Holy Warrior

by Angus Donald

  I found that trying to control the heavy lance was much more difficult than I had thought. The padded tip wavered all over the place as I moved with the gait of the horse, and as a result, I missed the target completely. Ghost faltered but carried on charging forward, impelled by his own momentum. At the last minute he shied slightly to the side to avoid the target, which crashed into my shield a heartbeat later with surprising force and nearly unseated me. The swinging sack of grain whistled past my back, missing me by a whisker.

  As I trotted back to Sir James de Brus, I was expecting a stream of ridicule to spew from his scowling face. I had heard him upbraiding his troopers and the man’s language, when he was angry, would have disgraced a whoremaster. But he merely said: ‘Nobody gets it right to begin with. Watch me again.’ And he cantered off towards the target, his lance straight out in front of his body, the long heavy wooden pole as unmoving as if it were held in a vice. He charged up to the target, going up to the gallop for the last few yards, hit the circle of wood dead centre and was riding easily past before the swinging bag of corn was a quarter way round its circular path.

  I tried again; missed again, and had to fend off the target with my shield once more. Then I made a mistake and slowed right down, to make sure I could hit the target foursquare. But Ghost and I were moving too slowly and the swinging sack caught me hard in the ribs and tumbled me out of the saddle. Bruised and breathless, I remounted Ghost and returned once again to Sir James. ‘I think we’ll start with something a wee bit simpler,’ he said, but not altogether unkindly.

  Sir James set up a pole at about head height, with a fork cut into the wood, into which was stuck a ring of plaited straw about the size of an apple. With a real lance, not a padded one this time, I had to put the spear point through the ring as I rode past and lift the straw circle off the pole. It was extremely difficult. I missed time and again, even only going at the trot, and found I was growing frustrated, angry even, with myself and with Sir James de Brus for making me feel so small and incompetent.

  ‘Now try it at the gallop,’ my teacher suggested after I had missed the ring for the twentieth time. I bit back an angry retort and dug my spurs into Ghost. He responded and we thundered towards the ring on the pole. Strangely, the galloping horse gave me a more stable platform and as we approached the ring I lunged forward with the lance, as if it had been a sword, and to my amazement, I pierced the straw ring and lifted it clean off the pole. I was elated. Triumph at last! Sir James even offered me a twisted grimace, which I took to be his scrumpled version of a congratulatory smile. ‘Now do it again,’ he said gruffly. So I did.

  Within the week I had mastered the straw ring. I could lift it off the pole nineteen times out of twenty. And so we went back to the quintain. Two weeks later and I had mastered that, too. And made a friend.

  After a long day tilting at the quintain, Sir James invited me to share a flask of wine with him. It was late November and the days were growing short; on that grey afternoon we sat in the monk’s refectory alone apart from a pair of knights sitting at the far end of the room playing tables, or as some call it, backgammon.

  We had been discussing the tactics of the Saracen cavalry. Sir James had already made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, before it was lost to Saladin, and he had been told much about the fighting style of Turkish cavalry - apparently they were superb horsemen, whose practice it was ride up close to their enemies, shoot arrows at them from horseback and then ride away swiftly - when Nur appeared at our table bringing bread and cold meat to go with the rather fine wine that Sir James had provided.

  Brus scowled at her, but then he scowled at everybody, it was just his habitual expression. But Nur seemed afraid of him and stepped closer to me. Then she noticed a loose thread on my tunic, and with a classically feminine gesture, she tugged it away from the cloth and then smoothed the material down again over my shoulder.

  I wasn’t paying attention to Nur, for once. I was watching Sir James and thinking about how one could defeat Saracen cavalry, and I saw his mouth fall open in surprise. When Nur had left, he leaned forward. And said to me in a low voice: ‘I beg your pardon, Alan, if I am being impertinent, but is that lovely lassie your bed-partner?’

  I blushed, and said, ‘Of course not. She is not a common whore. She is a good girl, a young servant who I am helping to return to her family in the Holy Land.’

  ‘But you do ken that she’s in head over heels love with you?’ Sir James continued, ‘I mean, it stands out a mile.’

  I was struck speechless. It had genuinely not occurred to me that my feelings for Nur might be reciprocated.

  Sir James seemed to realise that he had stepped into marshy ground and he began to talk at random to give me time to recover myself.

  ‘I knew a beautiful lass like that once, well not as beautiful as her, and she loved me, too, but I had a rival for her affections,’ he said. ‘It was back in Scotland, oh, years ago, but I remember her face well. Dorothea, or Dotty, was her name ...’

  I wasn’t really listening. I wanted to run after Nur and grab her by the arms and demand to know if she loved me or not. Instead, I managed to control myself and said distractedly: ‘Is that why you left Scotland? For love?’

  ‘Ach no, nothing so fine. It was just a killing. I killed a Douglas, and if you kill a Douglas you need to watch yourself because they’ll all be coming after you, the whole boiling pot of them looking for revenge. They are as bad as the Murdacs for vengeance, but then, of course, the Murdacs would be on our own side.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, my curiosity aroused in spite of myself.

  ‘It was just a grubby squabble in an ale-house in Annandale, but tempers flew and swords were drawn, and before I knew it young Archie Douglas was dead at my feet. I went to the castle see the chief of the Brus himself, my uncle Robert, to find out what could be done about the matter, and he was sympathetic, right enough. He was no stranger to an accidental killing himself. And so he gave the Douglases a blood price - wee Archie wasne worth all that much, he was a wastrel and a drunkard, and the Brus was a rich man, but as part of the agreement to save a feud breaking out between our two clans, he had to send me away. The Earl of Huntingdon, who was staying at the castle at the time and who is kin to the Countess of Locksley, suggested that I join Robin’s cavalry and help whip them into shape. And, I’ll tell you this Alan, I’m glad I did. I’ve never been happier since I joined this crew of scruffy layabouts.’ He gave me one of his horrible screwed up smiles again - and I realised that I believed him. He was happy; the scowling and the ferocious demeanor was just his way of disguising his feelings, of protecting himself and his dignity from over-familiarity.

  ‘What was that you said earlier about the Murdacs,’ I asked.

  ‘Oh they’re worse than the very Devil himself for vengeance,’ said Sir James. ‘Cross a Murdac and there’ll be murder for sure, as we say at home.’

  ‘You said something about them being on your side?’

  ‘Oh aye, my mother was a Murdac; she was the daughter of Sir William Murdac of Dumfries and Mary Scott of Liddesdale. But, of course, her father, Mary’s that is, was a damned Douglas from Lanarkshire ...’

  I was only listening to him with half an ear, I had other, more urgent things on my mind: I needed to know how Nur felt about me, and for that I needed to be able to speak to her.

  I found Reuben in the old town, back at his comfortable lodgings at the Jewish merchant’s home. After a good deal of cajoling, he agreed to teach me the rudiments of Arabic; we would have a lesson every day, and we would start the next day. I could have asked Reuben to act as an interpreter but was determined that I would be able to speak to Nur myself, and divine for myself her true feelings for me. At a moment of tender love, I did not want another man coming between us.

  I rode back from the old town and my meeting with Reuben in high spirits: but when I reached the monastery I found the place stricken with terror. The Devil was abroad, one old soldier who guarded the
gate whispered to me; and he had laid his red claw on the Earl of Locksley.

  It was true that Robin was gravely ill, near death, and had been laid out in his bed, pale and streaked with his own vomit — but I did not believe it was the Devil’s work. Somebody in the monastery had tried to poison my master; the same person, no doubt, who had tried to kill him in Burgundy.

  Chapter Ten

  The whole of Robin’s force - just under four hundred archers, cavalry and spearmen - was drawn up at the harbour side to witness the punishment. It was a gloomy day, the fat grey clouds lightly spitting rain from time to time, a weak sun only rarely peeping through. The prisoner, a sailor called Jehan from my own hated ship the Santa Maria, had been gambling with a local fisherman. He had lost his dice game and owed the Griffon five shillings; more than he could afford. And so he had refused to pay the man, claiming that, as a pilgrim heading for the Holy Land, his debts should be frozen until he returned from his sacred journey. It was a cheeky way to avoid his debt, for it was true, the Holy Father, the Pope himself, had ruled that the debts of anyone on this Great Pilgrimage should be suspended until the debtor returned home. But that was a move designed to encourage knightly landowners with great mortgages to go off to fight for Jerusalem. His Holiness clearly did not intend his words to allow shifty gamblers to welsh on their agreements. The Griffon fisherman had complained to the Knights Hospitaller, who controlled his part of Messina, and they had reported the matter to the King; and Richard was determined to make an example of the poor man. Jehan should have paid up or, better still, heeded King Richard’s decree that outlawed gambling with the Griffons.

  He was to be keelhauled - a harsh punishment that involved dragging the prisoner’s living body under the keel of a ship from one end to the other. And it is much worse than it sounds: after months at sea the keel of any ship is covered with tiny barnacles, sharp rock-like structures less than a quarter of an inch in height but rough and spiky enough to cut through skin and muscle if a naked body is dragged against them. The second danger, of course, is drowning. The man must hold his breath under water while undergoing the agony of being dragged over the keel-barnacles. Many drowned during this punishment; and those who did not were left appallingly lacerated. King Richard had ordered that this man must undergo keelhauling three times on three successive days. It was, in effect, a death sentence.

  The man was stripped down to a pair of linen breeches, his hands and feet tied and attached to long ropes. He lay forlornly, eyes closed, skin puckered with cold, at the prow of the Santa Maria, which was moored about twenty yards from the quay, while a priest recited prayers over his thin, shivering frame. The rain began to fall harder.

  Our men stood there in silence. Nobody had complained too much about the punishment: Jehan had been stupid and the consensus was that the punishment, while brutal, was not unfair. We had all been warned about gambling; Jehan had ignored that warning and then, much worse, had tried to welsh. The men hated a welsher. Besides, although we knew him, he was not truly one of us; just a Provençal sailor, hired in Marseilles to crew the ship.

  I was standing on the harbour wall, chewing on a chicken leg, with William beside me, and thinking about Nur. At my feet was a yellow cur, a foul limping street dog from the stews of Messina; half its fur had been eaten away by mange, exposing scabbed pink skin; its ears were no more than ragged tatters after many a ferocious canine battle and it had but one yellow eye. But the hideous dog seemed to be strangely attracted to me. It had followed me all the way from the monastery as I walked down to the harbour and I could not seem to shake it no matter how many times I kicked at it or shooed it away. It was a bitch, I noticed, and she just stared up at me from her position at my feet on the rough stone of the harbour with her pathetic yellow eye, quietly loving me. It occurred to me that she looked at me in exactly the same way that I looked at Nur.

  ‘Gi-gi-give her your chicken bone,’ said William. ‘That’s a-a-all she wants, give her the bone and perhaps she will go-go-go away.’ William was always a kindly fellow, and I thought that his plan might work, so I tossed the chicken bone to the smelly yellow mongrel at my feet. The dog snatched the bone out of the air with an amazing swiftness and darted away through our legs. Well, I thought to myself with a smile, so much for love!

  On the Santa Maria, Jehan had been picked up, head and feet, by two of his fellow sailors, with two more holding the ropes. With very little ceremony, they threw the man over the prow and with one man holding the rope attached to his feet and another on the rope attached to his arms they began to walk quickly along the two gunwales of the ship, dragging their ropes behind them.

  ‘Stop!’ a deep voice boomed from the stem of the ship. ‘Stop, you vermin, in the name of the King!’ It was Sir Richard Malbête. He had been given a new role by Richard - he was now the knight responsible for discipline and punishment in the whole army. It was an office that fitted his black soul like a glove. But it troubled me to see the Beast getting close to King Richard and being given responsibilities by him.

  At Malbête’s command, the two sailors pulling their unfortunate fellow under the ship stopped dead. I could only imagine what the poor victim was feeling, unmoving, bleeding from a hundred cuts and slowly drowning under the keel of the Santa Maria. ‘You go too fast,’ rumbled Malbête. And summoning two of his men-at-arms, he had them draw swords and stand in front of the rope-bearing sailors, walking backwards along either side of the deck, only allowing the men dragging the victim to advance at a very slow walking pace unless they wished to impale themselves on the swords. Finally they reached the stem and, sheathing his sword, Sir Richard Malbête indicated, at last, that the sailors might pull up their colleague.

  The victim was a mass of oozing cuts from his forehead to his shins; he had lost one eye, his nose was split and squashed against his face, and there were deep cuts across his belly and chest where the barnacles had sliced deeply. He looked as if he had been scraped repeatedly and deeply across his body with a particularly sharp rake. But he lived. He vomited what seemed like a gallon of seawater on to the deck, and while his friends among the crew swabbed gently at his wounds and tried to bind them, he coughed and flopped on the wooden deck, leaking gore like a gutted mackerel.

  ‘Tomorrow at noon he goes again,’ said Malbête. One of the sailors looked fearfully up at the Beast. ‘Begging your pardon, sir, but he’ll not survive another ‘hauling,’ he said in a respectful tone. The tall knight shrugged. ‘Tomorrow at noon,’ he said again and easily swung himself down into a skiff to be rowed the few yards ashore.

  The sailor was right. The poor man did not survive the second keelhauling, and was dragged, bloody but quite dead, from the water at a little past noon the next day. I did not see it, for I was tending to my master. And feeding the yellow dog, who because of her skinned and battered appearance had been nicknamed Keelhaul, or Keelie, for short.

  Keelie had not deserted me, as I had assumed - she reappeared as William and I were leaving the harbour after watching the punishment, and she followed us all the way back to the monastery. She had a pleading look in her eye, clearly wishing for another chicken bone, and though I shouted at her and even threw a half-hearted stone, she would not abandon me. So I decided to poison her. Well, not quite poison her but to feed her a small portion of everything that Robin ate. She would become his canine food-taster.

  It was a plan that proved popular with Keelie. We tethered her with a rope around her skinny neck in a corner of Robin’s chamber and fed her choice portions from Robin’s bowl. It was William’s duty to take her, on her rope leash, out into the monastery garden morning and night and, after a few mistakes, when she soiled the floor of Robin’s chamber, she soon learnt where she was to go about her natural functions.

  Regular feeding did wonders for Keelie. She quickly put on flesh and her fur began to grow back over the awful, naked pink skin. Her pathetic eye began to look brighter and, after a week or so, she developed a spring in her step that re
sembled that of a normal, healthy young dog. She looked well.

  The same could not be said of Robin. Three days before the keelhauling he had eaten a piece of candied fruit peel from a bowl on the table in his chamber and he had become very ill immediately. No one could remember when the bowl had appeared on the table. The cooks and servants of the monastery had denied all knowledge of it, and there were dozens of candied-fruit sellers in the old town of Messina. The fruit could have been bought by almost anyone and, when Robin was not in his chamber, the room was not guarded so any man or woman in the monastery could have slipped in and placed the bowl of poisoned fruit there.

  Immediately after eating the sugar-coated slivers of fruit peel, Robin experienced a tingling feeling, and then numbness on his mouth and tongue. He managed to tell Reuben, who had been summoned once again in his role as Robin’s physician. The numbness of the mouth was followed, Robin whispered to his Jewish friend, by nausea, vomiting and the flux, and a burning pain in his stomach. When Reuben had examined him he found that his pulse was dangerously slow, the heart struggling to beat. And Robin lay, grey, eyes closed and unmoving as his body valiantly struggled to rid him of the evil humours in his system.

  Reuben could not immediately identify the poison, but he also seemed distracted as if his mind lay elsewhere; the King sent Robin a golden drinking cup which was set with four emeralds, and a message that he had been informed by the finest doctors in Sicily that the emeralds would serve to purify any poisons in wine. ‘A unicorn’s horn works just as well,’ muttered Reuben when he saw the cup. I did not know if he was being serious or not but he allowed Robin to use the cup to take large quantities of well-watered wine, brought to him by William. Father Simon came and filled the room with the sound of his mumbled Latin prayers and the smoke of costly incense to purify it of any harmful airs, and once again I smelled the pungent fragrance I had smelled in Reuben’s house so long ago in York.