by Angus Donald
At first I waved away his offerings and buried my face in my hands. Then he surprised me by taking a stern line.
‘Now listen to me, sir,’ he said. ‘My nan always used to tell me that a killing casts a shadow over your soul, and the Lord knows we’ve done our share of killing today. The best cure for a soul-shadow is pottage and ale and a good night’s sleep. Now we haven’t got no pottage, nor no ale. But I have got this here hot cock-a-leekie, and you’d best eat it up. And I have got you this nice skin of wine. So you be a good master and eat that soup while it’s hot and drink this wine, and I’ll go and find you a place to sleep.’
The soup was mostly bones and gristle, and the wine not far from vinegar, but I got them down me to please Kit, praising him lavishly for his valour in the battle. His old nan was quite right, of course. I felt a good deal better after dinner. Then slept like a stone for fourteen hours and I was a new man.
We did not tarry long in Mirebeau. When the wounded had been gathered up, the prisoners collected and the fires in the town and castle extinguished, we rested for one full day only, before we were back on the road north. We travelled much more slowly this time, setting off mid-morning and stopping by mid-afternoon. King John was eager to show his ducal prisoner in every small town on the way back to Normandy, and he displayed the wretched Duke, with heavy metal fetters on his thin wrists and ankles, in each market square before crowds of gawping yokels. Arthur, stripped of his fine armour and battle fierceness, proved to be a thin, gingery, freckled lad of only fifteen summers. The poor boy was forced to stand on the back of a cart – guarded by two royal bachelors, unknighted young men of good families, who served in John’s personal retinue. These two were a pair of sycophantic bastards, it was said, who crawled to King John and bullied anyone they felt beneath them, trusting in their relationship with the King to keep them out of trouble. Neither had fought at Mirebeau. They were called Hugo and Humphrey and while John harangued the miserable Duke from his horse a few paces away, mocking everything from his bodily parts to his prowess in war, Hugo and Humphrey moved through the crowds encouraging the peasants to throw rotten vegetables, dung or even stones at the hangdog young prisoner. The small-town folk found this bewildering, I noticed, to see two such great persons – a Duke and King, one being the uncle of the other – behaving like a hedge-school bully and his hapless victim.
I was glad we travelled slowly – not only because I was still worn with fatigue from my exertions over the past few days but because our own wounded would not have survived a hectic pace. At least thirty of the Wolves sustained serious wounds during the battle for Mirebeau, and many of them would die of their injuries on the journey – but I was most concerned with Little John. He lay on his back in a straw-filled ox-cart oozing blood from the wound in his back as we jolted along the rough roads. His eyes were tightly closed, his face running with sweat, but he made no sound except for the occasional whispered groan when the wheels of the cart hit a particularly deep rut.
Somewhere near Chinon, I gathered the courage to ask Robin if he thought our friend would live. My lord’s happy face – he was touchingly delighted to have his wife and children with him and directly under his protection once more – grew sombre. ‘It is a bad wound, Alan, and deep. I think it would have killed a lesser man than John already. But John is very strong, in spirit as well as in body. And so … we will have to see. But if you wish him to forgive you for anything, if you have a peace to make with him, the time to do it is now, not later.’
Robin’s words chilled me. I had known Little John all my adult life and while I had seen him take some hard knocks in battle, I had never seen him laid low like this. He had always been like a rock – a bawdy, crude, battle-hungry mountain of a man. I could not imagine life in Robin’s company without him. I went to see him when we stopped the next afternoon, bringing a jug of wine for his comfort, and found Marie-Anne there. She and her maid-servant Constance, a petite pretty girl, had stripped the soiled clothes from his enormous body and were tenderly washing the caked blood away with soap and hot water.
The sight of his pale naked body was a shock. His face was waxy and the weight had melted off him over the past few days on the road. At first I thought he was dead, there and then, and the two women were laying out his corpse. I choked back a sob and Marie-Anne glanced at me and smiled sadly.
Then John opened one blue eye and whispered, ‘Do you mind, Alan. A little privacy, if you please. It’s not every day…’ He coughed out a gobbet of blood and his face screwed up with pain. ‘It’s not every day that I can persuade a pair of beautiful youngsters to soap my hairy cock and balls.’
He coughed bloodily again, laughing weakly at his own wit.
Constance blushed beetroot. Marie-Anne lightly slapped his naked thigh and said, ‘That’s enough out of you, John Nailor. You lie quiet and behave yourself.’ Then she turned to me. ‘He needs peace and quiet, Alan. Let him rest.’
I nodded and stumbled away, unshed tears burning beneath my eyelids.
I walked blindly – we were camped that afternoon in a broad hayfield near a fair-sized hall King John had commandeered for the night – and somehow found myself standing next to a stoutly built ox-cart, roofed and with thick wooden bars on all sides. And a voice spoke to me: ‘Sir, of your mercy, give me something to drink. I am faint with thirst.’
I looked up and found myself gazing into the face of the young Arthur, Duke of Brittany. The jug of wine was still in my hand and, wordlessly, I passed it to him through the bars. The boy tipped back his head and drank greedily.
Then he thanked me and said in a puzzled tone, ‘But you were the one I fought, in the square at Mirebeau.’
‘I was indeed, Your Grace.’
He nodded and said, ‘I’m very sorry that I could not accept your challenge for a second passage of arms, but Sir Raymond insisted we try to escape—’
‘Hey, you, get away from the prisoner!’ came a rough voice, in Norman French. I turned and saw two young men: the taller man thin, with jet black hair and dark stubble and a sallow, yellowish skin, like some of the men I had seen in the Holy Land; the shorter man, who had spoken, was wider in girth and had copper-coloured hair slicked back from his narrow head. Both had swords in their hands.
Despite their rudeness, I tried to be conciliatory, for I knew these men as Humphrey and Hugo, the King’s bachelors.
‘I merely gave His Grace a drink of wine, what harm is there in that?’ I said, with a friendly smile.
‘We will decide when the traitorous brat eats and drinks – and no one else,’ said Humphrey.
‘Which is never!’ snapped Arthur. He was standing at the bars of his cage, his face flushed, his right fist gripping one of the wooden poles, the knuckles white. ‘I believe you mean to have me starve or die of thirst. I have had nothing in two days.’
Hugo swung his sword hard, the flat of the blade cracking against the boy’s knuckles, and the prisoner stumbled back into his cage with a cry, his left hand nursing his right.
‘There is no need for that,’ I said. ‘Let the boy alone.’
‘You mind your own affairs, sell-sword,’ said Hugo. ‘He is lucky we do not stick him full of holes.’ And he lunged at the boy through the bars with his sword, causing Arthur to scramble to the far side.
‘I said, leave the boy alone.’ My voice had hardened. ‘He is the Duke of Brittany, a prisoner of war. He should be treated with respect until he is ransomed.’
‘King John himself gave him into our charge and we will treat him as we wish – indeed, like the disloyal dog he is.’ Humphrey was standing at my shoulder. He was half a head taller than me, though not as strongly built, and he looked down at me with black eyes, trying no doubt to intimidate me. He put a heavy hand on my shoulder and squeezed hard, his fingers digging into my flesh.
‘You will not fill your purse, hireling, by trying to mollycoddle this scum. Be on your way or we’ll teach you to keep your nose out of the affairs of gentlemen.’
I slumped under the weight of his hand, my arms by my side, as if in agreement. Then I dropped my knees an inch or two and smashed my right fist, with all my strength, into the fork between his legs. The blow lifted him, temporarily, off his feet, crushing his soft testicles against the bone of his pelvis like a hammer crunching walnuts on an anvil. He left out a swift whoosh of air, but no sound, and crumpled like a baby on the ground at my feet.
Hugo still had his sword between the bars of the cage. I stepped forward, trapped his right arm with my own, grabbed him by the scruff of his mail hauberk with my left and crushed his face against the poles of the cage, pulled him back, smashed him once more against them, then hurled him sprawling to the ground. My right boot crunched down on his right wrist, the hand still holding the sword. I heard a click of snapping bone. My left boot went to the top of his chest, half on the collar bones, half on his soft throat. If I moved it an inch I could crush his windpipe just with my body’s weight and so end his days.
I looked at the man pinned beneath my feet.
‘Listen to me very carefully,’ I said. ‘I will seek you out tomorrow at noon and, at that time, I will bring food and wine for the prisoner. If during the intervening hours, he has been hurt, even the merest scratch, even a splinter, even if his hair has been rumpled, I will kill you and your friend with a great deal of ease and – I may honestly tell you – pleasure. It’s important you understand this. Am I being clear?’
Hugo’s face was as florid as his hair but he gave a tiny nod of his chin against my boot.
‘All right then,’ I said. ‘I will see you at noon tomorrow.’
I did not see either Hugo or Humphrey at noon the next day. Instead, I was summoned to Robin’s tent after dusk by Sarlic.
‘The man wants to see you,’ said Marie-Anne’s bodyguard when he found me taking my ease with Kit and my own little contingent of the Wolves under a spreading oak. I was entertaining the men with one of the bawdier country songs that I had picked up on my travels, but I laid my vielle aside and followed him to the big black pavilion that housed my lord.
The tent was dark, lit only by a couple of tallow rush lamps on a folding table, and I could smell the meaty stench of the burning mutton fat that fuelled them. The rest of the space was bare except for a straw-filled pallet and a couple of stools. As ever, Robin travelled light, just his weapons and armour and a few spare clothes. The Earl of Locksley himself was sitting on a strongbox, sipping a goblet of hot, spiced wine.
‘What’s all this about you assaulting the King’s bachelors?’ he said without the slightest preamble.
‘They were mistreating a prisoner – Duke Arthur, to be precise – and they were rude to me when I gave the boy a drink of wine. I taught them a lesson.’
Robin sighed. ‘So it’s true, then. Well, one of your victims has a broken nose, a broken wrist and his neck injuries have rendered him incapable of speech; the other has balls the size of Spanish onions and cannot walk. King John is livid. He wants me to hang you forthwith.’
‘Truly?’ I said, my stomach turning cold. ‘He would hang a man over a disagreement between soldiers? I didn’t even touch my sword. And it’s not as if I killed either of them.’
‘They are his men, Alan. His favourites – they do all his dirtiest work for him and now they are both out of action.’
I put my hand on my hilt. I wasn’t going to allow myself to be hanged – by the King, by Robin, or anyone else for that matter. I saw that Sarlic had his hand on his hilt, too; he was watching me dark-eyed, the way a hawk watches a field mouse.
‘Calm yourself, Alan, I talked him out of it … in the end. But you’ve got to be punished, do you see? So I’m docking you a month’s pay. I am now admonishing you, Alan: you are a naughty fellow. Hear me? And you’re being sent away from the army, back to Falaise. And, since you have incapacitated his guards, your duty is to look after our most important prisoner – the Duke. Take him to Falaise and lock him up there until the King decides what to do with him. If he escapes, it’s your head on the block. No excuses. Chop. You are responsible for him. You alone. Understand?’
I nodded, relief rushing through my whole body. I do not think I am a coward, I have proved myself often enough, but hanging holds a special terror for me.
‘Thank you, my lord,’ I said.
‘Don’t thank me, just don’t make my life any more difficult than it has to be.’
I turned to go, but at the flaps of the tent, I turned back.
‘Robin,’ I said, ‘remind me – why do we serve this King?’
‘I serve him because I swore a solemn oath to do so. You serve me for the same reason. Is that good enough for you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said and pushed my way outside.
I left the next morning, accompanied by a score of the Wolves, our spare horses and baggage and the ox-cart that held the cage of Arthur, Duke of Brittany, heading north. I went to visit Little John before I left but he was deeply, unnaturally asleep on his bed of bloody straw and I did not care to awaken him. He looked worse than the night before – painfully gaunt, with white strands mixed in with his yellow hair, and blackberry bruises under his eyes. But when I bent down and put my ear to his lips, I felt the tiniest waft of his breath.
I prayed to God as we rode away from the column that He would spare Little John’s life, but I do not believe He heard me. A dozen miles out, I halted the march and burst open the prisoner’s cage and allowed Arthur to stumble into the warm August sunlight. He was very weak – from despair at his capture, mostly, and from lack of food over the past few days since the battle at Mirebeau.
I said, ‘If you will give me your word of honour not to try to escape, I will let you ride to Falaise as a member of my company. We will feed you and give you our fellowship. But you must know that if you do try to run, these men will hunt you down and I will bind you and drag you the rest of the way at the tail of my horse.’
‘I will ride,’ said the young man. ‘I give you my word of honour that I will not try to escape.’
The Duke of Brittany was as good as his word. For the next three days he rode with the Wolves, he ate and drank with us, and he made no attempts to run for freedom. My squire Kit, and Christophe, Richard the Lionheart’s grey-bearded veteran, kept a close eye on him at all times, even when the Duke went into the woods to relieve himself, but it proved unnecessary. The boy quickly realised I would not mistreat him and there stood a very good chance his countrymen would soon raise the colossal sum necessary for his ransom, and he would be freed. After a couple of days riding beside him, I began to like the fellow. He had shown himself brave in the fight at Mirebeau, and though he was rather undernourished, he had the strength, speed and enthusiasm of youth. He was not as haughty as he might have been for the grandson of a king, and once he had had a couple of decent meals, his natural good humour shone out like the August sunshine. We had stopped in a woodland glade, just inside the borders of Normandy, to breathe our horses and to take a drink from our wine-flasks, when I noticed him watching a pair of squirrels play-fighting in the branches above our heads. As the two nimble animals squabbled and chased each other through the leaves, I saw him laughing with pleasure at their antics. When we rode hard and fast for long periods, he never complained of fatigue. On the other hand, he clearly never forgot his exalted rank and position, and one evening as we ate round the camp fire, he tried to buy my loyalty.
‘Are you a wealthy man, Sir Alan?’ he asked, when I had a mouthful of roast hare.
I laughed and shook my head.
‘Would you like to be?’ he said bluntly. ‘I could grant you lands and titles in Brittany, if you so chose. Instead of heading for Falaise and a prison cell, we could all ride west to the Brittany border and I would reward you – all of you – handsomely.’
‘Watch your tongue, youngster,’ I said, swallowing the meat.
‘No, I suppose not,’ he said sadly. ‘You are King John’s loyal man. A good and decent knig
ht, I can tell. You have chosen his side in this contest and taken oaths, no doubt, and it is wrong of me to try to tempt you from the path of honour.’
I was glad I had finished the mouthful of rabbit. It might have choked me when he called me one of King John’s loyal men. He did not mention the subject again but in my heart of hearts I did actually, for a few moments, consider his offer – and I asked myself once again why I was fighting for a King I despised.
On the ride north, as we trotted through the pretty woodlands, well-kept barley fields and apple orchards of lower Normandy, I noticed Arthur and Little Niels seemed to spend a good deal of time riding beside each other. They were as far apart in rank as it was possible to be, but close in age and they both seemed to find amusement in the same small things. Little Niels taught the Duke some of the rough Flemish slang the Wolves used, mostly concerning sex and excretion. And I admit I was rather shocked when Duke Arthur burned his hand on a camp-fire coal to hear him cursing and using the word for a lady’s most private parts in a thick Flemish accent. Little Niels thought it the funniest thing imaginable and nearly made himself sick with laughter. The other Wolves seemed to have a high regard for our prisoner, too, and I overheard grizzled Christophe remarking to Claes that it seemed a pity the lad was to be incarcerated when we arrived at Falaise.