Chapter Twenty
I stared at William for a few heartbeats, sitting trussed as he was on the sandy beach. Then I laid down my sword and shield in the sand, pulled on my braies and chemise. Though the sun was sinking, I felt too hot and bruised to dress fully - I would have liked another swim but there was no time. However, I swiftly recovered my sword belt and strapped it around my waist before I went to kneel beside my faithful servant William.
For a few moments I merely stared at him, making sure in my own mind that he was the one. William looked puzzled; then he said: ‘Of your go-goodness, master, will you not cu-cut me free? My bonds are pa-paining me.’
‘Tell me your name first?’ I said.
He frowned at me. ‘But sir, as you well know, my name is Wi-William.’
‘Tell me your full name; tell me the name of your father,’ I said coldly, thinking of snakes, and poison, and falling rocks and giant spiders.
He stared back at me, his expression slowly changing. His normally helpful mien - a servant’s look; humble, cheerful, honest - changed and became hard, bleak and stone-like. He said nothing but stared at me with ancient pain-burnt eyes glowing in an adolescent’s downy face.
‘Your name is William Peveril,’ I said. It was not a question. ‘Your father was Sir John Peveril - and Robert Odo, now Earl of Locksley, had him mutilated, humiliated, destroyed as a man before your very eyes.’
He still said nothing. As I stared at him my mind went back three years to a time when I was not much older than William himself. I remembered a wooded glade in Sherwood at dawn, a big man strapped to the forest floor, the wet crunch of Little John’s axe as he hacked three of the man’s limbs off at Robin’s command, leaving only his left arm. And the boy, a ten-year-old lad whom we thought harmless and tied up like a Christmas goose but left alive to spread the tale; the same boy who now was tied up before me on the beach and staring at me with bleak, vengeful eyes.
‘Speak!’ I shouted at him. ‘You have nothing to gain by silence. Tell me that it was you who put vermin in Robin’s bed, and poison in his food and wine; admit it was you who pushed masonry on to his head at Acre...’
‘Why do you care?’ hissed William. ‘You hate him, too. I have heard you raving in your fever that he is a murderer, a thief, a Godless brute. He took my father’s manhood and left him a mewling beggar, unable to care for himself, unable even to shit with dignity.’
I noticed that his stammer had completely disappeared.
‘There was no one else,’ he went on still in that hate-filled tone, so unlike his ordinary voice, ‘so I cared for him: changing his pus-filled dressings, clearing away the shit from his arse, begging, stealing food for him - and each day resenting him a little more. For a full year he lived, a half-man, a despised cripple, until he found the courage to end his miserable life with his own dagger. I hate Robert Odo for what he took from my father, and for taking my father from me. But I know that you hate him as much as I do. He is evil and you know it. Cut me free and we will kill him together, you and I, cut me free and we will rid the world of a piece of rancid filth...’ And he burst into a fury of racking sobs, a thin slime bubbling in his nostrils, tears streaming down his cheeks.
‘Tell me first, William, how you came to be among us. Was this murder always in your heart? Had you planned this from the day we first met in Nottingham?’ He nodded. I was awed by his commitment to this vengeance. And not a little frightened. The stammer, the humility, the good-fellowship, it was all a fraud, all a means to his lethal end. ‘When my father had ended his own misery, I made a holy vow. I swore before the Virgin that I would kill the Earl of Locksley or die in the attempt.’
‘But I trusted you with my life!’ I said. ‘Would you have cut my throat too while I slept?’
‘Not you, sir, never you. You were kind to me.’ He sniffed wetly. ‘But I would gladly have killed the monster and crept away in the night, perhaps to join a monastery as a servant and spend the rest of my days repenting.’
‘And what about the boar?’ I said coldly. ‘That came near enough to killing me in Sicily.’
‘I am truly sorry for that, sir,’ sobbed William. ‘I fixed the nets to fall but then the Earl-monster moved his position. I did not mean to hurt you, sir, on my life, I did not!’
I could still hardly believe that my biddable servant had planned this, my cheerful William, who had served me so faithfully for so many miles, had had this dark murderous secret, and had kept it hidden, so well, for so long.
‘If I let you go now, will you promise to forgo vengeance on my master Robert of Locksley,’ I said formally, half-dreading the answer. ‘Will you swear on our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the name of the Virgin, and all the saints, to leave off your attempts to kill my master, and to leave our company and never return?’
‘Never!’ His eyes flashed at me. ‘I will never stop trying to slay that monster; I will hunt him down to the ends of the earth to have my vengeance; he must die a death worthy of his malignity...’ I saw that flecks of spittle had formed at the corners of William’s mouth and, foreseeing his fate, he began to struggle against the ropes that bound him.
I moved behind him, drew my poniard and, may God have mercy on my soul, I cut his throat as quickly as I could. When he stopped struggling, and I let his blood-slick body topple over on to the sand, I fell back myself as if I had been the one to suffer a death wound and I stared upward towards Heaven where God and his angels resided. But I could see nothing of the Divine. Night had fallen, and clouds covered the stars, and as I stared up into the darkness, lying boneless among the three fresh corpses I had made, I felt my own eyes fill with tears at the pity of life. As my tears welled, I thought about vengeance and feuds, of murder and holy warfare, and of loyalty and love. I pondered my loyalty to my master, which, despite his many grievous sins, had just now been put to the ultimate test; and of a boy’s love of his father that became twisted into something hideous. I had killed William because it was necessary. It was necessary for Robin’s safety, because the boy would not renounce vengeance, and I was, I discovered in that moment, despite every evil thing my master had done, still Robin’s loyal man. But there is sometimes more than one truth, and sometimes, when I have taken more than my usual quantity of wine, I believe that I killed William because of Nur.
I had not been loyal to her. After she had been mutilated by Malbête, I had screamed in horror when faced by her deformity - and she had fled. But, in fleeing, she was acknowledging that I could not love her, looking as she did. And it was true. So it follows that I had not truly loved her, for love surely transcends mere physical beauty, and, worse, I had not had the strength to be loyal to her either. And so I killed William, in some strange way, for Nur’s sake. Because I had proved disloyal to her, whom I claimed I loved, I wanted to prove that I could be loyal to Robin, whom I claimed I did not love.
On that dark beach I wept for William, and for me, and for Nur and Robin, and all of us poor sinners here on Earth, and at that very moment it began lightly to rain, and it seemed that the whole dark universe had joined in my silent weeping.
Finally, I roused myself. The blood-clotted poniard was still in my right hand. As I looked at it, I thought about all it represented. A gift from a kind man, who had been butchered before me at the command of my master; a tool that had been used to end the life of a young boy, cruelly wronged, in the name of loyalty to my master. I could hardly bear to look at it, and so, I pulled back my arm and hurled it spinning in the dark air to splash, unseen, somewhere in the forgiving ocean.
I stripped naked again and dragged the bodies as far out into the sea as I could, Keelie’s corpse too, and left them to sink and sleep for ever with the fishes, and then I washed myself once again from head to toe, scrubbing my body raw with the fine sand in the shallows. Next I dried, dressed and armed myself and walked wearily up the narrow cliff path back to the army.
I found my master in his tent, with Reuben kneeling before him tending to a wound in his thigh. He lifted his chin to me in acknowledgement when I entered and said: ‘Arrow wound: it’s not that serious, Reuben tells me.’ He waved his hand towards a tray that held a flagon of wine and several cups. I helped myself to a drink and sat on a cedar wood chest while Reuben finished wrapping a clean white bandage around Robin’s upper leg.
‘So what is troubling you?’ asked Robin, a little distantly. He sounded slightly irritated that I should have barged in on him. ‘I thought you would be carousing with the rest of them. Celebrating our glorious victory.’
‘I’ve killed Malbête,’ I said bluntly. ‘On the beach. I broke his neck with my shield.’
‘Good for you,’ said Robin. ‘So you did not need my help after all.’ He seemed indifferent, and then I saw that Reuben had given him something powerful for the pain. But the Jew looked up at me, a dozen questions in his dark eyes.
‘And I killed my servant William, too. I slit his throat from ear to ear. Also on the beach.’
That made them quiet. Both staring at me as if I were a madman. ‘He was the one who was trying to kill you,’ I said tiredly. More than anything I wanted to get to my blankets and sleep. The wine was loosening my grip on the world. I poured myself another cup. ‘He was a Peveril. He was the boy we left alive when you punished Sir John three years ago. He’s been trying to get at you more or less ever since.’
Both Reuben and Robin were stunned into silence. Then Reuben spoke: ‘That kind-hearted young servant boy?’
I stood up, finished my wine and looked directly at Robin. ‘So, my lord, you no longer have anything to fear from those quarters.’ And I turned my back on them and, ignoring the babble of questions that followed me, I stalked out of the tent and went in search of my bedroll.
Three days later we reached Jaffa. Saladin had razed the wall of the city and most of the inhabitants had fled before Richard’s victorious army. In fact, the town was in such poor repair, little more than a vast pile of rubble, that we were forced to camp in an olive grove outside the city. Ambroise had been right: Richard’s barbaric treatment of the Saracen prisoners at Acre had echoed across the Holy Land, and townsfolk would rather abandon their homes to his army than suffer siege from the victor of the Battle of Arsuf.
Ambroise pointed out exactly how clever he was when we shared a jug of local wine and a plate of figs, under a striped awning near the royal encampment. ‘He’s very fond of you, you know,’ said Ambroise, leaning forward like a conspirator, ‘the King, I mean. He thinks your music is refreshingly rustic. And he has asked me to approach you on his behalf.’ I was bemused. What could this mean? ‘Um, he knows, of course, that you serve the Earl of Locksley, and have done since, since...’ Ambroise could not think of a polite way to say ‘since he was an outlaw’ and so he just took a big sip of his wine. ‘Well, he knows, of course, that you are bound to the Earl, but certain people have been saying that you are not too happy with your place there; that there have been...
words...
between you and your master. And his Royal Highness wonders whether you would not prefer, or rather whether you might not consider joining his household, as a
trouvère.
As I say, he is fond of you, and he admires your music, and he knows that you fought well at Arsuf.’
I was struck dumb. The King of England wanted me to join his household? Me, a former cut-purse; as Robin had so rightly called me - a snot-nose thief from Nottingham? I had been asked to join the King’s company of nobles and friends. I could not think of anything to say. Ambroise, politely pretending that he could not detect my delighted confusion, went blithely on: ‘He would, of course, knight you himself. He does that with all the members of his inner circle. And there would be lands and a substantial stipend, in gold...’
It was too much to take in, and I mumbled something about thinking about it. But I could not sit still and while Ambroise chatted about other things, watching me carefully out of the side of his eye, I contemplated my glittering future as a member of the Royal
familia.
I would be Sir Alan Dale; Sir Alan of Westbury: Alan, the Knight of Westbury ... the thought made me feel drunk.
When I left Ambroise, I was walking on air. I tottered through the olive groves, beaming like a fool, the horrors of the past few weeks forgotten, and feeling a sense of deep benevolence to all mankind. There was only one strange thing to mar the night. I had the strongest feeling that I was being followed. As I strolled along, jaunty as Robin Redbreast, out of the corner of my eye I could see a small, dark figure trailing me. But each time I turned to look, it was gone. As I walked along the course of a dry stone wall, I suddenly turned and looked and I’m sure I could make out a the shape of a woman, dressed all in black, from head to toe in the Arab-style, fifty paces behind me. I shouted: ‘Nur!’ and rushed back to the spot where the figure had stood, but there was no one there. I was staring at a shadowy field of olive trees with no trace of a soul anywhere to be seen. Was it my imagination, fuelled by Ambroise’s wine? Was she a figment of a young man’s guilty conscience? Or had she really been there? A shiver crawled down my spine.
But when I got back to the Sherwood men’s camping area, grizzled Owain brought me back to solid reality and told me that Robin wanted to see me. Still feeling uneasy about my vision of the dark Arab woman, I walked over to his tent and, announcing myself, went in.
Inside, Reuben, Little John and Robin were gathered around a map on a scroll on a small table. All the men bore the marks of battle: Robin’s wounded leg was bandaged with a fresh cloth, I could see. Reuben was hobbling around, his broken leg still splinted, and even Little John had a long, crudely stitched cut on his forehead.
I stood in front of the three of them and waited for Robin to notice me. They all stood straight, Robin released the map, which rolled up with a crisp snap, and he turned to me. Without any further delay he said: ‘We’re going home, Alan. At least I am, and so are John, Owain and most of the men. Reuben’s going to Gaza, for good. He is going to represent my interests there in the, uh, frankincense trade. But I have some family business that needs my urgent attention at Kirkton. My wife - and my
son
- need me there.’