Le Château De Monfaucon,
Montargis, France
25th October 1228

The young King knelt and prayed a little before the hunt – God, after all, was on his side. Then he and his fifty-strong entourage clattered out of the Château de Monfaucon towards the domanial forest.

It was a blustery autumn day, with fine leaves churning in the wind, and a sufficient edge of rain to dampen the cheeks. The twelve mounted Cistercian monks who always accompanied the King were finding it increasingly difficult to adjust their chanting of the hours to the wind’s hullabaloo. The King glared back at them from time to time, irritated at their swooping and swelling.

‘You can all go home. I’ve had enough of your caterwauling. I can’t make out a word of it.’

The monks, used to their master’s whims, peeled off from the hunt procession, secretly relishing the prospect of an early return to cloisters, and to the roaring fire and plentiful breakfast that awaited them there.

Louis turned to his squire, Amauri de Bale. ‘What you said about the wild boar. Yesterday. When we were talking. That it, too, is a symbol of Christ. Was this true?’

De Bale felt a sudden rush of exultation. The seed he had so carefully sown had germinated after all. ‘Yes, Sire. In Teutonic Germany the boar, sus scrofa, is known as der Eber. I understand that the word Eber may be traced directly back to Ibri, the ancestor of the Hebrews.’ Via a peculiarly convenient false etymology, de Bale added silently.

Louis hammered the pommel of his hunting saddle. ‘Who were known as the Ibrim. Of course!’

De Bale grinned. He offered up a private prayer of thanks to the phalanx of tutors who had ensured that Louis was even better educated than his effete sodomite of a grandfather, Philip II Augustus.

‘As you know, Sire, in ancient Greece the boar was the familiar of the goddesses Demeter and Atalanta. In Rome, of the war god Mars. Here in France, the boar might be said to stand in for you, Sire, in the sense of encapsulating both valiant courage and the refusal to take flight.’

Louis’s eyes burned with enthusiasm. His voice rose high above the wind’s buffet. ‘Today I am going to kill a wild boar with my axe. Just like Heracles on Mount Erymanthus. God spoke to me this morning and told me that if I should do so, the attributes of the boar would transfer themselves to me, and my reign would see the permanent annexation of Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem by the Holy Mother Church.’

De Bale raised his eyebrows. ‘By the Holy Roman Emperor, you mean?’

‘I mean by me.’

De Bale found himself temporarily at a loss for words. This was getting better by the minute. The King had even made the suggestion himself. He checked out the horsemen surrounding them – yes, they’d heard the King all right. He could almost hear the surreptitious tightening of sphincters as the King’s entourage realized they were to hunt for wild boar – and not deer – that day.

De Bale glanced across at the King. At sixteen, de Bale was a full year older than Louis. Physically, he was already fully formed, whilst the King, at fifteen, was only incipiently pubescent. In terms of height, however, Louis towered over de Bale by more than a head, and he sat his horse with the confidence of unchecked youth.

‘Dente timetur,’ said de Bale.

‘Rex non potest peccare,’ riposted the King.

The King’s entourage burst into spontaneous applause. Even de Bale found himself moved by his monarch’s elegant jeu d’esprit. He bowed low in his saddle. De Bale had simply intended to protect his back – dente timetur was a well-known Latin expression for ‘you’d better watch out for the teeth’. But the King had countered with rex non potest peccare – ‘the king cannot sin’. By the most delicate of hesitations, however, between potest and peccare, Louis had transformed the phrase into ‘you cannot sway the king, wild pig’.

The pun had been so magnificent that de Bale was briefly tempted to ignore his orders and spare the King’s life – where else but in France could you find a fifteen-year-old king with the wit of a Peter Abélard? But a wise man thought twice before antagonizing a kinsman as powerful as Pierre Mauclerc, Duke of Brittany. De Bale was nicely caught between the Plantagenet rock and the Capetian hard place.

He eased his horse closer to the King’s, then darted a look back over his shoulder to see how the other squires were taking his arrogation of the King’s attention. ‘I know where you can find one, Sire. He’s a monster. The biggest tusker this side of Orléans. He’s four hundred pounds if he’s an ounce.’

‘How’s that? What did you say?’

The fool’s been praying again, thought de Bale – he should have been born a priest and not a king. If he carries on like this they’ll have to sanctify him. Either that, or he’ll finish up the bloodthirstiest, most vainglorious, most self-acclaiming tyrant since Nero.

As if in echo of his secret fears, de Bale’s very own version of a solemn prayer flashed, uncalled for, through his head. ‘May it please you God that after what I am about to do, this whoreson doesn’t end up as a martyr, and I a disembowelled, disjointed, discombobulated regicide.’

De Bale bowed in belated response to the King’s query, a sickly smile plastered across his face. ‘I’d actually been reserving him for myself, Sire. My servants …’

‘How can you reserve him for yourself? All wild boar belong to the King. Who do you think you are?’

De Bale flushed. God protect me from men who are my masters, he mouthed to himself. He was already beholden to Mauclerc, and here he was crossing swords with his other liege lord, Louis IX, whom Mauclerc wanted dead. De Bale could feel his brain spinning on its axis. He groped around for the right approach – the right way to jump.

‘The animal is well outside the royal forest, Sire, and therefore legally mine. And I have not killed him yet. I merely instructed my people to build a wicker barricade around his lair, and to keep him in place with a charivari. I know he’s in there. I just haven’t seen him. I was going to dedicate him to Our Lady and then slaughter him. They say he has twelve-inch tusks.’

‘Twelve-inch tusks? Impossible.’

De Bale knew his man. He shrugged, and looked away into the distance.

‘Then he’s the Devil, not a boar. Four hundred pounds, you say? And twelve-inch tusks? He’s an impostor. It’s inconceivable that our Lord Jesus Christ should be reflected in such a monster.’

De Bale edged in for the kill. ‘That could be so, Sire. You are doubtless right.’ He crossed himself with an extravagant gesture, almost as if he were sprinkling holy water over an invisible assembly. ‘What more suitable opponent, then, for a Christian king?’