Hoodsman: Saving Princesses

by Smith, Skye

  Robert and the other lord approached the taxmen and the knights moved out of their way. Raynar saw the face of the second man and dropped his head at an angle so that his rolled hat hid part of his face. It was the face of the Baron Belleme who had been at Edith's coronation. Luckily he had not attended the wedding else he would have already recognized him despite the disguise. The senior taxman noticed Raynar’s move to hide his face, and stepped forward to do the talking.

  The baron repeated Robert's question, "The treasury is in London now?"

  "Yes sire," said the senior taxman "but we still have a small office in Winchester. The new method of paying by tally stick is from London. In Winchester we still collect smaller amounts in coin. It is the same in all shires now. Each sheriff runs a local office of London's treasury. "

  "Don't talk to me as if I were a fool," spat the baron, "I know all that, but it is news to me that Winchester is now just another shire office.” Robert and the baron turned away and had words.

  Robert turned back. "Where is my brother Henry?"

  "He awaits you in Pevensey. He has been camped there since June," answered the senior taxman.

  Robert nodded, "And does he know I am here?"

  "Yes, sire, most assuredly. I would not be surprised if has not already broken camp and is riding here as we speak. It will not take long. His army is all mounted." The senior taxman had been told by Gregos to be helpful, open, and truthful to Robert. "I think," he added.

  "How large is his army?" asked Robert.

  "Sire, my answer would be just a good guess, as I have not been to Pevensey. Do you still want it?" the taxman waited until Robert nodded. "Perhaps five hundred cavalry and an equal number of infantry." There was mumbling amongst the knights.

  Robert stood straight. "This is not the time or place to discuss excise. I will discuss that in private with my brother. Please ride to him and tell him that in person. You may go now."

  The three taxmen bowed and backed and then turned and walked back to the counting house. The junior taxman was babbling a little from the repressed nervousness. Raynar told him to keep his words to himself until they were clear of Portsmouth.

  The senior taxman told the excise men at the counting house to relax and just be watchers and keep a tally of the number of ships and the size and type of loads as best they could, but in safety. "And for God's sake stay away from the alehouses and keep your peace. You are safe in here otherwise."

  The three of them mounted and walked their horses calmly out of Portsmouth, but then Raynar pulled up. The two taxmen were local men and knew the streets. "Which way is the fastest street to bring an army here from Pevensey. It would have to be fast for carts and have ample water for beasts."

  They looked at each other and said as one, "Through Chichester." The senior continued, "Whichever way you take west, you would use Stane street back to the coast, and that touches the coast at Chichester.

  "Lead on," said Raynar, "we must follow Gregos' orders to play this true. Robert asked us to take a message to the King, and so we shall.” They were all relieved when they realized that they did not need to pass by the Roman fort and its garrison of Mortain's men.

  * * * * *

  * * * * *

  The Hoodsman - Saving Princesses by Skye Smith Copyright 2010-13

  Chapter 26 - Ambushing a king in Sherwood Forest in November 1069

  Rodor passed the courier pouch to young Raynar. He did so without taking his eyes from the Normans. After being surrounded by hooded archers, these two Normans had dropped their weapons and dismounted. The Norman couriers were nervous. The deep hoods worn by these outlaws made the faces seem like dark holes and it was unnerving.

  They had heard about how vicious the Brotherhood in Sherwood could be to Normans and they could not even speak the language to bargain for their own lives. Luckily one of the hooded men spoke French, the one who now held the courier pouch. That man was now walking to the edge of the bush and turning his back to them.

  Raynar opened the pouch. There were sealed letters inside. Those would be personal. There was also a scroll. Part of it was in code. Those would be the orders to the Norman army in Pontefract. Without letting the Normans see what he was doing, he quickly copied the coded lines from the scrolls and then rolled them again and put them back into the pouch.

  He walked to the couriers and spoke to them in French. "These are messages to important people, no?"

  "Yes they are. You had better give them back to us and let us go our way. We will be missed and vengeance will be sought," said the older of the two couriers.

  "How much will you pay me not to destroy them?"

  "What!" exclaimed the older man. "What was that you said?"

  "If I let you go, but with a pouch of ashes, you will suffer, no?" The look of panic that crossed the man's face told the truth. "So how much? You Normans make a business of ransom. I ransom you this pouch." The men both offered their purses. "My mother did not raise any stupid children. Those are your decoy purses. Show me your real ones."

  The older man held out another purse. The other man shrugged to say he had no other. Raynar took only the latest purse. He did not bother to open it.

  "Where are the armies?" When the couriers squished their lips firm, Raynar asked again. "Come on, we don't seek to know secrets. We just want to stay away from them. Where are the armies?"

  The older man hesitated but the younger one blurted out, "Cospatrick's army is still on the north side of the River Aire, which is still in flood. We face them on the south side. Sweyn's army is at the mouth of the Humber, but is ready to sail for Denmark."

  "And the King's army, where is it?"

  "William has beaten the Mercians at Stafford. He will be at Nottingham by tonight," said the younger man.

  "Do I believe you?” responded Raynar. The couriers begged him to believe them. He handed the man the courier pouch and waved to the archers to let them go. "Be gone, quickly, before I change my mind."

  Raynar had chosen to wait for William in Sherwood. The main north-south highways ran along both sides of Sherwood, and the brothers of Sherwood kept a continuous watch on the traffic on both roads. Only friends of the Hood could cross safely from one highway to the other through this forest.

  Pickings had been rich on the Sherwood highways recently. Norman churchmen and their like were fleeing south. The Hood tried not to injure them as they robbed them of their treasures. They ignored warrior traffic unless they were couriers. Norman warriors would fight to save their paltry purses. It was far easier to prey on the hated Norman priests.

  The English on the highway were watched but not stopped. If they were villagers with a message for the Brotherhood, they would walk until they heard a signal, and then would make to the bushes as if to relieve themselves. They were never seen talking to an outlaw out in the open.

  This was the second set of coded messages that Raynar had copied. He had told the men to always let the messages and messengers through, but with lighter purses. Otherwise the Normans would choose another route. He had worked a full day trying to break the code of the first message. He hoped that this second message would give him more clues.

  The brothers of the Hood were vanishing back into the forest and making for the closest work camp. Rodor had created a series of camps in Sherwood. He called them deep camps, light camps, and work camps. The deep camps were true hiding places, complete with provisions and weapons and cave shelters like warm burrows in which to spend the long winter weeks.

  Most of Rodor's men had been holed up in the deep camps, hiding from the three weeks of non-stop rain. Living in the forest was not difficult so long as you stayed dry. Once you were wet, life became a misery. The light camps were well hidden, but designed for use only in good weather and for only a few days at a time. The work camps were simple hides with simple roofs meant for use by pickets and watchers. They were close to roads and villages, so fires were forbidden around them.

  Raynar worked on the cod
e for an hour under a work camp roof, before the other men were bored and wet enough to make for their closest deep camp. When they reached the deep camp he worked on the code again.

  "Give it up," said Rodor, "Normans are professional soldiers. They have probably been using coded messages for generations. You aren't going to break the code."

  "It has to be simple. The knights and lords can barely read. Having an order misunderstood could be more dangerous than having it read by the enemy." Raynar scratched his head. "So it has to be in French, not Latin, in case there is no cleric close by. And it has to be the same code for a long time." He went back to work on them, and cursed the shortening days for making it harder to read.

  Other men were now drifting in from the work camps. Pickings were over for the day. They arrived in twos and threes, and the first thing they always did was to change into dry clothes, and hang their wet ones up. Only then did they gather around a fire and eat a hot meal.

  * * * * *

  The autumn nights were getting longer. In the forest there was nothing to do at night but to sleep. Even when you were slept out, there was no good reason to climb out of the warmth of your bed until there was light to see by. Raynar rolled onto his side on the sheepskin and pulled his cloak around him to keep out the early morning fog.

  There was now enough light to read by so he unrolled the copies of the two coded messages and looked at them with fresh eyes. He had only copied the coded bits from the Norman scrolls. He had read the rest of the scrolls, which were in French, but they were standard orders about running an army, not orders about strategy and planning. They had not been worth copying.

  He kept adjusting his bed to stay warm. Then he had an idea. It was likely that the coded messages would include mention of the River Aire. He picked out the coded word that was probably Aire on the messages, and then using those known letters, solved other bits of the message. It was working. He transposed the known letters in every phrase, and guessed at new words, and thus learned more and more of the code.

  The message from three days past from William to Pontefract was

  * Prepare to attack north. Where ford Aire.

  And the reply from Pontefract to William was

  * Ford west Aire at Lindley

  Raynar woke Rodor with a light shake. "Lindley, do you know it? Is there a ford across the Aire there?'

  Rodor rubbed his eyes. "I have been there. It is not on the Aire. It is just a poor village towards the Peaks from Wachefeld."

  "I have decoded the messages. William is being told he must make for Lindley."

  "He is being told to cross the Aire on higher land," replied Rodor. "There is a ford across the Aire at Loidis, which is just north of Lindley. I know it because Earl Edwin had a church built there."

  "So the plan is for William to cross the Aire on high land and then sweep down the north bank of the Aire and attack Cospatrick's flank. I would wager that the Normans will fake a crossing at Castleford to keep Cospatrick busy while he is being flanked."

  "It means that William's army will march to the west of Sherwood," said Rodor. "Well, lad, I must eat crow about your wasting time on the code. I'm off to rouse the men and send them out to warn the villages from here to Loidis. They'll get everyone to the safety of the forest. No one will be near the west road when that army passes by, and there will be no food for them to forage. You've saved a lot of lives and a lot of hunger with your few hours of working on puzzles."

  * * * * *

  Raynar said his fare-thee-wells and made his own way to the highway on the west side of Sherwood. The brothers of Sherwood had been on the move for hours now, warning the folk, so there were village folk on the move everywhere. Poor folk with small bundles; farmers with their milk cows; wives herding children, children herding sheep. They moved out of Raynar's way without panic. Raynar looked like any other farmer riding his plough horse to safety.

  The plough horse was a young but ugly mare who had been named Horace by the children at the stable as a jest. Horace had been cheap because she was short and light and had narrow hoofs, which made for a poor plough horse.

  Other than being butt ugly, she was a reasonable saddle horse. She was certainly calm. He had tested her to find her strengths and weaknesses. She had only two strengths. She could stop and turn very quickly, and she cantered reasonably fast but only in short spurts. Her weaknesses were too many to name, but most of those were due to being only half-trained.

  The further he rode north, the fewer were the folk on the road. All morning as he rode, he had watched as groups of folk turned off the highway and onto a game trail that disappeared into the damp shadows. Raynar had decided to keep riding until he was near the northern most edge of the forest. By that time he hoped the highway would be empty.

  Eventually he could see the forest thinning ahead. The land was lower here, and swampy from the rains. He stopped at a place were the road had been churned into a quagmire by the traffic of oxen carts and horses. He could hear the mud sucking against Horace's hooves.

  Raynar explored the forest nearby. Some locals had dug a drainage ditch to lead the water away from the highway to help dry the road. Raynar dismounted and worked for an hour to block the ditch. There was a tiny path beside the ditch leading into the forest shadows. He tied the mare to a bush, and followed the path. The land was getting wetter as the land got lower. The path and the ditch ended in a flooded pond.

  Disappointed, he turned to follow the path back to the mare. The trees had kept their leaves long into the fall this year because of the rain, but they were falling now. Something was hidden under a now bare bush ten paces from the path. He squelched along the bank of the pond to see what it was. He found a tiny coracle boat made of basket weave and hides.

  He flipped the boat over and pushed it into the pond. It floated, so he stepped into it to see how much weight it could hold. It sank slowly in the water but did not leak much. There must be a paddle somewhere near, and a short search found one. The coracle settled as he sat in it, but once he was low it seemed stable enough, so he took the coracle for a paddle.

  More confident now, he paddled across the pond. On the other side there was a continuation of the path, but now wider and in regular use. He hid the coracle and followed the path. It led away to the north and with each fork of smaller paths the original became wider and better.

  Raynar returned to the Horace and led her to the pond. With her swimming behind the coracle, he paddled across the pond again. After some splashing and excitement as Horace overtook the coracle to gain the other bank, he was forced to chase her down the path and drag her back to the pond.

  He made camp under a large pine on a dry hummock near the pond. Despite weeks of rain, the needles in the shelter formed by the lowest branches were mostly dry. He left the mare there and returned to the highway. He made a simple hide on the east side of the muddiest stretch of the road and waited.

  The first cart along proved how bad the road was, now made worse by his blocking of the drainage. The ox cart got stuck half way and it took a huge effort by folk and oxen to free it. The next to cross the mud was a scouting patrol of Normans. Raynar curled himself low and small and did not peer out until they had passed.

  Unfortunately, the scouts stopped on the other side of the muddy stretch and then returned across the mud and dismounted. Other horsemen had arrived, and they all began to discuss the mud. There was a yell that froze Raynar's blood from the closeness of it. One of the scouts had found the blocked ditch and was yelling for help to clear it. "It's been purposefully blocked," was the warning from the scout. "This could be another fucking trap. Bloody outlaws."

  More horses were arriving and men were dismounting and yelling into the forest. "We know you're there you bastards, come out and fight!” There was the sound of squelching boots and of swords slashing into bushes. Then came the voice of someone who must be a commander, "What's the holdup?"

  "This muddy stretch could be a trap," said a scout close by
.

  "You have traps on the brain since fighting that wildman Eadric. It is just a mud hole. Secure the area if you must, but we are coming through."

  "We are not securing any bloody area, we are going back to scouting.” There was the sounds of the scouts leaving, and then the commanders voice giving more orders, and then more boots and swords in the bushes.

  Raynar had a choice. Run now, or wait until the army has passed and hope he is not found. He ran. He made it across the drainage ditch and onto the path before being spotted. Then a cry went up and he could hear boots running behind him. He could hear the sound of metal on metal, so they must be in mail. He outdistanced the armoured men to the pond and just barely had enough time to paddle the coracle into deep water before four men lined up along the bank of the pond. He was in luck. None of them had a crossbow.

  "I told you it was a trap," one man puffed.

  "Some trap, one fisherman," said another, between gasps for breath. "Get back to the highway."

  Raynar slept a cold night under the pine. It took him an age to fall asleep due to his anger at himself for blocking the ditch. The trap would have worked the same even if he hadn't blocked it. He decided to make another try at hunting William. All he had to do was to get ahead of his army again. Once asleep he had nightmares of being chased by headless Normans.

  After midnight he woke and listened. Had he heard something or was it his dream. No, it was what he didn't hear. It had stopped raining. He rolled through the pine needles until he could see a patch of sky. There were stars. At first light he packed up and rode for the Peaks to the north of Scafeld and he hurried Horace until he reached the safety of the first ridge.

  Once he was surrounded by hills he felt at home again. Safe. Everything was familiar. The tors, the twisted valleys, the layers of different rocks. Horace made good time on the bridlepath along the first ridge, and proved herself strong enough to carry him up and down the slopes. Each time he saw a village ahead he would approach it on sheep trails along the back side of a ridge. Once close he would dismount and scramble by foot to the top of the ridge and pear over. He had repeated this a handful of times before he found what he was searching for.