As Roland de Cygne made his way along the alley, he felt pretty pleased with himself, and his conquest. Before this, he’d had only brief and fumbling encounters with farm girls and serving wenches, so Martine was a good start to what he hoped would be a fine career as a lover. Of course, she was only a young woman of the bourgeois, merchant class, but good practice. And he supposed that she in turn must be quite excited to have a boy of noble blood for a lover.

He thought he’d handled his first approach to her especially well. As for telling her that he was descended from the hero of the Song of Roland, that had been only a slight embroidery on the truth. As a child he’d asked why he was named Roland, and his father had explained: “When your grandfather went on crusade, he had a wonderful horse called Roland, after the hero of the tale. That horse went with him all the way to the Holy Land and back, and he deserves to be remembered. It’s a good name, too. I’d have given it to your brother, but the eldest in our family is always called Jean. So I gave it to you.”

“I’m named after a horse?”

“One of the noblest warhorses ever to go on crusade. What more do you want?”

Roland had understood. But he didn’t think he was going to get many girls by telling them he was named after a horse.

He cut through an alley back into the rue du Temple. The sky was brightening over the gabled houses. The city gates were open by now, but there was hardly anyone about. The sound of the dawn chorus was all around, bringing as it always did a little thrill to his heart. He sniffed the air. As usual in the city streets, he could smell urine, dung and woodsmoke; but the delicious smell of baking bread also wafted past him, and the sweet scent of a honeysuckle bush from somewhere nearby.

Roland hadn’t wanted to go to Paris. But his father had insisted: “There’s nothing for you here, my son,” he’d said. “But I think you have more brains than your brother, and that in Paris you could do great things for the honor of your family. Why, you might even surpass your grandfather.” That would be a fine thing indeed.

Roland’s grandfather had been favored by history. After the mighty Charlemagne had died, and his empire crumbled back into provinces and tribal territories built on the ruins of ancient Rome, the kings of the Franks were often masters of little more than the Paris region, known as the Île-de-France, while huge domains, ruled by rich and powerful feudal families, encircled them: Provence and Aquitaine in the south; Celtic Brittany on the northern Atlantic coast; Champagne to the east; and below it, the tribal lands of Burgundy.