He drew his sword and used it to sketch a rough circle in the dirt. “See here. We have overrun the counties of Nottingham, Derby and Leicester. My men have all the highways and common ways covered. Nowhere is safe from us in these parts.”
Roger drew a smaller circle inside the first. “Here is Nottingham. Our main target. We have the place under siege. Nobody dares travel to or from the town except under armed guard. Even those convoys have been growing less in recent weeks. My men have killed too many of the constable’s soldiers.”
He looked up at the captain. Roger knew him of old. Matthew of Kniveton, steward of Earl Ferrers’s lands in Derbyshire. He was as violent and impulsive as his master, obeyed orders without question, and possessed not a scrap of pity or understanding. A face like old porridge and a brain to match.
“I am saying,” Roger added patiently, “there is no need to attack Nottingham. We can starve the place into submission. Much easier, and less bloodshed.”
“Your orders are to take Nottingham by storm,” came the reply. “There’s no time for a siege. We must strike quick and hard, before the enemy know what has hit them.”
“The defences of Nottingham have been repaired,” said Godberd. “Alan Kirkby, the constable, is no fool. He has strengthened the town walls, put every able-bodied citizen under arms. Women as well as men.”
He lowered his voice. “Listen, Matthew. You know what will happen if we launch a direct assault on Nottingham. Scores of our men will die, yours as well as mine. Hundreds, even. We will win in the end, of course. Sack the town. Have you ever seen a town given over to the sack?”
This was a false question. He knew perfectly well that Matthew had been present at the sack of Worcester, back in ‘64, when Earl Ferrers had destroyed much of the city and exterminated the Jewish quarter. In his desperation to avoid unnecessary slaughter, Roger tried to appeal to Matthew’s humanity.
His appeal failed. “You will storm Nottingham,” the other man said, slowly and deliberately, as if Roger was hard of hearing. “Or I will ride back to Peveril and tell our master you chose to disobey orders.”
Matthew placed a hand on his sword. “Unless you mean to stop me.”
Roger gave up. He knew the consequences of disobeying Earl Ferrers. His lord was a dreamer in many ways, but utterly merciless towards those who angered him.
“Very well,” he said hopelessly. “Let the blood be all on our heads.”
The attack was launched six days later. Roger needed time to gather all his men, divided into separate bands all over the Midlands. His messengers were swift. Dawn of the sixth day found him crouched at the edge of the forest opposite Carter Gate, the northern gateway to Nottingham. Between the forest and the town lay strips of ploughland and pasture, dotted with farmhouses. High on its sandstone perch, the square keep and high towers of the castle rose above all.
Matthew of Kniveton knelt beside Roger. Behind them, strung out in long lines inside the woods, Roger’s army of outlaws waited for the signal. They had ladders and ropes, even a battering ram made from a single mighty oak.
Their plan was simple enough. Success depended on a single wild rush. Roger’s best men were committed to the storming party. Their task was to carry the walls, get inside the town and throw open the gates. Then the rest of the outlaws would charge inside.
Roger preferred not to think of what came next. He was a hard man, used to violent death, but the deliberate slaughter of innocents was something else. It was a crime and a sin, and he would pay for it with his soul’s price.
He remembered the priest, murdered in the forests of Wiltshire by his late colleague, Walter Devyas. Walter was now suffering the torments of Hell, up to his throat in a stream of boiling blood. Would Roger soon join him?
“We cannot wait any longer,” hissed Matthew. “Robin Hode has betrayed us. He will not come.”
Much as he disliked Matthew, Roger was forced to agree. Sir Robert d’Eyvill, or Robin Hode as he called himself, was supposed to answer Roger’s call to arms. He and his band operated in the northern part of Sherwood Forest, and the d’Eyvill clan were staunch allies of Earl Ferrers.
Or they were supposed to be. Of all the rebel bands at large in the Midlands, Robin was the only one who had failed to attend the muster. Perhaps his family had turned traitor, or Robin wanted no part in the murder of Nottingham. If so, he had Roger’s sympathy.
He is a braver man than I, Roger thought. For a moment he despised himself, and for the first time in his life despised Earl Ferrers. Yet there was nothing to be done. If he failed to carry out orders, he and his men would suffer death and disinheritance. He remembered the fate of the last man to defy Ferrers, hanged from the rafter of his own house while it burnt around him. His wife and child, turned out and forced to beg.
Roger had approved of this rough justice at the time. Only now, with the sword pointed at his own throat, did he see the evil in it.
The scrape of steel pulled Roger back to the moment. Matthew had drawn his blade. His ran his tongue over his lower lip, eyes gleaming with bloodlust.
“Sound the horns,” he rasped. “Give the order. To hell with Robin Hode. We attack at once.”
Roger stood up, ripped out his own sword and raised it high. “Forward!” he shouted.
The sound of war-horns rippled through the forest. Horns, horns, horns, summoning men to slaughter. They were followed by a storm of cheers as a tide of men poured out of the forest. Those with ladders streamed towards the walls flanking the gatehouse, while a team of eighteen men lugged the ram on ropes towards Carter Gate itself. The serfs in the fields scattered and ran for the shelter of their hovels. Their cattle also fled, bellowing in terror.
Roger watched as the storming party flowed towards the walls. The sentries were slow to react, or perhaps shocked by the sudden appearance of an army outside Nottingham. The ram was already pounding at the nailed and cross-timbered gates when church bells started to clang inside the town.
The outlaws swarmed up the scaling ladders. Fighting erupted on the battlements, as the bravest guards stood their ground against the onslaught. Meanwhile the ram continued to smash against the gates, which held firm.
Roger gnawed a knuckle. “Get inside and open the damn things,” he muttered. He feared his men would forget the plan and turn to pillaging before the gates were opened. They were outlaws, after all, robbers and cutpurses, always with an eye to profit.
Still the gates held. The bells grew ever louder, and Roger thought he heard the distant note of a bugle.
“The garrison is alerted!” he snarled. “Unless those gates fall, they will be down upon us!”
“Kirky will hole up in the castle, surely,” said Matthew. “Why ride out and risk his skin in an open fight?”
Roger shook his head. “You don’t know him. I’ve fought Kirkby for years. He won’t hide behind castle walls. Fight, you cowards!”
He shouted in vain at the town wall, where the defenders were putting up a much sterner fight than expected. Roger suspected the town militia had got involved. The constable had drilled them far too well.
Roger looked back at Matthew’s horsemen, armed and mounted in neat ranks on the edge of the forest. Much good they were, pretty lancers all in a row. Cavalry were useless in an assault upon a fortified position, not much better in the vicious street fighting that followed.
“I’ll lead the rest of my lads,” he said to Matthew. “Hold your men back here in reserve. Once we get those gates open, come after us on foot. Leave the bloody horses behind!”
He ignored the other man’s furious expression and turned to his men. “Follow me, boys,” Roger bawled, waving his sword. “Last one to reach the castle has to dig the latrines for a month!”
Roger sprinted for the gates. His reserves streamed after him, howling their battle-cries. He leaped over several dead or dying outlaws, stretched out on the ground, their bodies peppered with crossbow bolts. More shafts flew from the walls.
“Arche
rs!” Roger cried. He halted and gestured frantically at his bowmen, who spread out and started to loose shafts at the defenders. His swordsmen rushed past to clamber up the ladders. One flopped to the ground a few yards in front of Roger, shot through the head by a keen-eyed marksman.
A shiver passed through Roger. That could so easily be him, bleeding his life out. He was bareheaded – in his excitement he had forgotten to don a helm – and wore only a padded leather jack for protection.
He swore as one of the ladders was pushed backwards off the wall by men with long spears. It crashed to earth with three screaming outlaws clinging to it like terrified apes. They landed with a bone-cracking thump. Roger and several others rushed to help them.
One had a broken collarbone; the others had fared worse. “Get them into the forest,” Roger snapped at his men. The wounded were helped or carried away under the trees. He didn’t fancy their chances: the only doctor among the outlaws was a broken-down sawbones, thrown out of a monastery for stealing the abbot’s wine. His assistant was a deranged young girl Roger had found wandering in the forest. She had some skill with herbs, which made up for her mad fits and tendency to cut herself.
Fresh hope surged through Roger as the city gates finally creaked inward. “Forward!” he shouted, straining to make himself heard above the din of battle. “The town is ours!”
He rushed through the archway into the streets, almost knocked flat by his own men. They had the taste of blood in their mouths now, and nothing on earth would save Nottingham from the horrors of the sack. Women raped before having their throats cut, children murdered or taken away as slaves. The streets bathed in blood, strewn with broken furniture, hauled out or tossed from high windows. Men turned into devils, splashed with gore as they capered and reeled about the streets, drunk on plundered ale and wine, fighting like rats over stolen treasure. Flames leaping from one thatched roof to the next, until the whole of Nottingham, once the second city of England, was engulfed in fire.
Roger saw this nightmare unfold in his mind. He could do nothing to stop it. Once soldiers were unleashed on a town, only a fool would try and restrain them.
He slumped against a wall. Already the killing had started. Somewhere nearby a woman screamed.
“No! Please – no! Please...”
Roger threw down his sword and stopped up his ears against the hideous noise. She would be raped and killed, and it was his fault.
My fault. I could have given the town a chance to surrender. Matthew refused to listen. He wanted blood. I was too weak to defy him. Too weak.
If the garrison had refused terms of surrender, then the guilt lay with them. Those were the rules of war. Roger had failed to even offer terms. Instead he had allowed his men, the scum of the earth, to fall upon Nottingham like a pack of ravening wolves. Savages. Barbarians. Godless men.
May God forgive me. He will not.
He looked up the castle, proud and defiant on its high ridge. Where was Kirkby? The gates remained firmly shut. Roger almost wanted the constable to charge out at the head of his men-at-arms and drive the invaders from Nottingham.
Roger tried to pull himself together. He was getting old, well over fifty. Old and soft. How many men had he killed, even after they begged for mercy? This was no different.
The face of Walter Devyas rose before him. He vividly recalled Walter’s look of shock and disbelief as Roger’s knife tore into his throat in the dungeon beneath Nottingham Castle. The accusation in his dying eyes. Hurt and betrayal. Bewilderment.
Walter would never have betrayed me. He followed me for years, trusted me, loved me. At the last I murdered him. Why? Because Earl Ferrers told me to.
His morale collapsed, buried under waves of guilt and self-loathing. Roger suddenly hated Ferrers, even more than he hated himself. The man was a vain and selfish fool, consumed with vengeance, and cared nothing for others.
Roger turned back to the gate. At least he could do one clean thing and kill Matthew. He would have preferred Ferrers himself for a victim, but in his absence the earl’s steward would do.
I will bury my sword in his belly, and then flee. Where to? Where can I hide from my lord’s vengeance?
Nowhere in England would be safe for him. Ferrers had a long arm, longer still if he won the war and took power, maybe the crown itself. Roger was faced with the prospect of exile. Abandon his home at Swannington, take his wife and children and go overseas. Gascony, perhaps, or south of the Pyrenees. The kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were always on the lookout for hired swords.
His men were still flooding through Carter Gate. Roger tried to push his way through the press of bodies, smashed two archers aside with the flat of his sword, and stopped.
He had picked up the sound of horns. Distant, just on the edge of hearing. They swiftly grew louder. War-horns, blowing wildly from the south, accompanied by the sound of rising thunder.
Roger turned and ran up the nearest stair to the walkway. He tripped over the body of a dead soldier, lying prone with a wound in his throat. Cursing, Roger scrambled up the last few steps on all fours.
There was still bitter fighting on the wall, outlaws locked in combat with guardsmen and militia. A man shrieked as he took a spear in the belly and was pitchforked off the walkway. His body twisted in the air, once, before it hit the cobbles with a very final thump. Roger ignored the fighting and shaded his eyes to look south, over the roofs and battlements.
Dust trails hung in the air. His heart lurched at the gleam of armour, sunlight flashing off rows of lance-points. Scores – no, hundreds – of horsemen were pounding down the Great North Road from the direction of Northampton. Armoured knights on destriers, as many as twelve abreast. There was no end to them, pouring out of the forest, and all the while the horns blew and the earth shook under the racing tread of horses.
Roger’s courage shrivelled up and died inside him when he spotted the banners flying at their head. One displayed the golden pards of the royal family, charged with a blue label bearing the arms of France. The other bore a blue and yellow striped pattern around a white centre.
The arms of Prince Edmund Plantagenet and Roger Mortimer, lord of Wigmore. Earl Ferrers had counted on taking Nottingham and other northern cities before the royal army could move from London. Instead Edmund and Mortimer had raced north at a tearing pace, faster than any of the rebels could have imagined.
Nottingham was saved after all. Roger looked desperately at the battle raging around him. Most of his men were inside the town, with only a few stragglers and wounded left outside. Oblivious of the storm about to hit them. Fighting still raged in the streets, where the militia stubbornly refused to give ground against the outlaws.
Elsewhere it was all plunder and looting, just as Roger had envisaged. Flames started to crackle over the houses just inside Carter Gate, plumes of black smoke rising into the air. Screams and shouts and the wail of terrified children mingled with the clash of arms. The stench of death and burning filled Roger’s nostrils.
The horns grew louder. Men stopped trying to kill each other and looked around in fear and bewilderment. Roger plunged down the steps, shouting until his voice was hoarse.
“Fly!” he bellowed. “Fly for your lives! Retreat! Get to the forest!”
Only a handful of his men obeyed. The rest stood still, dumbfounded, or carried on looting. Most didn’t even hear the death bearing down on them until Prince Edmund’s knights clattered through the gates. Edmund himself was to the fore, mounted on a glossy black destrier, battle-axe flashing left and right.
Taken by surprise, Roger’s men offered little resistance. They fled in all directions, and died, slaughtered by knights on horseback or hunted down by enraged civilians. Some tried to hide inside cellars or the back rooms of houses and taverns, only to be dragged out and butchered in the street.
Finally, there came a blast of trumpets from the castle. The drawbridge crashed open and the garrison stormed out in force, led by Alan Kirkby. Caught between two fires,
the outlaws were crushed, scattered, all but wiped out inside half an hour.
Roger himself tried to run. He slew three soldiers, narrowly avoided being skewered by a lance, and was chased by a mob through a smithy and down a maze of alleys and side-streets. At last he was cornered against the wall of St Mary’s Church near the market square. Panting, soaked in sweat, he decided to make a good end.
“Come, then,” he gasped. “Which of you will take my head?”
He grinned savagely at the press of dirty faces about him. Roger had often hunted deer with his dogs in the forest of Charnwood. When brought to bay, a stag always stood his ground and gored as many hounds and huntsmen as possible before he was brought down.
Now Roger was the stag. He sucked in a few deep breaths, commended his soul to God, and prepared to charge into the mob. They would tear him limb from limb, as he deserved.
“Make way, there!”
A harsh voice, used to command, cut through the air. The crowd of citizens parted like the Red Sea, and opened up a lane wide enough for a horseman to pass.
The newcomer was a knight, to judge from his splendid destrier and bright mail, though Roger didn’t recognise the arms on his coat. He had doffed his helm, and the face inside the mail coif was stern. Clean-shaven, square and fleshy, with keen blue eyes and a clipped brown beard.
He trotted slowly between the ranks of civilians, eyes fixed on Roger The knight looked almost serene, entirely in control of himself and the world around him.
“You are Roger Godberd,” he said in a calm, measured voice. “Leader and captain of the outlaws who have plagued the three counties north of Trent.”
Roger swallowed, hard, and drew himself up. “I am,” he answered.
“Hang him!” a voice shouted from the crowd. A few others took up the cry, but it quickly died down. The knight ignored it.
“Good,” he went on when all was quiet again. “You are my prisoner. Throw down your sword.”
Roger hesitated. “I would rather die on my feet than hang,” he said with a trace of his old defiance. “If you want my sword, get down off that horse and take it.”
The Hooded Men Page 15