The Hostility of Hanno: An Outlaw Chronicles short story (3 page)

But the man was lying. With a slow, dream-like clarity, Alan could see Rudolfo already reaching for the axe behind his belt.
And the dead, fear-stinking air was moving behind Alan’s back; he felt the whisper of it on his bare neck, although he had
not seen Rudolfo give the slightest signal. It was beginning.

Alan felt a heavy hand thud on to his shoulder – and he raised his left hand and flipped the full beaker of wine up behind
him into the face of the Chiavari standing at his back. A splash, a vile oath, and a clatter as the empty beaker hit the floor.
Alan’s poniard was already unsheathed in his right hand and without turning he jabbed the long blade backwards blindly, under
his left elbow between his arm and his ribs, and felt it sink home into the man’s groin. A squeal of rage and a wash of blood
over his fist, and Alan was on his feet and turning, tugging the blade free, moving to finish the wounded man with a second
plunging poniard strike to the belly.

If Alan Dale thought that he had moved swiftly to combat the Chiavari looming behind his stool, his brisk actions were as
nothing beside those of Hanno. The moment Rudolfo began to reach for the axe, the Bavarian put his right boot up on the edge
of the table and shoved it hard towards the man seated opposite, skidding the heavy wood across, smashing the table’s side
into his enemy’s chest and knocking him to the floor. Hanno was already twisting and rising, his dagger in his fist. He surged
up at the man standing behind his chair, the blade driving up, the soft pop of a knife-filled fist meeting slack jaw flesh,
and the dagger had buried itself under the chin of the Chiavari, ploughing through tongue and soft palette into his brain.
The man died instantly, on his feet, and Hanno turned like a cat, leapt two-footed on to the table, and used it as springboard
to dive at Rudolfo, who was only now struggling to his feet. As Alan jammed his poniard into the large belly of his already
stricken, wine-soaked victim, Hanno’s sunburnt shaven head smashed into Rudolfo’s mouth, knocking him immediately back down
on to the greasy rushes of the tavern floor. The two men lay prone for half an instant. Then Hanno’s body reared up above
his stunned opponent. A lateral swing of Hanno’s powerful right arm and his dagger punched into Rudolfo’s temple, cracking
through the thin plate of bone and deep into his skull. Hanno stirred the handle of the dagger once, extinguishing the divine
spark in his enemy’s appalled eyes in three long, slow, heavy heartbeats.

Panting, Hanno rose to his feet. He growled something in his backwoods German dialect to the very few remaining wide-eyed
spectators of the fight. Alan did not understand the words, he doubted that many in that dim, blood-stinking room recognised them,
but the message was crystal clear: ‘Anyone else have a problem with me?’

Outside the tavern, battle-joy boiling in their veins, Alan and Hanno trotted away down the narrow alley. Alan looked back
once but not a man had dared to follow them. They took two turnings, three, and then paused, their backs pressed flat against
the cool stone wall of a palatial house. And listened. Nothing.

Alan was grinning at his companion, his spirits soaring, his heart bounding. He tapped the other man’s broad chest with a
shaking forefinger. ‘You fight well, my friend,’ he said, his blood fizzing with post-combat euphoria. Hanno nodded distractedly,
still listening for sounds of pursuit. ‘And I didn’t do too badly either,’ Alan continued happily. ‘We make a damned good
fighting team, you and I.’

‘You are lucky!’ said the Bavarian. ‘The man you fight is too stupid.’

‘Hmm?’ Alan was taken completely aback.

Hanno looked at him, his face shrouded in shadow. ‘He puts hand on your shoulder. He gives warning. He is stupid.’

‘I finished him off pretty smartly.’

‘Yes, he is stupid.’

Alan’s glorious battle-stoked happiness drained swiftly away.

Hanno seemed to sense the change in Alan’s mood. ‘I show you,’ he said. He held up the index finger of his right hand before
Alan’s face. ‘This is my knife, yes?’ By a gleam of light from a nearby half-open doorway, Alan could see that the stubby
digit still had Rudolfo’s black blood on it. Hanno gripped Alan by the shoulders and turned him so that the young man’s back
was towards the Bavarian fighter.

‘Like this,’ he said. And he laid the finger lightly on Alan’s throat, on the left side, a fraction of an instant before he
put his left hand on Alan’s right shoulder, then he swiftly drew the finger across Alan’s neck as if cutting his throat, his
left arm across his back and shoulder bracing Alan’s body against the sweep of the cut.

‘This is how you do. See? This is perfect. He is stupid. You are lucky.’

For a terrifying moment the youngster felt as if he might burst into tears. Or lash out blindly at Hanno with his fists. But,
mercifully, he managed to control himself, and with a clogged, angry voice, he said, ‘Well,
you
were lucky – you were lucky
to have me there at all!’ And he pulled his shoulder roughly out of Hanno’s grasp and, without another word, marched down
the alley, leaving the bewildered Bavarian behind him.

Alan Dale rode slowly through the heap of dusty rubble that used to be the old town of Jaffa. It had been utterly destroyed
by the retreating enemy – with almost no stone standing upon another – at Saladin’s express order after the Battle of Arsuf,
two weeks previously. The battle, a bloody, day-long affair, had seen the light Saracen cavalry of the great Muslim warlord
overmatched, mauled and driven from the field by the repeated charges of the heavy Christian knights, and the Englishman had
played his part in that gory day most valiantly. But despite the victory, his spirits were low: he had come face to face with
some of the harsher realities of the world in recent weeks, and been forced to shed more blood than ever before in his life,
and his young, handsome face had been marked with its first lines of care.

He kicked his grey horse around the charred ruins of a grand house and pointed its nose down a steeply sloping road towards
the old harbour. The fishermen of Jaffa had enjoyed something of a boom with the arrival of the Christian army; if their shacks
and hovels had all been destroyed, no matter, for the hungry soldiery from half a dozen European nations made up for it by
buying almost anything they could catch, at almost any price they asked. Indeed, Alan had been dispatched to the harbour that
morning to buy a fresh tuna, if he could get it, for his lord’s table but he had been given strict instructions to pay no
more than three precious shillings – an outrageous amount already – for the noble fish. As the young man walked his horse
down the rubble road towards the waterfront, he felt the weight of battle fatigue press on his shoulders. His head was bowed
in imitation of his horse’s down-stretched neck and his chin almost rested on his mailed chest. He was still garbed for war,
although the great battle was many days behind him, for the shattered forces of Saladin had spawned a host of bandits – runaway
men who no longer saw the need for the Sultan’s discipline, and who now made their living ambushing unwary Christians – as
well as the more organized groups of Muslim warriors under one petty emir or another who harassed the Christian camp for loot
and glory. These groups of men lurked in groves of olive trees around the ruined town or in half-destroyed houses inside it
and rode out to surprise and attack small parties of knights, engage them, kill a few and then ride for safety before help
could be summoned. So, even though he had been dispatched on no more than a simple shopping errand by his master, Alan wore
a good iron-link hauberk despite the September heat, and as well as his poniard, he had a long sword hanging from his waist.

As Ghost, his faithful grey gelding, picked his way nimbly down the rubble-strewn road, Alan’s eye was plucked by a scene
to his left on a small promontory above the bay, a flattish piece of land that oversaw the curve of blue sea and the dirty
mass of crowded fishing boats below. A simple gibbet had been set up there some days before at Richard the Lionheart’s command,
a cross bar between two upright posts, and two dark corpses were twisting in the brisk wind from the Mediterranean. Evidently
another hanging was due, for a scrum of men in red surcoats was jostling around a small, squat figure, writhing hard, who
was evidently very far from resigned to his fate. Alan halted his horse and looked over at the scene, some thirty yards away.
He had a peculiar horror of hangings, for his father had been killed in such a manner half a dozen or so years previously,
when he was a boy, and in his heart of hearts it had always seemed a barbaric method of punishment: the slow strangling of
a man as he kicked and danced out his final moments at the end of a rough rope.

Alan was about to ride on down to the harbour when, with a sinking in his stomach, he recognized the brutal brown planes of
the knuckle-shaped bald head of the man about to hang.

Hanno.

There was no doubt about it. For several heartbeats, Alan hesitated. He could close his eyes, ride on and he would never have
to see the ugly little Bavarian again. He was not his comrade, his compatriot nor his friend; in all honesty, Hanno was an unfortunate
friendless fellow, a rude and graceless killer of men – and doubtless he had murdered someone of importance and was about
to pay the price.
I should ride on
, Alan told himself.
It is not my concern
, he said to his conscience. ‘A bad end is fitting
for a bad man such as he,’ he mumbled under his breath. And then he sighed, turned Ghost’s head around towards the top of
the slope and put his spurs into the beast’s sides.

As Alan approached the gibbet, he could see that Hanno had finally been subdued. He was bound at the wrists and around his
upper arms and was being pinned to the ladder propped against the gibbet by half a dozen men-at-arms, all in red surcoats
with a silver cross on the front – the Archbishop of Pisa’s men, Alan registered dimly. One of the red-coated Italians sat
a-horse, a vintenar by his look, or some other kind of petty officer. He nodded at Alan as he rode up on Ghost, and called
out a greeting.

‘God save you,’ sang out Alan in French. ‘And what have we here?’

‘A miscreant facing just punishment,’ said the vintenar, in that same language.

‘And what has the poor fellow done to deserve death?’

The man laughed bitterly and said, ‘His crimes are far too numerous to list but he will see the face of God today at the Archbishop
of Pisa’s orders because he has slain several of His Grace’s followers.’

Alan watched the noose being pushed over Hanno’s hairless head and the Bavarian, standing halfway up the ladder, looked at
him intently, a sly grin on his ugly face. Alan hated that look. It was too expectant; it placed obligation like a lead cope
around his young shoulders.

‘Friend, will you do me a great boon?’ he said to the vintenar. ‘Will you sell me this man? I have a purse of silver here
– three English shillings – which I will gladly exchange for his living body. I will take him away and you and the Archbishop
need never see his face again. I swear it. I am bound for England any day now and I will take this fellow with me. He will
be gone and you need not trouble your conscience with his death at your hands.’

‘His death will not trouble my conscience one jot – this man deserves to die. He is a killer, a murderer many times over. He
was born to hang. Did I mention that the men he killed were my brothers? I will watch him hang for their sakes, and for my
pleasure.’

‘What is your name, friend?’ said Alan softly.

‘I am Ignatio Chiavari, at your service,’ said the man, bowing in the saddle.

‘I am Alan Dale, a trouvère in the service of the Earl of Locksley,’ replied the Englishman. He thought for a moment about
the reputation of the Chiavaris, and of the yellow-faced one he had already met in the tavern at Acre. ‘Tell me, friend,’
he said, ‘are we not all killers, murderers, to one degree or another? Who among us can say that he is without mortal sin,
so blameless that he is fit to judge his fellow man? I know that I am not. My sins weigh heavily on me. In the name of mercy,
I ask you one more time, give me this man; allow me to purchase his life, to pay with my silver for his sins.’

‘What is this murderous villain to you? Why do you pester me on his behalf?’

‘So many of my friends have already died – in the struggle against the Saracen, and out of it – on this God-forsaken pilgrimage.
The Holy Land has been awash with blood since we came here – perhaps I do not want another corpse on my conscience.’

‘That man is already a corpse,’ said Chiavari, and he lifted his voice to the mass of men-at-arms holding Hanno on the ladder.
‘Carry on, Sergeant!’

‘Sir, I beg you,’ Alan protested.

‘Stand aside, sir,’ said the man, and drew his sword.

And as Alan watched, appalled, the men-at-arms bundled Hanno off the ladder and into space without the slightest ceremony.
The rope went taut as iron as it took the Bavarian’s weight; Hanno’s face began to swell, blood red and then darker; his tongue
was forced between his teeth, fat, ugly and purple; and his short legs began to kick futilely at the air.

Alan said, ‘No!’

His sword in his hand, he urged Ghost forward. Chiavari moved forward to block his path, cutting out at him with his long
blade. Alan blocked the sword blow, purely by instinct, pushing it away, and riposted equally without a moment’s thought,
scything his own heavy blade into the man’s unprotected face, crushing his nose and cutting deeply into his head across both
his eyes. Chiavari gave a great shout of pain and fell back in the saddle, his face a mass of blood and jelly. He would never
see again, but Alan was already past him, Ghost’s muscular body forcing his horse out of the way. The men at-arms scattered
before the gelding and its snarling, sword-wielding rider. Alan turned his horse by the gibbet, his right arm licked out,
his blade sliced through the rope, and Hanno’s body tumbled to the earth like a sack of dirt.