The Hostility of Hanno: An Outlaw Chronicles short story (4 page)

Alan circled Ghost around the fallen man, the menace of his long sword keeping the leaderless men-at-arms at a respectful
distance. From a dozen yards away, Chiavari, shouting with pain and fear through a bloody mask, urged the men to attack the
brutal madman who had just blinded him. But, sensibly, if perhaps ignobly, the men-at-arms kept their distance. Hanno was
on his feet by now, tugging at the cut rope around his neck, and Alan extended his left hand. Hanno grasped it with both his
bound ones, gripped and leapt up on to the back of Ghost. Alan cursed and cut hard at a man-at-arms who had come too close.
The man dodged the blade, staggered back and sprawled on to his backside. They were clear of the crowd. Alan put spurs to
Ghost’s sides and they galloped away.

***

The Archbishop’s men came for them the next day. Alan and Hanno were in the Englishman’s tent, a green woollen affair that
he had pitched in an olive grove half a mile outside the ruined city of Acre. Alan was drinking wine and tending to the bruises
that marked the Bavarian’s already battered face. The first he heard of their coming was the soft murmur of voices, the click
of hoof on stone and the jingle of metal accoutrements. He pushed open the cloth flaps, stepped out of his abode and into
bright sunshine; Hanno, his face still black and red from the bruising earned in the struggle before his hanging, was hard
on his heels. Both men had steel in their hands, violence in their hearts. They were confronted outside the tent by four
Italian knights on big gleaming horses, with pennant-streaming lances and red-and-silver shields, and four elegant squires
also mounted in a rank behind their lords. Alan Dale looked up at them all, squinting his eyes against the harsh Mediterranean
light, the handle of his sword slick against his palm.

‘You are Alan Dale, a man-at-arms in the service of the Earl of Locksley?’ said the foremost knight, scowling down beneath
the brim of his heavy helmet.

‘I am. What is it to you?’

‘You are charged with obstructing the Archbishop’s men in carrying out his justice, namely in seizing that villain, that foul
murderer’ – he jerked his chin at Hanno – ‘and unlawfully bearing him away, thereby preventing the …’

A huge man stepped out of the green flaps of the tent next to the one that had held Alan and Hanno. He had a vast, ugly, battered
red face framed with two braided yellow pigtails, a short-sleeved coat of iron mail that was too tight around his massive
chest, and a double-headed axe in one meaty fist. Around his brawny shoulders was draped a long green cloak. He looked fearsome
and irritated.

‘Save your stinking breath,’ the big blond man said to the knight.

He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Men began to appear from all around the camping ground, emerging from other
similar tents, from behind trees, from under crude shelters made of turf and olive branches, many wearing the same distinctive
green cloak as the big man, some bearing war bows and nocked arrows, others armed with axe or spear or sword. None of them
looked soft; each man looked exactly like what he was – a proven warrior, a seasoned fighting man with the scars to demonstrate
that claim and the pride to match. Scores of men appeared, and more, perhaps as many as a hundred, and they flowed towards
Alan Dale’s tent and the Italian knights before it, surrounding the aliens almost silently, with a quiet discipline but also
with an unmistakable sense of deadly menace.

The foremost knight stared at the blond giant before him. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I am John Nailor, but they all call me Little John.’ He spoke clearly and slowly in English, watching to see that the knights
comprehended his words. ‘I serve the Earl of Locksley, as do all these good men here.’ He waved generally at the villanous-looking
cloaked army that surrounded the Italians. ‘We are all Robin Hood’s men.’

Then John pointed a sausage-like finger at Hanno. ‘This ugly fellow is a friend of Alan Dale’s. That means he is a friend
of mine, of all of ours. Do you understand?’

The foremost Italian knight licked his lips, and nodded.

Little John continued in slow, measured English. ‘So, if you have a problem with this man, you have a problem with all of
us. If you offer him the threat of violence, you are threatening all of us. Am I being clear?’

The knight nodded again.

The big man said, ‘Now – if you like, if you are feeling particularly rash, you can fight us for him, all of us, right now.
But, alternatively, you could quietly turn your horses and ride away, and tell your master that you weren’t able to find the
fellow after all, and you fear he may have slipped away from the army and left the Holy Land altogether. Indeed, in truth,
we will all be taking ship in a couple of days and we’ll be gone from the Holy Land for good. So, you must choose: do you
pull your swords and die, right here, right now? Or do you ride away with honour?’

The knight said nothing. He looked around slowly at the sea of green-cloaked warriors, at the nocked bows and bright-whetted
spears, then merely gave a small, delicate shrug and began to turn his horse. The army of Locksley men opened a path before
them, a green corridor, and the four knights and their squires rode quietly through it out into the olive grove.

‘Well,’ said Little John, his face creasing with satisfaction. ‘That seems to be that.’ He looked hard at Hanno. ‘I hope you
prove to be worth all the trouble, baldy,’ he said. ‘Your mangy carcass is only walking around today because young Alan here’s
got a tender heart. So you might see if you can think of some way to repay his kindness. You are going to England, my fine
German felon, and if you want to keep that carcass intact until we get there, you’d better behave yourself. I hope you’re
well pleased with our company because, for better or worse, you’re one of us now. What say you to that?’

‘It is perfect,’ said Hanno.

Discover the fate of Hanno
in the latest epic novel of
The Outlaw Chronicles

Warlord

Read the first chapter now…

I have been thinking much upon Death of late; my own demise mostly, but also that of beloved comrades. I do not fear the Reaper
– I like to think that I never have – and yet I can sense his presence just over the next rise. Death is not the enemy; no,
he is an old, old friend coming as promised to collect me and take me on a strange journey. And perhaps when he raps at my
chamber door with his bony knuckles I shall even be pleased to see him, weary as I am: for he will take me to a place where
I shall see the face of God and, I earnestly pray, be reunited at last with those whom I have loved and who went on before
me.

Friend or enemy, he is coming, and soon. I can feel it in my old and creaking bones; I feel it in my bladder that now needs
to be emptied almost hourly in the long night-time, or so it seems. I feel Death in my aching kidneys, in my shortness of
breath and my constant, grinding weariness. But I have a task to complete before his shadow stains my threshold: I must set
down another tale of my young days as a bold warrior, another tale of my friend Robert Odo, Earl of Locksley; a lord of war,
a master thief, King Richard the Lionheart’s loyal lieutenant, and the man the people remember best as the outlaw Robin Hood.

I have not recalled this part of my life for a long time; it has been five years since I last took up the quill to write about
my strong, youthful self. My daughter-in-law Marie, who, with her husband Osric, runs this manor of Westbury on my behalf,
had convinced me that it was not good for me to be dwelling on ancient battles and fruitless quests. She told me with uncommon
firmness – it was indeed little short of a command – that I must pay attention to the present, that I must accept the life
of the man I am today, white-haired, stooped, and well past sixty winters, and not pine for the man I was and for all my glorious
yesterdays. And I think she may be right; for a while, for a year or more, I spent my days at Westbury inside the hall at
my writing stand, setting down the old stories of Robin and myself. It was not a healthy life: my eyes grew blurred and tinged
with blood, my hands ached from the long hours of scribbling, and my legs protested at their forced stillness, for I stirred
little beyond the courtyard for months on end. The unbalanced humours in my torpid body made me irritable, even angry; worse,
my mind became clouded and confused. In these past five years, with the writing stand dismantled and packed away and my quills
curling, moth-chewed and dusty in an old wooden mug, I have rediscovered the joy of fresh breezes and bright sunlight, and
of riding, if only on a gentle ambling mare, and I have joined my hunt servants in flying noble falcons and running the eager
hounds over my lands.

However, a visit to Westbury this week by my only grandson, Alan, has changed my mind, and decided me that I must grind black
ink, cut a fresh goose feather or two, and pore over parchment once again. That and the fact that Marie has gone to visit
her sick cousin Alice in Lincoln, and will not return for a week or more. So here I stand in the hall of the manor of Westbury,
in the fair county of Nottinghamshire, casting my mind back forty years, scratching out these lines as quickly as I may and
rekindling my old, half-forgotten skills.

He is a delightful lad, Alan; strong-limbed, cheerful, clean and obedient, with a fine seat on a horse and an ear for a pretty
tune – though he cannot sing a true note. He serves as a squire to the Earl of Locksley, not my old friend Robin, who has
long been in his grave, alas, but his vigorous son, the new earl. Alan is being trained in warfare and gentility at Kirkton
Castle, and seemingly has a respectable amount of talent with a blade; and I have received good reports of his courtly conduct,
too. But my grandson has almost no notion of events that took place before his birth, fourteen short summers ago. He knows
nothing and is oddly incurious about his grandmother Goody, my beloved but blazing-tempered wife, and about his own father
Robert, our son. Alan seems to believe that our good Henry of Winchester has been on the throne of England for an eternity,
since time began, when it has been no more than four and twenty years. And, while he has heard garbled tales of the noble
sovereign King Richard and his long wars in France, he once asked me, I believe quite seriously, if it was true that he had
a lion’s head. So it is for young Alan, in order that he might learn the truth of these long-ago struggles and the men and
women who took part in them, that I set down this tale, this tragic tale of cruel wars and savage devastation, of ugly, unnecessary
deaths and the inevitable search for bloody vengeance.

Prince John was on his knees. The youngest son of old King Henry, second monarch of that name, and brother of Lionhearted
Richard, now cowered on the greasy, fishy-smelling rushes on the floor of a run-down manor house in Normandy. Tears streamed
from reddened eyes down his pale cheeks and he clutched at the right hand of his elder brother, who was standing over him.
John’s thick shoulder-length reddish hair brushing the back of Richard’s hand, his oily teardrops anointing the King’s knuckles
as he babbled of mercy and forgiveness, swearing before Almighty God and all the saints that he would be a loyal man, a true
subject from this moment forth and for ever, if only his generous brother could find it in his heart to forgive him. Richard
remained silent, looking down coldly at his dishevelled sibling. But he did not pull his hand away.

I was watching this strange performance in the solar of the old manor house of Lisieux, in northern Normandy, some thirty
miles east of Caen. I was in the small, crowded room off the main hall, standing with a score of knights a pace or two behind
King Richard, and I must admit that I was thoroughly enjoying the spectacle. Prince John, once titled Lord of Ireland and
Count of Mortain, who had until recently enjoyed the enormous revenues of the plump English counties of Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire,
Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, was once again John Lackland, a man without a clod of earth to his name. Yet his fall was richly
deserved, for John had a list of black crimes to his credit as long as my lance: when King Richard had been captured and imprisoned
in Germany the year before, this snivelling prince had made an attempt to snatch the throne of England – and he had very nearly
succeeded. He had schemed with Richard’s enemy, King Philip Augustus of France, to keep the Lionheart imprisoned, hampering
the collection of the enormous sum in silver that Richard’s captor, the Holy Roman Emperor, had demanded – and even going
so far as to join the French King in making a counter-offer to the Emperor if he would hold his brother in chains for another
year. But he had failed, God be praised: the ransom had been painfully gathered from an already tax-racked English populace
and paid over, and Richard had been freed.

On his release, the Lionheart had crushed the rebellion in England in a matter of weeks. Then, just a few days prior to this
painful scene, he had crossed to Normandy with a large, well-provisioned army of seasoned fighting men. His avowed aim was
to push King Philip and his French troops out of the eastern part of his duchy, which they had annexed during his long imprisonment,
and contain them in the Île de France, the traditional land-locked fief of the French kings. And Prince John, who had so treacherously
sided with Philip, was now on his knees before his brother, weeping and begging for forgiveness.

Truly, John had been a bad brother; disloyal, duplicitous and treasonous, and all of this despite Richard’s great kindness
to him before his departure for the Holy Land. I despised the man – and not only for his underhand actions against my King;
I hated him on my own account, too. The previous year I had found myself, unwillingly, in John’s service – and I had seen,
at close quarters, his evil deeds, his callousness towards the people of England and his unholy delight in wanton cruelty.
He had, in fact, ordered my death on two occasions, and it was only by the grace of God and the help of my friend and comrade,
my lord Robert, Earl of Locksley, that I had escaped with my life.