Seated next to Sir Robert was Sir Richard Malbête. 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 Malbête 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 Malbête 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 Malbête and feel no more guilt than I would killing a rabid dog.