I understand, now that I have had children, why blood is so important. When my son Rob died, I felt that quite literally a part of me had passed on as well. My wife and I had raised him with love and care and we had poured all our hopes and dreams in to him. If he had been the son of another man, would I have loved him so much, or felt his death quite so keenly? Perhaps so. But I doubt I would have felt so powerfully that he was me, in some strange way, and that his death was my death. Then, of course, in the spring of the Year of Our Lord 1191, when I realised that Marie-Anne’s child Hugh was not Robin’s son, my first thought was for the shame that Robin must feel. It was bad enough that his wife had been bedded by Sir Ralph Murdac, that in itself would have given cause for many men to disown their wives — that it must have been rape made no difference — but for her to have been impregnated by another man, and a mortal enemy at that, was almost too shameful to contemplate.
There were several reasons why I knew that Hugh must truly be Murdac’s son, and why I knew that Robin knew this too. Firstly, I had noticed the signs of a forced coupling on Marie-Anne’s clothing — her dress was torn and bloody — when Robin, Reuben and I had rescued her from Murdac’s grasp in Nottingham Castle nearly two years ago. Ralph Murdac had captured her, after the death of King Henry but before Richard had returned to England and taken a firm grip on the throne. Murdac had been hoping, no doubt, to use her as a bargaining tool and as a way of putting pressure on Robin. Secondly, when Robin had killed her captors, he had taken her into his arms and asked if she were hurt; he was in truth asking whether Murdac had dishonoured her. I remember her answer clearly, she did not say, ‘I am unharmed,’ or ‘I have not been hurt,’ but only, ‘All is well now that you are here.’ I am sure that if she had been untouched by Murdac she would have said so. The third reason why I knew the child was Murdac’s was the colouring of baby Hugh: black hair and pale blue eyes. Despite what Goody had told me about babies changing their looks after birth, it seemed too much of a coincidence that, of all the people in Christendom, the baby should resemble Sir Ralph Murdac so closely. And anyway, the wise women say that immediately after birth, a baby resembles its father, and then later it takes on more of the look of the mother. The fourth point was the previously inexplicable disharmony between Robin and Marie-Anne immediately after the birth. Robin knew the child was not his — and it was my sacred duty to make sure that the rumour was squashed and that my master never found out that I was aware of his ignoble secret.
But, quite apart from Bernard’s loose tongue — and Robin would quite readily tear it from his head if he found out that my friend had been spreading this news — Murdac’s whisperers would be doing their work in England and there was a real danger that, when Robin returned, he would be a laughing stock. People would assume that he wore the horns of a cuckold, even though the truth was that Marie-Anne had been forced against her will by a monster. Robin would never admit that; he would never admit that he had been unable to protect the woman he loved. And how would this sad business affect the relations between husband and wife? If it became common knowledge, would Robin disinherit Hugh, throw him out of the family? And how would Marie-Anne feel about her baby being a universally known as a bastard, a child of rape, a nobody born out of wedlock. She would never admit the truth of that. But could Robin accept a cuckoo in the nest?
As I sat pondering these terrible truths, the party in the tavern was becoming raucous: Ambroise and Bernard were swapping couplets of dirty poetry with each other with great relish, and downing full cups of unwatered wine, and one of the other trouveres was already dancing with one of the Sicilian serving women. Leaving them to their revels, I slipped away to find my master.
I found Robin in his chamber in the monastery, reading the letter from Marie-Anne. His face was a cold, emotionless mask and as I entered the room on the pretext of bringing him his evening meal, he gave be a look of such blank metallic savagery that I almost lost my nerve and retreated.
‘Your supper, sir,’ I said quietly. And he merely indicated that I should put it on the table with a wave of his hand. I tore off a piece of the roast chicken with my fingers and took it over to Keelie, who had been watching my movements with great interest from a rush basket in the corner of the room.
‘Good news from England, sir?’ I asked disingenuously, crouched with my back to Robin, as the one-eyed dog licked the chicken gravy from my hand.
‘No,’ said Robin. And that flat single syllable sounded like a tombstone being dropped on to the grass of a churchyard cemetery. I turned to look at the Earl of Locksley; the letter was lying on the table next to his supper, but he was staring at the stone floor, seemingly in some sort of trance. For ten heartbeats we did not move; I stared at him, he stared at the floor. Then he dragged his gaze up to meet mine and said: ‘It seems your friend Prince John is causing trouble; wants to be King, I hear,’ he attempted a smile, but it never reached his grey eyes. I wanted to say something, to comfort him to tell him that it was all right, that it was not his fault that Murdac had ruined him, that it was not Marie-Anne’s fault either. But the gulf between lord and vassal was too wide. ‘Would you mind leaving me, Alan,’ said Robin. He sounded unbearably weary. ‘And tell the men that we will be departing in a week or so for Outremer and so they should prepare themselves. And tell Little John… oh, never mind, I’ll tell him in the morning. Good night.’ As I left, I saw him pick up the letter again and stare sightlessly at the thick vellum pages. I noticed that his hand was trembling slightly.
We left Messina ten days later: seventeen thousand five hundred soldiers and sailors of Richard’s grand army crammed into two hundred ships. Mategriffon had been carefully dismantled, piece by piece, and stored in one of the larger busses; the great destriers of the knights, held safely by two stout belly straps, had been lifted and swung out over the harbour by great cranes and lowered into their places in the larger transport vessels; and Berengaria of Navarre, accompanied by Richard’s sister Joanna, had been packed into a sumptuous but weatherly cog with all the comforts a mighty king could provide. With these noble ladies traveled one Arab slave girl, now a lady’s maid to Princess Berengaria, and to my mind a woman of such perfect beauty that she outshone any mortal woman alive. I had arranged Nur’s new position with Robin’s help, and a small gift of silver to Berengaria’s chamberlain, and I had never seen her so happy. ‘Alan,’ she said in her halting French as she kissed me on the dock, ‘you are a wonderful man, my saviour, my preux chevalier, and to reward you for being so kind and good, we shall do that thing again that you like so much, you know, with the leather belts and the honey
…’ I shushed her hurriedly and looked around the harbour, hoping that nobody had heard. Two yards behind me stood Little John who was organising the embarkation of our cavalry. He looked as if he had not heard a thing and I breathed a sigh of relief: too soon, of course. The moment Nur had left me to get into a skiff, he came a little closer: ‘Tell me Alan, what is the thing you like to do with the belts and the honey?’ he asked in a low, confidential tone.
I flushed a deep red. ‘It’s nothing, really,’ I mumbled, ‘in fact, I have no idea what she was talking about.’ My face was burning and I could not look him in the eye. ‘She’s a foreigner; she doesn’t understand what she is saying half the time.’ I tried a nonchalant shrug.
‘Really,’ said Little John. ‘Well, I’ll just ask her then.’ And before I could stop him, he cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed across the open water to the skiff that was carrying my beloved to her ship: ‘Nur, my darling,’ he yelled in a voice they could have heard across the strait in Italy. ‘Tell me: what does young Alan like to do in bed with the honey and the belts…?’ Half a dozen people turned around to stare at his booming voice, and I twisted fast as a greyhound and punched him as hard as I could in the belly.
In hindsight, I think the reason John folded up after my blow to his midriff had more to do with the fact that he was helpless with laughter than the strength of my punch. But, as I continued to hit him with my fists, getting in some quite decent blows to his face and body, he did manage to stop laughing long enough to grab me by the scruff of my neck and by my sword belts lift me furious and struggling off my feet and toss me into the dirty water of the harbour.
As the Santa Maria’s sail flapped and slowly filled, and the crew hauled on a cobweb of ropes to sharp whistles from the master of the vessel, I realised that I was very glad to be leaving Sicily. I had found love there, and happiness, it was true, but the air of surly menace from the defeated Griffons made me constantly uncomfortable — I never went anywhere unarmed — and the feeling of wasting time, while other Christians died for our cause in Outremer, was not a pleasant one. Also there was the problem of the assassin — I still had no idea who it might be, but I hoped that by leaving Sicily we were leaving him — or her — behind us. I felt hopeful and confident, now that we were now off again on the great adventure that I had long dreamed of. God would protect Robin, I was sure, now that we were engaged once again on this holy mission. We were heading for the Holy Land, at last, and with His help and guidance, we would soon bring the might of Richard’s immense army to bear on the Saracens. In a few months, perhaps, the holy city of Jerusalem would be free again and under good Christian rule…
On the third day out of Messina, near dusk, as the sun dipped low behind us and cast a sail-shaped shadow over the inky waves, a great storm came barrelling in from the south. The swell began to rise, causing the ship to twist and buck like a wild horse in its forward progress, the wind picked up, rattling the ropes and straining the old canvas sail almost to breaking point, and huge purple-black clouds came scudding across the grey sky — and with them came black rain, a torrent, lashing down like icy whips on to the surface of the water. Crouched under a piece of waxed canvas, at the prow of the Santa Maria, the world closed in around me. It was like being under a waterfall. The rain drummed madly on the canvas and the ship bucked and rolled beneath my cowering body; it seemed that God had unleashed his fury on the world, a cataclysm to rival Noah’s flood. Peering out from under the soaking cloth I could hardly see the next ship from me, a mere fifty yards away. The archers in the body of the Santa Maria were taking turns to bail water with their helmets but I could see that it was having little effect; for every capful of water the men threw overboard ten times as a much again and more crashed over the side as the waves pounded alarmingly against our frail craft. Soon we were alone in a roaring maelstrom of water and shrieking wind, with no other ships in sight, carried along by at unbelievable speed, dwarfed by mountainous seas, the soldier and sailors wailing, beseeching God to show us mercy but the sound coming through only in brief snatches between the smashing of the waves against the ship’s hull. I crossed myself and prepared as best I could for death, mumbling Ave Maria over and over through salt-wet lips, and I begged the Almighty in his infinite mercy to save the life of my beloved Nur, wherever she might be in this watery Hell, and if he had any spare mercy to save the lives of all the men, including mine, aboard this decrepit wooden shell that had been named in honour of the holy mother of His beloved son Jesus Christ.
All night long the storm raged, the ship tossed like a leaf in a hurricane, and I lost any sense of time passing: I crouched in wretchedness, holding tight to a wooden strut, soaking wet and freezing — my canvas shield long snatched away by a howling wrench of wind — and waiting at any moment for the ship to founder and a black wall of water to fall on me and drown my pain. But by God’s grace, she did not. And at dawn a weak watery sun rose in the east and I raised my head from its misery and saw that the tempest had miraculously eased. Our brave vessel was scudding along on a brisk westerly wind, still travelling at an alarming speed, but now was shouldering through big green waves with confidence, and causing no more than a fine spray to whip the ship’s sides with each impact. We had lost one man overboard, a sailor who had bravely tried to secure a flapping rope and who had been swept to his doom by a freakishly large burst of seawater but, apart from that poor soul, we were relatively unharmed. We all joined together in a prayer of heartfelt thanksgiving, and I realised that I had been deeply wrong to doubt in God’s grace, even for a moment. I should have known that he would save us: we were setting out to do his good work, to save the cradle of Christianity itself. We rinsed out our mouths with fresh water, stripped our soaking clothes from our bodies, and began to look about for the other ships of the fleet.
Astoundingly, as the clouds cleared overhead and the sea became even calmer, I could see that many of the other ships of the fleet were still afloat, though none were near us. They were scattered over the surface of the moving sea as far as the horizon on all sides, but still swimming bravely. It truly felt as if the hand of God had protected us from the full fury of the Devil. And, best of all, most wonderful of all, on our starboard bow no more than two dozen miles away, I could make out the low grey-green mass of the island of Crete.
We stayed for two days in the old harbour of Heracleon on Crete, recovering our spirits and waiting for the fleet to reassemble. Although we slept on the ships, there was time to visit dry land and bring on board fresh provisions and water — much of our stores had been damaged by water during the storm. I hired a local skiff and visited Robin, Little John and Reuben aboard their ship the Holy Ghost, and learnt that most of our fighting men were well and we had lost no more than a dozen to the storm, none of whom I knew well. One of our fellows, a seemingly steady Yorkshireman, had run mad during the storm and had tried to attack the master of his ship before throwing himself into the sea. But the majority of our force was intact and bobbing snugly in Heracleon harbour. Despite this news, I was heart-sick with worry: twenty-odd ships had disappeared in the storm, among them the richly appointed royal cog carrying Princess Berengaria, Queen Joanna — and my darling Nur.
On the morning of the third day, when it was quite clear that no more ships would join us in Crete, we headed on for Rhodes, which was a good place to gain news, situated as it was on a major sea route. I was racked with guilt: I had loved two women who were not of the Christian faith, a Jew and a Muslim, and I wondered if God, as a punishment for consorting with unbelievers, had decided to take both of them from me. I suspected that I was suffering from a touch of sea fever: I had hardly known Ruth, and to say that I truly loved her was a lie. My worry and guilt over Nur, though, was real enough. I remembered every time we had made love, and tortured myself with those exquisite memories. Why had I been so stupid as to send her into service with the Princess? I should have kept her by my side so that I could protect her, as I had promised to do. That was nonsense, of course, and I knew it — how could I protect her from the sea-borne wrath of God? — but that knowledge did not ease my pain.
We spent ten days in Rhodes, waiting for news of the other ships and because the King fell ill with a mysterious malady that kept him abed for a week vomiting and shuddering with fever. However, looking back I can remember very little about the time there, consumed as I was with worry about Nur. But we did gain some intelligence. Reuben seemed to have made contact with friends of his in the Holy Land, though how, I did not know. It seemed that King Philip was now outside the walls of Acre — along with German and Italian contingents, which had been there some months — and he was preparing to assault the ancient fortified town. In a sort of cruel joke, the besieging Christian army was itself besieged by Saladin’s forces: so there was a Muslim garrison in the stronghold of Acre, surrounded by Christians, who were themselves surrounded by Muslims. The situation did not sound very hopeful for our fellow pilgrims.
Finally we heard news of the ships, and it was mostly bad. Several had been sunk by the storm, and many, many men had drowned, but a few ships had been driven before the tempest. And the Princess’s cog, the noble ship that contained my precious girl and the royal women, had made it — battered and bruised — to Limassol in Cyprus. My heart skipped in my chest, my head spun: Nur lived!
Cyprus was a rich land — like Sicily it abounded with fruit trees, olives, grapes and corn, but it was ruled by an evil tyrant, a upstart called Isaac Comnenus, scion of the ruling house of Byzantium, who was now calling himself the Emperor of Cyprus having seized the island by force a few years back with the help of Greek and Armenian mercenaries. King Richard was incensed because the Emperor had imprisoned some of the men from our ships, which had been beached there after the storm, though not the royal ship, thank the Lord, which was anchored unharmed in a small bay to the west of Limassol. The imprisoned men had been ill-treated, despite their status as holy pilgrims, and the Emperor’s men had seized the Great Seal of England, which had been carried by Sir Roger Malchiel, one of Richard’s most trusted knights, who had drowned when his ship was wrecked on the rocks of Cyprus. The Emperor had invited the royal women to come ashore but, knowing the fate of their fellow pilgrims, imprisonment for ransom, they had refused. The royal ship had two floating consorts, filled with crossbowmen, plus a handful of men-at-arms. When the Emperor had tried to board the three battered ships, his men had been answered with a barrage of crossbow bolts and forced to withdraw. Berengaria was already wildly popular with the men and they would have laid down their lives to protect her from the Tyrant of Cyprus. So it was stalemate: the three ships were too battered to leave the bay and venture into the open sea; and the Emperor could not force the women to come to the land. When the royal ship asked permission to send a party ashore to collect fresh water and provisions, the Emperor flatly refused.
It was a bad mistake on Isaac Comnenus’s part. King Richard was not a man to accept an insult to his sister or his future Queen; so, quite casually, it seemed, he decided that we would take the island of Cyprus by force.
‘He’s gone mad,’ said Will Scarlet, as we shared a huge bowl of fish soup in a sea-front tavern in Rhodes harbour. It was Lent again, and meat had been forbidden to the entire army. ‘We must go to King Philip’s aid at Acre,’ Will continued, ‘and help him to take the city; beat Saladin, then on to Jerusalem. We can’t go off and conquer what is practically a whole country just because its ruler was rude to us. He should go and get his women, bring them safely back here and we’ll all set off for where God intends us to go: the Holy Land.’
I understood his outrage. I was as keen as anyone to reach our destination, but I also knew that Richard was not going to take Cyprus just to avenge a slight. ‘Robin says the island is the key to recovering the Holy Land,’ I replied blowing on a spoonful of the rich, fragrant soup to cool it. I was pleased that the food was good, since I was paying for it. Will had always been poor, but he was even more so now that he had been reduced to the ranks and was living on a common soldier’s wage. What he did not know, and I did, was that he was about to have to get by on even less. Robin had run through the money given to him by King Richard, and was in debt again. Nobody in our division was likely to see wages in the near future, and I did not begrudge Will a bowl of soup: I still had most of the purse of gold that the King had given me.
‘Quite apart from the wealth of the island, which is considerable,’ I continued, ‘and the fact that Isaac has no genuine claim to be its ruler, if we take and hold Cyprus, we have a base from which we can attack anywhere along the coast of Outremer. If we lose at Acre, which is almost our last toehold in the Levant, we can still come back to regroup in Cyprus. Robin thinks that Richard had always planned to take the island, and that this disrespect shown to his women merely gives him a decent excuse to invade.’
‘But it could take months,’ protested Will. ‘If the local lords back the Emperor we could be in for a long hard and costly fight.’
‘Maybe, but Reuben tells me the Cypriot knights do not love Comnenus. With luck, Richard could take the island in one or two battles. If he shows that he’s winning, the local lords will quickly come over to our side.’
Will still looked unhappy, but I was thinking that it might be very satisfying to meet the man who had denied my Nur fresh water and food, who was, as we sat here eating, torturing her with thirst and hunger. We finished the soup in silence.
The coast of Cyprus lay before us like a naked whore: lush, inviting, but only to be won at a price. Below the pretty whitewashed houses of the town of Limassol, which clustered around a large church and winked at us gaily in the spring sunlight, there was a long stretch of yellow beach: fringed with trees, gently rising, smooth, and the perfect place to land shallow boats. Beyond the town were the rich groves of oranges and lemons, stretching away into the distance, and beyond them, field upon field of gnarled olive trees rising up the slope to the mass of low greeny-purple hills beyond.
We had gathered the royal women in the night before and when they were suitably refreshed and cleaned, Richard summoned them to a feast on the deck; there he had publically vowed that he would avenge their honour, whatever it took. I had missed his speech as I was locked in a passionate embrace with my lovely Nur, in a dark corner of the King’s great ship, kissing her beautiful face over and over and promising that I would never leave her again. ‘I always know… you will come
… for me,’ she said in her halting French. And it wrung my heart. I gathered her up in my arms and kissing her on the lips vowed that from now on I would always keep her from harm; and so we began to make love. Not once in the next half an hour did I think of a similar promise that I had once made to the Jewess Ruth.
When our lust was expended, we lay in each other’s arms half-drowsing until I was started from her embrace by a call from William, who, breathless with excitement, told me that the envoy had returned from his embassy to the Emperor. I hauled on my braies and hose, and hastily pulled a tunic over my head, smoothed my hair, and went to hear the news on the upper deck, where a great crowd surrounded the King.
I was just in time to hear the herald say ‘… and then, Sire, when I had relayed your formal demands of restitution to him, he merely looked at me as if I had crawled out from under a rock and said, ‘Tproupt, sir!’ and dismissed me.’
“He said what?’ asked the King, his handsome face crunched with puzzlement. He had completely recovered from his illness and was clearly fizzing with high spirits.
‘“Tproupt,” I believe he said, “Tproupt, ir,”the herald looked slightly embarrassed. All around him knights were trying out this unfamilar word, it was like a chorus of doves: ‘Tproupt!’ ‘Tproupt!’ ‘Tproupt!’
‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ said the King. ‘Well, never mind. I suppose its some Griffon insult or other. Tproupt! How extraordinary. So, that’s that then: formalities over, now comes the fun part. Gentlemen…’ And the King began to issue a gushing stream of orders to his men for the assault on the stronghold of Cyprus.
There was scarcely room to breathe in the snake boat. The shallow craft was packed with Robin’s men-at-arms; seventeen big warriors in full armour in a vessel designed to take no more than ten. Robin, Little John and Sir James sat in the front, before the mast, and Will Scarlet and myself were crammed in the belly below the square grey sail with a dozen unhorsed cavalrymen. A grizzled sailor perched on the stem and guided us in with one hand on the steering oar.
We were forced to make the initial attack on the beach with only a fraction of our force: a mere three hundred men. But the King had judged that it would be enough, and each commander had been required to choose his best warriors, and leave the rest to watch from the ships. We seventeen in that tiny boat were the cream of Robin’s force, and that thought gave me a great deal of pride. King Richard’s problem was a lack of small boats. Every snack, skiff, rowing boat and coracle in the fleet had been assembled for the assault; as only boats with a shallow draft capable of landing on the beach could be used. And all were filled with fighting men; knights and men-at-arms in the first wave, followed by a hundred of Robin’s archers in the second wave, plus two boatloads of sea-sick crossbowmen from Aquitaine.
The low sides of the snake boat were dangerously near the water line, and if it had sunk we would all have drowned immediately due to the weight of armour we wore. But, strangely, I felt no fear. Once again, the presence of the King, two boats along from us, inspired unreasonable courage in my heart. He had that wonderful quality, my King; of course, he was noble and brave beyond measure, but more than this he made all of us feel that, under his command, anything was possible. We were three hundred men attacking a whole island — and one that was well defended.
The Emperor had been busy in the past few days. A huge barricade had been erected on Limassol beach to deny us a landing; it was constructed, it seemed, from anything that came to hand: huge rocks, sheep hurdles, the broken hulls of rowing boats, old planks and dead trees; enormous urns used for storing olive oil, too, were piled up along with every piece of wood in the town: tables, chairs, footstools, doors, even an altar from the church were stacked in a long line across beach barring our way in a surprisingly efficient and warlike fashion. And behind this formidable barrier stood nearly two thousand men: Greek knights in brightly polished round helmets, dark-faced Armenian mercenaries, Limassol townsmen armed with pikes and crossbows, Cypriot peasants conscripted from the fields wielding no more than make-shift spears and their grandfathers’ rusty swords. They had every advantage on their side: the barricade, the numbers, and their homeland to fight for. We were attacking from the sea with a handful of men, weary from travel, far from home and our clothes heavy, soaking wet from the spray. And yet, when I caught sight of King Richard’s eager face, as he crouched ready to spring ashore in the lead boat, I knew deep in my heart that we would be victorious.
A hundred yards out from the beach, Robin turned to the boats behind us, shouted an order, and the arrows began to fly. The Welsh archers bent their massive yew bows, aimed high and with a sound like a ripping cloth, loosed a cloud of shafts that rose high into the blue sky and fell like the wrath of the Almighty on to the barricades. The first wave of arrows dropped in grey sheets like killing hail: the steel points of the yard-long arrows slamming through mail coats of the knights just as easily as through the homespun tunics of the peasants, punching deep into the defenders’ chests and shoulders and backs to inflict horrible wounds; the men behind the barrier cowered under the onslaught, those with shields holding them above their heads, those without suffering catastrophe as the missiles plunged into their defenceless bodies. The wounded staggered away from the barricade, gouting blood, sometimes from more than one wound. The dead were trampled under mail-shod feet as the thick line of men shifted and writhed under the first lash of our shafts. And then the second wave fell on them, arrows clattering on the wooden table legs of the wall, spearing into a rashly upturned face, even puncturing the cheaper kind of helmet, and dropping men all along the barricade by the score. The third wave slammed down upon them down, and a fourth. The pitiful cries of the wounded Greeks were heartbreakingly clear on the salty air but I could also hear Little John, clutching his great war axe and keening to himself, a high pitched drone that sent shivers down my spine, as we raced towards the shore.
The arrows continued to do their grim work of thinning the enemy line. Our Welshmen in the boats behind us were now loosing their shafts at will, no longer in waves but in a looser but never ceasing cloud of falling death; and the Aquitainian crossbowmen, finding themselves in range, now added their bolts to the slaughter. Bodies lay draped across the barrier, leaking blood from many holes, and at the ends of the line, I saw the first peasants slipping away, running up the beach back into the fields to escape this barrage of death, their captains shouting after them. But the centre — the hard core of well-protected Greek knights around the Emperor and his golden standard — was solid as an iron bar.
King Richard’s boat was the first to crunch up the slope of the beach, wedging itself into the sand. And with a shout of ‘God and Saint Mary!’ our sovereign launched himself out of the vessel, staggered slightly as he landed, and then stood tall. As he surveyed the enemy line, a mere thirty paces away, his bright helm, ringed with a golden crown, glittered in the bright light of noon; a crossbow bolt sliced past his face, and he shifted his shield, the two golden lions of his personal device proud on its red background; his huge sword was upright in his right fist and, without so much as a glance to see whether the rest of his men would follow, our King began to run straight up the beach directly towards the make-shift barricade and Emperor’s golden standard, towards the thickest part of the enemy line.
There was no time to watch our noblest knight attack his enemy, as our own boat was driving up the sand, and I had to watch my balance as our craft left the smooth water for unyielding dry land. Robin was out first, leaping on to the sand and immediately sprinting up the slope to support the King, and I was tumbling after him, with the crossbow bolts whistling around me, just behind Sir James de Brus and Little John. In five heartbeats we had reached the wall, to the right of King Richard and the squad of hand-picked household knights that now surrounded him, and who were by now trading savage blows with their Greek opponents across the ramshackle defence. Robin shouted something to Little John that I didn’t catch. The blond giant dropped his great war axe and, protected by the swords and shields of Sir James and Robin himself, began pulling at a giant table that was wedged into the centre of the wall. He took a firm grip of a stout round table leg, bent his knees and hauled. There was a great tearing noise, and the table shifted a few inches; the Greek knights who had been engaging Robin and Sir James pulled back in surprise as the whole barricade seemed to tremble; a crossbowman popped up like a vengeful demon in front of Little John. He put his bow to his shoulder, aimed it at John’s back — so close that he couldn’t miss — and stopped. His head snapped back, a yard of good English ash growing suddenly from his eye socket, and he fell away behind the barricade. Our archers had reached dry land. I cut at a bearded face behind the hedge of wood, and forced it to duck away, and then a man lunged at me across the divide with a spear and I, in turn, had to dodge rapidly.
To my left, Little John was still hauling at the table leg, rocking his body back and forward in short explosive heaves. He gave one final massive pull, the muscles of his great arms swelling and writhing, the sweat standing out on his forehead, and suddenly the whole table came grinding out of the barricade in a great rush, like a cow giving birth to its bloody calf, leaving a small ragged gap in the enemy defences. John lost his balance and tumbled into the sand, but dozens of eager hands began to tear at the enemy bulwark, ripping away chairs, planks and small boulders, and in a matter of moments a great hole had been ripped in the centre of the wall — through which our gallant King rushed without a moment’s pause or thought for his safety; and we all — Robin, Sir James, myself and a dozen of his bravest knights — came charging after him in a howling phalanx of steel and fury.
I had my sword in my right hand and my poniard in my left; my head was covered with a tightly fitting dome of steel and my body from wrist to knee was protected with a hauberk of fine steel links, and I was determined to bring death to the men of Cyprus who had insulted my Nur. A Greek knight shouted a challenge at me and swung his sword at my head; I ducked and he slammed into me with his shield, but I was ready for this move, and rolled my body round his shield to his left, away from the sword, and hacked at the back of his knees with my own long blade. The blow did not break through his mail leggings but it dropped the knight to his knees, and I dropped my sword, grappled his helmet with my right hand, hauled it back to expose his neck and quick as summer lightning sliced through his throat with my poniard. The blood gushed hotly as I dropped his twitching body, and I immediately knelt to recover my sword — and saved my own life. Another sword slashed through the air above my head, I felt its wind on my neck, and I turned and lunged with my recovered long blade, almost in one movement, and catching the attacking man-at-arms neatly in the groin with the tip of my weapon. His armour consisted only of a boiled leather cuirasse and a kind of leather kilt and he stumbled away, hands cupped over his cock and balls, the blood leaking through his fingers. We had burst through the line of Cypriots, and I saw to my left King Richard engaged with a mass of knights in rich armour, Robin beside him, hacking and lunging, fighting like a maniac; and there was Little John, cutting a knight from his horse with a great blow from his axe and a spray of gore.
Another knight attacked me, a decent swordsman, it must be said, and we cut and parried three times, circling each other between blows, but his attention was not on me. He kept looking left and right, seeing to his dismay that his fellows were fleeing the barricade as more and more of our men-at-arms — and scores of Welsh archers who had abandoned their bows to fight with the short swords and axes — boiled through the gap that Little John had torn in their extraordinary defences. I wasn’t concentrating on my opponent fully either, for I too was astounded at how quickly the enemy were leaving the field of battle. And I nearly paid dearly for my lack of attention. The knight suddenly stepped in and chopped straight down at me with his long sword, a mighty blow that would have crushed my skull had it landed, and only just in time I blocked with poniard and sword crossed together, my arms almost buckling under the strength and savagery of his attack. Then suddenly, miraculously, his head flew from his shoulders; the square steel helmet with its leaking stump of neck rolling several yards over the ground. The body stayed standing for a few heartbeats and then the legs folded underneath it and it slumped to the bloody ground and I was left standing and facing Sir James de Brus, with his bloody sword, held double-handed and now extended above his left shoulder in the classic warrior’s pose.
‘Are you quite well, Alan,’ the Scotsman said, looking at me with a puzzled frown. ‘It’s not like you to take so long to dispatch just one man.’
‘I was distracted, James,’ I replied, ‘Look yonder.’ And I pointed to the edge of the beach with my bloody poniard. The self-proclaimed Emperor of Cyprus was riding for the tree line as fast as his horse would carry him, escaping like the coward he was to the safety of the hills. Behind him followed a shamefaced group of richly caparisoned, well-armoured knights, all apparently unwounded, and in the centre of the imperial bodyguard, the Emperor’s standard of golden embroidered cloth flapped limply in the mild sea breeze.
I had expected some sort of pause after our victory on the beach, perhaps just an hour to tend to our wounds and take a drink of cool water and a bite of bread. But King Richard seemed to be in even more of a hurry than he was before the battle. He grabbed the Earl of Locksley by the shoulder as Robin came up to him on the blood-soaked strand, and said urgently: ‘There is not a minute to waste; I must have the horses; as quickly as you can, Robert, get me horses for my knights. Get them from anywhere.’
Robin turned to me: ‘You heard him Alan: horses. Take a squad of men and get up to the town; requisition any steed you can lay your hands on. Quickly.’
‘Requisition?’ I said. I knew what the word meant but I wanted to be clear about what he was ordering me to do. I didn’t want to risk being hanged as a thief. ‘Oh for God’s sake, Alan, it means steal, take, confiscate. Just go and get the King his horses, as many as you can, any way that you can. You have my permission. And saddles, too, if you can find them. We can’t let the Emperor get away.’
I rounded up a dozen archers, who were going through the clothing of the dead on the beach and slitting the throats of any enemy wounded they found, and managed to lead them — they were reluctant to follow me away from their pickings — up the beach to the dusty road that led to Limassol.
The town was almost deserted — evidently the people had seen the way the wind was blowing and had fled the place to preserve their lives and possessions, but while there was ample opportunity for plunder, I told the men that I would personally see any man who stole without my permission whipped to bloody rags. I meant it, too.
Limassol was an eerie place without any visible inhabitants, but a pretty town filled with wide sunny squares and cheerful whitewashed houses with blue-painted shutters. In front of many a house was a paved forecourt where vines hung from trellises and provided shade in the summer. And it was behind one of these pleasant dwellings, larger than the rest and with the air of a great man’s inn, that we found a corral with a dozen horses. The inn even provided five rather battered saddles and, with my permission, the men helped themselves to some food they found in the kitchen, although I banned them from sampling a barrel of wine that we found already broached in the buttery.
Mounted on the ‘requisitioned’ animals, we found it a speedy business to scour the town for horseflesh and by early evening we had two dozen or so steeds of varying quality — including carthorses, mules and one old mare that looked more than ready for a merciful death — in a loose herd being trotted towards the beach.
The battlefield had changed significantly since the noon fight; the barricade had been totally dismantled and the bay was full of ships, which had come into land as close as they could for their draft. Skiffs and snacks plied between the big ships and the shore, ferrying provisions, arms, armour and rather seasick-looking horses to the beach. The animals were frightened and confused after the long sea journey, and particularly spooked by the final stage when they had been rowed, one big horse to a tiny rocking boat, from the transport ships to the beach. They were being fed and watered by squires on the sand and walked up and down the beach to regain their nerves and equilibrium.
I delivered my herd to King Richard’s grooms and they were added to a large bunch of animals that had been gathered from the surrounding countryside; some, evidently, had been the property of rich knights until recently, their Greek owners having either perished or been captured in the battle.
I dismissed the archers and went to seek further orders from Robin. I found him with the King, and a gathering of leading knights, clerks and members of the King’s familia.
Sir Robert of Thumham, the King’s High Admiral, was speaking as I joined the group, standing behind Robin on the fringes as befitted my lowly status. The sun was sinking at the far end of the beach, setting the sea on fire, in dazzling hues of red and gold, catching the King’s bright locks and seeming to give them an effect almost like a halo. ‘Sire,’ said Sir Robert, ‘our scouts have followed their army and they tell me that the Emperor and his knights are no more than five miles away, and are preparing to spend the night.’ He cleared his throat, and continued. ‘But it seems that there are many more of them than we had imagined. The Emperor has been reinforced by knights from the north of the island, who arrived too late today to participate in the battle.’
‘How many are they?’ asked the King; he was staring up into the air watching a pair of swallows twist and turn about each other in some elegant avian game.
‘Well, sire, the scouts say,’ Sir Robert swallowed, ‘more than three thousand men in all, including servants, camp followers and the like. With more men reported to be on the way. When we have disembarked all the men and horses, we shall easily overmatch them, but that cannot be achieved until the end of the week, at the very earliest. ’ ‘
‘I will attack them now, tonight, with whatever knights can find a horse and a saddle and have the courage to follow me. I cannot wait until the end of the week. The Emperor will slip away and hide in the mountains if I do not smash him now; and then it will be months before I can take this island. No. I must strike him now.’
‘But sire, that is madness,’ said a senior clerk, a weaselly little fellow called Hugo, whom I knew slightly and heartily disliked. ‘They are more than a three thousand, and we have but fifty horses, look sire…’ and he waved his arm towards the corral where less than three score sea-sick and mismatched animals were being fed with some rather damp, and no doubt salty, hay.
‘Sir clerk,’ said Richard frostily, and I realised with a little peep of wicked pleasure that the King had just been called a madman to his face, ‘you stick to papers and books, and leave the fighting and the chivalry to us.’ I stifled a smile to see the clerk put down, but there were more serious matters to hand. The King was attempting a night attack on an army three thousand strong with a tiny force of ill-mounted knights; and the odds against us were sixty to one. Each knight would be facing sixty enemies. Sixty! Perhaps the clerk was right — perhaps the King was mad!