King's Man (28 page)

From time to time, word filtered in about King Richard. After I had seen him at Ochsenfurt, he had been brought to Speyer, accompanied by the abbots Boxley and Robertsbridge, where the Emperor had staged a trial in front of the most senior churchmen and nobles of the German realms. Apparently, our King had acquitted himself well, refuting with ease the charges of betraying the Great Pilgrimage and of murdering Conrad of Montferrat, the King of Jerusalem. His eloquence and charm, his status as a pious knight captured while returning from the Holy Land and the fact that the charges were quite obviously false, meant that he elicited much sympathy from the German nobles – in fact, he made a number of good friends.

After the trial, it appeared he had come to some sort of arrangement with Emperor Henry. He was now being held in the Castle of Trifels, high in the mountains to the west of Speyer, and it was reported that negotiations for his ransom and return to England were proceeding smoothly. The trial having failed, Henry had come up with a new pretext for holding Richard: apparently the Emperor was demanding a fee for his services in ‘reconciling’ the Kings of England and France – and a figure of 100,000 marks had been mentioned. Richard, of course, would remain his ‘honoured guest’ until the money had been paid. But all could see that this fee was truly nothing more than ransom by another name.

Meanwhile, Philip Augustus, the as-yet-unreconciled King of France, had invaded Richard’s duchy of Normandy and was busily capturing castles and lands at an alarming rate.

But that was happening far away, and we had enough to do in Nottinghamshire without worrying about distant battlefields. We had our share of the extortionate 100,000 marks – about
67,000 pounds, perhaps twice the sum the whole country yielded for King Richard in one year – to collect from the long-suffering folk of northern England.

The attacks by Robin’s men on the tax collectors had continued all summer long, and many believed he was using some kind of witchcraft to see the future, for his outlaws always seemed to know where and when the richest convoys of silver would pass. His bowmen would swoop out of hiding, sometimes masked, sometimes merely disguised in deep hoods, and shoot down the mounted men-at-arms guarding the packhorse train, or drive them off. Then the outlaws would make off with the silver, still contained in the chests on Prince John’s pack animals, escaping back into the wilderness of Sherwood before any pursuit could be organized.

Sir Ralph Murdac, infuriated by the Earl of Locksley’s success, had taken to sending more and more armed men out with the bigger convoys of tax collectors, sometimes as many as thirty or forty or even fifty men-at-arms to protect each train. Robin, however, declined to take on the heavily armed convoys, selecting the weaker ones and continuing to wreak havoc and deny much silver to the Constable of Nottingham’s treasure vaults.

Convinced that the local people must be helping Robin in some way, perhaps informing him when tax convoys would be passing or acting as spies for his outlaw band, Murdac ordered that villages that had already been taxed should be taxed again, and again, as a punishment. The villagers responded by melting away from their holdings and taking to the forest. Deep in the safety of Sherwood, Robin fed them and sheltered them; some he armed and trained for battle. Thus he swelled the numbers of loyal men-at-arms under his command.

Though it pained me to be forced to carry out Sir Ralph’s orders to tax a countryside that had already paid up more than its fair share, I had no choice but to obey. I would try to ensure that we made as much noise as possible, shouting battle cries and blowing trumpets as we approached a village or manor, allowing its occupants to slip away before we arrived. And I forbade my men to chase after peasants fleeing into the forest, saying that it was unsafe to do so: who knew what or who might be waiting in ambush beyond the lush green curtain of trees? It gave me a reputation as an unadventurous commander, timid and very careful of his own safety – which irked me a good deal. But it could not be helped.

Other leaders of tax-gathering bands were not so gentle or fastidious. I heard terrible reports of villagers summarily hanged, men and women tortured with fire and boiling water until they gave up their meagre pennies, stock animals killed or confiscated, churches sacked and burnt, girls – or even young boys – raped for the amusement of the Prince’s men-at-arms. It was as if John’s troops were an occupying force; an enemy ravaging the land rather than Englishmen lawfully raising revenue in the King’s name. But the worse the depredations carried out by Prince John, the more men flocked to Robin’s outlaw banner and the more powerful the Earl of Locksley became.

And Nottingham was not the only stronghold from which Prince John’s men were sallying forth to wring silver from an unwilling countryside. The powerful stone castle of Tickhill, on the Yorkshire border, which was held by the famous knight Sir Robert de la Mare, had been amassing coin for Prince John over the past six months, and one chilly September morning fifteen knights and men-at-arms, including myself, rode out
from Nottingham to Tickhill, thirty miles to the north, with instructions from Sir Ralph to escort a wagon train filled with silver coin back to Nottingham.

The previous day, Murdac had summoned me to his large private chamber on the western side of the great tower and informed me: ‘You are too idle and too cowardly, Dale, that is what the men say about you.’ I bit the side of my tongue until I could taste blood but said nothing.

The lavish room had been empty when I entered it, but Ralph Murdac had emerged a few moments later from behind a curtain that shielded the privy. The seat of ease was at the end of a short passage, and was built into the outside western wall of the chamber. It was a rare luxury to have a garderobe, as these conveniences were sometimes called, in a private chamber, but it meant that a man could relieve himself in comfort – his waste dropping down through a wide chute and ending up in a midden pile outside the walls of the castle – without having to wander the dark stone corridors to use the common privies frequented by the ordinary men-at-arms.

‘It’s about time you started earning your keep here,’ he snapped, seating himself at a table piled with parchments. ‘You won’t be in command. Frankly, from what I hear, I don’t believe you’re up to it – it’s your base blood, of course. I don’t know what His Highness Prince John was thinking. You’ll take orders from Sir Roger Fotheringhay on the mission and you leave at dawn. That is all. Shut the door behind you on the way out.’

And with that he gave me a brief contemptuous look, picked up a goose-feather quill, pulled a piece of parchment towards him and began scratching at it. I said nothing; I merely shrugged, turned and walked out of the room.

I left the door open – but it was a poor revenge for having to swallow being called a lazy coward.

The journey to Tickhill Castle, a full day’s ride, was uneventful: it was a strongly built fortress with a high stone wall surrounding the bailey, and a tall keep built in the centre on top of a twenty-foot mound. The fifteen of us under Sir Roger’s command were allocated a section of the hall to sleep in, but we had not much space per man, for the castle seemed to be crammed with fighting men: including our party, I counted nearly a hundred men-at-arms of various ranks at the evening meal, and in the bailey the stables were filled to bursting with horses of all shapes and sizes.
Something is up
, I thought to myself.
Where did all these men come from – and where are they going?

It has to be said that the organization of Tickhill under Sir Robert de la Mare was impressive. His servants worked all night to prepare the three wagons for the journey and to load them with the silver-filled strong-chests. Locked, chained tight, personally sealed by de la Mare, then covered with mounds of rough sacking to disguise their presence, six immensely heavy chests were loaded into each wagon and, just before dawn, three teams of eight oxen were yoked into position to pull the weight of Prince John’s ill-gotten silver all the way to Nottingham. Our fifteen men-at-arms, yawning and scratching after a short night’s sleep, formed up on either side of the ox-wagons. The castle gates swung slowly open, the drivers cracked whips, called to their animals and prodded the oxen’s rumps with sharp goads, the men-at-arms clicked their tongues to their horses and the whole convoy began its ponderous passage on the road south.

We travelled at the speed of the slowest ox and so, when we stopped at midday for a bite of bread and a drink of ale, we had come no further south than the village of Carlton in the district of Lindrick. At an alehouse near the old Saxon church of St John the Evangelist, Sir Roger arranged food and drink from the local hostelry. He seemed nervous and agitated, and he kept giving me strange, flickering glances, as if he were somehow frightened of me. Perhaps he was uncomfortable that I had been demoted for this expedition, that I had to take his orders when I had previously been a captain of my own team of tax gatherers. But I paid it little mind. It was a cold, sharp day, grey skies and a whiff of rain on the breeze, and we ate a joyless meal in Carlton in near-silence. I just wanted to get back on the road to Nottingham with the least possible delay, and I was in no mood to swap pleasantries with my fellow men-at-arms. Half an hour later, my wish was granted and we set off again.

We were no more than half a mile out of Carlton, passing through a place where we were hemmed in by dense woodland to the west with open farmland to the east, when the arrows began to fly. The first I knew of the attack was a sudden hiss and thump, followed by a scream of pain from the man-at-arms in front of me, who folded over in his saddle clutching an arrow shaft which protruded like a thin, straight branch from his belly.

Sir Roger shouted something and I turned Ghost right, facing towards the woodland in the west: I could see indistinct shapes moving in the forest gloom and arrows flickering out from the trees like horizontal hail. Scores of shafts flashed by me, on either side, and in an instant the mounted men and their horses
were screaming and dying left and right. Hooded men, dark and menacing, wielding long war bows, advanced towards me through the trees like murderous wraiths, shooting as they came on. Ghost whickered and shied between my thighs and I tried to calm him as the deadly shafts sped past his flanks and sank into the flesh of his fellow beasts. One horse, spitted through the neck, screamed and reared. I saw a man-at-arms cursing an arrow in his left arm, trying to remove it, just as two more shafts smashed into his chest. I watched, immobile but for my jittering horse, while Sir Roger to my left took an arrow to the face, his helmeted head snapped backwards by the shaft before he slid dead as a boulder out of the side of the saddle. Death passed by me, surrounding me, close enough to touch, close enough to smell and close enough to feel the wind of its passing and hear its awful hiss and thump, hiss and thump. One knight, his horse stuck deep with three arrows, and he sporting a fourth jutting from his waist, managed to draw his sword and tried to charge the shadowy bowmen advancing through the woodland. He put back his spurs, shouted a feeble war cry; then his horse surged forward and he was met with a dozen more shafts that slashed out of the trees simultaneously, some taking his horse in the throat, while four or five thudded into his mailed chest. He and his mount were dead before they had travelled five yards.

And yet in all this carnage, amidst all this death and blood, Ghost and I remained untouched. I dropped the reins on the saddle horn and raised both hands, palms forward, fingers spread in the universal sign for surrender, crooning softly to Ghost to give him courage, and trying to hold him still between my knees.

Looking round quickly, I saw that all of our men-at-arms were down, and most of their poor horses were wounded or dead. The hooded wraiths with their long killing bows were no more than twenty paces from me, walking steadily forward with the soft, purposeful tread of executioners. Then I heard a familiar voice, one I had not heard for six months or more, shouting: ‘Cease shooting, men; hold those arrows. Cease shooting, you rascals!’ And out from behind a tree not twenty yards from me stepped a tall handsome figure in dark green, wrapped in a raggedy grey cloak, an arrow bag at his waist, a bow in his right hand.

‘Hello there, Alan,’ said Robin. ‘And how have you been keeping?’

Chapter Fourteen

The Earl of Locksley’s men, marshalled by Little John with his enormous old-fashioned double-edged axe, swiftly dispatched any of the men-at-arms who still lived. I stepped down from Ghost’s back and embraced Robin. My throat was choked with emotion: I had not realized till that moment how much I had missed him in the long deceitful months at Nottingham. And there were many other familiar faces grinning at me from under their hoods: Much, the son of a well-to-do miller, who loved the violent outlaw life more than the safe respectability of grinding wheat for a living; Owain, the master bowman, a valiant Welsh warrior and old friend who had made the journey to Outremer and back with me; young Thomas ap Lloyd, wielding a bow that had been cut down to match his youth and size; Little John came over and gave me a bear hug that nearly crushed my ribs; then he slapped me on the back and told me he was proud of me.

And then there was Robin.

My lord, the Earl of Locksley, looked closely at me, his bright silver-grey eyes staring deep into mine. ‘How goes it in Nottingham, Alan?’ he asked. ‘They don’t suspect that you are still my man, do they?’

‘I don’t think so. Well, they cannot be certain – but, Robin, how much longer do I have to play this role? They will find out soon: they must know that somebody is giving you information about the convoys’ movements.’

Robin stroked his lightly stubbled chin. ‘I think you must play this game just a little while longer, Alan, if you can stand it. The silver we take from Prince John goes directly to Queen Eleanor in London. And every penny we take weakens him and brings King Richard’s release a little closer.’