The Death of William Marshal

London, 1219. In a freezing chamber of the Tower, the greatest knight of his age lies dying.

William Marshal was a tournament champion, a pilgrim and a crusader, and he served the kings of England for half a century. Now he lies on his deathbed beside the boy king Henry, whom he has lately knighted. Before death silences him he must hand on to the boy everything he has learnt. But his words come out broken by fever, the boy is half asleep by the fire, and at the foot of the bed the demon Belphegor yawns and whispers rumours of a French army marching on London.

Through that last snowbound night the Marshal's memories rise up out of order. He was a younger son with no inheritance, a child hostage who lived under threat of the gallows. He learnt the craft of arms at Tancarville and spent vagabond years in the lists of France beside the Young King. Then came disgrace and exile, a winter of hunger on the roads with his squire Berengar, the pilgrimage to Cologne, Syria and the gardens of Damascus. At last he married Isabel de Clare, the heiress who made him one of the greatest lords in England. Her voice now rises to tell her own, very different version of the story.

The Death of William Marshal is not a chronicle of battles. It is a meditation on loyalty, memory and the strangeness of having lived. It is the confession of a man who kept faith with his enemies and his kings, and discovers at the very end that he was always a stranger to himself, just as he begins to glimpse some light.

Written with the intensity of a prose poem and grounded in the life of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke (c. 1146-1219), this novel is for readers of literary historical fiction set in the Middle Ages.

Translated from the Spanish (La muerte de Guillermo el Mariscal. Novela de caballerías), with a frontispiece map of the Angevin world.

About the author
Carlos Almira Picazo (Castellón de la Plana, 1965) is a Spanish novelist, poet and secondary-school teacher with a doctorate in Contemporary History from the University of Granada. His short fiction has appeared in anthologies of Spanish micro-fiction, and his novella El jardín de los Bethencourt won the Katharsis short-novel prize.