Dickon’s wife Sarah came to see me last night. Her swineherd husband faces the manor court of Westbury tomorrow, if I choose to bring charges against him. If I wished I could even send him to a King’s court for the felony of theft. He would receive a grim penalty if found guilty by the King’s travelling judges; and his guilt would be easily demonstrated. Half a dozen witnesses have heard him boasting that he stole my piglets, witnesses who are my tenants, men whose families I could throw out into the street if I were displeased with them.
Sarah was shown into my hall by Marie, while I was sitting alone by the fire, long past dusk, with a mug of warmed ale in my hand. It was very nearly my bedtime but I threw off my tiredness when I saw her. The tears were streaming down her old face, and she threw herself on the rush-strewn floor in front of me, startling one of my deerhounds from its slumber. The dog gave her a mournful look and then trotted away to find a more peaceful place to sleep.
Her boots were crusted with snow, and her shawl was white-dusted too, and I wondered whether we were in for a very hard winter as I waited for her to speak. I called for the hall servants to throw another log on the fire, to bring a stool for Sarah to sit upon, and to bring another mug of ale.
Marie showed that she was angry at these small courtesies by banging dishes down hard on the long table as she cleared away the remains of supper. But I ignored her and said: ‘Get up from the floor, Sarah, and sit. Tell me what it is you want — why do you disturb my peace on this cold night?’
‘Oh sir, it’s my old fool Dickon. He is drunk again on Widow Wilkins’ strong mead, and cursing you something horrible, and he is
…’ she halted, and I encouraged her to continue. She took a sip of ale. ‘Oh sir, he is talking of slitting his own throat. He says you will send him to the King’s court and they will hang him… and he vows he will not die that way. He says he would rather die by his own hand, like a soldier, and risk eternal damnation, than be hanged as a common felon. I tell him you would not send him to the judges, not for a piglet or two, and that it will just be the manor court and a fine. But he is mad, sir, and he sits in our cottage muttering and swearing foul oaths and drinking yet more and sharpening his knife. Oh sir, tell me you will not send him to the King’s court.’
‘He stole from me,’ I said, as coldly as I could manage. ‘He admits it. Year after year, he took my property and laughed while he robbed me. What would you have me do? There must be justice in Westbury.’
She broke down into another fit of violent sobbing that seemed to rack her very soul. And like the soft old fool that I am, I was moved by her tears. ‘Come, Sarah,’ I said. ‘This is no good. Go home now and tell Dickon that he must present himself to me tomorrow morning, sober and clean, and remorseful, and we two men will discuss this matter then.’
When the woman had gone, I went over to the big chest where I keep my most precious possessions and rummaging in the deepest recesses I found what I was looking for: an ordinary old sword in a battered leather scabbard. I pulled the blade from the scabbard and gazed down at the grey metal, my own tired face reflected back at me. How many men had I slaughtered with this weapon, I wondered — too many to count, surely. And yet it was an age-old symbol of justice; in the King’s hands it signified the power to kill in the name of the law. I made a cut in the air, just as an experiment, and the blade sliced cleanly through the drifting smoke of the hall; my right arm was unaccustomed to the weight of the sword, and my once-broken wrist gave a twinge, but it felt good in my hand. I cut again, and again, my feet moving smoothly in the old patterns, drummed into me by my old friend Sir Richard at Lea, as I lunged and parried, fencing with an imaginary foe.
‘What in the world do you think you are doing?’ said a sharp voice. It was Marie. ‘Put that thing away before you do yourself a mischief. You’re not twenty years old any more. Nor even twice that!’
For a brief moment, just a heartbeat, the Devil inspired me with a wild urge to strike down my daughter-in-law for those disrespectful words. For a moment, I honestly wanted to turn and hack at her neck and leave her twitching in a pool of blood. I saw myself clearly standing over her corpse, gory blade in hand, my body once again filled with the vigour of battle, the power of youth. And then I regained my senses, God be praised, and I slid the old sword back in its sheath, put it away and sat back down once again by the flickering fire.
Marie came over and draped a thick woollen shawl around my shoulders. ‘It’s cold tonight,’ she said kindly. But I did not deign to reply. I merely took another sip of my warmed ale. There was honey in it.
A bright strip of luminous yellow hovered in front of my eyes; an angel, perhaps, showing me the path to Heaven? Not an angel. And too painful to look at. It took me a very long while to recognise that it was hot sunlight, spilling on to a whitewashed wall. I closed my eyes. When I opened them the yellow strip had moved, and broadened at the base. Gradually I became aware of noises, too: the scurry of sandaled feet on stone; a gentle murmur of conversation; occasionally a cry of pain or the splash of liquid in a bowl. My mouth dry as sun-bleached bone, my tongue rough as a pine log, I closed my eyes again and slept.
This time when I awoke, there was someone leaning over me: dark glossy hair framing a white drawn face with huge sorrowful eyes. The strip of sunlight was now a block of gold on the wall, and I thought: evening. A cool wet cloth was applied to my forehead — it felt wonderful — and a little water was trickled into my mouth. A single word came into my head, a single beautiful, loving syllable: Nur.
She trickled more water between my parched lips, and I swallowed painfully, blinked at her and struggled to sit up, but a small white hand pushed me down with ease.
‘Where am I?’ said a harsh, croaking voice, which hardly I recognised as my own.
‘Shhh, my darling,’ said Nur. ‘Drink, don’t speak. You are in Akka, in the Hospitallers’ quarter, in a dormitory. You have been sick, very sick. But the fever has passed. You are safe now. I am here.’
‘Acre?’ I whispered, and Nur poured a little more water into my mouth. ‘Don’t speak; drink,’ she said. ‘Drink and sleep.’ Her lovely face went away and came back with a clay bowl filled with a bitter liquid. She guided the cool rim to my mouth, supporting my head, which strangely seemed to weight more than a boulder, and I sipped the rank liquid, and with some difficulty swallowed most of it down. The effort exhausted me, and I let my head flop back on to the pillow and dropped into a bottomless hole.
When I awoke again it was grey morning, Nur was gone. I turned my head and looked left and right: I was in a large cool stone chamber, in a bed in a row of similar ones, all but one occupied but sleeping men. At the far end of the row of beds, a large, plain wooden cross was fixed to the wall and below it an old man wearing nothing but a chemise sat upright on his cot; he was skeletally thin and almost totally bald; a mere few whisps of white hair covered his pink scalp. He saw that I was awake and smiled and nodded at me but said nothing. I smiled back and then looked away. My head felt clear: Acre, I thought; in the care of the Knights Hospitaller, a monastic order famed for healing the sick and fighting the paynim in the name of Christ. I was safe.
Shards of memory began to roll and tumble through my head; I remembered Sir Richard Malbete; his feral smirk as he shot me with the crossbow. And I recalled a tossing bunk in the belly of a foul-smelling ship, a great pain in my right arm, and a feeling as if my stomach were on fire; and raving, cursing at Reuben as he tended to my wounds, and trying to strike at him. And I remembered a large tent of white canvas on a windy hilltop, and the cries of wounded and dying men around me mingling with the shrieks of seagulls; and Robin’s eyes, filled with care, staring down at me and saying: ‘Don’t die on me, Alan, that is a direct order.’ And I remembered more pain, and the shame of vomiting and voiding myself uncontrollably — and Nur, always there; my sweet angel caring for me as if I was a baby, and washing my loins and limbs, and trying to feed me, and holding me tight when I thrashed in my fever. And most of all I remembered my beloved weeping for me. And how it made me want to die.
I must have slept again, for when I awoke it was full morning and Little John was standing at the foot of my bed, looking about ten feet tall and as wide as a house, suntanned, bursting with rude health and grinning at me. He was holding up a kite-shaped object; a stout wooden frame around thin, overlapping layers of wooden slats, faced with painted leather, round at the top and tapering to a point at the bottom. It was four and a half feet long, and nearly two foot across at its widest; a familiar image of a black and grey wolf’s head on a white background snarled at me from the front.
‘This,’ said Little John, rapping the object with his knuckles, ‘is a shield. It’s quite old-fashioned, but they built them to last in the old days. You are supposed to carry one of these when you go into battle. How many times do I have to tell you — all your fancy mincing around with sword and poniard is fine in a one-on-one fight, if you like that sort of thing, but in a proper battle you need a shield.’
He began speaking very slowly and loudly to me, as if to a child or an idiot: ‘If you carry a nice big shield, then nasty people won’t find it so easy to shoot you with their nasty crossbows.’ And he thumped the shield down at the foot of my bed. ‘I’ve also brought you another sword, since you seem to have lost yours. God’s greasy armpits, you youngsters, next thing I know, you’ll be fighting stark bollock naked!’
I wanted to laugh, but my stomach was still paining me, so I merely grinned back at him and said: ‘You are one to talk: I’ve seen you rip the shirt from your own back when the battle-fire is burning in you. Anyway, I’m not much good at using a shield… don’t really have your craven skill at hiding from my enemies behind a piece of wood.’
He laughed. ‘Well, that is easily remedied. When you’re on your feet, I will teach you. Somebody has to. It looks like we’ll be here for a few weeks, so you’ll have plenty of time to get strong. But, I swear on Christ’s bones, Alan, if you go into a proper battle again without a shield — I’ll damn well shoot you myself!’ And he turned and stomped out of the dormitory.
The next day, when Nur had fed me some gruel and washed me from head to toe, Robin came to see me. He was holding a bunch of grapes somewhat awkwardly in his hands, and he seemed not to know what to say or what to do with the fruit. Finally he placed them on the small table beside my head, sat down on the bed and said: ‘Reuben says you must eat green fruit. Apparently, it is good for ridding the body of evil humours. Green fruit reduces the amount of bile — or is it phlegm? — it reduces something bad anyway.’
I thanked him for his gift and again there was a slightly uncomfortable pause. I noticed that he looked tired.
‘Well, you seem healthier,’ he said after a while, ‘almost human again, in fact.’ And he smiled, which lifted the lines of worry from his face. I told him that I was feeling much better but terribly weak. ‘Reuben was certain that you would die,’ he said, ‘and I was very worried — worried that I’d have to go to the trouble of finding myself another trouvere.’ He smiled at me again and his silver eyes sparkled with something like their old mischief. ‘Reuben said that mending your wrist was the easy part,’ he continued — and I obligingly flexed my right wrist for him, which was stiff, skinny but mobile and had a fresh purple scar running up the forearm — ‘but the old Jew said the crossbow bolt in the belly would kill you, and when it didn’t, he was convinced that the fever you contracted after that would finish you off. I told Reuben, I told him, that you were made of strong stuff and that I didn’t believe a single raggedy Griffon crossbowman could put you in your grave but…’ he tailed off.
‘It wasn’t a Griffon,’ I said quietly. ‘It was Sir Richard Malbete.’ Robin stared at me for a few moments, his luminous eyes probing mine for the truth.
‘Now that is interesting,’ he said at last. ‘Sir Richard is very much our preux chevalier these days. Since he captured the Emperor’s standard in Cyprus, he has become the golden knight in the King’s eyes; he can do no wrong. So what really happened?’
I told him, and his mouth opened in surprise. ‘That fox-faced shit needs killing, if anybody ever did,’ he muttered when I had finished my tale. ‘But we have a little problem, Alan — nobody is going to believe you if you claim that Sir Richard, the golden knight, that shining example of chivalry, tried to kill you. You’d better keep that to yourself while we work out how to fix the bastard. Don’t go off trying to take him on your own, we’ll do it together. But it’s not going to be easy; he’s with the King a good deal these days, part of his household now…’
I had come to a similar conclusion myself. It would not be simple but, easy or hard, I was also determined to kill Malbete one way or another — for my own personal safety, if for no other reason. Although there were more than enough other reasons to put the Beast down: for Ruth, for the Jews of York, for Nur, and those butchered slave girls in Messina…
We sat in silence for a while. I took a grape; they were delicious: cool, firm and sweet as honey.
‘Robin,’ I said, slightly hesitantly, ‘can you tell me what happened; how we got here, how we took Acre. I don’t even know what month this is.’
He stared at me. ‘Yes, of course, has nobody told you? Well, it’s July; we took Acre a week ago, not without some trouble, but the garrison surrendered in the second week of July, the twelth day of the month, I think.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘I’d better start at the beginning.’ He reached over and tore off a cluster of grapes and popped them in his mouth. When he had finished chewing, he said: ‘We found you, and Ghost, in the dawn after the night battle in the olive grove, and we took you down to the beach where a hospital had been set up. The Emperor took to his heels again in the middle of the battle, which was lucky for us, because if he had rallied his troops they would have crushed us like a man stamping on an ant. But he fled, and we won, and your foxy friend Malbete came out of it looking like a hero, the golden standard in his proud right hand. He presented the standard to the King as a wedding present for his marriage to Berengaria in Limassol, a few days after the battle. He’s a wily bastard, Malbete; it was exactly the right move to make, and the King was delighted.
‘Anyway, we chased the Emperor around the island for a while, but the local barons had turned against him and finally he had to surrender — oh, and you’ll like this,’ he took another grape, ‘the Emperor gave himself up on the strict condition that King Richard would not bind him in iron chains. Richard agreed, and when Isaac Comnenus came in, Richard had silver chains forged and had him bound in those. He’s got a nasty sense of humour, our royal master, very nasty.’ And he laughed with, I believed, just a touch of bitterness.
‘So we had Cyprus, and Richard then set off at last for Outremer, and we ended up here at Acre. The siege was in full swing but going nowhere: the Muslim garrison inside the walls still defied us, and the Christian troops outside were themselves surrounded by Saladin’s forces. Of course, King Richard’s arrival changed all that. He started building siege engines immediately, great monsters that can knock holes in stone walls, you should see them, Alan, much more formidable than a mangonel. Anyway, we smashed a few holes in the walls, but every time we tried to make an assault, Saladin would attack us from behind. Eventually, after a lot of bloody fighting on two fronts, and when the holes in the walls were big enough, the garrison surrendered — first having received their master’s permission, of course. And, as part of the deal, Saladin withdrew as well. We’ve been lucky, though; I managed to keep our men out of the worst of the fighting…’ He gave a sour smile. ‘That is to say we were not invited to join in the bloodiest assaults.’
There was a tiny pause. I knew what a great dishonour this simple statement meant. He straightened his shoulders and looked me in the eye. ‘The truth is, Alan, I’m not in favour at court, for one reason or another. I believe the King has taken against me and that some members of his circle are whispering against me… spreading rumours about my family… If I knew who it was I’d slaughter the mealy-mouthed sons of whores. But I don’t.’ He looked at his boots for a few moments, and then pulled himself together. ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘On the bright side, we haven’t lost too many men, and you are clearly on the mend. But I’m not sure I shall be staying in Outremer all that long, the way things are going. I have a few matters that I need to arrange, and then I may well go home and look to my affairs there.’
I couldn’t meet his eye. I knew what these rumours were suggesting. That Marie-Anne had made him a cuckold, and that baby Hugh was not his son.
‘We may all have to go home soon. I think the whole expedition may be coming apart at the seams,’ he continued. ‘Our gallant King Richard seems to have managed to quarrel with everybody here. King Philip, well, you know how things are between them, and they’ve got worse. Philip feels that Richard stole his thunder by taking Acre when he couldn’t manage it alone. So that’s an irritant. But did you know that there are now two men claiming to be the rightful King of Jerusalem? Guy de Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat — neither has a very good claim, as it happens, only through their women, and as Jerusalem is in Saladin’s hands you might think the point moot. But no, it’s the cause of another royal quarrel: Philip has declared his support of Conrad of Monferrat, and Richard has taken the side of Guy de Lusignan. So there’s more bad blood between them. The word is that Philip is thinking of going back to France anyway. He’ll blame his departure on Richard but he just wants to go back so he can snatch some land in Flanders.’
I must have looked puzzled, for Robin went on. ‘I beg your pardon, I was forgetting that you wouldn’t know. The Count of Flanders died during the siege here, and now that he’s dead, Philip has designs on his land, which is directly to the north of his own territory. He’d no doubt like to have a crack at some of Richard’s holdings in Normandy, too.’
Robin paused for breath. ‘I haven’t told you the worst,’ he said. ‘As well as quarrelling with Philip and the French, King Richard has alienated the German contingent, too. Have you heard about the fuss over the flags? No? Well, it’s just another piece of arrogant stupidity. When we took Acre, Richard and Philip naturally hung their banners over the city, but the Germans, who fought under Leopold, Duke of Austria, felt that they deserved to have their banner up there too, and they had every right to, in my opinion — they had been fighting and dying here long before Richard arrived. So they hung up Leopold’s banner next to Richard’s. And Richard was furious — have you ever seen him lose his temper? It’s quite a sight. He went storming up to the battlements and personally kicked the Duke’s banner off the wall and into the ditch below. He said that, as Philip and he were kings, and was Leopold a mere duke, he had no right to fly his flag beside them as if they were equals. Now Leopold is furious with Richard and he, too, is threatening to go home. In a month there will be no Christian army left, at this rate.’
I was shocked: it seemed that the Great Pilgrimage, for which we had all travelled so far and suffered so much, was falling apart because of petty rivalries, jealousies and stupid quarrels. We had only just arrived in the Holy Land, and taken only one castle — I had yet to face a single Saracen warrior — and we might soon all be packing up and going back to England.
‘What other news? Have there been any more attempts on your life?’ I asked him, mainly to change the subject. He looked at me keenly. ‘As a matter of fact, yes, I believe so,’ he said. ‘It’s something I wanted to talk to you about. I was walking the perimeter of the city with Owain and some of the men — it was about noon, and sweltering hot, the day after we had taken the place — when an avalanche of rocks began above me: I was wiping the sweat from my eyes and looking up at the sun, or I wouldn’t have seen it: first a shower of rocks then a great boulder the size of a full-grown cow came crashing down. I just managed to jump aside in time. Gave me a shock, I can tell you. A lot of the masonry is loose from the battering we gave the place before we took it, and workmen are doing their best to patch it up, but I thought I saw somebody up there a few moments before the rocks began to fall. It could have been an accident, I suppose. But I don’t think so. I really don’t think so.’
‘I was hoping we had left all that behind in Messina,’ I said. And he nodded agreement.
‘But I think I know who it might be,’ I went on.
He looked at me, surprised. But remained silent for a few moments. ‘Well then,’ he said, slightly crossly, ‘who is it?’
‘I’m not certain; and I don’t want to give you a name in case I am wrong,’ I said. ‘It could cause no end of trouble and bad feeling.’ Actually, I was worried that Robin might quietly murder the person I had in mind, just as a precaution, and I was not yet fully convinced of his guilt. I did not want any more innocent blood on my conscience.
‘Let me make a few enquiries,’ I said, ‘and when I’m sure of my man, I’ll tell you his name.’
‘Very well,’ said Robin, trying hard to be light-hearted. ‘Play it close if you wish, but if I get murdered because you didn’t tell me, my spirit will haunt you till your dying day!’ Then he smiled at me and I felt a rush of affection for him. He had a lot resting on his head at that time: a murderer with the face of friend, huge debts unpaid at home and here, a wife who was making him look ridiculous in the eyes of his peers, and a royal master who, on the basis of slanderous lies, had banished him from his inner circle. I wanted to say something comforting to him but I could not find the words. He looked down at his interlinked hands for a moment. ‘You know, my friend,’ he said. ‘I sometimes wish I wasn’t an Earl, or the commander of an army, or a holy pilgrim on a sacred mission; I sometimes wish I was just a common outlaw again. If a man maligned me, I killed him; if I wanted something, I took it. Things were somehow simpler… and better.’ And with those words, he left.
Two days later I was able to get out of bed and take some sun for an hour in the stone-flagged courtyard of the Hospitallers quarter. I had several more visitors to my bed before then, apart from Nur who spent hours of each day with me: my loyal servant William, who actually burst into tears of happiness when he saw me upright and getting stronger; Reuben who made me piss into a jar before smelling and tasting the urine to determine what I could have told him myself: that I was better — and Will Scarlet.
My boyhood companion looked fit and strong — and happy, and the cause of his happiness was standing beside him in a shapeless green dress, with her white hair as fluffy as a lamb’s. It was Elise, the strange Norman woman who claimed to be able to see the future. They were now married.
There was more than fifteen years in age difference between them, and she was half a foot taller, but despite that, I could see that they were well suited to each other and clearly in love. She fussed over him like a mother hen, it is true, but she seemed to have brought out from his soul some latent strength. His eyes were clear and he held my gaze steadily as he told me their good news.
‘Elise predicted that we would be married one day,’ he said. ‘She told me on the day that I was whipped in France. And she was right, of course. But I didn’t know that I loved her until Messina. At first I told myself it was wrong; that the Devil was tempting me with lustful thoughts about her’ — I resisted the urge to smile; there was nothing lust-making about the skinny middle-aged woman before me that I could see — ‘but then Father Simon told me that if I took her hand in holy matrimony, our union would be blessed by God. And so we were wed by him a week ago.’
I congratulated him heartily; and indeed I was pleased for both of them. My love for Nur made me want all mankind to have the same happiness. ‘Of course, we want to have babies as soon as possible,’ he said. I looked at her white hair, and the wrinkles around her eyes, and murmured, ‘Of course,’ but he surprised me by continuing ‘so that God can bless our union in this Holy Land, and show us a sign of His divine approval of our match.’
It was clear that Will had not become any less religious since he set foot in the land that had given nurture to Our Lord Jesus Christ.
I kissed Elise, too, and just as she and Will were leaving she said: ‘I know that you don’t believe in my prophecies, Alan, but I was right about you, wasn’t I? You were not destined to die here in this place; as I told you, you will die in bed, at home, an old man.’ And then she did a strange thing; she bent down and picked up the old-fashioned wolf’s head shield that Little John had left at the bottom of the bed. ‘But carry this with you at all times; it will save your life,’ she said solemnly, then she took Will’s hand and they both left. I was struck by the fact that she should echo Little John’s advice about the shield, and I vowed that I would learn to use it, and carry it with me whenever I next went into battle.
As the days passed, I grew stronger. Robin had disappeared and when I asked after my master with Owain and Sir James de Brus, neither seemed to know where he had gone. Reuben seemed to have vanished, too. When I questioned Little John, he rather curtly told me to stop worrying, and to stop asking questions; my master’s business was his own. But the big man was as good as his word about the shield lessons and came each morning to give me instruction. In truth, it was not difficult, although my tender stomach muscles gave me some trouble to begin with — I now had a short, ugly purple scar to the right of my belly button, where the barber-surgeons had cut out Malbete’s quarrel. Wounded belly or no, Little John soon had me skipping about the sunlit courtyard of the Hospitallers’ quarter, John striking at me with a yard-long wooden baton, and myself using only the shield to block his powerful blows: high, low, and the tricky ones that aim to come around the edge. At first I was quickly exhausted by the exercise, and even though we practiced in the early morning, the heat soon became unbearable. But as I grew stronger, I was able to enjoy the practice sessions with my huge friend, and endure the discomfort for longer. When John saw that I had mastered the basic moves, he progressed to teaching me more sophisticated manoeuvres with the shield: strikes on an opponent with the flat and edge, and how to use the shield to distract your enemy so that he reacted slowly to your sword blow.
One day when we were practicing, I heard a voice call: ‘Move your feet, Alan, don’t forget to move your feet,’ and turned to see a tall man in a white cloak with a red cross on the breast, long sword at his side, and a wonderfully familiar face grinning at me from behind a huge black beard. It was my old friend Sir Richard at Lea, a Poor Fellow-Soldier of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, and one of the main reasons Robin had embarked on this Great Pilgrimage.
He and a hundred of his fellow Templar knights, perhaps the finest fighting men in Christendom, had come to our rescue in England at the battle of Linden Lea two years ago but only on condition that Robin brought his men to fight in the Holy Land. And here we were, and here he was.
I was tremendously pleased to see him, and clasped his right arm with enthusiasm, only wincing slightly as his powerful grip tightened on my recently mended wrist. He greeted Little John warmly and asked after Robin and Tuck, and then he turned and lifted his hand towards a man who had been standing beside him quietly smiling at our reunion: ‘May I introduce Sir Nicholas de Scras, a good Christian and a fine knight, but one who had the great misfortune to join the wrong order: he’s a Hospitaller, may God forgive him.’
‘Please pardon my friend,’ said Sir Nicholas, clasping my arm in greeting, although a good deal more gently that Sir Richard had done, ‘like many Templars, he has the great misfortune to think that he is amusing.’
While the Hospitaller politely greeted Little John, I studied him with interest: he was a man of medium height, iron-grey hair cropped short, slim, fit-looking with muddy green eyes and dressed in the black robe with the white cross of the Hospitallers. He looked a little too mild mannered to be a warrior, and I wondered if he eschewed battle and preferred to practice the gentler arts that this order of healing knights were famous for. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As I watched him, he picked up the shield that I had dropped and examined it closely, testing the strength of the layers of wooden slats with his thumb. ‘A strange device,’ he said, at last, turning the snarling wolf’s head towards me. ‘Am I right in thinking that you serve the Earl of Locksley?’
I nodded, and he continued: ‘And I understand his master of arms is showing you the finer points of combat with a shield?’ I nodded again. ‘Will you permit me to try a turn or two with your formidable friend? I might be able to show you something useful.’ I merely made a wide sweeping gesture with my arm that suggested that he was free to do as he liked in this quarter of Acre, owned as it was by his Order. And Sir Richard and I retired to a stone bench that surrounded the courtyard and sat down to watch the bout.
John looked a little uncertain to be facing an opponent who seemed so calm and yet who was so much smaller and lighter than him. ‘Don’t worry, Sir Richard, I promise to go easy on him,’ he yelled jovially over to us on the bench. But, despite his customary bravado, I think he sensed he was facing a master warrior.
‘Do your worst, John, he deserves a good thrashing,’ shouted Sir Richard cheerily, and he sat back on the warm stone to watch the fun. Sir Nicholas merely smiled at John, bowed his head, and they began. The two fighters circled for a few moments, and then John attacked, a heavy cut with his sword at Sir Nicholas’s shoulder. The Hospitaller merely shrugged it aside with a flip of his shield and immediately counterattacked with a series of lightning lunges to Little John’s face. The big man was forced back, back, ten feet, then twenty, back until he was almost against the stone bench on the other side of the courtyard; and then with the hollows of his knees against the warm yellow stone, he finally roused himself and, snarling at the smaller man, began to batter him with huge cuts at his head and upper body from the left and right in turn. Sir Nicholas blocked and blocked, again and again, using only his shield, gradually allowing himself to be forced back into the centre of the courtyard but continually holding his sword poised, his right elbow back, the snake-fast lunge always a potential threat. It seemed he was waiting for John to open up his body for the strike, but how Sir Nicholas survived that mighty battering from Little John without using his sword to protect himself I do not know — however, wherever John’s sword struck, there was the shield to deflect the massive blow. He did not use the wooden frame full on, to soak up the power of the sword, instead, Sir Nicholas used the curved outer surface to slide the blows away from his body, and waste John’s great strength on the air. And then the knight did something extraordinary: instead of blocking, he ducked a massive swing from Little John, which put the big man off balance, turned sideways, stepped under John’s sweeping blade and with the shield tilted the wrong way around — its rounded top down towards his own face, the narrow bottom end pointing upwards away from his body — he jabbed up with his elbow and slammed the tapered point up and hard into the side of Little John’s head, and immediately dropped the big man in a sprawling heap on the floor. He didn’t even look at John, but turned his head and stared at directly at me: ‘Did you see that, Alan?’ I gawped at him. He demonstrated the move once more, this time striking at empty air with the tapered point of the shield. Then the knight sheathed his sword, took off the shield, and went to kneel beside the giant on the floor. He wasn’t even out of breath. Little John had dropped his sword and, seated on his broad bottom on the stone floor, was swaying slightly and panting heavily. He had a dazed look in his eyes, and his mouth hung open in surprise.
I was no less stunned. I had never seen Little John beaten in a fight, and so quickly; it was almost unthinkable, and yet this slight man who only came up to Little John’s breast had dropped him in the dust with what seemed the greatest of ease. Sir Nicholas, kneeling beside his victim, examined Little John’s head, and called over his shoulder: ‘Richard, be a good fellow and get one of the servants to bring me a cloth and some water,’ and then he gently lifted Little John’s right eyelid, tilted his head back to catch the sunlight, and began to look deeply into his eye.
Sir Richard at Lea and I retired to the Hospitallers’ refectory and ordered a dish of roast fish, stewed peas, bread and wine from one of the brother-sergeants, and while we refreshed ourselves, I asked my friend what he had been doing in the past few weeks since the city had fallen.
‘The Grand Master has decided that we will make this place our headquarters until Jerusalem can be recaptured,’ he said. ‘So I have been busy arranging our new quarters. But the thing that takes up most of my time is dealing with the damned traders; I tell you, Alan, I’ve never met such a gaggle of greasy scoundrels in all my life. They’re a cowardly lot, always bleating about bandits attacking their camel trains and demanding protection from our busy knights. But then, damned nuisance that it is, protecting pilgrims and travellers from the human predators who roam the desert is one of our sacred duties here in the Holy Land.’ And he frowned and helped himself to another large piece of fish.
I knew that the Templars, though primarily a religious and military order, had branched out into trade; with their outposts, known as commanderies, all over Christendom, their own huge fleet, and connections up to the highest level, it was natural that they should expand the practice of shipping food and weapons to their own far-flung outposts to include goods that could be sold for a profit. They had even developed a clever system whereby money could be deposited by a merchant in one commanderie in, say, France, where the traveller was given a piece of parchment as a receipt, and on presentation of the parchment at another Templar commanderie hundreds perhaps even thousands of miles away, he was returned the same amount of money, less a small fee. It made travelling, always a dangerous business for merchants, much safer. The other great advantage the Templars enjoyed was an exemption from all taxes, by order of the Pope. It was often claimed that the Templars, despite their individual vows of poverty, now possessed wealth beyond the wildest dreams of kings and emperors.
‘And Saladin hasn’t gone away,’ Sir Richard continued. ‘He might have lost Acre, but he’s still out there in the hills with more than twenty thousand men. He’s waiting for us to leave the city, then he’ll swoop and we’ll have a proper battle, a proper bloody battle, by God. And we need to be ready for that — so when I’m not nurse-maiding merchants, I’m training the new men to fight.’
‘When will we leave here?’ I asked. I was anxious to see Jerusalem, the Holy City, and pray for the forgiveness of my sins at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the most sacred site of Jesus’s tomb.
‘That depends on our royal masters: King Richard is keen to press on south to Jerusalem but Philip is talking openly of going home to France; he claims he is not well, that this damned heat is killing him. The good news is that he and Richard have managed to decide between them who is the rightful King of Jerusalem: they have decreed that it is Guy de Lusignan, but — and this is a nice compromise, Alan — he’s only to be king for his lifetime, after his death Conrad of Montferrat or his heirs will succeed him. At least they’ve managed to agree that without more quarrelling.’
At that moment, I saw Nicholas de Scras approaching our table with William in tow. ‘I found this young fellow wandering around the hospital, looking for you,’ said Sir Nicholas with a smile. He seated himself on a bench at the table and helped himself to a piece of fish.
‘Sir, the Earl of Locksley has returned and asks that you to attend him, if your health permits, at your earliest convenience,’ said William. The presence of these two imposing knights had made my servant adopt a more formal manner than usual. I pushed myself to my feet, stuffed a last crust in my mouth and made to leave.
‘Do not exert yourself too much, Alan,’ said Sir Nicholas. ‘The brother-physicians at the hospital say that they are very pleased with your recovery, but you are to take as much rest as possible, d’you hear me?’ I nodded, waved farewell and hurried away to attend my errant lord.