I had just settled her in her seat when a voice behind me spoke; a slow, deep voice I had heard before: ‘You killed my man, singing boy; you murdered my sergeant!’ The voice sounded mildly annoyed rather than madly enraged. I spun as fast as I could, my sword in my hand, and there in the doorway of the house loomed the tall form of Sir Richard Malbête, with four men-at-arms holding torches and peering out from behind his bulk. ‘And I have not forgotten that you gave me this,’ the Beast said, running a finger down the red scar on the side of his face. ‘I have not forgiven you, singing boy, and I remember well your Jew-loving master’s tomfoolery at York,’ he rumbled, his feral eyes glittering madly in the torchlight. ‘You, and your so-called Earl, will pay a pretty price for standing in the way of my pleasures.’
I don’t believe I felt fear when I saw Malbête standing there with his four men - more swords than I could expect to fight and survive - and it wasn’t hatred either, although I had long dreamt of killing him. Instead, I felt a strange calmness, a clearheaded detachment. I was very conscious of my body, how I was standing, sword in my right hand, my left foot slightly in front of the other, and I was beginning to think about the exact moves I would make when the fighting began. The first thing would be to get the girl away. She was well seated on Ghost, bare feet in the stirrups, and looked as if she knew how to ride, and so a hard slap on my animal’s rump should set him off at the gallop. I was confident that Ghost could carry her to safety. It is strange that my first thoughts should have been of her. I had not formed any attachment to her, I was not in love with her; I saw that she was beautiful, yes, but she was nothing to me and yet my first instinct was to see her safe, at the risk of my own life. Truly, God moves in mysterious ways.
My next thought was that, in fact, there were too many of them to fight only one man efficiently, they would get in each other’s way, and they were standing crowded in a doorway behind Malbête. Therefore, I realised, I had to go forward, towards them, to take the fight into that doorway. If I stood there in that narrow opening, only one or possibly two men could come at me at a time, until one or two of them took it into his head to climb out the window, and come at me from behind. Then I was probably dead. But for several precious moments, if I could hold the doorway, the girl would have the time to get away.
So. Now. Time to move, Alan: I’d slap the horse with my left hand, make a lunge at Richard Malbête’s head to make him move back, and then get into the door to hold that space as long as I could. The singing was growing louder, the singers were in this very street, and just before I launched myself into my doomed attack, a wonderful thought struck me. God was surely with me: I knew that song! I had heard it sung, many, many times over the long miles between England and the Mediterranean Sea. It was a song in the Welsh language! And the men singing it ...
‘Ho there, it’s young Alan; joy to you on this fine night,’ said Owain, his voice thickened with wine. ‘How’s about you give the boys a tune?’ I turned my head slowly, my neck muscles seeming to be stiff and unyielding, and there was Owain standing like a Visitation of Christ, at the head of about thirty red-faced archers - bows unstrung, it was true, and all drunk as lords, but each with a short sword in his belt, which I had personally trained them to use. God be thanked for his mercy.
‘Look, he’s found himself a woman; and, by Jesu, she’s a tasty piece,’ shouted one of the archers. He was quickly shushed into silence by his drunken fellow bowmen. Sober, on the whole, they showed great respect for me.
‘Are you all right, Alan?’ asked Owain, ‘only you look a little pale. Have a drink.’ He held out a flask.
I turned back to look at the doorway. Sir Richard Malbête was gone. And halfway up the street, walking away from us at a brisk pace, was a knot of men-at-arms in surcoats of scarlet and sky blue. I was content for now to let them go.
I sheathed my sword. ‘I am well, thank you Owain,’ I said. ‘But I would be grateful if you could provide me with an escort to take this lady back to headquarters. There are a lot of drunken, disreputable types on the streets tonight.’ I looked down my nose like a school-master at the gang of tough, wine-flushed men who had undoubtedly just saved my life. And the Welshmen all cackled merrily at my feeble jest.
Love is perhaps the strangest of all human experiences; the moments of happiness it offers are truly sublime, but I’m not sure you could describe it as pleasant, and often it is a source of great torment; yet we seem to seek it out all our lives like moths drawn to a deadly flame. In a matter of days, I was deeply in love with Nur, for that was the name of the slave girl that I rescued from the grand house in the old town that night. It started for me with a terrible kind of lust; when I looked at her slim body, her great dark eyes, her perfect skin, and plump, almost bruised looking mouth, I wanted to possess her, to wrap her in my arms and kiss her, to encompass her with my body so that we were joined, made one. I don’t mean in the crude physical way that ordinary men and women couple - I refused to allow myself to touch her, which was foolish of me. I know now that when you find love, you should grab it with both hands and enjoy it while it lasts. But then I was young, on a holy pilgrimage, and I was filled with a deep sense of boyish morality.
There were practical reasons, too. For a start, I could find no language to communicate with her - she spoke no English, French, Latin — I even tried her in the Langue d‘oc, the southern tongue that many of the troubadours spoke and which was King Richard’s native language. But she could not understand a word of any of them. Only by hand gestures and eye contact did we establish that I was Alan and she was Nur, and that I was her protector in the camp and she should stay close to me and my servant William and not wander off on her own. She told me that she was ‘Filistini’, and I took that to mean that she was an Arab from Outremer, one of the Philistines of the Bible, though how she had become a slave in a household in Sicily I had no idea.
On the first night, when we had returned to the monastery, William and I scoured around and found her some clean female clothes, a little food and wine, and some water and a cloth for washing. She seemed terrified of both of us, which was understandable. But William was kind to her and, by mimicry, showed her what was expected, and that we meant her no harm. He was a good boy, deeply kind and loyal to me. Then we both stood guard outside the door of the cell, feeling noble and, for my part, wondering what on earth I was going to do with her and desperately trying not to think of her perfect thrusting young breasts beneath that thin silk wall hanging. After an age of listening to her splashing and singing inside the cell, and trying to suppress my imagination, I had a brilliant idea and sent William off to find Reuben. He had grown up in the Arab lands and would surely know how to speak to her in her own tongue.
William returned shortly with the Jew — he had indeed been playing dice while I was searching for him in Messina, but he was touched by the fact that I had tried to seek him out. He knocked on the door of the cell and entered. A quarter of an hour later he emerged.
‘I have told her that, although young, you are a great Christian warrior from the north and that you are travelling with this army to seek battle in Outremer. I have said to her that, if she serves you faithfully, you will allow her to accompany you as a servant, that you will feed and clothe her and protect her until you reach the Holy Land, and then you will return her to her father’s village unharmed. All of this she has agreed to, and she is waiting inside to show her undying loyalty to such a noble knight.’ He said all this with a perfectly straight face, but I scowled at him anyway.
‘But where will she sleep?’ I asked. What am I going to do about clothes and - you know - women’s things ...’
‘As to where she will sleep, I believe she expects to sleep with you. That is her trade, she is a pleasure girl ...’
‘Certainly not,’ I snapped, straightening my shoulders and glaring at Reuben. ‘I rescued her from rapists and took her away from a life of degradation, and now that she is safe, I will not use her for my own sinful purposes.’
By God, I was a pompous little tyke in those days. Reuben was already laughing, his brown eyes creased shut with pleasure, tears dripping down his cheeks. He howled with glee, clutching his stomach and doubling himself over in his merriment. I put my hand on my sword, and took a step towards him, and he just managed to smother his mirth and avoid bloodshed. ‘Of course, young Alan, of course,’ he finally managed to say, covering his laughter with a coughing fit. ‘She can stay with the other women, if you wish. I will arrange it with Elise.’ And giggling, shaking his head ruefully and snuffling wetly he walked away, with my furious eyes boring into his back.
By staying with the other women, Reuben meant the collection of tents that had been set up at the back of the monastery, and which housed the two dozen or so women that followed the officers of the headquarters staff. They were cooks and cleaners, washerwomen and seamstresses, mistresses and prostitutes, and Elise the strange Norman fortune-teller was their leader; but they were hardly acknowledged to exist by the knights of King Richard’s household. We were after all supposed to be keeping ourselves pure, as befits holy pilgrims on a sacred journey.
When I entered the cell, Nur was kneeling on the floor, with her eyes lowered submissively. She was clean, her wet hair tied in a thick braid at the back of her head, and dressed in a threadbare old chemise that fell past her knees. Then she looked up at me and I felt a shock like a bolt of lightning. Her deep tar-pit eyes stared into mine and sucked me into her soul. I tried to break our locked gaze and yet I could not look completely away; I took in her gorgeous dark red lips, high cheekbones, tiny upturned nose, the long elegant neck, the swell of her generous bosom beneath the thin chemise. I was stiffening in my undergarments just looking at her kneeling there, and I was sure that behind those doe-like eyes she could tell that my prick was filling up with pure lust. Behind me, William coughed. And I realised I had been staring at her for too long. I looked away guiltily and noticed that the food and wine had disappeared, and that the plate and goblet had been washed and dried. Then I took a step closer and came to stand in front of her - I was painfully aware that my fully erect member was just inches from her face - and I put out an arm to raise her up but she grasped my hand, turned it over and softly kissed my palm. My member gave a visible twitch below the cloth of my tunic. It was an extraordinarily erotic act. I felt her soft lips barely touch the skin of my calloused paw but it was like the touch of a hot iron and I jerked involuntarily.
I lifted her to her feet and William wrapped her in his cloak - she could not wander the halls of the monastery in that flimsy chemise, it would have started a full-scale battle - and I gruffly ordered William to escort her to the women’s quarters and see that she was well received by Elise. Then I went to the lavatorium, stripped my body naked and poured bucket after bucket of cold water over my body to try to expunge the sinful thoughts that were careering crazily around my head.
Within three days, I was completely, utterly, insanely in love with Nur. I found that I missed her face, her proximity and I wanted more than anything else to be in her company. I constantly thought about touching her, stroking her face. In my dreams we made love endlessly, our bodies entwined, making a wonderful array of shapes and patterns. And I would awake, covered in sweat, with my member as hard as a sword hilt...
Nur would come to me every morning and bring me bread and cheese and ale and a pitcher of water and a basin to wash in. Sometimes, if I awoke early from an erotic dream, the long grey early morning hours seemed an eternity, I could hardly wait to hear her timid knock and see her beautiful face at the door. And then she would come in, and smile a greeting, and pick up my clothes to wash and mend. I was lost in love - and yet we never touched. Since that kiss on my palm the first night, I had not touched her again. I didn’t trust myself. I was miserable and elated; I was so happy just to gaze upon her beauty, and cast down when she left me to go about her womanly chores. And then there was the guilt; and the totally unwarranted shame. Father Simon came to see me and preached a homily on young men’s lusts and how God would turn his face away from youthful sinners who took advantage of poor serving women, even if they were infidels. If only he knew, the chinless old fool. He told me that I was the talk of headquarters, that Little John was making crude jests about Nur and myself - and I blushed hotly in rage at the injustice of it all. But I could not really complain - I had Nur in my life and every morning when she greeted me, my soul was full of joy. I went about my duties that autumn and winter like a sleepwalker. When I practiced sword play with Little John, he beat me easily and scolded me for lacking attention. I did not care. I thought of nothing but Nur and her body: her deep black eyes, her creamy breasts; her tiny waist, and how it would feel to put my hands around it; how her lips would feel against mine; how her buttocks would feel nestled in the curve of my pelvis. What it would be like to enter her ...
But enough of this nonsense. I am sure that you, my patient reader, have experienced love and know full well its pleasures and pains. Let it suffice to say that I was a young man, and I was truly in love for the first time.
I tried to expunge Nur from my fevered thoughts with healthy outdoor exercise. Robin had suggested that I work on my skills with a lance, which were surely lacking, and he had also asked our captain of cavalry, Sir James de Brus, to teach me.
Sir James started me off on the quintain, which he had set up beyond the army camp on a fairly level piece of ground north of the city. Above us on a high hill that overlooked the whole of Messina, King Richard was constructing a great wooden castle. It was a curious building, formed of already fabricated parts, which Richard had brought with him from France. It was strange to see a pack of foot soldiers toiling up the hill and carrying with them a long section of ready-made rampart complete with tooth-like crenellations, or to watch a group of cavalrymen using their horses to haul a great wooden door up the steep side of the hill. But I could see the logic: timber was scarce and it was much more sensible of Richard to have brought his own materials to construct a defensible position than to rely on God to provide the appropriate materials locally. The castle was to be called ‘Mategriffon’ — literally ‘Kill the Griffons’ - as a grim reminder that Richard, from his new stronghold high above the town, could take Messina and punish its citizens whenever he chose.