Agravale, rich city, possessed a duke in those times, Raymond the Simple, a puppet prince whose instincts were monastic, save in his obedience to his wife. The Duchess Lilias kept her husband like a half-tamed ape, mewed up in the palace with baubles to trick his temper. He was as weak of wit as he was feeble of limb, while Lilias, proud Semiramis that she was, queened it through all the Southern Marches. She was a greedy dame, loose of mouth and loose of life. Bishop Jocelyn was her confessor and her confidant. The pair pandered to the passionate temper of the city of Agravale, and were very obedient to their Father the Pope.
The Bishop and his companies had marched back from the Seven Streams with much plunder and honour, and the holy praise of Mother Church. They had martyred and massacred, laid waste the province, dangled their dogmas on the points of their lances. There had been much rejoicing at Agravale, much opening of wine casks. Triumphant Masses had been sung in the great cathedral of St. Pelinore. A tourney had been held without the walls, for there was good cause for pride and pleasure in Agravale. The children of the south had upheld the Roman Faith; their swords had shone in the cause of truth.
The great inspiration of the city was a certain passionate rivalry that existed between Bishop Jocelyn and Lilias the Duchess. The pair diced with gold, gambled with extravagance, for the edification of the saints and the good people of Agravale. When Dame Lilias laid out new gardens with marble fountains and towers therein, the Bishop out-gardened her by the magnificence of three acres. When Jocelyn feasted all the beggars of the city, the Duchess out-charitied him with much silver and good cloth taken from her coffers and her presses. The pair kept Agravale a-bubble with their vanities. The Bishop would have hired the angels out of heaven to out-dance the wantons who tripped at the bidding of Lilias the Duchess.
The rivalry between the pair had been exaggerated the more by the swaggering quarrels of their knights and mercenaries. Like hired gladiators, they were ever ready to rend each other’s throats in the cause of chivalry. It had so happened that the Bishop’s champions had been worsted by Lilias’s men in a late passage of arms without the walls. Percival, captain of the ducal guards, had unhorsed some dozen of the Bishop’s paladins with his single spear. There had been great wrath thereat in the episcopal palace.
One August morning, a bronzed, iron-faced man entered the forecourt of the Bishop’s palace, threaded his way through the loungers by the stair leading to the inner gate. A guard met him with crossed pike on the top step, bearing the episcopal badge on the breast of his tunic, a golden key in a mailed hand. Tristan, turning a deaf ear to sundry witty gentlemen who were sitting on the benches in the sun, told the guard his business.
“Friend, I would see your captain of the horse. Tell him a stranger has tramped leagues to serve under him. Tristan le Sauvage is my name.”
The guard grounded his pike and stared Tristan over.
“Sir Ogier is at dinner,” quoth he.
“He can listen the better, being so wholesomely occupied. Come, friend, lead on.”
The man took Tristan to a small room that was joined to the guards’ hall by a winding stair. At a table, with a page boy at his elbow, sat a giant with a great hairy jowl, gigantic hands, and a heavy paunch. He was gnawing a mutton bone like a huge ogre, and had a tankard of ale at his right hand. He stared Tristan over with his small, close-set eyes, showed his teeth when he heard his business. Ogier had been born a butcher’s son in the distant north, and had carved out his fortune by the sheer weight of his arm.