Robin Hood and the Caliph's Gold Read online

  Foreword

  Every family has stories about its more colourful members, both living and dead, and mine is certainly no exception. But I had always assumed that the family legend that my many-times-great grandfather was a member of the original Robin Hood’s 12th-century gang of outlaws – that he was, in fact, the renowned medieval trouvère and swordsman, Sir Alan Dale – was no more than a charming fairytale passed down by successive generations of the Westbury family with their tongues firmly in their cheeks.

  However, after the death of my father Professor Roderick Westbury-Browne last year, and the discovery of a mass of papers in a dusty school trunk in his neglected attic in Albert Street, Nottingham, I have changed my view. The papers, which are typed out on faded yellow A4 paper, purport to be a collection of ancient manuscripts transcribed to a modern format from the original decaying vellum by my father in his spare hours, when he was not engaged in teaching Medieval History at the University of Nottingham. Of the original vellum, no trace now remains, but the type-written pages appear to be nothing less than a series of fresh stories composed in the early 13th century by Sir Alan Dale in his later years at his manor of Westbury.

  I had long known that my father was an old friend of Angus Donald, the popular historical novelist, and I vividly recall the two of them sitting up late into the night over a bottle of whisky discussing matters of mutual interest. However, perhaps rather stupidly, I had not connected Mr Donald’s splendid series of eight novels about Robin Hood and Alan Dale – collectively known as The Outlaw Chronicles – with my father’s own stories about my family and their antecedents in Nottinghamshire as well as his own long-term interest in the many legends surrounding the Holy Grail.

  Sadly, it is too late now to ask my father about the truth or otherwise of his claim to kinship with Alan Dale, the Knight of Westbury, and Mr Donald has been unable to tell me anything more than that my father was convinced the connection was genuine. Mr Donald did, however, admit that the origin of his Outlaw Chronicles was indeed the extraordinary set of thrilling stories that he and my father discussed at length some decades ago.

  It seemed fitting, therefore, to hand over my late father’s typed-up manuscripts to Mr Donald for editing and publication. And the fruit of this, the first instalment of a new collection of adventures of a long-dead hero, is contained within the following pages. I trust that all these newly discovered tales will one day be published, and the travails of a man who may well be my ancestor may prove both edifying and entertaining to the general reader.

  Michael Westbury-Browne

  The Old Grange, Lichfield, Staffordshire

  June 20, 2019

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  The storm came out of Africa, a ravening beast of wind and water and fury. It drove up from the south in a black wall and smashed into the side of the ship; one gigantic wave lifting and canting our vessel – the Tarrada – far over on the starboard beam.

  The rain lashed the ship in freezing torrents, hard as hail, filling the air completely with moisture so that it became almost impossible to breathe. I seized hold of a backstay with both hands as the deck beneath my feet surged upwards. Nevertheless, choking, spluttering in the suddenly blinding wet, I struggled to keep my feet on the slippery planks beneath me. The kindly sunlight of a Mediterranean mid-afternoon was immediately extinguished as the ship was thrust into this roaring waterfall. The wind howled about me, the ship plunged and slewed a quarter turn, hurling my body in a short arc to crash into the ship’s rail. Had I not been gripping on to the rope, I’d have been swept to my doom.

  One poor fellow, our company’s only priest, who had been standing unwarily by the starboard rail, was indeed snatched up and hurled overboard, immediately lost to the ocean. I caught one glimpse of Father Simon’s white terrified face, and wide, silently screaming mouth, before he disappeared for ever, and my first thought was: This is Robin’s fault! He is entirely to blame.

  After that I had no time for musing, nor for more than a passing sorrow at the priest’s fate. I was clinging for my life to the taut rope as the ship danced beneath me, soaring as a wave bore it upwards, dropping like a stone as the seas hollowed out a space below its timbers, and smashing into the water. A green wave crashed across the deck, slapping the breath from my lungs, wrenching the backstay from my grip. I dropped and slid, panicking like a child, bashing once more into the rail but, by God’s grace and my own desperate lunge, finding a hold, hugging the hard wood into my armpit.

  Another wave smashed into me and its horrible power sucked at my body, but I gripped harder, squashing my body into the corner between deck and rail, until the wave’s grip slackened, released me and the ship righted herself.

  When able to look up again, I saw a dozen men on deck in similar poses to mine: huddled, soaked, clinging on for dear life. But surely there had been at least twice that number on the deck when the storm had struck. How many were lost? I thought, and then again: This is all Robin’s fault.

  A spike of white lightning split the black sky, and vast groan of thunder followed immediately like the grinding of two mountains. The iron cascade of rain battered my head without mercy. I lifted my eyes to the aftcastle, the raised fighting platform at the rear of the Tarrada, which housed the massively thick steering oar, and saw Robin Odo, Earl of Locksley, lord of this company, owner of the vessel, and indirect author of this watery madness. He and the ship’s captain were wrapped like drenched monkeys around the steering oar, or the tiller, as I had also heard it called, struggling to keep their course as the ship was madly buffeted about by the storm.

  Yet I could also see that, despite the bellowing of the tempest and the desperate prancing of the ship, Robin and the captain, a stocky piratical type called Aziz, were arguing furiously about something. I could see mouths opening and closing, exaggerated facial expressions of mutual disagreement.

  Captain Aziz was occasionally gesturing quickly with one hand towards the north, when he could afford to release the long wooden tiller for an instant. It was quite obvious that Robin did not at all agree with him. But after a few moments of screaming back and forth – the meaning of their words stripped away by the wind before they reached me – I could see that Aziz had won the dispute. Robin nodded reluctantly and I saw them lunge together, their weights combined, and heave the tiller over to the right.

  There was a squealing of whistles, just audible over the howl of wind, and a stamping of bare feet on the rain-slick deck as the crew ran to their stations. I watched with humble awe as the nimble sailors scrambled up the various rope spider-works that held the three masts and their yards in place, quite contemptuous of the whip and fury of the weather. They loosed this sail and tightened another, hauled tight on that rope or line – despite many years of travelling, my understanding of the intricacies of seamanship is still lamentably poor – and the ship came around, the canvas of the sails snapping angrily in the tumult; more ropes were pulled in, tied off, and we began to run north with the wind and the storm directly behind us.

  The noise dropped immediately, our passage became smoother and, although we were still regularly battered with rain bursts and the ship buffeted with great swells, my deep terror that the Tarrada was about to be plunged to the bottom of the ocean slowly began to subside. We were travelling at a vast lick, being thrust remorselessly, so it seemed, by the very sea itself in this new direction of travel. I was drenched, dripping and chattering with cold, but when I finally released my death grip on the rail, got unsteadily to my feet and wiped the running water from my eyes, I found that Robin himself was standing right beside me.

  “Aziz says we must make for dry land. He says we must find shelt
er.”

  “Where?” I shouted over the still-considerable din of the elements.

  “He thinks the island of Crete is only a dozen miles to the north. We can ride out the storm there. I think we should battle on but Aziz knows these waters. He says we will be ripped in twain if we do not make landfall.”

  “It’s the storm season,” I bellowed. “It’s mid-October, too bloody late in the year to start a long voyage. We should all have stayed safe and dry in Jaffa. But you insisted, you said we must sail now, or we’d never get . . .”

  “Don’t start with me, Alan,” my master yelled back. “This isn’t the time. Go below and check on the horses, will you. They’ll be in a rare state.”

  That stopped me. My own beloved mount, a fine grey gelding called Ghost, was stabled below. I took a hard breath and, as usual, meekly obeyed my lord’s command. Robin turned away and walked forward beside the rail, balanced like an acrobat and riding the wild heaves of the ship with irritating ease. I started to work my way aft through the splash and spray, clinging to the ship’s rigging whenever I could, stumbling, slipping, creeping slowly towards the hatch that led down to the hold. The deck bucked beneath my feet with every cautious landlubberly step. God knew what our beasts must make of this mad agitation of their cramped quarters below. Horses cannot vomit, of course, but in their distress the other end of the animal can certainly make up for this natural deficit. Above me lightning cracked, the thunder roared out its terrible pain; the rain hammered the deck mercilessly.

  We very nearly made it safely to land. The coast of Crete was a dark looming shape on the horizon, visible through the veils of rain, rushing towards us with alarming speed. The sailors had taken down most of the sails by now and we were scudding along under a single foresail, pulled down to half its normal height, a bed-sheet sized scrap of canvas, no more. This reckless speed, driven by the rolling waves, was still too great for my comfort yet, as we entered the mouth of a narrow bay, with a grey beach in its back teeth, I began to feel that we might possibly live to see the dawn.

  I was plastered with sprayed horseshit and hay, only half washed clean by the ceaseless rain, but feeling better in my own mind. Below-deck had been a hellish shambles: one huge destrier, with a white-flecked mouth and creamy withers, had been bucking, kicking and biting everything and everyone within reach. It had been driven completely insane by the storm, kicking out the wooden panels of its stall, ripping the skin and flesh of its legs badly in the process. It had to be dispatched; and I sliced through its neck with one clean blow of my sword. The poor animal’s death seemed to calm the rest of the herd substantially. Ghost was still trembling, skittering and rolling his eyes in his stall, but I soon managed to soothe him. Softly murmuring in his wild, twitching ears, gently stroking his sweaty satin neck.

  Back on deck I watched the rocky coastline approaching, measuring with my eye the distance at which I believed I could swim to safety, if absolutely necessary. Once that point was passed, I felt my own body relax, just a fraction. We were inside the bay, only a stone’s throw from the semi-circle of the beach, swooping in and I was turning to say something to the man standing next to me, when there was a tremendous screeching noise and the whole ship jumped and shuddered, coming to an abrupt, awful stop.

  We were all thrown forward, the man beside me a short, heavy fellow called Edwin landing with his knee in my back, pinning me to the deck. We disentangled ourselves and stood. Aziz was screaming at his crew in a fury, and suddenly a dozen Arabs were crowded along the larboard rail and peering over the side at the churning ocean. The beach was only thirty yards away but the rolling waves were still pounding at us, each wave that smashed into us causing a scream of tortured wood. We’d hit something, apparently, some outcropping of rock; a little submerged island in the centre of the bay.

  “Get all the hatches open, Alan,” Robin was yelling at me from the aftcastle. “Get the horses swimming; and save as much of their gear as you can.” Then he was calling to Little John and others. I grabbed Edwin and we began fighting our way through the panicking crowds of men, ours and the Arab crew, some of whom were already throwing themselves off the stricken ship into the churning sea and paddling the short distance to land.

  We hauled back the hold hatches, all of them, throwing them wide and got the ridged loading boards in place, the rain still hammering down, and with the help of a dozen of Robin’s men we started leading the frightened horses out of the hold. Some men, following Robin’s directions, were seizing sacks and boxes, and barrels of goods, and hurling them over the sides; many of them sank immediately, others bobbed sluggishly in the waves and swimming men guided the containers that floated to the beach.

  The lower decks of the vessel were now awash and, at the front on the larboard side, I could see by dim light a thick jet of sea spurting like a severed artery, pumping saltwater deep inside the shattered body of the round ship.

  I swung onto Ghost’s bare back, got him clattering up the loading ramp on to the deck and urged him with my heels to jump into the white-whipped sea. He balked only once, then as a massive bolt of lightning bleached the sky, he gathered all his courage and made a truly heroic leap and splashed down heavily into the roiling water. A dozen heartbeats later we were shaking seawater from ourselves on firm sand. Behind me, I could hear the grinding of the Tarrada’s torn-open planks against the submerged rock even over the dreadful noise of the storm. But we were, praise God, now on land, if not particularly dry, and I took a moment to say a grateful prayer and thank my patron saint Michael, the great warrior archangel, for my safe deliverance.

  We worked until nightfall to get all the men and horses and as much of the goods, food and war gear off the stricken ship. Then we anchored the Tarrada with three lines attached to trees and rocks on the small beach.

  We piled the pitifully few barrels and boxes that had survived on the beach under a lashed-down tarpaulin and led the sick and trembling horses to the shelter of a thick wood on the northern side of the bay. We tethered the exhausted creatures under the trees, a strange type of local pine with thick gnarled trunks, long drooping limbs and delicate, almost feathery green leaves that turned white-brown at the tips. I thought we ought to camp beneath them; if we wove the branches overhead together, I reckoned, we could make a nearly waterproof ceiling for our camp. However, Hanno, an iron-tough, shaven-headed Bavarian man-at-arms, loudly disagreed with me.

  “I know a better sleep-place,” he said, in his unique kind of English. Hanno had joined our company of English and Welsh men-at-arms in the Holy Land, after being abandoned by his own lord, Duke Leopold of Austria, and he had not only become my friend and comrade but had also appointed himself my mentor in all of the varied arts of warfare.

  Hanno had scouted the bay while we were busy unloading the ship and had discovered, apart from a few ramshackle fishermen’s shacks, apparently abandoned by their owners for the winter months, an extensive series of dry, spacious caves burrowed into the sandstone of the bay’s northern headland.

  By midnight, all of the ship’s surviving men were ensconced in dry warm caverns under a sandstone roof, with fires already lit and the soup simmering, the salvaged goods and gear piled around us, steaming gently, and our exhausted men preparing to spend the night in relative comfort. I stood at the mouth of the cave, sipping a welcome mug of barley broth, with a cheery blaze crackling behind me, and looked out through the drifting curtains of rain at the Tarrada stuck in the middle of the bay like a beached whale on its invisible perch. The fury of the storm seemed to have slackened somewhat but I wondered how we were going to get the ship off its rock and fix it up well enough to continue our journey. It seemed an impossible task.

  “God’s great bulging balls,” said a rumbling voice. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been more grateful to have hard ground under my boots. I near shat my braies when we came barrelling in and ripped out our arse on that reef.”

  I turned to look at a huge looming shape, a man nearly seven feet
in height, standing behind me. A flash of lightning lit up his vast, cherry-red face, framed by two fat, plaited ropes of sea-bedraggled blond hair. I very much doubted he had truly been close to soiling himself in fear: for my friend John Nailor, also known as Little John, was Robin’s trusted lieutenant and right-hand man and one of the most courageous warriors I’d ever met.

  “Get comfortable, John,” I said. “We’re likely to be here for a long time. Heaven knows how we’re going to fix that great big hole in the hull.”

  “Aziz will know how,” said Robin appearing out of the gloom of the cave to stand beside Little John and stare out into the lashing rain. “He has some fine carpenters among his crew. He’ll know just how to patch her up. But first thing in the morning, when this blow has passed, we need to get the remaining stores out of her, salvage as much as we can. Might even be worth diving for the sunken flour sacks. This little lot . . .” he waved at a pile of still-dripping barrels and boxes stacked at the rear of the caves “ . . . won’t feed us for more than three days. By the end of the week, we’ll be hungry.”

  A little later, I wrapped myself up snugly in my large forest-green cloak, which was still damp from the sea but also warm from the fire, and curled in a dark sandy corner of the cave. I was tired, all muscles aching, and very dispirited, too. I thought then about our poor priest, Father Simon, who was snatched from the deck by the storm. Had God deserted us? Was He punishing us? Why would He take up to Heaven His servant and not another man? As I prepared myself for sleep, I listened to the rattle and crash of the wind in the trees of the dense wood below us and the hiss of rain on the rocks outside the cave, and thought longingly of the warm, sun-lit land we’d sailed from a week before, the land where Jesus Christ himself had walked.

  The Tarrada was a dismal sight, even from a distance. She was tied up at the end of long, rickety wooden jetty that speared out into the Mediterranean Sea from the harbour of the port of Jaffa. She was the kind of vessel usually known as a round ship, or cog, a type of craft used for transporting large numbers of men or large quantities of goods by sea over great distances.