King's Man

by Angus Donald

  I stretched out my hand in the darkness and made contact with the rope. The same rope that Robin, Hanno and I had climbed down five months ago. It seemed incredible but, apparently, the buttery and this secret way into the castle were still quite unknown to the defenders.

  I climbed up the rope into the dark shaft. My arm muscles were soon protesting; though I carried no shield, I was weighed down by my mail coat and sword, and by the heavy back-sack that I wore. But very shortly I sensed a space around me, and groping quickly with my left hand, I found the lip of the housing. Then Hanno was there, lighting the lantern, and I was using his big key to unlock the low, wide door that led to the old buttery.

  So far, so good. The buttery, as far as I could tell, was the same as it had been five months ago.

  A clatter, an appalling din of wooden noise as a small ale cask fell to the floor with a crash, toppling from a pile of larger ones. Then there was a high-pitched squeal of rage and something dark moved very fast in the corner of the buttery. My heart seemed to explode and I had my naked sword in my hand before I knew what was happening.

  Hanno and I stood frozen in silence. There were no further sounds. Then Hanno laughed quietly. ‘It is just a rat,’ he whispered. ‘But he gives you a good fright, yes?’

  I said nothing, but re-sheathed my sword, cursing my jumpiness. And a few moments later Hanno and I were walking confidently along the corridor outside the buttery in the bowels of the upper bailey, in the very heart of Murdac’s stronghold.

  At this hour the interior of the castle was largely still – there would have been sentries on the ramparts, and groups of menat-arms bunched together in the towers on the walls, and in the guardhouses and barracks in the middle bailey, but this part of the castle was eerily quiet. Hanno and I passed only one person as we made our way towards the great tower and Ralph Murdac’s chamber: a servant carrying a tray of wine cups. The surly devil ignored us, brushing past in an irritable manner. It seemed that our surcoats gave us the invisibility we craved.

  We passed a guard room at the base of the great tower, and as we walked past, I could not help glancing through the door. My eyes just had time to take in the homely scene: two or three men-at-arms in red-and-black surcoats playing dice at a table in the centre of the room by the light of a single candle, and a dozen soldiers snoring in cots around the edges of the chamber. We walked past without inviting any comment; indeed, without even being noticed. My nerves began to ease: we were going to succeed! God willing, we were going to make it all the way to Murdac’s chamber – where Sir Ralph was no doubt slumbering peacefully – without a single challenge.

  The chamber of the Constable of Nottingham Castle was on the western side of the great tower, on the second floor. I had not been there since that fateful day in September the year before when I had been summoned by Murdac and told that I was to accompany the silver wagon train from Tickhill back to Nottingham. Hanno and I arrived there, walking normally along the stone corridors and pretending to converse with each other in low tones, like any two men-at-arms on a midnight errand from their captain, or just stretching their legs after a long stint of sentry duty.

  We stopped just short of the chamber, hearing the sound of pacing feet, and after a cautious peep around the bend, Hanno whispered in my ear that there was only one man doing duty before the door. My German friend reached down and pulled the misericorde from my boot: ‘Do it quick and quiet,’ he said into my ear, putting the weapon in my hand. ‘No noise, no fussing.’ I nodded, my heart hammering. It was time once again for cold-blooded murder. I peeked round the corner, too, and took a look at my victim. Like the sentry outside Kirkton Castle a year and a half ago, the man-at-arms outside Murdac’s door was young. But this time, when I looked into my soul, I found I had no qualms about taking his life – it was necessary, I said to myself, and that was all that really mattered.

  My heart quietened, I took a deep breath and moved fast, without hesitation. Two quick and silent steps, as he was turned away from me, and I grabbed his nose and mouth with my left hand and slotted the misericorde hard and neatly into the back of his brain with my right. It was as easy as sliding a well-greased bolt on a cellar door. The blade glided home, the man kicked once and collapsed into my arms, a dead weight. That was it; there was nothing more to it.

  Silently, Hanno was by my side. ‘Perfect,’ he said. And I was very pleased.

  I passed the sagging corpse into Hanno’s arms, cleaned my misericorde on the dead man’s surcoat, slid the weapon back into my boot, drew my sword, took a deep breath and burst through the door of Murdac’s chamber, with Hanno hard on my heels, dragging the limp body of the sentry behind me.

  After the gloom of the corridor, Murdac’s room was shockingly bright, lit as it was by two large candle trees. It was a comfortable chamber, spacious and warm, with costly furs scattered over the polished wooden floor, and a fire burning merrily in a large fireplace built into the outside wall. In the centre of the room was a large table, and seated at the table, his glorious long sword drawn on the surface before him, was Rix.

  The tall man picked up the sword, and I could not help admiring its blue pommel jewel glinting at me in the candlelight, and the elegance of the long slim lines of the blade. I was entranced by the weapon, and my eye caressed it, even as Rix pushed back his chair, stood to his full height and said in French: ‘Ah, you are here at last. Sir Ralph has been half-expecting an assassin. And how fortunate that it should be you! We have some unfinished business between us, I believe.’

  I nodded but said nothing to the tall man. Instead my eyes roamed the room, seeking out the target of our deadly intentions, the Constable.

  A sumptuous four-poster bed stood against the far wall of the chamber with the thick curtains drawn. And, as I looked at it, a dark and tousled head poked out from between the drapes, blinking wildly, like a mouse coming out of its hole. It was Ralph Murdac, and his expression when he saw me was one of equally mingled fear and surprise.

  ‘You!’ he said incredulously. ‘You, of all people! Alan Dale – the traitor, the thief, the gutter-born rat who wants to be a knight. That it should be you who has come for me, sword in hand, in the dead of night – I can scarce believe it. Kill him, Rix; kill him now! Slice the nasty jumped-up little peasant into pieces.’

  Rix stepped away from the table and, at Murdac’s command, he saluted me with his beautiful sword, holding the hilt to his brow for a moment, before sweeping it into the first position of the serious swordsman: en garde!

  ‘Get over to Murdac,’ I muttered over my shoulder to Hanno, without taking my eyes off Rix. ‘Grab him; hold him fast; keep him out of the fight. I’ll handle this one alone – I made a vow to St Michael to cut down this long streak of shit, and I mean to honour it.’

  I felt Hanno move away from me in the direction of the big bed and I took a step towards Rix. With no preliminaries at all, I swung my blade as hard and as fast as I could at his head. His sword leapt upwards and he parried my blow with a clang of steel. But I was already swiping low, aiming to sink my sword into his calf muscle. Miraculously, his long blade was there before mine, once again blocking my strike with ease. I lunged with all my speed at his chest; he nonchalantly flicked my blade out of the target area and it slid past his left arm into space.

  Then he attacked: a feint at my body, then another, followed by a lightning strike at my throat. By God, he was fast; much faster than me. By sheer luck I managed to avoid being spitted on his sword, sweeping my own blade up just in time. I deflected his lunge into the air above my left shoulder and counterattacked, against his right, hoping for a score on his sword-arm that would slow his terrifying speed. But, once again, he swept my blow away almost contemptuously.

  I could hear muffled thumps and yelps coming from the four-poster bed, but I dared not look away from Rix, even for a moment. I thrust again at his chest, and he swatted me away. I hacked low; he merely stepped back. Then he attacked once more, striking left and right, high and
low, his weapon a lethal silver blur, and it was all I could do to keep his sword point out of my flesh. It occurred to me then, in a blinding moment of clarity, that I was going to lose this fight. He was the better swordsman; there was absolutely no doubt about it. I was giving ground slowly, making nothing of the fight; merely blocking, parrying, dodging and ducking. I was outclassed, overmatched – I was going to be cut to pieces.

  We fought on almost in silence, the only sound the clang and clash of our blades, and the panting of my breath. As Rix stepped away momentarily and began to circle round to my right, I caught a glimpse of the four-poster. And saw my German friend, calmly sitting on the edge of the bed, the curtains drawn back, his arm curled around Ralph Murdac’s tousled little head, as one might carry a ball, his long knife at the Constable’s throat. Murdac was very pale, his crisp blue eyes under Hanno’s muscular arm were enlarged with fear, and a trickle of blood was leaking from his mouth. Hanno was frowning at me; he looked almost comically disappointed. But holding Murdac as he was, he could not easily release him and come to my aid against Rix. I could expect no help from that quarter.

  I jerked my attention back to the fight just in time: Rix’s sword came lancing towards my eye and I parried and slashed at him wildly. He blocked and riposted, and I hacked again at his head with all the savagery in my soul. He merely ducked the blow. He was perfectly balanced, and as cool as a river trout. I, meanwhile, was red-faced and panting with exertion. I aimed another tremendous hack at his shoulder, which he blocked. His counter-stroke, a lunge at my heart, nearly skewered me, but I jumped backwards in the nick of time. My left foot landed on a fine bearskin rug, the rug skidded on the polished floor, and before I knew it I had landed painfully on my arse, and my sword was skittering and bouncing away across the shiny wooden floor to my right.

  Rix stood over me. He smiled coldly, saluted me once again, and lifted his sword over his head. I was scrambling on my knees before him, staring up in shock and fear as his beautiful sword rose in the air, my hand reaching desperately for the bottom of my left leg …

  My fumbling hand found the misericorde. The triangular blade slipped loose from its boot-sheath and I brought it up and struck like an angry viper, slamming it down in a hammer blow straight through Rix’s soft kidskin shoe, nailing his left foot securely to the wooden floor.

  He screamed – he screamed one word, loud enough to wake the dead: ‘Miloooooooo!’

  But I did not listen; I was scuttling away after my sword. I collected the weapon, regained my feet and, while Rix tried to turn right towards me, his long limbs tangled because of his pinioned foot, I stepped in to him, swung back and chopped the blade down hard into the angle between his neck and his left shoulder, giving it all my strength, and cutting a foot deep into his chest cavity. For a shaved moment, I caught a glimpse of grey flabby lungs deep in his gasping purple torso before the blood welled and filled his chest.

  And he was down.

  I tugged my sword loose from the shattered bones and meat of his thorax, and only just in time. There was movement from the far side of the room, a curtain was torn back – it was the heavy curtain that covered the entrance to Murdac’s privy – and out of that dank passageway stumped the ogre, Perkin’s killer, Adam’s assassin, walking on one good leg and one wooden one. The half-man whom I had believed I had stamped to death in the list in the outer bailey five months ago was resurrected. Milo was doing up his broad belt, and staring about him with bovine stupidity.

  Time is a strange beast: some moments seem to last for ever, yet others go by in a flash. I felt as if I had been fighting Rix for hours, but I realized later that it can have been no longer than a hundred heartbeats or so, just the time it had taken for Milo – who was on the seat of ease in the privy – to finish his business, wipe himself, drop his tunic and do up his belt, and come to see what all the clang and clatter was about in Murdac’s chamber.

  Milo saw me standing over the bloody dead body of his friend, blinked, scowled, gave a feral shout – and charged. And though his left leg, above the knee, had been replaced with a strappedon leather cup attached to the stump of his thigh, and a stout bar of wood to walk on, he moved at a pretty decent lick. I knelt quickly beside the tall swordsman’s gory corpse and picked up his lovely weapon with my left hand; then I stood to meet the ogre’s hobbling charge, a sword in each fist.

  In the three heartbeats before he reached me, I had time to notice that he still bore the marks from our battle in the lists on his face. He had but one good eye; small and piggish, and glaring with bottomless rage, and his hairless head was a crumpled mass of scar tissue from the battering my boots had given him, all yellow and shiny and furrowed, with barely any recognizable features at all. A flashing image of Nur came into my head: and indeed they would have made a pretty pair. His head was like a ball of beeswax that has melted after being placed to warm too near the fire. He looked even more monstrous than he had before our battle. Yet I was amazed that he lived at all, for I had been sure that I had stamped his vital spark to extinction – but live he did, and now he sought revenge.

  When Milo was a mere yard from me, I twisted to my right out of his path like the Saracen dancers I had seen in Outremer, twirling in a complete circle, fast, and hacking down hard on his outstretched left arm with Rix’s gorgeous sword. The blade sliced clean through the thick knotted muscle and solid bone just below his elbow, cutting away his forearm with a single blow and leaving him, roaring with pain, the blood jetting from the stump. But I wasted no time in gloating at his injury; instead, continuing my twisting manoeuvre, I found myself behind him and cut down with a smooth sweep into the slab of solid muscle of his right thigh using the plain old sword in my right hand. There was not enough power in my strike to cut through that knotted limb, but he did fall to his knees squealing with pain.

  I took his remaining hand then: a neat downward blow with Rix’s incomparable sword slicing all the way through like a hot blade through butter, sending his pudgy, ham-like fist thumping to the floor. He was a dead man then, of course: both arms useless and unable to rise on his one wounded leg. And I stood before Milo, between his half-kneeling, blood-drenched massive body and the long heap of his friend, and looked at him for a moment or two, remembering the wrestling match in the list, and the crunching explosion of his boot in my ribs in Germany, and the sight of the torn bodies of Perkin and Adam as we found them on the bank of River Main. He stared back at me with his one mad eye. There was nothing to say, and so I held my tongue: I merely gave him a merciful end, thrusting with both swords simultaneously into his huge breast, the two long blades plunging deeply into the chest cavity, driving towards his engorged ogre’s heart.

  ‘Not so bad,’ said Hanno from the bed, where he was still holding Ralph Murdac securely around the neck. ‘But very far from perfect. I think the tall, skinny one is going kill you, for sure. You are sloppy, too confident and your attacks are obvious. You must practise, Alan. Practise more. You must try to do better in future.’

  I stood there between the corpses of the two men I had just killed, and nodded my head in agreement. Hanno was right, I had not deserved to win the fight against Rix. It was all very well being able to dispatch a half-trained man-at-arms in a mad battlefield mêlée, but faced with a serious swordsman such as Rix I had very nearly lost my life.

  ‘Shall I do this one for you?’ said Hanno, jerking his chin down towards Ralph Murdac’s terrified little face. ‘Show you the proper way?’

  I shook my head. ‘Just tie his arms and bring him out here on the floor. I want him for myself.’

  While Hanno bound Sir Ralph Murdac with his belt and a strip torn off the bed-sheet, tying the man’s elbows behind his back and his wrists to his feet so that he was in a permanent kneeling position, I moved the heavy table up against the door, blocking it. Milo’s roars must have roused some of the garrison, I reckoned, and it would not be long before someone came to investigate. The big table, heavy as it was, would not hold Murdac�
��s men back for long, but it might give us an extra moment or two to escape. And we were not planning to leave by the door anyway.

  I shoved the plain old sword back in my scabbard and came over to where Murdac was kneeling, with Rix’s magnificent, gore-smirched blade in my hand.

  Murdac could not take his eyes off the sword. When I held it low before me, he seemed fascinated with it, watching the red blood drip slowly from the tip on to his wooden floor.

  ‘Stretch out your neck,’ I said. ‘It will make it cleaner, and quicker for you.’ And I lifted the long blade, holding it cocked in two hands above my right shoulder like a professional executioner.

  Murdac turned his face up towards me, his pale cheeks stained with tears. ‘Please, Alan,’ he said. ‘Please, do not kill me, I am begging you.’ And the tears rolled down his handsome cheeks, and dripped from his perfect little chin.

  ‘You deserve it many times over,’ I said, and I had to harden my heart, because the sight of his small quaking, sobbing body was weakening my resolve.

  ‘Please, Alan. By all that is holy, spare me. Spare my life. I will go away, I will leave England and never return. I have money, you know …’

  ‘We do not have time for this nonsense,’ said Hanno. ‘Strike, Alan, and let us be on our way.’

  I moved my arm back another inch, and Murdac shouted: ‘Wait! Wait – if you kill me Alan D’Alle – which I know is your true name – if you kill me, you will never know the secret of your father’s death.’

  I rocked back on my heels, as if I had been struck a blow. ‘What secret?’ I managed to stammer out. ‘What is this secret?’ I lifted the sword higher.

  Just then there was a loud hammering at the door of the chamber, and the sound of rough soldiers’ voices.

  ‘Alan, we have no time. Strike!’ said Hanno.