‘What?’ I asked. ‘God will keep me safe as long as . . . as long as what?’ There was a note of desperation in my voice that I wasn’t proud of.
‘God will keep you safe . . . as long as you remember to move your feet!’ And with a grin and a gentle cuff to my head, he strode away to the stables. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
God might well have been keeping me safe, but I made my own preparations for surviving the battle. I sharpened both my sword and my poniard on a whetstone; I mended a rent in my aketon and padded the inside of my helmet with scraps of wool for extra protection. Around me the men were making similar preparations. I saw with a twinge of unease that Marie-Anne was busy cutting linen sheets into long strips to make bandages and I wondered how many of us would need them the next day.
My job during the fight was to act as a messenger for Robin. He would be with the infantry and I was to ride out to his captains - bowmen and horse, on either flank - and deliver his orders. It was a dangerous job that would depend on the speed of my horse to evade capture and death at the hands of the enemy. So I went to the stables and, on Robin’s authority, I chose the best horse I could find for the job: a mettlesome grey gelding, young and feisty; in fact, the same horse I had ridden on the night of the rescue. I had found that I liked him, and he seemed to like me. I brushed him down myself until his grey coat gleamed, and made sure he was well fed that evening with a hot bran mash. Then I went up to the walkway that ran all the way round behind the palisade to watch the sun sinking over the hills to the west. There were a dozen fellows with me, idling, gossiping, spitting over the rampart into the moat, and, as we watched the great red orb slide down behind the bare hillside, a stir of movement rippled through the men on the ramparts. Somebody pointed and I looked due south to the end of the valley and saw horsemen; a line of mounted men trotting down the valley towards us. They looked to be too few, no more than four dozen men, perhaps a three score at most, and I felt my spirits lift. We had about the same numbers of cavalry. In that arm, at least, we were equal. Perhaps God was looking out for us after all. And then, to my left, there was a gasp and I looked again and saw, on the horizon in the gathering gloom, a skyline thick with black figures, hundreds and hundreds of them, horses and foot, wagons and pack animals. It was a proper army, a horde. That thin line of horsemen, I realised belatedly, stupidly, had just been the scouts. A mere skirmish line that was equal in numbers to our entire mounted force.
Sir Ralph Murdac had come to Linden Lea.
Chapter Seventeen
As the light fled from the valley of Linden Lea, Sir Ralph’s vast host settled itself for the night, spreading out over the fertile land like a pot of spilled ink. They set up camp a mile from the manor, their cooking fires making dozens of pinpricks of light, winking in the blackness like the myriad eyes of an enormous beast that was waiting to devour us.
Robin’s estimation of their strength had clearly missed the mark, or he had been misled; their numbers must have been at least three or four times our own. When I mentioned this to Little John, who had come to stand by me on the rampart in the dusk and survey the enemy host, he merely shrugged, and said: ‘So we’ll have to kill a few more of the bastards, then.’ He seemed wholly unconcerned and that made me feel a great deal better. Looking at this giant of a man, standing with wide-spread legs, idly twisting his great double-bladed war axe in his ham-like hands, ancient horned helmet crammed on his straw-coloured head, I could not imagine him being defeated by any number of enemies - he looked like some invincible Saxon deity - and that gave me heart.
When it was fully dark, Robin called all of us together again. He addressed a packed courtyard, but his talk had none of the flamboyant rhetoric of his speech earlier that day. He simply said: ‘The plan stands. It’s a good plan. Yes, there are a few more of them than we thought, but don’t be down-hearted, they’ll die just as easily. Just obey orders, do the bloody work that you all do so well, and we’ll be celebrating victory this time tomorrow.
‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘If the battle goes awry, and I truly do not believe it will, I will give three long blasts on my horn.’ His hand went briefly to the hunting horn at his belt. ‘If you hear this horn ring out three times, you are to retreat, all of you, you are to break off the fight immediately and get your raggedy outlaw arses back here’ - there was a faint ripple of laughter - ‘any way you can, as fast as possible, get back here. I really don’t think we will need to retreat. I believe we will beat them out there. But if you hear my horn, it’s back to the manor. Once we’re in here, if necessary, we can hold them for weeks.’
Then he ordered the archers, sixty men led by ugly old Thomas, to form up in silence, ready to take up their positions out in the forest. Each man had two full arrow bags at their waists, each holding thirty shafts fitted with mail-piercing razor-sharp bodkin heads. They left from a side gate in the palisade, crossing the moat on a bridge of planks, formed up in groups of ten on the other side, hardly visible in the darkness, and sprinted the hundred yards to the welcoming cover of the woodland. There was no sign of movement from the enemy as the little groups of bowmen scuttled through the darkness and into the trees. Confident of their superior numbers, Murdac’s camp seemed happy to ignore us. Perhaps they thought we were running away.
Next, the cavalry under Hugh: fifty-two hard, well-disciplined men, clad in chain-mail and armed with twelve-foot spears, with horses trained to rear and stamp and kill, trotted out of the main gate and rode away towards the hills behind the manor house. Before he left, Will Scarlet sought me out and clasped my hand. He said: ‘If I have ever wronged you, Alan, I ask for your forgiveness now. I would part as friends so that, if misfortune befalls either of us tomorrow, we will not die with any ill-feeling between us.’ I was moved and, with a tear in my eye, I embraced him. ‘There is nothing but friendship between us,’ I said. And he grinned at me again before vaulting on to his horse and disappearing out of the gate. It was only after he left that I thought about what he had said. Had he wronged me? How had he wronged me? Was he the turn-coat? The thought curdled my good feelings at our parting like a splash of vinegar in a bowl of sweet milk.
With the archers and the cavalry gone, the manor seemed a half-deserted place. We ate a subdued meal in the hall and I spread my blankets by the banked logs of the central fire and tried to sleep. But the night was hot and I could not find rest. The men were talking in low tones, gathered in small groups of friends; some were drinking quietly, others were praying, or moving about the hall restlessly. And always, as a low accompaniment to the dull hum of nervous humanity, there was the constant scraping of whetstones on steel blades -
sheek, sheek, sheek
- as men sharpened their swords and spears obsessively to ward off the terrors of their imaginations. I thought of Bernard and Goody, safe in Winchester, with good food and wine and the protection of the royal household, and to my shame I envied them. When I closed my eyes, I saw the great grim host of Sir Ralph Murdac; and imagined that malevolent nobleman high above me on a great horse, swinging his bright sword and slicing its blade deep into my body.
I slept at last but was woken before dawn by men coughing and spitting and yawning and trampling on me as they passed by. I scrambled up and found a jug of water and ewer to make a quick toilet. I checked my burnt ribs and they seemed to be healing well: lines of pink scar tissue and the dark brown remains of the scabs. For some reason, this made me feel optimistic. When I had washed my body and face, I went outside to see the beginnings of a beautiful day. Up on the walkway behind the palisade, Robin and Little John were surveying the enemy and, as I came up to join them, I saw that the host was still there - seemingly even more numerous than the night before - the horses picketed in neat lines, the men scurrying about like ants. Robin was pointing at a large construction in the middle of their camp that was the focus of much bustling activity; a square frame made of thick wooden beams, with a vertical arm shaped like an enormous spoon pointing skywards and resting on a solid-looking crossbar padded with what looked like two great sacks of wool. John was saying: ‘ . . . I’ve seen likenesses of them but I never saw one in the flesh before. Do you think it will trouble us?’
‘What is it?’ I asked.
Robin replied: ‘It’s a mangonel, something the Romans invented many hundreds of years ago. It’s a giant catapult, which can throw great boulders hundreds of yards. I’ve never heard of one employed in England before but the French and Germans use them for reducing castle walls to rubble. Not very accurate, and it takes an age to set up and aim correctly. We’ll be fine as long as we are mobile. And mobile we shall be. But, Alan, just to be on the safe side, don’t discuss this machine with the men, all right. They might find it a little disconcerting.’
I nodded dumbly and continued to stare at the strange contraption. As I watched, a gang of soldiers attached ropes to the great bowl of the spoon and very slowly began to winch it down, away from us until it was level with the ground, where the men secured it with thick ropes tied to great metal nails hammered into the earth. I saw as the spoon was lowered that there was a great iron and stone counterweight on the far end of the throwing arm. Next, with a great deal of stumbling and shouting, the men wrestled a huge stone, the size of a full-grown pig, into the bowl of the spoon. After a brief consultation, everyone stood clear and one man pulled a lever that somehow released the ropes holding the bowl down. The great arm swung upwards and, with a clap that could be heard where we were standing half a mile away, the arm hit the crossbar and the stone flew from the bowl and sailed up in a low arc before splashing down with a tremendous thump into the stream in the middle of the valley a thousand feet from that devilish machine.
‘It’s too big to be very manoeuvreable,’ said Robin.
John grunted. ‘So it is,’ he said. ‘Which means, if we stay on the move, it should be fairly easy to avoid being squashed.’
‘Do try to avoid it, just for my sake,’ said Robin, in a mock pleading voice. John laughed and, ignoring the wooden steps that led up to the parapet, jumped straight down the ten foot from the palisade walkway to the courtyard floor and immediately began shouting orders to his men. Robin looked at me. ‘Better get mounted, Alan, we’ve got a busy day ahead.’
With John at their head, more than two hundred outlaws, armed with sword and shield, helmet and spear and whatever oddments of armour they could scrape together, marched out of the front gate of the manor of Linden Lea. It was full morning and the sky was pure blue: it promised to be a very hot day. The beauty of the day lifted our hearts and the men began to sing: an ancient song that told of the battle of Mount Baddon in which King Arthur had defeated his enemies. Robin and myself, the only mounted men, rode at the centre of the chanting column. Behind us marched twenty-five archers, some of the best men with a bow that Robin possessed, led by Owain. Robin had left ten older men in the manor to guard Marie-Anne. They had all sworn that they would die before they would allow her to be captured. ‘Make sure you do,’ was Robin’s reply, his eyes hard as granite.
We marched straight towards the enemy but stopped a hundred yards before the great boulder flung by the mangonel, which was stuck in the valley floor like a great raisin in a giant cake. The men formed two ranks of a hundred each, with the green wall of the forest about a hundred yards to our left, facing due south down the valley towards Murdac’s army, which was a little more than three hundred yards away. Our front rank knelt, grounding their spears in the turf, held steady with the right hand, the left supporting a kite-shaped shield; the rank behind stood straight with spears pointing skyward. Owain’s archers stood behind the second rank, and behind them sat Robin and I, our horses, my grey gelding and Robin’s black stallion, munching the green grass as if there was nothing in the world that could be of concern to them. Then we waited. The sun beat down on our heads, and we waited some more, sweating quietly, for the enemy attack.
For an hour, we stood watching Murdac’s men. A mass of cavalry had formed up to our front, in two loose ranks: about two hundred men. Equal numbers, I told myself. But I was lying. One horseman is worth at least three or four footmen. I could clearly see the red and black surcoats of Sir Ralph’s killers. The square-topped steel helmets, and bright spear points winking in the bright sunlight as the knights of the first conroi jostled for a place in the long line. I was beginning to regret wearing my aketon; the padding might be useful in stopping a sword cut but it was as hot as the fires of Hell on this lovely summer’s day. The metal on our accoutrements was becoming almost too hot to touch. The men began to fidget. I looked up into the perfect blue sky: far above a hawk was circling the field, watching the evolutions of men with a dispassionate avian eye. John turned to Robin and said: ‘What are they waiting for? Here we stand, a mere two hundred footmen, as juicy a target as ever presented itself. Why don’t they attack?’
‘They think it’s a trap,’ said Robin.
‘So they’re not entirely stupid then,’ growled John.
Robin raised his voice: ‘Owain, go forward and give them a little tickle, will you.’ Then he bellowed the order: ‘Open ranks!’ and with wonderful precision all the men moved as one, taking a step or two to the left or right, the line extending and leaving room for the archers to move through the rows of spearmen out in front of the line. Till then I had not appreciated how well trained Robin’s infantry was. I had seen them at practice, at Thangbrand’s and at Robin’s Caves, marching and wheeling and going through their manoeuvres, but I had not realised how much like real soldiers these raggedy misfits had become. Owain’s bowmen jogged fifty paces forward, lined up, pulled back the strings on their big bows and, on the command ‘Loose!’ sent a shower of arrows arcing forward to patter on to the line of enemy horsemen. It was at the extreme range of the bow, about two hundred and fifty yards, and the damage done was slight: one horse, skewered in the haunch by an arrow, reared and nearly threw its rider, barging into the next animal in the line and causing a ripple of movement all along the conroi. A knight pitched backwards in the saddle, a shaft protruding from his side. But that was all the harm we caused with that first salvo. The cavalry were too well armoured and the distance too great for much slaughter. Owain cried ‘Loose!’ once more and another thin curtain of steel-tipped shafts fell on the waiting line of men and horses. Again there was not much resulting carnage. Another poor animal began bucking and kicking from a wound I could not see. But the bowmen’s provocation was having the desired result. A knight had ridden out in front of the line and was exhorting his men to valour. The first line of cavalry re-ordered itself and began to move forward at a walk.