Outlaw

by Angus Donald

  The conroi was checked by the wagon circle. It was too big an obstacle for the horses to jump and, in frustration at missing the archers, the riders milled around the outside, leaning out of their saddles and stabbing with their long lances at our folk inside the ring, who dodged and parried and retreated out of reach. Robin’s horn sounded again; two short notes and a long one, and out of the green wall of the forest our own blessed horsemen erupted.

  They were a beautiful sight: a dozen mailed cavalrymen perfectly aligned in a single row, galloping towards our defensive ring. Hugh was in the centre with the white wolf banner fluttering above his head as his men swept across the glade. Their lances were couched, tucked under the arm and held parallel to the ground, aimed at the foe, spear points lusting for blood. One of Murdac’s men had just time to shout a warning and then Hugh’s men crashed into the scattered ranks of the enemy, spearing men and horses as they smashed through the milling throng, scattering the sheriff’s troop like wolves running through a herd of sheep.

  Robin’s horn sounded again, three rising notes that set the hairs on my neck standing erect: ta-ta-taaa, ta-ta-taaa. ‘Come on, then, lad,’ said my blacksmith friend. ‘That’s the attack, that is.’ And he leapt up on to the wagon and over the other side, swinging his two great hammers, surprisingly nimble for such a big man. Once out of our cart-ring he gave a passing enemy horse a great smash on the forehead and the poor animal tottered and sank to its knees. Quick as a weasel the smith was on his rider, even as the animal was sinking, pounding with both the great lumps of metal in turn at his square helmeted head. He must have smashed through the helmet and into the brain because, suddenly, there was a great gout of blood and greyish pink matter that splashed the front of his chest. He saw me watching, appalled at this savage display, and he smiled an enormous, battle-mad grin and shouted: ‘Don’t gawp, boy, get stuck in, get stuck in . . .’

  Robin was to my right, standing on a wagon with another archer; both of them calmly shooting arrow after arrow into the enemy horsemen. I turned to my left and there was Little John, outside the circle, swinging his enormous axe with murderous skill. I saw him hack into the back of a rider and cut straight through his mail, severing the spine. As he tugged the double-blade loose, the man fell forward, limp as a doll, his head almost touching his foot in the stirrup as a scarlet fountain from his partially severed waist shot straight into the air.

  Everywhere I looked there were Robin’s followers, men, and some women too, on foot, some armed only with quarterstaves or stones, some with hoes or scythes, surrounding isolated riders and smashing them and their mounts with a near-berserk fury. A body of horsemen, disciplined and armed with the long lance, can destroy a crowd of infantry in moments; but when the horseman is alone and surrounded by a pack of blood-crazed peasants with a chance to wreak vengeance for the crimes committed against them, and their forebears, by that mounted symbol of Norman power, it’s like watching a crippled spider being overrun by a pack of maddened ants. The horses were hamstrung, quick-smart, with long, sharp knives; the unfortunate man-at-arms’s legs seized by many hands. He was yanked, tugged alive, from the saddle to be pulverised to bloody ruin on the steaming earth. Pounding metal, blunt tools punched into living flesh; screaming man and horse, and hot, squirting blood.

  But it was not all going our way: one of the plumed knights was wreaking havoc on our people. His reins dropped over his saddle horn and controlling the horse only with his knees, he laid about him with sword and spiked mace, smashing skulls and severing arms. As I watched an arrow slammed into his thigh, and he wheeled away with a curse.

  The blacksmith just in front of me had stopped hammering at his foe’s mashed skull and was watching Little John, who sank his huge axe-blade with a graceful backhand into the throat of a passing horse. The unfortunate animal, spraying gore, reared with the last of its strength and dislodged the rider, who lay winded on his back on the life-drenched ground. Within a heart-beat, he was surrounded by a swarm of hacking, gouging peasantry. ‘That’s the way, lad,’ the blacksmith grinned at me, ‘no lollygagging, get stuck in.’ And then his mad, happy face suddenly changed shape, paled and he sank to his knees. From the centre of his chest the bloody tip of a steel lance was protruding. He looked down in disbelief and his huge body juddered and jiggled as the man-at-arms on the other end of the spear tugged at the weapon to release it from his sucking flesh.

  An image of my father’s distorted hanged face leapt into my mind and I found myself screaming ‘Noooo . . .!’ My naked sword was in my fist and I was up and had leapt over the wagon before I could think. I charged at the rider, whose lance was still trapped in the smith’s body, and swung my weapon at his leg, crazed with red fury. The blade slammed into his mailed calf and the man shouted in pain but the blow did not break through the chain armour. The man dropped the lance and swung at me, left handed, across his body, with a huge war axe. I dodged, and then another horse barged into the back of his and he staggered in the saddle, both arms flailing, the axe hanging from its strap on his left wrist. I grabbed the mailed sleeve of his right arm, my mind boiling, heaved and, with a rattle and a crash he thumped down on to the turf, his helmet knocked off, wheeling away.

  I didn’t think for a second about what I was to do; it was as if there was another boy controlling my body. As the enemy horseman sprawled on the ground, bareheaded, I swung the sword as hard as I could at his exposed neck and I felt the jar of the blade as it chopped into his spine at the base of his head. He screamed and his body gave a huge convulsive jerk. But my heart, my tender heart was singing. Here was vengeance, this was a blow struck for my father’s memory. The man convulsed again; there was a massive spurt of bright gore and then he lay still, face up, blood pooling underneath him, with my old sword half-severing his head from his body.

  I saw his face clearly for the first time. He was no steel monster from a nightmare. His blue eyes stared at Heaven, his skin was milk-white and unblemished except for a wispy blond moustache on his upper lip, his jaw slack, red mouth open revealing perfect white teeth. He was, perhaps, only two or three years older than me. Then he breathed a last sigh, like a man taking his ease after a long day of labour, a long rattling huff of air as his soul left his body.

  I looked down at the first man I had ever killed. I stared at him. My eyes were pricking with tears. And I reached forward to . . . to touch him, to apologise, to beg his forgiveness for ending his young life - I don’t know what. I pulled my hand back, and looked up and away from him. I saw Robin above me, standing on the wagon, an arrow nocked at his bow, searching for a fresh victim. His eyes met mine. He nodded at me, and shouted; and above the screams of battle, I could hear his strong confident voice as clear as if he were next to me: ‘A fine kill, Alan. Neatly done. We’ll make a warrior of you yet.’ He smiled at me, a relaxed careless grin. I stared at him, my mind whirling. And then by some strange alchemy my mood changed, I became infected with his courage. Where I had felt sick and weak at having cut short a young life, I now felt a glorious surge of blood to my limbs. I looked down again at the dead boy at my feet and I found my hand reaching for my sword. I grasped its plain wooden handle and, with a great heave, I tugged it loose from the vice of his backbone. Then I stood straight, lifted my chin, steadied my shaking legs, and looked about for more enemies to kill.

  Chapter Four

  The battle was done. The surviving enemy men-at-arms, and there was not above a handful, had run, some on foot, some two or even three to a horse, back down the road in the direction they had come.

  I looked around the field and my stomach turned to ice: it was scattered with dying horses, crawling, staggering blood-soaked men, the air filled with bubbling screams and groans, the ground covered with so much gore that the lush clearing was green no more: a stinking midden of blood and mud, horse shit and shattered bodies. The battle smell was sharp as salt: a metallic odour, coppery and blunt at the back of the nose; with notes of dung and piss, fresh sweat and crushed gra
ss. But above all that, above the pain and death and horror and filth, I felt a great swooping, skylarking joy at merely being alive, joy that the enemy was beaten, and that we were victorious.

  Robin’s ragged men and women were hurrying from body to body, cutting the throats of the enemy wounded, stifling screams and digging through their pouches and saddlebags. Only one enemy remained standing on the field. It was the knight, his helmet off, a bloody gash in his side, his chain mail clogged with blood, his left thigh pierced by an arrow, but still on his feet, sword and mace in hand, surrounded by a ring of Robin’s men, some freshly wounded, who were taunting him and pelting him with stones. The mocking outlaws stayed prudently out of reach of the knight’s sword and mace: I could see three bodies at his feet.

  ‘Come on, you cowards,’ the knight shouted. His English was unaccented, which was rare for a knight. ‘Step forward and die like men.’ A stone bounced off his chest. ‘You pack of lily-livered villeins, come forward and fight!’ And, in answer to his taunt, one rash outlaw, a big fellow armed with an axe, rushed at him from behind. The knight seemed to have eyes in the back of his head. He half turned to the right and blocked the man’s wild axe swing with his sword. Then he changed direction, his feet as neat as a dancer’s, and swinging his torso to the left, he neatly crushed the man’s skull with one blow of his spiked mace. The man crumpled, jerked once, lay still. The knight had done it so casually, a killing flick of such skill and grace, that his jeering enemies were silenced.

  ‘Come on then, who’s next?’ said the knight. ‘Let’s start a pile.’

  An archer pushed his way through the ring until he was just five yards from the knight; he nocked an arrow to his bow, pulled back the hemp cord and was about to sink a yard of ash into the knight’s chest when Robin, arriving at a run, shouted in his iron battle voice: ‘Hold!’ And, pushing through the crowd around the knight, he said: ‘Sir, you have fought with courage. And now you are wounded. I am Robert Odo of Sherwood. Yield!’

  The knight cocked his head on one side; he was a handsome man, about twenty-five, with a big black bushy beard and bright eyes. He replied: ‘You wish to yield? Very well, I accept.’ He was smiling, even in the face of death. Robin stared at him. The archer hauled back his bow cord the final inch. The knight lifted his chin, a heartbeat from his Maker. But Robin stuck out a commanding arm, palm toward the archer. And then my master began to laugh, amid the blood and death, the pain and fury, he laughed and laughed. And the knight, laughing also, dropped his mace, spun the sword in a glittering sweep in the air, caught it by the bloody tip in his mailed hand and offered the hilt to Robin. ‘I am Sir Richard at Lea,’ he said smiling, ‘and I am your prisoner.’ And, still smiling, he collapsed on the mud at Robin’s feet, unconscious.

  We packed up the wagons with astonishing speed. In fact, Robin’s band did everything quickly, without fuss. The wounded were loaded with the baggage. The very badly wounded, only three men that I saw, after they had been given the last rites by Tuck, were dispatched with a swift dagger to the heart, administered by John. He did it with a strange gentleness, cradling their heads in his enormous hand and thrusting once, quickly, through the ribs to release a bright gout of heart’s blood. It seemed that this was the custom of Robin’s band. And nobody commented on the way these men were hurried on to Heaven, or the other place. Graves were dug, again with great speed, for our dead. Their dead - there were twenty-two corpses, and no wounded: all who had not run, except Sir Richard, had been executed by Robin’s men and women - were stripped of anything valuable: weapons, mail, boots, clothes, money, and lined up by the side of the road; their grubby chemises, these undershirts being the only item of clothing too dirty even for Robin’s men to steal, fluttered in the wind, grey, ragged flags to mark their passing to the next world. Tuck said a few brief words over the row of dead men, and I felt a pang as I caught sight of my victim’s blond, blood-smirched hair. They were the enemy, but they were also warriors and men. Tuck made the sign of the cross over the bodies and turned away; Hugh, mounted and at the head of the column, gave the cry: ‘Forward!’ and the whole lumbering train set off again down the forest road. I looked at the sun - only an hour had passed since we had been warned by the spy. I hitched my sword belt, turned my back on the bloody clearing and walked after the column, following my victorious outlaw lord.

  We turned off the Great North Road soon afterwards, and on to a series of lesser tracks, each one narrower than the last. The great green wood closed in around us until the sides of the ox-carts were whipped with branches and the sunlight was rarely seen. The rutted pathway twisted and turned so regularly that, in the gloom of the forest, I soon lost track of north and south, east and west. As darkness fell, I realised that I was hopelessly lost. But Robin clearly knew where we were heading and we plunged ever onward, travelling by the light of a few pitch-wood torches, until we arrived at an ancient hall, deep in the forest.

  Robin left us there: Hugh, the wounded men-at arms, the women, the children, the livestock, the cumbersome ox-carts and their loads of tribute, Sir Richard and me. The steward of the hall, Thangbrand, a grizzled old warrior, had killed a pig and prepared a feast for Robin and his band, but I was filled with strange melancholy humours after the battle and could barely eat; I kept thinking of the blond boy I had killed - his face hung before me when I closed my eyes, red mouth smiling, showing his white teeth, as blood seeped around his neck from the hideous wound in his spine. He was too young to have been one of the men who had killed my father, yet I had no doubt he would have obeyed such an order. So I believed I had taken at least some measure of vengeance for my father in taking this man’s life, even if he was only a symbol, an embodiment, of the forces that had deprived me of my parent. And I was very glad that Robin had seen me kill this enemy; but why then did I feel so miserable? It was too much to understand, so I retired to a corner of the hall, wrapped myself in my cloak and tried to block out the sound of carousing around the ale barrels and find the oblivion of sleep.

  Robin and his unburdened cavalcade left the next morning. Every man was freshly mounted on horses from Thangbrand’s stables. Tuck embraced me and urged me to mind my manners and consider my immortal soul every once in a while. Little John gave me a powerful slap on the back. When Robin himself came to bid me a brief farewell, I knelt and asked if I might not accompany him, but he raised me up and told me to obey Hugh in all things and attend to my lessons with him. ‘You will serve me better with a little education under your belt, Alan. I need clever men around me. Learn from Thangbrand, too,’ he said. ‘He was once a great fighter and he has much to teach you. One kill doesn’t make you a warrior, though it was a fine start, a very fine start.’ He smiled and clasped my shoulder. ‘I’ll be back soon, never fear,’ he said. ‘Doubtless, I’ll have need of your new skills before long.’ Then he turned his horse and cantered away. As I watched him ride away through the trees, I felt suddenly uncertain, bereft, even a little afraid. I was alone among strangers in the middle of the wilderness.

  Thangbrand’s hall, like his name, was a throwback to Saxon times. Built of sturdy oak posts and wattle-and-daub walls, in a wide clearing hidden deep in Sherwood, it appeared to exist in a simpler time, a time before the proud Frenchmen came to these shores. A large oblong building, with a high thatched roof, the hall was the centre of a settlement of about thirty folk. A rickety wooden palisade surrounded the hall and its outbuildings: stables, granaries, workshops, a smithy, a cookhouse and several ramshackle huts where the lowlier human inhabitants slept, along with the animals. It was in one of these that Sir Richard was lain. He had sworn to Robin the night before, on his honour as a knight, that he would not try to escape until his ransom was agreed and paid by Sir Ralph Murdac. In truth, he was too much knocked about to run far. He had lost vast quantities of blood and he was only intermittently conscious. An axe blow had smashed several ribs and punctured his right side, Tuck told me, after he had tended to him to the best of his abilities. His left
thigh had been pierced by an arrow, which had been removed while Sir Richard was unconscious. Fortunately, the thigh bone had not been broken. Now bandaged and pale, stripped of his armour, but with a flask of water mixed with wine at his side, he sat on the floor of a pigsty, propped against the back wall on a pile of clean straw, and observed the bustle of his rustic prison through the wide opening.

  Thangbrand’s household, of which Hugh had assumed temporary mastery as Robin’s lieutenant, consisted of Thangbrand, his extremely fat wife Freya, their two dark, well-made sons, Wilfred and Guy, who were only a few years older than me, and a skinny daughter called Godifa, of about nine or ten summers. Another boy, William, a sturdy red-head about my age much given to oafish grinning, lived there as well, a cousin of some sort. There were also a dozen men-at-arms, some wounded from our skirmish, some I’d never seen before, and half a score of male and female servants.

  Shortly after Robin left, Hugh summoned me and outlined the shape of my life there at Thangbrand’s. I should learn, he told me, as much as I could from those around me. And I would be punished if I disrupted the household, if I stole anything or did not attend to my duty. If I behaved myself, and paid close attention in my lessons, and worked hard, I would receive something of inestimable value, a treasure of the mind, a thesauros . . . He was talking about my education.