by Angus Donald
I could see nothing through the wood but a glimpse of the broad back of a Cassingham archer ahead. The man was slowly standing up. The sound of the wheels and the singing grew louder. Then came the crack of a whip and the low booing of an ox stirred to quicken its gait. I heard a man laugh, a high shrill sound, like a fellow only feigning amusement. And another man laugh, deeper, more confident.
Then it began.
First came the creak of old wood from fifteen yew bows, a whooshing sound of flight, the wet thuds of steel-tipped shafts sinking into flesh and the first horrible shrieks of pain. I was in the saddle in an instant, urging my men on to their mounts and fighting through the tangle of low-growing ferns, grasping gorse bushes and tree branches. A man behind cried out as a whippy ash branch I’d pushed past slashed him full face, but I ignored it. The arrows were whistling forward, again and again – I heard cries aplenty, shouts, roars too, coming from ahead. Then I was through, on to the road, the sunlight dazzling, a scene of bloody chaos before my eyes.
There had been about twenty French men-at-arms with the two wagons, a weak conroi, but the arrows had done their work and a mere half-dozen saddles still held occupants. Riderless horses, panicking and some stuck with shafts, were milling everywhere, a few lashing out with hind hooves in pain, a pair of them galloping madly down the road. Blood-spattered human bodies feathered with shafts had tumbled to the road-bed, some still feebly moving. Other men had collapsed on the two high-sided wagons and lay bleeding on the wax-covered sheets that covered the loads, punched out of their saddles by the power of the yew bows. And arrows still hissed and flashed in the air.
I came out of the tree line at the canter, shouting ‘Westbury!’ with all my might – I had Fidelity in my right hand, left holding up my red boar shield, reins looped over the pommel, and controlling the horse with my thighs alone.
A man, a knight, I believe, was shouting to his men in French to rally and charge the archers in the trees. I aimed my horse directly at him and the French knight lashed out with his sword and our blades clanged together as we met. I stopped his strike dead but my hilt-grasping fist continued onward to smash into his jaw beneath his helmet. I felt the blow shudder up my arm, his head rocked back and then I was past. I wheeled tightly and cut back-handed at his neck; the steel crunched home and he flopped in the saddle. My men were out of the woods and all around me now, cutting down the last remaining French. I saw sleepy old Joseph take a clean axe blow to his back from a frenzied fellow in a red surcoat and flat-topped tubular helmet. The arrows had more or less stopped by now. The axeman was on a black gelding and as I approached Joseph’s slumped form, he turned his horse and spurred at me screaming his hatred and hacked at my leg with his weapon. I took the blow plumb on my shield and lunged past with Fidelity, ramming the steel as hard as I could at his oncoming body, punching the blade through mail and deep into his belly.
Then it was done.
Robin and the rest of the archers were emerging from the trees, faces alight with victory. All our enemies were down or dead in the saddle. Back down the road towards Winchelsea, the archers had stopped and were calming the two runaway horses, and were even now bringing them back up the track towards us.
William Cassingham had set aside his bow and, as he strode towards the wagons grinning like a demon, I noticed the broad-bladed falchion grasped in his right hand. Robin was by my stirrup, looking happily up at me.
‘Just like the old days,’ he said. ‘I feel like a twenty-year-old again.’ And he leaped lithely up on to the side of the first wagon. After hauling a blood-smeared corpse out of the way and letting it tumble to the road, he tugged at the waxed cloth.
I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, the unmistakable flash of a blade. I whipped round and saw it was only Cass. He was hacking savagely at the neck of a dead man with his falchion, the corpse’s head gripped firmly in his left hand by its long brown hair, the rest of the body trailing on the road. It took three short blows to free the head and then he had his bloody trophy.
‘Robin,’ I said, gesturing at the blood-smeared lord of Cassingham. ‘Seriously? You’re going to allow him to do this revolting sort of thing? We are not savages …’
‘Come now, Alan. Don’t be so prim,’ said my lord. ‘Don’t make something out of this. There is purpose to the lad’s butchery. Wait. You’ll see.’
I screwed up my face in disgust but held my tongue. These men were enemies, invaders of my country, after all, and they were dead. I did not wish to fall out with my companions over the handling of a few French corpses.
Robin took my mind off this grisly matter in a time-honoured fashion by showing me our booty. In the first wagon, in neatly tied sheaves of a dozen, well slathered in goose grease, were spears, swords and daggers, newly forged and of the highest quality. Enough weapons for fifty men, and there was more: chests containing full suits of mail, sheaves of arrows and a dozen oiled crossbows with hundreds of iron-tipped oak bolts to match them.
The contents of the second wagon truly took my breath away. At first glance it seemed not as full as the first, but when the waxed cloth covering had been stripped back I saw it was filled with dozens of small oblong oak chests, iron-bound, padlocked shut and almost too heavy for one man to lift.
At Robin’s urging, Cass took his falchion to one at random. It took all of the young man’s strength and no little time to chop through the seasoned oak, but once the chest had been breached we all crowded around to see the mound of bright silver coins glinting beautifully on the soft green grass – glinting beautifully by a small congealing puddle of crimson blood.
Chapter Nineteen
I didn’t like the taking of heads. It seemed to me barbaric, unchristian, cruel and altogether wrong. But I understood why Robin had ordered Cass to undertake that bloody task. The lad appeared to lack entirely the sense of horror an ordinary man feels at the sight of blood and death. I also understood, eventually, why it needed to be done. My lord had always used fear as a weapon of war: long ago in Yorkshire he had once had me murder and decapitate a man-at-arms and replace his head with that of a horse in order to sow fear into the hearts of our enemies. That memory still makes me shudder. But it was undoubtedly effective. The outrages committed by Cass and his men on the road to Winchelsea had a similar result. The wagons and the surviving horses were spirited back to Cassingham as swiftly as possible and some efforts were made to erase the signs of the battle. But in the deep pools of blood, Cass and his men planted a short, well-sharpened stake and mounted a severed head garlanded with leaves, flowers and moss. It was as if some gruesome man-headed plant had suddenly sprouted where the poor fellow had died.
The bodies of the men we killed were stripped of their arms and armour and sunk in the local marshes with heavy stones bound to their chests, with luck never to be seen again. We did not allow the wounded to live to tell the true tale of the fight.
The rumours began almost at once of a great bloodthirsty demon loose in the countryside who ate up Frenchmen and their worldly possessions and left only their heads, which, apparently because they were so full of the French language, he found too difficult to stomach. Other tales told of an English ogre who lived below the earth and rose up to pull Frenchmen into his underground lair, leaving their heads behind as a warning. These rustic fantasies delighted Robin, who did all he could to encourage them. He even urged Cass to hang half-decomposed polls, similarly decorated, from the trees around the manor and on the tracks leading to it to frighten away any curious strangers who might come this way.
None of this behaviour surprised me. I knew that parts of Robin’s soul were very dark indeed. Yet what he did with the chests of silver – that did surprise me.
Robin had always been an open-handed lord, almost recklessly generous to his followers, but to folk outside the circle of his familia it was a different story. He quite often treated them as no more than prey. As long as I had known him, his ambition had been to amass as much wealth as possible, b
y any means fair or foul, and to guard it jealously like a dragon from the old tales. He justified this by telling me this wealth protected his family, and as it was his paramount duty to protect his wife and sons, it was also his duty to accumulate wealth. I had never been comfortable with this side of Robin’s nature and we had frequently fallen out over his blatant worship of Mammon.
In the summer of the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and sixteen all that changed. It began with the purchase of foodstuffs for the manor. Men were flocking to join us, sometimes several dozen a week. We swiftly ran through the provisions that Cass’s steward had hoarded against the lean times of winter and, to feed the swollen numbers of men training at our camp, we had to buy grain and meat and ale and wine from all across the counties of Kent and Sussex. Robin was overly generous to the farmers who brought these foods to him, paying sometimes as much as twice the market price.
‘I want these men happy to supply us,’ Robin said when I caught him slipping a honey-seller a couple of extra shillings and attempted to tease him about it. ‘I want them to sell to us and not to Prince Louis’s victuallers nor the rebels in London. I also want them to keep their mouths shut about exactly where we are.’
I was relieved to see that my lord did add a level of good old-fashioned menace to his dealings with the local peasants. He had Mastin and a couple of the bigger archers seize one fellow – who had made a sly joke about selling his oats to the French for a better price – and threaten to feed him his own testicles if he so much as spoke to a Frenchman again. And though the fellow was suitably cowed and swore that he would never have dealings with the enemy, it had all been no more than a jest, your honour – that day I missed my old friend Little John even more than usual.
Robin’s solution to the problem of keeping our training camp at the manor of Cassingham undiscovered by the French was to bribe every man, woman and child in the Weald to keep our secret. If the sheriff’s tax demands had been too harsh, Robin would make good the difference in bright silver. If your milk cow died of sickness, here was the kindly old Earl of Locksley with the coin to replace the animal. A poor man bound to make a pilgrimage but without the funds for the road? Robin would oblige him with a fat travelling purse. When the local churches needed money to help the sick of the parish, there was my lord with a generous contribution.
They loved him for it. He was greeted everywhere he went with a smile. Working men doffed their caps and called out his name. Young maids brought him bunches of wildflowers; ale wives brewed him special vats of their finest ale. And Robin loved to be loved. In those weeks, dispensing largesse with both fists, he was cheerier than I had ever known him. He joked with the Wealden men, flirted with the ladies, dandled their newborn babies on his knee and proclaimed them all – even the squashed-faced, puke-dripping bawlers – beautiful.
No one went away from an encounter with Robin empty-handed.
I found it absolutely infuriating. Every time he doled out another handful of our precious silver, I ground my teeth and thought about the many times when we’d had nothing, not a penny to bless ourselves with. He was broadcasting coin about like seed corn scattered upon a field: throwing it away, as far as I could see. But somehow I could not find the words to remonstrate effectively with him.
Every few days the men under his command, sometimes led by him, sometimes by Cass or one of his captains, or by me or Mastin, would sally out. Based on information that was happily passed to him by the local people, we would ambush a convoy of pay for the French troops or a line of food wagons, or just cut up a foraging party and perform the now familiar grisly rites with the beheaded Frenchmen. We ranged from Sevenoaks to Sandwich, from Worthing to Wrotham. We slaughtered the French and we stole their money and, almost as importantly, their arms and armour. And each time we killed the French, Cass and his men made their gruesome tableaux with the severed heads. The money came in by the barrel. Every week, no matter how much Robin gave away to the poor, our coffers at Cassingham were replenished. The young lord of the manor seemed to have no interest in money at all and was content to have Robin providing his largesse to all and sundry. I pulled my hair but could not reproach Robin. For he had given me a small barrel of coin and told me solemnly that I should preserve it for Robert’s future.
I had been paid off too.
‘Don’t think of it as money,’ said my lord, to my intense irritation, when I finally summoned up the power to suggest he need not give an entire chest of new silver pennies to the monks at Canterbury, who had asked him to help contribute to a special jewelled crucifix for the cathedral’s lady chapel. ‘Think of it as the silver armour that keeps us all safe from harm.’
And for a few glorious weeks that summer, it did.
Of course, the idyll came to an end – and with shocking brutality. One afternoon in early July, I was training the men – now all fully armed with sword, spear, helm and shield, thanks to Robin and Cass’s endeavours, some even sporting iron-link mail hauberks that hung to their knees – when Robin and a score of his men-at-arms rode into the courtyard of Cassingham with a donkey cart in their midst. I could tell something was wrong: Robin had a fixed carefree smile on his lean face but his eyes were as small and hard as granite pebbles.
I dismissed the troop of spearmen, releasing them to wash off the sweat in the bathhouse, and went over to Robin. The men were gathered around the cart looking inside with expressions of disgust, horror and fear. As I forced my way through the crowd, I caught a waft of putrid odour that almost made me cough up my dinner. Inside the cart were two reddish-brown bodies, clearly dead and having been in that state for some days, for maggots writhed and glistened in the eye sockets. Keeping a hand over my mouth and nose, I examined the corpses: they were two of Cass’s new recruits, bowmen I thought, from up near Penshurst, although it was difficult to be certain. I fancied at first that they had been coated in blood, dipped in it, for the amount of gore could not possibly have come from their wounds alone. Then I realised that every inch of skin had been peeled from their bodies, slowly, carefully, perhaps over several hours, days even. I could not begin to imagine the expanse of pain that they had endured before they died.
I blundered away from the cart and nearly crashed into Robin, who was standing beside me. ‘You Frank, and you Stephen, get these men decently buried, will you?’ he was saying. ‘Get them in the ground as quick as you like and find a priest to say the right words over them. But most importantly get them buried quickly, you understand?’
I felt a wash of nausea surge up from my belly into the back of my throat and I very nearly splashed it all over my old friend. But he put a hand on my shoulder and looked into my watering eyes with concern.
‘You know what this is?’ I said, when I could speak again. ‘You know what this foul act represents?’
Robin nodded. But I put it into words anyway: ‘It is revenge. For the beheadings, for the ambushes. Somebody is coming after us and he is very serious about taking his revenge on us, on all of us.’
‘I know, Alan,’ said Robin tiredly. ‘But I think it is worse than that: those two men would have talked. They would have done anything to stop the pain. Anything. They will have told whoever it is, the revenge-seeker, that we are here.’
I had the full story from Robin over a jug of ale, when my stomach could finally accept nourishment. The two men had been with us for no more than ten days and had slipped off one night to pay a visit to their sweethearts in the village of Hever. It seems they opened their mouths too wide in an inn there. They had been seized by the French and taken to Rochester Castle – now in the hands of Prince Louis’s men – and when the foul stripping work was done, and they had told everything they knew, they had been dumped on the road near Ashford and discovered by one of Cass’s patrols that morning.
‘The French know we are here, Alan,’ said Robin. ‘It can be only a matter of time before they come for us with all their forces. It is time for the second phase.’
‘Dispersal,’ I
said. ‘Which is a way of saying: every man for himself; sauve qui peut, as our foes would put it.’
‘Don’t be so gloomy, Alan. It’s not like that. And it’s not as if we expected to go undetected here for ever, is it? Cass and I have it all worked out. As you know very well – you’ve sat in on enough of our council gatherings.’
Our conversation was interrupted then by shouts from the palisade. ‘Alarm! Alarm! They’re coming! Knights are coming,’ a man on the walkway was shouting wildly and the courtyard of Cassingham became a kicked ant-hill, with men and women rushing everywhere, yelling in fear and anger, pushing other folk out of the way, snatching up weapons. Sheer bloody pandemonium.
It seemed the French had come to Cassingham.
Chapter Twenty
Knights did come to Cassingham that hot July afternoon. But they were not French. They were a quartet of Norman knights, some of the very few lords of the duchy who had remained in the service of King John after the fall of his continental possessions. Robin and Cass gave them wine in the hall, while I arranged for their horses to be cared for, then I joined them for the council of war.
Robin had not completely cut his ties with the King after the humiliating episode at Sandwich in May; he had, in fact, been sending John reports from time to time of his activities and his actions against the French. My lord was concerned lest the King should believe we had switched sides and rejoined the rebels; if the King thought us traitors, it could be lethal for Marie-Anne and Hugh at Kirkton – and for Robert.
As it happened, I knew one of the Norman knights who paid us a visit that afternoon: he was Hubert de Burgh, a proud hawk-like man who had been castellan of Falaise Castle before Normandy was lost. I had served under him there and while he could be rather stiff-necked and touchy about his honour, he was a good man at heart. He had remained unwaveringly loyal to King John – despite the reservations he must have had – through disaster, defeat and civil war. I could not but feel a grudging respect for his constancy.