Longsword

by David Pilling

  “You promised not to dishonour me,” she said quietly as Robert took her towards the stair.

  He dropped her hand like a hot coal. “I only meant to take you… to show you somewhere you could rest,” he stammered. “There are beds upstairs, and I will have food and wine sent up to you. Hot water to wash in. Clean garments to replace those rags you wear.”

  Esther’s suspicions increased. The Devil had no reason to be kind to anyone, save for his own profit. Perhaps this was a game Robert liked to indulge in before taking his pleasure. There was no way of telling.

  “Stay down here,” she said, “please.”

  He bowed stiffly from the waist and took a step back. Esther took a deep breath and started to climb the steps.

  16.

  Sherwood Forest

  “Up, vermin!”

  Hugh was out of his bedroll and on his feet in an instant. His short time among the outlaws in Sherwood had taught him to move quickly, especially if their chief was on hand.

  It was early. The grey morning sky was just starting to lighten in the east. He rubbed his face and tried to clear his mind of nightmares. They had afflicted him every night since he left Nottingham, almost six weeks gone. A pack of slavering red-eyed hounds chasing him through a forest. His horse stumbled and threw him from the saddle; wicked yellow teeth closed on his leg. The forest and the hounds faded, replaced by men with faces like grinning demons.

  “What shall we do with him?” one snarled.

  “Put him to the fire.”

  “Cut him up and rub salt into his wounds. Make him dance.”

  Their shrill laughter ceased as another demon appeared, larger and uglier than the rest. Basilisk eyes drilled into Hugh as he lay sprawled on the ground, bleeding from the bite marks on his leg.

  “No,” said the chief demon. “This one shall serve me.”

  Hugh’s nightmares were inspired by the staged man-hunt he had arranged with the Sheriff of Nottingham. As planned, Hugh was chased into Sherwood by teams of wolfhounds and their handlers. One of the dogs broke from its leash, caught Hugh and sank its teeth into his leg. He might have suffered worse if a band of outlaws hadn’t sprung from their hiding place. They shot the dog and drove away the soldiers, who were aware of the plan.

  The outlaws took Hugh to their camp deep inside Sherwood. Here he met Nicholas d’Eyvill, every bit as foul a man as the Sheriff had described.

  Hugh soon came to think of him as no man at all, but the Beast.

  “Up! On your feet! Move!”

  The Beast’s voice roared through the trees. Hugh spied his bulky figure moving among the sleepers on the forest floor, or in their rough tents of animal hide. The big knight thrashed his men awake with his favoured weapon, a thick wooden club laced with strips of iron.

  The outlaw camp was near one of the d'Eyvill manors at Egmanton, in the eastern part of Sherwood Forest. This was the Beast’s favoured headquarters, though he never stayed in one place for more than a few days. Hugh had noted six temporary camps and twice that number of caches of food and gear scattered about the forest.

  He stood to attention, hands loose by his sides, as his new master stormed towards his part of the glade. Three of his fellow sleepers were much slower in rising. The Beast unleashed his sadistic fury on them.

  “Up! Up! Up!” he screamed as he leathered the whimpering sluggards with his club. Hugh stood still and regarded him with carefully concealed hatred. He had a few half-healed scars on his back, recent tokens of the Beast’s cruelty. The best way to avoid acquiring more was to stay quiet and do as he was told.

  The Beast was aptly named, in appearance as well as character. He resembled pictures Hugh had seen of apes in foreign lands: squat, hairy and powerfully built, flat-headed and with long, brutally strong arms ending in heavy fists. He maintained discipline through the harshest of methods, and delighted in making examples of those he suspected of shirking, disloyalty, or looking at him the wrong way.

  This morning the Beast had a companion, a tall, dark-eyed man who watched his host’s excesses with studied indifference. This was Sir Adam de Everingham, a frequent visitor to the outlaw camp. His family were the hereditary Keepers of Sherwood Forest and had their seat at Laxton, not far from Egmanton.

  As Keeper, Everingham was responsible for enforcing the forest laws and ensuring Sherwood was free of poachers and outlaws. Instead he had turned poacher himself, and secretly aided and abetted outlaw bands in return for bribes. Hugh despised him for a traitor and a profiteer, though not as much as he despised the Beast.

  “Your men seem tolerably awake now,” Everingham remarked when the Beast paused for breath, panting and sweating. His victims slunk away, stifling moans of pain.

  Over thirty men filled the glade. Most were dressed in rustic greens and browns, a few of the wealthier or more fortunate in gambesons and even a mail shirt or two. They stood in perfect silence, eyes fixed warily on their chief.

  “We’re moving out of Sherwood,” the Beast declared when he had got his breath back, “to join my kinsmen in the Isle of Ely. Some of you ignorant pigs won’t know where that is. I do. We ride there and pick the country clean on the way. Any questions?”

  There were none. No-one ever dared to ask questions of the Beast.

  Hugh’s heart beat a little faster at the news. The Isle of Ely. John d'Eyvill’s camp, and the main rebel headquarters after Kenilworth. Now his work could begin in earnest.

  It took four days to reach the Cambridgeshire fens. The outlaws rode at a hard pace, but as the Beast had promised there were plenty of profitable diversions on the way. Any travellers they met on the roads were robbed. Those that offered resistance were murdered and dumped by the roadside.

  The Beast was not without a grim sense of humour. One luckless friar they met with was robbed of his palfrey, made to climb an oak tree and deliver a sermon from the highest branches. He was grossly overweight, and wept like a child as he clumsily ascended the tree. The branches creaked ominously under him. The outlaws howled with laughter, even more so when a gust of wind blew up his cassock and exposed his fat buttocks.

  “Pray over us, Father!” the Beast shouted. “Beseech God to forgive us our sins! The higher you climb, the better He will hear you in Heaven!”

  Hugh watched grimly. He had already formed a clear impression of his companions. Few seemed to have any kind of political motive. They were thieves, plain and simple, who knew little and cared less for the memory of Simon de Montfort or the grievances of the Disinherited.

  By some miracle the friar reached the top of the tree. He hung there like a massive ape, clinging with his wrists and ankles to a bough that swayed dangerously in the wind. He shut his eyes and started to mutter something the outlaws couldn’t hear.

  “Speak up!” the Beast yelled. “I want to hear the blessings you shower on us!”

  His wretched victim only clung tighter to his bough. The Beast turned and called out three of his men.

  “Put some shafts in the fat bastard’s hide,” he snarled. “That should make him squeal or burst. Either is good.”

  His men slid off their ponies and strung their bows. Hugh felt sick as they took careful aim at the gibbering friar.

  A great howl of laughter went up as all three arrows hit the mark. Their victim tumbled out of the tree and hit the ground with a bone-shattering and very final thud.

  “Poor sport,” sniffed the Beast. He turned his horse away from the dead man, whose belly had burst open and spilled his entrails all over the road.

  The outlaws rode away from the scene in a storm of dust. Hugh lagged well to the rear. His own stomach heaved, and he found it difficult to hold back tears at what he had just witnessed.

  The Beast carved a trail of further atrocities as the outlaws rode south-east. They took care to avoid major towns or castles, but fell like ravening wolves on isolated settlements. For Hugh the journey passed in a hellish blur. He grew hardened to the sight and smell of fire-blackened houses and the
wanton robbery and murder of innocents. He forced himself to play his part, demanding money from cringing serfs at knifepoint, but stayed clear of the worst excesses.

  An atmosphere of terror had settled over the land. In his darkest moments, as he lay awake at night listening to his hateful companions gloating over their latest crime, he wondered if the Devil was unchained and loose in England. Perhaps the last days were coming, heralded by the collapse of law and the ineffectiveness of those tasked with upholding it.

  Where did his true loyalties lie? The Lord Edward and his spymaster had not uncovered the whole truth about Hugh’s past, and he had not told them.

  In the summer of 1264, when King Henry was still a prisoner and Simon de Montfort ruled the land, Hugh responded to de Montfort’s summoning of the feudal host. The reason for the summons was the threat of invasion from Flanders, where the exiled Queen Eleanor had gathered an army of mercenaries to reclaim her husband’s kingdom. Every town and village in England was required to provide men to help repel the invasion. No coercion was necessary. The response was feverish, and the host that gathered on Barham Down, between Canterbury and Dover, said to be the largest ever seen in England.

  Hugh had been among them, fired by zeal for his country and the memory of his dead brother, if not any great enthusiasm for de Montfort. Like many others, he had allowed himself to be infected by the propaganda that swept through the streets of London.

  A horde of aliens was poised across the Channel, they were told by Montfort’s criers, ready to invade English territory. “They are led by Queen Eleanor, that hated virago who has drained London with her taxes and tried to impose her avaricious foreign relatives on the people. She plans to unleash her foreign soldiers on our city with orders to spare no-one, slake her thirst for revenge on the English by bathing in our blood!”

  The threat of invasion came to nothing in the end. Still,Hugh could recall the glorious sense of common purpose on Barham Down. It was like nothing he had experienced before or since. The flame still lingered, deep in the core of his soul. That was why he had fought for the royalists at Chesterfield. Not for the sake of the King, but for England.

  And now England was being torn to bits by rival factions, like dogs fighting over a prime cut of meat. Simon de Montfort’s dream of a land governed by consent instead by royal tyranny had turned sour. Hugh felt bitter.

  The time will come, he vowed silently, when I will see the Beast and all his loathsome followers dancing on the gallows.

  Sleep, when it finally came, was a merciful balm, and for the first time in weeks nightmarish hounds did not chase him through the forest.

  Next morning the outlaws rode on. The close woods and forests gradually petered out into strips of pasture, low-lying watery meadows and fens. Hugh had never been in such flat, open country before, and found the lowering grey skies and endless horizon oppressive. He longed for the bustle and the excitement of London again, the close-packed streets and teeming crowds.

  They came within sight of an enormous abbey, surrounded by a prosperous-looking market town. The town had no walls or gates. Thick black columns of smoke rose from the streets into the gloomy wetlands sky, mingling with the smoke from chimneys. Here and there a building was licked by tongues of flame. Faint screams and the clang of church bells reached the ears of the outlaws from a mile distant.

  The Beast led them at a hard gallop towards the town. A small group of horsemen rode out of the gates to meet them, under a banner that snapped and rippled in the wind.

  Hugh flinched at the sight of the big knight at their head. Sir John d’Eyvill.

  17.

  Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire

  The Cistercian abbey at Garendon lay inside Charnwood Forest, a few miles from Godberd’s farm at Swannington. He knew this part of the world better than any, and loved it well, but felt uneasy as he led his gang out of the woods towards the old church.

  Godberd had come home for reasons of pure self-interest, in disregard of his orders to harry the supply lines of the royal army besieging Kenilworth. His contempt for Henry de Hastings, along with personal greed, led him to temporarily abandon the rebel cause. As a sop to his conscience, he had divided his band and left half under the command of Walter Devyas, with orders to prey on the royalist supply lines as Hastings instructed.

  Godberd feared he had committed a terrible blunder. Devyas was a brigand, first and foremost, with no political allegiance. He had only taken up arms in the rebel cause for the opportunity to rob and plunder, and was now free to indulge his worst excesses. No-one travelling the roads in or around Warwickshire would be safe from him.

  These doubts churned in Godberd’s mind as he rode up to Garendon. Signalling his men to halt, he reined in and dismounted. The doors of the abbey remained closed. He imagined the monks clustered inside like a pack of frightened sheep, peering through the narrow slit windows at the ruffians who had come to disturb their peace.

  “Ten of you come with me,” Godberd said, turning to address his men, “the rest stay with the horses. This shouldn’t take long.”

  He approached the doors of the nave, flanked by his brothers Geoffrey and William. Geoffrey had brought his followers to join those Godberd led out of Kenilworth, increasing the number of their company to fifty-five.

  Godberd hammered his fist against the double doors. “Open up!” he shouted, “I have business with the abbot that cannot wait!”

  The sound of heavy bolts being drawn echoed from inside. The doors swung open a fraction and a pale face peeped out, staring at Godberd with round, fearful eyes.

  He booted the door in and thrust the little doorkeeper aside. The interior of the nave appeared before him, with its rows of marching pillars and high, arched ceiling. Godberd recalled a time in his life when he had been overawed by the magnificence of such places. How he had crept in and out of the abbey like a supplicant, relieved at escaping from the house of God with his soul intact.

  That time was gone. A score of the brethren were gathered just inside the nave, resembling overweight magpies in their black and white Cistercian habits. Timid, shaven-headed, weak little men, he considered them. Unable to cope with life, they chose to hide away in cloisters. Godberd was tempted to bark, to see if they would scatter and fly away.

  Only one faced him with a spark of defiance. This was Abbot Simon, a stern and leathery man in late middle age. He looked down on Godberd with a cold eye.

  “Roger Godberd of Swannington,” he said in his harsh voice, used to command and being obeyed, “once a tenant of this abbey, now an outlaw and traitor. What business do you have here?”

  “Not to beg forgiveness,” Godberd replied. “Some years ago I leased land to Garendon Abbey. Since then I have incurred debts. I want the charters returned to me. Now.”

  The Abbot was not intimidated. “The leases were made in good faith, and I do not haggle with outlaws. You must leave.”

  Godberd smiled grimly. “I knew you would be stubborn,” he said, “but I am trying to be reasonable. Hand over the charters, and there will be no trouble.”

  “You dare threaten me, wolfshead? I am all that stands between you and your soul’s damnation.”

  “I already stand outside the law of God and man,” said Godberd. “If I was to drop dead this instant, you would refuse to bury me on consecrated ground. I owe you nothing, save a bloody nose if you continue to defy me.”

  The monks quailed. One or two of whimpered and pawed at the Abbot’s skirts. His proud head lifted, and he folded his arms in their long sleeves.

  “Commit violence against me or my brothers,” he said quietly, “and you will be excommunicated. Your soul shall be condemned to the lowest circle of Hell. An eternity of fire awaits you.”

  Godberd lost patience. He snapped his fingers. The men behind him spread out and advanced purposefully on the cowering monks.

  *

  A short while later, Godberd and his company were back on the road, heading back to their camp ins
ide Charnwood Forest. They neglected to scout ahead and rode straight into an ambush.

  Godberd was deep in contemplation when the peace of the forest was shattered by a war-horn. Mounted soldiers burst from the trees. He instinctively drew his sword and galloped straight at them. The outlaws surged after him. His only armour was a quilted leather jack, and he had forgotten to don the helm tied to his saddle.

  A fully armed knight thundered at him, faceless behind a steel casque. The knight wielded a vicious flanged mace and triangular shield that bore six white lions rampant against a blue field.

  Godberd ducked a sweep of the mace that would have taken his head off. He slashed at the knight’s exposed back, cursed as his sword scraped harmlessly against finely wrought mail. His horse stumbled into the flank of the knight’s much bigger destrier, causing her to stumble and almost throw her rider. Godberd dropped his sword and grasped the knight’s helm with both hands, trying to wrench it off. Their struggled ended when both men overbalanced and fell from their saddles.