by Dan Davis
Still he fell no further than to one knee, resting his weight upon his falchion. It was a blow that would have felled a horse and yet the fellow struggled to his feet.
William de Ferrers’ men, those he had fed with his own blood, had been able to resist such a strike.
Jocelyn pushed forward and bashed what was left of the shield into the man’s back. He staggered forward, slammed into the wall beside the doorway, breaking off a whole section of the painted plaster I had done a couple of years before. The man slumped and dropped his falchion by his side. His eyes glazed over and a trickle of shining dark blood ran down his cheek from the crack I had made in his skull.
Jocelyn, his face twisted in anger, stalked forward to finish the stranger off.
“Wait,” I commanded.
Jocelyn half-turned to me. “He is mine to kill.”
“Yes but I wish to know who he is,” I said, fighting the urge to crack Jocelyn on the skull for speaking to me with such disrespect.
“He’s a bloody madman, is who he is,” Jocelyn said, his eyes wide. “Do you see what he has done to my shield, Richard?”
I was laughing when the man leapt to his feet and charged me, screaming like a demon.
“Christ!” Jocelyn shouted and jumped back out of the way.
I checked the man’s rush, the arrow stuck in my shield snapping against his body. He rebounded from me and I pushed him back down against the wall in a shower of plaster. The damage to the wall was particularly infuriating because I had spent money I did not have in order to brighten up my hall in an effort to keep Emma happy.
So I stamped on his knee, hard and all he did was growl at me so I smashed his nose with my fist, crunching the bone and splitting the skin apart. His head rocked back and he settled down, finally, clutching his destroyed face and whimpering.
He was younger than I had first thought. His green clothes were dirty but not ragged and had barely been mended, suggesting they were new. He wore a cap dyed the same shade of green. Like his friend, he was sopping wet from the night’s rain.
“You are a keen fellow,” I said. “Who are you?”
He snarled and started to rise so stabbed my sword through his knee and ground the point against the bones inside. He screamed like an animal. And he smelled like one, too.
“He moves as quickly as you do,” Jocelyn said, sounding offended. “Or almost.”
The man thrashed around and cursed, his voice hoarse from screaming. He was smearing his blood all over my wall and floor.
“Go and see to the door,” I said to Jocelyn. “There was a third and fourth man. Archers, both. They ran.”
“I am sure they did,” Jocelyn said and ran to the door. His squire followed and together they shut it and came back to me.
“Watch him closely,” I said to Jocelyn and turned to my servants. “It is over for now. The sun will be up soon enough. There are at least two more of these fellows but I doubt they will return. Cuthbert, I shall ride out for those archers this morning. Have the horses readied. My grey courser. Bert the Bone, wake up your bloody useless dogs. We shall all need food. God bless your brave souls. Worry not about this man here, nor the filthy fellow over there. I shall deal with them both. Now, be about your day.”
They busied themselves with excited whispers and I turned my attention to my prisoner.
The man was jammed up against the wall, half propped up and half lying to one side. He leaned on one elbow and his other hand clutched his ruined knee. I had no doubt he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life. His head was bleeding and his nose smashed. A stream of blood welled from his head and ran down his face and neck onto his chest. The blood from his leg leaked onto the floor. It smelled wonderful, almost masking the foulness of his skin and hair.
“I am Sir Richard of Ashbury,” I said to the man speaking English. “I am lord of the manor. I should take you to the sheriff, I suppose but I think that instead I shall kill you.”
In truth, I had no intention to kill him. My blood lust was fading. His speed and power intrigued me, as it reminded me of the men I had fought many years before, in Palestine. Instead, I was attempting to unsettle him.
He laughed. A gurgling, hacking laugh that shook his body.
“I cannot die,” the man said, his manner of speech that of a commoner. His voice was a growl like gravel grinding on steel. “I will live forever in Eden. By the power of the Green Lord’s blood in this life. I die and I live again. I cannot die. You can do nothing to me, nothing.”
Jocelyn bristled. “He is truly a madman,” he said and stopped when he turned to me. “What is it?”
His words were echoes of the mad ravings of the followers of William de Ferrers twenty-five years before, in the Holy Land. The talk of a Green Lord was new but it was the same madness.
“Richard?” Jocelyn said, prompting me. I shook my head.
Could it be, I wondered, that William had returned to England? It was the sort of attack he liked to make. If so, why send merely a few men to attack me? I was almost offended that he would send so few, and those few barely competent. If it was indeed William, surely he would have known they would fail.
Jocelyn sighed at my prolonged silence and sank to his knees before the man. The hall behind me grew lighter as the hearth fire grew to flame and the servants busied themselves lighting more tallow candles.
“Did you not hear?” Jocelyn said. “Are your ears stoppered with mud? A lord has commanded you to speak your name. From where have you come? Why did you attack us so? You know that we are knights, do you not? You could never have defeated us.”
The man stared at Jocelyn. His eyes ran, behind his smashed nose, a small smile on his bloody lips. He chuckled, like a saw catching on a knot of wood.
“Do not think feigning madness will save you,” Jocelyn said. “Madness or not, you shall be tried and the court will certainly condemn you to death. Do you understand that? Do you? But perhaps you can do right by God. Perhaps the court will treat you with sympathy if you were merely doing as commanded. Did your lord send you here? Who is he? Is he one of the rebels? Which of the rebel barons is your master?”
The man’s eyes were wild and full of joy. His bloody smile spread slowly wider across his face. The man licked his lips.
“Jocelyn,” I said, starting a warning.
Jocelyn half turned to me and the man darted forward, quick as a cat and yanked Jocelyn’s dagger from his belt.
Startled, Jocelyn fell back and scrambled away. I moved forward, ready to stop the man in green from stabbing Jocelyn.
Instead, the man plunged the dagger into his own eye, up to the hilt.
He was laughing as he died.
We all fell silent as the body slump sideways to the floor. It lay still, but for a jerking foot.
“What in the name of God?” Jocelyn cried.
The hall crackled with the sound of the growing hearth fire. My servants froze in the middle of whatever task they were doing. Anselm’s face, behind me, was white.
“He murdered himself,” Jocelyn said.
“I saw.”
Anselm cleared his throat. “Why would he do such a thing, lord?”
I looked back at the body of the other attacker. It may have been my imagination or the flickering of the firelight but I thought perhaps the dead man’s body moved. A leg jigging. Bodies did that sometimes and yet I wanted to be certain.
Jocelyn spoke to Anselm. “He was a madman,” he said. “Moon touched.”
“We will carry both men into the yard,” I said to Jocelyn and Anselm. “We three. We shall take their heads and toss the corpses into a pit by the pig sty.” They both stared at me as if I was mad. I cuffed at my mouth. The smell of the blood was making me salivate. “And then we shall eat while our horses are prepared. We have a pair of archers to catch.”
With those archers, I had two more chances to discover if my old enemy had truly returned to England.
If so, I would torture from them the truth
of what William de Ferrers’ intentions were.
And where, precisely, I could find him.
***
“But why did we take off their heads?” Jocelyn asked as we mounted our horses in the courtyard in front of the house.
It was an unpleasant business and I had taken their heads by lamplight out beyond the workshops by the middens. I did not truly expect them to rise up from their deaths but I could not be sure. If they were William’s men, and I thought it likely, then they would have a bellyful of his blood. His blood made them strong, fast and quick to heal. I doubted the blood could heal them from such terrible wounds but it was not worth the risk.
So, to be safe, I hacked their heads from their bodies before tumbling them into a shallow grave. After that, we three men-at-arms had dressed in our mail hauberks and carried our helms and undamaged shields. It was light enough to see by, the sun brightening the damp world from over the wooded horizon.
“Sometimes a man can seem dead but get to his feet again,” I said. “I did not wish to take any chances while we pursue these archers.”
“Surely they were dead,” Jocelyn said. “Did you think they were witches?”
“Perhaps,” I said, not meeting his eye.
Jocelyn looked at me suspiciously. He might not have said it but he must already have suspected what they were. When he was a little lad, William and his followers took him. I had saved Jocelyn and his sister Emma shortly before William had drained the children of their blood. Even then, I had just saved them from a terrible inferno that had engulfed their wooden cage, started by William so that he could escape while I saved the prisoners.
We never spoke of what happened in that cavern, what the siblings had seen. Emma was far too young at the time to remember anything of it at all. I was sure, though, that Jocelyn must have remembered me bathing in a bath of blood, drinking it down and curing myself of terrible burns in mere moments.
But it had happened twenty-five years before and Jocelyn was a man in the prime of his life so if he wanted to pretend ignorance then I was willing to let him.
We rode through the gate and out into the dawn, scattering chickens. The air was damp, but spring-damp, a smell of succulent young leaves and the whiff of blossom here and there in the grey-purple light. The manor house and outbuildings at Ashbury were surrounded by a timber wall and deep ditch but they were meant to deter petty thieves, keep animals from crossing the boundary either way. Properly manned, it could also have formed a sturdy barrier against an armed attack.
Mostly, I had built it as a way of announcing my return to the ancestral home after ten years in the Holy Land. My intention was to bring the villagers and servants together in a sort of festival of digging and log splitting. That had been fifteen years ago and the wall was sagging in places. I did not have the money to rebuild yet it remained an adequate defence.
But without a guard posted, a ten-foot timber wall would never keep out a determined man.
There were footprints in the mud that Anselm claimed to be able to interpret as the tracks left by two men running. It seemed as though the archers had run east along the track toward the smaller of my woods near to the village. That track and the wood came out on the roads toward Derby and, beyond, Nottingham.
I wished I had more men with which to cover more ground but times were hard and all I had was the ancient hunting dogs and their more ancient kennel master riding one of my sway-backed old nags.
Though it was not raining, the world was sodden. Water dropped from every leaf and the grass drenched with fresh rainwater. The sun struggled to shine through the wet blanket clouds hanging over us. But it was light enough to hunt.
We rode along the track toward the wood. It was a lane, really, with dense hazel hedgerows both sides and the hedge on the northern side growing thicker until it became the Ashbury high wood. The air was clear, refreshed. Even wet, an early summer morning in England was a lovely thing. I felt good to have killed a man again. I looked forward to catching the archers. I looked forward to them telling me where their master hid.
“They could be miles away,” Jocelyn protested again. “In any direction.”
“Not according to your squire,” I pointed out.
Jocelyn scoffed at Anselm’s tracking and hunting abilities. The lad was ranging ahead so could not take offence. The dogs bounded ahead of us, excited to be outside but useless at tracking the archers. It was simply too wet for them to sniff the men out.
“You should have those dogs killed,” Jocelyn said. “They’re far too old. Half of them are mad and the other half are blind. All of them are as stupid as Bert the Bone.”
Bert was the kennel master and nothing Jocelyn said was entirely incorrect.
“We shall find them,” I said, loudly, because a lord must appear confident even when he is not.
Anselm rode back along the track. He rode very well for a lad of sixteen, nothing flashy about his style at all.
“A smear of mud, my lords,” he said, grinning. “Up ahead where the wood begins beside the lane.”
Off the side of the track, he showed us where the ground had been disturbed by something. Perhaps a man slipping, dragging a swathe of long grass up leaving the wet earth bared below. It was right by a gap in the hazel and alder, leading into the blackness of the wood proper. A mixed wood of hazel, ash and oak with elder everywhere in the understorey. A couple of great elms poked above the canopy in the centre. The leaves were heavy, dripping and subdued. The air felt dense and close. Even the birds were keeping close counsel.
“We cannot ride through there,” Jocelyn said. He loved sitting atop his horse, a fine bay courser that I had bought for him, and fairly detested walking.
The dogs were so far up ahead they were almost out of sight and playing with each other and the kennel master Bert berated them.
“If you find a scent,” I shouted to Bert the Bone. “Blow the horn.”
He raised a skeletal hand in acknowledgement and I dismounted.
“How did those dogs miss this?” Jocelyn said, nodding down at the disturbed ground. “I told you they are useless. You should invest in a new pack. I heard Ralph’s brother Walter has a pregnant bitch. Good dogs, his lot, you should see them track a deer.”
“That would break old Bert’s heart,” I pointed out.
“He’s even more useless than his dogs,” Jocelyn said.
“Says you who won’t even get off his horse,” I said. “Come now.”
We tethered our horses and went forward into the darkness on foot with our shields raised, me, Jocelyn and Anselm. A bowman was worth little without his bow, whether he used a crossbow or a war bow. But a single arrow could fell a knight, no matter how brave and skilled he was. Something that King Richard found to his cost so many years before when he blundered into the range of the crossbow that killed him. I intended to keep my shield up.
Anselm went first and we followed. The morning wind rustled the leaves in the canopy above, shedding a steady pattering of rain down on us. My shield, helm and everything else caught on branches and budding twigs and the drenched leaves soaked my mail hauberk. Anselm and my servants would be busy scouring the rust off everything. I decided again that I needed to find a new squire.
“The branches are broken here,” Anselm said, over his shoulder. “Someone pushed through this bush, not long ago.”
“You fancy yourself a tracker, Anselm?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “I know that hunting appeals to you.”
“Yes, my lord,” he said, whispering. “My father loves to take deer.”
“Surprised he has leisure time,” I said.
“How can you even see anything?” Jocelyn muttered behind me in the darkness.
“Spread out,” I said to them both. “Leave space between us. Together we make too tempting a target.”
It was yet black as night under the dripping trees and I imagined an archer taking aim at me from the shadows. It smelled powerfully of mushroom and mould under the cano
py. We pushed on through the woodland toward the fields beyond, my shoes sinking into the soft woodland floor with each step. I was slowly realising we had no chance of finding men, creeping through at a careful walking pace.
Ahead, a group of rooks chattered in their high nests. They began cawing wildly jostling and flapping in the branches. A few swooped through the trunks before us, like apparitions. Their cawing set off more birds, the noise spreading through the wood in every direction.
“Our archers have scared them,” I said, meaning the rooks. “They sound rather far ahead, would you not say? We must hurry.”
“They will be running for their lives,” Jocelyn said. “And they will be unarmoured. We will never catch them like this. We should get back on our horses and ride around. We could get in front of them by midday.”
“You are probably right,” I admitted. While I knew I could out-pace and out-distance any mortal man even in my armour, I also knew my men could not. “Anselm, what do you think?”
“Me?” The lad spluttered, looking down. “I do not know, my lord.”
“Ah,” I said. “So you disagree? Come on, speak up, boy. And keep going. That way.”
We kept moving forward and Anselm spoke without looking round at us. “It is simply that following a trail is the best way to find a man who does not want to be found. My father says a man can go to ground in an acre of woodland and it would take a dozen men a week to find him.”
“He does, does he?” Jocelyn said. “I take it that your father likes to exaggerate. Or perhaps you do.”
“No, sir,” Anselm said, ducking the water-laden leaves of a wild stand of hawthorn. “He also says you can flush a man out if you frighten him enough. You and your men can thrash the bushes, curse his name and list the things you will do to his family if he does not give himself up.”
“Your father is the most honourable knight in Christendom,” Jocelyn whispered, snapping branches aside with his shield. “He would never say such a thing.”
“But he did,” Anselm blurted. “He won his fortune taking hundreds of knights in tournaments. Many of them fled the field and had to be hunted down.”
