by Angus Donald
He looked at me strangely, noting the mud- and blood-smeared black surcoat, and the odd combination of my youth and my arrogance. Then, perhaps reassured by the direction I had come from, he said: ‘I haven’t forgotten it, sir: it’s Magdalene. But I might well ask, sir, who are you?’
‘I’ve been told to relieve you. That’s all you need to know,’ I said rudely. ‘Sir Ralph’s orders.’
He nodded, but still seemed a little uncertain. The hand behind my back gripped the handle of the misericorde tightly; in a couple of moments he was going to feel its point in his heart if he didn’t accept my explanation. I stared at him challengingly, straight in the eye. But finally he seemed to be convinced by my high-handedness and he shrugged and pushed past me, heading back towards the encampment. I watched him until he disappeared into the crowd of dark tents and finally relaxed, breathed out a huge lungful of air, and slid the slim blade back into my boot.
I had used up a lot of my nerves in this one night, and I noticed that my hands were trembling slightly, but I still had one obstacle to overcome: the walls of Kirkton Castle itself.
In the event, getting into the castle was simpler than I had expected. I merely walked away from the mass of tents, through a wide empty expanse of silent sheep pasture and towards the looming black bulk of Kirkton. When I was fifty yards away, a torch sprang to light on the battlements and, in response to it, I shouted: ‘Hello, Kirkton! I’m a friend. Hello! Don’t shoot. I come from Robin. I come from Lord Locksley.’
An arrow slashed past my ear and buried itself in the ground a dozen yards behind me, and I lifted both arms in the air and shouted again: ‘Hello, Kirkton. I come from the Earl of Locksley; let me in for the love of God.’
Another arrow hissed past and I heard a deep, Welsh-accented voice, a voice I knew well but had not heard for more than two years, shouting, ‘Stop shooting, you ynfytyn, stop wasting arrows.’ And then, much louder: ‘Who is out there? Come forward and name yourself.’
‘Tuck, it’s me – Alan. Get that idiot to stop trying to spit me like a bloody capon. Don’t you recognize me, you great tub of pork dripping? It’s Alan Dale. It’s me.’
‘God bless my soul!’ said the Welsh voice. ‘Alan Dale, back from the Holy Land, back from the dead. Miracles and wonders will never cease.’ And a rich, golden-brown belly laugh rolled out towards me through the darkness.
Chapter Two
They hauled me up over the wooden battlements on a loop of rope in less time than it takes to skin a rabbit – my old friend Tuck and a burly but shame-faced archer on guard duty called Gwen, whom I knew only slightly. The front gate was barred tight shut, Tuck told me in a low tone, and awakening the gate-guard to explain why the main portal needed to be opened would have taken too much time and caused far too much fuss. I was so pleased to see my stout friend that I hardly minded at all that I had trodden in a month-old corpse – my foot sinking into its rotten guts almost up to the boot top – that lay in the ditch below the palisade, while I was waiting for the loop to be thrown down.
Tuck had hardly changed at all in the time I had known him; he had the same cheerful round face, creased from half a lifetime of smiles, the same bulbous nose, reddish-brown hair, now dusted with a little grey, but still cut in the tonsure. While he was no longer a monk, as he had been when I first met him, he was still a member of the clergy: now the personal chaplain to Marie-Anne, Countess of Locksley. His new rank did not seem to have changed his attire. His brown monk’s habit was perhaps more worn and stained, and he seemed to have lost a small amount of weight – but apart from that he was exactly the same strong, broad, confident man that I had left behind at Kirkton when Robin and I rode out of its gates for the Holy Land more than two years ago.
The castle, too, was wonderfully familiar, even in the darkness. And as Tuck, leaving Gwen still mumbling apologies to continue his sentry duty, led me down from the walkway that ran all the way around the inside of the wooden battlements, down into the bailey courtyard of the castle, and over into the great hall, he chatted away happily as if we had parted just the week before. I was only half listening to him, my head being filled with such emotions after my bloody adventures that night; and I was further fuddled by the joyful sense of homecoming that almost overwhelmed me as I looked around at my master’s stronghold in the darkness.
‘… and we are pretty much down to our last barrel of flour,’ Tuck said. ‘The water and ale are holding out, of course, but then I’ve been rationing from the beginning of the siege …’
Murdac’s men, I gathered from Tuck’s happy prattle, had arrived a month ago, unheralded, and had immediately launched an attack on the castle. But the garrison of forty men that Robin had left behind to protect his wife and child had been supplemented by a force of another two score menat-arms who owed allegiance to William of Edwinstowe, Robin’s elder brother.
The combined force inside Kirkton had managed to fight off two determined assaults and then Murdac’s forces, bloodied but unbeaten, had set up camp in the fields around the castle and seemed to be attempting to starve the inhabitants of Kirkton into submission.
‘Lord Edwinstowe is here?’ I asked Tuck.
‘He is now snoring like summer thunder through yonder door,’ my friend replied, nodding at the entrance to the solar at the end of the great hall, Robin and Marie-Anne’s private chamber.
‘And Marie-Anne?’ I asked Tuck, incredulous.
‘She has taken up residence in the tower. It’s the safest place for her if the enemy ever gets into the castle. She is in good health and quite comfortable, she tells me, and it allows her to keep an eye on the stores, which we have stockpiled there. Her little boy Hugh’s in fine fettle, too.’
‘Robin’s brother William threw Marie-Anne out of her own bed, in her own castle …’ I was beginning to feel the stirrings of rage at this insult to my master’s lady, who was now forced to sleep in the motte, the stout square wooden tower that loomed over the bailey. It was the castle’s last line of defence, and a powerful two-storey fortification, situated on a great mound of earth, which a handful of good men could hold against many enemies if the bailey was overrun, but it was a rough-and-ready structure, built with an eye on military strength, not comfort, and it was no place for a gently born lady to reside.
‘Peace, Alan, be at peace,’ said Tuck. ‘Lord Edwinstowe is the master of this castle – for the time being. Doubtless things will change now that Robin has returned. It was right that he should have the master’s chamber. He saved us, you know; without his men-at-arms we would have been overrun when Murdac attacked. It is true that the siege has been quiet for a while now – bar the odd exchange of arrows and insults – but it would not do for him to be offended. It is his men who keep the enemy beyond our walls.’
I could see his point, yet a part of me still wished to kick open the door of Marie-Anne’s chamber and drag the sleeping baron out into the courtyard. But I said nothing and merely shot a hot glare at the solar door.
‘You’re different, Alan,’ said Tuck. ‘You’ve changed since I last saw you; become harder, more wrathful. But never mind all that, tell me, how was the Holy Land, was it wonderful? Did you pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? Did you feel the living presence of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?’ Tuck’s eyes were shining; he had wanted badly to join us on the Great Pilgrimage and it was only out of a strong sense of loyalty to Robin that he had remained in Kirkton to watch over Marie-Anne. I was glad that he had stayed; whatever he said about William of Edwinstowe, I knew that it had been Tuck who kept my lady safe in Robin’s absence.
‘It was … hard. Very tiring; exhausting and bloody, and many good men died for nothing … But I will tell you all about it later,’ I told Tuck.
‘Of course,’ he said, bowing his head in acquiescence. ‘We have more urgent matters to attend to. Where is Robin now? What are his plans?’
So while Tuck bustled about and fetched me a mug of ale and a plate of bread and salty ham, I
told him of Robin’s plans for lifting the siege. When I had finished explaining how a small force could defeat a much larger army, and exactly what Robin wished us to do to help him accomplish this, Tuck sat back, his mouth slightly open, and said with genuine awe in his voice: ‘That man has the Devil in his marrow bones. It is an excellent plan, Alan, and it might even work, but it is not a scheme that could ever have been devised by a good Christian. I pray for his soul, I truly do, for I fear that in the next world Robin will burn for eternity.’
He ran over the details once again with me, but my tiredness was overcoming me like a sickness. It was nearly dawn and I could barely keep my eyes open when, finally, Tuck said: ‘So this will all take place at midnight tonight?’
I nodded, yawning.
‘Well, God have mercy on their souls. But you must rest, Alan.’ And he lent me an old blanket and guided me over to a pile of greasy furs at the side of the hall, where only moments later I slid down into grateful slumber.
I awoke in broad daylight, with a vision of loveliness, a blonde angel standing over me. Her behaviour, though, was far from angelic. She was booting me none too gently in the ribs with a dainty kidskin slipper and crying: ‘Alan, Alan, get up. I’ve been waiting ages for you to wake. This is no time to be a slug-a-bed – get up! I want to talk to you. I’ve got so much to tell you!’
As I knuckled the sleep from my eyes, I saw that it was Goody, more properly Godifa, Marie-Anne’s ward and an old friend from my days as an outlaw. She must have been nearly fifteen, I calculated swiftly, an age when many country maids would have already been betrothed, even married with children, and she was a rare beauty: fine gold hair, tied in twin plaits, framed a sweet oval face with a small, short nose, and a healthy blush of pink in the cheek. Her eyes were the violet-blue of a thistle in bloom, and her loveliness almost took my breath away. I realized I was gawping at her, trying to find words of greeting and failing.
‘Stop flapping your mouth at me like a freshly caught fish and come and have some breakfast,’ she said. ‘I want to hear everything, absolutely everything about your adventures in the Holy Land. Is it true that the Saracens are cannibals? I’ve been told that they eat the raw flesh of the Christian children that they capture …’
I silenced her foolish questions and salved my own inexplicable speechlessness with an embrace. For a moment, when I put my big clumsy arms around her, she melted into my body, before struggling away and crying, ‘Oh, Alan, you smell – in fact, you stink! You stink of blood, sweat and worse, and … Oh, you smell of men. You must have a bath immediately …’
I was suddenly aware of the clothes I stood in, still stiff and creased from having been soaked and then slept in; my face was crusted with dried mud and, looking down at my fingers, I saw that they were still spattered with the young sentry’s dried blood. When I pushed a dirty hand through it, I could feel that my cropped blond hair was standing in stiff spikes on my crown.
‘I have travelled three thousand weary miles to get here, suffering untold hardship and danger in foreign lands, not to mention killing a man and sneaking through the enemy’s camp last night – I think it would be strange if I came out of all that smelling of rose water!’
I was stung, just a little, to have this gorgeous, sensestrumming girl complaining of my soldierly odour. Although I knew I did not look my best, I wanted to be treated as a returning hero, a victorious warrior, not a malodorous vagabond.
‘Anyway, I have no time to waste splashing about like a silly little girl in soapy suds and hot water; I must speak to Lord Edwinstowe without delay.’
It was Goody’s turn to pretend to be offended. ‘Do only little girls wash? Very well, sir, I shall inform His Lordship that a certain uncouth and very smelly soldier-boy requires his company immediately.’ And she stuck her tongue out at me and swept away. But for the mocking tongue, she would have appeared quite the grand, well-born lady, and I realized that she had changed in more than just her looks.
I fetched my own breakfast from the kitchens, and spent half an hour idling in the bailey courtyard chewing on a dry crust and looking about me in the September sunshine like a yokel at a county fair. It was hard to believe, given the placid yet bustling air of the place, that outside the wooden walls of the bailey were hundreds of enemies intent on our destruction. But the bailey was rather full, I noticed; I assumed that all the people in the surrounding villages and smallholdings had been gathered into the castle to keep them safe from Murdac’s pillaging men-at-arms. I was wondering if any of the peasant men here could fight worth a damn when I noticed two boys scuffling in a ring of their cheering fellows. One was short and dark, about ten or eleven, the other tall, an adolescent, almost a man. The match looked so uneven that I was sure the small, dark boy would be badly injured. And it crossed my mind to intervene, give the taller boy a cuff or two and send him on his way. Instead, to my surprise, after ducking a couple of haymakers from the tall one, the dark boy grabbed his opponent’s right arm as it flashed past his head, tucked his right shoulder into the tall boy’s right armpit, pulled down, hunched over and hurled him on to the packed mud of the courtyard floor. The tall adolescent was as surprised as I was. And while the little dark lad pulled the dazed fellow back to his feet – I could see that it was not a serious fight, mere playful rough-housing – I saw Tuck making his way into the throng of chattering boys and shooing them towards a stable-shed that had been converted into a schoolhouse. As the flock of boys passed me, I called out to Tuck and beckoned him over.
‘Who is that short dark boy?’ I asked my friend. ‘And by what witchcraft did he learn to tumble taller fellows in the dust like that?’
Tuck beamed with almost paternal pride and shouted to the boy: ‘Thomas, Thomas, come here – I want to introduce you to somebody.’ And when the dark lad obediently trotted over, Tuck said to him: ‘This, my boy, is Alan of Westbury, trouvère to the Earl of Locksley, newly returned from battling the Saracens in the Holy Land.’
The boy stared directly at me, his charcoal-black eyes a match with his dark hair. He had an air of tremendous assurance about him; not arrogance, just the look of someone who has found his place in the world and who will concede it to nobody. He appeared unusually solid – brown and strong, like a pillar of seasoned oak; it was an unnerving quality in one so young. ‘I am honoured to make your acquaintance,’ he said gravely. Then he added: ‘Sir, may I ask, are you Alan Dale the swordsman?’
I nodded, struck by his total self-assurance. He was interrogating me! ‘I have occasionally been called that,’ I admitted.
‘Then might I ask a great boon?’ this extraordinary boy continued. ‘Would you condescend to exchange a few passes with me one day, and perhaps show me something of your prowess? I wish to learn how to fight, and I have been told that you are one of the best men with a blade in England.’
‘It seems that you already know how to fight,’ I said, inclining my head at the tall boy he had recently bested, who was now limping into the makeshift schoolhouse.
He shrugged: ‘That was just boyish nonsense, merely a kind of wrestling that I am attempting to devise; I wish to learn to fight like a proper soldier.’
His air of cool maturity was so pronounced that it was almost laughable. I was looking at a boy who could not be much more than eleven, and yet he spoke like a man in his prime. But, in truth, I sensed he would be a difficult fellow to laugh at; his stance, his stare, his whole being demanded that he be taken seriously.
‘If we survive this coming battle against Ralph Murdac’s men, I will gladly exchange a few passes with you, assuming you still wish to do so – but on one condition,’ I said, matching his solemn tone.
‘Sir?’ he said inquiringly.
‘That you teach me the trick with which you tumbled the taller boy.’ I smiled at him. ‘Fellow warriors should teach each other their skills, don’t you think? That way we all learn to be better men.’
He was taken aback by my words, I could see, but to his credi
t he hardly showed it; it was almost as if he were used to being addressed as an equal by full-grown men-at-arms. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said gravely. ‘I shall look forward to that day.’ And he bowed deeply from the waist and, turning, jogged off towards the school shed.
I turned to Tuck: ‘What an extraordinary lad! Wherever did you find him?’
‘That, my friend, is Thomas ap Lloyd,’ said Tuck. ‘Does the name seem familiar?’
I just looked at him blankly.
‘He’s the son of Lloyd ap Gruffyd. Surely you remember him?’
I had no recollection of anyone by that name.
Tuck laughed at me, but the sound was coloured with a strange sadness. ‘Have you killed so many, Alan, that their names no longer mean anything to you?’ he said. ‘Oh, Alan, we must look to your soul before too long. I fear the blood of so many slaughtered men may have stained it permanently.’ And he walked away, shaking his head gently, making for the schoolhouse, which was now packed with chattering youths and children of both sexes.
And then I knew who the boy’s father was: the Welsh archer who had tried to kill Robin before we left for Outremer. Hoping to claim Murdac’s bounty, he had crept into Robin’s chamber one night and found me asleep there, waiting to deliver a message to my master. Mistaking me for Robin, the bowman attacked. After a short, terrifying fight in the darkness, I had killed the fellow. The boy, I recalled, this Thomas ap Lloyd whom I had just met, had subsequently been taken into the castle for his own protection. There was a strange logic in this act of Christian kindness, and I felt Tuck’s influence: ‘The sins of the father must not be visited on the son,’ the former monk had once quoted to me, and I saw that he had put his principle into action.
