King's man oc-3 Read online

  I made the sign of the cross over my gory confection to keep his spirit quiet, mumbled an apologetic prayer to St Michael, the sword-wielding archangel and patron saint of battle, and gathered up my victim’s helmet, sword-belt and spear. Then I began to trudge up the muddy track. My whole body was shaking, every step I took was unsteady, and suddenly the pain in my bitten hand came roaring out of nowhere like an angry bear. I switched the spear to my other hand and fought the reeling giddiness in my head. My victim had been slightly shorter than me, even before I hacked off his pimply head, and a shade thinner, but I calculated that on that dark night, from a distance of a hundred yards or so, if I walked in his tracks, I could pass as his double before an unsuspicious eye. I finally won control of my body and mind and banished the thoughts of the infernal deed I had just done; I slumped my shoulders a little and tried to emulate his resentful slack-kneed slouching as I walked away from his mutilated cadaver.

  As I reached the brow of the hill, and paused, pretending to scour the area with my eyes like a dutiful sentry, I heard the mournful call of a barn owl hooting three times from the tree on the ridge away to my right. And for the first time in hours, I cracked a smile.

  Hanno.

  It was the signal, a message as warming to my heart as a hug from a loving mother.

  If I had heard the sour barking screech of a mating vixen, the message would have been: Run for your life, the kill has been discovered. Run.

  But Hanno’s skilful imitation of a hunting owl was telling me that, for the moment, I was safe. And in that moment, I loved him for it.

  I could imagine his ugly round face, his stubbled, badly shaven head and wide grin, and hear his harsh foreign-accented words of praise at my completion of an unpleasant, difficult, bloody task, and I turned towards the tree where I knew he was concealed, a mere hundred and fifty yards away now that I was at the top of the track, and had to resist the urge to raise my hand to him in salute. Instead, I turned on my heel and, walking boldly, even jauntily, surcoat swishing around my shins, spear casually on my left shoulder, I made my way downhill, away from the muddy road, away from my friend Hanno, and plunged into the heart of the enemy encampment.

  I walked with purpose, quietly but never stealthily, through the sleeping tents of my enemies, with what I hoped was a nonchalant grin fixed to my face — though it was, of course, too dark to see my expression. A few campfires were still smouldering between the tents, and a handful of men-at-arms dozed beside them wrapped in blankets, or sat slumped over jugs of ale. The September night still retained a little of the warmth of summer, but most of the men had retired to the large, low, saggy woollen tents that were dotted over almost all the surface of the open field.

  Somewhere in the sleeping camp, I knew, was a friend and comrade, a strange middle-aged Norman woman named Elise. She had attached herself to our company on the way to the Holy Land, and had become the leader of the women who had joined our marching column. A healer of no little skill, she had undoubtedly saved many a life on the long journey to Outremer and back, tending the hurts of battle. Some whispered that she had other, darker skills and could read the future, but while I had found that her prophecies for the most part seemed to come true, they were always vague enough to be interpreted in several ways.

  My master had sent Elise into the camp two days previously, to read the soldiers’ palms, tell wondrous and bone-chilling fireside tales — and to deliberately sow a particular fear among the enemy’s ranks. I hoped that she was safe: had she been captured and found to be a spy, she would have faced a slow and painful death.

  I had half-overheard Robin give her orders the day before she left us to wander in the guise of a travelling seller of trinkets into the camp — to be honest, I had been hanging around him hoping to persuade him that I was not the right man for the task of dealing with the sentry; but I had the impression he knew this and was avoiding a conversation with me.

  ‘Elise, you are sure that you can do this; that you wish to do this?’ Robin said, fixing her with his strange silver eyes, his handsome face concerned and kindly. They were equals in height, but she was as thin as a straw, clad in a long shapeless dark dress that had once been green, her lined face topped with a mass of white fluffy hair. She looked like nothing so much as a giant seeding dandelion.

  ‘Oh yes, Master Robin, I can do this. It is but a small thing to spin a few tales at a campfire.’

  ‘And you know which tales you are to spin?’ asked my master.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ she said impatiently, ‘the spirits of dead men are trapped inside the wild ponies hereabouts, and horse-headed monsters patrol the night stealing men’s souls for the Devil… Wooooooah! Hooooagh!’ She made a series of loud eerie noises in the back of her throat and waggled her fingers in the air like a madwoman. It should have been ridiculous, comical even, but on that warm September afternoon I felt my blood chill a little. ‘Don’t you worry, master, they will all have nightmares,’ this odd woman continued. ‘And don’t you concern yourself about me, sir; no harm will come to me. I have seen the shape of the future in a bubbling cauldron of blood soup, and all will be well; you shall have your victory, sir. Mark my words. A great victory after a night of fire and mortal fear.’

  Robin embraced her, and promised that she would be well rewarded for the risks she was taking. ‘Serving you, my lord, is reward enough,’ said this strange creature calmly in her French-accented tones. ‘Your fame will last for more than a thousand years,’ Elise continued; her eyes seemed to have glazed over, and she clearly had at least one foot sunk in the swamp of madness. ‘And those who serve you, they too will be remembered: John, Tuck, Alan, even my poor dead husband Will — they shall not be forgotten. So, I say again: the reward of serving you is enough: it is a path to immortality.’ And she gave a short, high-pitched laugh that was uncomfortably close to a cackle.

  He had that wondrous ability, did Robin, of commanding love in the people around him, no matter what he did. And I was not immune myself — I had witnessed Robin committing the most appalling crimes, yet I was still his faithful hound. Hearing her half-crazed declaration of loyalty nipped at my conscience and I slunk away from Robin without raising the subject of the sentry’s death. I could not bear to be seen to be less courageous, or less loyal to Robin, than a bone-skinny, half-crazed wise woman.

  I avoided the firelight as I walked through the enemy camp that dark night, circling around behind the tents whenever possible, and kept on sauntering downhill, roughly south-west, heading towards the dark, looming bulk of Kirkton Castle, Robin’s high seat overlooking the Locksley Valley. Although my master was lord of Sheffield, Ecclesfield, Grimesthorpe and Greasbrough, and dozens of smaller manors scattered all over the north of England, Kirkton Castle was his home. It was also the home of Robin’s wife, Marie-Anne, the Countess of Locksley, and she was even now inside its walls, besieged by the very men whose sleeping forms I was passing, whose snores and farts I could now hear. However, with God’s help, and Robin’s cunning, the castle would not be under siege for much longer.

  The camp of the besieger, Sir Ralph Murdac, erstwhile High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests, was laid out in the shape of a crescent moon, well out of bow shot, about three hundred and fifty yards to the north-east of Kirkton. Some of Robin’s men, including myself, had watched it from concealment up on the high hills for four days and nights: we knew that it contained more than three hundred armed men in total — mostly spearmen, but with a handful of crossbowmen and about eighty cavalry — and that its strength easily overmatched our small force.

  Robin had left England two and a half years ago to take part in the Great Pilgrimage to the Holy Land with a small, well-trained army of archers, spearmen and cavalry, but battle, disease and the fleshpots of the Levant had thinned our ranks so that when we landed at Dover ten days ago, seasick, sore and wet through from a rough Channel crossing, we had only thirty men-at-arms capable of straddling a horse, and a scor
e or so of Robin’s surviving archers. But though we were a ragged lot, battered by much hard travel and the loss of many comrades, the fires of war in the Holy Land and the brutal journey home had tempered us like the finest steel, so that we believed ourselves to be the equal of any company twice our strength. Yet for all that we were hardened by battle, and confident in our abilities, we could not face a force such as the one Sir Ralph Murdac had mustered here — six times the size of ours — in honest, open battle and expect to be victorious.

  Murdac was a loathsome man, a short, dark Norman lordling with the Christian kindness of an angry adder and the trustworthiness of a rabid rat. While he had been High Sheriff — before King Richard came to the throne — my master had been a very successful thief and outlaw, the famous Robin Hood of song and tale, no less, and he had humiliated this sheriff in many ways, robbing and killing his servants without the least compunction. They had long hated each other but had clashed in full battle only once before, more than three years ago at the manor of Linden Lea, north of Nottingham. On that occasion, after two days of the most appalling carnage, Robin had emerged the victor — but only by the skin of his teeth. Murdac had fled the country, avoiding the righteous wrath of King Richard, who wished to interview his sheriff about a vast quantity of missing tax silver, and the little shit-weasel had then taken refuge in Scotland, staying with powerful relatives. But when Richard departed his realm to undertake the Great Pilgrimage across the seas, Murdac had emerged from his Scottish bolthole and taken service with Prince John, King Richard’s treacherous younger brother. Now protected by John, Sir Ralph Murdac had offered a huge bounty in silver for Robin’s head, and at least one man to my knowledge had died trying to claim it.

  Apart from his bitter enmity with my master, I, too, had cause to hate Ralph Murdac: when I was nine years of age, his men-at-arms had burst into our peasant cottage before dawn, ripped my father from his bed and, after falsely accusing him of theft, had hanged him from an oak tree in the centre of the village. Four years later, the same Ralph Murdac had threatened to cut off my right hand when I was caught stealing a pie in Nottingham market; and later still he had had me cruelly tortured in a dungeon at Winchester in an attempt to get information about Robin. If I ever had the chance, I would kill him in a heartbeat, with a great deal of pleasure: he was less than a clump of rotting duckweed in my eyes, and the world would be a better place with his filthy presence expunged from it.

  By the grace of God, and the kindness of Robin, I had risen in rank since the days when I was a poor fatherless village boy, forced to thieve to fill my belly. I was now Alan of Westbury, lord of a small manor in Nottinghamshire that had been granted to me by the Earl of Locksley. This gift was something for which I would be forever grateful. I had been a nobody, a starving cutpurse, but now I had a place among men of honour, among noble warriors, not only as a holy pilgrim newly returned from Outremer, but as the holder of half a knight’s fee of land. I had made the impossible, almost unthinkable leap from humble peasant to horse-borne lord of the manor; and I had Robin to thank for it.

  I tried my best to repay my debt to Robin by loyal service in war and in peace, and by giving him the gift of my music. For now, as well as being one of his captains, a leader of his ragtag troops, I was Robin’s trouvere, his personal musician. I hummed a snatch of music softly under my breath as I walked through the camp of my mortal enemy, striding as confidently as I could manage and trying not to trip over the guy ropes in the darkness.

  My eye was drawn to a large tent in the centre of the field; in the rare splashes of firelight I could just make out that it was a gaudy, striped affair, black and blood-red. My footsteps seemed to take me towards it of their own volition, and as I drew closer I saw a short figure dressed in dark clothes standing outside the entrance to the pavilion by the remains of a large campfire. By the dying flickers of the campfire’s flames I could see that it was Murdac himself, apparently standing alone, and examining a jewel-encrusted box; turning the object over and over in his hands so that the precious stones shot out gorgeous bright gleams of reflected firelight.

  My feet took me closer and closer to his hateful shape. Surely this was an opportunity sent by God: Murdac alone, in the darkness, facing away from me. I paused, just a dozen yards from the little man, and the spear seemed to leap off my shoulder and level itself. I can do this, I told myself; if I can kill an innocent sentry-boy, I can scrub this shit-stain from the world. I would have no qualms at all about sending his stinking soul to the Devil.

  I clutched the spear more tightly and was just about to sprint forward and slam the sharp point deep into Murdac’s kidneys, when the little bastard bent down and gathered a handful of dry twigs from a wood pile at his feet and threw them on the fire. And, as the kindling caught, the flames licked higher and revealed the presence of two other figures on the far side of the fire. I stopped dead and stood as still as a rock, spear extended in front of me, silently uttering a prayer of thanks to St Michael that I was still cloaked by the night, invisible to those who stood in the widening pool of firelight.

  I could not see them clearly in the dancing flames, but I could make out their distinctive shapes in the gloom: a tall man on the left, taller than me by half a head, and I am six foot high in my bare feet; but, while I am broad in the shoulder, deep in the chest and well muscled in the arms from long hours practising with a heavy sword, he was thin, painfully thin, like a man who has survived a long famine or a terrible disease.

  His height and thinness were accentuated by his shadowy companion’s extraordinary shape: he was a huge bald man, and I swear on Our Lord Jesus Christ that he was as broad as he was high; a round mass, neckless, squat and lumped with muscle, like an ogre from a children’s tale. They looked like a stick and a ball standing side by side.

  Then Ralph Murdac spoke, and his familiar high-pitched French whine set my teeth on edge: ‘Thank my lord prince for his noble gift,’ he said, and he slightly raised the jewelled box, ‘and tell him that I will attend his royal court in less than a month; the moment that I have concluded matters here.’

  ‘My lord,’ the squat ogre rumbled in French, and his voice sounded like the grinding together of two enormous rocks, ‘His Highness has requested your presence on the morrow; he has had bad news from abroad and desires your counsel. He was most insistent that you should attend him.’

  ‘I will attend him as soon as I am able,’ snapped Murdac crossly. ‘But I must have my son. I must reclaim my son from this nest of bandits. Surely His Royal Highness will understand…’

  The two men said nothing, but the ogre gave a mountainous shrug, and they both turned away at the same time and disappeared into the great tent.

  I wanted to be gone; the knowledge that I had very nearly thrown my life away in an ill-considered, suicidal attack raised goose bumps on my whole body. I had missed certain death by a heartbeat. Those two grotesque men would have shouted a warning to Murdac before I could even get within spear-range, and I would then have likely missed my mark and been hunted through the camp like a lone rat in a pit full of blood-crazed terriers. I was Daniel in the lion’s den, I told myself, and only by remembering this and putting aside any thoughts of revenge against Murdac would I live to see another dawn.

  I walked quickly away from the great tent without being seen — regretfully leaving the silhouette of my enemy unharmed by the fire — and once again bent my steps towards the dark mass of castle on the southern skyline. There was a sentry on the far side of the camp, alert and patrolling his section of the perimeter with an unnatural keenness for the late hour. Leaving the encampment behind and walking the bare twenty yards of open turf towards him, I notched up my courage for a final pantomime. I marched straight up to the man, my right hand casually behind my back, and called to him abruptly, in my most officer-like tones: ‘Hey you! What’s the password? Come on, come on; don’t tell me you’ve forgotten it.’

  He looked at me strangely, noting the mud- and blood-sme
ared black surcoat, and the odd combination of my youth and my arrogance. Then, perhaps reassured by the direction I had come from, he said: ‘I haven’t forgotten it, sir: it’s Magdalene. But I might well ask, sir, who are you?’

  ‘I’ve been told to relieve you. That’s all you need to know,’ I said rudely. ‘Sir Ralph’s orders.’

  He nodded, but still seemed a little uncertain. The hand behind my back gripped the handle of the misericorde tightly; in a couple of moments he was going to feel its point in his heart if he didn’t accept my explanation. I stared at him challengingly, straight in the eye. But finally he seemed to be convinced by my high-handedness and he shrugged and pushed past me, heading back towards the encampment. I watched him until he disappeared into the crowd of dark tents and finally relaxed, breathed out a huge lungful of air, and slid the slim blade back into my boot.

  I had used up a lot of my nerves in this one night, and I noticed that my hands were trembling slightly, but I still had one obstacle to overcome: the walls of Kirkton Castle itself.

  In the event, getting into the castle was simpler than I had expected. I merely walked away from the mass of tents, through a wide empty expanse of silent sheep pasture and towards the looming black bulk of Kirkton. When I was fifty yards away, a torch sprang to light on the battlements and, in response to it, I shouted: ‘Hello, Kirkton! I’m a friend. Hello! Don’t shoot. I come from Robin. I come from Lord Locksley.’

  An arrow slashed past my ear and buried itself in the ground a dozen yards behind me, and I lifted both arms in the air and shouted again: ‘Hello, Kirkton. I come from the Earl of Locksley; let me in for the love of God.’