The Messina strait was a sheet of pure dark blue water, only wrinkled by a few petulant white-capped waves. I had been told by the sailors that in ancient times, it was home of two monsters called Scylla and Charybdis, but they were full of such ridiculous tales, as I had discovered over the past few weeks, and it seemed altogether too harmless a stretch of water for such an evil reputation. The late September sun smiled down with a friendly warmth, the sky was untroubled by a single cloud, and a fair wind pushed our massive fleet of ships swiftly across the channel between the scuffed toe of Italy and the golden island of Sicily — the rich land of oranges, lemons and grain and sugar cane, of Norman kings and Greek merchants, of Saracen traders and Jewish money-lenders, of Latin priests and Orthodox monks living side by side in a colourful mix of creeds and races. Sicily was where the fabulous East began, and it had been chosen by our sovereign lords as the launching off point of our great and noble expedition.
King Richard’s mighty force — more than ten thousand soldiers and seamen, with more men expected to join him in the coming weeks — was packed into an armada of more than a hundred and thirty great sea-going ships. There were scores of big, lumbering busses — great fat-bellied craft used for transporting bulky stores, some fitted with special berths for the war horses; dozens of smaller cogs that carried men-at-arms and their mountains of equipment; swift galleys packed with knights, with ranks of chained Muslim slaves at the oars; there were flat-bottomed boats that could be used for landing men and horses directly on to beaches, and snacks, or snake boats as they were sometimes called, the slim, elegant descendants of the Viking longships; and a host of smaller fry, fast with low, triangular sails, which zipped between the large craft and communicated the King’s commands to the fleet. The whole sea-bome pack of us, perhaps the greatest force ever assembled, was advancing in one great colourful, cacophonous swarm towards the ancient harbour of Messina. Pennants were flying from every masthead, trumpets and clarions blared, and drums beat out the time for the slaves at the galley’s oars. It must have been a daunting sight for the thousands of local people who lined the Sicilian shore to watch our approach.
The city of Messina was laid out on the coast roughly on a north-south axis and we approached it from the sea to the east. The famous harbour, the source of Messina’s wealth, lay snug inside a curled peninsula at the southern end of the city, where it gave precious protection to the shipping from the winter storms. As we turned south to begin our approach towards the harbour’s narrow mouth, I looked west and saw the great stone palace of Messina, one of the residences of Tancred, the Norman King of Sicily, where Philip of France and a handful of his knights, at Tancred’s gracious request, had set up their headquarters a week before. My heart gave a little skip of excitement as I saw the royal lilies of France on the banners fluttering over its battlements. The palace lay on the edge of the city, slightly to the north of the great Latin cathedral of Messina, blessed by the Virgin herself in a famous letter, with its tall square stone tower and long, high nave.
Beyond the palace and the cathedral, higher up the slope and slightly to the south, was the Greek monastery of San Salvatore, low but stoutly walled and with a fine reputation for producing illuminated copies of great and rare books. The old town of Messina, the kernel from which the city had grown, lay to the south of the palace, the cathedral and the monastery. Curved around the harbour but set slightly back from the water’s edge, it was surrounded by strong stone ramparts, pierced by several gates and defended by many towers — but it looked prosperous rather than formidable. It contained many large houses, some two or even three storeys high, and at least half a dozen well-maintained churches in both the Greek and Latin styles. Its merchants had a reputation for being rich but frugal and its women were said to be both beautiful and lecherous — but woe betide any man who dishonoured them, for their fathers and husbands were as vengeful as scorpions. Three stout wooden gates opened out from the town wall on to jetties that ran out into the harbour, so that rich, exotic goods could be unloaded and easily transported into the safety of the warehouses in the old town itself. Beyond the sprawl of the city of Messina, high in the west soared the grey mountains of Sicily, brooding like a gathering of huge, disapproving churchmen over our triumphant arrival.
As we swept through the narrow mouth of the bay and into the harbour, I was standing at the prow of the Santa Maria, an ancient sixty-foot cog with a single square sail that had been my home for the past six weeks. It was also home to forty-seven tired, wet, seasick archers, a dozen crew, and a scattering of the soldiers’ women — all of us crammed as tight as an egg into the little ship so that there was no space anywhere to lie down at full stretch.
I knew every inch of the old Santa Maria — from her sharp beaky prow and leaky clinker-built wooden sides, to the round stem with its long, scarred steering oar tended by her craggy master Joachim — and I was thoroughly sick of her. I could not wait to disembark in Messina and end this stage of a seemingly interminable, tedious and uncomfortable journey.
After a week of feasting, and jesting and resting our tired bodies in Lyons, and many conferences between Robin and King Richard, to which I had not, of course, been privy, Robin’s force had set off again southwards with the rest of the King’s army. King Philip and the French host, which was less than one third the size of Richard’s force, had marched east to take ship with the Genoese merchants in their fine city. The two armies were to rendezvous in Sicily and proceed from there to the Holy Land. Under King Richard’s personal command, his huge force — Englishmen, Welshmen, Normans, as well as Angevins, Poitevins, Gascons and men from Maine and Limoges — had marched south along the valley of the Rhone to Marseilles. We sang as we marched and were cheered by Provencal villagers, who lined the roads to throw flowers at us and watch our great, slow-moving procession. We waited another week at Marseilles, for the King’s ships and yet more knights and men-at-arms to arrive, as a goodly number had travelled via the long route from England by sea. But on the eighth day news reached us, carried by local fishermen, that the grand fleet had been delayed in Portugal. The men-at-arms had run riot in Lisbon, killing Jews, Muslims and Christians and had sacked the city in a three-day orgy of destruction. The word ‘York’ leapt into my mind.
King Richard was furious. The shouting from his royal apartments in Marseilles, the commandeered inn of a local nobleman, could be clearly heard fifty paces down the street. And ever the impatient man, Richard immediately hired, borrowed or bought every ship he could lay his hands on in Marseilles and the neighbouring ports, and dispatched one half of his force, under the command of Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Ranulf Glanville, the former Justiciar of England, directly to the Holy Land. Their task was to relieve the Christian forces there, which, we had heard, were engaged in a desperate struggle against the Saracens at the great fortified port of Acre.
The rest of Robin’s army, with myself and forty-eight archers berthed in the Santa Maria, began a leisurely crawl eastwards along the coast, round the gulf of Genoa and down the Italian seaboard. We were deliberately travelling slowly, stopping each evening to weigh anchor in a convenient bay and scare up supplies and fresh water, dawdling and waiting for the main fleet to come round the Spanish peninsula and catch us up. I had suffered terribly at first from seasickness, as had almost all the archers, and the beginning of the voyage had been accompanied by the sound of dozens of big men taking it in turns to retch over the side, when they were not lying moaning and praying in the bottom of the ship. When it rained, we were soaked to the skin, when the sun shone, which was most days, we burnt in the strong unfamiliar Mediterranean light. The food was execrable, casks of salted pork most of which had already gone rotten, mouldy cheese, make-shift bread of flour and water cooked like pancakes on a griddle, sour ale, and wine that tasted salty. And the smell was appalling: the constant stink of unwashed men, of damp salt-rotted clothes, of black and evil bilge water, wafts of rotting fish from the store rooms in the stem, and the occasional whiff from the faeces that streaked the outer sides of the cog where the archers did their latrine business. I soon began to long for the sun to sink, just for the chance to get off the damned ship and stretch my legs on God’s good, clean, dry unmoving land.
Going ashore was dangerous, though. One of our men was murdered by villagers near Livomo: they caught him alone near a farmstead and, being suspicious peasant folk, they accused him of being a thief and beat him to death with sticks and stones. The King would not allow us to take revenge and Robin, unfairly I thought, rebuked me for allowing one of his men to wander off alone.
At Salerno, where we tarried for several days, we finally had good news. The main fleet had reached Marseilles, it had refitted for one week and was now fast approaching Messina. We set out from Salerno with our hearts high, and as the fast spy boats reported sighting the main fleet, cheering burst spontaneously from all our lips. We were united with all our strength, and I assumed that after a quick stop at Messina for fresh food and water we would be heading on to the Holy Land. I hugged myself. I might even, I thought, with God’s good grace, celebrate Mass this Christmas in Jerusalem. As it turned out, I could not have been more wrong.
It took the best part of two days for the whole fleet to disembark at Messina and for King Richard’s quartermasters to allocate accommodation for fifteen thousand men. King Richard was determined to make his presence felt on the island and almost immediately after landing he occupied the monastery of San Salvatore, claiming it as his main headquarters and as the store dump for his vast army. The bewildered Greek monks were removed kindly but firmly by the King’s household knights, and the place began to fill with bundles and boxes and stacks of weapons and the cries of large confident men.
Robin’s troops were allocated a large field to the north of the palace as a campsite, close to the rocky shoreline, where there was a convenient stream for drinking water and washing. We pitched our tents and dried our salt-wet clothes as best we could, spreading them out on bushes and scrubby olive trees; we oiled our weapons, shaved for the first time in weeks, and washed the salt from our long hair. Some of the men wandered down to the old town to buy bread and cheese and olives and fruit, some went in search of women, some killed the time gambling, drinking and sleeping while we all waited for orders. It was the last week in September and a disconcerting rumour had began to circulate among the men: we had missed the sailing season; there was no way our fleet could safely make it across the stormy Mediterranean this side of spring. So there would be no Christmas in Jerusalem this year.
Our camping field began to change overnight — timber was cut and hauled in and the men began throwing up more permanent shelters than our thin canvas tents: huts with walls of woven branches, plastered with mud, roofed with turf or double layers of canvas which had been smeared with oil and wax; lean-to shelters and even small cottages with straw-thatched roofs and wooden plank walls. In less than a week, our field began to look like a village, and the same was happening all over the area to the north of Messina, where along the shore line other contingents of the army were making their temporary homes more weather-proof. Firewood was in short supply, and the men soon had to travel miles up the steep slopes of the mountains to find even a small bundle of sticks to cook their pottage. As the first autumn rain lashed down, the mood in the camp began to change: the shopkeepers in the old town had doubled the price of bread and wine, much to the anger of the men; dried fish now sold for a shilling a pound, an outrageous price; even fresh fish became scarce as so many men were trying their luck with baited lines from the ships in the harbour. There was little to do, although John did organise battle practice at least once a day for his spearmen, the archers set up butts to shoot at and Sir James took his cavalry out each morning for a couple of hours of exercise in the mountains. But most of the time the men were idle and spent the days foraging for food or firewood or gambling in the old town. Three men were flogged on Little John’s orders for brawling in the old town. There were two fatal fights between Robin’s soldiers and local men over dice before the beginning of October. Reports of men being insulted or even robbed by the locals were common.
I was lucky: Robin had taken over one part of the monastery of San Salvatore, and William and I were soon snug in a monk’s cell, myself sleeping on a stone ledge padded with cloaks and a wool-filled paliasse, William on a pile of straw on the floor. Little John, Owain and Sir James de Brus had similar accommodation in the cells next to mine, and each had been allocated a soldier-servant to look after them. Reuben had taken up residence in the old town. He knew of some Jews who lived there, merchants of some sort, and he had wangled an invitation to stay with them. I believe he had the most comfortable lodgings of all of us. Although, Robin had a proper chamber to himself in the monastery, with a fire to warm the cold stone, a small bed and a big table where his officers would meet to eat and discuss our plans. And I saw to it that he always had at least two men-at-arms keeping an eye on him at all times — whoever had tried to kill him with the adder in Burgundy might well try again.
To be honest, like most of the men, I was very bored. I practiced weapons skills with Little John every day — he was teaching me the finer points of the flanged mace — and attended as many services in Messina’s beautiful cathedral as I could. I was bitterly disappointed that we were to stay in Sicily all winter. And I had a nagging feeling that I was not worthy to set foot on the holy soil where Jesus Christ had walked, that I was too mired in sin, and that God was delaying my arrival in Outremer until I had fully repented of my transgressions and cleansed my soul. The weight of the souls of the Christians I had killed at York hung heavily upon me. But I could also sometimes hear my empty promise of salvation to Ruth echoing in my ears at night, mocking my failure to keep my word. So every morning at before dawn I would rise and attend Matins in the cathedral and every evening before I slept I attended Compline, and I went to as many services in between as I could. But, despite the ethereal beauty of the cathedral, its glorious coloured-glass windows, and its exquisite golden paintings of the Christ child and his mother on the walls, which I gazed at in humble devotion, nothing seemed to shift my deep feelings of guilt. I prayed for long, uncomfortable hours on my knees in front of the great altar, asking the Virgin for forgiveness, but still I could not shake the bad thoughts from my head. I wished Tuck were with us; he would have eased my conscience, of that I was certain.
‘God’s great fat oozing haemorrhoids! What you need is a good fight,’ said Little John, when I complained about my mood to him one afternoon. ‘Or a good fuck. Sort you out in no time.’ But the prospect of either seemed very remote.
And then, in the midst of all this gloom and guilt, King Richard decreed that he would host a day of joy and music in honour of his royal cousin Philip of France — they were not getting on at all well, so the scuttle-butt went, and this was an attempt to mend fences — and, Robin told me, I was to perform in front of two kings in the fragrant herb garden at the back of the monastery, if the weather was kind. He took me aside one drizzly morning under a covered walkway where the monks had once met for chapter and told me about the musical event and my part in it. ‘Stick to the loveydovey stuff, and maybe something traditional; nothing at all political — we are supposed to be soothing Philip’s feathers, not ruffling them,’ he said. Before I could protest at his calling my beautiful, finely wrought cansos ‘loveydovey stuff’, he shocked me into silence with his next words. ‘And, by the way, Sir Richard Malbete is here, with our lord King Richard. He arrived last night from Marseilles.’
I goggled at him. The Evil Beast was here, in Messina, with the King? ‘He was in dire disgrace after the blood-bath in York,’ continued Robin. ‘The King did not take kindly to his Jews being killed. I’m told he was really quite upset; he relies on them to lend him money for his military adventures.’ He smiled at me a in a lop-sided way. This was Robin’s financial position, too, in a nutshell. ‘So Malbete lost his lands in the North and has come on this Great Pilgrimage as a penance,’ Robin grinned at me, and then said jokingly, ‘Under your Christian logic, to cleanse his soul from the foul sin of killing Jews, Malbete must kill an equal number of Saracens.’
I frowned. I did not like it when Robin was disrespectful about the True Religion or our great mission to save the Holy Land. Robin ignored my sour look and went on: ‘Our story is that you and I were never in York, never in the Tower, and we never cut our way through a crowd of men-at-arms to get free and clear. That, if it ever happened — and it does sound far-fetched, doesn’t it? — was done by some other men. Not us. Understand?’
‘You declared your rank to the men-at-arms,’ I pointed out.
‘An impostor,’ said Robin briskly. ‘A wily Jew who wanted to save his skin by pretending to be the famous Earl of Locksley. Tell me that you understand?’
I understood. Robin did not want himself to be associated this catastrophe; he did not want to explain why he was there, or to admit that he had killed Christian townsmen in defence of Jews. Mostly, I felt he was embarrassed; it was not a glorious episode for anyone. But that was fine with me. I would be perfectly content never to think or speak of those bloody few days again. ‘What about Reuben?’ I asked. ‘When Reuben finds out Malbete is here, he will cut his living heart out.’
‘Yes, I thought of that. So I told Reuben myself that Malbete was now with the King and I promised him that, if he let the evil bastard live until we got to the Holy Land, I’d help him quietly kill him myself. I said you’d probably want to pitch in, too.’
I nodded; I’d gladly help send Malbete’s soul to join his master the Devil. ‘But why wait?’ I asked. ‘Why not just kill him now?’
He looked for a moment as if he wasn’t going to answer me, and then he seemed to come to a decision. ‘Two reasons, Alan. And this is not to be repeated. I am in deadly earnest, you are not to breathe a word of this, all right? Firstly, I don’t want to disturb calm waters just now. If the King’s knights start killing each other, even if we managed a discreet, tidy little murder, it could tear this expedition apart — it’s bad enough that Richard’s hardly speaking to Philip — and while I couldn’t care less which bunch of religious fanatics flies their flag above Jerusalem, I do want this campaign to succeed for reasons of my own. Which leads me to the second point. If it went wrong, I wouldn’t want Reuben hanged for murder in Sicily — King Richard has vowed that he will speedily execute any man who takes the life of another pilgrim; and Malbete, curse him, is a pilgrim. I need
… I need Reuben to help me do something in Outremer, and only he can help me do it. No, Alan, I’m not going to tell you what it is yet, and please don’t ask me. I’ll tell you more about it nearer the time.’
I was not the only trouvere to accompany the army to the Holy Land. In fact, there were quite a few of us and we had begun to gather in the evenings for wine and conviviality in a tavern in the old town of Messina where we would tell stories and play each other bits of our new compositions. I was especially fond of Ambroise, a jolly little soul, almost as wide as he was tall, with great beaming cheeks, sparkling black eyes like a bird’s and, when he chose to exercise it, a ferocious wit. He was a Norman from Evrecy, near Caen, a minor vassal of King Richard’s and, as well as composing music for his lord’s entertainment, he told me he was writing a history of the holy war. I first came across him at the edge of the crowded harbour, bent over a slate that he was scratching at with a piece of chalk. ‘What rhymes with “full dock”?’ he asked me suddenly, twisting his fat neck round to look at me. I had not realised he knew I was there. I replied without thinking: ‘Bull’s cock.’ He laughed, his whole little round body shaking with mirth, and he wheezed: ‘I admire the way your dirty mind works, but I don’t think that’s an appropriate phrase for a poem in praise of our King’s glorious arrival in Messina. You’re Alan, the Earl of Locksley’s trouvere, aren’t you? I’ve heard people say you are pretty good, for a youngster. I am Ambroise, the King’s man. Part-poet, part-singer, part-historian — but all gourmand,’ and he slapped his ample belly and laughed again.
We were firm friends from that day onwards.
In fact, our arrival in Messina had not been as uniformly glorious as Ambroise or the King might have hoped. The local population was a mixed crew: mainly Greeks, with a sprinkling of Italians, a few Jews and even some Arabs — and they all hated us. When we had arrived at the harbour there had been some booing and jeering from the crowd, audible even over the blare of the trumpets, even a few pieces of rotten fruit thrown. Fists were shaken, and King Richard had been extremely angry, white-faced, his blue eyes seeming to spark with fury. He had wanted to put on a show of his power and majesty and had assumed that his Sicilian audience — quickly dubbed the Messy Nessies by Little John — would be suitably awed. They were not. They seemed to regard us as something between an army of occupation, and a crowd of foreign bumpkins who could be robbed and insulted at will. The feelings of dislike, I have to say, were entirely mutual: we referred to the Greeks dismissively as ‘Griffons’, and the Italians as ‘Lombards’; the Arabs, many of them slaves, we ignored as beneath our Christian contempt.
Ambroise had the honour of beginning the musical festivities on a bright October morning in the herb garden of the monastery of San Salvatore. The weather had cleared and it was a half-warm sunny day, the sky a pale blue but streaked with woolly clouds. He opened with a simple and supposedly melancholic song of a knight who is bemoaning the departure of his mistress. It was hardly an original theme. Actually, as my friend is long dead now, I can admit to myself that Ambroise was not an enormously gifted trouvere. God rest his jolly soul. He had a fine voice, it is true, but his musical compositions were rarely inspiring. And, occasionally, I even suspected him of appropriating other men’s ideas. He admitted to me once that he found all the conventions of troubadour-style music-making, with its focus on unrequited love, a tremendous bore. What interested him most was poetry, specifically epic poetry that recorded dramatic events. He was talking once again about his history of the Great Pilgrimage, something he would bang on and on about when he was in his cups in The Lamb, our favourite watering hole in the old town.
If I remember correctly, Ambroise’s song began: Farewell my joy,
And welcome pain,
Till I see my lady again…
Grim, I think you’ll agree. And it was quite difficult to imagine rotund little Ambroise as a heart-sick swain, as he described himself later in the piece, unable to eat or drink for love of his departed lady. But perhaps I am wrong: I’m ashamed to say that I paid scant attention to my friend’s turgid verses and spent the time studying his audience instead. King Richard sat in the place of most honour, next to his royal French guest. Richard was a tall man, well-muscled and strong, although with a slight quiver to his hands when he was nervous or excited. At the age of thirty-three he was in his prime. His red-gold hair was truly regal, it glinted and sparkled in the brisk morning light; his complexion was fair and slightly sunburned, and his honest blue gaze was unflinching. His reputation as a warrior was second to none, and it was said that he loved nothing more than a good, bloody fight. Richard was what Tuck would have called a ‘hot’ man, whose anger was always near the surface, and who, when riled, was a fearsome sight. Beside him, the French King, Philip Augustus, was as different as chalk from cheese. He was a sallow, dark fellow; thin, even frail looking with large luminous eyes and, at twenty-five, the bowed back of a much older man. Tuck would have called him a ‘cold’ man, hiding his true feelings behind a wall of ice. Richard and Philip had been great friends in their youth, some even said that the young Richard had been infatuated with Philip, but it was clear in the way that they held their bodies, seated on cushioned chairs in the sweet-smelling herb garden, that there was very little love now between the two Kings. Also present were Robin and several of King Richard’s other senior commanders, including Robert of Thurnham, a knight I had met last year at Winchester and who had helped me then to escape the clutches of Ralph Murdac. He was now a very important man, Richard’s high admiral no less, and I had not had time to renew our acquaintance beyond a brief smile and nod.
Seated next to Sir Robert was Sir Richard Malbete. The Evil Beast had a fresh pink scar all down the right side of his face, I noticed with great satisfaction, but other than that he seemed regrettably unchanged. His white forelock and splintered feral eyes were exactly as I remembered them, but it seemed that he did not remember me at all as, when our eyes met briefly, his blank animal gaze showed no flicker of recognition. I felt it would be unwise to stare so I looked away quickly.
There were also a handful of French knights present at the gathering, a gaggle of local prelates, and the governors of Messina, appointed by King Tancred, two creatures who called themselves Margarit and Jordan del Pin, a pair of nervous, shifty looking knights, richly dressed but who said little and watched the two kings unceasingly with dark, worried little eyes.
The governors had good reason to be nervous; Richard and Tancred were involved in a vicious dispute over money. I never completely understood the complexities of it, but it seemed that Tancred’s predecessor had promised Richard’s predecessor a large sum of money to support the great expedition to the Holy Land. Both were now dead, but Richard was insisting that Tancred make good old King William’s promise. Then there was the matter of Richard’s sister Joanna: she had been married to William and when he died, and Tancred became king, she should have been given a large sum of money, a dower, and allowed to live as she chose. Instead, Tancred had withheld the money and kept her in close confinement, virtually a prisoner. When Richard and his huge army arrived in Sicily, Tancred took fright, released Joanna, and sent her with a smaller sum of money to Richard. She was now lodged securely in great comfort across the Messina straits at the monastery of Bagnara on the mainland. Richard was still demanding the rest of the cash from Tancred and, with fifteen thousand men at his back, and yet more on the way, he made a very compelling argument. Some people have suggested — Robin for one, but that was how his mind always worked — that Richard’s bloody actions in the next few hours were merely a move in the chess game between himself and Tancred, with an eye to forcing the King of Sicily to pay up.
As the notes of Ambroise’s song faded away, and the courtiers smattered their applause, a small cloud covered the sun, and I could feel the true chill of October in the air. I got to my feet, picked up my instrument, and bowed low to the two kings — it had been arranged that I should perform next. As Robin had suggested, I stuck to the traditional: rendering the classic tragic poem of Tristan and Isolde quite exquisitely, I think, accompanying myself on the vielle with a simple but elegant tune I had devised that morning. You will think it merely the boasting of an old man, but I swear to you that I saw genuine tears in King Richard’s eyes as I bowed the last haunting chord.
The next performer was an old friend of King Richard’s: a grizzled warrior of fifty years, much hated by the other courtiers, and known as Bertran de Born, viscount of Hautefort, who had a reputation for raping his female servants and stirring up trouble between the great princes of Europe whenever he got the chance. He got up and launched into a long unaccompanied song in praise of warfare, all axes clashing and shields splintering, broken heads and pierced bodies, which ended
… ‘Go speedily to Yea-and-nay, and tell him there is too much peace about.’ In fact, the poem was rather good, a bit old fashioned but darkly funny and very stirring; and much as I disapproved of the old man’s trouble-making reputation, I could not fault his music.
‘Yea-and-nay’ was Bertran’s nickname for King Richard, something to do with his supposed indecisive-ness as a youth, which our sovereign lord seemed not to mind at all — but then they had known each other for a very long time. Afterwards, I did wondered if Richard and Bertran had secretly been in collusion because the moment his poem was done, a knight burst into the garden and, without the slightest ceremony, blurted: ‘The Griffons are rioting; and they are attacking Hugh de Lusignan!’
Hugh was one of the barons of Aquitaine, a vassal of King Richard’s and a member of a powerful family that included one of the claimants to the throne of Jerusalem. Hugh had, perhaps unwisely, taken up a comfortable residence in the old town of Messina despite the fact that tension between the pilgrims and the locals was running so high.
‘What!’ roared the King, leaping to his feet. To give him due credit, he did sound quite genuine in his anger.
‘Sire,’ said the messenger, ‘there has been trouble all morning, great insolence from the Sicilians, our men-at-arms pelted with stones. Then fighting broke out and now a large force of armed Griffons has surrounded Lusignan’s house and seems determined to break in and do murder.’
‘By God’s legs, that is enough,’ said the King. ‘To arms, gentlemen, to arms! We will teach these riotous dogs some respect for Christ’s holy pilgrims.’
He beckoned Robin, Robert of Thumham, Richard Malbete and the other knights. ‘There is no time to waste,’ he said. ‘Arm yourselves and gather what men you can. We will take this town in the time it takes for a priest to say Matins. Do not tarry: to arms! And may God preserve us all.’
The King then strode over to where Philip was still sitting, surrounded by his French knights. ‘Cousin, will you join me in subduing these insolent curs?’ Philip’s expression was blank. I could tell he was furious from his clenched jaw muscles — perhaps he too suspected that Richard was stage-managing the events — but he merely shook his head and said nothing. Richard stared at him for a moment, then nodded, turned on his heel and strode from the garden.
The speed and fury of Richard’s attack was truly astonishing. It might have appeared reckless, to attack a town of more than fifty thousand souls with no more than a handful of knights, but it proved an extraordinarily effective strategy. I was later to discover that King Richard was quite capable of subtlety in warfare, and subterfuge, finesse, and fine generalship, when it was appropriate, but what he loved most was a mad, all-out rage-fuelled charge, with himself in the lead, wading into the enemy with his great sword swinging, and slaughtering his foes by the dozen.
We gathered outside the monastery, some thirty armoured horsemen, ready to fight and die beside our King. I had struggled into a mail hauberk, crammed a plain steel cap on my head and strapped on sword and poniard, grabbing my mace as an afterthought, before mounting Ghost in the monastery forecourt — but I noticed that the King had dressed himself for war even more quickly. He was outside the big gates of the monastery, literally bouncing up and down in the saddle, urging his knights to ‘hurry, hurry, for God’s sake!’
We had sent off Owain with messages for the rest of the army to come and join us but King Richard was like a man possessed: he could not wait another moment for battle to begin. And, bizarrely, his haste made the task of capturing Messina far easier than it would have been if we had waited for the army to get organised and come up.
The King ran an eye over the handful of assembled knights, nodded, and said: ‘Right, let’s go and teach these scum some manners.’ And with that we were off galloping down the hill in a mad scramble towards the old town, the King in the vanguard, Robin just behind him and myself somewhere in the middle of the pack, with Little John beside me on a giant white horse, grinning with pleasure at the thought of imminent slaughter. I too was filled with a euphoric sense of excitement. For some reason, I felt that I could not die if I followed King Richard into battle, that somehow the sacred aura of kingly power that radiated from him would protect me. Absolute nonsense, of course: being in the King’s company was no safer than being anywhere else in a battle — quite the opposite given his reckless streak, if the truth be told.
Outside the main gate of the old town a mob of about four hundred Sicilians had formed up in what I can only assume they thought was a military manner on a small knoll. The Griffons were armed with a random assortment of weapons and armour, some with swords and spears, some with crossbows and round shields, some helmeted with leather caps, a few with large wood axes, some even carrying fishing tridents. They pushed and shoved at each other, and a dozen men, their leaders, I suppose, seemed to be shouting at the tops of their voices at each other and at their men and trying to squeeze the loose, unruly crowd into some semblance of order. I learnt later that they had planned to march on the monastery and hold the King to ransom. They would never have succeeded; they couldn’t even form up properly without jostling and shoving each other.
When Richard saw them he did not slacken his mount’s pace for an instant. He just shouted: ‘For God and Holy Mary!’ and charged straight up the hill and into the mass of Sicilians, whirling his sword in a near-berserk fury, hacking and stabbing, cutting down men and forcing his way yard by yard into that huge sea of confused humanity. And we all piled in right after him; thirty steel-clad knights at full gallop in a tight wedge, with Richard as the point. It was like an axe blade chopping into a rotten cabbage.
God forgive me, but I enjoyed that fight. Ghost leapt into the ranks of the enemy, knocking two men down with sheer momentum, and I skewered a third through the gullet on the point of my sword as we followed our battle-mad King into the fray. Little John was wielding his giant axe with terrifying skill to my left, cutting down foes with short controlled sweeps of the double-edged blade. I had my reins looped over the pommel and with sword in one hand and mace in the other, I lashed out left and right slicing into unprotected bodies and crushing skulls, controlling Ghost with my legs alone. The mace was a vicious weapon: a two-foot steelshafted club with a ring of eight sharp, flat triangles of metal welded to the heavy head; it had the power to punch through iron helmets and breach the skulls beneath. Swung at full strength against chainmail, it could easily break an arm or leg. I crushed the jaw of one man with an upward blow, then scythed the mace laterally at another man-at-arms, cracking into his temple. A great jet of blood sprayed in my eyes and I was momentarily blinded. I half-sensed, half-saw someone lunging at me with a spear from my right hand side and knocked away the point on pure instinct with my sword, then reversed the direction of the blow and chopped the blade down into his skull.
The noise was deafening: the battle cries of our warriors, the clash of steel, the neighing and squealing of horses and the shouts of rage and agony from wounded men. I spurred Ghost forward, felt a hard blow against my left boot, hacked at a retreating back, and suddenly the mass of Griffon soldiers had broken, like a smashed cage of doves, all the birds set free at the same time, and hundreds of men were streaming back towards the gate of the town — which I noticed with disbelief was slowly opening to receive the fugitives. It was a terrible, fatal mistake on their part.
‘After them,’ shouted Richard, waving his huge sword in the air; the long blade and his sword arm completely drenched in gore. ‘After them while the gate is open.’ And we barrelled down the hill, mingling with the running Sicilians, spurring past a victim and then hacking back into face and neck with our swords as we rode past, slicing open cheeks, cracking skulls and dropping bodies in our wake. Whoever was in command of the gate must have realised his error in letting the terrified fugitives in, for as we approached I saw men on either side of the portal, struggling to shut the heavy wooden barrier in the face of a blood-splashed tide of terrified men. They would have had more chance trying to hold back the sea. Our knights were in and among the crowd, cutting and stabbing down into the mass, churning up the horror. I saw Robin spur back, level his sword like a spear and charge at the knot of men trying to shut the left-hand gate. He half-blinded one man with a lunge that smashed into his eye socket, the ripped eyeball popping free and dangling on a bloody thread of tissue, then Robin chopped down hard with his sharp blade into another man’s bare arm, half-severing it from his body, and the other fellows pushing at the gate turned and ran, back into the muddy streets of old Messina. All resistance at the town gate ceased in a few short moments; any living Griffons took to their heels, disappearing into the warren-like streets of the town as fast as their legs would carry them.
The gates were ours, and the King finally called for a pause for breath. As the horsemen milled in the entrance to the old town, stroking the flanks of their sweat-streaked mounts and puffing and blowing from the exertion of slaughter, I looked for my friends. Robin appeared to be unhurt but Little John had a bloody cut on the side of his thigh, which he was in the process of roughly bandaging with an old shirt. I called out to him but he merely said: ‘A scratch, Alan, just a scratch. God’s hairy bollocks, I must be getting old.’ He gave me a huge lunatic grin that warmed my heart.
I looked down at my boot and there was a long deep cut in the thick leather but whatever blade had caused it had not penetrated through to my flesh. I’d need a new pair of boots when the day was over, though. Not all of us had been so lucky. There were four riderless horses in our company and two more, heads down cropping the grass, by the blood-drenched knoll where we had made our first madcap attack. The site of our first charge was marked by mounds of Griffon dead and wounded, some crawling, others lying crying and cursing in fear and pain. One horse, disembowled, with purple innards bulging and glistening on the grass, screamed incessantly until a passing knight dismounted and gave it its final ease with his dagger. Several men in the King’s company had deep cuts or stab wounds to show for our battle with the Sicilians. One knight’s arm dangled limply from a dislocated shoulder. Robert of Thumham had a bad cut across his cheekbone, but he appeared cheerful, joking with the King, Bertran de Born and Mercardier, Richard’s grim-faced mercenary captain, as he mopped at his wounded face with a silk scarf. ‘That will leave a bad scar,’ I thought to myself, and unconsciously looked for Malbete in the crowd of horsemen. I caught his flat gaze, noted that his own scar seemed to have become a deeper red; I quickly looked away. From what I could see the bastard was completely unhurt. Despite what Robin had said about waiting till we reached the Holy Land, I knew that if I had the chance, and I could be sure nobody would witness it, I would cut down Malbete and feel no more guilt than I would killing a rabid dog.
My thoughts turned unbidden to Reuben. Presumably he was at his lodging inside the old town. Was he safe? Through the open gate, I could see our reinforcements streaming down the hill, making for the knot of our horsemen at the entrance to the town. A crowd of archers on foot, lead by Owain, was hurrying towards us, and mounted men-at-arms, sergeants and spearmen, knights and their squires, all were converging on the King with savage grins of delight. With the gate in our hands, the capture of the old town was a foregone conclusion, and then would come the sack, a night of fire and blood, of women raped, men slaughtered, and valuable goods stolen or smashed for pure pleasure.
The Griffons seemed to realise their peril, as they had regrouped while we tended our horses and our wounds, and a wall of men had been formed across the main street leading into the heart of the town. The wall thickened with every passing moment, as townsmen, terrified of what our victorious troops would do if set loose in their homes, swelled the wall. Those with armour were pushed to the front, and there was a fairly credible barrier of linked shields and spears to stop our advance. The shield wall might have been almost formidable — a difficult obstacle to overcome — but for two things. We had plenty of archers, who were now grinning with pleasure at the chance of loot and mayhem and hastily stringing their bows, and King Richard was our commander.
Robin and Owain formed up our bowmen in no time at all and at a nod from the King, they began to loose volley after volley into the wall of Griffons. Waves of grey shafts fell like sheets of winter rain on the townsmen’s shield wall. The slaughter was appalling, relentless; and the Griffons had no reply. They stood bravely, bleeding and dying in defence of their homes and families. As the needle-tipped arrows slashed down again into their ranks, men screamed and dropped to the floor by the dozen at each volley, clutching at yard-long ash shafts that sprouted from their bodies before they were dragged in a gore-slicked trail to the back of the wall and nervous, unhurt men took their places. The wall began to thin, to waver under the bowmen’s onslaught, the back ranks began to fade away in ones and twos, family men slipping away into the back alleys of the town, shunning the fight to protect their children, and King Richard, seizing the moment perfectly, hauled out his blood-encrusted sword, and shouted ‘For God and the Virgin! Havoc! I say havoc!’ and he and every able-bodied man on horseback — there must have been sixty or seventy of us gathered by this time — raked our horses sides with our spurs and thundered forward in a great galloping steel-clad mass and crashed through the enfeebled shield wall like a birch broom through a pile of dry leaves. We charged into them, swords raised, punched easily through the wavering curtain of frightened men — and unleashed hell on the ancient, once-peaceful town of Messina.