In the darkness, with sleep-dogged men and horses, it took an age to get ready to ride out and challenge the revelling madwomen. But finally we were prepared and, wrapped in righteous fury, I trotted out of the gates of Westbury at the head of six mounted men. Two of them bore burning torches, but the other four, and myself, carried twelve-foot man-killing lances. We had been openly challenged by Nur, and our response would be swift and deadly. I anticipated punching the steel point of my lance into Nur’s belly, and imagined her expression of shock and surprise as the spear-head went home, and she writhed around the shaft in her final agony.
But the women did not wait to receive our charge; they fled the very moment they saw our cantering horses approach. And I did not catch even the merest glimpse of my former lover. The women melted silently into the copse at our advance and, when we arrived at the fire, there was not a living thing to be seen.
There was however a sight that chilled our very souls. The lumpen shape that had been roasting over the fire, while these women cavorted about it, was no pig, nor sheep: it was the naked body of one of the men-at-arms who had ridden with me in the disastrous foray against the women’s woodland village the previous week. I could see by his tortured frozen expression that he had been alive when he was lowered over the flames and that he had subsequently died, slowly, in screaming, unquenchable agony.
And there was worse: some parts of his half-cooked body had been cut away by sharp knives, several strips from the brown, crisped buttocks, arms and thighs. Until we interrupted them, the witches had been gorging on his poor roasted flesh.
My head reeled, and I had difficulty keeping my supper where it belonged. This was a monstrous, demonic, almost unbelievable act. I ordered two men to cut down the body and wrap it in cloaks, so that we could bear it back to Westbury for a decent Christian burial. One of the men I detailed to cut our comrade free suddenly bent double and vomited copiously bedside the dying fire, and I had to fight the urge to do the same myself. I was helped in my task by a distraction.
‘Sir Alan, sir,’ cried Kit, perhaps the sharpest-witted of my men. ‘The manor, the manor – it’s burning,’ he said, pointing away behind us towards Westbury, where the first yellow flames were licking the black night sky.
Three days later I went to Nottingham Castle, a notional begging bowl in my hands, and a very real and heavy purse of silver in my saddlebag.
We had vanquished the fire after a long, long night of brutal hard work by every living soul in Westbury who could hold a water bucket. The guest house was utterly destroyed, as was a storeroom next to it, and the stables were also badly burned, but by dawn it had been completely quenched and one quarter of the Westbury compound was a charred mess of burnt beams and soggy cinders. Goody was not harmed, thank God. Rather than going back to bed, when we rode out for the courtyard so boldly, Goody had decided to go into the hall and find something to eat from the sideboard there. She was eating by the light of a single candle at the long table when the fire broke out in her guest house. Nobody had seen any strange folk around, but we all assumed that one of Nur’s madwomen had crept into Westbury and set the fire in Goody’s apartments while all the fighting men were busy charging out to challenge the witches at their awful feast.
I had not credited Nur with such cunning, and I had made a bad mistake. Now it was time to end this deadly game before my beloved was seriously hurt.
I presented myself to the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Sir William Brewer, in his private chambers in the Great Tower of Nottingham Castle. I did not know the man, except by reputation: he came from a family of hereditary foresters in Devon, and was said to be vigorous, ambitious – and utterly venal. He greeted me graciously, insisted on feasting me in the big hall in the Middle Bailey – which I knew of old – and for a consideration of five pounds in silver, he lent me a conroi of twenty of his best cavalry for a month.
For two weeks, aided by a man from Alfreton, who knew the land well, we scoured the woods in search of Nur and her gaggle of God-cursed wretches. In vain. We swiftly found the clearing and its circle of mean huts and hovels, and burnt everything in it to the ground – but the only soul we found there was an aged woman, blind, and unable to walk, who revealed nothing under questioning except that Nur and her coven, some forty females of varying ages from barely ambulant children to toothless hags, had left some days ago and headed north. The old crone seemed almost to welcome the knife, wielded efficiently by a Nottingham sergeant, that slit her throat and ended her miserable existence on this Earth.
It was a frustrating time. I had been out-fought by a woman with no deep knowledge of war nor the stratagems of battle, and made to look an utter fool. She eluded me, and left no trace. I sent messages north to Kirkton and Robin’s garrison there, but nothing had been seen or heard of the Hag of Hallamshire or her coven. We scoured the wilder parts of Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire by night and day, and found nothing. I was at a loss. After four fruitless weeks, I dismissed the conroi men back to Nottingham, and returned, shamefaced, to Westbury and Goody. Perhaps Nur had worked some kind of charm of concealment. Or maybe, more simply, after years of living wild without the comforts of civilized life, she was adept at moving through the countryside without disturbing a soul.
There was one great boon that my otherwise fruitless struggle with Nur had bestowed on me. That embarrassing contest with the witch had cured me of my malaise. I worked hard in that time; I slept little, but deeply, and drank hardly at all. Without knowing it or wishing it, the mutilated Saracen bitch had cured me of my melancholy, when no other remedy could.
Nevertheless, that summer saw the beginning of a long period in which I never truly managed to find ease. A time of nervous uncertainty, of general but constant fearfulness, a time that frayed the nerves and made everyone short-tempered and quick to anger: it was the season of the witch.
Country folk are superstitious. They always have been and always will be. So in Westbury, from the summer of the Year of Our Lord eleven hundred and ninety-six until the early spring of the next year every minor disaster was an attack of witchcraft, every accident must be black magic: if a cow gave birth to a stillborn calf, it was Nur’s malice; if a bucket of milk, left out too long in the warm sun went sour, it was her sorcery; a frail grandfather of four score years died suddenly in the village – Nur must have stolen his soul. Every misfortune, every setback – even those with patently obvious causes – was laid at her door; and folk whispered that it was in truth my fault for angering her. People spoke openly – though wisely not in my presence – of the curse that lay over Westbury, and wondered how it might be lifted. To make matters worse, the harvest was bad that year – Nur had clearly brought the rain clouds in August and a succession of heavy, pounding rainstorms to crush the standing wheat.
I asked Arnold, the local priest, to exorcize any evil spirits that inhabited the village and the manor, and the little man made a great show of bumbling about the place in his best robes with his servant holding a huge leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible, mumbling prayers in bad Latin and splashing holy water about with enthusiasm. But the villagers refused to believe it had worked, and when a nervous girl claimed she had seen Nur and her witches riding broomsticks across the face of the full moon, nobody was inclined to disbelieve her.
We saw no sign of Nur at all in that period, but there was evidence from time to time that she had not forgotten us and that she had agents of her evil in the area. Not long after the meagre harvest, in late August, Goody found a figure made from plaited wheat straw in her bed in the newly rebuilt guest house; long black thorns had been stuck in the belly of the doll, and through its eyes. Goody was shaken and brought the horrible object to me, and I burnt it – and from then on Goody abandoned the guest house and slept in my chamber. Chastely, I hasten to add, with a long round pillow separating us in the big bed. Though I did on more than one occasion feel the stirrings of an almost overwhelming lust, watching her lovely sleeping face, or catching a glimp
se of her white body as she dressed in the morning, I restrained myself. It was a small price to pay for the reassurance of having her under my watchful eye.
In October, we received a letter from Robin telling us that Thomas was impressing all in the army with his courage and prowess, that Little John had been ill with an ague but had now recovered, and that the Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully had finally succumbed to the Crab that had been slowly eating his belly, and all Paris, all France, was in mourning for him.
Robin’s letter brought the events of my time in Paris back into my mind; it felt long ago and far away – as if those terrible occurrences had happened to another man, a stranger. I wondered idly where the Master was hiding, and whether he would surface now that his old spiritual lord was dead. But I could not bring myself to care overmuch; my time in Paris seemed like a bad dream, and one that I had no urge to recall. Hanno’s death was still a deep and painful wound, only lightly scabbed by time.
The months passed with a surprising swiftness. The Feast of the Nativity came and went, and in January I was forced to dole out grain from my store houses and open several casks of salted pork to distribute to the poorer villagers of Westbury in the harsh winter months, else they would have starved to death. But I received scant credit for my largesse. Even that cruel winter, with drifts of snow covering the iron-hard fields, was said by some to be the work of the black witch. And, of course, it was I who had rashly brought her wrath down upon our community.
Our spirits began to lift with the coming of spring, as they always did. And I began to feel restless. I thought of my friends in Normandy and began, for the first time in many, many months, to feel the pull of war.
I broached the subject with Goody after dinner one blustery March day while she was spinning wool sheared from our sheep into fine thread – a seemingly endless task – by the hearth in the centre of the hall.
‘Yes, we are rather stuck,’ she said. ‘We fear the curse too much to be married, and yet we cannot find that wretched woman either to make her lift it or, indeed, to kill her. And while she is out there somewhere, you fear that by going off to war, to do your duty as a knight to the King, you will leave me in danger. We are trapped by our fears.’
I looked at Goody with no little surprise. It was an intelligent, candid, merciless expression of our situation. And one that was absolutely true, of course.
‘So what should we do?’ I asked.
‘We must do what good men and women have always done when beset by fear. We face it, we walk up to it, nose to nose, and spit in its eye – and we do what must be done regardless of our fears. You must go to Normandy; I will pack up Westbury and go back to living with Marie-Anne in Kirkton until you return. And when you return victorious from the war, my dearest love, we shall be wed here, in our home, and to Hell with that foul bitch and all her works.’
I took her into my arms, and at that moment I loved her as much as I had ever done. It was a deep love, a love of the soul, not inspired merely by her beauty, although she was truly as lovely as the dawn, but by her courage and strength, her clear-eyed intelligence and certainty.
I departed from Westbury a month later, having spent the intervening weeks training half a dozen or so of the more adventurous local lads as men-at-arms. We had not the leisure for sophisticated teaching but by the time we left they could all wield a sword and shield with moderate competence, and hit a man-sized straw dummy with a lance in two out of three passes from the back of a galloping horse. In fact, I was pleased with my little troop. I left three of the older men-at-arms with Baldwin to help him in his duties about the manor, and the Countess of Locksley had agreed that she would send a strong party of bowmen to escort Goody to Yorkshire, when she was ready to move in with her friend at Robin’s castle. And so it was that I led ten fully equipped men-at-arms south with me that April – although the majority of the men had been farm boys the month before – and I must confess, for the first time in many, many months, my heart was light.
We took one of the ships that now regularly plied between Portsmouth and Barfleur supplying Richard’s army, and after a rough day’s passage, which was the first sea journey for most of my men, and an occasion for much grey-faced groaning and vomiting, we arrived on Norman soil. Almost the first person I saw on the quay at Barfleur was my lord of Locksley. He had been waiting for me.
Chapter Twenty-three
Robin seemed tired and thin, the skin stretched tightly over his cheekbones, but his grey eyes sparkled with pleasure as we clasped hands in greeting. He put his hands on his hips, looked me up and down and said: ‘Well met, Alan – you look like your old cheerful self again. I’m glad to have you back among us where you belong.’ And I felt the familiar glow of affection at seeing my lord.
Beyond Robin stood Little John, a blood and muck-stained bandage wrapped around half his face covering some cruel injury. ‘About bloody time, too,’ growled the big man. And then he spoiled the effect by grinning at me. ‘God’s rotting toe-rags, lad, it’s good to see you! I was worried that you had given up the noble profession of arms and decided to spend your days as a stay-at-home, wimple-wearing milk-sop.’
He laughed and hugged me, and I broke away and tried to lift up a corner of the bandage that covered the right-hand side of his face. ‘What’s this, John? Did one of your catamites get jealous and try to scratch your eyes out?’
Little John actually blushed. ‘It’s just a scrape; a French knight got lucky with his lance at a tiny dust-up we had near Vernon. It will heal in a day or two.’
‘You’re getting old and fat and slow, John,’ I said, grinning cheekily at him, and poking a finger into his big, steel-hard belly. He nodded in agreement and then, noticing my disappointment – I had been hoping for our usual friendly exchange of insults – he added quickly: ‘Not too ancient to put you across my knee, you, you, you … battle-dodging brat!’
I could tell by this lacklustre response that even Little John was weary to the bone; and I felt a sense of shock and sadness. I had never seen the big man flag before, either physically, mentally or verbally. He had always been a pillar of strength and I was oddly embarrassed, even a touch shamed, by his weakness.
Then I was engulfed by a crowd of familiar smiling faces, my back slapped, my shoulder pounded and my hand shaken vigorously by calloused archers’ paws. Robin’s warriors were making me welcome. Lastly I spotted a mounted figure in red at the back of the sea of green-clad men-at-arms, a tough, lean-faced fighter armed with lance and sword, and bearing a red shield marked with a fierce wild boar device; I almost didn’t recognize my squire Thomas.
He dismounted and greeted me shyly and I saw that he had grown taller in the year since I had seen him. He would never be as tall as me, but I was standing in front of a man – and a formidable one at that.
Robin took me aside: ‘We have work to do, Alan, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Nothing too onerous, but we’re to escort a pack of chattering English masons and a train of building supplies to Château-Gaillard, and we must make haste, the King insists that we make haste.’
Château-Gaillard – the ‘saucy’ castle. Even far away in northern England there had been much talk of the cunningly fashioned, gigantic, apparently impregnable stronghold that Richard was constructing on the very edge of his territory, right on the threshold of the French King’s possessions. Rumours of the vast expenditure in silver that the King had poured into this undertaking had reached my ears, even in such a backwater as Westbury, as had stories about his feud with Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, who had once been his staunchest supporter. The rift had come about because Richard had insisted on building his huge new ‘saucy’ castle on the Archbishop’s land – at a crook on the River Seine in the manor of Andeli – without that venerable prelate’s consent. In protest, the Archbishop had gone so far as to place an interdict on the whole of Normandy, which in effect caused all offices of the Church to cease. But Richard had taken the case to the Pope in Rome and, there, ol
d Celestine had sided with the Lionheart. It had been smoothed over now, and King and Archbishop were reconciled: probably because Richard had promised Walter two other rich manors and the port of Dieppe as a douceur.
‘How go things with the King?’ I asked Robin, as we walked our horses along on the road south from Barfleur at the head of a lumbering train of supplies and a marching double column of burly masons in square white aprons, their precious tools slung in sacks on their broad backs. At first Robin did not answer: he merely frowned down at his hands holding the reins. ‘Between you and me, Alan, last summer was disastrous for Richard,’ said my lord finally, in a low voice. ‘Philip got his tail up, and snatched the advantage in the field several times; and now the French have made alliances with the counts of Boulogne and Flanders …’ These were two very powerful princes, I mused, lords of the rich lands to the north of the French King’s domains, and with very strong trading connections to England, in wool and cloth and wine, mainly. This was bad news indeed.
Robin was still quietly speaking: ‘… and no doubt emboldened by this diplomatic coup, Philip sallied out last July and besieged Aumale. He’s learned a lot from Richard since the early days of the war – he’s still cautious, but when he moves, he moves very fast. And now his siege train is even bigger than ours – with at least two dozen “castle-breakers”, I’m told. It was certainly powerful enough to knock the mortar out of the walls of Aumale. When he heard the news of the attack, Richard rushed up there with too few men, in his usual gallant, reckless fashion; he took Nonancourt, and ravaged Philip’s territories, but when the French King declined to come away from Aumale and fight him like a man in open battle, Richard charged in and attacked him before its walls and got himself very badly mauled. The French were prepared for him, well dug in behind ditches seeded with wooden spikes, and our knights got handed a bloody whipping – our Locksley boys weren’t with Richard that time, mercifully, but the Marshal’s men were badly cut up. Richard had to withdraw and shortly afterwards the Aumale garrison was forced to surrender to Philip. To make matters worse, Richard got himself wounded a few weeks later – shot in the knee outside Gaillon by a crossbowman – and that put him out of action for the rest of the summer.’
Warlord (Outlaw 4) Page 33