King's Man

by Angus Donald

  I repacked the back-sack, and readied myself to flee at a moment’s notice, then I began to tune the instrument as quietly as I could. Mutterings of conversation came drifting down from the candlelight above the barbican, not thirty yards away, as they heard me plucking at the five strings and adjusting the pegs on the head at the end of the vielle’s long neck. I could not hear the words distinctly, and I would not have understood them even if I had, but I knew that the guards were aware of my presence.

  And then I began to play.

  My master Robin had almost always been short of money during the Great Pilgrimage. Since he had commandeered the lucrative frankincense trade, that had all changed dramatically, of course, but for most of the time he had lacked sufficient quantities of silver to meet his obligations as the leader of nearly four hundred fighting men. And the fault had been King Richard’s. My sovereign had promised Robert of Locksley a certain amount of silver in exchange for Robin’s promise to come to war and bring his feared Welsh bowmen with him. Unfortunately, as is often the way with rich men, and especially kings, Richard had been slow to pay what he owed to my master, and Robin had suffered a lack of ready funds as a result.

  As a favour to Robin, I had used an opportunity to play music with Richard to remind my King of his debt to Robin, and we had enjoyed a sort of musical duel: I had sung a verse suggesting that Richard should pay up promptly and Richard had replied by telling me not to stir up trouble. It had all been done in a spirit of fun and laughter, but the outcome was that Robin was paid a proportion of the silver he was owed, and Richard and I had formed a bond as fellow verse-makers.

  That dark night, seated on the cold earth outside the barbican of the main gate of Ochsenfurt, I played the music that accompanied the song that Richard and I had written together. It was a simple, distinctive melody, repeated twice and then elaborated on in the third and fourth lines, before returning to the main melody again. I bowed the opening notes, and sang:

  My joy summons me

  To sing in this sweet season …

  I bowed the next few chords and continued:

  And my generous heart replies

  That it is right to feel this way.

  And then I stopped and listened. There were raised voices coming from the barbican, and a few incomprehensible shouts of enquiry, but I tried to erase them from my hearing. I was straining to hear if my sovereign lord, Richard the Lionheart, King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou and Poitiers, would join me in my carolling from inside his prison cell. If the guards in the barbican could hear me, I was sure that anyone kept imprisoned in the adjoining tower would be able to hear me, too.

  I waited for a few minutes. In silhouette against the battlements of the gatehouse I could see a man-at-arms standing with a flaring torch in his hand, peering out into the darkness. But I held my peace. I doubted that they would sally forth to find me, and even if they did, I would be able to slip away before they could catch me. The man on the battlements turned his head and said something to someone behind him. And then fixed the torch in a nearby becket and went back into his warm guardhouse. Once more, I thought, just one more time, and then I’ll go.

  And I drew my bow across the strings of the vielle, and once again I sang the first verse of ‘My Joy’. There were more shouts from the guardhouse and two men appeared, this time on the battlements, clutching bright torches. Since I had not received the response that I was looking for, I backed away into the darkness, leaving the men-at-arms atop the barbican to shout their querulous challenges into the empty night.

  I walked southwards, away from the river, keeping a little further away from the town wall and the water-filled ditch, but still holding them in sight. It was not just the barbican that had conscientious sentries: each of the four town walls was patrolled by alert soldiers, too. But there were not so many men concentrated near the south-western corner of Ochsenfurt when I arrived there a few moments later and found a spot under a bush from which to observe the second tower. The shouts of the guards at the barbican had drawn a single man, running from the western section of the town wall; I had seen him trotting in the opposite direction to me as I approached the second tower.

  Oddly, I also believed that I could hear a strange noise behind me; a heavy crunching tread, like a huge beast moving ponderously through the undergrowth. When I stopped to listen, the noise also stopped. A quiver of ancestral fear ran through me, the notion that something was out there, behind me in the blackness, something that meant to do me harm. I shrugged off my nerves, telling myself to get a grip on my courage. It was most likely a boar or a stag, raiding the rich farmland for something good to eat; or perhaps a sleepy cow blundering around in the darkness.

  The second tower, on the south-western corner of the town, looked deserted. Not a chink of light to be seen; nothing stirring at all. I waited perhaps a quarter of an hour, huddling in my bush, and then, straightening up, I bowed the first chord and sang the first verse of ‘My Joy’. Nothing. No response from the tower, no angry cries of alarm from the guards. I tried the second verse:

  My heart commands me

  To love my sweet mistress,

  And my joy in doing so

  Is a generous reward in itself.

  Again: nothing. That second verse had been written by King Richard himself – it was a witty reply to my own first verse, using many of the same words to give a different meaning to the verses. Richard had been justifiably proud of his composition. I doubt very much he would have forgotten it. But: nothing. So I packed up the bow and the vielle into the back-sack, and began to move off eastwards towards the third tower.

  The approach to my third performance spot was easier than the last two as there was a small wood to the south of Ochsenfurt which made it possible to come undetected to a place close to the walls. The third tower looked as unpromising as the second; there were no guards in evidence and not a chink of light showing. I wondered whether I had made a mistake, that Richard was not imprisoned in one of these tall round fortifications; maybe he was not in Ochsenfurt at all. Perhaps he had been moved once again to another location altogether. Was I just wasting my night, when I could be tucked up in the warm hay of the stable listening to Hanno’s snores?

  I unpacked the vielle, feeling a little discouraged, and with very little ceremony I launched once more into the first verse of ‘My Joy’. Again, there was no response, not a sound from either a guard or royal prisoner. Dispirited, I began a listless rendition of the second, the royal verse. And then it happened.

  A light showed at a tiny window at the top of the tower; a little spark of good cheer. I stopped playing, dumbfounded. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be …

  And then I heard a voice: not strong, nor particularly tuneful, the voice of someone only just awakened – but familiar, very familiar, and it made the skin all over my body pimple like a plucked goose’s flesh. The voice sang:

  A lord has one obligation

  Greater than love itself

  Which is to reward most generously

  The knight who serves him well.

  It was Richard. I had found my King. And he had remembered, and sung back to me, the verse I had written so long ago, to remind him of his debts to Robin.

  I had tears stinging my eyes as I struck the strings of the vielle for the final verse: and I sang it in unison with my lord, my captain, my King, his voice growing in strength with every note.

  A knight who sings so sweetly

  Of obligation to his noble lord

  Should consider the great virtue

  Of courtly manners, not discord.

  When we had finished, there was a long silence. My throat was too choked to speak. And finally, I saw a pale face at the window high up on the tower, and a royal voice called out: ‘Blondel, Blondel, is that truly you? Or are you some night phantom sent to taunt me in my misery?’

  ‘It is me, sire. It is Alan Dale. It is truly me, and we – myself and my lord abbots Boxley and Ro
bertsbridge – have come to accomplish your freedom. Take heart, sire, your friends are close at hand.’

  At that moment, something flashed in the corner of my eye. Purely out of instinct, I moved back half a step as a shining steel sword blade slashed past my face, missing my nose by a quarter-inch. If the blow had landed, it would have hacked straight through my skull, killing me for sure. But, God be praised, I was young then, and very fast. I dropped the bow and turned to face my attacker with only a frail wooden vielle in my hands. He was a tall, very thin man, taller than me by half a foot, and he was not slow either. And suddenly I knew him. He was the man I had seen beside the fire with Prince John, at the siege of Kirkton six months ago. I had no time to reach down for my misericorde, but my beloved musical instrument was enough to deflect the next strike; a lightning lunge at my heart. By God, he was quick! Holding the instrument by the neck, with the sound box towards my enemy, I caught and deflected his sword as it flickered towards me – and what a sword: a long, slim blade, chased with gold, a crosspiece decorated with ropes of silver, and a large blue gem, a sapphire, I assumed, set in a ring in the centre of the silver pommel. I saw all this in an instant, and at the same time, my vielle swept up and to the right and pushed the magnificent blade safely past my body. I riposted instinctively; hours and hours of training in the strike. And if the vielle had been a sword, my counterblow would have killed him. As it was, the blunt end of the vielle’s round body smashed into his face with enough force to crush his nose and send him staggering back. I fumbled at my boot top for the dagger; I needed steel for this work, not frail wood. He looked angry and surprised as we circled each other. I watched his sword arm, waiting for his next move and trying not to think of how much I wanted to own that lovely blade, but my hind brain was shrieking another warning: one that I could not at that moment decipher.

  I had the misericorde in my left hand and the vielle in my right when he attacked again; a scything diagonal back-hand cut with the long sword aimed at my head and coming fast from my right-hand side. I swept up the vielle and the sword crunched into it, leaving me unharmed but with a tangle of splinters and kindling, held together with five cat-gut strings in my hand. I dodged the next blow, and hopped over a slash at my ankles, trying to get in close to use the misericorde – all the while, my brain yelling its inchoate warning – and as he was turning after his low sweep, I jumped forward, jabbed at him with the misericorde – a feint – and swung the wrecked vielle at his head. He avoided the blade with a neat half-turn but the rump of the smashed instrument pivoted around the back of his head, wrapping the cat-gut strings around his throat. Then I pulled. He dropped that wonderful sword and turned away, both his thin white hands flying to his neck to loosen the strangling cat-gut. I dropped the misericorde in turn, and leapt on his back, using my weight to drive him to the ground, my hands scrabbling for the cat-gut, wrenching it tight, the vielle strings cutting deeply into his long throat. I hauled for my life, with one hand on the neck of the instrument and one on the wreckage of the bridge. He gurgled wetly, his eyes bulged, his tongue protruded like some evil purple sausage as his body kicked and writhed under mine. I knew he was dying; all I had to do was hold on and pull the vielle strings tighter and tighter …

  And then something exploded in the side of my chest, I heard the crack of bone as my body flew off the supine swordsman and flipped over. As I lay on my back, the cat-gut still in my grasp, still around the thin man’s neck, I saw a giant form, round as a glacial boulder, barely human, looming above me. I knew that I had been kicked in the ribs as I had never been kicked before; it felt like a hoof-blow from a fear-maddened stallion. I also knew what my brain had been screaming at me as I fought the swordsman: Where is his friend? Where is his giant, muscle-bound companion from the fireside? I knew now.

  The ogre – for there was no way on God’s green earth that this monstrous fellow could have been wholly human – raised a gigantic foot, ready to stamp on my two wrists which were still half-hauling on the cat-gut and strangling the life out of the tall man. Hurriedly releasing the vielle strings, I pulled in my arms just as his foot came stamping down on the place where they had been moments before – and I swear I felt the earth shudder with the impact of his boot. I rolled away from the pair of them: the thin one, now kneeling and coughing and groping for his sword, and then rising, impossibly quickly, shining blade in hand; and the ogre, striding towards me with an insane gleam in his piggy little eyes. He appeared to be unarmed but, seeing his massive ham-like hands clenching and unclenching in front of him as he advanced on me, I knew that if I allowed myself to be caught by them, I was a dead man. My misericorde was gone, lost in the struggle, and I am ashamed to say that I did not hesitate for an instant. I turned and ran, as swiftly as I could with my damaged ribs. I ran like a craven hare into the trees behind me.

  With a sword in my hand I fear no man; but unarmed against a first-class swordsman and a monstrous creature from some feverish nightmare … Anyway, enough of my poor excuses, I fled. I ran for my life. The ogre lumbered after me for twenty yards or so, panting and growling behind me like a bear, but my pain and fear drove me onwards and I soon lost him in the thick cover of the wood. As I ran, I could hear the shouts in German from a couple of men-at-arms on the walls. And above their harsh cries, I could make out the calls of my King in good, clean French, demanding to know what had happened beneath his prison tower. But he received no response from his loyal subject below. I needed all my wind just to run.

  My ribs were giving me a deal of trouble. So much so that I found I could not climb the knotted rope that was still hanging down the side of the wall when I reached Tuckelhausen half an hour later. I called softly for Hanno, but received no response. Doubtless my friend was sleeping soundly in the soft hay. I was reduced to tossing stones through the hole in the roof, hoping that the noise of their rattling on the tiles or landing inside the stable would wake my friend. Fortunately it worked and I soon saw his round, shaven head poking out of the hole in the tiled roof.

  Hanno managed to haul me up without too much difficulty, and not half an hour later I found myself gulping from a flask of wine, and wiping the greasy soot from my face as I told my friend the news and he strapped up my battered side tightly with long strips of linen.

  He was overjoyed to hear that we had successfully located King Richard, but alarmed by the attack on me by the two mismatched assassins.

  ‘Who are they, Alan, and why do they want to kill you?’ he asked with a puzzled frown. ‘If they are in the service of Duke Leopold or the Emperor Henry, they must surely arrest you and you are then hanged in the square as a spy. What does this mean?’

  ‘They are Prince John’s men,’ I told him, and explained that I had seen them before, outside Kirkton, bringing a message from Prince John to Sir Ralph Murdac.

  ‘Ach so, but why do they want to kill you?’ asked my friend. He was a master of stealthy movement, was Hanno, in daylight and darkness; he could hunt and track animals and men better than any other fellow I ever knew. But he was not swift of thought when it came to the dark motives of princes.

  ‘Prince John does not wish Richard’s whereabouts to be known to the world,’ I said, trying to explain it as simply as possible for Hanno’s benefit. ‘The Prince must have spies in Westminster. When they told him that we were setting off on this mission to find Richard, he gave this unlovely pair of killers the task of making sure we did not find him. If we were to quietly disappear on this journey – both of us and perhaps the monks and abbots, too – who would know about it? It might be weeks, even months, before another diplomatic party was dispatched to try to find our King. And that delay would give Prince John more than ample time to make an arrangement with Leopold.’

  ‘Do they attack us again?’ asked Hanno.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, although I was very far from sure. ‘But we must be on our guard, and the sooner we get the abbots to Ochsenfurt, into the presence of the King and registered as an offi
cial English embassy, the better.’

  So, the next morning, an hour or so before noon, I stood once more before the gate of the barbican, at the north-western corner of the town of Ochsenfurt, while Hanno bawled up at the guards a translation of our names and rank and the purpose of our visit. It felt very different from the last time I had been before this portal only hours previously. The abbots and I were dressed in our finest clothes; clean white woollen robes for the clergymen and tall staffs topped with golden crosses, and a scarlet tunic embroidered with silver thread for me, topped by a fine new grey woollen hat. I did my best to look lordly as Hanno bellowed that we had come to pay our respects to Duke Leopold of Austria and to pay a visit to his illustrious prisoner King Richard the Lionheart of England.

  The wooden iron-studded gate swung slowly open and we were ushered into Ochsenfurt by a squad of ten mail-clad menat-arms, each armed with spear and sword and proudly bearing the symbol of a red ox, the town’s badge, on the chests of their snow-white surcoats. We were escorted through the narrow streets into the centre of town to the antechamber of a great hall, where we were offered refreshments – politely declined – before being shown into the great hall itself and the presence of Duke Leopold, loyal vassal of the Emperor Henry, ruler of much of the southern German lands, former pilgrim – and the mortal enemy of our good King Richard.