To watch a battle is to take part in it only in spirit – and yet, when it was over, I felt almost as exhausted as if I had single-handedly fought the entire French garrison myself.
Mercadier’s lines of footmen moved forward almost casually, covering the three hundred or so yards to the wall at a brisk trot. As they reached the first loose stones before the breach they were met with a withering hail of crossbow fire, and I saw a score of men in the front ranks fall. The sole weakness of Richard’s plan was that the garrison knew full well where the attack would come, and when our punch would be delivered, and I could see hundreds of defenders gathered at the breach – nearly the whole garrison I guessed – crowding together, their arms glinting in the hot sun, light bouncing from polished helms as they prepared to defend to the death their walls. A last giant quarrel from a baliste on the eastern side of the road smashed into the jostling crowd of foemen in the breach, smashing two of them away – and yet more men eagerly filled the ranks, their steel points glittering as they awaited our assault. A shout of rage erupted from hundreds of throats as Mercadier’s men, now less than thirty yards away, began scrambling up the loose piles of rock and stone, shields on their backs, helmeted heads tucked low, clambering up the treacherous rubble using hands and feet like a swarming herd of human beetles – launching themselves into the maw of Hell.
They were rascals, bandits, priest-murderers and gutter-born thieves – but Mercadier’s men did not lack for raw courage. They swarmed up the loose rubble towards the breach in the outer wall of the castle – and were met with a devastating volley of crossbow bolts, spears, and loose rocks hurled down upon them. Many men fell under this onslaught, crushed by hurled boulders, spitted by quarrels, and those who reached the top of the stone stairway were swiftly cut down by the well-trained knights and men-at-arms at the top, their swinging swords spilling light and spraying blood as they hacked into the desperate, yelling horde of men surging towards them. Mercadier’s men boiled up the rocky slope – and died in their scores at the top, and yet more men came on behind them, trampling their dead and wounded comrades, mashing their bodies into the uneven stony incline as they forged upward, screaming taunts and lunging madly at their enemies.
The men of Loches were stalwart in defence; a score of knights in full iron mail, supported by crossbows and spearmen, held that breach, cutting down the leather-jacketed routiers who hurled themselves at them with swinging blows of sword and axe. The second wave of mercenaries attacked. And a hundred more of Mercadier’s men were fed into that cauldron of pain, rage and death, into the riot of scything steel and spurting blood.
Yet the breach held.
Now I could see that the mercenaries of the third wave were beginning to hang back a little on the rocky slope, and were milling around beneath the walls, rather than rushing to their deaths in that terrible blood-splashed bottle-neck. They were still dying in great numbers, plucked from this life by a hissing crossbow quarrel, an arrow or a hurled spear. Sergeants were screaming at the men, striking them, urging them onward – but the impetus of the initial attack had been lost. Here and there a brave man, or perhaps a pair of friends, even a small group, would rush up the slope, stumbling on the loose stones, which were now red and slippery, screaming their battle cries and waving weapons – and would die, chopped down by the long blood-slick swords and jabbing spears of the defenders.
Still the breach held.
I heard a trumpet, loud and strong from my left; two long blasts. Turning my head away from the appalling spectacle of bloody heroism and death at the breach, I saw a massive formation of unhorsed but fully armoured men start forward from our lines, thirty or so knights on foot, each clad from head to foot in protective iron links, and a couple of score men-at-arms and squires behind them. A standard fluttered above the foremost rank: it was William, Earl of Striguil, and his knightly followers; the Marshal blatantly disobeying the King’s orders and ramming his men into the battle, just at the moment when they were needed most.
‘The old fool! The disobedient glory-hunting fool,’ I heard the King mutter. And watched in awe as William and his men broke into a heavy run and charged, heedless to all danger, across the open ground before the castle, sweeping Mercadier’s men out of their path, bounding up the gore-greased stairway and into the steel fence of the breach.
William and his knights smashed into the line of defenders and I could hear the crunch of wood, the squeal of metal and clash of blades as the two lines collided. The enemy line sagged, pushed back by the force of fresh men pressing against it; and I saw Mercadier, limping a little, shouting at his men from below the walls, urging them to add their weight to this fresh attack. Sword drawn, he joined his raggedy warriors scrambling up behind the Marshal’s fresh troops. I saw William himself, taller than other men, on the very lip of the breach, laying about him with a long sword, and dropping enemies with every stroke. And beside him his superbly trained household knights, their mail gleaming silver in the sunlight, hacked and carved their way forward, inch by bloody inch.
The resistance began to melt, the Marshal and his men were pushing forward, the defenders’ line was buckling backwards; there was a tremendous howl and a surge forward by Mercadier’s men as they pitched in behind the Marshal’s knights, adding their fury to the mêlée, and suddenly they were all through the breach, like a great dam bursting, our men flooding forward, washing the enemy from my sight.
The slaughter after the taking of Loches was appalling. William the Marshal’s men and Mercadier’s rogues – those who had survived the horror in the breach – killed every living soul they could find inside the castle. The castellan and his wife and baby daughter, and a pair of priests, managed to surrender to the Marshal himself when he and his closest knights had fought their bloody way to the top of the tower – and they were the lucky ones. Everyone else inside the walls of Loches perished. Mercadier’s men, who had shown immense bravery in attacking that hellish gap, showed the other side of the routiers’ reputation when they had broken through the outer wall, and overcome the slight resistance of a few young squires in the smashed north-western corner of the keep. They sank to the level of beasts: a group of routiers discovered the cellars and they drank deeply of the rich yellow wine of the region, and this fuelled their depravity in the captured stronghold. Men, whether armed for war or not, servants, priests, monks – were all put to the sword. Women, old and young, were raped by long queues of routiers, who shouted jests and drained tankards of wine while they waited their turn to defile some unfortunate belledame, whose only crime was to have been married to a French garrison knight.
Loches was ours by mid-afternoon – it had only taken King Richard a matter of hours to reduce this formidable stronghold – but the looting, raping and murders continued until long after midnight.
At dawn the next day, King Richard set about restoring order. He had a gibbet set up in the bailey of the castle and hanged three of Mercadier’s men that his household knights caught in the act of raping an old woman. And the message to all the troops was clear: that devilish playtime was over; the King’s army was being called to heel.
As ever, the sight of the hanged men put me in mind of my father’s death. And I gave thanks to God that Robin’s men had not been called upon to perform the executions. But an execution of a wholly different sort had taken place, which I only discovered when I returned to my tent later that evening accompanied by Thomas and Hanno.
Under a large blanket at the back of the tent, where he had been resting, and keeping the weight off his burnt feet, I found the skinny, blood-sodden corpse of Dominic.
His throat had been cut from ear to ear.
Chapter Eight
With Loches subdued, King Richard left a small garrison to repair the walls and drove south with the army into Aquitaine. After hearing of the bloody fate of Loches, castles now held by the foe in my lord’s vast southern dukedom opened their gates to us and threw themselves on Richard’s mercy: and, as ever, i
t delighted the King to be magnanimous in victory. The forces of Geoffrey of Rancon, Richard’s enemy in the south, and Philip’s ally, dissolved before us; some surrendered, were forgiven and renewed their allegiance to our King, others fled east into Burgundy. None could stand in the face of Richard’s righteous wrath – and the might of his castle-breakers.
We had buried Dominic in the monastery churchyard inside the walls of Loches before we left that sad citadel, and the old man lay next to some hundred or so of the French garrison who had died so bravely in its defence. As Hanno shovelled the earth over his shrouded body, and one of Richard’s priests mumbled prayers for his soul, I could feel a deep rage rising in my stomach. I felt almost certain that I knew who was responsible for the death of this good man – Mercadier. He could not have accomplished the deed himself, of course; we had all seen him heroically storming the breach with his men, and then less than heroically sacking and looting the castle. But I was sure that one of his routiers, one of his cut-throats who had not taken part in the assault, had done the deed to strike back at me for killing his red-headed man-at-arms.
There was nothing I could do. Nobody could remember seeing one of Mercadier’s men entering my tent while we were watching the battle. But then, encamped shoulder to shoulder with at least two thousand other souls in a vast township of woollen tents and roughly built shelters, and living on top of each other as we were, there was a constant stream of people – soldiers, squires, farriers, whores, pedlars – walking past my tent day and night, and nobody would notice one murderous routier among that throng.
I told Robin and he was characteristically uninterested.
‘That will teach you to annoy Mercadier,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘You should count yourself lucky that he didn’t decide to cut your throat at the same time.’
But despite his apparent callousness, I heard later from Little John that the Earl of Locksley had been to see Mercadier privately, taking John with him, and had told the mercenary captain quite bluntly that if any harm at all were to come to his friend Sir Alan of Westbury, he, Robin, would take it as an act of provocation and there would be very serious, painful and fatal consequences for Mercadier.
‘Give the black-souled bastard his due, he didn’t turn a hair when Robin threatened him,’ Little John told me. ‘And Robin can be very unsettling when he chooses to be. The man just smiled, cool as a trout, and said: “I hear you, my lord – young Westbury is your man, and is under your protection.” And he flatly denied having anything to do with the old priest’s murder.’
I was touched that Robin should take my side, but a little irritated too. Did he think I could not take care of myself? And, in our tent, I noticed that Hanno and Thomas also took turns to stay alert all through the next few nights – Robin was not the only one who seemed to believe that I needed protection.
Then word reached us that the King of France, Philip Augustus himself, was heading down towards us with an enormous army to confront Richard and to try and salvage something, after the fall of Loches, from the collapse of all his carefully wrought schemes in the south.
So we turned back north to meet him and, by the beginning of July, Richard and his entire force of knights, footmen, mercenaries and mighty castle-breakers, were camped outside the gates of Vendôme – and I must confess that I was well pleased. I felt that finally I might have the chance to arrange an audience with His Grace Cardinal Heribert of the Holy Trinity Abbey to ask about my father, the theft and his fateful visit to Paris two decades ago.
The city of Vendôme was held against us by a small and presumably rather nervous French garrison – like Loches, it had been handed over to Philip by Prince John while Richard was imprisoned the year before – but the garrison was attempting to hunt with the hounds and run with the hart, and it was in almost constant communication with Richard’s heralds, sending costly gifts to Richard, and dispatching embassies from the various city guilds and religious institutions. The feeling in our camp was that, if we were to beat the French in the coming battle, Vendôme would happily surrender to King Richard without a fight and accept his magnanimous forgiveness. If we were to be beaten by Philip – and I could not for a moment imagine that we would be – then Vendôme would remain in French hands, and would no doubt welcome Philip with flower-strewing maidens and sung hosannas. It was a truly practical, unsentimental arrangement – Richard did not have to waste lives and materiel capturing Vendôme, which would fall into his arms like a swooning virgin if he managed to see off the French King. This unspoken agreement also meant that there was a large amount of daily traffic between Richard’s camp and the great men of Vendôme, negotiations of all kinds were taking place, knights inside the walls were looking for future favours from the King, merchants were making discreet deals with the army’s quartermasters to supply them with food and equipment that was badly needed. And I had decided to take advantage of this unofficial accord to go myself into the city of Vendôme, and pay a visit to Cardinal Heribert.
I had been quite prepared to make a clandestine visit to the town, a knotted rope flung over the walls on a dark night, perhaps, or a quiet purse of silver passed to a venal sergeant manning a gate, but I was aided in the accomplishment of my desire by a most unexpected source. Robin mentioned that Sir Aymeric de St Maur and his Templar entourage were making an official embassy to the knights and burgesses of Vendôme, on behalf of King Richard, a formal mission to prepare the ground for the submission of the town after the French defeat. On hearing this, I approached the Templar and asked his leave to accompany them into Vendôme. When he asked why, I stretched the truth and said that the Cardinal had been a friend of my father’s when he lived in Paris, and I wished to pay my respects. To my surprise, the Templar readily agreed.
‘Certainly, Sir Alan, if I can be of service, I should be happy to oblige you,’ said Sir Aymeric, smiling at me in a benevolent, avuncular fashion.
I was slightly unnerved by this – we had met on several occasions and he had never been this friendly. The last time I had been this close to him, he had threatened me with torture with red-hot irons to persuade me to reveal the whereabouts of the notorious outlaw Robin Hood.
‘And how is the noble Earl of Locksley? In excellent health, I trust,’ Sir Aymeric said gravely as we parted, having agreed that I would join him and his embassy the next day before dawn and we would ride into Vendôme under the Templars’ black-and-white banner together. I assured him with the utmost courtesy that his former mortal enemy, and the object of his almost diabolical fury one year earlier, was in the finest fettle.
The next dawn, Sir Aymeric was just as cordial. Hanno, Thomas and myself joined their party, which comprised his beaming lieutenant Sir Eustace de la Falaise, six sergeants, and several of King Richard’s senior barons and clergymen. I nodded a stiff greeting at Sir Eustace, a good-looking young Norman knight whom I did not know well but who had a decent reputation as a fighting man if not as a deep thinker, and Sir Aymeric enquired with infinite concern whether I had broken my fast that day. When he discovered that I had not, he pressed a cup of wine on me and a perfectly delicious honey cake.
I had told Robin of Sir Aymeric’s extraordinary affability the night before. ‘I don’t think there is anything sinister about it,’ said my lord. ‘He merely wants to put the unpleasantness of the past behind him. We are reconciled, Alan, remember that. Whatever he has done, we are all supposed to be amicable now. I expect you to be on your very best behaviour—’
‘Yes, you play nicely with Sir Aymeric,’ interrupted Little John, chuckling heartily. The big man had been listening to our conversation from the corner of Robin’s big tent. ‘Let him share your toys, but don’t let him bully you.’
I was irked by both Robin and John’s attitude. Of course I would behave myself. Did they think I was going to brawl over some harsh words the previous year?
‘So you have completely forgiven him, have you, Robin, for attempting to have you burnt at the stake?’ I said, a litt
le truculently. Robin was not a man known for his abundance of Christian forgiveness.
‘If ever I get the chance to do him some damage – or shove a blade into any of his sainted Order of blood-thirsty, God-struck maniacs – I will gladly do it; as long as it doesn’t put my people at risk or harm my interests in any way. But, for the moment, it suits me to treat him as an ally. So behave yourself, Alan. As John says, play nicely with the Templars like a good boy – for now.’ And he grinned at me, his eyes twinkling with vicious amusement.
As Hanno, Thomas and I joined the column of mounted men that morning and began to ride out of the camp and towards the walls of Vendôme, less than half a mile to the south, I pondered Robin’s description of these Templar knights as ‘blood-thirsty God-struck maniacs’ – it seemed a bit too harsh to me. They were the vanguard of Christian knighthood: superbly trained in all forms of combat, deeply committed to the cause of Our Lord, and aloof from the petty squabbles of the princes of Europe. They served a higher cause: Christendom itself. Much feared by the Saracens, and merciless in battle against all infidels, they were men that I felt a good deal of admiration for: men I looked up to as an example of how to be. I would have no trouble ‘behaving myself’ in their company.
Vendôme is built into the crook of a bend in the River Loir, where that great artery of trade divides into three streams. Vendôme itself seemed to be almost floating on water; and I imagined the inhabitants must have a good deal of trouble with flooding in wintertime. We approached on the main road from the north through brown-yellow fields of ripening barley and halted our horses outside the gates of the city, which lay on the far side of the first bridge across the Loir. One of the Templar sergeants walked his horse across the bridge and in a loud, officious voice announced who we were. As if pushed by an invisible giant’s hand, the huge wooden gates of the citadel swung open to receive us.
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