King's Man

by Angus Donald

  The whole country seemed to realize this, too. As we made our way north from Canterbury, to Rochester, then London for a brief stop of one day, and on again to Bury St Edmunds, we were joined by a constant stream of men-at-arms: country knights rallying to the royal standard, tough young lads looking for a bit of adventure, and canny barons, smelling Richard’s victory on the wind and wanting to renew their allegiance to him before his ultimate success.

  At Huntingdon, we were met by William the Marshal and a hundred well-equipped men-at-arms from Pembroke. The Marshal’s brother had only recently died but William had chosen to forgo attending his funeral to meet us, just to demonstrate his loyalty to the King. It was a touching scene: this thick-set, grizzled veteran of scores of bloody contests embracing our thin, pale King. Both men were in chain-mail under their surcoats, but while William was clad from big toe to fingertip in heavy links, I saw that Richard was wearing only a much lighter, shorter, sleeveless mail coat, of the kind some men had worn in Outremer. It was easier to bear if you were weak, wounded or suffering from the sun’s oriental heat – but it was not as strong as the heavy chain-mail in deflecting a blow. And I wondered privately whether Richard, after his inactive year in captivity, was truly fit for a bruising battlefield.

  By the time we made our camp outside Nottingham, pitching our tents in the deer park to the west of the castle, we were a thousand men strong – and our numbers were boosted by another four hundred when we linked up with Ranulph, Earl of Chester, who had been watching the castle from the high ground to its north, and David, Earl of Huntingdon. The latter had been sent by his father – the Scottish King, William the Lion – who was a great friend of Richard’s and determined to support him in the struggle against Prince John. David, who also happened to hold the English honour of Huntingdon, brought with him a powerful force of knights. And we were glad to have them.

  At a meeting in his royal pavilion in the deer park, in a space packed with loud, eager, armoured men, Richard gave a rapid series of orders to his barons. The whole of Nottingham Castle was to be encircled by our troops immediately, this night. Now.

  ‘He wants it sewn up as tight as a mouse’s arse,’ said Little John to me after we had met in an alehouse in the eastern part of Nottingham town. Little John had been in command of Robin’s contingent of a hundred or so archers who had been left in the north, with the Earl of Chester’s men, to keep an eye on Ralph Murdac. ‘Nothing is to go in or out,’ said my giant blond friend, as we sat at a rough bench sharing a gallon of weak ale, a big bowl of watery turnip soup and half a loaf of stale rye bread.

  I had been shocked when I rode into Nottingham that afternoon. A swathe of the town some hundred and fifty paces across, just to the east of the castle, had been completely destroyed. Streets that I had known well, indeed, that I had walked down just a few months ago, were gone, along with the shops and taverns, peasant hovels and workshops that had once lined them. All that remained now were smouldering ruins and piles of grey ash.

  John told me how a force of two hundred knights and menat-arms had ridden out of Nottingham Castle under cover of darkness two nights before and, using ropes and the muscle power of their big destriers, they had pulled down all the buildings, tearing them quite literally apart. Then, without a thought for the ordinary men, women and children who might be trapped inside their dwellings or trying to salvage their meagre possessions or save their beasts, Murdac’s men had set fire to the wreckage of straw-thatched roofs and broken timber beams, tumbled beds and furniture. It was only by God’s grace and the hard work of Little John and his archers, who fought the fire all night, that the whole of Nottingham town had not burnt down. As it was, John’s blond eyebrows had been singed off, which gave him a slightly surprised look. And three of his archers had been badly roasted and would be unable to fight.

  And the point of all this cruel and wanton destruction? To create an open space which would allow the crossbowmen on the eastern wall and in the big gatehouse of the outer bailey to see what they were shooting at, and to deny cover to an attacking enemy.

  Cruel, it might have been, but it was also the wise, the clever thing to have done. As Robin had said, Sir Ralph Murdac was no fool.

  Nottingham Castle’s fortifications followed the contours of the massive sandstone outcrop on which it was built. The castle proper – that is, the upper bailey, the great tower and the middle bailey – sat on the highest part of the outcrop, protected on its western and southern flanks by unscalable hundred-foot-high cliffs topped with thick twenty-foot-high stone walls. There was no way in from that direction.

  Below this, and to the east and north of it, was the outer bailey: the largest, most open part of the castle, housing stables and workshops, as well as the new brewhouse, a cookhouse and a bakery. This outer area did not have the luxury of stone walls but, in truth, it did not need them, for it was ringed by a ditch and an earthen rampart, six foot high, on which was entrenched a heavy wooden palisade another twelve foot in height. And now it looked down on the town across a huge smouldering scar of empty space.

  Standing in the ditch on the outside of the outer bailey walls, a man would have to jump – or fly – more than twenty foot up in the air to clear the defences. And while he was attempting that impossibility, he would be continually assailed by the crossbow bolts, spears, rocks and arrows of the defending men-at-arms. Even if the attacker managed to get over the twenty-foot-high defences, he could only be supported on the other side by any of his fellows who had managed the same incredible feat – and there would be few enough of them alive after charging through a blizzard of crossbow bolts across the hundred and fifty yards of scorched and emptied land on the castle’s eastern side.

  King Richard had ridden once around the whole circuit of Nottingham Castle when he arrived that afternoon, the twenty-fourth day of March, by Tuck’s reckoning, eleven hundred and ninety-four years after the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The King was accompanied by a dozen knights and the royal standard, with its two golden lions on a red background, was proudly displayed for the benefit of the hundreds of enemy heads that peered at him over the battlements. Afterwards, at a meeting of his senior commanders in his pavilion in the deer park, Richard declared succinctly: ‘It’s the gatehouse. That is truly the only way in. We take that and we can flood the outer bailey with our men. With God’s help, and given a bit of battle chaos, we can follow them, get right in amongst them when they retreat, and take the barbican of the middle bailey next. If we take that, the castle is as good as ours. So, first we take the gatehouse.’

  I admired his confidence: but I could not share it. His breezy talk of taking gatehouses and barbicans and baileys, as if they were a child’s castles in the sand of a beach, made me nervous. From my time as a member of the castle garrison, I knew that the stoutly built wooden gatehouse that pierced the wall of the outer bailey on its eastern side housed about a hundred heavily armed men under the command of a couple of captains and a senior knight. Worse still, the King had promptly assigned the difficult and bloody task of capturing it to the Earl of Locksley, and Robin, naturally, had given the task to Little John – and to me.

  So, over watery turnip soup and weak ale, Little John and I discussed our plans for the next morning, when, at dawn, with only a hundred men each, we were going to storm the gatehouse of the outer bailey and attempt to deliver the royal castle of Nottingham up to its rightful owner.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was cold; a thick frost had turned the black scar of land between the gatehouse and the first houses of the town into a dull smear of grey. I peered out of the side door of a large wool warehouse on the edge of the grey strip of frosty-burnt ground in front of the eastern wall of the outer bailey. It was perhaps half an hour before dawn, and the first inkling of paleness was visible in the sky behind me. I could see my breath steaming in white plumes in the cold air. At my back were Hanno and Thomas – who was unhappy because I would not allow him to join in the assault on the l
eft flank, the southern side of the massive wooden gatehouse. I knew that it would be a hard, gory slog of an assault – we all did – and, perhaps sentimentally, I wanted to spare Thomas, who was still no more than twelve years old, the bloodbath that was about to take place.

  Though his disappointment had rendered him silent, Thomas did not sulk. He assisted me with a smooth efficiency as I dressed for battle, helping me to wriggle into an old patched mail coat, which I wore over a padded aketon; fitting my helmet on neatly – a plain steel cap with a nasal guard – and strapping it under my chin. My long leather gauntlets, with sewn-in steel finger and forearm guards, had been waxed and oiled until they were supple, and so had my sword belt, with Goody’s silver Christmastide buckle at the front securing it around my waist, cinched tight to take some of the weight of the mail coat. Thomas had cleaned and sharpened my old sword and oiled the misericorde that now sat in its sheath in my boot. I had never been so pampered before going into battle, and I found the sensation a pleasant one. When Thomas handed me my shield, which he had freshly whitened with a thick layer of lime wash and repainted with Robin’s device of the black-and-grey snarling wolf, I was ready to fight – ready save for the cold, empty feeling in my belly when I dwelt too much on the task we were about to attempt.

  I looked behind me into the gloomy interior of the warehouse. The side walls and the far end of the building, twenty paces away, were stacked high with bales of wool, but it was the men I was looking at. Ninety-four of Robin’s hand-picked men-at-arms, each wearing a long dark surcoat of green cloth over whatever oddments of armour that he had, stood watching me, waiting for the signal to proceed. A few of them were checking their blades, or the leather straps of their shields, and some were on their knees, uttering a last prayer before we went in to battle. I looked at my company – former outlaws, thieves, runaways and ne’er-do-wells, even some, I noticed, who had once served in Murdac’s ranks – and I tried to appear unconcerned about the coming slaughter. They were all good men, brave men, I thought to myself, whatever they had done in the past. All was now forgiven. I did not feel worthy to command them. There wasn’t a man in that warehouse who was not afraid; but I knew that every man there would rather die than show it.

  We had managed to commandeer five wooden thatching ladders, each more than twenty-five feet long, from the towns-folk. And the two men assigned to carry each one were closest behind me. The ladders were unwieldy things to transport, and the men carrying them were the best in the company, men I knew personally from Sherwood or Outremer. They were men I trusted with my life. In truth, all our lives were in their hands.

  Hanno leaned towards me, and said in a low voice: ‘Do not worry, Alan. It is good. We can do this.’ And I nodded at him, managed a smile, and said, ‘I know, Hanno, I know. I’m sure it will be a wonderful success.’

  I was lying: I was nervous and very far from sure that we could achieve what we had been asked to do that morning. I looked out of the door once again at the gatehouse, its boxy shape looming black in the half-light before dawn, half as high again as the gate that it guarded. We were going to attempt to run towards it, enduring the spears and arrows and crossbow bolts of hundreds of enemy soldiers, prop the thatching ladders up against the palisade, climb up into the teeth of a determined opposition, get over the wall, and fight our way down to the ground – and somehow survive long enough to open the gate and allow our mounted troops to gallop into the outer bailey and capture it.

  It seemed ludicrous; a method of self-immolation, not a serious battle plan. But, if that proved to be the case, at least we would not be dying alone. Little John and another hundred or so of Robin’s men would be attacking the north side of the gatehouse at the same time as us.

  I looked north, up the slope of the hill along the grey frosted line of the burnt area, at the singed line of houses and shops that now marked the new edge of Nottingham town, and heard a horn sound a single long blast in the chilly air. As I watched, I saw a huge warrior, bareheaded and with bright yellow hair in two long, thick braids on either side of his head, stepping out from a big house sixty paces away. He carried a huge double-bladed axe and an old-fashioned round shield. He lifted the axe and shouted something loud and rough and joyful, and more men spilled out of the house, carrying their slender wooden ladders.

  I turned into the warehouse, meeting dozens of pairs of expectant eyes, and said in a loud clear voice, ‘Right, this is it. We form up outside, now.’ And then I stepped out into the grey dawn, turned to face the gatehouse and commended my soul to God and St Michael.

  Within the gatehouse, the enemy had not all been sleeping; their sentries were alert. There were shouts and angry cries, and whistle and trumpet blasts as the garrison of the wooden fortification was roused as fast as possible from their bed rolls. A hundred and fifty yards away, heads began to appear on the palisade, little round black shapes, clustering thick as elder-berries on the crenellated wooden walls. A single crossbow twanged from the gatehouse, a sergeant shouted something angrily, and a bolt whizzed past a good twenty yards to the right of my waiting men, who were by now formed up in a loose mob behind me, the ladder-bearers to the fore.

  And then there was more movement to my right as Robin stepped out from between two houses, slightly up the slope from our position, and a great mass of men followed him – archers, more than a hundred of them, all in uniform dark green, but few with more than a scrap or two of armour. They shuffled into a loose line, two ranks deep, between my position and Little John’s men, with Robin at the southern end. My lord raised a hand in cheery greeting to me, put a horn to his lips and blew two short notes.

  And the archers began to shoot.

  With a tremendous creaking of wood, a hundred men pulled back the hempen strings on their powerful yew bows, leaned far back and loosed. Up, up, almost vertically, they climbed into the grey dawn sky, seeming to pause in the air for a moment at the top of their parabola, before plunging down, down, the shafts falling on to the gatehouse and into the bailey beyond it, and slamming deep into the logs of the building and into the men sheltering behind the wooden walls, driving down into their cowering bodies like a solid, killing rain.

  Even from more than a hundred paces away, I could hear the cries of pain from the defenders as the lethal yards of ash wood, tipped with four-inch-long, needle-sharp bodkin points, cascaded down upon them, punching through the padded jerkins of the crossbowmen, and plunging deep into the mail-clad shoulders and chests of the enemy men-at-arms with awful force.

  Robin’s archers waited a few moments to check their range, and then they hauled back their bows once more and loosed another storm of wood and steel up high in the sky to fall like the wrath of God upon the enemy. And then a third wave of death swept up, seemingly swallowed up by a pale and hungry sky, before being spat down venomously on the defenders below.

  It was time to go.

  I turned to look at the men behind me. I knew that I should find something to say to those frightened, familiar faces – Robin would have had said exactly the right thing, at that time, to put courage into their hearts. But I had nothing to offer. I pulled out my sword, raised it in the air and said: ‘Right, let’s go. Keep your shields high. For God and King Richard – forward!’ And I set off at a jog across the burnt strip of land towards the imposing bulk of the gatehouse, the soft ash puffing beneath my running feet.

  For a moment, I feared that nobody would follow me; that I would be charging across that wasted strip of land on my own to certain death. But I was too proud to look behind me – and, eternal praise be to Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I soon heard the rattle and chink and thump of running men behind me. My heart soared. I was about to take my sword to a hated enemy, and I was charging into battle at the head of as brave a band of fighting men as had ever trod this earth.

  We had crossed fifty yards of open ground before the first crossbow bolts began to fly: black streaks of death hissing from the battlements like a demo
nic swarm of hornets. I felt rather than saw a quarrel smash into the top right corner of my shield. I heard a cry behind me and turned my head. At least four of my men were down, just from the first crossbow volley. The ladder-man directly behind me had dropped his burden and was kneeling on the grey-black ground, coughing blood, a quarrel protruding from his neck. The bolts were whistling past me left and right, I stopped and took a step back towards him, and he looked at me with beseeching eyes. Men were falling all around me, quarrels were whipping past in long black blurs – the earth seemed to be moving beneath my feet; I had the strange sensation that I was in the midst of a wild gale on a storm-tossed sea. I sheathed my sword and held out my right hand to the ladder-man, but at the last minute hardened my heart and grabbed the first rung of his ladder instead. Keeping my shield arm up, I shouted: ‘Come on, come on; let’s get this over with quickly.’ And those of us who could still run stumbled forward again, the bolts hissing and cracking around us.

  I heard Robin’s horn ring out three times, and was dimly aware that the deadly rain of our arrows had ceased. But I had no time to ponder what damage might have been done to the enemy by my lord’s arrow-storm: his barrage did not seem to have slowed their deadly crossbow work one jot. Men continued to fall all around me, skewered, punctured, plucked from this life by the wicked black bolts. I feared that there would be not one single man alive by the time we made it to the wall. By God’s mercy, I was mistaken.

  In what seemed no more than a few moments, two score of us survivors were panting, sweating, cursing below the high wooden walls of the palisade and the four remaining ladders were sweeping up through the grey air in a great arc to thump on to the battlements. ‘Up, up!’ I shouted, but I might have saved my breath. The men – God bless them – were swarming up the frail ladders like monkeys up a ship’s rigging, and I began to climb too, awkwardly with one hand on the rungs and my shield held above me, behind a heavy-set man with bright red hair and a vicious-looking spiked axe in his right hand. The ladder bounced alarmingly under our combined weight, and I heard a cry above me and was nearly swept from the ladder as the red-head crashed into my shield, a long spear waggling from his chest, before crunching to the ground below me. I looked up and stared into the eyes of a terrified man, no more than two or three yards away, glaring down at me between two crenellations on the battlements. He leant forward to loose his crossbow at me and, by the grace of God, even at that close remove, he missed – and I swear I flew up the final rungs of the ladder and launched myself over the top. The man’s bow was now unloaded, but as my feet landed on the walkway behind the palisade, he swung it at me in a short, hard arc. If it had landed, it would have crushed my skull, but I caught it on my shield, batted it away and, using my kite-shaped protection like an axe, I hacked the edge into his jaw. He fell away, inside the walls, down into the outer bailey, screaming wordlessly, blood flying. I took a brief moment to draw my sword – a heartbeat, but I had no more time than that. A man hurled himself at me from my left and I smashed him away with my blade.