“Tut, tut! Our sweet comrade is still wroth with us, John. Women are unreasonable.”
Falconer growled at him.
“Let the wench be! We have flayed her pride, and she hates us.”
A squire, very hot and dusty, came cantering down on them.
“News, sir—news!”
“Out with it.”
“My Lord of Troy is still camped on Bracknell Plain. They have not stirred, sir. Their horses are unharnessed, their sentries pushed out no farther than a furlong.”
“Ye gods! This Roger Bland was never a soldier. Why, we shall be on them before they can get to horse. Come, sirs, come.”
Away in the woods Martin Valliant was seeing strange things. He had followed the march of Sir Gregory’s men from Woodmere, and when they had reached the rolling heaths that led up to Bracknell Plain, he had drawn away among the pine thickets so that he could watch them without being seen. His course had led him toward one of those strips of woodland that jutted out into the plain toward my Lord of Troy’s camp, an open wood of beeches and Scots firs. The place seemed silent and empty, full of deep shadows and splashes of sunlight that played on the bracken and the trunks of the trees.
Then of a sudden he saw something that made him drop down in the bracken like a bird when a hawk is hovering overhead. A knight in armor was riding his horse through the wood. He reined in and remained motionless, spear on thigh, red plume trailing under the branches. He wore a red tabard embroidered with gold; his horse’s harness was of red leather studded with brass; his spear was painted black, and a bunch of white roses had been tied to its throat.