As noon approached, Reuben led us off the coastal track and on to a path that led into the foothills. My head was splitting, but we were all suffering in the tremendous heat by that point, the sun beating down on our heads like the open door of a furnace. We all wore thin leather gloves, even in the heat, because to touch a piece of metal that had been so many hours in the sun was to receive a painful bum. Finally we turned off the track on to an even smaller path, fit for no more than goats, and steadily rising. We travelled in single file, and in silence, at Robin’s order, heads down, enduring the heat, our universe restricted to the dusty haunches of the horse in front; the only sound the clop-clopping of hoof on stony outcrop, blindly trusting that Reuben would lead us right.
Finally we stopped, long past noon, in a grove of cedar trees, which miraculously contained a small trickling spring. I watered Ghost and tied him to a bush, stripped off my mail hauberk, felt under-tunic and sodden chemise and sponged my body with deliciously cold spring water. I seemed to have no strength at all; my head was pounding, my body felt alternately hot and then very cold. I began to shiver even in the heat of the day. I tried to eat a little, but could not force anything down. Many of the men curled up in the shade of the trees. But I resisted an almost overwhelming the urge to sleep.
Little John was idly sharpening his great war axe beside the spring and I sat myself down next to him, hoping to distract myself from my discomforts, and said: ‘John, what are we really doing here?’
‘We are following orders like the loyal soldiers we are,’ he said, and carried on working the whetstone smoothly along the round edges of his weapon in rhythmic sweeps.
‘Seriously, John, please tell me. What are we doing here? What is going to happen?’
‘You don’t look well, lad. Are you ailing?’
‘I’m all right,’ I lied. ‘Tell me what is going to happen.’
He sighed. ‘God’s greasy bollocks. Don’t get all high and mighty, Alan. What we are doing is just the same as what we always used to do in the old days in Sherwood. We are going to stop a train of fat merchants, and relieve them of their wealth. See those scouts up there on the ridge?’ I looked over to the slight rise to the east of us; I could make out two human forms lying flat against the dun-coloured earth just below the crest. ‘I see them,’ I said.
‘They are watching for the camel train,’ said John. ‘When it comes, we are going to go up that crest, shoot the train full of arrows, charge down the other side and kill everybody who resists us. In short, we’re going to ambush them. We are going to take their goods — and teach them a lesson.’ He grinned at me, his old reckless battle-mad grin. ‘It’s what Robin wants; and as his loyal men we are going to carry out his commands. Some people might call it banditry, some might call it highway robbery. I call it a rewarding day’s work! Any road, Alan, you cannot speak of this to anyone, ever. Do you understand?’
I stared at him. I knew all the rules of being in Robin’s familia; and silence was one of the first. I was about to say something about Christ’s teachings, right and wrong, good and evil, but suddenly the world seemed to spin, my eyes fluttered, I felt myself falling, falling and everything went dark.
When I came to, I found I was wrapped up like a baby in my cloak and set under a broad cedar tree. Clearly the fever had returned and I found I hardly had the strength to move. I vomited once, copiously, and felt if anything slightly worse. Then I slept again. When I awoke, the sun was hanging low over the sea to the west and I could just make out a faint dust cloud to the south.
A signal was passed to the men and, as silently as they could, the archers strung their bows, and the cavalry mounted their beasts, and they moved into their positions on this side of the crest. Robin insisted that every man wear his black silk kerchief over his face. I had slept for perhaps two hours in the afternoon heat, and while I was not expected to fight because of my sickness, I wanted to see the battle. So I forced myself to my unsteady feet and slowly climbed up the side of the ridge on leaden legs until I was a yard or two from the top. My head was spinning, and my stomach lurching, but I made it, and cast myself down on the hot sand and rock.
Lying down flat just below the crest, I could see the camel train approaching through a haze of dust and heat. There were about forty beasts, ambling along with their peculiar swaying gait; each burdened with two great bundles, tied either side of their humps, and with a man sitting well forward on almost on the camel’s neck, driving the animal along with a long stick. The camels were tied nose to tail to the animal in front and beside this long train of beasts of burden rode a single file of cavalry. They were perhaps twenty men, mounted on destriers, big, well-schooled warhorses, the men heavily armed with lance and shield — and wearing, I noticed with a splash of shock, white surcoats with a red cross. They were a detachment of Templar knights. We were going into battle against our friends and allies, the humble knights of Christ, whose solemn duty it was to protect travellers and merchants on the dangerous roads of the Holy Land. I felt a wave of nauseous disorientation that was not entirely due to my fever: I was on the wrong side. These riders were holy knights, doing God’s work protecting the weak. My friends and companions were thieves who meant to murder innocent men and steal their goods. My vision blurred, blackened, and I had to drop my head into my arms for few moments to regain my senses.
When I looked up, the camel train was now a mere fifty paces away. Should I warn them? The Templar knights were riding into a trap. But what of my loyalty to Robin and my friends? Before I could come to a decision, the choice was taken from me. To my far left, I heard Robin shout: ‘Up!’ and twenty bowmen sprang out of the earth on the ridge; pulled arrows from their arrow bags on their hips and nocked them to their bows. ‘Stand fast…’ shouted Robin. ‘Aim at the horsemen, we only want the horsemen… And loose!’
There was a noise like a passing flight of birds and the first wave of arrows smashed into the column of Templar knights like a mighty wind rattling a stand of dry reeds: the yard-long ash shafts clattering shields and armour, some of the steel bodkin heads lancing deep into mail-clad torso and thigh, puncturing bellies and lungs. There were yells of pain and gouts of blood; horses hit by accident screamed and cavorted on their hind legs. The camel train, panicking, began to run madly, blindly ahead; coming closer to our position. ‘Fast… and loose,’ shouted Robin and once again the grey shafts sliced into the white surcoats of the horsemen below us, punching into flesh. Half a dozen saddles were now empty, but these knights were some of the best-trained fighting men in Christendom. There were shouts of command and some sort of order was quickly forged from the chaos of bucking horses and cursing, blood-splattered men. The knights massed in a single line facing the bowmen silhouetted on the ridge and, shields high, lances levelled, they began to gallop towards us — only to be met by another devastating flight of arrows, which emptied another handful of saddles.
By now there were barely ten Templars still in command of their mounts as they came charging towards our ridge in a ragged line, the hooves of the destriers shaking the earth; but the bowmen stood their ground, shooting independently now, but fast and deadly accurate. I saw the leading knight knocked back by an arrow that sunk up to the flight into the centre of his chest, and another man go down in a slithering rush of half a ton of dead meat as his horse was hit in the throat by three arrows one after the other. A third man was pinned through the thigh to his saddle, and then as his horse turned I saw him pinned again through the other thigh in exactly the same place. And then our own cavalry attacked.
Coming from around the side of the ridge, twenty hard horsemen, twelve-foot lances couched, smashed in to the side of the ragged, arrow-thinned ranks of the Templar knights. It was the classic cavalry manoeuvre, known as a la traverse. And it ripped the knights apart. The long spears punched through hauberks, the needle points slicing into the flesh beneath; and the Templars died, skewered like spitted hares or cut down by the swinging swords of our cavalrymen, as they came round again for a second charge, hacking and snarling at the arrow-stuck knights. One Templar, gore-splashed, his lance gone, sword in his hand, had avoided death on the spearheads of our cavalry and was still charging the line of bowmen on the ridge. He got within twenty feet before a handful of arrows smashed into his chest and stomach simultaneously and tore him, still screaming defiance, from this sinful world.
With tears in my eyes, and a lump of shame in my throat, I saw those brave men die. I managed to get to my feet, I don’t know why, there was nothing I could do, but I began to move towards my master. As I approached, I heard Robin issuing orders for our horsemen to get after the camel train and stop it before it galloped into the sea, and then I was raving at Robin shouting ‘Murderer, murderer,’ the tears spilling down my cheeks. ‘You killed them, you fucking killed them all!’
‘Not now, Alan,’ said Robin coolly. ‘Not now. You are sick, mad with fever, and this is not the time for your childish ranting.’ And he walked down the other side of the slope with a score of jubilant bowmen following in his wake. I sank to my knees; weighed down with shame and anger — and guilt. How had it come to this? I had wanted to come the Holy Land to do good, to do God’s work; and now I knew I was part of something monstrous and venal, something truly wicked.
I don’t know how long I knelt on that ridge, thinking of those noble knights, murdered in a few short moments for one ruthless man’s profit — and I believe I may have passed into unconsciousness for a while — but by the time I had roused myself and managed to totter down the ridge to join our men, the camel train had been stopped and brought back under our control, and Reuben was explaining in Arabic to the drivers that if they agreed to behave themselves and drive the camel train and its precious cargo to a new destination, a small village by the sea called Haifa, where the precious cargo would be loaded on to a ship, they would be rewarded and set free with their camels to return southward. If not… he made a short gesture, the flat of his hand moving across his throat in a cutting motion. It did not take them long to decide to agree.
I was wrong when I accused Robin of killing all the knights. Not all were dead. Three Templars had survived the battle: wounded, bloody, they were now on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs, helmets off, an armed man standing tall behind each of them. But they showed no fear — their eyes seemed to be lit with an inner fire, a certainty about this life and the next; staring proudly, defiantly at their masked captors. One of the knights, I noticed with an awful lurch in my chest, was my old friend Sir Richard at Lea.
‘Our ransoms, sir, will be promptly paid by the Grand Master, who is now at Acre…’ Sir Richard was saying to Robin, as I wobbled unsteadily towards them. The sun was sinking into the blue-grey waters of the Mediterranean, casting long, grotesque shadows in front of the kneeling knights. ‘There will be no ransom,’ said Robin heavily, his voice was muffled by the silk kerchief and yet I saw, at once, that Sir Richard recognised it.
‘Is that you, Robin of Sherwood, masked like a coward? If it is so, let me see your face,’ said Sir Richard, trying to struggle to his feet. He was pushed back down by a heavy hand; Little John was standing directly behind him. He turned his head and looked up at the huge, blond masked man looming behind him; but there was no mistaking him from his size, ‘and I know you are John Nailor, and there,’ he jerked a chin at me, and I stopped in my tracks, ‘that is young Alan Dale!’ Sir Richard’s handsome face contorted with fury. ‘Why do you attack us? Why have you killed my men? We are not your enemies, do we not all share in the same mission here in this Holy Land?’ He suddenly stopped speaking as Robin pulled down the silk mask; and my master’s drawn, tired-looking face was clearly visible in the dying light of the day. He spoke coldly to Sir Richard. ‘There; now you see me; may it give you a final satisfaction,’ he said. ‘We will talk like men, face to face. And I will tell you the truth. I never shared your passion for recovering Jerusalem, I have no quarrel with Saladin nor any Saracen; I would not be here at all were it not for you.’ He pointed an accusing finger directly at Sir Richard. ‘I am here not from my own free will but because you forced me to swear an oath to accompany the King to this God-ridden land.’
Robin’s men, seeing that their master had bared his face, also pulled down their masks. ‘I care not a jot who holds Jerusalem — Saracen, Jew or Christian,’ Robin continued, ‘but because of you and your meddling with my life — and the King’s failure to keep his promises of payment — I am now in debt to half the moneylenders of Europe and the Levant. I must have money, and you,’ Robin paused, shrugged and then said quietly, ‘you stand in my way. That’s all.’
Sir Richard stared at my master. ‘That’s all? You have killed twenty good men; decent, noble knights for the sake of a little money. And you say: that’s all? God will surely punish you for the foul deeds you did today,’ he said thickly. ‘I leave you to your conscience and God’s judgment.’ And then I saw him begin to pray, muttering the familiar words: Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum… under his breath.
‘You’ve seen my face, Sir Richard; I cannot let you live. Go to your God, I truly hope he receives you with open arms. John…’ And he nodded at Little John, who I saw with horror had a long unsheathed knife in his hand.
Those next few moments are graven on my mind, and will be for all eternity. The blade in John’s hand gleamed as it caught a last sunbeam, then his hand slashed quickly from left to right, abruptly cutting off Sir Richard’s mumbled prayers. And I seemed to be frozen, a stone statue. I saw Sir Richard fall, in that awful twilight, his hot blood spilling thickly down his neck into the pure white surcoat, and then pooling on the desert sand. And suddenly I was released. I screamed ‘No!’ and hurled myself towards John, too late, but determined to make my protest. I was screaming incoherently at John, and then I turned, appalled, as the other two knights died also before my eyes, and I turned again and began to shout and swear at Robin like a lunatic; weeping and wailing and shaking my fists and cursing him to the sky as a murderous villain, a man of no honour, a God-damned cur.
Through my spittle-flecked raving, I heard Robin look past me and say calmly: ‘Shut him up, John, will you,’ and something heavy smashed into the back of my skull and I knew no more.
I awoke once again in the sunlit dormitory of the Hospitallers’ quarter. But this time there was no Nur, no smooth white hand on my fevered brow, no cool drink of water served by a dark-haired angel. Instead there was William, looking plain and worried, and holding out a cracked earthenware beaker of ale.
I cautiously felt my head; there was a large knot at the back the size of a hen’s egg, and an ache like a bar of red-hot iron behind my eyes. My friends had at least carried me back to Acre, it seemed. My body was covered in sweat, and I was freezing cold. I took the beaker of ale, and swallowed it down in one draft. Then I pulled the rough blankets around me and tried to control my shivering.
‘Where is Nur?’ I asked my anxious-looking servant.
‘Oh sir,’ he said. ‘Oh s-s-sir, I do not know. I have not seen her for three da-da-days, since you rode out with Robin on the exercise. She is not in the women’s qu-qu-quarters; Elise has not seen her either. We think she may have run away, gone ho-home to her village.’
‘I have been here three days? And Nur has been gone that long?’ My head was spinning with this news; I could not believe that she would leave me without saying anything. A hideous fear began to creep into my head.
‘Yes, sir. You have been ra-raving something awful sir, about blood and sin and Go-God’s judgment. Saying terrible things, sir, about the Ea-Earl.’
Even through the fever, and the accursed headache, I could feel a rising tide of panic, filling my soul with mortal terror for Nur’s life. And the name of my terror was Sir Richard Malbete. I tried to suppress the fear that the Beast had laid his foul hands on her, but I could not.
‘Where is everybody else?’ I asked, for I had noticed that the dormitory was almost empty. There were no Hospitaller brother-knights about either. The place was almost deserted.
‘Everyone has gone to se-see the ex-executions,’ said William.
‘The executions?’
‘Saladin has failed to hand over the ransom and the Tr-True Cross, and so King Ri-Richard has ordered that all the Saracen prisoners be ex-executed.’
‘All of them?’ I said incredulously. ‘But there are hundreds, thousands of them. He can’t kill them all.’
‘Sir Richard Malbete has taken on that du-duty, sir,’ said William, with a perfectly straight face. ‘They will be ex-executed outside the city walls in fu-full view of the everybody, today, sir, at no-noon.’
‘You’d better help me to get dressed, William.’
The battlements of Acre were packed with folk and it was only by way of a good deal of squeezing, jostling and shoving that William and myself found a place to the north of the main gate where we could see what was happening below. On a wide area of sandy plain, beyond the trenches that had been dug during the siege of Acre, were row upon row of Muslim prisoners, each bound tightly and forced to kneel with their heads extended. I found out later from my friend Ambroise — who was writing an account for the scene for his History of the Holy War, and who liked to give exact numbers, even if I sometimes suspected that he made them up — that there were two thousand seven hundred prisoners on that plain of death. And they were all to die. The condemned prisoners — men, women and even children — were making a hideous noise, wailing, moaning and chanting the name of their false God, and were hemmed in on three sides by the ranks of our army, so there could be no hope of escape. Far to the south I could see Robin’s bowmen in their distinctive green cloaks, and behind them row upon row of our cavalry. I could even make out Robin sitting perfectly still on a horse in front of the first line of archers, only twenty feet from the nearest prisoners. There were occasional jeers, catcalls from the troops in our army, and I could see that a few were making wagers amongst themselves, but most stood and watched the slaughter like yokels watching a cattle sale at a country fair.
Malbete’s men had already begun their grisly task, and they worked in twos: six pairs of men-at-arms, each pair taking a row of prisoners. The first man-at-arms would strip any headgear or any scarves or turbans from the prisoner, then clear the way for the sword blow and then he would hold the victim steady by his hair while the second man-at-arms hacked at his neck until the head was free. It was slow, bloody work and the scarlet and sky blue surcoats of the soldiers soon became a sopping uniform scarlet. Sometimes it took as many as four blows to cut the head from the body, and many a victim lived for many moments after the first slicing blade had chopped into his neck. Of course, the easiest to kill were the children, who were quite often dispatched with a single blow. One pair of executioners was particularly inept, regularly chopping at the neck and missing completely, whacking into backbone or sliding off skull to the laughter of the crowd. Malbete oversaw the whole operation, occasionally striding up to a pair of his men who were making a meal of a victim, his boots sloshing in the puddles of gore, pushing the men-at-arms roughly out of the way and hacking through the wretch’s neck with his own long sword to finish the job.
From our vantage point high on the battlements, William and I could see the whole gruesome display clearly; but the people seemed like dolls, and the whole thing a piece of macabre theatre. As I watched, a pair of blood-splashed men finished a row of two hundred victims; they cleaned the red filth from their swords with glistening hands, and calmly began on the first victim in a new row. Hack, hack, a great spurt of gore and the victim falling headless on to his side, neck still pumping blood, the head rolling a little way away, casually stopped by a man-at-arms’s boot.
‘What has happened to the world?’ I said silently to myself. ‘Have men all run mad? Why does God not stop this? Why do we all not stop this? Am I trapped in some hideous nightmare in a world without mercy, a Godless universe of indiscriminate blood and death?’ And yet even while I thought this, a worse idea was crawling out of its slimy pit deep in my skull. ‘You feel nothing,’ said the dark maggot’s voice in my head. ‘You see true horror, appalling brutality, blood being shed on a massive scale — hundreds of men, children even, slaughtered in front of your eyes — and you feel not a thing. Are you still human? Have you lost the power to feel anything?’
My head was swimming, and I closed my eyes; images of slaughter were whirling in my brain: Sir Richard at Lea’s body falling to the rocky ground, his blood flowing black as tar; the severed heads littering the sand like discarded rotten cabbages in the plain before me; the chop of a blade, a curse, and a gust of laughter from the crowd, as the men-at-arms missed his mark. The world spun, turning like a child’s toy; I could feel my body beginning to sag, my legs turning to water.
‘William,’ I whispered. ‘I think I need to go back the dormitory.’
My fever returned that night with all the ferocity of a rabid wolf. And with it came the dead. My dead — the ghosts of all the men whose lives I had taken, all the men I had seen die; and they were many. I screamed in my sleep as images too terrible to bear came crowding into my racked brain. I saw the first man I had ever killed, in a long-ago skirmish in Sherwood Forest, his young face grinning at me, his neck bleeding from my sword cut. He was cutting the throat of my mother while Sir Richard at Lea looked on, totally unconcerned, saying: ‘She had to die, Alan, she stood in my way.’ I saw Little John once again take up his great axe and cut the limbs from a brigand strapped to a woodland floor, and Robin, laughing, pushed over a Saracen prisoner with his foot, howling with demonic glee as the head fell off and rolled away leaving a trail of red in the sand.
I lost the ability to tell if I were awake or asleep: dead men came to my bedside in the dormitory that long night and spoke to me, and I raved and screamed at them, begging them leave me be. Malbete came up to me as I lay there with two severed children’s heads, one in each hand like monstrous bloody oranges, and told me I must eat them: ‘Fruit will cleanse the evil humours from your body,’ he said, but in Reuben’s voice. Then he laughed his deep mocking cackle.
There was a figure in the room; small, dark, dressed head to toe in black cloth, its face totally covered with a black veil. The figure came towards me, holding a single candle: as I shrank back, gibbering in fright, a small white hand came out and felt my forehead: it was cool and perfumed. And I knew with great relief that it was Nur, my lovely Nur had come back to me; my beautiful girl was beside me again. But I could not see her face. I reached out a hand, grasped the black veil and pulled. The veils slipped easily away from her head — and I screamed, screamed and screamed, yelling loud enough to rouse a thousand corpses from their coffins.
Instead of the fresh lovely face of my beloved was a monster, a caricature of the beauty of my girl. The lips had been hacked from the face, exposing teeth splintered to shards and pink gums in a skull’s permanent grimace; the hair had been shaved to black stubble; the nose had been sliced away, leaving nothing but a pink, blood-and-snot crusted hole; and those beautiful dark eyes were now red-veined with her suffering. She turned her head away and bent down, fumbling for the veil, which had fallen to the floor, and I saw that her ears, too, had been crudely hacked off, leaving a suspicion of an earlobe just hanging on below small bloody holes in the side of her head.
I gaped at my beloved Nur with astonishment and deep horror; she moved her head towards me, just a fraction, and I swear I could not help but cringe away from her hideousness. She saw me recoil and snatched at the veil with her small white hand, wrapped it around her head, dropped the candle to the floor and ran from the room, leaving me only the whisper of cloth as it brushed the stone in her passing, and a lingering smell of her perfume.
My screams had roused the dormitory and brought me a visit a few moments later from Sir Nicholas de Scras, a lantern in his hand, his cropped grey hair tousled from sleep.
‘Your young friend came to see you, then,’ he said. ‘I told her she should not visit until you were fully recovered. But I see that she disobeyed me. Did she frighten you?’
‘What happened to her? My God, she was so, so beautiful, so perfect…’
‘She would not tell me who inflicted those grievous wounds but I got the impression it was some of our knights — have you offended anyone recently? She had been raped, too, very brutally — our brother-physicians had to sew up her nether regions.’ He was entirely matter of fact about this most intimate of operations. ‘But there is nothing seriously wrong with her, Alan. She is a healthy girl and her injuries are mainly to her vanity. She should recover in time, with God’s mercy — and your loving care, of course.’
What the Hospitaller said was no doubt true. But for one who had been so beautiful, what sort of life would she have as a freak: a hideous curiosity that would have children running from her in terror? And what about me? I had sworn that I would always love her: could I love her so brutally stripped as she was of her beauty? I didn’t want to think about it.
I felt a white-hot wave of fury for Malbete; for I was certain it was he, or his minions, who had mutilated her. I could hear his words in my head: ‘It seems you have cut up another one of my people, singing boy. I think perhaps I shall now cut up one of yours.’ In that moment, I’m ashamed to say that I felt self-pity, too. He had taken away the one truly beautiful thing in my life, and perverted her into a monstrosity. And I felt guilt, too. Most of all guilt. If I had not tried to kill Malbete in that cack-handed fashion, she would not have been harmed.
More guilt, too, for in my secret heart, I knew I could never truly love Nur looking as she now did.