John continued to babble and sob at the feet of the King – who remained stern and silent – when a voice from the far side of the chamber, a dry, cold voice, with a hint of the nasal twang of Gascony, called out: ‘Sire, give him to me, I beseech you. Give him into my hands and I will strip every inch of skin from his living body and leave him in raw, screaming agony, begging for the sweet mercy of death.’
Prince John’s whimpering stopped as if his mouth had been plugged; his bowed red head whipped round to the right and he stared into the gloom on the far side of the chamber from whence the voice had come, seeking its owner. I knew that voice. It belonged to Mercadier, King Richard’s long-time captain of mercenaries, a grim and merciless man. Mercadier had been fighting on Richard’s behalf in Normandy longer than any of us and, as a warrior and leader of several hundred battle-hardened paid fighters, he was worthy of respect – yet he had the most unsavoury reputation of any man in Richard’s army. His men, while fanatically loyal to the King, were, when unleashed to ravage an enemy’s territory, capable of a savagery that was certainly bestial and very nearly demonic. There were tales of nuns raped and crucified, churches looted and burnt to their foundations, of babies tossed into the air and caught on his laughing men’s spear-points; the streets of towns captured by these men quite literally ran with hot, fresh blood. A ghastly foretaste of the Hell they would doubtless one day inhabit followed these soldiers of fortune, these routiers, as they were sometimes called, wherever they plied their ungodly trade.
Mercadier stared boldly at the King from the far side of the chamber, awaiting a response to his bloodthirsty offer – which I had not the smallest doubt was entirely genuine. He was not a handsome man, I reflected, although his looks were certainly striking. Beneath a mop of jet black, long-ish hair, which looked as if it had been cut with a sword, and probably had been, the mercenary captain’s dead brown eyes stared out of a swarthy, sun-darkened face that was bisected by a long, jagged scar that ran from his left temple, across his broad nose to the bottom right-hand corner of his mouth. In the slanting afternoon light of the chamber that long yellow-white cicatrice gave him an almost monstrous appearance, like some misshapen creature from one of the Devil’s uglier realms. Mercadier’s offer to flay the royal traitor hung in the air: the silence thickened, clotted, until John gave a little coughing sob and dropped his red head into his two cupped hands.
Then I heard a deep voice, growling like a bear, half under its breath: ‘Oh, for God’s sake, sire, have we not had enough of this tomfoolery?’ and looked to my left where William the Marshal, Earl of Striguil, Lord of Pembroke, Usk, Longueville, Orbec and Meuller, and dozens of other castles and manors in England and Normandy, was scowling over the King’s shoulder. This veteran warrior – perhaps the finest in the army, and a man of unimpeachable courage and chivalry, a knight sans peur et sans reproche, as the trouvères put it – was looking disgustedly at the tableau before him, impatient for this pantomime of contrition and forgiveness to come to an end.
Finally, the King spoke, with an edge of grumpiness in his voice, the tone of a man whose private pleasure has been curtailed. ‘Oh, all right. Get up now, John, will you? And let us put an end to all this nonsense.’
‘Do you forgive me then, sire?’ asked Prince John, his white-and-red blotched face staring up piteously at his elder brother, looking very much like a well-whipped lapdog.
Richard nodded. ‘Let us put it behind us. You are no more than a child who has been badly advised by your friends. Come, brother, on your feet.’
As John rose, I caught his eye and he gave me a glare of such ferocity and hatred that for a moment I was taken aback. I managed to suppress my broad grin and adopt a stern expression while our eyes were engaged. But I understood that look. Quite apart from our past involvements – and the fact that, as he saw it, I had tricked and betrayed him – he was a proud man in his late twenties, the son of a king, who had been forced to humble himself in front of a room full of his brother’s knights – and, to boot, he had been called a stupid child to his face. His humiliation was complete.
Richard gave no sign of having seen the spark of fury in John’s eye. He raised him up and kissed his younger sibling, clapped an arm around his shoulders and said: ‘Come on, let us all go and have a bite of dinner together. What have you got for us today, Alençon?’ The King addressed his question to a gloomy young Norman knight standing by the doorway, who owned the hall in which we were gathered. The knight sighed lugubriously; housing and feeding a royal household full of active hungry men put a heavy strain on the purse of even the richest lord: ‘We have two pair salmon, sire; caught fresh from the Touques this morning. And there is cold venison, left over from yesterday. Some boiled ham. Rabbit pie, too, I think. We have a milk pudding …’
‘Excellent!’ Richard clapped his hands together, cutting short his host’s doleful speech. ‘Then let us eat at last.’
As we all trooped into the hall, the knights joking quietly with each other as they filed through the door, I heard one say a mite too loudly: ‘He’s no more than a naughty little boy!’ His companion half-laughed, then frowned and said: ‘Have a care, Simon, he’s still royalty; he might even be King one day and, if so, I doubt he’ll be as forgiving as his brother to those who have crossed him.’
At first light the next morning, well fed and rested, I rode out of Lisieux at the head of a column of a hundred armed men. At my left shoulder, on a quiet brown rouncey, rode Thomas ap Lloyd, my squire, a serious dark-haired youth on the lip of manhood, who cared for my weapons and kit, spare lances and shields, cooking and camping equipment and so on, with a zeal and efficiency that verged on the miraculous. At my right shoulder rode Hanno, a tough, shaven-headed Bavarian man-at-arms, who had attached himself to me on the long road back to England from the Holy Land, and who treated me with the friendly disrespect warranted by an oak-hard killer who had taught me so much of the arts of war, ambush and bloody slaughter.
Behind Hanno and Thomas rode Owain the Bowman, a short and deep-chested captain of archers – my second in command. Owain carried a banner on a tall pole: an image of a snarling wolf’s head in grey and black on a field of white. It was the standard of my lord and master the Earl of Locksley, whom I had left behind in Yorkshire to recover from a javelin wound to his left thigh, taken at the siege of Nottingham in March.
It was now May, in the Year of the Incarnation eleven hundred and ninety-four, the fifth year of the reign of King Richard, and a magnificent spring morning. The fruit trees were still adorned with the remains of their delicate lacy blossom, the grass on the verges glowed vivid green, birds called and swooped about the column, men smiled for no particular reason, the sky was a deep, innocent blue, with a scattering of plump clouds. The world seemed fresh and new and filled with possibilities; and I was on a mission of great import and no little danger for my beloved King.
Because Robin had been wounded, as had his huge right-hand man ‘Little’ John Nailor, I had been given the honour of leading a company of a hundred of Robin’s men to Normandy as part of King Richard’s army. I had never had sole command of such a force before, and I have to admit that the feeling was intoxicating: I felt like a mighty warlord of old; the leader of a band of brave men riding forth in search of honour and glory.
The bold Locksley men of my war-band were a mixed force of roughly equal numbers of men-at-arms and archers – all of them well mounted. The men-at-arms were lightly armoured but each was the master of a deadly lance twice as long as a man. In addition to his lance, each cavalryman had been issued with a protective padded jacket, known as an aketon or gambeson, a steel helmet and sword, and a thick cloak of dark green that marked them out as Robin’s men. Many of the men had additional pieces of armour that they had provided themselves: old-fashioned kite-shaped or even archaic round shields, iron-reinforced leather gauntlets, mail coifs and leggings and the like, scraps of iron, steel and leather, strapped here and there to protect their bodies in the mê
lée; and many had armed themselves with extra weapons that ranged from long knives and short-handled axes to war hammers and nail-studded cudgels.
The mounted archers were mostly Welshmen who boasted that they could shoot the eye out of a starling on the wing. The bowmen had each been issued with a short sword, gambeson, helmet and green cloak, as well as a six-foot-long yew bow, and had two full arrow bags, each containing two dozen arrows, close at hand.
Under a billowing red linen surcoat emblazoned over the chest with a wild boar in black, I was clad in a full suit of mail armour – an extremely costly gift from Robin. The mail, made of interlocking links of finely drawn iron, covered me from toe to fingertip, saddle seat to skull, in a layer that was very nearly impenetrable to a blade. I had a long, beautifully made sword, worth almost as much as the armour, hanging on my left-hand side, and a very serviceable, long triangular-bladed stabbing dagger, known as a misericorde, on the right of my belt. A short, flat-topped wood-and-leather shield that tapered to a point at the bottom was slung from my back, painted red – or gules, as the heralds would have it – and decorated in black with the same image of a walking or passant wild boar as adorned my chest, an animal I had long admired for its ferocity in battle and its enduring courage when faced with overwhelming odds. I was proud of my new device, which, since I had been knighted – by no lesser personage than King Richard himself – I was now entitled to bear, and which I had formally registered with the heralds. A conical steel cap with a heavy nose-guard and a long ash lance with a leaf-shaped blade completed my panoply.
We had sailed from Portsmouth in the middle of May, after a delay of several days due to bad weather, and landed at Barfleur to tremendous celebration from the Norman folk, overjoyed at the return of their rightful Duke. On that fine spring day, a week later, trotting south-east out of Lisieux on my tar-black stallion Shaitan, I felt the familiar lapping of excitement in my belly – I would soon be going into battle for the first time on Norman soil and taking my sword to the enemy. The King had charged me with reinforcing the garrison of the castle of Verneuil-sur-Avre, forty miles to the south-east, which was now besieged by King Philip. In truth, I had volunteered for the task: I had a very good reason for wanting to preserve one of the occupants of Verneuil from the wrath of our King’s enemies. The plan was to use surprise and speed to break through the French king’s lines to the north of the fortress. Once inside, we were ordered to bring hope and good cheer to the besieged, stiffen their defence, and to reassure them that Richard and his whole army of some three thousand men were only a matter of days behind us.
Apart from my private reasons for wanting to succeed in this task, I was very conscious of the fact that, as captain of the Locksley contingent, I was representing Robin. While I knew that King Richard had confidence in me as a soldier, I wanted to do well in this task for Robin, my liege lord, and for all the men of the Locksley lands. But I was more than a little concerned about being able to fulfil Richard’s instructions. He had spoken breezily of our galloping through King Philip’s battle lines, as if they were merely a cobweb to be brushed aside. I didn’t think it would be so easy. So, when we stopped at noon to rest the horses and snatch a bite to eat, I detailed Hanno and two mounted archers to ride several miles forward as scouts and bring back a report on the French dispositions.
As we approached the vicinity of Verneuil the mood in the column changed significantly. I put out more scouts to the east and south and we all rode in our full armour, with lances at the ready, swords loose in their scabbards and our eyes constantly searching the copses, woods and hedgerows for signs of horsemen. The flat land we rode through that afternoon, once so rich and well cultivated, now bore the harsh imprint of war. King Philip’s Frenchmen had been ravaging the farms and villages hereabouts with all the usual savagery of soldiers let loose to plunder and burn at will. It was a common tactic that allowed the occupying army to provision itself at no cost to its commanders and at the same time destroyed enemy lands and deprived the local lord of the bounty of his wheat and barley fields, his root crops, animals and orchards.
We rode through a battered, scorched landscape, the crops burnt down to charred stubble, the hamlets black and reeking, the bodies of slaughtered peasants – men, women and even children – lying unburied at the roadside, with the crows pecking greedily at their singed corpses. We did not stop to bury the dead like Christians, not wishing to delay our advance, though we could all feel the presence of unquiet spirits as we rode more or less in silence through those cinder-dusted, desecrated lands.
I was, however, sorely tempted to have the men stop and dig a decent grave for a young fair-haired peasant that we passed hanging by his neck from a walnut tree. There was something horribly familiar about the canted angle of his neck and the awful vulnerability of his dangling bare feet. I realized as I rode past that gently swaying corpse that it put me in mind of my father’s death, ten years before, in the little hamlet just outside Nottingham where I was born. My father Henry, my mother Ellen and my two younger sisters Aelfgifu and Coelwyn and I all scratched a living from a few strips of land in the fields on the edge of the village. Despite long days of hard labour, we were barely able to feed ourselves; but there had been an abundance of laughter and happiness in our small cottage, and much music and singing. My father had a wonderful voice, slow-rolling and sweet like a river of honey, and my fondest memories of that simple household were of my mother and father singing together, their voices intertwining, their melody lines looping and folding over each other in the smoky air of the low, one-room cottage like gold and silver threads in a fine castle tapestry. My father was the one who taught me to sing – and it was thanks to that skill that I first came to the attention of my master Robin Hood. Six years later, I was his personal trouvère – a ‘finder’ or composer of songs – and also his trusted lieutenant. In a way, I owed my extraordinary advancement from dirt-poor labourer to lord of war to my father’s love of music.
He had been a strange man, my father. I had been told that he was the second son of an obscure French knight, the Seigneur d’Alle and, as such, he had been destined for the Church. He had duly become a monk, a singer at the great cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. But somehow he had been disgraced and forced to flee to England. Robin, who had known him then, had told me that some valuable objects had gone missing from the cathedral and my father had been accused of their theft – accusations that my father had strenuously denied. Nevertheless, he had been cast out of the Church and had had to make a living with his voice. As a masterless trouvère, he had travelled to England and wandered the country singing for his supper and a place to lay his head at the castles across the land, but tidings of his expulsion from Paris ran ahead of him and he could find no secure position; no lord was willing to take a thief into his household. Eventually, during his long wanderings he met my mother, Ellen – a lovely woman in her youth – and married her and submitted to the dull but stable life of a common man working the land. I remember him cheerfully saying to me once, when I was no more than five or six years old: ‘None of us knows what God has in store for him, Alan; we may not have fine-milled bread on the board or fur-trimmed silk on our backs, but we can wrap ourselves in love, and we can always fill our mouths with song.’
My family was a contented one, happy even; I might well have inherited the strips of land my father worked and been trudging behind a pair of plough oxen on them to this day, had it not been for my father’s untimely death. Before dawn one morning, as we slept – my mother, father, myself and my two sisters, all snugged up together on the big straw-stuffed mattress in our tiny hovel – half a dozen armed men burst through the door and dragged my father outside. There was no pretence of a trial; the sergeant in charge of the squad of men-at-arms merely announced that the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire had declared that my father was a thief and an outlaw. Then his men wrestled a rope around my father’s neck and summarily hanged him from the nearest oak tree.
I watched
them do it, at the raw age of nine; restrained by a burly man-at-arms and trying not to cry as my father kicked and soiled himself and choked out his life before my terrified eyes. Perhaps I am weak, but I’ve never been able to watch a hanging since – even when the punishment is well deserved – without a sense of horror.
That act of unexpected violence destroyed our family. My mother lost the land that my father had ploughed and, to stave off destitution, she was forced to gather firewood each day and barter it to her neighbours for food or sell it to any that would buy; and few would. Why hand over a precious silver penny for sticks of timber when there was plenty of kindling to be had for free in the woodlands not three miles away? We slowly began to starve: my two sisters died of the bloody flux two years after my father’s death, a lack of nourishment making them too feeble to fight off the sickness when it struck. Faced with a stark choice, I became a thief; cutting the leather straps that secured the purses of rich men to their belts and making away with their money into the thick crowds of Nottingham market. I like to think that I was a good at it – I have always been lucky, all my long life. But, of course, one cannot rely on luck alone. I was thirteen when I was caught in the act of stealing a beef pie; the Sheriff would surely have lopped off my right hand if I hadn’t managed to escape. That was when I went to join Robin Hood’s band of men in the trackless depths of Sherwood Forest.
The Hostility of Hanno: An Outlaw Chronicles short story Page 4
