The Death of Robin Hood (11 page)

‘God, no. Sarah would never allow it. She is a bad apple, Matilda. Let the Church keep her, do what it will with her, so long as she’s kept away from my door.’

I do not know why I had continued to pursue my questions with Sir Osbert – some bizarre feeling of guilt maybe, because I had shunned Tilda when she came to me in need. In a confused way, I may have felt that I should at least try to find her somewhere to lodge, and this cousin of her father’s had seemed an appropriate person to ask. But it was quite clear that even her family would have nothing to do with her. From my own experience of the woman, I concluded that they were wise. I vowed to put Tilda from my mind. Her troubles were not mine, her future not my concern, and like Sir Osbert, I should endeavour to keep her away from my family at all costs.

Over the
next few days, d’Aubigny set me to work. He gave me command of a
conroi
of knights – unhorsed, of course, as there is little call for a cavalry charge inside a castle’s walls – thirty-two good men, many of them younger, stronger and fitter than I, and most of much more illustrious parentage, but under my authority nonetheless. Sir Thomas and Miles were my lieutenants – although I was slightly worried about the reliability of Miles, who according to his father was growing increasingly bored by confinement within our battered walls – and I was given the whole of the southern half of the outer bailey to defend, some two hundred yards of wall in the shape of a wide V, with its square south tower at the point of the V, the main gatehouse at the eastern end and the muddy beach at the River Medway at the western. It was a goodly stretch of the defences to watch with only a handful of knights, but most of them had servants, pages, squires and common men-at-arms in their retinue so, in fact, including a handful of my Westbury men, I had near a hundred under my command.

I gave half to Sir Thomas and posted them to the western wall, and my half looked after the eastern stretch between the main gatehouse and the south tower. I emptied the tower of men by day – a controversial order that had d’Aubigny knitting his eyebrows when I reported to him in the great hall at the end of my long, exhausting first stint on duty. He was seated at the table with one of his clerks examining a parchment roll that listed the remaining stores. He saw my approach, dismissed the clerk and nodded at me pleasantly.

I told him of my plan and he frowned and said: ‘Why?’

‘The outer bailey’s south tower is the target of the full force of the enemy artillery,’ I said. ‘It is not so difficult to divine that they mean to make a breach there and attack it with overwhelming force. And there is nothing we can do to stop the trebuchet battering, except perhaps to sally out and try to kill the engineers and burn
the siege machines. But I am told you’ve forbidden any of our men to make sorties.’

‘No attacks outside the walls,’ said d’Aubigny. ‘I’m not wasting men’s lives in daredevil adventures that will likely achieve almost nothing. Even if you drove off the guards and burned the machines, the King has the resources and men to build more in a few days.’

‘I understand that,’ I said. ‘Neither do I wish to waste men’s lives. But only this morning one man was killed inside the south tower and another two were injured on the walls by flying splinters of stone. Three casualties in a couple of hours. I need those men for when the tower falls and a breach is opened.’

D’Aubigny said: ‘You plan to sit idly by while they knock a hole in my walls?’

‘Not idly. The trebuchet barrage ceases at dusk, when my men and I will go into the tower and with the help of the castle’s carpenters and masons we will do whatever we can to shore up the damage and strengthen the walls. But that tower will fall. The only uncertainty is when. By day, my men, on either side of the tower, clear of the flying shards, will wait and watch for a breach. When that happens we will plug the gap with our bodies and hurl the enemy back. I need every man fit and ready for that hour. That is the moment of greatest peril. If we can stop them, hold them, keep them out till nightfall, the masons may be able to repair the breach overnight. They will have achieved nothing for their pains.’

‘You will have to be alert and quick off the mark, when it happens. You know the King’s men will be swarming into that hole the moment it is opened.’

‘We will be ready,’ I said.

‘Good,’ said d’Aubigny. ‘Yes, very good, Sir Alan. I’m allocating you another ten knights to strengthen your numbers. Sir George Farnham and his Surrey men will report to you at dawn. That will be all.’

He dismissed
me and looked back down at the parchment roll.

‘Sir, might I ask something?’

‘What is it?’

‘Some of the men have been asking what our strategy is – and I do not know what to tell them.’

‘You may tell them our strategy is to defeat King John here at Rochester, teach him a lesson, force him to reissue the great charter and bring peace to England.’

‘With the greatest respect, sir, that is not a strategy, that is a series of rather vague war aims. How exactly are we going to achieve this?’

I thought I’d gone too far but d’Aubigny smiled.

‘Very well, Sir Alan, if you prefer plain speaking, I will indulge you. Though I will leave it up to your conscience whether to tell your men. Our strategy is to hold the King here for as long as we can, to defy him and deny him this castle until Lord Fitzwalter or any of our other so-called friends grows a pair of balls and comes to our rescue. How likely is that to happen? Well, that is in God’s hands. But our duty is clear. We deny John this castle until the last of us lies dead among the ruins. Or, more likely, till we can no longer stand from lack of food and are too weak to defend ourselves.’ He tapped the parchment roll under his hand. ‘Our strategy is to die here. And to die hard. Is that plain enough for you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

My own strategy of emptying the south tower by day was sound enough, but King John’s response set it almost at nought. As Robin had rightly said, John wanted this castle and he wanted it now.

His men kept up a series of attacks on the southern walls, four or five every day that had my men running here and there to respond to the peril. None of the attacks was pressed hard enough to present a real danger of the enemy actually over-running the walls, yet each one had to be treated seriously. Two score or so of men-at-arms carrying
ladders, or knotted ropes with iron hooks attached, would run screaming at a section of outer bailey wall under a lethal cloud of crossbow bolts from the town walls and would attempt to scale it and come at us with the most foolhardy kind of bravery. When the alarm was called, our knights would immediately rush to the section under attack, hurl boulders or sometimes boiling oil or water down on to the attackers’ heads, loose a few crossbow bolts and push the scaling ladders from the walls with pitchforks. The handful of the enemy who actually reached the top of the wall would be cut down in instants by half a dozen of my young knights. It might last for a quarter of an hour, perhaps even less, but this was a furious period of blood and noise and blurring steel, of screaming men and pumping hearts, before the surviving foes below the wall would retreat, shaking their fists and hauling their wounded behind them as they ran back to the safety of the town.

Each attack like this, while a small victory for us, might cost a man or two injured or, mercifully less frequently, dead; some to crossbow quarrels from the town walls, some to wounds from the sword-storm on our walls, some just from a well-aimed javelin. And, despite the hundreds of King’s men we cut apart, crushed, boiled alive or hurled to their deaths from the walls, this steady erosion of our manpower, day after day, was lethal to our cause. We had fewer than two hundred men under arms in the whole castle garrison and every man who died was irreplaceable.

John had thousands of men, mostly mercenaries who had no claim on his loyalty beyond their pay, and he had more than enough mailed bodies to waste a few hundreds against our walls. And from atop the keep, where Robin’s archers had been posted, from time to time yet more companies of men were spotted coming up the road from Dover to join the King’s banner.

Worse than the constant draining away of our men was the grinding fatigue we all suffered day after day. My forty knights and their serving
men had to be awake at all hours and ready for battle at a moment’s notice, for these petty assaults took place by night as well as in the daylight hours, and every time the cry of ‘To arms, to arms,’ was heard echoing along battlements, we must all of us haul ourselves to our feet and run in the direction of the alarm and enter the fray once more.

I spelled the men, each day pulling one man in three from the battlements to give them a few hours of rest in the straw-filled barns inside the walls, but that made the scramble to repel an attack even more frantic from those fewer numbers still on the watch. And with each day that passed, the tired men on duty were slower to react to an alarm and slower in the mêlée, too. More men died. More men were needlessly wounded.

The King’s strategy to wear us down was succeeding. All day long the five trebuchets beat again and again, crack, crack, crack, against the crumbling corners of the south tower. The relentless noise of our coming destruction wore away at our spirits, at our courage, like the missiles, chip-chip-chipping away at the stones of the tower. The knowledge that our doom approached a little closer, every day, every hour, made even the bravest knight a little more fearful, brought a little closer to his own breaking point.

But even worse than the fatigue was the hunger.

The store barrels were empty. There was no flour left to make bread. The root vegetables were almost gone. Every rat, cat and dog in the castle had long disappeared.

Hunger was our constant companion, the ache of empty bellies, the lassitude and weakness of our limbs. My mind dwelt on the many feasts I had enjoyed in my long life, of dripping roasts, pigeon pies and milk puddings, of fresh bread smothered in butter and sweet preserves, of fat cheeses, lush fruit, salty ham. I wanted to gorge till I puked, then sleep for a year and a day.

Every day at noon, the castle cooks would haul a cauldron of hot soup up to the walls, a salty slop thickened with a handful of dusty oats
that contained less and less nourishment as the days went by – a scrap of onion each, perhaps, a tiny piece of turnip. And yet when we heard the noon bell and queued for it, bowl in hand, there was not a man whose mouth was not awash in anticipation.

After I had been captain of the southern walls for just over a week, they started killing the horses.

Horse
meat is good. If you have never had to eat it, and I pray you are so fortunate, I may tell you it tastes very similar to beef, but gamier. There is a guilty tang, too, a sickening sweetness at the back of the throat, that comes with spooning down a bowl of something that was once a loyal companion to a man.

William d’Aubigny ordered that his own destrier, a fine black stallion worth a hundred pounds at least, the equivalent of ten years’ revenue from my lands at Westbury, be killed first. That was the mark of the man – once the decision had been taken to begin slaughtering these noble beasts, he would not let another’s valuable mount feed the garrison before surrendering his own to the castle butchers. It was a gesture, for we knew that all the horses would be eaten eventually, yet it was well received by the knights under his command. When we wolfed down our horse-meat soup at noon and sipped our cups of water, tinged pink with a few drops of wine, Sir George Farnham, a bluff, stout fellow, called out a toast to our gallant commander, praising his generosity and valour. It put heart into us all – just those few scraps of good red meat – and when the alarm was sounded a few hours later for an assault
on the main gatehouse, I noticed a new vigour in the knights as they contained and countered the attack of the onrushing Flemings.

It did not last. For a fighting man, one bowl of soup a day, even fortified with scraps of horse meat, is not enough to keep his body strong and his courage high.

I took a rare break from the walls on the eleventh day of November. It was the feast day of St Martin – a Roman knight who renounced violence and became a peace-loving bishop. I wondered if there were a lesson for me there and thought about my conversation with Abbot Boxley – although I could not renounce my duty, nor could I celebrate the saint’s life with a feast. In fact, I quit my post because I needed to see Robin about an urgent matter that I could not discuss with anyone else. I had done my tally at midnight of the men who were still fit to fight – and come up one man short. He was still missing the next morning – and I felt a chill in my soul. I left Sir George in command of my section of wall and sought out my lord in his post at the top of the southern tower of the keep.

I found him there with Mastin and a broad-chested, brown-faced man called Simeon, the archer captain’s second-in-command, and a dozen bowmen on duty, gazing beyond the outer bailey walls below and over at Boley Hill, where the trebuchets were being served. As I came up through the arched doorway, Mastin was in the act of drawing a bow – and what a bow it was. Bigger than any I had seen before. The stave was more than seven feet in length and as thick as my wrist at the centre. I could see the huge muscles on Mastin’s arms and shoulders bulge and writhe as he pulled this beast of a weapon back to its fullest extent. He loosed and the arrow flew up and away over the walls, over the dry moat, over a straggle of huts before the semicircle of trebuchets, and flashed down to skewer the lower leg of a man loading one of the catapults. The man’s cry of pain was audible even at this distance: a high
animal yowl. Robin and Mastin – his hairy face sweating with the effort of the shot – congratulated each other excitedly.

I had never seen an arrow shot so far before – three hundred yards, maybe even a shade more – and to hit its target at the other end was not far short of miraculous.

I joined in the words of praise.