Knight of Shadows

by Toby Venables

  And that was the moment Salah al-Din had chosen to attack. Cavalry clashed. Blood and arrows flew. Decimated, the Christian forces had retreated to the high ground of the Horns. And now here they stood, in this lull, contemplating their inevitable fate.

  So deep was Gisburne’s despair now that it gripped him like a sickness.

  MOMENTS BEFORE, ONE of their number – a yeoman who, two days prior, Gisburne had heard conjuring loving, longing images of the lush, green pastures of his farm in Kent – had suddenly and completely lost his wits, scooping up handfuls of the ash-grey dust and grit and shovelling them into his mouth until he gagged and retched, only to repeat the process, laughing and moaning like an idiot. For a moment, those around could only stand and stare, their resolve utterly drained – until a doughty, toothless old soldier called Bowyer stepped forward, and, with no more emotion than one would spare for an ox, raised his mace and felled the man with a blow across the temple. The yeoman twitched in the dust. Bowyer stove in his skull with a second blow, straightened then turned back again to contemplate his own doom. Gisburne was sickened – but also relieved. He wasn’t sure, in that moment, whether to detest Bowyer for the act, or detest himself for lacking the resolve to do the same.

  None spoke. The big man next to him – Gisburne thought his name was John – let his head droop, and a long, shaky breath escaped him. It almost sounded like a death rattle.

  Tongues were parched, brains exhausted almost beyond the capacity for thought, but this, Gisburne knew, was not the reason for their silence now. He had seen men find inner reserves in worse states. He had seen soldiers shout and sing and laugh in defiance when they were so badly beaten and wounded it seemed impossible that they were alive.

  This was different. It was the silence of defeat.

  He yearned for some familiar sound then – any sound – was almost ready to batter his fellows into some response. When people roared and shouted in battle, even if it was to mask their terror, you at least knew they had some spirit left. But when that silence fell… That’s when you knew you had lost. Gisburne had seen it before. The colour draining from faces, the resolve falling from limbs. It was as if their lives were already leaving them – as if they had come to some realisation that their end was upon them, and that no matter what they did, they would never witness another new day – never kiss another woman, never eat another meal, never see another place beyond the wretched field of corpses. Such men were finished before the fatal arrow or sword point struck, already picturing themselves food for the birds that circled patiently above their heads. Spirits flown, their very ghosts crushed. Red stains in the dust. “Battles are first fought in the mind,” Gilbert used to say.

  In this chaos, from the left of him, came an impossible, utterly incongruous sound.

  Laughter.

  It was not, as one might have expected, the laughter of madness, or cynicism, or irony. It was a rich, full-throated, belly laugh – something as alien to this place as the cool sound of trickling water. A laugh Gisburne had heard a thousand times – perhaps tens of thousands of times. It had been a constant presence at his side for over a year now, from Sicily to Thessalonika and on into the Holy Land. On innumerable occasions in the past, that laughter had lifted Gisburne’s spirits when things seemed lost. Now, it chilled him to the bone.

  Gisburne turned and stared dumbly at the familiar face next to him, its white teeth flashing in the sun.

  Robert of Locksley laughed at everything. At danger, at pain, in the face of his own death. No, that was not quite true. He did not believe in the possibility of his own death. He seemed somehow charmed – capable of shrugging off the most extreme hardship. Even here, where the summer sun hammered down upon them and men felt their tongues splitting from lack of water, Locksley could be heard to comment on how the climate was good for his bowstring, giving his arrows extra range and power. It should have been infuriating, yet time and again, Gisburne had seen it lift men from the depths of their own despair.

  “Well, what a merry ballad this will make,” Locksley said. And he laughed some more. “I’ve a mind to make a better ending of it.”

  The big bearded man – the one called John – looked at Locksley with an expression of wonder, as people so often did. It was the very same expression Gisburne had once worn himself.

  “Do you really think we can?” said John.

  “Well, I certainly don’t intend to die here. Do you?”

  John received this as if it were a revelation – an entirely new possibility that had not crossed his mind. “No.” he said. “No, I don’t.” And something real seemed to change in him. In spite of himself, Gisburne marvelled at it.

  This was Locksley’s great skill – apart from his genius with a bow, of course. As a bowman, he was formidable. The truce Gisburne had struck with him in recent weeks – a truce struck mostly with himself, and of which, in truth, Locksley was barely even aware – had been a wise move. Pragmatic. Only a fool would refuse to make the most of so keen a weapon. But that didn’t mean Gisburne had to like it.

  “Boy!” called Locksley. “I need arrows.” But the boy, as if deaf, remained motionless, cowering behind the rock which he somehow imagined would afford some protection, his thin arms clutched about his knees, his face expressionless and empty.

  Locksley sighed – the kind of sigh ordinary men gave when they found a fly in their drink.

  “One more shot, then I am spent – for now,” said Locksley, for once a note of frustration in his voice. Gisburne noted the phrase “for now”. Locksley could not – would not – conceive of a future that did not include him. He was utterly irrepressible. “Well, no one can say I’m not spoiled for targets.” He placed the arrow upon his Welsh longbow – as long as him – his still-keen eyes scanning the field. “Who shall we send this message to, Master John?” And he laughed once again. It was a laugh of unrestrained delight. Of unlimited possibilities.

  At its sound – entirely unbidden, entirely unexpected – Gisburne felt a surge of raw emotion. Of hope. Of defiance. He thought to resist it, knowing the nature of its source. But today he did not care, any more than a drowning man gave a damn about who built the raft. Locksley had reminded him he was alive. That there were still things to do, that he mattered. He did not care if it was misguided or a delusion – did not care that he knew it to be both these things – he just knew he needed it. And he saw the effect it had on those around him – how they were emboldened by it, returned to life. He knew why Locksley inspired men as he did; but for a moment, he felt all the love and admiration for this man that had once also inspired him.

  He was not dead. Not yet.

  He blinked hard again, his eyes clearing. They alighted on something in the tumult, as if drawn to it. All at once, fully formed, an insane idea entered his head – a notion so audacious, so stupendous, he felt his scalp bristle and a thrill rise up in him. He felt himself about to laugh. With his left hand he grasped the arrow that Locksley was preparing to draw, and – eyes wide – pointed a shaky finger out across the heaving ocean of men. Locksley flashed him a look of almost homicidal annoyance – no one, no one, interfered with his draw... But then, following Gisburne’s fevered gaze, he broke into a broad, white-toothed smile.

  Off to the left of them – in the southwest, where the two armies were closest – a tent emerged from the boiling mass of the Saracen army, its long yellow banners whipping and flapping in the wind. Below, framed within it, but clearly visible even to Gisburne’s bleary eyes, was a tall, distinct, figure. It was clad in a russet kazaghand – an armoured jerkin – picked out with gold. From the jerkin rose a silvery mail coif, which surrounded the bearded, hawk-like face, its eyes intense with concentration. Above that – making the tall figure taller still – sat a conical yellow cap from which was draped, almost to the length of a cloak, a shawl of pure, nearly blinding white.

  Salah al-Din.

  “D’you think you could hit that?” Gisburne’s mind reeled so violently a
t the possibility that he physically staggered, suddenly seeming to see the whole battle – the entire war, the future of every man here – turning upon this one moment.

  It was an insane suggestion. The target was at the very limit of even the Welsh longbow’s range. No bowman alive could hope to hit anything so distant with any accuracy. But that was the kind of challenge Locksley lived for.

  He grinned wide at the suggestion. “I can,” he said. He braced his left foot upon a rock, squinted at the figure framed in the yellow tent, and sniffed at the air, as if measuring the breeze. Then, with the leader of the Muslim world in his sights, he lowered his arms and upper body, and began to draw the creaking bowstring.

  XXXI

  THEY TAUGHT YOU to aim for the chest. Then, if your aim was not true, you would still likely hit something. But Locksley was never much of a one for rules. In fact, as Gisburne had noted time and again, to him, rules were like a red rag to a bull. Locksley took pleasure in doing the exact opposite of what was expected – in proving the rules wrong, or merely defying them for his own perverse satisfaction. Gisburne had met plenty of men who had no respect for authority, or who resented it, but Locksley’s defiance verged on the pathological.

  He had something else about him that the men responded to, though. Something more than charisma or charm – although he had barrel-loads of those too.

  It was luck.

  No matter how bold or foolhardy his actions, fortune favoured him – far more than any one man deserved, never mind a careless, amoral rogue such as he. It was as if he was somehow indestructible in both body and spirit, and in turn imbued those around him with a kind of boundless confidence – the feeling that if they simply stood near this charmed man, they would not, could not come to harm. It was this that had brought him to Gisburne’s attention, back when they had first met in the pay of William the Good, Norman king of Sicily. That, and the fact that this lowly archer had, in the space of only a few weeks, somehow gathered his own loyal retinue about him – an army within an army, formed about a locus of natural authority. Such things were not always welcome where authority was supposed to go hand in hand with status, whether blessed by nature or not. But Gisburne respected him, to such an extent that he chose not to question the fact that this common bowman spoke to him – a mounted serjeant, worth half a knight, so it was said – as an equal. Whatever it was the man had, you couldn’t fake it. And it got results.

  Gisburne’s cool pragmatism, natural caution and orderly mind had also apparently intrigued Locksley. Though complete opposites in just about every way, they had gravitated towards each other, ultimately forming a kind of unspoken partnership. Men flocked around Locksley, and Gisburne commanded them as if his own company – though he always knew it was Locksley to whom they really belonged. Locksley himself had no commander, and never would. Yet the bond had endured through the madness of Willam’s bloody invasion of Thessalonika, and the doomed assault on Constantinople that followed. It had held firm as, time and again, they had watched whole companies perish around them to be replaced by new blood, and was made stronger as they two, out of all of them, somehow survived every extreme they faced. So formidable had they proved as a fighting unit, that when Locksley took to horse and affected the hauberk of a serjeant – and even began to address knights in a familiar manner that Gisburne himself would never have presumed – his employers let him have his head. When William’s crazed dream of conquering Byzantium had finally come to a shuddering halt on the banks of the Styrmon, the pair had headed south, seeking new employment in the Holy Land.

  They had found it almost immediately in Reynald de Châtillon.

  When they had left the carnage of William’s campaign, the cracks had already begun to show. It had been at Gisburne’s instigation. The sacking of Thessalonika – after which as many as seven thousand Greeks lay dead – had sickened him. He knew, too, that William’s luck was running out, and that theirs could not last much longer. He had also begun to realise that Locksley, fired by their successes, believed himself somehow untouchable. The man feared nothing. That was the source of his strength, but such beliefs were also dangerous. Gisburne had watched as Locksley had hurled himself ever more recklessly at his fate, and seen the delight in his eye as each time he had again come through unscathed, as if more deeply convinced of his own immortality. Where before it had spurred Gisburne on, now it began to unnerve him.

  Locksley had finally agreed to accompany him south to the Holy Land on the promise of rich pickings – the protection of wealthy pilgrims en route to Jerusalem. This, at least, was an enterprise with some degree of honour. Locksley cared not a jot for that, but after Thessalonika, Gisburne had discovered a desperate need for it. He was a common mercenary, fighting for pay, fate having robbed him of the chance to be a knight. So be it. He had come to accept that bitter truth. But he could not ignore the knightly virtues with which he had been raised for half his life – could not simply unpick them from his being. He was not a callow fool or dreamer; he knew the terrifying realities of war. But now, perhaps more than ever, he yearned for his actions to carry some meaning, however slight. To work for something more substantial than the greed or ambition of a warlord. Slaughter – at which he had proved so proficient – had brought such feelings to the fore.

  Gisburne had also begun to understand that Locksley had no such feelings, no such misgivings. He had begun to wonder what feelings the man had. Locksley had saved his life countless times, often putting himself in mortal danger in order to do so. But while Gisburne had once marvelled at his courage, and felt deeply indebted to his protector, what he could not fight off was the creeping suspicion – and the final, undeniable realisation – that Locksley had done it not for the sake of a valued friend, but simply because he could. It had begun to dawn upon him that Locksley not only had no friends, and no personal attachments, but had no real need of them. He loved only challenges – opportunities to push himself to ever greater extremes.

  Gisburne had seen many such men on campaign, those who spurned company and toughened themselves for war, made fortresses of themselves. Armies were filled with them. But, almost without exception, they were in denial. They were building walls in order to protect some frail thing within – to save themselves the pain of personal attachments. Some could sustain it, but many ended up bitter caricatures of their former selves, or crumbled inward, into the growing emptiness they contained, and became wrecks of men. In Locksley, however, he had encountered something altogether different – a man who seemingly did not see the point of relationships – at least, not meaningful ones. He was a man who loved the void – who gazed into it and saw not the horror of emptiness, but infinite potential. When Locksley looked at other men and women, he saw about him not people, but a source of amusement. Obstacles, challenges, resources. To be used, overcome or tossed aside as part of a grand game that he would play and play until he had won. The irrepressible spirit that men so much admired – a spirit to which despair was utterly alien – was, in reality, an unstoppable, all-consuming force of chaos. Locksley was a man made for war – a man who was emotionally unhurt by it, because he had nothing whatsoever invested in it. Gisburne was not like him and could not be. And during those trying times, in which years of experience are compressed into months, he had invested heavily in their friendship. It was not something he could avoid, nor easily undo. But now he understood the investment was not returned, he realised it made him vulnerable.

  Gisburne had encountered such a man only once before: Prince Richard, now King Richard the Lionhearted of England, Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Count of Anjou, Maine and Nantes, Overlord of Brittany. Like him, there was nothing Locksley dared not do. Locksley had none of the advantages of birth that Richard boasted, but he had a ferocious intellect that Richard lacked. And, Gisburne suspected, he had known the reality of poverty. There was no telling what he might achieve if he set his mind to it – if he lived long enough.

  When they fell in with R
eynald – somewhat against Gisburne’s better judgement – things at first seemed to have come good. The Holy Land was ever turbulent, but it was not at war. There was great wealth to be tapped – they even minted their own gold coins here. The women were bewitching, the food and wine cheap and plentiful, and when the merchants tried to cheat you, they at least did so honestly, offering a smile and a shrug when they did not succeed. For battle-weary soldiers, it was idyllic. And Reynald himself was a knight of noble standing, devoted to the protection of Christian pilgrims. A straightforward task, or so it seemed.

  As Gisburne was soon to discover, Reynald’s Christian zeal led him into actions far beyond the protection of pilgrims. In the first week that they were garrisoned at Reynald’s desert fortress of Kerak, they were sent on a foray to seize three Arab traders their new master had claimed were spies, and their possessions. When one had the temerity to protest, swearing he would petition King Guy of Jerusalem about the outrage, Reynald had him flung from the castle walls as the others watched. The body remained on the rocks below as a warning, its bones picked clean by vultures. As he gazed down at them in disgust, Gisburne realised that what he had taken for a tangle of dead, dessicated shrub and a tumble of stones on the rocks below was in fact a disordered pile of regularly replenished human remains bleached white by the sun.

  Slowly, the grim realisation dawned on Gisburne that they had fallen into the service of one of the most odious tyrants in the whole of Christendom. That Locksley had begun to admire the boldness of his methods gave him no comfort. He sensed, for the first time, a kind of madness in this man he called “friend” – worse, a madness that was drawn to madness, that revered it, as if driven by some unchecked compulsion to dissemble and destroy.

  Reynald, it turned out, was not merely a bully, a murderer and a thief, but a fanatic. As a much younger man, Gisburne learned, Reynald been captured by Seljuk Turks during a plundering raid on Syrian peasants at Marash, and was kept prisoner at Aleppo for sixteen years. The conditions under which he was kept were known only to Reynald, but Gisburne had seen two outcomes of long-term imprisonment of Christian knights at the hands of the Muslims. Some – such as Raymond of Tripoli – had come to a better understanding of their captors, even to respect them. Reynald, however, was of the other type. When his vast ransom was finally paid – one hundred and twenty thousand dinars, so it was said – he emerged more bitter, more unpredictable, and more dangerous than ever before, driven by hatred and a desire for vengeance.