by Angus Donald
One day, hearing of a haul of expensive spices from the Saracen lands that had been landed at Newhaven and was coming up to London by road in a convoy, we lay in ambush at a spot near the village of Crowborough. It was the perfect site for an attack: the main road turned suddenly and passed between steep banks on either side, and our archers had plenty of foliage and undergrowth in which to take cover. We heard the approach of the wagons clearly and just as Robin was about to give the signal to loose, a storm of arrows burst from the woods slightly further down and on the other side of the road. We joined in the barrage, of course, and when all the guards were dead, each stuck like a hedgehog with arrows from both sides, we cautiously emerged to find ourselves face to face with another of Cass’s ‘conrois’, led by a big ugly bowman called Ralph.
We laughed and shared the loot – Ralph was an admirer of Robin’s – and once we were all safely away from the site of the robbery we pooled our food and drink and, making good use of the captured spices to flavour our ale, made merry into the night under the stars.
Robin was as happy as an apprentice on a holy day. He was reliving his youthful adventures, leaping out from cover, slaughtering his enemies and disappearing back into the forest laden with booty. He also kept up his new practice in those weeks of giving money away like a drink-addled sailor in port and this ensured that he received a steady stream of information from the local inhabitants and that he was not once betrayed.
The hammer blow fell when we were returning to our temporary camp near Goudhurst with a wagon full of grain sacks taken from a poorly guarded French convoy. I heard the pounding of hooves behind and, fearing attack, Robin had everyone off the road and into the scrubby woodland beside in a trice, weapons drawn, ready to flee or fight. A single rider on a sweat-splattered dun horse came tearing round a bend in the road and Robin stepped into its path, stopping it with an upheld palm. It was a strapping young man named Frank, one of Ralph’s men whom we had met a week or so before at the comical double ambush at Crowborough. There was nothing amusing about this meeting. The man slid exhausted from his horse and Robin had to support his considerable weight to stop him crashing to the ground.
‘My lord,’ he panted, his young face beetroot with exertion. ‘Thank God I have found you. It’s Cassingham. They came there. They came in force and did … terrible things. Sir, we must go. Master William is there already. It is too, too horrible, I can’t—’ He began coughing violently.
We got little more out of the fellow that morning. Cassingham had been attacked by the French, that was clear. The servants had scattered to the woods, some had been injured. Worst of all, Mastin, who by sheer bad luck had been visiting the manor when the attack went in, had been captured along with five of his bowmen. I witnessed the youthful levity wiped from my lord’s face like chalk on a child’s writing slate cleaned with a damp cloth. In an instant, he looked all of his fifty-one years.
Robin and I left the man to our comrades – bidding them to return to our barn in Goudhurst with the laden grain wagon and wait there for orders. We wasted not another instant. We were in the saddle and galloping south, driving our horses mercilessly. My own mind whirled in a tornado of fear for what awaited at our journey’s end.
We found the lord of the manor of Cassingham sitting cross-legged on the packed earth floor of what remained of his hall. All around him were piles of ash and blackened timber. The framework of the eastern wing, two walls at least, was still standing, although it was so pitted by fire that a hard kick would send it tumbling. Here and there a few twisted iron objects poked above the charred debris, and the shape of the long oak hall table could still be made out under a heap of cinders. Even the palisade that surrounded the courtyard had been incinerated, as had almost all of the outbuildings. The hall itself had burned for two days, we later learned, and the blaze had only been extinguished by the first rains of autumn, which fell like a torrent on the very day we rode south. It was mid-September. The summer, that special time of sunshine and simple pleasures, was over.
Cass had his unsheathed falchion across his knees and his head was bent over it, his long red hair falling forward. When I called to him and stepped closer, he looked up and I saw his face was grimed nearly black with ash and he’d been weeping. I crouched down beside him, putting a hand on his shoulder.
‘Do not upset yourself, lad,’ I said. ‘It is a great blow when one’s home is destroyed, and all the possessions in it, all the memories of family and friends are consumed, but we can always rebuild. We have the money – God knows we have the timber – and there are plenty of willing hands. My own home in Westbury has been burned to the ground before and I understand the pain you’re feeling …’
‘It’s not just my home – you are right, we can always rebuild the hall. It’s … it’s that,’ and he jerked his head at the far side of the courtyard. I saw that Robin was kneeling beside a scatter of bodies on the ground.
‘The French strung them up by the neck over the gateway, all five of them, after they had done … what they did to them. I don’t think they were all dead. One of them had got a hand free and was trying to save his neck from the rope. The fire killed them. That or the pain. I cut them down … but afterwards … but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do … It was all my fault. Their deaths must be laid at my door.’ He made a horrible croaking noise and I realised he was half-laughing in a lunatic way. ‘Their bodies are at my door – ha-ha-ha – there by my burned-out door.’ I gave his shoulder a hard squeeze, partly to stop the awful noise he was making.
‘It is not your fault, Cass. Never say that. We know who is to blame and it is not you. Remember that.’
I squeezed his shoulder again and got to my feet. I did not want to look at the bodies. I had seen enough horror in my time to know that I wished to see no more of it. But I walked over to Robin and those awful prone forms anyway – you might call it a debt I owed to the dead men.
I was aware of other folk moving around the courtyard, Cassingham servants, the pretty blonde girl, Sarah, who had served us food, and a few of Cass’s men-at-arms, eyes big with shock and grief, beginning to clear up, carrying blackened timbers away, sweeping the ash into huge piles. The lord of the manor too had got to his feet now and was starting to direct operations with a few quiet commands. Robin was standing silently beside the bodies, his eyes the colour of cold iron. I forced myself to look down at them.
These were not men, I thought, these five reddish-brown man-sized things, skinless, hairless, melted into shapelessness by fire. These crusted horrors may once have contained the essence of my comrades, but no longer. This was cooked meat, dried blood, bone and gristle – no more.
I looked away and saw that Robin was in conversation with Simeon, Mastin’s second-in-command. The archer was white as a sheet, trembling and holding out a long thin object wrapped in a grubby linen sleeve, offering it to Robin.
My lord turned to me. ‘Simeon says they flayed, hanged and burned the others here,’ he said. ‘He watched it all from hiding in the woods. But they took Mastin with them. It seems they are heading back towards Dover.’
A shiver of pure horror swept down my back, raising every tiny hair on my body in protest. I realised what lay in store for my friend.
‘I’m going after them,’ said Robin.
‘I’m coming with you,’ said Cass.
‘Enough chatter,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
Chapter Twenty-two
The three of us set off a half-hour later in pursuit of the White Count’s men. Cass had suggested we go in force – a hundred archers and a hundred men-at-arms – but Robin said it would take time to muster the men and that we could never hope to match the French strength in numbers. We were better using stealth, he said, than marching through Kent with a small army that could be seen and heard from miles away.
‘He hopes to draw us into the open,’ said Robin. ‘I can see no other point in keeping Mastin alive – except as bait. He wants us to mass our forces and come
at him with all our strength so he can crush us once and for all. The White Count wants us to fight his kind of war – ranks of mailed knights charging at each other across the fields of glory. We need to fight our kind: the war of sudden ambush, strike and run, the war of a thousand tiny cuts. The war of the weak against the mighty.’
We went as fast as we could but did not take the direct route to Dover. Robin insisted the enemy would likely be laying ambushes on the road, hoping to trap us as we followed. So Cass led us by secret paths and ways in a loop north and east as far as the outskirts of Canterbury, and then further east so that we came into Dover from the direction of Walmer Castle, a little further up the coast.
We travelled as fast as we could urge our horses – we changed them at a friendly manor just outside Canterbury, owned by a cousin of Cass’s, and pushed on all through the night – but it was dawn once again when we found ourselves hidden from sight in the woods above the white cliffs to the east of Dover Castle.
I shinned up a tall elm, a few yards back from the tree line, to get a better view. The castle itself was largely the same, a little more battered, a little more worn down, but still holding out bravely against the French. The three golden lions of England flew yet above the keep. No, it was the French encampment outside Hubert de Burgh’s fortress that had changed out of all recognition. A six-foot-high earth wall with an accompanying outer ditch had been thrown up all around the French lines and watch towers stood every hundred yards along its length. The enemy had evidently learned a lesson from our surprise attack in July and in the two months that had passed they had been busy.
I also realised that Robin had been right about taking the precautions he had, for the camp was evidently on high alert. I saw several patrols of crossbowmen, twenty strong, passing along the inside of the earth walls. And in the centre of the camp, at least two full conrois of cavalry were mustered and mounted, ready to face any attack. There could be no surprising them.
In the middle of the encampment some three hundred yards away, I saw something that sank my heart into my boots. On the platform with the cross bar in the centre of a cleared circle, a knot of men had gathered around a struggling figure. As I looked on, ropes were slung over the beam and the men dissolved to leave the prisoner, stripped naked and secured by his arms and legs, stretched out in an X shape. Even from this distance, I recognised the burly hair-covered body of Mastin. Beside him sat a small box-shaped contraption made of rungs and struts, and I realised with a heave of my stomach that it was the skin-drying rack.
I climbed down the tree to confer with my friends.
‘We could wait till nightfall,’ said Cass, ‘create some sort of diversion, then sneak over the wall when they are distracted, creep up to the gibbet and cut Mastin free.’ There could be no doubting Cass’s courage but Robin killed the idea dead.
‘They are expecting us,’ he said. ‘From what Alan says they have mounted guards, crossbow patrols – men standing by just so that they catch us in the act of trying to rescue our friend. Even if we got to him undiscovered and cut him free – what then? We wouldn’t have a hope of getting the four of us out of there alive. We would all be hanging from that bloody gibbet this time tomorrow.’
Cass looked crestfallen. Robin said gently, ‘In other circumstances it might have been a splendid idea but—’
A long, yowling scream interrupted him, a noise that stole the breath from all our lungs. Cass reacted first, leaping for the lowest branch of the elm and climbing the tree like a monkey.
Robin and I looked at each other. ‘We don’t have time to wait for nightfall,’ I said.
‘You know what we must do, don’t you?’ he said. I swallowed, appalled. For I knew exactly.
Another scream ripped apart the morning air. Cutting through the sounds of a camp of a thousand men just waking up. Indeed the scream seemed to mute all the other hubbub with its terrifying power.
Cass jumped down to the grass beside Robin and me. He was as pale as whey. ‘They’ve started,’ he said. ‘Two men in butcher’s aprons are …’ he looked for a moment as if he couldn’t get out the words ‘… cutting at him.’
‘I don’t think we can save him,’ said Robin. ‘I wish we could but I cannot see how we can get inside the camp and get out again without all of us being—’
Another horrible, bubbling scream. Cass jumped half an inch in the air.
‘All we can do is give him a swift death.’
We looked at each other. There was no other solution.
‘If we are all agreed, the sooner we do it the better,’ I said.
‘But how?’ said Cass. ‘It is a good three hundred yards, maybe three hundred and ten. On my best day ever I could not shoot two hundred and fifty yards and be sure of hitting my mark. And we don’t even have a line of sight from here,’ he said, gesturing at the high earth wall thirty yards in front of us.
Robin stepped back into the trees and returned with a long linen-wrapped package. He pulled off the covering to reveal Mastin’s own thick-waisted, pitch black, seven-foot yew bow.
‘We know it has the range,’ he said.
‘There is a certain grim poetry to this,’ Cass said. ‘Live by the sword – or in this case the bow.’ We each managed a taut smile, before another hellish shriek of pain wiped our faces clean of amusement.
‘Can you shoot it? Have you ever actually hit anything with that monstrous thing?’ I said to Robin.
‘It’s a bow, Alan. I’ve been shooting bows, all kinds of bows, since I was a lad.’
‘But it is a blind shot, my lord. From more than three hundred yards.’
‘What choice do we have? Tell me.’
It seemed impossible, even for Robin. And yet, looking at my lord’s steel-grey eyes, I wanted to believe he could do it.
‘You know you have only one shot,’ I said. ‘One shot, remember – they’ll see the direction of the arrow – then they will be on us like a pack of wolves on a newborn lamb.’
‘I know that, Alan,’ said my lord. ‘Now get up that tree and give me the angle. You are directing this. You are my eyes. Cass, you give me a hand to get a bow cord on this beast.’
In the branches of the elm, I looked over the camp. The business of the new day was continuing: folk were poking campfires into life, some were washing faces and hands in buckets of water. Others were standing around drinking from flasks of ale. I could smell frying bacon, wafting on the breeze. And in the midst of all this, a man was being stripped of the skin that covered his flesh. Mastin’s whole upper body was now sheeted in blood and – by God – a tall figure in pure white clothing was standing beside him whispering in his ear.
‘The White Count is there,’ I said excitedly. ‘Kill him. Kill that bastard.’
Cass and my lord were looking up at me, the vast bow strung and in Robin’s hands. Cass stood beside him with a quiver of arrows.
‘One shot, Alan,’ Robin said. ‘Is he stationary?’
‘No, no, the French bastard is circling around Mastin, taunting him, no doubt. Oh God, now he is closing in. Is that a knife in his hand? Jesu—’
Another howl of anguish ripped across the air between us.
‘Just give me the line, Alan. Quickly now.’
I pointed. Sticking my arm straight out towards the gibbet. Below me Cass dragged a long line in the earth at the base of the tree with his falchion.
‘Is that right?’ said Robin.
I looked down at the line and up again at the far-off gibbet. ‘A little to the right,’ I said.
‘There’s a slight breeze from the west,’ Cass said. ‘I was compensating.’
‘Very well then,’ I said.
Robin plucked an arrow from Cass’s quiver. He nocked it to the string, raised the bow and with a vast heave of his chest and shoulder muscles began to haul back the cord. Back and back it went. I could see his whole arm vibrating with the strain. Back came the cord. Back until it was nearly at the level of my lord’s ear. His face was the colou
r of a ripe plum and the muscles of his arms were standing out like a nest of writhing snakes.
He loosed. The arrow flew into the wide blue sky, sweeping up and up, then arcing down towards the gibbet. It slammed into the platform three yards wide and a yard short of Mastin’s dangling, bloodied form, causing a French man-at-arms to leap sideways with the shock of its appearance.
‘You missed!’ I shouted, beginning to clamber down the tree. ‘For God’s sake, why couldn’t you—’
‘Stay where you are,’ said Robin. ‘Stay up there. You are my eyes.’
Robin snatched another arrow from Cass’s hand. He nocked it.
‘Three yards to the left, one short,’ I said.
Robin said nothing, concentrating on pulling back that impossible cord.
Three hundred yards away, the gibbet was now emptied of men, save one hanging limply from his arms. Trumpets were sounding all over the camp, men were rushing to horses. I watched a man point with awful accuracy directly at me – I thought for a moment I had been seen, but I knew the trees were thick enough to shield me. He was merely pointing unerringly at where the arrow had come from.
Robin loosed. The shaft soared high and long and plunged down to stick quivering in the platform again. This time a bare yard to Mastin’s right.
‘A miss,’ I said. ‘Fraction too far right. A yard. Robin we have to go. We really have to go now. They are coming for us.’
A conroi of horsemen was trotting towards the gate in the wall nearest to us. Behind them was a marching block of a hundred crossbowmen in yellow-and-black surcoats. Spearmen were being marshalled to the right of the camp. We were about to be swamped by the enemy.
