My daughter-in-law Marie is in love. She sings as she feeds the chickens outside in the courtyard, she gave me an extra spoonful of honey on my porridge this morning, and smoothed the thin grey hair off my forehead in a gesture of rare tenderness when she brought me my mug of warmed ale this evening before bed. Her eyes are bright, merry even, her cheeks slightly flushed, and she laughs for no reason; and occasionally she dances a few steps, swinging her skirts gaily, when she thinks nobody is looking.
The object of her affections? Osric. Her distant cousin, my rotund bailiff, has brought joy to her heart after several fumbling weeks of a courtship, which was often almost too painful for an old man to watch. Finally, she consented to his ponderous advances, and now she has moved into the small guest hall on the far side of the courtyard, where he and his sons reside, and talks of a marriage in the spring. I am glad for her but I cannot say I understand why she loves him: he is an ugly plodder, a painstaking dullard, in whom the last ember of youth has long been extinguished. He is one of the last people on earth I would choose to spend my remaining years with; while she, only five years younger than him, still has the waist and wits of a saucy young maiden. But love him she does. What can it be that has aroused her ardour?
‘He is a good man, Alan, and that is why I have chosen to wed him. He is steady, honest and caring, and he will never leave me,’ Marie told me with a smug smile, ‘and I want you love him, too. He has saved Westbury with his hard work; you must try to think of him as another son.’
That, I think, is unlikely. But, for Marie’s sake, I will try to behave a little more warmly towards him.
Christmas is approaching: the season of feasts and frivolity. We have slaughtered most of the pigs and great round hams, sides of bacon and long strings of plump sausages hang from an iron ring, drying and smoking above the fire in the centre of the hall. We have more than enough firewood for the winter; Osric and his sons spent a week clearing dead timber from the copse by the stream and hauling it with ox teams to the hall. The buttery is stacked with barrels of good wine from Aquitaine, and Marie has been baking huge game pies and fat pastries out on the big oven in the courtyard. We had the first snowfall last week and more is coming: perhaps strangely, I am looking forward to a really good snowstorm, to being snug in my hall with a roaring fire and plenty to eat and drink.
There is one dark cloud on my horizon: Osric has reported to me that Dickon, my elderly swineherd, has been stealing from me. Apparently, a few weeks after the sows have farrowed, he quite often takes one of the piglets away from its mother and either sells it for meat or, if it is old enough, fattens it himself for his pot. He always claims that the mother pig has rolled on her offspring while asleep and that the piglet has died, and as my sows can have anywhere between eight and sixteen piglets in a litter, nobody has noticed the crime until now. Dickon, that one-armed old fool, was drunkenly boasting of it in the ale house, and Osric overheard him. Now Osric wants to raise a jury of twelve men from the village and have Dickon tried for his crimes at the next manor court, just before Christmas. I am troubled about this: is a piglet here or there so much to worry about? I have not missed them in the past and I still have many breeding pigs, and as much pork meat as I require, and more. Marie says there is a principle at stake here, that I am too soft with the villeins, and it is my fault that I let Westbury decline so much in the years before Osric arrived. As lord of the manor, she says, the villeins should fear and respect me, how else will they refrain from robbing me blind and laughing up their sleeves? Osric says that, as Dickon has over the years laid his one good hand on chattels of mine worth more than a shilling, I could have him prosecuted for a felony: if found guilty, the penalty for old Dickon would then be death by hanging. I sometimes wonder to myself what Robin would do in these circumstances. Would he have a man hanged for a piglet? In the old Sherwood days, to even touch Robin’s money chest was a death sentence. The manor court is to be held two weeks from now: I must think on this some more before then.
I do find it touching, if utterly bewildering, to watch Marie and Osric together: she so happy and girlish; he a great blundering mole-faced booby. Under my brows, I observe their tender glances, the way they fondle each other’s hands and arms, discreetly, whenever possible. It reminds me of my own first true love, of the first time I felt that breathtaking, swooping feeling, the hollow-ness in my chest in the presence of my beloved, the soaring joy at her smile, and the physical ache at her absence. I think, foolish old man that I am, that I’m in truth a little jealous of their happiness.
When I talk of my own first love, I do not, of course, mean with Reuben’s daughter Ruth, God rest her soul. I knew her only for a few days, in extraordinary, appalling circumstances, and if I felt any long-lasting emotions over her death, the uppermost one was guilt. I had liked her, admired her beauty and, wanting to play-act the chivalrous knight, promised to guard her life with my own. I broke my promise. In the months that followed I felt a huge pressing sense of guilt at her death, like a lead cope around my shoulders — and a wheeling flock of unanswerable questions circled inside my head: what if I had been quicker with my sword? Should I have fled the bailey of York Castle when I did? Would it have been more honourable to have stayed and died with her? I felt a little spike of hatred, too — for Robin. I fully believed that he could have saved her had he chosen to, though it would probably have meant abandoning Reuben to his doom.
I spoke to my solid friend Tuck on our return to Bradfield, at length and in private. Or as private as one can be in a castle packed with four hundred men all busily preparing for a long campaign.
‘He’s a deeply practical man,’ Tuck said to me after I had told him the story and revealed my feelings of shame, guilt and anger. We were sitting side by side on a great wooden coffer in the gloomy north-east corner of St Nicholas’s church. ‘And there is not much room in his heart for sentimentality. He sees that something needs to be done and he does it, regardless of the cost to himself or anyone else. As we both know well, he can be utterly ruthless.’
There were a handful of archers standing near the font while the priest, an innocuous but slightly silly man named Simon, blessed their bows with holy water before our departure for war, but the men were out of earshot. ‘And you must ask yourself, Alan — honestly — what would have been achieved by saving the girl?’ the monk said. I looked at Tuck, in confusion. Surely saving the girl, or any human life, was a noble end in itself?
‘I mean, if you take the longer view,’ he said. He had the good grace to drop his eyes, but he struggled on despite his evident feelings of shame: ‘By saving Reuben, Robin preserved this army. Without Reuben’s Jewish friends in Lincoln, who have since lent us a dragon’s hoard of silver, we would not be able to leave for France next month to join in the Great Pilgrimage to save the Holy Land. If he had saved the girl, but lost Reuben, well, without wages our soldiers here would slip away back to their homes, or take to the forests as footpads, and the army would have disintegrated; Robin would have disappointed King Richard, disobeyed him in truth. He would be out of favour; he might even have been outlawed again for dereliction of duty. No, as you have described it, with so many enemies about him, and so little time, he was bound to save Reuben
…’
I glared stonily at the floor. Tuck remained quiet for a while and then he said: ‘Remember that, even when we can’t see it or understand it, Almighty God always has a plan, Alan. Perhaps this poor girl had to die so that Robin might lead his men to recapture holy Jerusalem for the True Faith.’
I could see the point Tuck was making, although I did not want to acknowledge it; and I still felt a knot of anger in my gut at the seemingly easy way Robin had made up his mind to sacrifice the girl.
‘Tell me honestly, Tuck,’ I said at last, ‘will Ruth be received by Our Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven. Surely she was an innocent soul?’
Tuck sighed, a long low exhalation like the last breath of a dying man; then he looked up at me, his kindly, nut-brown gaze meeting mine. ‘I fear not,’ he said finally. ‘She was a Jew and, as Our Lord has taught us, the only way to find a place in Heaven is through His grace.’ I looked away from Tuck, tears pricking my eyes, and found I was staring at a great painting of Christ on the Cross on the church wall, a beautiful image of the Saviour suffering and dying for our sins. I was grateful that Tuck had not lied to me. Then, to my surprise, he went on: ‘But God is ineffable and all merciful, Alan, and his forgiveness is boundless. In His wisdom, He may perhaps see fit to take her to His bosom.’
I was comforted by his words. Christ preached love — and how could he fail to show His love to one who was so clearly an innocent, slaughtered by fiends possessed by the Devil.
We rode out of Kirkton on the last day of April, heading for Southampton to take ship to Normandy. Robin rode at the front of a long double line of horsemen, a hundred and two men strong, each clad in newly burnished chainmail and square-topped, riveted steel helmet, and armed with big kite-shaped shield, a sword and a twelve-foot lance. Beside Robin rode Sir James de Brus, the cavalry commander, scowling as usual and grumbling to himself as he twisted in the saddle and surveyed the ranks of our mounted men-at-arms. Behind the cavalry came the archers, one hundred and eighty-five men carrying long bowstaves, full arrow bags and short swords, laughing and joking but walking briskly in the spring sunshine. They were Owain’s pride and joy, men selected by him for their strength and skill with a war bow, who as the grizzled Welsh captain boasted, ‘could put a bodkin point between a man’s eyes at a hundred paces, and another in his belly before he fell to the ground’.
Next came the baggage train, ten big wagons pulled by huge, slow-moving oxen, and loaded impossibly high with food, wine, ale, tents, clothing, horse gear and extra weapons. Four of the ox wagons carried only arrow shafts, in bundles of a dozen, piled high and lashed tight to each lumbering wooden vehicle. Last of all came the rear-guard, ninety-three leather-jacketed spearmen commanded by Little John, with sixteen-foot broad-headed weapons, sharp hand axes in their belts and their old-fashioned round shields slung on their backs. They were responsible for the safety of the baggage train, and for driving the herd of sheep that would feed us en route, and they had orders to move at their own pace rather than try to keep up with the main body of Robin’s men.
Our mood was high as a hunting falcon: we were setting off on a noble task, doing God’s work and with the prospect of adventure, glory, loot and loose women ahead of us, and the promise of Heaven for any who died in battle. There wasn’t a soldier among us who did not feel proud to be part of our company. Swept up in the excitement of our leave-taking, I had temporarily forgotten that I was angry with Robin; the shade of Ruth grew fainter and I rode behind him and Sir James with the glorious sense of a great and exciting journey begun.
Joy, though, was not universal. Beside me rode Reuben. He seemed to have aged ten years since the terrible days at York Castle, and if I am honest, though he was only in his middle thirties, he was beginning to look like an old man, his lean brown face cut with fresh deep lines of grief. Robin had persuaded him to join us on this great mission to the Holy Land as our treasurer and Robin’s personal physician, and Reuben, perhaps because he was too dispirited to argue, had consented to accompany us and look after the financial matters of Robin’s army, and to tend to my master’s health. He told me in a dull voice that now that his daughter was dead, he had nothing in England to hold him here, and he longed to see his desert homeland once more before he grew too old. He rarely spoke now, and when I looked over into his red-eyed face as we rode along that spring morning, I realised that once again he had been weeping, and I felt a twinge of my old guilt.
At Kirkton, we left behind us Goody, Marie-Anne and Robin’s newly born son and heir, Hugh. The Countess of Locksley had given birth two weeks before our departure; the labour had been long, a full day closeted in her chamber with Goody, a serving maid and the wise crone from the village, with only the odd stifled moan and request for more hot water making its way through to the hall. Robin, as was his habit when his raw emotions might expect to be engaged, had remained icily calm through out the experience, waiting hour after hour in the hall, reading a scroll of romances in a large ornately carved chair, almost a throne, and occasionally summoning me to sing to him or talk of inconsequential things. He ate and drank very little and did not move from his position in the chair until Goody threw open the door of the chamber and came running out, eyes sparkling, face clay-red, shouting: ‘It’s a boy, Robin, a healthy boy. Oh, come and see. Come and meet him. He is so beautiful.’
Robin’s son was a lusty child with light blue eyes and jet black hair and the squashed face of a monkey. To me, little Hugh did not look in the slightest bit beautiful and I was puzzled at first that the child should have this colouring: Robin had light brown hair and Marie had chestnut locks. But Goody explained the facts of nature to me, as we stood together over the cradle in Robin and Marie-Anne’s chamber a day or so later.
‘Oh Alan, you men know nothing about babies’ — this was from a twelve-year-old maiden — ‘some babies are just born with black hair. I was myself, or so my mother told me. And look at me now.’ She twirled in front of me, her Saxon-blonde hair, which had been tied in two braids either side of her pink cheeks, swinging as she moved.
I reached out and took a braid in my hand as it swung past me; it was the colour of spun gold but soft as feathers. Goody snatched it back. ‘I said “look” not “touch”.’ Suddenly she was all busy-ness. ‘Now Alan, I need you out of the way, we have to make the place properly clean for the baby,’ and she shooed me briskly out of the chamber like a middle-aged goodwife dealing with an unruly schoolboy.
Travelling as part of an army is obviously a very different experience to journeying as a lone man, or as part of a small group, as I had been used to. We carried with us a sense of sprawling menace that nothing could dispel even in our own land. Shepherds would flee before us on the peaceful downs, and villagers would bar their doors and shutter their windows at our approach, even in the tranquil southern counties of England. It was not so long ago — grandfathers could clearly recall it — that, during the Anarchy of Stephen and Maud, gangs of armed men would roam the land, pillaging at will. And country folk have long memories.
But we did not despoil our own people; we had plenty of supplies, thanks to the loans of silver from Reuben’s friends, and each night when we made camp in a fallow field or common wood, we killed an animal or two and roasted the mutton and made merry. My music was in great demand. Almost every night, I would be called upon to sing and play for my supper, and I was glad to do so. I sang the old country songs, for the most part. Amusing peasant ditties about unfaithful husbands and angry wives, songs of the farmer and his beasts, or tales of great battles fought long ago by King Arthur and his knights. The cansos and sirvantes, the songs of courtly love and satirical poems that I used to sing in the halls of the nobility, were less popular with the rough soldiery. Occasionally, Robin would call his officers together and we would dine and make plans for the next few days or weeks, and at the end of our gatherings I would indulge my audience in a more sophisticated musical offering: there was one I was particularly proud of which I composed at that time. The song tells of a beautiful golden brooch, with a pin in the shape of a sword, worn by a noble lady. The brooch is in love with the domina whose breast he adorns — and guards from the touch of another lover — but of course there can never be true love between a jewel, however beautiful, and a great lady, the brooch can only ever serve his mistress, he can never possess her, but he is content with this role. Tragically, at the end of the canso, the brooch is cast away by the lady, who says she has grown tired of it, and the bright jewel rests in a deep, muddy ditch, remembering its love until Judgment Day.
You might think that my mood was particularly black when I wrote that song of talking jewellery and tragic love, but in truth, I was feeling very optimistic. My relations with Robin were more or less back to normal. I had decided to forgive him — I told myself that I must strive to be a loyal vassal and support all of his decisions, whether I agreed with them or not — and I was happy in the company with the other captains and vintenars, with the exception of James de Brus. But that was no problem: I was merely courteous and distant with the Scotsman, and he with me. And I had a new body servant, which made me feel very grand. William — the boy who had helped me steal the ruby from Sir Ralph Murdac — had been summoned from Nottingham Castle. The loyal fellow had been regularly sending verbal reports on the activities of Murdac through some mysterious network of Robin’s spies and as a reward, as we marched past Nottingham on our way south, young William had joined us as my manservant. He was a diligent lad, quick-moving and eager to please, very intelligent, though with a slight stammer, and good at anticipating my requirements. He kept my applewood vielle and its horsehair bow, a much prized gift from my old musical mentor Bernard, in a highly polished state and he was always on hand to fetch and carry. He was a grave boy, though, only smiling rarely and never up to the high jinks that I indulged in when I was his age. But I liked him, and I was glad of his service.
The one cloud in my sky was that Tuck was not accompanying us on this great adventure. Partly as a result of William’s reports — Murdac had apparently repeated his offer of a hundred pounds of silver for Robin’s head — Robin had asked Tuck to remain at Kirkton Castle to watch over Marie-Anne and the baby with his two enormous, battle-trained wolfhounds Gog and Magog. These great beasts could tear the arm off a man as easily as I could tear the leg off a boiled capon, but they were as mild as the Baby Jesus around Tuck’s friends. Robin had also left a score of bowmen, ten cavalrymen and ten veteran spearmen as a garrison. It was not enough to hold the bailey of the castle but, if attacked, as I well knew from my experiences in York, they were a big enough force to hold the strong keep.
Instead of my friend, the jolly fighting monk, we were accompanied by Father Simon, the priest of St Nicholas’s Church in Kirkton — a man I did not particularly care for, who seemed to have been born without a chin; his mouth merged seamlessly into his neck, almost as if somebody had removed his lower jaw. Father Simon held brief prayers every morning before we marched, mumbled in bad Latin and incomprehensible to the men, and on Sundays he sang Holy Mass, out of tune, I may say, for the whole army. I got the distinct feeling that he did not like Robin much; in fact, I could sometimes imagine that he hated him, although like any sensible mortal who wished to remain on this earth a while longer, he feared my master and treated him with respect.
I believe I knew why the priest disliked him: as many of the men knew, Robin had been involved in the old pagan worship of the Mother Goddess during his time as an outlaw, and although he now paid the proper homage to the True Religion of the Living Christ, his devilish past allegiances had not been forgotten. Whatever Robin felt about Father Simon in return, or privately believed, we were on a holy pilgrimage to the birthplace of Our Lord and it would have been unthinkable to travel without at least one priest. So the chinless cleric came with us.
I have this to say in Father Simon’s favour. He did not set himself above the men, as some priests are wont to do. He just got on with his allotted tasks. Before we embarked on to three great cargo ships at Southampton, Father Simon insisted on blessing the vessels to protect us from the dangers of the deep; and his prayers seemed to work. The crossing was smooth and uneventful, and took only a day and a night before we were trooping out at the quay at Honfleur, King Richard’s port at the mouth of the great river Seine in Normandy.
I had never been out of England before, and was astounded to find that Normandy looked almost exactly the same as my homeland. Perhaps I had expected the grass to be blue and the sky green, I don’t know. But the sensation of familiarity was extraordinary. The fields looked the same, the houses were similar and, until they opened their mouths to speak French, the people could have been easily mistaken for good honest English folk.
During the march through the Norman countryside, as we made our way southwards, there were certain elements of our army — mainly the folk who had previously been outlaws — who held the opinion that the French peasants existed solely to provide us with free food and drink. Robin had other ideas and was determined to maintain strict discipline. This land was the patrimony of our King, he said, and we were not to ravage it. Little John caught and summarily hanged two cavalrymen for stealing a chicken on the first day on Norman soil, and Robin gathered the men together and made a quiet, determined speech directly under the swinging heels of the looters.
‘You think I’m being harsh?’ he asked the four hundred angry men who were assembled before him. He used his loud, carrying battle voice. ‘Do you think I’m being unjust? I don’t give a damn. No man under my command steals so much as a penny, desecrates a Church, or beds any woman without her consent — unless I have given them permission. I will hang any bastard who does so from the nearest tree. No trial, no mercy, just a final dance at the end of a rope. Is that clear?’
There were a few sullen murmurs from the men, but they knew that there had to be discipline, and the former outlaws among them also knew that Robin could be a great deal more brutal if he chose to.
But Robin had not finished: ‘And that goes for the officers, too. Any captain who robs or rapes will be whipped in front of the men as a lesson to all, and then demoted.’ This was most unusual. Shocking, too. By common custom the officers were disciplined under different rules to the men, and their chastisements never included corporal punishment. Perhaps Robin had said this because we were, unusually, an almost entirely basebom contingent of King Richard’s army. Although led by an Earl, we were mercenaries — or we would be when Richard paid Robin the money he had promised. I saw Sir James de Brus glowering at Robin, and fingering his sword hilt. He was the only man among us, apart from Robin, who had been born noble, and I could almost hear him thinking: I will die with my sword in your belly before I submit to a whipping like an errant serf. But he said nothing. He was, after all, a good, professional soldier and he knew when to hold his tongue.
There was little need for rape: as we marched through Normandy, women seemed to appear from nowhere and attach themselves to our column, like bees attracted to a honey-pot. Some were whores looking for rich pickings, and some were fairly virtuous women who were looking for adventure and who believed that by attaching themselves to a strapping young man-at-arms they would see the world. And, as they made no complaints to Robin, he did not need to enforce his discipline. One extraordinary creature caught my eye, though not for the reasons you might expect a young man to find a woman interesting. She was a very tall woman of about thirty or more years, extremely thin with long hands and feet. She dressed in a long, dirty green robe that covered her from shoulder to ankle and she seemed to have no breasts or womanly curves at all. Her hair, though, was a magnificent explosion of tangled white locks, which stood out straight from her scalp. She resembled nothing so much as a dandelion about to shed its seeds. And her name was Elise.
‘Read your fortune, master?’ she called to me in camp one evening as I was replacing a broken strap on Ghost’s saddle-rig. Amused, I allowed her to look at my right palm.
‘I see great love in your future,’ Elise said, peering up into my face. I nodded indulgently: it was a fairly standard, almost obligatory prediction for a young man. She went on: ‘And I see great pain. You will think you are strong in your love; that your love is a castle that cannot be broken, but you are not as strong as you believe. And you will betray your love with the sight of your eyes. Love comes in by the eyes — and leaves the same way. On that day; you will wish you were blind, for your sight will have killed all the love in your heart.’
I snatched my hand away. It was all nonsense, of course, but it sounded suspiciously like a curse. And, to be truthful, these women who claim to have second sight make me uneasy; some of them have real power given to them by the Devil, so it does not do to cross them.
‘You do not like my prophecy,’ she said, looking at me curiously. ‘Very well, I will give you another: you will die an old man, in your own bed, at your own hearth.’ It was a standard piece of nonsense, given out to many a fighting man to gain favour, I assumed, and thought no more about it. I merely smiled, gave her a farthing and told her to be off.
But Elise stayed with our column; she rarely spoke to me, and I avoided her, but she became, I noticed, the leader and spokeswoman of the women who had joined our pilgrimage. Robin saw that she kept the peace between the women, who before she had joined us often argued like cats and dogs, and he did not care that she made a few coppers here and there telling stories and reading palms; he reckoned her harmless and tolerated her presence, and the presence of the other women, on the march.
But two weeks into our journey across France, Robin was forced to show his steel. Will Scarlet was exposed by Sir James de Brus as a thief. And worse, he had stolen from a church. It was sheer weakness of character: Will had always been an accomplished pick-pocket and lock-breaker, as a boy outlaw he had been known as ‘scoff-lock’ because of the contempt with which he treated the big iron devices that rich men used to secure their money chests. With the right tools he could have any lock opened as fast as a whore’s legs. But he was not an outlaw any more, he was a holy soldier of Christ, a pilgrim, and Robin was ready to make this point clear with brutal force.
Will had been in charge of a patrol of twenty mounted men-at-arms, a conroi as these squadrons are called, but I knew he had been having trouble getting the men to obey him. He was younger than most of the troopers, and if the truth be told, while he was a gifted thief, he was not a gifted soldier. He did not even ride very well. It seems that the men had come across an empty church while on forward patrol and they had egged Will on to pick the lock of the coffer where the church’s silver was kept. It was a foolish thing to do a mere week after Robin’s edict, particularly since his own men had later turned traitor and informed on him to Sir James. But I imagine that Will wanted to show the men under his command that there was something he could do well.
Actually, I blamed Robin. Will Scarlet was not the man to lead a conroi of twenty tough, salty cavalrymen and Robin should have known that. The young red-head — he was my age, fifteen summers — had been given the command as a reward for serving Robin loyally during the outlaw years. But Will was a fool, too: firstly, he had trusted his men to stay silent about their crime; and he had thought that by playing the good fellow with them he would gain their respect; lastly, he had relied on his long relationship with Robin to protect him. He was wrong on all three counts.
He was roughly stripped to his braies and hose and lashed to a tree in a peaceful woodland clearing and, while Sir James, Robin and Will’s conroi looked on, Little John cut his naked back to ribbons with a horsewhip. Although they were old friends, Little John laid on with fury — he was not overly concerned about a theft from the church, but he did not like Robin’s orders to be flouted.
Will screamed from the first blow, which echoed like a meaty slap around the clearing, and by the time Little John had reached the allotted number of twenty lashes, and the blood was running thickly down his ripped white back and soaking into his braies, Will was mercifully unconscious.
The boy was cut down, and tended to by the strange woman Elise, who gently washed his back free of blood, then smeared it with a goose fat salve and bandaged it with clean linen, and the whole column was given a day of rest. Before Will’s conroi were allowed to disperse, Robin spoke to them: ‘You are disgraced,’ he said coldly, his eyes glinting like cold metal in the morning sunshine. ‘Not only did you steal from a church, against my express orders, but you also betrayed your captain — which is a far worse crime, to my mind. I should hang every man jack of you.’ The men-at-arms were looking at the ground, fiddling with their bridles and the manes of their horses, their shame written clear on their faces. ‘But I will not do that.’ There was a collective exhalation of breath, audible where I was sitting on Ghost across the clearing. ‘Instead,’ Robin continued, ‘I have decided that, as a conroi, you are disbanded. This unit is no longer part of my force. Any man who wishes to leave, may return his horse, saddle and weapons to John Nailor and depart this company, immediately, on foot, never to return. The men who wish to stay, Sir James will allocate to a new conroi; if the officer will take traitorous curs such as you. You are dismissed.’
And he turned his back on them and rode away.
The men of the disgraced conroi, some of whom looked mightily relieved, were divided between the other squadrons; but I was interested to see that not a man elected to leave the army. I was glad, too, that Robin had shown mercy — but a part of me suspected that my master knew that he could not afford to sacrifice so many men over what was, in truth, a fairly trivial affair.
Will recovered swiftly and with in two days he was back in the saddle, as an ordinary trooper, of course. He bore his hurts without complaint, but seemed strangely quiet, never speaking unless it was absolutely necessary. The episode left a slightly bad taste in all our mouths, but it was soon forgotten in a fresh crisis — a week later somebody tried to murder the Earl of Locksley.
On the march through France and Burgundy to Lyon, we avoided castles and towns, partly to keep the men away from temptation, and partly because, as we had found in England, a large group of heavily armed men is seldom given a warm welcome in any settlement. So every afternoon, our scouts guided us into the camping ground for the night, usually a large field near a stream, or a piece of common ground. Occasionally we would descend on an isolated farm, where Reuben would silence the protests of the farmer with a gift of silver, and we would pack ourselves into the outbuildings where we were guaranteed a dry night. But most of the time we pitched tents, twenty men to each one, and cooked on great communal fires. Robin had his own tent, which a couple of the archers would set up for him every night. Robin had the tent to himself but, until he retired, it was the hub around which the whole camp revolved. His officers, and even some of the men, those who had known him since their outlaw days, felt free to come in and out of the tent almost at will. It was only when he retired for the night, usually long past midnight, that he had the space to himself.
One night, we were somewhere near the great city of Tours, after I had been trying out a new canso on my master, I saw that he was tired and, picking up my vielle and bow, I left him to his rest. I laced the tent flaps shut behind me and had taken no more than two steps away towards my own tent, when I heard a sharp cry of pain, followed by a series of crashes and metallic bangs, exactly as if someone was sword fighting inside the tent. Not bothering with the tent flap, I plunged my poniard through the canvas and ripped a great hole in and then I ducked into the tent, blades in both fists.
The candle was still lit and I could see Robin, shirt-less, sitting on the edge of his sleeping pallet, drawn sword on the floor below him, clutching his bare lower arm, and cursing quietly under his breath. The tent’s meagre furniture looked as if it had been hacked apart and in the centre of the floor was a thin jet-black snake, originally more than two or three foot long, an adder I assumed, that had been hacked into three bloody pieces.
‘Get Reuben,’ Robin croaked. His right arm was turning an angry red colour and it was beginning to swell.
‘Are you all right,’ I asked stupidly.
‘No, I’m not… go… get Reuben… fast,’ Robin could hardly speak for the pain, and I cursed myself for hesitating and rushed out of the tent. In less than thirty heartbeats I had Reuben, hair tousled from sleep, eyes gummy, kneeling beside Robin and examining two swollen puncture wounds on the outside of Robin’s right forearm. Then Reuben had a knife in his hands — as usual I didn’t see where it came from — and he was cutting a strip from Robin’s shirt and tying it around the Earl’s upper arm above the elbow. Then he gently pushed Robin down on to the pallet and tied his wounded arm loosely to one of the struts that supported his bed. Now, with Robin lying white-faced on the pallet, his right arm tied below him, Reuben began very gently to sponge the puncture wounds with diluted wine.
‘Are you going to cut the wound and suck out the poison?’ I asked Reuben, perhaps a little ghoulishly. An old outlaw had told me once that this was the only way to prevent death after a snakebite. He joked that the only problem with this infallible cure was that if you got bitten on the arse, nobody would volunteer to save you.
‘Of course not,’ snapped Reuben. ‘What a ridiculous idea! He’s already been wounded, should I make the wound larger and spread the poison around in a bigger cut? And I certainly don’t want any of that venom in my mouth. Just bring me some bandages, Alan, and hold your silly tongue.’
At that moment, Robin rolled over on to his side and vomited copiously over the edge of the bed, only narrowly missing the arm that Reuben was so tenderly washing. I retreated to fetch clean bandages, and some holy water, hurriedly blessed by Father Simon, for Robin to drink.
When I returned, Robin was unconscious. His face was white, but sweating heavily, his arm purple-red and hugely swollen below the tourniquet. Reuben was sitting beside him on a stool, calmly drinking a beaker of wine.
‘Will he live?’ I asked Reuben, trying hard to keep the tremor out of my voice.
‘I expect so,’ said Reuben. ‘Although he will doubtless be ill for some days. He’s young and strong and, while adders do kill people, it is usually the old, the very young and the weak who die from their bite. A more interesting question is: how did the adder get into his bed?’
‘Could it have crawled there to hide from people, or perhaps to sleep?’ I suggested, and I already knew the answer before Reuben supplied it.
‘No wild serpent is going to voluntarily enter a camp full of hundreds of men, dodge all those pairs of booted feet and decide to take a nap in a bed two feet off the floor,’ Reuben said scathingly. ‘Someone put it there. The question is who?’
It was a question we pondered fruitlessly over the next few days. Clearly it had been an assassination attempt, if a clumsy one, but who could have been responsible? Was it another archer trying to claim Ralph Murdac’s hundred pounds of silver? Almost everyone in the camp had access to Robin’s tent, and people were in and out every day. It would have been relatively easy to slip a sleepy adder from a bag into Robin’s blankets with nobody the wiser.
I posted two men-at-arms outside his tent every night from then onwards. And kept an eye on them to make sure that they didn’t sleep. I also told them that Little John would have then flayed alive if another assassin got past them, which was quite unnecessary as the whole camp was outraged by the cowardly attempt on Robin’s life, and a murderer, once unmasked, would have been hacked to death in moments by a mob.
Little John had taken command, and we didn’t let Robin’s unconscious state affect the march. He was merely strapped to his pallet each morning with stout leather belts and carried by four strong archers in the centre of our column. For the first day, when he merely lay there, whey-faced, wounded arm bandaged, I had the powerful illusion that he was dead, and we were carrying his bier in a ceremonial procession. I felt an unexpectedly powerful stab of grief, a physical ache in my chest, before I told myself sternly to pull myself together. Gradually Robin improved, and after two days the swelling in his arm began to subside.
When we reached the outskirts of Lyon, Robin had regained his senses but was still as weak as a kitten. He insisted on mounting a horse, though, and looking like a three-day-old corpse he rode up and down the length of the column to show the men that he was fit and well. They cheered him, God bless them, and Robin just managed to lift his sword with his bandaged arm to return the salute.
As we marched down the Saone Valley towards the city of Lyon, just inside the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, it became clear that we were not the first large force to have passed that way in recent weeks. King Richard and King Philip had joined their vast forces at Vezelay, a hundred and twenty miles to the north in Burgundy, a few weeks ago and had marched the grand army down to Lyon, in a magnificent parade of their joint strength. The road was dusty and worn down; the grass verges had been stamped flat and were littered with the detritus of a passing multitude: broken clay cups, bones and scraps of food, abandoned boots, hoods, old rags, even a few good blankets had been tossed aside as the mighty host had flowed past.
And then, one day, we came over a rise and I looked down at the largest assembly of souls I had ever seen. I stood breathless; stunned that there could be so many people in the whole world, and all crammed into such a small area of land. Between the arms of the rivers Saone and the mighty Rhone was massed the chivalry of Western Europe; more than twenty thousand souls, the population of a large city, was encamped there in a gigantic heaving sprawl of gaudy tents, glinting steel, mud and humming humanity that stretched almost as far as the eye could see. Horse lines, fluttering pennants, burnished shields, rough buildings of turf and wood, bright striped pavilions for the knights, blacksmiths in canvas tents beating out helmets, barbers pulling teeth, squires bustling about their duties, heralds in particoloured tunics announcing their lords with a brave squeal of brass. At the edge of the field a horse race was in progress, watched by ladies and gentlemen in their finest clothes. Knights in full armour practiced combat with each other, men-at-arms sat drinking outside makeshift taverns in the summer sunshine, whores paraded about in their finery seeking trade, priests preached to gatherings of the faithful, mendicant friars in brown robes begged alms for the poor, dogs barked, beggars whined, children played tig around wigwams of stacked lances…
We were in the presence of the greatest, most powerful army the world had ever seen. Surely, with this vast assembled might, Saladin and his Saracen army of infidels was doomed and Jerusalem, the blessed site of Christ’s Passion, would soon once again be safe in Christian hands.