‘You’d better help me to get dressed, William.’
The battlements of Acre were packed with folk and it was only by way of a good deal of squeezing, jostling and shoving that William and myself found a place to the north of the main gate where we could see what was happening below. On a wide area of sandy plain, beyond the trenches that had been dug during the siege of Acre, were row upon row of Muslim prisoners, each bound tightly and forced to kneel with their heads extended. I found out later from my friend Ambroise - who was writing an account for the scene for his History of the Holy War, and who liked to give exact numbers, even if I sometimes suspected that he made them up - that there were two thousand seven hundred prisoners on that plain of death. And they were all to die. The condemned prisoners - men, women and even children - were making a hideous noise, wailing, moaning and chanting the name of their false God, and were hemmed in on three sides by the ranks of our army, so there could be no hope of escape. Far to the south I could see Robin’s bowmen in their distinctive green cloaks, and behind them row upon row of our cavalry. I could even make out Robin sitting perfectly still on a horse in front of the first line of archers, only twenty feet from the nearest prisoners. There were occasional jeers, catcalls from the troops in our army, and I could see that a few were making wagers amongst themselves, but most stood and watched the slaughter like yokels watching a cattle sale at a country fair.
Malbête’s men had already begun their grisly task, and they worked in twos: six pairs of men-at-arms, each pair taking a row of prisoners. The first man-at-arms would strip any headgear or any scarves or turbans from the prisoner, then clear the way for the sword blow and then he would hold the victim steady by his hair while the second man-at-arms hacked at his neck until the head was free. It was slow, bloody work and the scarlet and sky blue surcoats of the soldiers soon became a sopping uniform scarlet. Sometimes it took as many as four blows to cut the head from the body, and many a victim lived for many moments after the first slicing blade had chopped into his neck. Of course, the easiest to kill were the children, who were quite often dispatched with a single blow. One pair of executioners was particularly inept, regularly chopping at the neck and missing completely, whacking into backbone or sliding off skull to the laughter of the crowd. Malbête oversaw the whole operation, occasionally striding up to a pair of his men who were making a meal of a victim, his boots sloshing in the puddles of gore, pushing the men-at-arms roughly out of the way and hacking through the wretch’s neck with his own long sword to finish the job.
From our vantage point high on the battlements, William and I could see the whole gruesome display clearly; but the people seemed like dolls, and the whole thing a piece of macabre theatre. As I watched, a pair of blood-splashed men finished a row of two hundred victims; they cleaned the red filth from their swords with glistening hands, and calmly began on the first victim in a new row. Hack, hack, a great spurt of gore and the victim falling headless on to his side, neck still pumping blood, the head rolling a little way away, casually stopped by a man-at-arms’s boot.
‘What has happened to the world?’ I said silently to myself. ‘Have men all run mad? Why does God not stop this? Why do we all not stop this? Am I trapped in some hideous nightmare in a world without mercy, a Godless universe of indiscriminate blood and death?’ And yet even while I thought this, a worse idea was crawling out of its slimy pit deep in my skull. ‘You feel nothing,’ said the dark maggot’s voice in my head. ‘You see true horror, appalling brutality, blood being shed on a massive scale - hundreds of men, children even, slaughtered in front of your eyes - and you feel not a thing. Are you still human? Have you lost the power to feel anything?’
My head was swimming, and I closed my eyes; images of slaughter were whirling in my brain: Sir Richard at Lea’s body falling to the rocky ground, his blood flowing black as tar; the severed heads littering the sand like discarded rotten cabbages in the plain before me; the chop of a blade, a curse, and a gust of laughter from the crowd, as the men-at-arms missed his mark. The world spun, turning like a child’s toy; I could feel my body beginning to sag, my legs turning to water.
‘William,’ I whispered. ‘I think I need to go back the dormitory.’
My fever returned that night with all the ferocity of a rabid wolf. And with it came the dead. My dead - the ghosts of all the men whose lives I had taken, all the men I had seen die; and they were many. I screamed in my sleep as images too terrible to bear came crowding into my racked brain. I saw the first man I had ever killed, in a long-ago skirmish in Sherwood Forest, his young face grinning at me, his neck bleeding from my sword cut. He was cutting the throat of my mother while Sir Richard at Lea looked on, totally unconcerned, saying: ‘She had to die, Alan, she stood in my way.’ I saw Little John once again take up his great axe and cut the limbs from a brigand strapped to a woodland floor, and Robin, laughing, pushed over a Saracen prisoner with his foot, howling with demonic glee as the head fell off and rolled away leaving a trail of red in the sand.
I lost the ability to tell if I were awake or asleep: dead men came to my bedside in the dormitory that long night and spoke to me, and I raved and screamed at them, begging them leave me be. Malbête came up to me as I lay there with two severed children’s heads, one in each hand like monstrous bloody oranges, and told me I must eat them: ‘Fruit will cleanse the evil humours from your body,’ he said, but in Reuben’s voice. Then he laughed his deep mocking cackle.
There was a figure in the room; small, dark, dressed head to toe in black cloth, its face totally covered with a black veil. The figure came towards me, holding a single candle: as I shrank back, gibbering in fright, a small white hand came out and felt my forehead: it was cool and perfumed. And I knew with great relief that it was Nur, my lovely Nur had come back to me; my beautiful girl was beside me again. But I could not see her face. I reached out a hand, grasped the black veil and pulled. The veils slipped easily away from her head - and I screamed, screamed and screamed, yelling loud enough to rouse a thousand corpses from their coffins.
Instead of the fresh lovely face of my beloved was a monster, a caricature of the beauty of my girl. The lips had been hacked from the face, exposing teeth splintered to shards and pink gums in a skull’s permanent grimace; the hair had been shaved to black stubble; the nose had been sliced away, leaving nothing but a pink, blood-and-snot crusted hole; and those beautiful dark eyes were now red-veined with her suffering. She turned her head away and bent down, fumbling for the veil, which had fallen to the floor, and I saw that her ears, too, had been crudely hacked off, leaving a suspicion of an earlobe just hanging on below small bloody holes in the side of her head.
I gaped at my beloved Nur with astonishment and deep horror; she moved her head towards me, just a fraction, and I swear I could not help but cringe away from her hideousness. She saw me recoil and snatched at the veil with her small white hand, wrapped it around her head, dropped the candle to the floor and ran from the room, leaving me only the whisper of cloth as it brushed the stone in her passing, and a lingering smell of her perfume.
My screams had roused the dormitory and brought me a visit a few moments later from Sir Nicholas de Scras, a lantern in his hand, his cropped grey hair tousled from sleep.
‘Your young friend came to see you, then,’ he said. ‘I told her she should not visit until you were fully recovered. But I see that she disobeyed me. Did she frighten you?’
‘What happened to her? My God, she was so, so beautiful, so perfect...’
‘She would not tell me who inflicted those grievous wounds but I got the impression it was some of our knights - have you offended anyone recently? She had been raped, too, very brutally - our brother-physicians had to sew up her nether regions.’ He was entirely matter of fact about this most intimate of operations. ‘But there is nothing seriously wrong with her, Alan. She is a healthy girl and her injuries are mainly to her vanity. She should recover in time, with God’s mercy - and your loving care, of course.’
What the Hospitaller said was no doubt true. But for one who had been so beautiful, what sort of life would she have as a freak: a hideous curiosity that would have children running from her in terror? And what about me? I had sworn that I would always love her: could I love her so brutally stripped as she was of her beauty? I didn’t want to think about it.
I felt a white-hot wave of fury for Malbête; for I was certain it was he, or his minions, who had mutilated her. I could hear his words in my head: ‘It seems you have cut up another one of my people, singing boy. I think perhaps I shall now cut up one of yours.’ In that moment, I’m ashamed to say that I felt self-pity, too. He had taken away the one truly beautiful thing in my life, and perverted her into a monstrosity. And I felt guilt, too. Most of all guilt. If I had not tried to kill Malbête in that cack-handed fashion, she would not have been harmed.
More guilt, too, for in my secret heart, I knew I could never truly love Nur looking as she now did.
Chapter Seventeen
I awoke the next morning clear-headed but weak - knowing exactly what I must do. It would be humiliating, but I must go to Robin and beg his forgiveness. Without his help and protection I would have no chance of taking the fight to Malbête and revenging the awful hurt done to my poor girl.
There was no sign of Nur in the women’s quarters, and Elise told me that she had taken all of her belongings and left at some time during the night. Will Scarlet was with his wife when I spoke to her and they both seemed pleased to see me much recovered from my fever. However, I was shamefully relieved that Nur had fled. I had no idea what I would have said to her. I had promised to love her always, and to protect her, but I knew what the truth was: I could do neither. She was gone, and to be honest, a part of me was glad. Another part of me ached for the beautiful girl who had shared my bed these past few months; the first girl who ever truly owned a piece of my soul.
Elise knew the secrets of my heart, I don’t know how. Perhaps it was just ordinary women’s insight, maybe her special gift. ‘I grieve for your love, Alan,’ she said. ‘It entered by the eyes, as I said it would, and I see that it has flown the same way. But do not blame yourself, such is the fickle way of men; you cannot love truly, the way a woman loves, with the whole of your heart. But that is how God, in his great wisdom, has made you.’
I presented myself to Robin in his harbour-side palace, and went down on one knee before him. I had prepared my speech as I walked there, but when I delivered it to him, I realised that it was not half as eloquent as I had hoped, and not a quarter as sincere. I finished by begging his pardon for the things I had said during the attack on the camel train, and saying that if I had not been out of my head with fever I would never have said them.
‘I doubt that very much,’ said Robin coolly. ‘I think that fever or no, you meant every word you said. I think that you want me to help you to kill Sir Richard Malbête, and that is why you are here, on your knees, abjectly begging my pardon. But no matter. We shall call it the fever speaking, if you wish. But I tell you now that if you ever speak to me like that again - fevered or well - I shall have you roasted to death for your insolence. Now go and begin gathering your things; we leave tomorrow. This Great Pilgrimage’ - there was a hint of a sneer in his voice - ‘is taking the road to Jerusalem.’
I turned to go, but he stopped me, and said in a different, quieter voice: ‘Alan, I am truly sorry about what happened to Nur.’ I said nothing for I could feel tears forming behind my eyelids, a knot in my throat. ‘If there is anything I can do ...’ he said and tailed off.
Then Robin sighed and said: ‘Alan, you said a while back that you thought you knew who it was that was trying to kill me. Of your goodness, tell me his name.’
I turned back and looked at my master. His silver eyes were boring into mine, willing me to reveal what I knew. I shrugged and wiped my wet face: ‘I thought it was Will Scarlet, with help from Elise, who is now his wife,’ I said, looking at the floor and sniffing loudly.
Robin considered for a while, tapping his chin with a finger. ‘Yes, I can see it,’ he said at last. ‘He resented being punished and demoted, although he deserved it. I humiliated him in front of his men, which was perhaps a mistake. And he has always had open access to my apartments. She loves him, and knows the countryside, the ways of serpents and poisonous plants. Yes, I can see them as my murderers.’
‘But it is neither Will nor Elise,’ I said flatly. Robin stared at me, his eyes glittering dangerously. ‘Do not make sport with me, Alan. I warn you.’
‘It cannot be Will or Elise because they were being married at noon on the day after we took Acre, the day that someone showered broken masonry around your head. I asked Elise for the exact day and time of her wedding, and I checked the truth of it with Father Simon, who performed the service. They were in the porch of a church in the southern part of Acre at the time you were attacked, with a dozen witnesses. It cannot be them.’
‘Very well,’ said Robin, disappointed. ‘But you will continue to make enquiries?’ I nodded. ‘If you give me the name of the guilty man, you will have my complete and utter forgiveness for your intemperate words the other day, and I will help you to destroy Malbête as swiftly as you like,’ he said. It was a good bargain and, as we clasped hands to seal the deal, I was surprised to find that I still felt some warmth towards the man, greedy, Godless, murdering monster that I now knew him to be.
The army assembled the next day on the plain outside Acre where, two days before, Malbête and his men had taken so many innocent lives. Great barrels of sand had been brought up from the sea shore and spread over the worst of the blood, but the stink of slaughter hung in the air like a curse.