The Life of Sir Archambeau: Ch. 3 (pt. 4) - Death Comes in Fours
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He walked along a dirt track through a forest. A frown scarred his face. His leg ached with each step, an old injury from the battle near Sedons. Vainqueur had died yesterday. Behind him trailed fifty soldiers.
Archambeau was hunting down a group of deserters pillaging the surrounding villages in the aftermath of the battle. For the second time in ten years, another claimant to the throne was attempting to oust King Hugh. This time it was his nephew, Charles II. The two-month-long campaign wasn’t playing out in the king’s favor, and many saw fit to abandon their king when he needed them most. Reports from scouts said the bandits were living in this forest, and it was Archambeau’s job to find them.
A fine job this is.
The whole business at the manor had gone out the garderobe[1] and into the cesspit. He had failed himself and the old blind woman. He should’ve gotten that countship over Roul. What had the man done besides lose a leg? How could a legless sap like him be expected to protect his subjects when he couldn’t walk without a crutch? All Archambeau had received was a small lordship in a nowhere town. Worst of all, Roul had married Camille, forcing him to marry Alice. The bitterness had followed him the last ten years.
That decade had been misery. With each sunrise, he had felt more of the life he was supposed to have slip away. Each step had taken him farther down the wrong path that he could never backtrack on and could only stray farther from. Life was now a purgatory of his own making. An emptiness deeper than a chasm and colder than the oceans filled him. Morning and night he cursed her, for at least if he had never met her, then he would never know of the life he was missing out on.
They stopped at some dead trees. The deserter camp was half a mile north of their position. How could those cowards abandon King Hugh? They rested before continuing on.
An itch had developed between Archambeau’s shoulder blades. Since setting out that afternoon in early summer, he could not shake the sense of having forgotten something. He suspected it involved the old woman. Had there been three visions or four? He squinted at a faraway rock, trying to remember. The journey was overly familiar to him in a way he couldn’t express, like he had lived it already. What did it matter anyway? Her advice would do him no good, and the visions were of no importance anymore. He had forgotten them in any event, pushed them right out of his mind through his ear and vowed to never think of the experience again so long as he lived. Indeed, the whole experience was so horrid he was glad to have forgotten it.[2]
None of it mattered; it was all in the past. He had failed. Utterly and completely. There was nothing for him except a ruined life.
And the job of capturing these useless renegades.
But no matter how hard he tried, he could not ignore the feeling.
They came upon the deserters an hour later and received a shock, for instead of twenty men as the scouts said, they found over sixty.
The camp was set up in a part of the forest where the canopy provided ample cover from the elements and there was little in the way of undergrowth. The tents were placed haphazardly, and tattered blankets were tied down to make shelters for those without. Five or six fires cooked deer meat; the smell wafted over and reminded Archambeau that he hadn’t eaten since morning. A stomach growled behind him. From what he could see, a dozen men were napping, and the rest were talking. Four guards patrolled in twos around the camp.
“We can’t take this many men,” whispered a soldier.
Archambeau decided he was not coming back. These cowards would be rounded up right now and taken to camp to face trial and the noose. He wanted this over with so he could live out the rest of his miserable life alone. Then who knew what would come next—well, the old woman knew. He might return to the manor to give her a piece of his mind.
He whispered loud enough for the soldiers to hear: “They don’t know we’re here. You will run in fast and kill a few and the rest will give up. That has been the plan since we set off. Do it.”
The soldiers shifted their feet and muttered some words before quieting under Archambeau’s glare. He divided the soldiers into three sections, and they silently drew their swords. He sent one section left and another right to pinch the deserters from the sides while the third section stayed put to attack them straight on.
When the guards walked to the far end of the camp and Archambeau felt sure no one else was paying attention to what lay beyond their fires, he raised his sword high and brought it down, a quiet swish that cut the air. The three sections ran in, leaving Archambeau behind. He wasn’t going to fight and die; that was their job.
A piece of him broke at his cowardice.
The first part worked: The cavalcade of fifty yelling soldiers descending upon the deserters did catch them off guard, but the rest of the plan didn’t work, for while the soldiers did kill a few, Archambeau had severely underestimated the bandits. They fought instead of surrendering, terrified of the noose.
Archambeau watched as his soldiers fell two at a time. They couldn’t handle a ragtag bunch of deserters. Scum of the Earth, that’s what he’d been given.
Two of the traitors broke out of the melee and spotted Archambeau. With a glance and a smile at each other, they ran toward him. Archambeau shouted for help, but his men couldn’t hear him, so instead of drawing his sword and fighting like the knight he claimed to be, he turned around and ran like a coward.
Another piece of him broke.
I’m a knight, I’m a knight! Why wasn’t he acting like one? He was too afraid of dying. The old woman had seared the fear of death into his mind where there had never been such a fear before. Another reason he hated her.
Following the trail they’d taken to the camp, the deserters whooped behind him, hurling threats with joyous glee. “I’ll cut your legs off and make you crawl back to the king!”
Their cackling hounded him as he slipped into a narrow valley between hills. Down the rambling path, he took a sharp right turn and climbed one of the hills to the top. There he crouched, holding his breath as the pair ran past below him.
“A knight that can’t fight! Ha!”
They gave up on their insults and threats when they started to repeat them, then began to swear when they realized they had lost him. Eventually, they became silent, and all Archambeau heard after that were twigs snapping.
The woods became eerily quiet. Archambeau didn’t dare exhale.
Without knowing if the fighting at the camp was over—and he didn’t dare go back to see—he climbed down the hill.
At the bottom, he hesitated, unsure which way to go. Thinking the path to the left looked familiar, he went right until the valley let him out of the hills, then he took off running east until he had to stop and rest. Puffing and sweating like a pig, his throat was scratchy, and he needed water. Ten years of good food and nice things had made him fat and lazy.
At a ditch, he went down and fought through dead branches to reach the other side. A short distance later, he came to a stream half covered by ferns that trickled from a small cliff. Eagerly, he fell to his knees and drank. Once he had his fill, he sat on the ground and punched a rock, leaving a smear of blood.
Everything had gone wrong. How could he blunder such a simple job? What would the king say? He would be beheaded! Why couldn’t he die like he had in the visions? Why couldn’t God end his suffering? What was the point of going on?!
Above the trickling of the stream, he heard two men laughing far too close for his own comfort. Jumping to his feet, Archambeau drew his sword and faced the two deserters across the water.
“Are you lost?” one mocked.
“Think we’re scared of your sword?” the other jeered.
“He’s forgotten who’s chasing who. So old that he stumbled off the beaten path!”
Archambeau bristled.
“Came across our camp with his little soldier friends and thought he’d take us by surprise. You want to kill us ’cause we deserted? Down with the king!”
“You-You should have-have surrendered!” he said. What had become of him? He was scared of unwashed bandits.
The renegades laughed again, faces twisted in murderous glee. They attacked mid laugh, expecting to catch him off guard.
It got messy. In an eyeblink, a sword sliced his thigh, and he lost a finger. When they tried to encircle him, he turned and ran. The bleeding thigh slowed him down, and the pair caught up and encircled him again; he needed to kill one of them fast to focus on the other.
A sharp pain spread from his chest, and his knees buckled. A curse got caught in his throat. The tip of a sword peeked through his chest. How puzzling. Who put it there? A boot planted on his back pushed him forward. Archambeau hit the forest floor as the blade was pulled free. The bed of grass and flowers did not cushion his fall. The bandits howled with laughter.
With an effort and a groan, the dying Archambeau rolled over and stared at the sky above.
Good. It’ll all end soon.
The memories of the visions came back to him. Of all times, he thought, not sure whether to laugh or scream in anger. Too late. He could have used the help. No, this was what he wanted. Finally, he could leave all his mistakes and regrets behind and move on to the next life.
A last breath escaped his lips. The body was pulled into the dirt, the soul into the sky, and Archambeau was no longer.[3]
But he didn’t immediately return to the hallway. Instead, he lingered on the path and saw the aftermath of his death:
The removal of his life from the world impacted three people and one pack of wolves the most.
A ravenous wolf pack found his body the next evening. They feasted on it for supper.
The king’s army assumed the deserters had killed him and the rest of his men, but Archambeau’s family refused to believe it. Alice sent men to find him, but they returned empty-handed. They clung to hope for a year and a day and then, on the following morning, wept.
Knowing nothing of what happened to him, word of the missing lord reached far and wide and attracted the attention of rumorists[4]—those whose lives survive on gossip and half-heard, half-remembered truths that somehow spread faster than merchants travel and pigeons fly.
Some rumorists plied their trade right in front of the grieving family, spinning their tales of hearsay and reported lies as “news” to the very ears of those sick with worry. They said, with the certainty only a liar can have, that Sir Archambeau was seen not five miles away, riding east. They said that he was tired of the noble life and went off to seek adventure. They said that he went off to find the Holy Grail. They said he was last seen fighting bandits. They said he became a monk. They said that he’d sent his soldiers to fight the deserters and slipped away. They said he abandoned his king and joined the deserters. They said a knight saw him in the arms of a comely mistress. They said many things with many an allegedly and apparently and reportedly mixed in. One claimed to have spoken to the lord himself and said that he said he hated his family. (It is clear these rumorists have less honor than a gnat.) They said all this in the hopes of earning a reward that was never promised. All were sorely disappointed when none came and even less happy with what they did receive, because Alice had these fiction-flingers’ heads chopped off. The men who spun tales of Archambeau lying with another woman were castrated, and the women who did the same became lighter in the chest. Many cheered at these actions, and for a few years, the kingdom became a wholly better place from the absence of these rumorists and their rumorings. But they, eventually, did return.
Hundreds of years later, Archambeau’s bones were unearthed during the construction of a train station.[5]
As for the Archambeau of the present, he—
—stood at the end of the hallway, stupefied.
[1] From the French garde de robes, meaning “robes or clothing protector.” It is a storeroom, a private room, a bedchamber, or a castle’s toilet. In this instance, it refers to a toilet.
[2] See Appendix II.
[3] Stories have been told and retold since before the Stone Age. Each retelling of a story fits the needs of the storyteller and the world in which they find themselves. The Archambeau story is no different. The two surviving manuscripts are not the definitive versions of either story; they are simply the only ones that survived to modern day. They are products of their time. Brother Guyart Restout (b. 1412, d. February 12, 1451), a monk at the Monastère de la Grande Chartreuse, wrote about his first encounter with the Archambeau story in his diary. In it, he details how Archambeau sides with the rebel count Jean Allard in the second vision. Allard’s ascension to the throne weakens France and leaves it open for invasion from the English. When Count Archambeau visits the manor again twenty years later, the old man highlights to the count how his decision to side with Allard will negatively impact his legacy and how he will be remembered as a traitor should Charles II ever win back the crown.
[4] A rumorist is a person of low moral fiber who follows the practice of rumor-spreading (or rumor-mongering): the act of listening to gossip and spreading homemade tales with the goal of being the center of attention. Ultimately, a rumorist’s dream is to have a rumor they created spread around the world; whether anyone believes their lie doesn’t matter to them. Rumorists tend to be: elderly women, midwives, housewives, reporters, politicians, teenagers, taxi drivers, propagandists, intelligence gatherers, women, and men. These types of people tend to live sad little lives or have something missing in their life that they feel can only be filled by spreading gossip.
[5] Line not found in the original manuscript.