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.