Pin crouched over the remains of the King’s stag, the royal animal slain in the Royal Forest, and not by the King’s hand, nor by his gamekeeper, for Pin was that gamekeeper. The smallest of the men about the King in this party of seven, Pin alone was not of the King’s tribe, not even a Burgundian. He was but a lowly deer gutter, whose father had been the son of a turnip monger. Pin held his position of honor at the King’s stirrup based on his woodcraft and chaselore alone.

Pin was a peerless hunter with bow and knife. He guided these warriors on their lance hunts of the greater animals which were so dear to them, as reflecting their horseborne way of war.

He rose up out of his crouch, his bow across his broad bony shoulders, his gutting knife hanging from his slim hips to remind him with a touch of his wiry thigh that he alone was ‘of the forest’ in this bunch, and that he must choose his words carefully. Not only was he the only man on foot, he was the smallest of the lot—this caused his hackles to raise on his hairy neck and he forgot himself, just like that.

“Never mind,” he thought to himself, “I’ve not the wits to lie for this sack of aged guts.”

The King cleared his throat, his heavy blood-colored beard brushing his leather hunt vest, as he demanded wordlessly and gruffly of his gamekeeper, “So Pin, how came the grandest stag in my forest to fall to another man’s hand?”

The others sat their horses uneasily. Pin looked up into his master’s face, took him eye-to-eye in that way he had of communicating to the King when the kill thrust was most appropriate, in that way the King had long ago come to trust. Why the King even let Pin lay with the fair-haired kettle wench that rubbed the feet of the King’s own mistress. There was an alien kind of trust between the two men; one beyond estimation, one beneath estimation.

Pin pointed to the gut-pile, heaped of a hasty style he had often cursed under his breath as he worked alongside the big oaf, and broke the hesitant silence with his grating voice, “This here stag was gutted by your chamber mate’s big ancy-handed whelp here, most like while you pondered the priest’s words last eve. It was slain from horseback by an older rider whose thirteen-hand steed is not yet submitted to his girth, which would be the ole fat boy that sits next to you—your chamber mate My King, Cherndon.”

The King’s chamber mate and fussy hand about camp roared an oath before God, and his nephew drew his sword and snarled down at Pin, “Liar; turnip sucking liar! Was one of your sorry sort—most like your old hag mom crawl out a her hole to gnaw her gums on the King’s venison!”

The Priest silenced the chamber mate’s nephew, and then addressed the King, “Sire, your very hand of justice is being accused by a dirt-born child of pagans. The Lord knows the truth. Let it be said or let it be proved, I counsel.”

The King looked clear-eyed and scowling down into Pin’s face, seeming to curse him for a terribly honest soul in crooked company. The King nodded to Pin and said to the other five, he on foot and they on horse, “Let it be proved.”

With those words the King turned his hunt horse around and turned again under the great sweeping oak under which this stag had been feasting when it was run through, nodding to his master at arms, the old one-eyed cuss with hands like malls, to see to this function.

The big man leaped down from his horse as his man pulled off with the beast, to tower looming over Pin, “Off with the bow boy, toss the ignoble arms onto the stag-heap. This is war-play before God.”

As Pin did so One-eye turned to the King’s own chamber mate and scoffed, “You old fat sack of oats, sit your horse opposite your judge, and King.”

As the King’s chamber mate, the man who he had trusted with his confidences and who ordered the running of his household, brought his horse to rest with his back to the stream that had watered this stag at dusk last night, One-eye stabbed an oft broken finger at his nephew, Turgund, the biggest young man of the chiefly class. “Now get down off your horse—case your sword for he is dirt-born and swordless—and take up your lance in defense of your uncle’s honor.”

Turgund did this with a smirk, seizing the lance from its rest with such fury as to make the haft warble and the keen steel edge sing in the morning breeze.

Pin looked up at the brute and rued his own honesty.

One-eye then shoved the haft of his own lance into Pin’s hand and growled, “Do your best blabber lips,” and stalked off toward the King and the priest and the horse handler.

Pin was now facing the big brute across the hastily butchered ruin of the stag, a wrongly slain beast with whom Pin now felt a close kinship. The chamber mate, with his sagging gut and windy bowel, was sitting his horse with his back to the stream, facing his judge, his King. Pin had his back to the great oak and his King, who he had served loyally since about the time of his adversary’s birth.

“A great fix Archer,” he thought to himself, “to be in a lance fight with a big lancer, this is. At least point it at him!”

With that thought Pin stepped forward with his lance pointed at the broad leather-armored chest, and, to his shock and awe the no-gutting foot-kissing whelp, barely 18 years, a full lifetime younger than Pin, leaped over the stag-heap and came down in a crouch even as a searing fire-brand of pain swept outward and upward from Pin’s foot and lit his entire being on fire.

Pin collapsed flat on his back with a groan, holding the haft of the lance with a twitching grip, as if the very worms of the earth were tickling his soul. The lance was soon being kicked away to the sound of old One-eye’s bored admonishment, “Be quick about it. He ran loyally at the King’s stirrup longer than you been taking breath.”

“My Mom,” he thought through his agonized haze of pain as the big boy bent to slit his throat with his broad pointy dagger, “he’ll throw my head to Mom, not a tooth left in her head to gnaw a pig’s rib or me to bring it home.”

A surge of defiance overcame him and he drew the gutting knife that he had used in the King’s service these 19 autumns gone, and slid it up beneath that warrior’s leathery vest, and scraped those overfed bowls from their high-hipped dish-bowl.

The warm feel of bloated overfilled guts steeped in wine by the sack spilling over his leggings and tunic made the pain in his maimed foot go away, even as the sound of old One-eye’s astonished voice—a voice not prone to take on that tone—washed over his ears as he spiraled into the Inner Dark, “Well I’ll be a Pig Eater’s whelp, Old Pin’s just gutted your last wily hope Fat Man…”

The sound—no, the feel—of hooves beating the earth overcame him as he sank into its dank heart.

After this, the first duel in Christendom known to have been fought according to the institution of trial by combat established by King Gundebald of Burgundy, Cherndon, the Kings Chamberlain, fled to the church of Saint-Marcel, but King Gontron ordered him to be seized and stoned to death.

This author was not able to determine the fate of the gamekeeper from the English language sources available.