King's Man

by Angus Donald

  I was shocked. I knew that Robin was fearless but to insult the Master of the Temple in such a crude way, a senior member of the most respected knightly order in the world …

  ‘But have you not made it worse?’ I asked. ‘Will they not now come and attack you here, at Kirkton?’

  ‘How could I make it worse? They have declared war against me personally, they are seeking to have me burnt alive at the stake – and it is not because they are concerned about some silly conjuring tricks in a petty Yorkshire skirmish or about the state of my immortal soul. Think, Alan. You know what this is really about …’

  I knew exactly to what he referred: frankincense – the extremely lucrative trade in this incense, burnt in every major church in Christendom every day. This most precious commodity originated in southern Arabia and its trade had been a significant source of revenue for the Knights Templar and their associates in Outremer – until Robin had persuaded the Arabian frankincense merchants – none too gently, it has to be said – to trade with him instead. Robin’s friend Reuben, a tough and clever Jew, had remained in Outremer when most of the rest of us had returned to England and he was responsible for continuing the commerce in frankincense, acting on Robin’s behalf. And what lucrative trade! The little whitish-yellow crystals of frankincense, bought for pennies in the land of Al-Yaman at the foot of the Arabian peninsula, were worth more than their weight in gold in Europe. Reuben bought large quantities from the traders in Gaza for a modest amount of silver, and shipped the precious crumbs to Sicily where another of Robin’s confederates sold them on to Italy and the rest of Europe.

  I did not know the full details of the trade, but I had seen its results. When we had arrived at Dover several months ago, we had been raggedy, seasick and exhausted, but also very, very rich. We had carried with us on our long journey home – in conditions of strictest secrecy, of course – several large chests of silver, thousands of pounds’ worth, which were now lodged in Robin’s strongly built counting house in the bailey of Kirkton Castle. And that was not the full extent of Robin’s fortune. Since we had returned from the East, two more shipments of silver had arrived at Kirkton with the compliments of Reuben and a letter assuring his friend that all was well in Gaza and that commerce was booming. The frankincense trade had made Robin a wealthy man and would continue to enrich him – unless the Master of the Knights Templar and His Holiness the Pope had their way.

  This is what Robin was alluding to when he said that the Templars were not truly concerned with the state of his soul. They wanted to unseat him from his golden frankincense throne and recover the trade for themselves; doubtless His Holiness had been promised a fat slice of the pie as well.

  ‘It is just an opening move in a long, complicated game,’ Robin said. ‘They think I am vulnerable to their threats of excommunication. I am not; I care not a clipped farthing for the pronouncements of faraway priests and popes. And interdiction? I can buy that off. Geoffrey, the Archbishop of York, would sell his sister for a chest of silver, let alone mumble a few words to lift some priestly malediction on my lands.’

  What he said was true: Archbishop Geoffrey, King Richard’s illegitimate older brother, was notoriously venal; he had been forced to take holy orders to make him ineligible for the throne and thereafter he seemed determined to make himself the richest prelate in England.

  But, though I did feel a little reassured by Robin’s words, as ever, I found his complete lack of respect for the institutions of the Church deeply unsettling.

  ‘What about might? Will they not ride north and besiege us again?’ I suggested. To my mind, Robin was too complacent. I did not think the famous fighting Templars were a force to be so easily ignored.

  ‘How many Templar knights do you think there are in England at the moment, Alan?’ asked Robin. ‘A dozen? Perhaps a score of them? All their fighting men are out East: in Outremer, in Acre, in Jaffa or in Cyprus. They have too few knights here to start seriously throwing their weight around. And if they recruit common foot soldiers, well, I too have the silver to attract men-at-arms to my standard.’

  This was true. And, in fact, Robin had already begun spending his frankincense hoard to this end. Apart from the twenty men whose lives he had spared after the battle outside the walls of Kirkton, Robin had arranged for a fresh contingent of fifty master archers to join him from Wales. Father Tuck, who had once been a bowman, had arranged for these men to join Robin’s wolf banner. In addition there were three score of cavalrymen, recruited locally, that he was training in the lush green dales around the castle. Kirkton was once again bustling with soldiers, and I reflected that perhaps Robin was right: perhaps there was nothing the Templars could do but make impotent spiritual threats.

  I was wrong.

  Chapter Five

  I watched from the south-facing battlements as the armed column approached Kirkton Castle, plodding up the steep muddy road from the river valley bottom. I had been gazing out over the drizzle-washed dales, taking a sharp breath of fresh air and trying to find a rhyme for ‘damsel’. The column came on slowly, red-and-gold flags hanging limply above a dozen damp horsemen, watery winter sunlight occasionally breaking through the grey cloud cover and glinting off mail coats and spear points. Above the clop of hooves and the rumble of distant thunder, I could hear the steel accoutrements of battle chinking daintily. But these men in dripping hoods, their bodies slumped by tiredness, were not coming to war. Their approach was too slow, too open for them to be anything other than peaceful visitors of some kind, and, of course, there were too few of them.

  Despite their damp clothes I could see that they were travelling in some style – all their horses were big and well fed, their lanolin-impregnated woollen rain cloaks were of the finest quality: clearly this was the entourage of some wealthy noble or courtier. But it was a strange season to be abroad – during the cold, dour month of January many knightly folk preferred to remain at home and bide by a roaring fire rather than venture out into the elements. Whoever it was that had ordered this journey had urgent business with us.

  When the damp and muddy horsemen finally arrived at the closed gates of Kirkton Castle, and announced their presence formally with the blast of a trumpet, I was astonished to recognize my old friend and one-time musical mentor Bernard de Sezanne at the head of the column. Bernard was the last person I expected to see braving the chill to pay a call on his friends. He hated to be far from a well-stocked buttery, a friendly young woman or two and a cosy hearth.

  Christmas was weeks past, and we had kept the festive season tolerably well at Kirkton with much eating and drinking, and singing and laughter. I had fulfilled my promise to young Thomas, too, and had given him several lessons in the use of the sword. He was talented and I believed that one day he would be a fair swordsman, but he was still too small and weak to wield a blade with any skill – nevertheless he was fast, very fast indeed. He had, in turn, shown me how he had thrown the much bigger boy and explained to me his ideas about wrestling: ‘I try to use the strength of the other man against him,’ he told me gravely. And then he demonstrated how, with quickness and a judicious use of leverage, he used the momentum of his opponent to defeat him. When we grappled, he even managed to have me on my back in the dirt a couple of times before I felt that my dignity had suffered enough for one day at the hands of a small boy.

  The weather over the Christmas period had been mild but now we were in the middle of a cold spell, with bleak short days and little to cheer the soul, and with the prospect of spring still several months away. Kirkton was uneasy in itself, too. Unusual things had been occurring in the area; things which the local peasants, as ever, blamed on witchcraft: a calf had been born with two heads, an old man had drowned in his own well, and strange lights had been seen in the sky at night. In the alehouses of Locksley and in the surrounding villages it was whispered that the Hag of Hallamshire, a terrifying black-clad witch with a hideous visage straight from a nightmare, had returned to the area. She was said to st
eal babies and sacrifice them to the Devil and then feast on their blood. Several villeins from Locksley claimed to have seen the Hag out on the dales shouting curses in a strange tongue at the moon when they were returning home from the alehouse at midnight. I would normally have dismissed such talk as nothing more than the over-stoked imaginations of drunks, were it not for a weird message that the Norman fortune-teller Elise had given me.

  Elise had been much praised for her role in the victory against Ralph Murdac’s men, and Robin had given her a fine grey mare and a bag of silver as a reward for spreading terror so well among the besieging troops. She was now, despite her foreign and sometimes alarming ways, a popular figure at the castle: not only for the help she had given against Murdac but also because she had a rare skill as a healer, and several men and women of Kirkton owed their lives to her skill with herbs. On Robin’s advice, she had paid a visit to another famous healer, wise woman, and some said witch, named Brigid, who was an old friend of Robin’s and, it has to be admitted, of mine too.

  Brigid, who lived in seclusion in a small hut deep in Sherwood Forest, thirty miles to the south of Kirkton, had healed my arm when I was bitten by a wolf a few years before; I still bore the scars – a row of pink dimples on my right arm. When Elise announced that she was planning to visit Brigid, I gave her a small bag of dried orange peel to give to Brigid as a present from me. The stick-hard brown skin of the fruit had travelled with me all the way from Spain where I had purchased it from an Arab doctor whom I’d consulted about a troublesome cough and running nose. The man had told me that by steeping the dried peel in boiling water and adding a little honey I might make a soothing liquor to combat my ailments. To be honest, I had not bothered to make the drink and my cold had cured itself, but the little leather sack had remained with me, untouched for many long months in my saddlebag. I thought that Brigid might find it both interesting and medicinally useful.

  Elise was gone for a month over the Christmas period, but when she returned she took me to one side in the great hall and, after passing on Brigid’s greetings and thanks for my gift, gave me some disquieting news.

  ‘My sister-in-craft thanks you for the gift but bids you to beware,’ said Elise. ‘She has cast the runes and she tells me that you must avoid at all costs an ugly woman in black, who wishes you ill.’

  ‘Is this another silly tale about the Hag?’ I asked, a little alarmed in spite of myself.

  ‘I know not,’ said Elise. ‘But my sister is a wise woman and I should not take her warnings lightly, were I you.’

  Fine, I thought. Fine. Beware a woman in black. Beware the Hag of Hallamshire. I told myself that I was not frightened of witches. Well, only a little.

  ‘Are you going to let us in then, or do you expect us to freeze to death out here?’ Bernard shouted up at the wooden battlements. I stopped my day-dreaming and hurriedly gave the signal to the porters, who unbarred the huge wooden gates and swung them open to admit my friend; then I ran down the nearest set of steps to greet my old music teacher as he trotted into the bailey.

  Bernard’s nose was blue-red with cold, which matched the colours of his rich clothes. As I helped him down from his horse he pretended to be an old man, moving stiffly with many little grunts and sighs. ‘A drink, Alan, a drink – and quickly, for the love of God. I would give my very soul for a sip of wine.’ And so I led him into the hall, leaving the gate guards to succour the horses and men-at-arms of his escort, and installed him on a bench by the central fire that burned all day at that time of the year while a servant was dispatched to bring hot spiced wine for both of us.

  ‘Welcome to Kirkton Castle, Bernard,’ I said. ‘And what brings you out in our bracing Yorkshire weather?’

  Bernard waggled a limp hand in my face. ‘Shhh, shhh, my boy, not now, not now. Let me get a little heat back into my tired old bones.’

  Bernard was perhaps in his mid-thirties, but he loved to be dramatic and it pleased him to pretend to be an ancient grand father, victim of gout and the rheumatics and every passing chill.

  Fortunately, the servant returned soon afterwards with a flagon of hot mulled wine. After two large restorative cups, Bernard finally deigned to speak to me.

  ‘Ahhh, that’s better,’ he said, thrusting out his cup to be refilled. ‘Alan, you are a gifted host, a man who knows when to be silent and merely pour the wine. I can feel life returning to my frozen limbs.’ He peered at me closely. ‘How is your music these days? Are you composing?’

  I didn’t have the chance to answer, for he continued: ‘I hear things about you, Alan, in my travels about the world. Good things, mostly. I even heard someone attempting one of your tensos the other day, the one about the debate between King Arthur and the field mouse.’ He hummed a snatch of my music. ‘The fool made a complete hash of it, of course, and I had to show him how it should be done. But it is good that people are performing your works. I’m proud of you, Alan. You make a tired old man very happy.’

  ‘You are not so old, Bernard. Come, tell me your news. What brings you here?’

  ‘Bad news, Alan. Very bad. The worst kind. I have been dispatched by my royal lady, by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, may she live another thousand years, with an invitation for your master and mistress to join her at Westminster. Sent out into this freezing wasteland to seek you out, with scant thought for the chill it must cause in my old bones. But I’d better deliver my message to the great man himself. Where is the noble Earl of Locksley?’ He looked about the hall in a comical manner, one hand shading his eyes, as if Robin might be hiding like a cutpurse in some dark corner.

  ‘He’s gone hunting today. He’ll be back soon. What is this terrible news, then?’ I said impatiently.

  ‘You’ll find out in good time. Doubtless His Lordship will tell you it all. But I will keep it till he returns. Give me some more wine, I beg you.’

  And, infuriatingly, he refused to say another word on the subject until Robin returned an hour later, wet, happy and tired, with a brace of young fallow deer draped over his saddle as the grey winter day slid imperceptibly into the darkness of true night.

  When Robin had washed and restored himself with wine and food, he summoned Bernard to his carved oak chair at the end of the hall to hear the news.

  ‘I come from Queen Eleanor, esteemed mother of our good King Richard,’ my old music teacher began, ‘with news of the worst, the gravest kind, my lord.’

  Robin nodded and made an impatient circling motion with his wrist and hand, urging the French trouvère to get to the point.

  ‘Calamity has struck,’ went on Bernard, clutching at his brow, ‘disaster is upon us,’ he said, and then he paused.

  ‘Yes, yes, calamity, disaster, news of the worst kind. I understand. Get on with it, man,’ Robin said with uncharacteristic shortness.

  Bernard allowed himself to savour one more moment of drama, testing the patience of my master to the utmost before he said: ‘Richard has been taken. Our noble King is in chains. He has been captured by evil men while he was making his way home to England.’ Another pause. And I could see that Robin was now extremely annoyed.

  ‘Who has him? By whom has he been captured?’ asked Robin coldly, his face a mask. He was fingering his sword hilt and, I reckoned, was only three heartbeats away from freeing Bernard from the burden of his own head.

  ‘By Duke Leopold of Austria! He is now languishing in chains at the mercy of his mortal enemy. In deepest, darkest Germany!’

  It was appalling news. Disastrous. And I could forgive Bernard for making the most of its delivery. Peace and prosperity in England depended on Richard being alive. His acknowledged heir, his little nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, was a mere child of five, and the whole kingdom knew that his brother Prince John had his eye on the throne. If Richard were to be killed in Germany, England could well erupt into civil war with some of the barons supporting the legitimate heir, despite his extreme youth, and others making the practical decision to follow John, who was more likely to
win a contest of military strength. Bloody chaos would follow: there were still grandfathers alive who could remember the dark days of the Anarchy, when King Stephen and the Empress Matilda vied for mastery of the country. It was a time of famine and fear, with marauding bands of soldiers roaming the land, burning cottages and crops, stealing stored food, raping maids and generally despoiling the territories of their enemies.

  ‘This is going to be very, very costly,’ said Robin.

  I was deep in thoughts of the carnage of civil war, and it took me a few moments to grasp his meaning. And then it dawned. Richard was too valuable a captive to be killed out of hand, no matter how much Duke Leopold hated him. His royal person was worth a king’s ransom. And England would have to pay it.

  ‘Queen Eleanor commands your presence: she wishes you and the lady Marie-Anne to attend her at Westminster as soon as possible,’ said Bernard, in the measured tones of a diplomat, far removed from his excited rendering of the fateful news about King Richard.

  ‘She wants to discuss what’s to be done, no doubt,’ said Robin. ‘All right, we’ll come to Westminster. Yes, we need to make plans. We leave tomorrow at dawn.’

  The next day, as a pale blue light washed over the hills to the east and rolled back the night, our company rode out of the great gate at Kirkton and took the road east towards Sheffield. As I trotted out of the portal, I looked back and saw the first pink fingers of daylight catching the pair of lumpen shapes on long poles either side of the gatehouse: the severed heads of two men-at-arms, impaled on long spears – former Murdac men who had turned deserter.

  The men had stolen a few items, including a small bag of coins, and had dropped silently over the walls and headed south in the middle of the night on foot, presumably hoping to become outlaws or possibly rejoin Sir Ralph at Nottingham. When the theft and their disappearance had been noticed in the morning, Hanno was dispatched with half a dozen mounted archers to track them down and bring them home to face Robin’s justice. The shaven-headed Bavarian had taken no more than half a day to catch them, trapping them in a wood near Chesterfield, and he reappeared that evening with two bodies slung over a couple of packhorses. One deserter had died in the mêlée; he was the lucky one. The other man Robin had hanged until he was partially dead, and then flogged with metal-tipped whips – the remaining former Murdac men-at-arms being detailed to perform the punishment – and finally, with his skin hanging off him in bloody strips, and the blood puddling around his feet, he was beheaded in front of a jeering crowd in the centre of the bailey. The heads of both deserters were then stuck on spears and mounted either side of the main gate as a terrible warning to anyone else who might think of betraying Robin.