King's Man

by Angus Donald

  Robin knelt beside the lantern, opened the little horn door and pinched out the candle inside – and once more we were plunged into absolute darkness.

  Hanno led us silently and swiftly onwards, down a dank set of stairs, through a door and into a short corridor, where we paused again. I could see another glow of light seeping from around the corner. Motioning us to stillness and silence, Hanno dropped quietly to the floor and peered at boot-level around the corner from where the light was coming. He stood again and moved in close to Robin and me: ‘Two of them,’ he breathed. And putting a palm on my chest, and shoving me gently against the wall he whispered: ‘You stay here, Alan. Don’t move.’

  My master nodded at me, and then pulled up his hood to cover his face. And with that my two friends, the one with a bare round shaven head, and the other shrouded in his hood, both armed and very dangerous, stepped around the corner and left me alone in the gloom.

  I heard Hanno say loudly in his best English accent: ‘Hello, you fellows, be so good as to tell me: is this the way to the cheese store?’ Then there was a thump and a muffled scream and a clatter of falling metal and a horrible wet gurgling sound. And suddenly I knew exactly where in Nottingham Castle we were. We were just outside Prince John’s treasury. Just yards away from the greatest haul of silver coin in central England.

  When I peered round the corner I could see Robin and Hanno, each manoeuvring a slumped guard’s body and arranging it so the arse was on the ground, legs extended, back to the stone wall of the corridor. They were evidently trying to make it appear as if the men were asleep at their post by the door. The ruse would not have fooled anyone for very long: the spreading pool of blood beneath each corpse told the truth.

  Taking a heavy bunch of keys from one of the dead men, Robin inserted one into the big iron lock and turned it. As I approached down the corridor, he flung the door open and held up the horn lantern, relit from the guards’ candle stub, to cast its glow inside the room.

  It was like a dragon’s treasure cave: a glittering hoard. There were small barrels overflowing with silver pennies, iron-bound chests containing precious gems, small round sacks of coin piled in heaps, silver and gold plates and candlesticks, cups, knives, mazers, serving dishes, bright pieces of women’s jewellery, and all the moveable wealth of middle England scattered about the place on shelves, in wooden boxes and casks and even in mounds on the floor. As the candlelight was reflected, sparkling and bouncing off this incredible accumulation of booty, I sensed that even Robin was stunned to see so much wealth in one place.

  But he did his best not to show it. Instead he busied himself pulling open his cloak and unwinding a series of confections of rope and cloth bags from around his waist. He hurled a couple at me and I caught them in the air. Unfolding them, I found that they were pairs of rough canvas bags attached to stout networks of rope. Hanno showed me how to wear them: he filled the two canvas bags with silver pennies then draped the heavy bags over his neck so that the chinking burdens hung from a kind of harness under his arms, gently nudging his ribs. Then he grabbed another pair of bags and began again.

  ‘Only coin, I think,’ said Robin. ‘Leave all the bulky stuff. And carry no more than you can comfortably run with, boys. Quickly now!’

  And we fell to with a will, using our hands to shovel the bright discs of silver in glittering cascades into the bags and then hanging them around our necks and shoulders, festooning our bodies with a fortune. I could not resist a quiet laugh: if I were to die at this particular moment, I thought to myself, I would die a very rich man.

  Robin passed me a wide leather belt upon which were hung six big leather pouches at equal distances. I strapped it around my waist and filled each pouch with golden coins: fat, greasy, glittering Bezants, the like of which I had not seen since my time in Outremer. I looked at the other two men: their eyes were bright with greed and the simple delight of seeing precious metal shining in the candlelight. And our joy was infectious.

  Finally, Robin called a halt to our plundering: ‘No more,’ he said. ‘No more, or we will not be able to move.’

  I was fingering a beautifully carved golden cross, studded with precious gems. ‘Alan, put that down and let’s be away from here,’ he ordered.

  For a moment, I considered defying him, I wanted that cross; it was so beautiful, so fine – surely I had earned it for all the recent strains put on my loyalty to him? – such is the dark pull of treasure on a man’s soul that I gave Robin an evil glare, and considered shoving it in my boot top – and then I came to my senses and replaced the gorgeous cross on a nearby shelf. And reluctantly we left the treasury, Robin locking it carefully behind us.

  We stepped over the two corpses, chinking slightly as we moved, each carrying in the region of sixty pounds of precious metal hung in dozens of bags slung from cords and ropes about our bodies. As we staggered our way down the corridor, once more in pitch darkness, I laid my hand on Hanno’s shoulder ahead of me, with Robin moving heavily behind me. We were carrying as much coin as we could, yet we had hardly made a dent on the contents of the treasury – at most we had taken one tenth of all the silver and gold there. I marvelled at how much wealth Prince John had accumulated in the past few months – despite Robin’s constant depredations on his wagon trains. John must easily be the wealthiest man in England by a long mile. As I thought about this, I missed my step and blundered into the back of Hanno, and the bags of coin at my chest banged into the ones slung at his back with a grinding squeak. ‘Be quiet!’ hissed Robin savagely. Mutely I accepted his rebuke.

  More than anything I dreaded running into a party of menat-arms: under normal circumstances, with Robin and Hanno at my side, we would have been a match for any group of armed men – even a dozen of them. But encumbered as I was, with that dead weight of metal around my neck, shoulders, chest and waist, I would be as slow-moving in a fight as the ogre Milo; I was not sure I could defeat even one half-competent man-at-arms. And so I prayed that we would not be discovered as we proceeded as silently as we could down each corridor and passage, following Hanno’s unerring sense of direction in the dark.

  Finally we stopped by a big door in the sandstone wall, Hanno lifted the rusty latch and we stumbled into a dusty room and quietly shut the door behind us. I heard Robin scraping away with a flint and steel until he had a glow, and then a small flame with which to light the candle inside the lantern. By that guttering light, I saw that the walls of the room were stacked with barrels of varying sizes, all thickly covered with cobwebs. Wine barrels, ale casks, huge tuns – dozens of them. I tapped one or two of them experimentally and found them to be empty. The cobwebs should have given me a clue: clearly this room had not been used in years. To be honest, I was sorely disappointed: I could have done with a drink – the excitement of the night and the effort of carrying all that weight of metal had made me thirsty.

  Hanno beckoned me over to the far wall, where an old curtain was hanging from a rail. He pulled back the curtain to reveal another door, very wide and low – no more than five foot high – and like a conjuror at a county fair, he pulled a big iron key from his pouch, brandishing it in the dim light of Robin’s lantern. I was mystified, but followed Hanno when he unlocked the door, stooping to get through the low entrance and into a very small chamber beyond. Once Robin had joined us, Hanno solemnly locked the low door behind us, tucked away the key, and gestured with a flourish at a structure in the centre of that small space. It appeared to be some sort of well housing: a wide circular stone wall about knee height and six foot in diameter, above which stood a small crane arm, with a heavy-looking block-and-tackle pulley. A thick rope dangled from the crane arm, falling away into the darkness of the well.

  I frowned: I knew that the castle had a deep well in the outer bailey near the new brewhouse, and huge cisterns for storing rainwater in the roof of the great tower in case of a siege, but I’d had no idea there was a well here, at what I judged to be the south-eastern side of the upper bailey. Surely we
were too high up here for men to have found water by digging through the sandstone. I peered down into the shaft of the well but could see no more than ten feet down. And I could discern no flickering shine of reflection off a surface of water. Perhaps a dry well, then?

  Robin came over to me, grinning happily: ‘What do you think, Alan – brilliant, isn’t it? Underneath that uncouth, ale-guzzling exterior, your man Hanno is a bona fide genius.’

  I was very slow that day, I confess. And my puzzlement must have been obvious. Robin laughed: ‘Come on, Alan – you can work it out. What is that room out there?’ He indicated the low door we had just passed through.

  ‘It’s an old buttery,’ I said. ‘But it looks as if it has not been used for some time now.’ I was still none the wiser.

  ‘And what do butteries contain?’

  ‘Butts,’ I said stupidly. ‘Butts of ale and wine, and so on and so forth.’

  ‘And where do butts of ale come from?’

  Suddenly I had it. ‘From a brewhouse. From the new brewhouse in the outer bailey,’ I said excitedly, my brain finally working at full speed. ‘But before that was built three years ago, they used to come from the old brewhouse outside the castle walls, which was next to The Trip to Jerusalem tavern. So this is not a well …’

  Hanno came over to join us by the wide shaft. ‘That is the way that the ale is delivered to the castle in the old days. They make it in the brewhouse and put it into barrels and then they bring the barrels up this shaft so the men can be drinking it in the castle. But nobody uses it now. It is forgotten, I believe. Perfect, eh, Alan? A perfect way out.’

  ‘Shall we?’ said Robin with a smile, gesturing at the rope that hung down into the darkness.

  Climbing down that rope with sixty pounds of metal strapped to my body nearly ripped my arms from their sockets. But it was only a short descent – no more than twenty feet. Soon all three of us were standing, hearts pounding with exertion, in a low chamber, five paces by five paces, quarried out of the sandstone deep beneath the south-eastern wall of the upper bailey, beside a tunnel with hacked-out shallow steps leading away downwards and eastwards into the darkness.

  Robin, lantern in hand, led the way. The candlelight danced and flickered on the close yellow walls, making eerie patterns and shapes with the rough, pebble-dotted sandstone rock so that, to my tired and punch-drunk brain, it seemed the tunnel was peopled with demons, fairies and bizarre creatures. It was hard to believe that it had only been that morning when I had stomped Milo into bloody mush. I felt I had entered some other, magical world. The tunnel turned this way and that and I saw that there were other passages leading off the main thoroughfare to unknown destinations deep in the rock on which the castle was built. A man could get lost here, I thought, in this underground maze. And perhaps, once lost, he would enter a fairy realm and never be seen by mortal eyes again.

  But at last our spooky twisting passage down the tunnel came to an end and I found myself with Robin and Hanno in a long, low cellar, once again filled with empty casks, but this time clearly in use. And not long afterwards, having passed through several wider caverns cut from the soft sandstone, we emerged out of the darkness, through a heavy leather curtain and into the back room of The Trip to Jerusalem.

  As we stepped, blinking, into the tavern, I saw a cosy, homely sight laid out before me. Little John was seated at a table by the fire with two small children. Unaware of our presence, he threw a pair of dice, and the children – a boy and a girl, both little dark-haired mites with big deer-like eyes – cried out joyfully at John’s bad luck with the gambling bones. I saw that John’s double-bladed axe was leaning casually against the table by his side. Over by the counter, I saw something of quite a different tenor. The children’s parents were standing by the racks of flagons and mugs and ale-pots, staring at John, immobilized with fear. I knew them slightly: they were the young couple who ran The Trip – and I have never seen two people look more terrified in my life. The woman was clutching at her husband’s arm, and every time Little John made a sudden move, to scoop up the dice, say, and throw again, she flinched as if Sir Aymeric’s hot irons were being applied to her parts.

  Over by the door that led to the rest of the tavern stood two tall, grim-faced hooded men, armed with sword and bow – men I knew, and who nodded a greeting to me. And my heart sank a little. While I was most grateful to Robin for rescuing me, for saving me from torture and certain death, I still balked slightly at his ruthless methods. He had clearly threatened this good couple’s children to ensure their co-operation. And while it was a very effective way of guaranteeing our safety that night, as we emerged weighed down with booty from our adventure in Nottingham Castle, I could not but feel a chill in my bones at the soul-suffering that Robin had inflicted on these decent people.

  Having said that, no one had been hurt, and we passed the rest of the night with great conviviality in The Trip to Jerusalem, feasting on honey cakes and ham and preserved berries washed down with ale provided by the frightened brewer and his wife, while Little John set riddles for the children to guess, and allowed them to ride on his back as if he were a horse. They were enchanting creatures, about five or six years old, I would say. And I privately swore that they should come to no harm, even if it meant facing Little John and Robin over drawn blades.

  A few hours before dawn I asked Robin how he had known that I needed to be rescued. And I thanked him profusely, if a little drunkenly – for I must admit the ale had taken a hold of my tired head – for saving me.

  ‘It was the wagons,’ said my master, looking fondly at me over a foaming mug of good Trip to Jerusalem ale. ‘The wagons we captured outside of Carlton. There was no silver in them. Nothing valuable in them at all. Those great chests in the three great wagons, so firmly locked and sealed by Sir Robert de la Mare, were full of no more than sand and gravel.’

  ‘So we knew you were neck-deep in the shit, young Alan,’ interrupted Little John. ‘It was obvious: Murdac had hoped to trap us with the lure of silver, but he wasn’t prepared to risk the actual precious metal. We knew then that the game was up – that the minute you put your nose back inside Nottingham, you were headed for the noose.’

  ‘They sent two men to arrest Hanno here,’ Robin said, ‘but he’s not a man to be led meekly to the gallows.’

  ‘I kill them both – pffft, pffft!’ Hanno moved a flat bladelike hand back and forward across his own neck, and made a strange whistling noise between his broken teeth. ‘Then I take Ghost from the stables and fly north to Sherwood, very fast. I am lucky to be able to track down Robin that very same day.’

  ‘Still, I think we have more than compensated ourselves for the lost wagonloads of silver,’ said Robin with a smile, and he nodded towards the pile of bulging sacks of coin in the corner of the room. By my reckoning we had removed nearly two hundred pounds of coin from Prince John’s treasury – and I couldn’t help but return his smile.

  ‘To John Plantagenet’s princely generosity,’ I said, lifting my mug of ale. Robin laughed, and my friends all repeated the toast and we drank.

  At dawn, with two packhorses tottering under the weight of precious metal, we rode through Nottingham town, hooded, anonymous and looking as innocent as six heavily armed and badly hungover horsemen can. I was happy to be astride Ghost once more, and even more pleased to be in the company I was – free at last of the subterfuge of the past six months. The tavern-keeper and his wife and their two sweet children waved after us as we rode away, the children looking happy, tired and just a little madcap, having spent the whole night awake with playful grown-ups, the parents relieved but still a little shocked and fearful. We made it out of the northern gates of Nottingham town as the church bells were ringing out for Prime and set our horses’ heads north on the road to Sherwood.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was tired, deep in the bone tired, and when, a day later, we reached Robin’s Caves, an old outlaw hideout in the heart of Sherwood, the first thing I did was
sleep for several days. But while I was restoring my muscles and sinews, and allowing my bruised face to heal, with lazy days spent pottering around Robin’s sprawling camp and long nights on a comfortable over-stuffed straw pallet inside the main cave, Robin was busy.

  He invited friends, and fellow outcasts from Sherwood, and men loyal to King Richard from all over the north of England to join us in a feast under the stars in the Greenwood – and to hold a council of war. The country was on the verge of outright civil war, Robin told me; small groups of supporters of John had clashed with those of Richard in pitched battle on several occasions in the past few months, and Richard’s men had had the worst of it. Now they came to us, in their hundreds – poor men, knights, even a minor baron or two – to sit at a huge circular table in a clearing near Robin’s Caves, around a huge roaring fire, and gorge on roast venison, and wild boar, and mutton, on stews and puddings, and pies and autumn fruit, and cheese; all at the outlaw Earl’s expense. Vast quantities of ale and wine were drunk, too, but by and large the company remained orderly. The feasting lasted for several days, and there were games and competitions, wrestling and foot races, for those sober enough to participate.