The Caves were roomy, though; at a pinch, they could shelter a couple of hundred men. It was rare, of course, for there to be so many at the camp at one time. Robin sent out a constant stream of armed patrols, each twenty men strong and under the command of a trusted ‘captain’, to scout the surrounding area for enemy troops, and to lay ambushes for rich travellers. He did it, I think, to keep the men hard and busy and out of trouble; for if they were allowed to stay around the Caves, they tended to sit about drinking and gambling and would soon get into fights among themselves. Discipline, though, was as harsh as it had been at Thangbrand’s. The rules were simple: show respect to Robin and his officers; obey his orders without question; don’t steal from your comrades; and don’t even think of touching the chest of silver in the back of the cave that held Robin’s Share. If you transgressed, the penalty was a horrible death.
I was happy there. The men accepted me as Bernard’s assistant
trouvère
, and Robin’s protégé. I sang for the men at night, either with Bernard, or, increasingly, on my own. I hunted almost daily with Robin, gorged myself on venison, enjoyed philosophical discussions with Tuck, when he was there, which was seldom for he preferred to stay alone at his monk’s cell by the ferry. What had been a temporary place of exile from Kirklees Priory had become his permanent home. Some said the prior was glad to be rid of him. It certainly suited Tuck. Occasionally, I practised my sword-play with John, although he was busy training the recruits that seemed to appear by magic at the cave, always hungry, always ragged, and mostly grateful for a chance to serve Robin in battle.
Goody became a great favourite of the outlaws and their womenfolk. She was spoiled by almost everyone in the camp and she ran about the place making smart remarks to grizzled old warriors and being applauded for her wit and spirit. They had heard the story of her courage against the werewolf, as I heard the wildman Ralph being commonly called, and they loved her for it. And she was quite at home in their company, having grown up at Thangbrand’s. However, her clothes grew ragged and unkempt and face and hair soon became filthy. In that rough company, her new look fitted like a hand in a glove.
I mentioned the wildness of her appearance to Robin one day when we were out hunting and he nodded. ‘She needs a mother,’ he said. We had stalked a herd of deer that afternoon but they had been spooked by something and had galloped away; now we were walking slowly back to the top of a hill where we had left the horses. ‘I shall have to send her away somewhere. You too.’ He looked at me sideways. I was shocked. ‘Send me away? Why, sir?’ The prospect appalled me. I had settled in well to life in the Caves, I was happy there; I felt I had earned Robin’s trust, maybe even his friendship.
‘I can’t have you wasting your youth here with us,’ Robin went on. ‘Singing crude ballads for drunks every night. You’ve got much too much music in you for that, you know. Bernard has done a fine job in teaching you.’
‘But where will you send me?’ I asked.
‘Somewhere civilised,’ he said, and then he changed the subject.
‘You’re a fairly pious fellow, Alan, aren’t you?’ I knew he had seen me making my prayers before bed in the main cave every night. But he did not say it in a mocking way; he seemed genuinely interested.
‘I believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is my saviour and the saviour of all mankind,’ I said. He grunted. ‘Do you not believe in Our Lord, sir?’ I asked, knowing the answer.
‘Used to,’ he said. ‘I used to believe with all my heart. But now I think that the Church stands between God and Man, and its shadow blocks out the light of God’s goodness. I think the way to God is not through the corrupt and prideful Church.’
He fell silent, thinking, and perhaps conserving his breath as we walked up that steep hill. Then, as we neared the top, he said: ‘It seems to me that God is everywhere, God is all around, God is this . . .’ He swept his hand in a wide curve around him, indicating a swathe of woodland. It looked particularly beautiful that spring day. We had reached the top of the hill and we looked over a rolling stretch of lush greenery. Below us, twenty yards or so away, our horses were tied in the shade of a magnificent spreading hornbeam, bright green with new leaves. Below the tree, a purple carpet of bluebells, like a rippling sea that flowed away seemingly endlessly through the forest. It was a golden afternoon; a light wind rustled the new leaves, and a pair of larks swooped and played in the branches. Just as Robin spoke, a stag stepped out of the trees ahead of us. Its noble head was crowned with a huge set of spreading antlers; its liquid eyes surveyed us from beneath impossibly long eyelashes. We froze. Robin and I were alone, the hunt servants were still struggling up the hill out of sight behind us with our equipment. Robin had a strung bow in his hand and a linen bag full of arrows at his belt. But he didn’t move. The great red animal stared at us and we looked back in wonder. It was a perfect specimen, in its prime: head alert, mounted on a long proud neck, glossy muscular haunches and long clean legs ending in neat black hooves. It stood four-square, and shook its antlers in our direction as a challenge; every inch the king of the forest. I looked at Robin out of the side of my eye, expecting him to raise his bow. But he didn’t move. Eventually, after a final long regal look at us, the great deer trotted back out of sight into the woodland. And I found I had been holding my breath.
‘Was that beautiful creature not a fine example of God’s presence?’ asked Robin. ‘God made that animal, and there is much godliness in that splendid beast. I need no priest or bishop to tell me that.’ He was speaking the vilest heresy - I knew that none could come to Salvation without the Church, but part of me, a wicked corner of my soul, could not but agree with him.
There was one distressing note in my life at Robin’s Caves. It was the captive soldier that Robin had taken just before he had rescued us from the wolves. He was kept in a small wooden cage, a short way from the main cave, which was just high enough for him to stand and long enough for him to lie down straight. I stumbled upon him one day when I went out to stretch my legs. He was filthy, confined as he was and open to the weather, and near starving, too, as he was fed only slops that a pig would refuse. Everyone in Robin’s band just ignored him but I couldn’t get him out of my mind. His name was Piers, he told me, and, feeling sorry for him, I would steal food from the kitchens and bring it to him from time to time, and talk to him like a human being.
He was not an intelligent man. Just a local Nottingham boy, an orphan who had been forced to beg and steal for his bread in the town and had even been outlawed for a time and had hidden out in Sherwood. When he told me this, I felt a bond of kinship with him. But then a cold realisation crept into my stomach. And I knew why he was being kept here, a prisoner with no ransom value. He had once been part of Robin’s band and then he had run away from his comrades to rejoin lawful society. With a shock, I knew I was looking at a corpse. Quite apart from the fact that he had participated in the slaughter at Thangbrand’s, he had, as Robin would see it, betrayed the band. He was, as Robin had said, a ghost; a dead man breathing.
I kept my face calm as he told me how he had joined the city watch and then, after a few years, and after much sweat and many a hard knock, had made the leap into the ranks of Sir Ralph Murdac’s elite cavalry. It was something of which he was very proud. He was, as I have said, a very stupid man. He had no wife, nor children, and little conversation besides constant complaints about his conditions. His wound had been healed by Brigid, though he was not grateful, and called her a witch, but without room to exercise, and little food, his muscles were wasting away. In truth, he was a miserable fellow. But my heart was filled with pity for him nonetheless and I prayed that his end would be swift and painless. My friendship with Robin would be sorely stretched, maybe even to breaking point, if I had to witness another punishment of the like meted out to Sir John Peveril.
The only other person who spoke to Piers was Tuck. Once, when I came to see the poor man, I found Tuck in earnest conversation with him. And another time, when I approached the cage, I heard Tuck saying prayers for the poor man’s soul. But though I felt pity for the caged soldier, a part of me, a shameful part, began to hate him just a little, too. I hated him because he was weak, and stupid, and helpless - and because I could not help him. But mostly I hated Piers because he was the cause of a great rift between the two men I most liked and admired.
I had been exercising my sword arm, which was by now fully healed, with some of the men in the woods outside the caves, when a great thunderstorm had gathered almost without warning and drenched us. As we all streamed back into the main cave, dripping and cursing, I saw Tuck and Robin standing almost nose to nose. The atmosphere in the cave crackled like lightning. Tuck, flanked by his great wolfhounds Gog and Magog, was shouting: ‘ . . . don’t tell me you are seriously going to go through with this blood-thirsty pantomime.’
‘I have told you my reasons,’ Robin replied in a voice as cold as charity. The great dogs, sensing their master’s hostility to Robin, began to growl deep in their throats, a terrifying rumble that was almost as loud as the thunder outside the cave.
‘You think this . . . this barbaric, blasphemous, pagan display will bring you power over these people, that you will be seen as some kind of incarnation of a god? You are chancing your immortal soul with this nonsense, you are risking—’
Robin, his face like a stone, interrupted him. ‘Do not speak to me about my soul, priest!’ The dogs’ growling had reached a higher pitch, their lips pulled back to display their huge white teeth. I remembered what they had done to the wolf pack, and shuddered. Robin ignored the animals completely. As I stood there, stomach churning with anxiety, I heard a creak behind my ear and turned to see Much, the miller’s son, with a bow in his big hands, an arrow nocked, and the string at full draw. It was pointing at the dogs. I looked around the great hall of the cave and I saw half a dozen other men, either with bow strings drawn and aimed at Tuck, or clutching their sword handles ready to sweep out their blades and cut the monk down.
The two men stared at each other, faces inches apart, neither giving any quarter in this dispute, and then Robin broke the locked gaze and looked around the cave. He had a curious expression on his handsome face; just for a second he looked like a guilty schoolboy. In that intense, private communion with Tuck, he had seemed unaware that bloody violence was only a heartbeat away. Now, as he realised that the cave was poised to break out into war, a flash of irritation rippled across his face.
‘Oh, for pity’s sake, Much, put that bow down,’ he snapped. ‘And the rest of you, put up your swords. Now! We are all friends here.’ Then he looked back at Tuck and gave him a half smile. The monk shook his head, almost smiling too, and fondled the heads of his great animal bodyguards, quieting them. The tension was draining out of the cave and the men began to move about, unbuckling their war gear, starting to clean their muddy swords, and drying the rain from their faces with rough woollen blankets. Tuck said quietly to Robin: ‘I can’t stay here, I can’t be part of this . . .’ And Robin said simply: ‘I know.’
Tuck plucked up a bundle of his belongings from a corner of the cave, whistled up his dogs and, without a word of goodbye, he strode out of the cave and into the rain.
Easter was approaching and with it the beginning of the new year. And we had wonderful news: Marie-Anne would be traveling up from Winchester to pay a visit to Robin at the Caves. I had dreamed of her on many a cold night, her beautiful Madonna face framed in blue and white, and now that she was coming, I could barely contain my excitement. I even went so far as to bathe my whole body in a freezing stream, rubbing my skin with a mixture of ashes and fat and scrubbing it clean with fine sand from the stream bed. I washed my clothes, too, though they were a sorry threadbare collection of rags after so long in the wild. There was new cloth to be had, bales and bales of the dark green wool that Robin’s men wore as a badge of their allegiance to their master. One day I begged for a length of cloth from Robin to make myself a new surcoat and he took me to a chamber far at the back of one of the smaller caves where the stores were kept. Robin showed me a roll of fine green wool and told me to help myself to as much as I wanted. I was grateful but Robin brushed aside my thanks and left me to cut my cloth.
There were two other men in the chamber, engaged in a curious task. Using the same dark green cloth, Lincoln green I have heard it called since, they were cutting thin ribbons of material, less than half an inch thick but of extraordinary length - about ten yards long. When I asked the men what they were doing, I was told: ‘We’re making summoning thread.’ And when I asked what that was they just chuckled and said I’d find out in good time.
Marie-Anne arrived with almost no fanfare and a small retinue of a dozen soldiers from Gascony, liegemen of Queen Eleanor, her mistress. But she had an immediate effect on the camp. She kissed me affectionately on the cheek, admired my new exercise-given manly physique, asked after my singing - which to be honest, I had rather neglected since coming to Robin’s Caves - and left me more in love with her than ever. She was introduced to Goody, took one look at her dirty face and raggedy clothes and ordered a great cauldron of water heated and an area to be closed off with curtains. After Goody had been forced to wash - she had to be dragged screaming into the hot water and forcibly scrubbed - Marie-Anne soothed her sulks by getting an outlaw tailor to make her a new silk dress and tying ribbons in her hair. Within a day or so, Goody was her willing slave.
Robin seemed immeasurably happier now that she was by his side at last. It was a strange, unpleasant sensation to see them together. I found that I resented Robin for having her love. My master had aroused many emotions in my heart in the year I had known him: awe, fear, disgust; but also respect, affection, maybe even a kind of love. Now I felt angry with him for spending so much time alone with a woman for whom I would have done anything. They asked me to sing with them one evening, soon after Marie-Anne’s arrival, but I could not bear the thought of the three of us being together and so I pretended that I had a head cold and was not in good voice. I could see that Marie-Anne was hurt by my boorish refusal; Robin too seemed puzzled.