Chapter Three
The first hint that the attack was beginning came in the form of a spark of firelight, high on the brow of the hill; a red blinking eye in the darkness. Then came another, and another. They began to move – and grow. And the night air was ripped apart by a series of screaming wails, a clutch of different notes but blending together in a strange and disturbing way, an unearthly devilish sound that seemed to rise up from the very bowels of Hell itself. Even I, who knew the source of this weird, howling music, and had heard it several times before, was struck by its power to bring horror to the night. I had first heard the sound at the battle of Arsuf on the road to Jaffa in the Holy Land, where it presaged an attack by the fearsome cavalry of Saladin. It was the sound of Turkish trumpets, of massed clarions and shrieking fifes, of booming gongs and clashing cymbals and ear-scalding whistles; an infernal din designed to strike terror into any Christian heart – even when played rather poorly by a gaggle of Yorkshire villagers recruited specially for the task by their newly returned lord.
When I heard that hellish din, I was standing on the walkway behind the palisade on the north-eastern side of Kirkton Castle. I was in full war gear, which had been supplied by Marie-Anne: conical helmet with a nose piece, kite-shaped shield and long spear, a sword at my waist, the misericorde in my boot; knee-length chain-mail hauberk to protect my body over a big padded jacket known as a gambeson or aketon, leather gauntlets on my hands and stout boots sewn with strips of steel to guard my ankles and shins.
Within a few heartbeats, the first shouts of alarm were sounding from Murdac’s camp. And out of the darkness, down the gently rolling hill, the spots of flickering orange light grew and took shape and revealed themselves. Out of the black night thundered three wild moorland ponies, eyes rolling in terror, shrill neighs torturing the darkness, hooves madly churning the damp turf – and the source of their terror was firmly harnessed to them: for behind each wild pony was a wooden cart, piled high with wood and straw and soused with oil and pig fat, and burning like the infernos of the Devil’s own demesne.
The noise from the camp in the field below me was enough by now to wake the dead from their slumbers. But above the yells, and the hellish music, I thought I could make out a lone woman’s voice, with a slight Norman-French accent, shouting in English over and over again: ‘It is the horse-demons, the steeds of Satan – run, run. They are coming; the horse-demons are coming to steal your souls.’
The wild horses, maddened by the fiery carts they could not escape, charged straight down the hill into Murdac’s camp sowing destruction in their flaming wakes. They charged into the outskirts of the camp, trampling tents and crushing half-sleeping men beneath their hooves and the wheels of the heavy wooden carts. Many tents and shelters of the men-at-arms were burning by now; flags and pavilions set alight, pyramids of stacked spears collapsed and snapped like twigs beneath the wheels. The camp was humming like a kicked ants’ nest, half-dressed men running hither and yon, screaming in rage and fear and confusion. And the lone Frenchwoman’s voice continued to shout: ‘The horses of the Devil are coming; the steeds of Satan; they are coming for your souls,’ adding her mad shrieks to the bounding chaos. And the wild, eerie Saracen music wailed, boomed and screeched on, its hideous sounds adding eldritch notes of terror to the night.
Then the arrows began to hiss out of the darkness.
Men silhouetted by the leaping firelight were spitted like red deer by unseen skilful hands as they stumbled out of their shelters, barely armed, fuddled by sleep, confused by the noise, the blaze and the hot winds of panic. One man appeared to be more in control of himself, a captain no doubt, but as he barked orders to the men running about his tent, three arrows smacked into him in less than half a heartbeat. I knew that Robin’s archers, scattered around the perimeter of the camp and shielded only by darkness, had orders to shoot down first any who appeared to be in command. And there were few who were still in possession of their faculties on this night of chaos and cacophony, as the archers plucked the lives of Murdac’s men from this world one by one.
The wild horses with their fiery burdens were in the centre of the camp now, galloping in screaming terror, and as I watched, the wheel of a cart struck a large iron cooking pot and careered over, spilling its flaming, roaring load over a swathe of the camp and starting a dozen fresh fires. The arrows whizzed through the darkness, thumping home into the bodies of terrified running men who had nowhere to hide. One brave figure appeared out of the darkness and shot dead a maddened pony, which was galloping past him, with a single, well-aimed crossbow bolt to the head. But while the poor horse stumbled and died, and the cart tumbled forward and tipped its burning load over the convulsing animal’s dying body, the crossbowman was in turn skewered through the neck by a yard-long arrow that flickered out of the darkness to leave him choking on his knees in a circle of burning straw and roasting horse blood.
A high, clear trumpet blast, easily heard even over the noise of the blaring Saracen horns, dragged my eyes up to the north, where a mass of strange cavalry had appeared. The heavily armed, mounted men, about thirty of them, seemed huge and menacing, draped as they were in long, dark cowled cloaks that swept over the horses’ rumps and swirled down by their boots. Their long sharp spears pricked the fire-lit night, and their painted shields portrayed a crude red figure of a horse, daubed in dried blood on a white background; but their faces – or the place where their faces should have been – were the most dreadful sight of all. Each man, though mounted on a steed, appeared himself to have the long head of a horse, with pointed ears, white eyes, and blood-red flaring nostrils. Even I felt a twinge of dread, and I knew full well that it was merely Robin’s men, masked with rolled discs of sheepskin, ears and eye holes cut out and the mask painted to look like the muzzle of a hellish beast. They appeared to be Satan’s steeds indeed, come to carry away men’s souls.
The devilish horsemen charged. The spear points descended to the horizontal as one and this steel-tipped mass came on like a great black thunder cloud, surging down the slope in a shallow V-shaped formation to bring death and destruction into the camp.
‘Alan, Alan, come on! Come on! It is time,’ shouted a voice below me. And I looked down to see Tuck, flanked by his two enormous dogs, Gog and Magog, holding the reins of a horse meant for me. It was time: and if Edwinstowe and his men refused to join us, there were still more than a few stout men-at-arms who owed their loyalty only to Robin and who would ride out with us this night to heap more terror on the enemies of their lord.
The gates were thrown open and we burst out of them in a pack, perhaps a dozen of us mounted, with myself in the lead, and a score of men on foot: Robin’s spearmen and bowmen, left behind while he was on the Great Pilgrimage, supplemented with a handful of the braver or perhaps just more loyal men from the surrounding lands. Led by Father Tuck, the foot soldiers ran behind the cavalry, screaming their war cries, each man wielding a long spear or short sword from the castle armoury. I noticed with admiration and a little trepidation, looking over my shoulder, that the lad Thomas had armed himself with a kindling axe and had joined the other local men running behind the horsemen. I had no time to tell him to return to the hall as we surged out into the night towards the enemy.
We horsemen cantered out of the gate which lay at the southeast of the castle and turned left, spurring ahead of the infantry to hurtle into the southern section of Murdac’s camp. My chest was thrumming with the black thrill of battle, the unparalleled feeling of having a well-trained horse between my legs, a stout shield on my arm and a long spear couched under my right elbow. I knew that our chances were slim, but I felt little fear that weird, wild night. We were riding to the charge; and battle, with all its mad-flecked, God-cursed, sky-soaring joy, was upon us.
A terrified picket, a sentry in red and black, turned to run back into the camp when he saw us coming out of the night: a mob of galloping horsemen screaming like devils and heading straight for him. As he turned to run, a grey and reddish blur streaked past me, one of Tuck’s enormous battle-trained wolf-hounds. The animal leapt at the running man, his giant jaws opening and snapping shut, crunching deep into the meat of his right leg, and then they were both rolling on the dark turf, a tangle of grey fur and flapping black surcoat, appalling screams for mercy and bone-grinding growls. And then I was past them, and there were sleep-shackled enemies blundering from between the tents to my front, only half visible in the blackness. I lined up the horse and galloped straight at a man-at-arms who was struggling into a leather-backed mail shirt, his arms up above his head, his face covered by the hauberk, and I screamed ‘Westbury!’ as I drove my right arm forward and plunged the lance-tip deep into his unprotected doughy belly.
He dropped immediately and seemed to curl like a snake around my spear. But I managed to twist my wrist and pull the point free of the man’s guts as I thundered past. I had only just levelled the spear again when I found I was facing another enemy, a mounted man-at-arms in a boiled-leather cuirasse and helmet, screaming hate and waving a heavy mace at me. I rose in the saddle and my lance jerked forward and punched through the stiff leather and into his chest, the blood-smeared point given its enormous killing power by my galloping horse. He was a dead man before he was even within range to strike a blow. Releasing my spear, leaving it bobbing madly from his torso, his blood greasing the front of his cuirasse, I hauled out my sword. I could hear battle-charged shouts behind me as our assorted footmen tore into the south end of the camp, hacking and howling, stamping and stabbing at their foes, wiping out all in their path like a wave of human fury crashing on to a beach. Leaving them to their bloody business, I was intent on reaching the centre of the sweep of tents where I knew Murdac’s shelter to be. I longed to face him, to take my sword to him in the joyous carnage of battle, and send him to Hell where he belonged. But as I urged the horse forward, slicing my sword down into the neck of a passing man-at-arms and batting a terrified crossbowman out of my path with the flat of the blade, I could see that Robin’s plan was already working. Scores of men-at-arms in black and red were streaming from the camp and away eastwards into the darkness, some crying out loud to God in their terror, others saving their breath to make good their escape.
I guided my horse round the side of a broad, low tent and came face to face with a terrifying apparition: a giant man on a huge horse, a black monstrous shape lit only by splashes of firelight but seeming to loom over me. He had a great doubleheaded axe in one enormous fist, and I could see that it was dripping with fresh blood, and the head on those giant shoulders was that of a massive stallion, its nostrils seemingly breathing fire. I could not help myself but I reined back in alarm, and then the apparition used his free left hand to lift the sheepskin horse mask from his face and reveal the grinning, sweaty visage and yellow matted locks of John Nailor, Robin’s right-hand man and my good friend.
‘Boo!’ he said, as if playing a hiding game with a child.
I managed a shaky smile at my old comrade. And Little John said: ‘God’s dangling gonads, Alan, don’t tell me your bowels were loosened by all this mummery!’
I shook my head and lied through my teeth: ‘Of course not, but the trick seems to have worked on Murdac’s men. The bastards are all running away.’
‘Not all of them, Alan,’ said Little John. And he nodded to the east where a group of a dozen men-at-arms on foot were being pushed into line by a grizzled sergeant to form a forlorn-looking and very thin shield wall. ‘This little fight’s not over yet, Alan. Come on! There’s more sport to be had.’
He pulled the terrifying horse mask back down over his face and we turned our mounts together, put back our spurs and charged, knee to knee, axe and sword swinging, myself screaming ‘Westbury! Westbury!’ and Little John making a hideous keening noise deep in his throat. We charged like madmen, or creatures from some terrible nightmare, straight at the thin wall of a dozen frightened soldiers who were cowering behind their kite-shaped shields. And the formation shattered like a clay cup dropped on a stone floor as they ran for their lives, scattering into the darkness. I managed to land only a glancing blow on to the helmet of one fleeing man before he scurried under an upturned cart, safely away from my searching blade. I let him live; reining in, panting, to survey the night and catch my breath.
Little John had been wrong. The battle was, to all intents and purposes, over, and as I turned to speak to him I saw that he too had disappeared into the night. I was alone, and just ahead of me was Sir Ralph Murdac’s black-and-red striped tent, now with a circle of pine-pitch torches burning around it. I walked my horse over towards the circle of light; praying fervently to St Michael that I should be lucky enough to find the little Norman rat still in his foul nest.
Murdac was not there, but Robin was. My master was unhorsed, the sheepskin mask hanging by a cord around his neck, a great war bow in his hands, an arrow nocked, the hempen string drawn back to his ear. He was aiming across my path, away from the light and into the darkness; my head turned and my eye naturally followed his aim. A small dark figure was racing a midnight-black horse away from the camp as fast as possible, its pounding legs snapping guy ropes and tumbling tents in his wake. And I knew in my bones that it was Murdac. A heartbeat later my master released the bowstring and sent a yard of ash, tipped with a needle-like bodkin point, flashing away into the darkness. The arrow struck Murdac. I saw the strike, high in his back on the left-hand side; it was a superb shot, one that only Robin and a handful of other men in the world could have made. The bobbing target was more than a hundred yards away by then, the range increasing with every moment as horse and rider surged towards safety. Murdac’s black-and-red surcoat could only be seen intermittently that dark night, when the horse and rider passed through a patch of firelight; it was a nigh-on impossible feat to hit the target, and yet Robin had made it. But it was not a lethal strike; I saw Murdac lurch forward in the saddle with the heavy impact of the shaft in his back. But he did not fall and moments later he was still in the saddle, swaying wildly, but remaining defiantly a-horse, and passing swiftly beyond view down the dale towards the River Locksley as the dark curtains of night closed behind him.
I heard Robin curse softly under his breath as I leapt off my mount to greet him and congratulate him on his stunning victory.
‘I meant to kill him, Alan,’ said my master after we had clasped right arms in greeting. ‘I meant to kill him for sure this time, and I honestly thought I had him, but once again it seems that I have failed.’
‘He may yet die from his wound,’ I said, smiling at him with affection. ‘Perhaps God intends for him to suffer a slow and hideously painful death, when the wound goes black and the pus runs thick and begins to smell of month-old rancid mutton …’
‘You’re just trying to cheer me up,’ said Robin with a wry laugh. ‘Or possibly make me feel peckish. Either way, thank you, Alan. No, I missed my mark with Murdac, and we shall have to deal with him again on some other occasion. Now, we have other matters to attend to; come, we’d better make sure these bastards are all dead, captured or gone from here.’
Robin turned away and was calling for his horse when William, Lord Edwinstowe, with a score of mounted men-at-arms behind him, trotted into the circle of torchlight around Murdac’s pavilion. I knew that Edwinstowe’s men had not charged with us when we rushed out of the castle gate to support Robin’s attack, and none of them carried the marks of battle – not a scratch nor a splash of blood on a single one of them. But the cautious baron must have seen the way the battle was going, that Murdac’s men were running, and come to the conclusion that he must join in if only for the sake of his knightly reputation. I realized then that, though he might be Robin’s brother, I thoroughly despised him.
‘Robert,’ Edwinstowe said curtly, nodding at my master. ‘William,’ came the equally terse reply. Then Robin, by now mounted, walked his horse over to his brother. He smiled at him without much warmth, and said: ‘I thank you for the great service you have rendered me over the past few weeks. I am in your debt.’
‘Well, Brother, when I got wind of Ralph Murdac’s plans to attack Kirkton, what else could I do but come here? I merely fulfilled my family duty,’ said Edwinstowe. ‘No more, no less. Duty to one’s family is a sacred trust, and it must supersede all other … considerations.’
‘And I am most grateful,’ said Robin. ‘I shall not forget what you have done for me here.’
Baron Edwinstowe half-smiled; he seemed pleased by Robin’s thanks. ‘It seems that I underestimated your battle plans. I must congratulate you on this scheme, this … ruse, and on your notable victory.’ His gauntleted hand described an arc that took in the shattered, smouldering enemy camp, now empty of Murdac’s men. Robin gave him a bright, gleaming smile. And for a moment the baron seemed to be about to say something more, but he merely nodded and then turned his horse and, leading his conroi of unmarked men-at-arms, he trotted back towards Kirkton Castle.
The prisoners looked tired and very frightened. Pale-faced and bound at the wrists and neck with stout ropes, a forlorn two dozen men, some lightly wounded – the very badly hurt had been mercifully dispatched to their Maker in the immediate aftermath of the battle – sat disconsolately with their backs to the wooden palisade, stripped nearly naked, and guarded by a handful of joyfully victorious archers, who were sharing flasks of mead and time-honoured army jokes. It was not long past dawn in the bailey courtyard of Kirkton Castle and Hanno was congratulating me on my kill the night before last. ‘I am very pleased with you, Alan,’ said my Bavarian friend, his round shaven head split with a grin to reveal his ragged assortment of broken grey teeth. ‘It is a beautiful killing, ah yes. Very nice, very quiet, and very nearly perfect.’
My bitten finger throbbed from misuse, even though I had strapped it tightly before the battle last night. I looked at my friend a little sourly and I marvelled at his use of the word ‘beautiful’ for such a sordid piece of butchery.
‘What do you mean, nearly perfect?’ I said. ‘I took him down without a sound.’ I was feeling the melancholy humour I always felt after a bout of bloodletting, when the world seemed flat and grey, and my soul was heavy with regret at the men I had killed. My finger was paining me more than a little, too.
‘Ah, Alan, do not mistake me,’ said Hanno, all seriousness now. ‘I am most proud of you – but next time you must take him while he stands, left hand and dagger together’ – he mimed clamping a hand over an invisible victim’s mouth and shoving the blade into the back of his skull at the same time – ‘not use your weight to knock him to the ground, and then kill him while you both roll around like happy pigs f*cking in the mud.’
‘Well, next time, I’ll try to do much better,’ I said with a grimace. I was feeling slightly sick at the memory of that bloody murder in the black field. Hanno was a passionate advocate of perfection, endlessly harping on about it: the perfect ale, the perfect woman, the perfect sword blow. He also had no ear at all for when I was being sarcastic.
‘This is the correct spirit, Alan,’ said Hanno, nodding earnestly. ‘Each time you perform a task, you must try to do it better than the last time – until it is perfect. I recall my first silent kill … oh, it is many years ago, in Bavaria. I am in the service of Leopold, Duke of Austria, a great and powerful man, and the orders come down to me from the renowned and most noble knight Fulk von Rittenburg …’
At that moment, I was spared having to hear a story I had heard a dozen times before by the arrival of Robin, still wearing the long dark cloak that had been part of his horse-demon costume the night before, accompanied by Little John and Marie-Anne and a nursemaid who was carrying a small, solemn-looking, slightly pudgy boy – he must have been about two and a half years of age, if my calculations were correct.
Robin stopped in front of the prisoners and quietly drew his sword. His face was as bleak as a full gibbet in mid-winter. Behind him I could see Marie-Anne looking strangely frightened and confused. John, on the other hand, looked unconcerned and he shot me a cheery wink.
‘Get them on their feet,’ Robin said curtly to the archer guards. And while the prisoners were roughly pulled into a standing position, Robin studied them, his eyes as coldly metallic as the naked blade in his hand.
‘You came to this place and laid siege to my castle with your master, the coward who calls himself Sir Ralph Murdac, seeking to murder my servants and despoil my lands, while I was away fighting for Christendom in the Holy Land. Is this not true?’
The bound men said nothing, shuffling their feet and staring at the packed-earth floor of the bailey. One fellow began to weep silently. Robin continued: ‘And yet did not His Holiness Pope Celestine declare that a man’s lands and estates are under the protection of Mother Church while he takes part in a holy pilgrimage? To attack such a man’s property is to break the Truce of God, which is a grave sin, as despicable as attacking Church property itself, is it not?’
The men remained silent. Robin paused for a beat, and then went on: ‘And so, by God’s holy law, by the law of His Holiness the Pope, you all richly deserve death for your crimes outside these walls. Do you not?’
I was privately amused that my master, a man who I knew did not have the slightest allegiance to the Pope in Rome, or any high Christian churchman for that matter, should use this law as a justification, I assumed, for executing these men. Get on with it, I thought to myself. If you have decided to kill them, get it done. Don’t give them a long sermon to take with them to their graves.
‘But what angers me more than a cowardly attack on my lands while I was fighting the good fight in Outremer,’ Robin continued, ‘is that your master has cast suspicion on the honour of my lady wife, the Countess of Locksley.’ Robin’s gaze lashed the cowed men, many of whom were now mumbling prayers under their breath, convinced their time on Earth was nearly ended.
‘The coward Murdac claims that Hugh here, my little son,’ Robin emphasized the last word, ‘is not truly my son, but his.’
For more than a year, I knew, Sir Ralph Murdac had been spreading the rumour that he had lain with Marie-Anne and got her with child. The rumours had reached us as far away as the Island of Sicily, and they had made Robin heartsick, and a figure of ridicule, the cuckolded husband – something Robin could not abide. Worse still, the rumours were true. Murdac had lain with Marie-Anne when she was his captive, during Robin’s outlaw days, and although it was surely a forced coupling, the boy was undeniably his. I was shocked that Robin should speak publicly about these intensely private and shameful matters. Even I, one of his closest men, had never dared to speak of it to him. But it seemed he was now determined to make the subject an open one.
‘Before the Virgin, does any man here support the liar Murdac’s claim, and say that my boy Hugh is his whelp?’
The prisoners stared at the little boy sitting quietly in his nursemaid’s arms. The boy stared back with his huge pale blue eyes from under a mop of jet hair. God forgive me for saying this, but he was the very image of Murdac, a miniature Sir Ralph – and every man here could see it. Still nobody said a word.
Fast as a cut snake, Robin lunged forward with his sword, sinking the blade a foot deep into the naked belly of the nearest prisoner, who screamed in pain and collapsed bleeding and whimpering to the floor, clutching his punctured midriff. Even though I believed that Robin meant to kill them all, I was as surprised as any man in that courtyard by the suddenness and callousness of his strike.
Robin held the sword up towards the morning sky, the unfortunate prisoner’s bright blood trickling down the central channel of the blade towards the hilt. ‘I will be answered,’ my master said quietly, his voice ice-hard. ‘And so I ask you again: Does any man here maintain Sir Ralph’s claim that this is not my son?’
There was an immediate chorus of ‘No, my lord!’ and ‘By my faith, he is your son, sir!’ and similar answers from the prisoners. The man who had been stabbed gave a groaning cry, a little writhe and, mercifully, appeared to pass out from the pain.
But one of the standing prisoners took a half step forward. He was a handsome man, tall and proud. ‘I will not lie,’ he said, looking directly at Robin, matching his stare. ‘I will not go before the face of God with a lie on my lips. He is not your son – you only need to look at him to see that. Clearly his true father—’ Robin’s sword flashed out and ripped through his throat, and he dropped to his knees, gouting blood between clutching fingers as his precious life-fluid cascaded down his white chest.
‘Anyone else?’ said Robin, as still and cold as a gravestone.
Another loud chorus of ‘No, my lord! He is surely your son!’
‘You all deserve death for your actions over the past few weeks … but I am a merciful man,’ said Robin. And behind him, I saw Little John explode in a loud coughing or choking fit, covering his mouth with one huge hand, his face glowing a bright rosy red as he struggled to regain his composure. My master gave John a stern flick of a glance, and twisted his mouth very slightly in rebuke, then he continued: ‘I am a merciful man, unless I am crossed, and I may, I may now be moved to show mercy. If any man here will swear before God and the Virgin, and all that he holds dear, that he will serve me, and my son Hugh, faithfully, all his days, with all his might and main, I shall grant him his miserable life. Is any man here prepared to take this solemn oath?’
A forest of hands shot up into the air, many tied to other men’s – one particularly short man was jerked off his feet by the raised hands of two tall men on either side of him. And there was a clamour of voices declaring: ‘I will, my lord, gladly, I will.’ In fact, perhaps not very surprisingly, it seemed that the entire mass of prisoners was prepared to accept the offer of a life in faithful service to Robin.
As the prisoners were cut loose by the archers, each kneeling in turn to make the pledge of loyalty to Robin, placing their hands between his, I was struck by how clever my master had been. He had, at a stroke, recruited a score of trained menat-arms, which he badly needed, who would now find it difficult, if not impossible, to return to Murdac’s banner because they had publicly acknowledged that Hugh was Robin’s son. He had weeded out, and swiftly dispatched, the one man who would never serve him, and had displayed a ruthless strength, and a generous clemency which, it was to be hoped, would bind these soldiers to him more strongly. But would these men, Sir Ralph Murdac’s men, really remain loyal when the threat of imminent death had passed? I marked their faces and vowed that in future I would keep a wary eye on each and every one of them.