by Angus Donald
The noise was deafening: the battle cries of our warriors, the clash of steel, the neighing and squealing of horses and the shouts of rage and agony from wounded men. I spurred Ghost forward, felt a hard blow against my left boot, hacked at a retreating back, and suddenly the mass of Griffon soldiers had broken, like a smashed cage of doves, all the birds set free at the same time, and hundreds of men were streaming back towards the gate of the town - which I noticed with disbelief was slowly opening to receive the fugitives. It was a terrible, fatal mistake on their part.
‘After them,’ shouted Richard, waving his huge sword in the air; the long blade and his sword arm completely drenched in gore. ‘After them while the gate is open.’ And we barrelled down the hill, mingling with the running Sicilians, spurring past a victim and then hacking back into face and neck with our swords as we rode past, slicing open cheeks, cracking skulls and dropping bodies in our wake. Whoever was in command of the gate must have realised his error in letting the terrified fugitives in, for as we approached I saw men on either side of the portal, struggling to shut the heavy wooden barrier in the face of a blood-splashed tide of terrified men. They would have had more chance trying to hold back the sea. Our knights were in and among the crowd, cutting and stabbing down into the mass, churning up the horror. I saw Robin spur back, level his sword like a spear and charge at the knot of men trying to shut the left-hand gate. He half-blinded one man with a lunge that smashed into his eye socket, the ripped eyeball popping free and dangling on a bloody thread of tissue, then Robin chopped down hard with his sharp blade into another man’s bare arm, half-severing it from his body, and the other fellows pushing at the gate turned and ran, back into the muddy streets of old Messina. All resistance at the town gate ceased in a few short moments; any living Griffons took to their heels, disappearing into the warren-like streets of the town as fast as their legs would carry them.
The gates were ours, and the King finally called for a pause for breath. As the horsemen milled in the entrance to the old town, stroking the flanks of their sweat-streaked mounts and puffing and blowing from the exertion of slaughter, I looked for my friends. Robin appeared to be unhurt but Little John had a bloody cut on the side of his thigh, which he was in the process of roughly bandaging with an old shirt. I called out to him but he merely said: ‘A scratch, Alan, just a scratch. God’s hairy bollocks, I must be getting old.’ He gave me a huge lunatic grin that warmed my heart.
I looked down at my boot and there was a long deep cut in the thick leather but whatever blade had caused it had not penetrated through to my flesh. I’d need a new pair of boots when the day was over, though. Not all of us had been so lucky. There were four riderless horses in our company and two more, heads down cropping the grass, by the blood-drenched knoll where we had made our first madcap attack. The site of our first charge was marked by mounds of Griffon dead and wounded, some crawling, others lying crying and cursing in fear and pain. One horse, disembowled, with purple innards bulging and glistening on the grass, screamed incessantly until a passing knight dismounted and gave it its final ease with his dagger. Several men in the King’s company had deep cuts or stab wounds to show for our battle with the Sicilians. One knight’s arm dangled limply from a dislocated shoulder. Robert of Thumham had a bad cut across his cheekbone, but he appeared cheerful, joking with the King, Bertran de Born and Mercardier, Richard’s grim-faced mercenary captain, as he mopped at his wounded face with a silk scarf. ‘That will leave a bad scar,’ I thought to myself, and unconsciously looked for Malbête in the crowd of horsemen. I caught his flat gaze, noted that his own scar seemed to have become a deeper red; I quickly looked away. From what I could see the bastard was completely unhurt. Despite what Robin had said about waiting till we reached the Holy Land, I knew that if I had the chance, and I could be sure nobody would witness it, I would cut down Malbête and feel no more guilt than I would killing a rabid dog.
My thoughts turned unbidden to Reuben. Presumably he was at his lodging inside the old town. Was he safe? Through the open gate, I could see our reinforcements streaming down the hill, making for the knot of our horsemen at the entrance to the town. A crowd of archers on foot, lead by Owain, was hurrying towards us, and mounted men-at-arms, sergeants and spearmen, knights and their squires, all were converging on the King with savage grins of delight. With the gate in our hands, the capture of the old town was a foregone conclusion, and then would come the sack, a night of fire and blood, of women raped, men slaughtered, and valuable goods stolen or smashed for pure pleasure.
The Griffons seemed to realise their peril, as they had regrouped while we tended our horses and our wounds, and a wall of men had been formed across the main street leading into the heart of the town. The wall thickened with every passing moment, as townsmen, terrified of what our victorious troops would do if set loose in their homes, swelled the wall. Those with armour were pushed to the front, and there was a fairly credible barrier of linked shields and spears to stop our advance. The shield wall might have been almost formidable - a difficult obstacle to overcome - but for two things. We had plenty of archers, who were now grinning with pleasure at the chance of loot and mayhem and hastily stringing their bows, and King Richard was our commander.
Robin and Owain formed up our bowmen in no time at all and at a nod from the King, they began to loose volley after volley into the wall of Griffons. Waves of grey shafts fell like sheets of winter rain on the townsmen’s shield wall. The slaughter was appalling, relentless; and the Griffons had no reply. They stood bravely, bleeding and dying in defence of their homes and families. As the needle-tipped arrows slashed down again into their ranks, men screamed and dropped to the floor by the dozen at each volley, clutching at yard-long ash shafts that sprouted from their bodies before they were dragged in a gore-slicked trail to the back of the wall and nervous, unhurt men took their places. The wall began to thin, to waver under the bowmen’s onslaught, the back ranks began to fade away in ones and twos, family men slipping away into the back alleys of the town, shunning the fight to protect their children, and King Richard, seizing the moment perfectly, hauled out his blood-encrusted sword, and shouted ‘For God and the Virgin! Havoc! I say havoc!’ and he and every able-bodied man on horseback - there must have been sixty or seventy of us gathered by this time - raked our horses sides with our spurs and thundered forward in a great galloping steel-clad mass and crashed through the enfeebled shield wall like a birch broom through a pile of dry leaves. We charged into them, swords raised, punched easily through the wavering curtain of frightened men - and unleashed hell on the ancient, once-peaceful town of Messina.
Chapter Nine
The sack of a town is never a pretty sight. But this was one of the worst I have ever seen. King Richard had cried ‘Havoc!’ and this meant that his men were set free to plunder and rape and kill to their hearts’ content. No quarter would be given, everything in the town now belonged to the victorious troops. Richard was deliberately punishing the town for its insolence, for the rotten fruit thrown and the jeers when he made his magnificent entry into the harbour. As the cavalry careered through the last defences of the town, the archers and footmen came roaring after them, racing into the streets beyond, kicking down doors and charging inside private houses, killing anyone who opposed then and ransacking the interior and more often than not setting fire to the buildings for sheer spite. They were looking for wine and coin and women - but not necessarily in that order. It was as if they had all run mad, like the Christians of York, crazed with lust and cruelty and the urge to shed human blood.
As the sun dipped behind the hills to the west, much of the town was ablaze, blood and wine flowed in the gutters and bodies littered the streets. Drunken men-at-arms blundered through the burning town, naked steel in hand, tripping over their own feet and snarling at shadows, looking for unmolested houses to pillage, women to rape, another barrel of wine to broach. More often than not, the drunken man-at-arms or archer would collapse unconscious i
n a doorway, all his lusts slaked - and a good few had their throats cut by morning by locals seeking revenge for daughters deflowered, sons cut down before their own hearths and property destroyed or stolen. Fear and death stalked the fire-splashed darkness, as the citizens cowered in their cellars, or hid behind barred, even nailed-shut doors and prayed for the nightmare to end. But dawn was a long way off, and the desires of Richard’s victorious men were far from satisfied.
King Richard and his household knights, including my master Robin, had ridden to Hugh de Lusignan’s house. He was quite safe, firmly barricaded in a strong two-storey stone building with a score of well-armed men to protect him, and the bodies of a dozen Griffons at his door. After ceremonially embracing Hugh - the King had, after all, ostensibly attacked Messina to come to his defence - Richard withdrew back to the monastery on the hill with his household knights to bandage their scrapes and enjoy a victory feast together. Robin, rather reluctantly I believe, accompanied his liege lord; he was obliged to, in truth. But I had the strong feeling that he would have preferred to do a little lucrative plundering in the burning town. Little John had long disappeared, presumably in search of merriment and valuables, and I was left alone, walking Ghost up a narrow street, stepping around the bodies, heading towards the Jewish quarter. I wanted to be sure that Reuben was unharmed. Although I knew he could take care of himself, I was uneasy with memories of the last blood-crazed mob of fanatics I had encountered in York.
I rode slowly past a dark side street, and glancing into it, I saw a knot of men-at-arms, perhaps a dozen or so, shoving and squabbling excitedly. There was a woman on the floor and some ruffian was covering her, while the others waited to take their turn. I paused, and half of my mind wanted me to go to her, save her, and drive off those drunken beasts. But I was alone, and they were a dozen violent men. I hesitated, like a craven coward. Was it my duty to save that poor woman? She was a legitimate prize of war, an enemy. My own King wanted her punished. I remembered something that Robin had said to me the year before. I had not understood it at the time, although I thought about it often since then. He had said: ‘Right and wrong is rarely simple. The world is full of evil folk. But if I were to rush about the earth punishing all the bad men that I found, I would have no rest. And, if I spent my entire life punishing evil deeds, I would not increase the amount of happiness in this world in the slightest. The world has an endless supply of evil. All I can do is to try to provide protection for those who ask it from me, for those whom I love and who serve me.’
He had told me this only a few hours before he had ordered that a captive brigand, an evil fellow called Sir John Peveril, be strapped to the earth of a woodland glade and have three of his limbs chopped off in cold blood in front of his ten-year-old son. The man Peveril lived, I was told, if you can call him a man after that: he was just a trunk, a head and one arm. My master let the boy live, too; not out of kindness or mercy but to spread the tale of this horror.
I now understood what Robin meant by his little speech about right and wrong: that woman was nothing to me, so why should I risk my neck to save her? But I also knew what the right thing to do would have been. I knew what a truly chivalrous knight would have done. Sadly, the coward in me was too strong and, as I argued right and wrong with myself, Ghost sensibly walked on past the alley, and I surrendered to my weaker side and rode on by, cursing my own cowardice.
When I reached the house where Reuben had taken lodgings, I saw that there was nobody at home. The place was heavily boarded up and not a chink of light escaped from the shutters into the dark street. Reuben, probably sensing trouble, had evidently abandoned the town for some other safer place. While I was worrying about him, I thought bitterly, and braving the streets of a blood-drunk town, he was probably playing dice in some snug shelter north of Messina with Robin’s men - and no doubt winning.
I turned Ghost back towards the main gate of the town. As so often after a battle, I felt a sense of melancholy. I was tired, my foot, where the boot had taken a sword blow, was aching, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the girl being repeatedly raped by a dozen lust-crazed men. Then, just as I was passing a wide wooden two-storey house with the door smashed to kindling and hanging from its hinges, I heard a long, drawn-out scream of fear. It was a woman’s voice, a young woman, I believed, and she was in mortal terror. I stopped Ghost this time, and she screamed again, a long rising howl of utter dread. Then I heard a man laugh, an evil gloating sound, and a jest shouted to someone else.
Without allowing myself to think this time, I got down from Ghost’s back, tied him to a post, drew my sword and entered the house.
It was the dwelling of a rich man, clearly. The large front room with its high ceiling, which had once been a fine chamber, had been completely ransacked. By the moonlight that spilled through the open shutters in front window, I could see that ornate furniture, smashed, was scattered about the place, priceless hangings had been torn down from the walls, and there was a strong smell of wine and excrement - someone had recently relieved themselves in that plush chamber and I guessed that it was not the owner. In the dim light, I could just make out the corpse of a very fat man, richly dressed and lying in a black puddle at one side of the room. I ignored the body and threaded my way through the detritus of his house, towards the rear of the building. I heard the scream again, but this time it ended abruptly in a hideous bubbling gurgle. It sounded exactly like a woman having her throat cut.
I stepped through a doorway into an open-air courtyard that was brightly lit by a pair of torches fixed to beckets on the wall. And I saw that I had walked into a slaughter yard. The stone floor was literally running with blood, trickles of the liquid oozing between the cobbles, and the naked form of two young women were lying curled together on the floor, their plump white lifeless bodies resembling the carcasses of butchered pigs in the flickering torchlight. A third girl was hanging limply from an upright wooden frame in the shape of an X. It was a whipping frame, I realised, and I knew I was in the slave quarters of a merchant’s house. The girl was obviously dead. Though her back was towards me I could see that her throat had been cut to the bone. And the man who killed her was standing by the whipping frame gaping at me in surprise. The girl had been whipped, stabbed through the buttocks and no doubt raped before the man had ended her life. He wore a scarlet and sky blue surcoat, spattered with her blood and the blood of her dead sisters. And he carried a long, smeared knife in his right hand.
I said no words of challenge but simply took two steps towards him and swung my sword at his head in a fast round-house cut. He desperately tried to block my strike with his gore-smirched dagger, and it saved my blade from burying itself in his skull, but then I stepped in towards him and smashed the iron pommel of my weapon into his mouth, shattering teeth, smearing lips and dropping the man to the floor. He stared up at me, as I stood over him, and he just had time to scream through his broken mouth, ‘My lord, help me!’ in English before I plunged the sword point down hard into his throat and silenced his voice for ever.
I stood away from him. In my black fury, I could have hacked his dead body into morsels - but I managed to control myself. I had done murder, although I did not regret it for a moment, and I knew I must leave this place as quickly as possible. King Richard had vowed that he would execute anyone who killed a fellow pilgrim: on the voyage from Marseilles, he had had a murderer tied to his dead victim and thrown into the sea to perish. I cocked my head to one side: could I hear singing coming from somewhere? It must be my imagination. As I looked around the courtyard before making my departure, I noticed a fourth girl, bound and gagged and crouching naked in the corner of the space by a shadow-dappled whitewashed wall. She was so still and white, she almost seemed part of the wall. But when I went to her, I saw that eyes were huge and dark with horror, and her hair was a slick of shining black down her naked back almost to her tiny waist. Even terrified as she was, and in that place of blood and pain and death, I saw that she was beautiful; ext
raordinarily beautiful. But she had seen me kill the man-at-arms. She was a witness. A thought flashed across my mind: I knew what Robin would do in these circumstances; she was a witness to a capital crime, she would have to die. In our outlaw days in Sherwood, Much the miller’s son had once killed an innocent page boy because he was a witness to a murder Little John had committed. Much even boasted about it until I told him I would shut his mouth for him, if he did not. So I knew what Robin, in his ruthlessness, would advise me to do. But I was not Robin.
I went back into the front room and seized a silk wall hanging that was lying on the floor, but which was mostly clean, and brought it back into the slave quarters. The girl had not moved. I cut through the ropes that bound her and wrapped her snugly in the silk cloth. And all the while she stared at me with her huge, beautiful eyes. I thought I could hear boots moving about on the floor above and I tried to hurry the girl along as gently as I could. But she did not seem to understand my words. With gestures and pointing I finally managed to communicate the urgency to her, and get her to understand that we must leave that house - now! And in a dozen heartbeats I had her outside in the street. I could definitely hear the sound of drunken singing: soldiers, no doubt, who were looking for another victim to rape, another house to plunder, and the sound was coming closer. I wanted to get the girl on the horse and lead her away from that place of death as quickly as possible - I could feel my skin crawling in anticipation of deadly danger - but she seemed very worried about her silk wall hanging coming open and was refusing to mount up on Ghost until she had fixed her dress. So I cut a hole in the hanging for her head, and cut a strip off the end to make a belt, and with her head poking through the priceless silk and the material tied to her waist, she at last consented to climb into the saddle.