dog Knights.”

I did a mental double take. “Huh?”

“Three Dog Knights. It’s the name of our jousting company,” Fenice explained, offering her gauntleted hand. I shook it, wondering if someone else liked old 1970s music. “Pleasure to meet you. Nice cat. We’re performance jousters,” she added, as if that explained everything.

“Uh . . . okay.” I looked at CJ. She sighed and tugged me over to where Moth had gone into meat-loaf mode on one of the bleacher seats.

“There are two kinds of jousters—competition and performance,” CJ said quickly. “Most jousters you see here are performance jousters—men and women who put on scripted shows, work the Ren Faires, etcetera. The others are competitive jousters—they don’t do shows; they only compete for the purses and titles.”

“Ah. So the competition guys are the real jousters.”

“Real, my arse,” Fenice said, plopping down on the bench at my feet. “We train just as long and hard as the competition crowd—longer and harder, because we have to know how to unhorse someone without harming them, how to fall while wearing a full suit of armor, and how to hit marks. That lot just thinks they’re better than us.”

I looked to where she was waving a scornful hand. Beyond the nearest stable a collection of RVs was clustered around a huge white-and-blue striped tent. Emblazoned across the top of the tent was a pennant bearing one word: Joust!

“Farrell Kirkham and his team?” I asked.

“They’re the worst of the lot,” Fenice said with a disgusted curl to her lip. “Think their shite don’t stink. Think they’re better than us. You know what they call us? Ground pounders. Shield taggers.”

“Yeah, I heard him say that. What’s it mean?”

“A jouster who can’t stay in his saddle,” CJ answered. “It’s not very nice.”

“And not at all true. Every time we come up against the competition crowd, we clean their clocks,” Fenice added. “They’re just smug bastards because they don’t have to perform to pay for their travel or horses or gear. They have sponsors.”

She said the word like it was dirty.

“Ah. And your team . . . ?”

“Three Dog Knights—so named because of Walker’s three dogs—performs at a number of fairs and schools. We also do corporate retreats. We have seven different shows,” Fenice said proudly.

“Wow. So, you’re part of the team with Walker McPhail?”

CJ, who had been standing on the seat next to me, peering around with a hand shading her eyes (sunglasses were verboten to Wenches unless they had a medical excuse), looked down with an odd look on her face. “How do you know Walker?”

I grimaced and rubbed my hip. “I . . . uh . . . ran into him on the way in from the tent city. I met Farrell, too. He seemed a bit intense.” Intense was the nicest thing I could think to say about him.

“He’s a snake in the grass,” Fenice said. “Oh, there’s Patrick. Patrick!” Fenice bellowed the name and waved her arm at a man in knight’s garb who was leaning against a fence railing and flirting with a woman holding a tray of empty beer steins. “Damn him, he’s got another Wench. . . . Patrick!”

Fenice took off at a lope toward the duo.

“Husband?” I asked CJ, who was back to peering around the area.

“Hmm? Oh, no. Brother. He prefers to be called Vandal. He’s her twin brother, actually, although you wouldn’t know it. They don’t look at all alike. There he is! My lamb!” CJ pulled an embroidered triangle of cloth from her poofy chemise sleeve and waved it in the air. Across the ring, Walker—on foot this time—had opened up the gate into the ring. A man in a full suit of jousting armor (the heavy plated stuff) rode into the ring on a big piebald horse, followed by another armored man on the black horse named Marley.

“That’s Butcher there,” CJ said excitedly, waving her cloth favor. The man on the piebald gelding lifted a hand and waved back. “Isn’t he the yummiest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Well . . . I can’t actually see him,” I pointed out. “He’s in full armor. All I can see is that he has to be very strong to wear all that. How much does that weigh?”

Walker and another man with spiky blond hair entered the ring, each bearing a number of long wooden lances.

“CJ! It’s been forever, luv.” A woman approached us from the other side, stopping to give CJ a kiss on the cheek and a big bear hug. “Is this your cousin? Hello, I’m Bliss.”

“Pepper,” I said.

“That your cat?” Bliss, an older woman with an ash gray pageboy, bent to pick up Moth. She was in sweats, the first person at the Faire I’d seen who wasn’t in garb, but Moth didn’t seem to mind. He gave her his patented slitty-eyed look for a few seconds, then graciously lifted his chin and allowed her to scratch his neck. “Nice puss!”

“No, he’s not, and no, he’s not. He’s CJ’s mom’s cat. We’re stuck with him for the next two weeks.”

“You’re stuck with him,” CJ reminded me. “Oh, good, they’re going to do the heavy-armor jousting. The plate armor weighs about thirty pounds, Pepper. But it looks good on Butcher, don’t you think? He plays the Fearsome Black Knight.”

“Doesn’t do as good a job at it as Walker did,” Bliss said, sitting down next to us, a contented, purring Moth in her arms. I toyed with the idea of offering her money to take over cat-watching for me, but realized the few bucks I had wouldn’t go very far in buying her off.

“That’s because Butcher is an inherently sweet lamby-pie, and Walker is . . . well, Walker.”

“Why isn’t he jousting now?” I asked, watching as the men in the ring set the lances along one side. The two men on horseback were walking their horses around to calm them, each keeping to one end of the oval. Down the center a long white wooden fence had been set up. I figured that must be the list, what they called the actual area the jousters used. As a dedicated reader of medieval romances, I thought it was kind of cool seeing one in person. I summoned up the memories of every medieval I’d ever read as Walker and the blond man separated, each taking a lance to one of the jousting knights.

Bliss gave me a long look, her brown eyes almost black as she examined me. “It’s a long story,” was all she said.

I was about to tell her I had the time to listen to it, when CJ stood up and started jumping up and down, yelling, “Go, Butcher, go! Knock him on his a*s!”

I didn’t see a starting signal, but all of a sudden the horses were thundering down the list, the two jousters swinging their lances from an upright position to a horizontal one angled above their horses’ necks, the almost ten-foot-long wooden poles bobbing up and down for a few seconds as each was aimed dead-on to the man riding toward it.

“Oh, my god!” I gasped, sucking in my breath a moment before the lances connected. There was a great c***k! as both lances struck the curved metal plate on the approaching knight’s shoulder, splinters flying off of both shattered tips. CJ’s boyfriend, Butcher, was thrown backward in his saddle by the impact, but he held on. The other man wasn’t nearly as lucky. He was flipped backward like Butcher, but unlike the bigger knight, he lost his grip on the reins, his broken lance flying over the horse’s rump as he sagged drunkenly off the right side, the animal’s momentum throwing him further off balance until he hit the ground with a tremendous crash.