I awoke the next morning clear-headed but weak — knowing exactly what I must do. It would be humiliating, but I must go to Robin and beg his forgiveness. Without his help and protection I would have no chance of taking the fight to Malbete and revenging the awful hurt done to my poor girl.
There was no sign of Nur in the women’s quarters, and Elise told me that she had taken all of her belongings and left at some time during the night. Will Scarlet was with his wife when I spoke to her and they both seemed pleased to see me much recovered from my fever. However, I was shamefully relieved that Nur had fled. I had no idea what I would have said to her. I had promised to love her always, and to protect her, but I knew what the truth was: I could do neither. She was gone, and to be honest, a part of me was glad. Another part of me ached for the beautiful girl who had shared my bed these past few months; the first girl who ever truly owned a piece of my soul.
Elise knew the secrets of my heart, I don’t know how. Perhaps it was just ordinary women’s insight, maybe her special gift. ‘I grieve for your love, Alan,’ she said. ‘It entered by the eyes, as I said it would, and I see that it has flown the same way. But do not blame yourself, such is the fickle way of men; you cannot love truly, the way a woman loves, with the whole of your heart. But that is how God, in his great wisdom, has made you.’
I presented myself to Robin in his harbour-side palace, and went down on one knee before him. I had prepared my speech as I walked there, but when I delivered it to him, I realised that it was not half as eloquent as I had hoped, and not a quarter as sincere. I finished by begging his pardon for the things I had said during the attack on the camel train, and saying that if I had not been out of my head with fever I would never have said them.
‘I doubt that very much,’ said Robin coolly. ‘I think that fever or no, you meant every word you said. I think that you want me to help you to kill Sir Richard Malbete, and that is why you are here, on your knees, abjectly begging my pardon. But no matter. We shall call it the fever speaking, if you wish. But I tell you now that if you ever speak to me like that again — fevered or well — I shall have you roasted to death for your insolence. Now go and begin gathering your things; we leave tomorrow. This Great Pilgrimage’ — there was a hint of a sneer in his voice — ‘is taking the road to Jerusalem.’
I turned to go, but he stopped me, and said in a different, quieter voice: ‘Alan, I am truly sorry about what happened to Nur.’ I said nothing for I could feel tears forming behind my eyelids, a knot in my throat. ‘If there is anything I can do…’ he said and tailed off.
Then Robin sighed and said: ‘Alan, you said a while back that you thought you knew who it was that was trying to kill me. Of your goodness, tell me his name.’
I turned back and looked at my master. His silver eyes were boring into mine, willing me to reveal what I knew. I shrugged and wiped my wet face: ‘I thought it was Will Scarlet, with help from Elise, who is now his wife,’ I said, looking at the floor and sniffing loudly.
Robin considered for a while, tapping his chin with a finger. ‘Yes, I can see it,’ he said at last. ‘He resented being punished and demoted, although he deserved it. I humiliated him in front of his men, which was perhaps a mistake. And he has always had open access to my apartments. She loves him, and knows the countryside, the ways of serpents and poisonous plants. Yes, I can see them as my murderers.’
‘But it is neither Will nor Elise,’ I said flatly. Robin stared at me, his eyes glittering dangerously. ‘Do not make sport with me, Alan. I warn you.’
‘It cannot be Will or Elise because they were being married at noon on the day after we took Acre, the day that someone showered broken masonry around your head. I asked Elise for the exact day and time of her wedding, and I checked the truth of it with Father Simon, who performed the service. They were in the porch of a church in the southern part of Acre at the time you were attacked, with a dozen witnesses. It cannot be them.’
‘Very well,’ said Robin, disappointed. ‘But you will continue to make enquiries?’ I nodded. ‘If you give me the name of the guilty man, you will have my complete and utter forgiveness for your intemperate words the other day, and I will help you to destroy Malbete as swiftly as you like,’ he said. It was a good bargain and, as we clasped hands to seal the deal, I was surprised to find that I still felt some warmth towards the man, greedy, Godless, murdering monster that I now knew him to be.
The army assembled the next day on the plain outside Acre where, two days before, Malbete and his men had taken so many innocent lives. Great barrels of sand had been brought up from the sea shore and spread over the worst of the blood, but the stink of slaughter hung in the air like a curse.
Earlier that morning, I had been pleased to run into Ambroise, my tubby trouvere friend, as I was hauling my gear to the stables. After an exchange of pleasantries, I asked him what had driven King Richard to make that awful decision to kill all the Saracen prisoners; I was still shocked by my sovereign’s actions, and I admit my faith in him as the noblest Christian knight of all had been shaken.
‘It wasn’t a pretty affair, I know,’ said Ambroise, ‘but it was necessary. Quite apart from revenge for all the Christian blood spilled by these people during the siege, all those crossbow bolts fired from the walls into our camp, what was Richard supposed to do with them?’
‘He could have waited until the ransom was paid,’ I said, ‘and then released them. Saladin has the reputation of a gentleman, a man of his word; he would surely have paid up given enough time. Wouldn’t he?’
‘Oh, Alan, you are naive sometimes. Yes, they say Saladin is a gentlemen, but he is also a soldier, a great general. While Richard held those captives, our King could not move from Acre. And Saladin knew that, which is why he delayed the payment for as long as he could. Richard was, in effect, pinned down here by the prisoners. He could not afford to let them go; they would merely swell the enemy ranks; he couldn’t take them with him on the road south to Jerusalem — think of the men required to guard nearly three thousand people on a long dusty march, and feeding and watering them would be an expensive problem, too. No, he couldn’t let them go, and he couldn’t take them with him. He waited for Saladin to redeem them, but when it became clear that the Saracen lord would not pay up — or part with the piece of True Cross — Richard had no choice but to do what he did.’
I shook my head. I was sure that there must have been another way.
‘There is one more point to make in this bloody affair,’ said Ambroise, ‘no less important. We have captured Acre, but that isn’t the last fortress we have to take on the road to the Holy City, not by a long chalk: there’s Caesarea, Jaffa, Ascalon… and many more before we take Jerusalem. And all those cities are watching very closely how Richard behaves here at Acre. And what have they learnt? That Richard follows the rules of warfare: he will accept surrenders, and spare the inhabitants of cities, as long as the bargain made for their surrender is kept. But he will have no qualms about slaughtering anyone who stands in his way or who breaks a bargain with him. Those cities have seen what Richard will do, if necessary, and I’ll wager his actions here at Acre will make the taking of them a whole lot easier.’
I shuddered slightly, as if a goose had stepped on my grave. King Richard’s attitude seemed to me to be uncannily similar to Robin’s ruthless approach to life and death.
Later that morning, mustered with Robin’s cavalry and awaiting orders, I looked down at the brownish, clotted sand as it crunched under my boots, and wondered if all that blood really would make the battles for other cities easier for our men. It seemed unlikely to me: surely if I were defending a city and I knew I was likely to be executed by Richard if I surrendered, I would fight all the harder to defend my walls. But what did I know?
The King had ordered the army into three great divisions, each roughly containing five or six thousand men, for the march south. In the lead division were the King’s chosen men, among them Sir Richard Malbete, the knights Templar and Hospitaller, along with the Bretons, the men of Anjou and the Poitevins; in the second division were the English and Norman contingents, who guarded King Richard’s personal Dragon Banner, and the Flemings under James of Avesnes; and in the third division came the French and Italians, led by Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, the most senior French noble in the Holy Land. We were to hug the coast, with our fleet shadowing us on the march, the great ships which would haul the heavy equipment and supply us with provisions along the way. Thus, with our right flank guarded by the fleet, we only needed to worry about the left.
Before we set off, Robin called all his lieutenants and captains together to give us our orders. ‘We are heading for Jaffa, which is eighty miles from here and the closest port to Jerusalem,’ said Robin when his senior men were gathered around him in a loose circle. ‘It will not be an easy march. We must take Jaffa if we wish to take Jerusalem, and Saladin, of course, aims to stop us.’ He looked around the circle to make sure everyone was paying attention.
‘Our position is to the rear of the central division; cavalry will form up in the centre with a screen of infantry, bowmen and spearmen, on the left and right of the horsemen. We stay together, we all march together, I can’t emphasise that enough. Any stragglers are likely to be cut up by Saladin’s cavalry. So, if you want to live, don’t get left behind, is that clear? The infantry’s job is to protect the cavalry. At some point during this march we will face Saladin’s main army and in order to beat him we must keep our heavy cavalry intact. So I say again: the bowmen and the spearmen are to act as a screen against their light cavalry, and their job is to protect our heavy cavalry at all costs. Sir James de Brus has more experience of our enemy, so I think it would be helpful to hear his views. Sir James…’
The Scotsman scowled and cleared his throat. ‘According to the few reports we have, Saladin fields some twenty to thirty thousand men, mostly light cavalry, but he also has two thousand fine Nubian swordsmen from Egypt, and a few thousand superior Berber cavalry — lancers, for the most part. In numbers alone, his force over-matches ours but his main arm, the Turkish light cavalry, is weaker, man to man, than our own horsemen. They are fast, much faster than our destriers, but only lightly armoured, and they use a short bow that can be shot from the back of a horse; secondary weapons are the curved sword or scimitar, the light lance and the mace. One on one, our knights will always beat their horsemen, but that’s not how they fight. They don’t stand and slug it out against single enemies.’
Someone muttered: ‘Cowardly scoundrels,’ and Sir James stopped and glowered round the circle of hard men. ‘These men are no cowards,’ he said. ‘Their tactic,’ and he gave special weight to the word, ‘is to ride in close to the enemy, loose their arrows, kill as many as they can, and ride away again before they can be challenged. That way their enemy gets hurt but they don’t. It is not cowardice, just good, plain common sense. But they have another tactic too, when facing Christian knights, which is to harass the enemy with their arrows, and try to provoke a charge. When our knights attack, the Turks disperse in all directions, and the heavy charge suddenly finds itself with no target. It’s like a big man trying to punch a swarm of wasps. Our knights become separated from each other, the force of the charge has been dissipated and the individual knights, scattered all over the field, can then be surrounded and slain by a dozen lighter, faster cavalrymen.’
Robin took over the briefing once again: ‘So we do not charge them. Our cavalry does not charge until we can be sure of landing a heavy blow on their main force and smashing it. And when they attack us, the infantry must soak up the punishment. The archers, of course, will take our revenge at a distance; but the spearmen must stand firm and take what they have to give us.’ Here Robin gave a wintry smile. ‘It is not all bad news for the footmen,’ he went on, ‘they will be divided into two companies, each taking a turn to defend the cavalry for one day on the left flank, the flank nearest the enemy; on the second day they will march between the cavalry and the sea, on the right, and enjoy a delightful stroll with hardly any danger at all. Anyone lucky enough to be wounded gets to ride in one of our nice comfortable ships.’ The men laughed, more as a release of tension than because the jest was a particularly good one.
‘Is everybody clear?’ said Robin. ‘If so…’
‘What if we are directly attacked? Surely we can charge then,’ asked a dim-witted cavalry veteran named Mick.
Robin sighed: ‘They will feint at you often, but your job as a horseman is simply to march, march, march southward to Jaffa; try to understand this, Mick. The enemy wants you to charge him because he is faster than you and so you cannot catch him, and it will break up our formations. Once our cohesion is broken, and the men are scattered, the enemy has us at his mercy. So what will we do, Mick?’
‘Ah, oh, I suppose we should march, march, march all the way to Jaffa,’ said Mick, slightly embarrassed. There was more laughter, in which I was glad to see Mick joined.
‘Good man,’ said Robin.
It was truly a wondrous sight: like a gigantic glittering snake, nearly a mile long, the Christian army set out from Acre, pennants flying, clarions crying, the hot sun reflecting shards of light from thousands of mail coats, shields, buckles and spear points. We left behind a strong garrison; most of the young women we had accumulated in our travels, including Richard’s new bride Queen Berengaria and his sister Queen Joanna, and two or three thousand or so sick and wounded. I wondered what had become of Nur, whether I would ever see her again — whether I wanted to — and then pushed that thought away: this was not a time for self-pity.
King Richard, splendid in his finest gilt-chased armour, a golden crown on the brow of his steel conical helmet, rode up and down the line all that first day with a company of knights, exhorting the commanders to keep their companies close together and not allow any to lag behind. He seemed to be brimming with energy, now that we were finally setting off towards our destination, and his strong voice could be heard in snatches up and down the column, over the immense tumult of nearly eighteen thousand men on the move.
We marched in the rear part of the second division, myself riding Ghost at a walk in a double column with eighty-two surviving mounted men-at-arms, led by Robin and Sir James de Brus. Like all the other troopers, I carried shield and lance, and wore an open-face helmet, knee-length hauberk and felt under-tunic beneath the mail, despite the blistering heat. We were plagued by huge clouds of flies that buzzed and crawled over our faces, drinking the sweat and as we were for ever slapping and brushing at them, we must have looked like and army of lunatics, twitching and flapping and sweating as we ambled along in the harsh morning sunshine.
To my left walked Little John’s company, a mixture of archers and spearmen. To my right, past the other line of cavalry troopers, marched Owain’s men on the seaward side. We had one hundred and sixty one archers fit for duty and eighty-five spearmen — I knew this because Robin had asked me to make an accurate tally before we left. Some of our men had died en route to Outremer, some perished in the siege, and some were sick with fever and had to be left at Acre, but ours was still a formidable force. The archers and spearmen had been divided between two companies: one commanded by Owain, and the other by Little John. If attacked, the spearmen were to form a shield wall and stand firm, and behind them the archers were to shoot down the foe. We cavalrymen were not to take any offensive action, unless absolutely necessary: as Robin had hammered home to us, our job was to march, march, march — and stay together.
Behind us came a small force of belligerent Flemings, and then the French knights of the third division. They were the rearguard, and also had charge of protecting the baggage train: forty lumbering ox-carts, several strings of pack horses, and three dozen mules. Most of the baggage was on board the galleys of the fleet, which could just be seen, keeping pace with us out on the calm blue water to our left, wet oars dipping and flashing like freshly caught mackerel in the sunlight.
By mid-morning it was already evident that the column had problems. The gap between our second division and the Frenchmen of the third seemed to grow larger with every step. And we were reluctant to slow our march because it would mean losing touch with the Norman knights in front of us. So we stuck rigidly to our pace and the space between our company and the French grew wider. At one point, King Richard came thundering past with a tail of sweating household knights, and I could hear him shouting angrily at the French commander, Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, telling him in no uncertain terms to keep up. I could not hear the Duke’s reply, but the harangue seemed to have no effect at all, as the hole in the marching column continued to grow. At noon, having covered no more than five miles, we stopped for a meal and a much-needed drink of lukewarm water from our skins. It was then that I noticed, for the first time, the enemy scouts.
Three hundred yards to my left, riding along the top of a small sandy ridge, was a line of cavalry: small, lean men on small, wiry ponies, their heads wrapped in black turbans, from which the crown of a steel helmet with a cruel looking spike emerged. I could see the shape of their short bows, protruding from a leather carrier behind the saddle. They looked an evil crew, their dark bearded faces seemingly marked with malice and a lust to spill Christian blood. Despite the heat, I shivered.
As we resumed our march, the enemy cavalry kept pace with us, hour after hour, walking their beasts, and coming no closer. Occasionally one rider would peel off from the column and gallop away to the northeast to make a report to the main body of the Saracen host, which was out of sight somewhere in the hills. By mid-afternoon, I noticed that the line of Saracen scouts had thickened considerably — instead of a single row of walking ponies, there were now a fat column of men and horses, three or four deep. And behind the enemy column I could see more horsemen coming to join them. I looked behind me: the gap between our division and the ranks of the French cavalry had opened even wider. There was now a good quarter of a mile of empty space between us.
‘Should we stop and wait for the French?’ I asked Robin. I knew what he would say before I even finished the question.
‘We have our orders,’ said Robin tersely.
I twisted in the saddle and looked behind me again. The third division was composed of a little more than a thousand mounted knights, mostly French but also with a few hundred renowned Italian noblemen from Pisa, Ravanna and Verona. They were accompanied by more than five thousand spearmen and crossbowmen, unhorsed men-at-arms, servants, muleteers, ox-cart drivers and assorted hangers-on. Despite King Richard’s clear orders, they even seemed to have brought along all their women. In the vanguard of the division, in two glittering ranks, rode five hundred French knights, splendid in bright surcoats and riding under gaily fluttering pennants. Behind them trundled the ox-carts and the mule trains, guarded on either side by the footmen: tall spearmen in leather armour and skilled Italian crossbowmen, their bows over their shoulders, singing as they marched. In the rear was another double row of knights. The formation was a good one, designed as it was for the defence of the supplies in the wagons, or it would have been but for the yawning space between the third division and the rest of the army. There seemed to be no sense of urgency, but I could see that the real problem was the ox-carts, which moved along too slowly. Even moving at a walking pace, the double row of knights at the front was constantly having to rein in and wait for the big wagons to catch them up. And every time they did this, the space in our column gaped a little wider.
‘Alan,’ said Robin, ‘ride up to the King and inform him of the situation; tell him we are in grave danger of leaving the French behind, and that we must slow the march. Go on, quickly. I don’t like the look of those Saracen horsemen.’
I guided Ghost between two of Little John’s walking spearmen and put my spurs into her sides. As I galloped up the left-hand side of the army, I looked over to the East and I could see what Robin was concerned about. A river of horsemen, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, was spilling out into the coastal plain roughly opposite Robin’s force — but they were heading towards the gap in the column. If they got between the main body of our army and the French they could surround the wagon train and cut it up at their leisure. I put my head down and raced Ghost as fast as I could towards the royal standard, a rippling splash of wind-tossed gold and red that fluttered half a mile ahead; and, in what seemed like only a few moments, breathless, sweating like a slave, I was calling out to the household knights to let me pass and, suddenly, I was in the presence of the King. He looked older than when I had last seen him this close to, on the beach in Cyprus, and more careworn, and I knew I was about to add to his worries.
‘Greetings, sire, from the Earl of Locksley, and he says that the French and the baggage-train are being left behind and we must slow the march or abandon them. Also, it looks as if a large body of Saracen horse is on the verge of getting between us and that same division.’
‘Are they, by God! William, Roger, Hugh, you three come with me; the rest of you keep the column going. Blondel,’ I smiled with pleasure at the King’s use of his personal nickname for me, ‘how many cavalry does Locksley have, about four score, isn’t it?’ I nodded in agreement. ‘Right, let’s see if they are any good.’
As we cantered back down the column, the King, his three bravest knights and myself all riding abreast, I saw that we were already too late. Three or four hundred Saracens in loose formation were galloping their scrubby little horses straight at the leading knights of the French division. All had their short bows in their hands, and as we watched, they let fly a cloud of arrows, which sailed high, came down, and rattled against the knight’s shields and chainmail coats. Without slowing their horses, the Saracens plucked fresh arrows from quivers on their saddles, nocked and loosed again; and again; and again. I was astounded, their rate of fire was faster even than our own Sherwood bowmen, and they were accomplishing this from the back of a galloping horse! Just as the Saracens must surely smash into the ranks of the French knights, who had levelled their lances, and were trotting forward ready to receive them, the Saracens swerved away from the line of knights, rode swiftly along the face of the division shooting another shower of arrows, skewering horses and men at close range, and then curved away back the way they had come, turning in their saddles to give the French one last parting volley from their short bows. It was an amazing display, and I doubted if anyone in our army could match their skill on the back of a galloping horse.
As they rode away from the knights, I noticed something strange: although many of the Frenchmen were stuck with arrows, some even had three or four shafts jutting from their mail, there were only a handful of empty saddles; far too few for the volume of arrows loosed at them. And then it dawned: the arrows might come thick and fast, but they had little power to penetrate proper armour, unless the horsemen were close. Certainly their weapons did not have the immense power of a Christian war bow, which could smash an arrow head through the interlocking steel rings of a hauberk, through the felt padding underneath and on deep into the body of a knight.
The King was now very close to Robin’s men, and we were still a good half a mile from the French division, but I swear I heard the roar that the French knights gave as they dug their spurs into their horses flanks and began to enthusiastically pursue the fleeing Saracen cavalry.
The King shouted: ‘No, you fools, no!’ And we pulled up, panting, next to Robin and his marching men, as five hundred of the finest knights in France galloped madly across the field in front of us, the giant destriers bearing heavy, fully armoured knights, chasing the bouncy little ponies that skipped away into broken scrub-land to the east. The knights charged in a compact mass, but on reaching the broken ground they split up into knots of twos and threes, chasing after Saracens like a pack of terriers dropped into a rat-infested barn. And worse than this — no sooner had the knights charged than another smaller force of Saracens, perhaps two hundred or so warriors, emerged from behind a low ridge and headed straight for the now-unguarded, open face of the wagon train. With stunning speed, they charged straight through the gaggle of crossbowmen who had hastily assemble to bar their way, cutting down men with their scimitars and shouldering the footmen aside with their ponies, and began slaughtering the unarmed drivers of the ox-carts with their blades, and leaning low in the saddle to hamstring the draught beasts. Within a dozen heartbeats, the whole baggage train had been brought to a standstill. The French knights at the other end of the third division were too far away to help, and although a handful of unhorsed men-at-arms and spearmen fought valiantly, they were no match for fast-moving men on horseback. In front of our eyes, the Saracens butchered the foot soldiers, slicing unprotected into faces and warding hands with their cruel curved swords, and begin to loot the wagon train. It was sheer carnage, footmen reeling back, blood jetting from terrible face wounds, others simply running to the rear, oxen bellowing in pain, drivers trying to hide beneath the heavy carts to escape the fury of the marauders — and the Saracens, almost unchallenged, helping themselves to goods, clothes, valuables, food and trotting away at their leisure with their plunder hanging heavy from their saddles.
We had not been idle, however. Robin’s cavalry force of eighty tough, well-trained men had turned around and formed up in two ranks, lances raised, and at the King’s command of ‘Advance!’ we trotted towards the bloody chaos of the French division.
The men advanced in perfectly straight lines. At a command from Sir James, the lances of the first rank came down in unison and forty horsemen leapt forward as one man. The first line covered the ground to the wagon train in ten heartbeats and crashed into the handful of Saracens who had been particularly greedy or just tardy in making their getaway. Moments later the second line followed them in. Sir James de Brus’s hours and hours of patient training had showed their worth. The lines of mail-clad riders surged forward like a rake through long grass, and the long spears plunged deep into the disordered enemy, skewering them in the saddle, and hurling their punctured corpses to the ground. However, only a few dozen raiders were caught by our sharp lances; most had seen our approach and were galloping eastward, heads turned back to watch us, as fast as their laden horses could carry them.
And then, having swept the enemy away from the wagons, and taken as many as we could on our spear points, we did the proper thing. We halted the charge with exemplary control a few hundred yards past the strewn wreckage of the lead ox-cart, and returned to the safety of the division. I had killed no one; in fact, I never came within twenty feet of a Saracen; but order had been restored to the wagon train in a short space of time, and the marauders had been seen off.
‘Neatly done, Locksley,’ called the King to Robin. ‘Very neatly done.’ And my master bowed gravely in the saddle at his sovereign, but I thought I caught a flicker of intense relief crossing his face, as brief as summer lightning.
‘Blondel,’ my King was calling to me.
‘Sire?’
‘Get back up to the head of the column. Go and tell Guy de Lusignan to rein up — I beg your pardon, I mean kindly request His Highness the King of Jerusalem to halt the march at my request. We will camp here today and try and get this mess sorted out. Off you go. Quickly now.’
And so I went.
The French knights drifted into the camp very late that afternoon in ones and twos, exhausted, thirsty, on lame, sweat-lathered horses. Their charge had had no impact on the enemy, as they had not been able to bring their lances to bear on him. They had achieved nothing; and lost more than half their number in the bloody spread-out skirmish that followed. After the charge had petered out, the knights found themselves scattered, alone, in unfamiliar territory, and they had been swiftly surrounded by swarms of Saracens, who appeared as if from nowhere; their horses were promptly killed beneath them, stuck with dozens of arrows, and then the unfortunate noblemen were either taken prisoner, or briskly slaughtered by enemies who outnumbered them ten to one. No more than two hundred of the knights who charged so boldly that afternoon made it back into the camp that evening, and many of those bore grievous wounds that would ultimately bring them face to face with their Maker before long.
I got all this from Will Scarlet, who watched some of the surviving French knights come limping in, and had spoken to their sergeants. Will had done well in our brief charge against the looters of the wagon train. He had killed a man with his lance, goring him through the waist above the hip as the Saracen was trying to escape with two great sacks of grain, which were so large that they had significantly slowed his horse. Will was excited at having, as he put it, ‘struck a proud blow for Christ,’ and I was pleased for him. I could not remember why I had ever suspected him of being Robin’s potential murderer. Looking at his honest face, with his cheerful gap-toothed grin, as he told me yet again about how he had directed the lance-head for the killing strike, I realised that he was a true friend, and a good man to have by my side when we were so far from home in an enemy land. I felt a wave of sheer misery when I thought of England; I longed for the cool air of Yorkshire, for Kirkton; I longed to see my friends Tuck, Marie-Anne and Goody once again; for a brief self-indulgent moment, I wished for nothing more than to be home once more.
The next day we stayed where we were, within a morning’s brisk ride of Acre, but we saw nothing of the enemy save for a few lone scouts on the skyline. The King had decided to re-order the divisions, much to the shame of the French. From now on, Richard decreed, the Knights Hospitaller and Templar would take turns in guarding the baggage in the wagon train. It was the position of maximum danger and, correspondingly, the most honour, and he was relieving the French of that duty. It was a slap in the face for Hugh of Burgundy, of course, but Richard was angry that his orders had been disobeyed on the first day of the march and he wanted to punish the Duke.
The King also comprehended that, in the heat of late summer — it was by now the end of August — we could not march in the middle of the day, so he ordered that the next day we all rise in the dead of the night, so as to be ready to march at break of day. And that is how we proceeded from then onwards: stumbling out of our blankets while the moon was still high; saddling horses largely by sense of touch, shuffling into our positions in the dark and moving off as the first pink streaks stained the eastern sky above the mountains. We halted each day before noon, made camp, and fed and watered the horses, before collapsing exhausted in any shade we could find to sleep away the afternoon.
Even travelling only during the morning, it was a very hard march; the problem for me was not so much my mail hauberk, which was heavy enough, but the thick felt under-garment that I needed to wear beneath the mail to serve as padding and give me sufficient protection against the arrows of the Saracens. It was almost unbearably hot to wear, and yet I dared not take it off while we were on the road, for we were under threat every day.
We were attacked somewhere along the column almost constantly, small harassing raids on a place where the enemy perceived there to be a weakness. A couple of hundred Saracens would swoop in, riding like the wind, swing past our marching line, shooting arrow after arrow into our ranks and then gallop away, still firing their short bows as they retreated. It was humiliating, rather than truly dangerous, at least to the mounted men-at-arms.
Unless shot from very close, the arrows would not penetrate through our mail and felt under-jackets, but stuck in the metal rings leaving us looking, after a prolonged cavalry attack, like human hedge pigs. Each arrow strike was no harder than a slap from a man’s hand but it was still unnerving and painful to feel a weapon strike your body, even if little damage was done. The real danger was to the archers — who built themselves makeshift shields from old wicker baskets or empty wooden boxes and who wore as much extra padding as they could in the searing heat — and to the horses: clad only in a cloth trapper, these brave animals were especially vulnerable to the arrows. Although they penetrated only a hand’s breadth into the animal’s muscles, half a dozen arrows could drive a horse mad with pain, and several animals went berserk during the march, killing men of our own side by kicking and biting like demons, until they were put out of their misery by a brave knight with a sword or, more often, a crossbow bolt or arrow from a few yards away.
Robin’s company fared better than most. The Saracens soon learnt that if they came to close to our ranks, and the great Wolf’s Head banner that we marched under, they would lose scores of their men from the sharp arrows of our bowmen. In fact, we were seriously attacked only three times over the next ten days as we marched through that heat-blistered terrain.
We marched past Caesarea, which had been razed to the ground by Saladin, and did not even pause for a drink at this once-proud Biblical city; but we did not lack for supplies, even though the baggage train was attacked on an almost daily basis. In the early evening, food, supplies and sometimes great barrels of fresh water and ale were brought ashore from the galleys of the fleet. And, on the whole, we ate well in the cool of the dusk. One evening, the King asked me and several of the other trouveres to come to his fireside and sing, but, while we pretended some jollity, drank his wine and made verses together, it was an uncomfortable meal. Sir Richard Malbete was there and he spent the whole meal staring at me across the fire with his feral, splintered eyes, but saying nothing. I imagined that I could see the mutilated face of Nur hovering above his shoulder, and it put me off my versifying. The King had received a spear thrust in his side during one attack on the column, not a serious wound, but enough to give him pain when he moved too quickly, and he was not in the best of form as a musician. And, on top of all that, it felt somehow wrong to be singing witty ditties about fair ladies and their elegant games of love, when we were in the middle of a desert, with the cries of the wounded breaking the night, and with a vast army of pagans somewhere out there in the darkness who would be trying to kill us in the morning.
One evening, William came to me, bearing a message from Robin. My master had been distant with me since the raid on the caravan, despite the fact that we were now officially reconciled. And I was not unhappy with that state of affairs.
‘The Earl wants you to come to his te-tent, as quickly as possible,’ said William.
I found Robin in his pavilion, seated on an empty box with a drawn sword in his hand.
‘What is it, sir,’ I asked as I entered. Robin jerked his chin at the bed, a simple pallet with a rough wool blanket on it. ‘Pull back the blanket, carefully. It’s not a snake this time,’ he said. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. And very cautiously I peeled back the woollen covering. Then I stepped back with a gasp of disgust: a huge, mottled brown furry ball as big as my hand was lying in the centre of the bed, and then, very slowly, it moved one of its many greasy legs.
‘What is it?’ asked Robin. He used the flattest, dullest tone possible, the one he used when he was feeling some strong emotion but wished to disguise it.
‘I think it is a spider, but I have never seen one so big,’ I said. ‘Reuben would know.’ Suddenly, Robin moved — he stood up, lifted his sword and lunged all in one smooth action, stabbing the great hairy beast through the centre of its body, the blade splitting the canvas of the pallet. The legs writhed as the animal was impaled on Robin’s blade, and biting back my deep disgust, I could see yellow pus seeping from its death wound.
Reuben was summoned and he hobbled into the tent on a pair of crutches. His broken leg, it seemed, was healing well, and he had suffered no ill effects from his horseback jaunt with Robin on the day of the frankincense raid. ‘It’s a tarantula spider,’ he said. ‘Give you a nasty bite but not fatal. And it was in your bed? Again?’ He sounded incredulous.
Robin waved us out of the tent — he wanted to sleep, he said, but Reuben stopped me just outside. Taking my arm, he led me out of earshot and said: ‘I understand that you have had a falling out with Robin.’ I made some meaningless grunt by way of reply. ‘He is a hard man, certainly; ruthless, and he can be cold as the grave, but you must try to put yourself in his shoes. He carries the weight of many lives on his shoulders, and he does not complain: his men, his wife Marie-Anne, and their little son, you, and even myself — we all are beholden to Robin. And he does the things he does, even the terrible things, to succour us all.’
I said nothing. I knew Robin’s philosophy well: he would do anything to protect those inside his familia, his friends, loved ones and retainers, and all the men and women who served him. But anyone outside that charmed circle was nothing to him; enemies, strangers, even comrades of the Cross did not exist as real people for him. They were to be used, lied to, tricked, ignored even killed if it served his aims.
‘I am a Jew,’ said Reuben, ‘I understand about family, and about protecting your own. And I know why Robin does what he does. And I can respect that. He is a great man, truly he is. And that is why,’ he stopped for a few moments, ‘that is why, if you know who the person is, within our camp, who wishes to harm Robin in these foul and underhand ways, you must tell me now.’
He looked at me, his dark eyes catching a hint of firelight, and waited for me to speak. I wondered if he knew that Robin had abandoned his daughter to death in York, and how that would change his opinion of the ‘great man’. Perhaps he had not seen, as I had, Robin make that awful decision. I guessed not. But something stopped me from telling him the truth about Ruth’s death. Instead I said, slowly and clearly: ‘I do not have any idea who it is who wishes to kill Robin.’
I was lying. I was almost certain who the guilty person was. I just did not know why he wanted my master dead. And a part of me was not sure any more that I wanted to stop him.