Chapter Twenty
It was cold; a thick frost had turned the black scar of land between the gatehouse and the first houses of the town into a dull smear of grey. I peered out of the side door of a large wool warehouse on the edge of the grey strip of frosty-burnt ground in front of the eastern wall of the outer bailey. It was perhaps half an hour before dawn, and the first inkling of paleness was visible in the sky behind me. I could see my breath steaming in white plumes in the cold air. At my back were Hanno and Thomas – who was unhappy because I would not allow him to join in the assault on the left flank, the southern side of the massive wooden gatehouse. I knew that it would be a hard, gory slog of an assault – we all did – and, perhaps sentimentally, I wanted to spare Thomas, who was still no more than twelve years old, the bloodbath that was about to take place.
Though his disappointment had rendered him silent, Thomas did not sulk. He assisted me with a smooth efficiency as I dressed for battle, helping me to wriggle into an old patched mail coat, which I wore over a padded aketon; fitting my helmet on neatly – a plain steel cap with a nasal guard – and strapping it under my chin. My long leather gauntlets, with sewn-in steel finger and forearm guards, had been waxed and oiled until they were supple, and so had my sword belt, with Goody’s silver Christmastide buckle at the front securing it around my waist, cinched tight to take some of the weight of the mail coat. Thomas had cleaned and sharpened my old sword and oiled the misericorde that now sat in its sheath in my boot. I had never been so pampered before going into battle, and I found the sensation a pleasant one. When Thomas handed me my shield, which he had freshly whitened with a thick layer of lime wash and repainted with Robin’s device of the black-and-grey snarling wolf, I was ready to fight – ready save for the cold, empty feeling in my belly when I dwelt too much on the task we were about to attempt.
I looked behind me into the gloomy interior of the warehouse. The side walls and the far end of the building, twenty paces away, were stacked high with bales of wool, but it was the men I was looking at. Ninety-four of Robin’s hand-picked men-at-arms, each wearing a long dark surcoat of green cloth over whatever oddments of armour that he had, stood watching me, waiting for the signal to proceed. A few of them were checking their blades, or the leather straps of their shields, and some were on their knees, uttering a last prayer before we went in to battle. I looked at my company – former outlaws, thieves, runaways and ne’er-do-wells, even some, I noticed, who had once served in Murdac’s ranks – and I tried to appear unconcerned about the coming slaughter. They were all good men, brave men, I thought to myself, whatever they had done in the past. All was now forgiven. I did not feel worthy to command them. There wasn’t a man in that warehouse who was not afraid; but I knew that every man there would rather die than show it.
We had managed to commandeer five wooden thatching ladders, each more than twenty-five feet long, from the towns-folk. And the two men assigned to carry each one were closest behind me. The ladders were unwieldy things to transport, and the men carrying them were the best in the company, men I knew personally from Sherwood or Outremer. They were men I trusted with my life. In truth, all our lives were in their hands.
Hanno leaned towards me, and said in a low voice: ‘Do not worry, Alan. It is good. We can do this.’ And I nodded at him, managed a smile, and said, ‘I know, Hanno, I know. I’m sure it will be a wonderful success.’
I was lying: I was nervous and very far from sure that we could achieve what we had been asked to do that morning. I looked out of the door once again at the gatehouse, its boxy shape looming black in the half-light before dawn, half as high again as the gate that it guarded. We were going to attempt to run towards it, enduring the spears and arrows and crossbow bolts of hundreds of enemy soldiers, prop the thatching ladders up against the palisade, climb up into the teeth of a determined opposition, get over the wall, and fight our way down to the ground – and somehow survive long enough to open the gate and allow our mounted troops to gallop into the outer bailey and capture it.
It seemed ludicrous; a method of self-immolation, not a serious battle plan. But, if that proved to be the case, at least we would not be dying alone. Little John and another hundred or so of Robin’s men would be attacking the north side of the gatehouse at the same time as us.
I looked north, up the slope of the hill along the grey frosted line of the burnt area, at the singed line of houses and shops that now marked the new edge of Nottingham town, and heard a horn sound a single long blast in the chilly air. As I watched, I saw a huge warrior, bareheaded and with bright yellow hair in two long, thick braids on either side of his head, stepping out from a big house sixty paces away. He carried a huge double-bladed axe and an old-fashioned round shield. He lifted the axe and shouted something loud and rough and joyful, and more men spilled out of the house, carrying their slender wooden ladders.
I turned into the warehouse, meeting dozens of pairs of expectant eyes, and said in a loud clear voice, ‘Right, this is it. We form up outside, now.’ And then I stepped out into the grey dawn, turned to face the gatehouse and commended my soul to God and St Michael.
Within the gatehouse, the enemy had not all been sleeping; their sentries were alert. There were shouts and angry cries, and whistle and trumpet blasts as the garrison of the wooden fortification was roused as fast as possible from their bed rolls. A hundred and fifty yards away, heads began to appear on the palisade, little round black shapes, clustering thick as elder-berries on the crenellated wooden walls. A single crossbow twanged from the gatehouse, a sergeant shouted something angrily, and a bolt whizzed past a good twenty yards to the right of my waiting men, who were by now formed up in a loose mob behind me, the ladder-bearers to the fore.
And then there was more movement to my right as Robin stepped out from between two houses, slightly up the slope from our position, and a great mass of men followed him – archers, more than a hundred of them, all in uniform dark green, but few with more than a scrap or two of armour. They shuffled into a loose line, two ranks deep, between my position and Little John’s men, with Robin at the southern end. My lord raised a hand in cheery greeting to me, put a horn to his lips and blew two short notes.
And the archers began to shoot.
With a tremendous creaking of wood, a hundred men pulled back the hempen strings on their powerful yew bows, leaned far back and loosed. Up, up, almost vertically, they climbed into the grey dawn sky, seeming to pause in the air for a moment at the top of their parabola, before plunging down, down, the shafts falling on to the gatehouse and into the bailey beyond it, and slamming deep into the logs of the building and into the men sheltering behind the wooden walls, driving down into their cowering bodies like a solid, killing rain.
Even from more than a hundred paces away, I could hear the cries of pain from the defenders as the lethal yards of ash wood, tipped with four-inch-long, needle-sharp bodkin points, cascaded down upon them, punching through the padded jerkins of the crossbowmen, and plunging deep into the mail-clad shoulders and chests of the enemy men-at-arms with awful force.
Robin’s archers waited a few moments to check their range, and then they hauled back their bows once more and loosed another storm of wood and steel up high in the sky to fall like the wrath of God upon the enemy. And then a third wave of death swept up, seemingly swallowed up by a pale and hungry sky, before being spat down venomously on the defenders below.
It was time to go.
I turned to look at the men behind me. I knew that I should find something to say to those frightened, familiar faces – Robin would have had said exactly the right thing, at that time, to put courage into their hearts. But I had nothing to offer. I pulled out my sword, raised it in the air and said: ‘Right, let’s go. Keep your shields high. For God and King Richard – forward!’ And I set off at a jog across the burnt strip of land towards the imposing bulk of the gatehouse, the soft ash puffing beneath my running feet.
For a moment, I feared that nobody would follow me; that I would be charging across that wasted strip of land on my own to certain death. But I was too proud to look behind me – and, eternal praise be to Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I soon heard the rattle and chink and thump of running men behind me. My heart soared. I was about to take my sword to a hated enemy, and I was charging into battle at the head of as brave a band of fighting men as had ever trod this earth.
We had crossed fifty yards of open ground before the first crossbow bolts began to fly: black streaks of death hissing from the battlements like a demonic swarm of hornets. I felt rather than saw a quarrel smash into the top right corner of my shield. I heard a cry behind me and turned my head. At least four of my men were down, just from the first crossbow volley. The ladder-man directly behind me had dropped his burden and was kneeling on the grey-black ground, coughing blood, a quarrel protruding from his neck. The bolts were whistling past me left and right, I stopped and took a step back towards him, and he looked at me with beseeching eyes. Men were falling all around me, quarrels were whipping past in long black blurs – the earth seemed to be moving beneath my feet; I had the strange sensation that I was in the midst of a wild gale on a storm-tossed sea. I sheathed my sword and held out my right hand to the ladder-man, but at the last minute hardened my heart and grabbed the first rung of his ladder instead. Keeping my shield arm up, I shouted: ‘Come on, come on; let’s get this over with quickly.’ And those of us who could still run stumbled forward again, the bolts hissing and cracking around us.
I heard Robin’s horn ring out three times, and was dimly aware that the deadly rain of our arrows had ceased. But I had no time to ponder what damage might have been done to the enemy by my lord’s arrow-storm: his barrage did not seem to have slowed their deadly crossbow work one jot. Men continued to fall all around me, skewered, punctured, plucked from this life by the wicked black bolts. I feared that there would be not one single man alive by the time we made it to the wall. By God’s mercy, I was mistaken.
In what seemed no more than a few moments, two score of us survivors were panting, sweating, cursing below the high wooden walls of the palisade and the four remaining ladders were sweeping up through the grey air in a great arc to thump on to the battlements. ‘Up, up!’ I shouted, but I might have saved my breath. The men – God bless them – were swarming up the frail ladders like monkeys up a ship’s rigging, and I began to climb too, awkwardly with one hand on the rungs and my shield held above me, behind a heavy-set man with bright red hair and a vicious-looking spiked axe in his right hand. The ladder bounced alarmingly under our combined weight, and I heard a cry above me and was nearly swept from the ladder as the red-head crashed into my shield, a long spear waggling from his chest, before crunching to the ground below me. I looked up and stared into the eyes of a terrified man, no more than two or three yards away, glaring down at me between two crenellations on the battlements. He leant forward to loose his crossbow at me and, by the grace of God, even at that close remove, he missed – and I swear I flew up the final rungs of the ladder and launched myself over the top. The man’s bow was now unloaded, but as my feet landed on the walkway behind the palisade, he swung it at me in a short, hard arc. If it had landed, it would have crushed my skull, but I caught it on my shield, batted it away and, using my kite-shaped protection like an axe, I hacked the edge into his jaw. He fell away, inside the walls, down into the outer bailey, screaming wordlessly, blood flying. I took a brief moment to draw my sword – a heartbeat, but I had no more time than that. A man hurled himself at me from my left and I smashed him away with my blade.
The walkway and the ground beneath it were littered with dead, victims of the arrow storm, but more men in strange red livery were running along the walkway at me from both sides, converging from all around the palisade on the gatehouse. A crossbow twanged and more by luck than judgement I managed to get my shield up in time; the bolt ricocheted off its curved surface and away. And then I was fighting by pure instinct. I went right towards the gatehouse to engage a swordsman who was cutting at me. He came on too fast, and I dodged his wild swing at my head, lunged and stabbed him deep in the stomach. The man behind him was more cautious: he feinted at my legs and then chopped at my neck and I had to block with the shield before dispatching him with a short, hard thrust under the chin. Suddenly, the blood was singing in my veins; all my earlier nervousness burnt away by the heat of battle. I was inside the walls of the castle, fighting for my lord and my King, and slaying their enemies with a righteous fury. And I was no longer alone. As I cut the legs from beneath a big crossbowman with a low, vicious sweep of my sword, I glimpsed more of my men behind me on the walkway of the palisade. There was Hanno, snarling and hacking at a mob of men-at-arms who had appeared from the south. And another two of our men came boiling over the wall. Three men, now four and five. They were tumbling over the top of the ladder and taking their swords with a deadly swiftness to the enemy. And my ladder was not the only one that had successfully surmounted the palisade – I could see two others further along the wall, and the men, my brave men, Robin’s wonderful fearless men, pouring over the top like the bursting of a dam.
I charged towards the gatehouse, skewering a man who was emerging from its cover straight through the cheek, mangling his face and ripping the blade free, running heedlessly past him as he dropped screaming to his knees, and now I was entering into the gloom of the narrow building. A tall knight, his face red with fury, ran at me out of the upper storey of the gatehouse, mace and sword whirling. I gave ground, two steps, three, until I was once again outside the structure, half stumbling over bodies as his berserk onslaught drove me backwards. There were flecks of white spittle at his lips, which were drawn back in a grimace of mindless rage. He lunged at me with his sword, and I stepped back and away to my right towards the palisade, dodging the blow. He swung at my head with the mace, screaming something at me, and lunged again with his blade. I parried the mace with my sword, and blocked the sword with my shield; for a moment we were locked together, faces only inches apart. Then I bullocked my head forward, smashing the steel rim of my helmet into his teeth, snapping several off at the root, and he stepped back, bloody-mouthed, in surprise – and into thin air.
The battle-crazed knight fell fifteen foot on to the hard-packed earth of the outer bailey. I could hear the crack of his neck from the walkway, and he twitched only once before he lay still.
With the knight’s death, the defence of the gatehouse and our section of the palisade came to an end. The surviving crossbowmen were running. Hurrying, stumbling, jumping down the wooden steps that led to the ground, and streaming away from the gatehouse, back towards the castle. And we ran after them – jubilant, hearts pounding, muscles glowing. Our men were hoarsely cheering themselves and their achievement – but we had no time for celebrations. ‘The gate!’ I shouted. ‘Get to the gate. We must open the gate.’
And I led more than a score of men, fizzing with victory, to the huge wooden door of Nottingham Castle, where another fight was already reaching its climax. Little John, like some giant Saxon war god of old, his yellow braids swinging in time with the sweeps of his double-headed axe, was cutting his way methodic ally through a gaggle of terrified enemy men-at-arms, but I could see that his assault on the north side of the barbican had been even bloodier than ours. There were very few men in Robin’s dark green livery fighting beside him – perhaps a mere two dozen of the hundred that had set out such a short time ago.
We men of the southern attack charged into the fray, yelling our war cries and brandishing weapons – and the enemy melted away before us, deserting the gate in panic and retreating a hundred yards or so to where a dozen knights on foot were rallying the fleeing troops and preparing for a counter-attack. We had only a very little time, for there were so few of us – fewer than fifty men still on their feet, the mingled remnants of both attacking parties – and if we did not get the gate open swiftly, the enemy would mass in their hundreds and easily overwhelm us.
Two of Little John’s men were fiddling with the cross-bar that held the swinging sections of the great door together. There was some kind of locking mechanism, a bar-and-lever combination, and the men, it seemed, could not fathom how it might work.
The enemy knights had stopped roughly forty fleeing crossbowmen, and I could see them reassembling, calmer now, under orders again, loading their weapons, using the hook on their belts and a foot in the stirrup at the end of the bow to haul the drawstring back.
Worse, a large crowd of men-at-arms – perhaps a hundred or more in Murdac’s black surcoats with the red chevrons – was pouring out from the barbican in the middle bailey. Reinforcements. Things were about to get very, very bad.
‘Hurry!’ I snapped to the men pushing and pulling at the cross-bar on the gatehouse door. ‘They are coming. We have only a few moments before they attack.’
‘Get out of my way,’ boomed a deep confident voice that I knew so well. And I saw Little John shove the men aside and swing his blood-soaked axe double-handed at the oaken beam that barred the door.
Thunk!
But even Little John’s mighty blow only chipped out a slim bright brown-yellow splinter of wood an inch thick from the cross-bar. The wood was old oak and tough, and the bar a foot wide. We didn’t have time for John’s rough carpentry.
‘Form a line here,’ I shouted. And with one eye on the mass of black-and-red enemy a hundred yards away, I pushed and pulled Robin’s men into two ranks, the front rank kneeling, the second rank standing, shields to the fore.
Thunk!
Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Little John was beginning to lay into the crossbar with a slow but steady rhythm. Then Hanno was by his side, following John’s blow immediately with one of his own from a smaller, lighter, single-bladed war axe.
Thunk! Think!
The two axe blows made strikingly different sounds.
‘Stay tight, and keep your shields up,’ I shouted to our raggedy wall of forty or so men. But the men needed no urging, for the crossbowmen had reloaded and soon, as everyone could plainly see, their wicked bolts would begin to fly again.
Thunk! Think!
I looked behind me to the east and saw that the sun was fully up by now. It was going to be a lovely spring day.
‘Here they come!’ I shouted. The crossbowmen had divided into two groups of about twenty men each and were advancing on either side of the main body of a hundred or so of Murdac’s men-at-arms. At seventy yards they began to loose their quarrels. Not as a volley but individually: two or three men shooting, then stopping to reload while the others advanced. These were clearly first-class troops, well disciplined and brave. They kept up a nearly constant rain of missiles on our thin, weak shield wall, forcing our men to cower behind their flimsy protection to avoid being spitted like hares.
Thunk! Think!
A man standing beside me on the edge of our double line screamed suddenly and fell backwards, a black bolt thrusting from his eye.
‘Keep those shields up!’ I shouted, and crouched down myself in the front rank beside the men, trying to keep my body as much as possible behind my kite-shaped shield.
The two groups of crossbowmen were now so close that they could hardly miss. And between them the men-at-arms were advancing in a purposeful manner, swords drawn, some armed with short spears or cut-down lances. I knew that at about twenty yards away they would launch into a run and smash through my thin line of exhausted, battered men. We had, by my reckoning, only a few moments before we were overrun by the enemy. The crossbow bolts were rattling against the shield wall, occasionally finding a gap and giving rise to a yelp or scream.
Thunk! Think!
‘God’s bulging bollocks!’ shouted a great voice, clearly in pain. And I turned to look back at Little John, who was peering over his own shoulder at a black quarrel sticking out from his huge right buttock; his green hose were glistening black, soaked with blood. But he merely shrugged the pain away, leaving the evil-looking bolt in place, and turned back to his task.
Thunk! Think!
I heard Hanno yell something but could not make it out. The enemy men-at-arms were only forty paces away now.
Thwick! A different sound. I risked another quick look behind me and saw that John had finally chopped his way through the bar. Limping more than a little, he was helping Hanno to swing the heavy wooden portal open. I looked out of the gap between the slowly opening doors of the gatehouse and saw a sight beyond it that made my heart leap with joy.
Horsemen.
A great mass of armoured horsemen, led by a tall knight in brightly polished, gold-chased helm riding a magnificent destrier beneath a red-and-gold standard. And beside him was another familiar figure, faceless in his flat-topped tubular helmet but wearing a deep green surcoat with a black-and-grey wolf’s mask depicted on the chest. The horsemen came on at the trot. They were only thirty yards away. The lead horseman lowered his lance, and all his companions – at least three-score knights – followed his example in a wave of white wood and glittering steel. A trumpet sounded and the cavalry came up to the canter. It was Richard, my King, coming to the rescue. And my liege lord, the Earl of Locksley, was riding at his side.
Another trumpet rang out. The horsemen charged.
‘Down!’ I shouted. ‘Everybody down. Lie down. Lie still, lie absolutely still if you want to live.’ And as one the men in the shield wall dropped to the muddy ground. I could feel the wet earth vibrate under my cheek, and hear the rumble of massive hooves, and I dared not look up as the household cavalry of Richard Plantagenet, by the Grace of God, King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou and Maine, a company of some of the finest and bravest knights in Christendom, poured over our prone bodies like a rushing equine waterfall, jumping cleanly over the cowering bodies of forty prostrate men in a welter of pounding hooves and flying mud, before spurring on to smash straight into the advancing line of black-and-red men-at-arms, lances couched, a battle cry roaring from every mounted warrior’s throat.
When I finally lifted my head I saw a scene of utter carnage. King Richard’s cavalry had crashed into Murdac’s men-at-arms like a mighty tempest blowing through a field of stacked wheat, the twelve-foot razor-tipped lances skewering bodies and hurling the enemy several yards backwards. Those who had not been pierced by their spears or crushed by the giant hooves of the knights’ destriers had scattered. And when the lances were gone, snapped off, impaled in heads or buried deep in infantrymen’s bellies, Richard’s knights pulled out long swords or a mace or an axe and the butchery continued. I saw Robin lopping the sword arm from a man-at-arms who had been foolish enough to turn and face him. But even those who ran rarely escaped. I watched a fleeing crossbowman easily overhauled by a horse-borne knight, who hacked down in passing, slicing open the poor man’s unprotected face. Three knights surrounded a knot of struggling men-at-arms, battering at their heads and upheld arms with mace and sword until all the footmen had fallen in a sodden, twitching heap. Everywhere running men-at-arms were being sliced and hacked and battered by the victorious knights; no quarter was given, and none of the enemy were thought to be worth ransoming, so scores died, and their bloody rag-doll bodies were trampled and torn time and again under the hooves of the knights’ big horses as they criss-crossed the outer bailey looking for fresh prey. The lucky ones, or those enemy crossbowmen and men-at-arms who could run the fastest, made it back to the barbican in the middle bailey, and were quickly pulled inside for safety as the thick iron-studded oak door slammed shut behind them. But they were few, very few.
Richard’s knights, however, did not have it all their own way. After the initial onslaught was over, from the walls and towers of the upper and middle baileys, Murdac’s surviving Flemish crossbowmen took their revenge. Foot-long oak bolts, tipped with sharp iron, hissed from the battlements, sinking deep into horse and rider without discrimination. Javelins were hurled downward, and huge boulders, too. One unfortunate knight, unhorsed outside the barbican of the middle bailey and battering futilely with his sword hilt at the barred door, was fried alive when a cauldron of red-hot sand was poured on him from a murder-hole above. I saw another knight, cursing and crying with pain, pinned through the meat of his thigh by a black quarrel to the wood of his saddle.
But the outer bailey was ours. When the defenders who had remained there were all dead, mortally wounded or captured, and there were no more easy targets for the roaming knights’ swords, most of the mounted men, panting and praising God, retreated back beyond the open gate of the captured gatehouse and out of range of the defenders’ deadly missiles. There was nothing else for them to do: the main castle was shut tight, secure from their blood-spattered blades, and their horses could not gallop through the grey stone of its massive walls.
We men in Lincoln green had picked ourselves up from the ground by this point, though we had taken no further part in the fight for the outer bailey. A few of the brighter enemy men-at-arms had thrown their weapons away and run towards us, shouting as they came that they wished to surrender. They escaped the wrath of the knights, and took refuge with us, under guard, on the far side, the town side of the gatehouse and the wooden palisade we had so valiantly captured. The outer bailey of Nottingham Castle belonged to King Richard’s men – but we could not easily move about in it, except by running and dodging and hiding behind the few scattered buildings there, for fear of the crossbowmen who now lined the castle walls, seemingly determined, even though the fight for that ground was over, to pick us off one by one.
King Richard came walking unhurriedly across the open space, horse-less and hobbling slightly. For some reason – most probably ignorance of who he was – the crossbowmen seemed to be sparing him. He stopped in front of the right-hand part of the wooden double door that Little John had managed to open in the nick of time and greeted me cordially:
‘Blondel, how goes it?’ he called. ‘You survived, I see.’
‘I’m well, sire. Quite miraculously unharmed.’
The King nodded distractedly and just then a crossbow bolt slammed into the ground between us. It seemed that the bowmen on the castle’s stone walls had finally woken up to the fact that the King was in their sights. Richard ignored the bolt sticking out of the earth in front of him, and a second one that landed on his other side but closer to the royal foot. He was staring up at the wooden bulk of the gatehouse. We were at the extreme range of the crossbow’s power, more than a hundred and fifty yards from the battlements of the middle bailey, but Richard must have known that, with his light desert armour, any quarrel that struck him could still do considerable damage. The King’s self-possession, I thought admiringly, was remarkable.
Two household knights came hurrying up to their sovereign as he stood in the doorway of the gatehouse gazing silently up at its structure. They were carrying two large shields and, standing behind the King, they lifted the kite-shaped objects to protect his back from any further insult from the castle crossbowmen.
‘You did very well, Blondel,’ said the King ruminatively, ‘to capture this gate. I thank you for it. But, you know, we cannot hold this place …’
A crossbow bolt skittered off the shield being held by one of the knights standing protectively behind him, and my concentration was diverted momentarily so that I did not hear what the King said next.
‘… it’s a shame really, but it can’t be helped,’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon, sire,’ I asked, embarrassed by my inattention. ‘What did you just say?’
‘I said, my good Blondel, that you are to take your men and burn this gatehouse to the ground. Destroy the whole outer palisade too, while you are at it. If we cannot hold the outer bailey, then they shall not have it either. Burn this and all the defences that you can get at. And when we have done that, I shall send heralds to talk to this Murdac fellow, to see what he has to say for himself.’
It was easier said than done to burn the palisade. I gathered up the survivors of that morning’s attack, borrowed a score of Robin’s archers, and we set about placing dry straw and brushwood faggots doused with oil along the inside and outside edges of the palisade, ready to put it to the torch. We were harassed constantly by the crossbowmen in the middle bailey and I had to use a screen of men carrying shields on both left and right arms to keep those men laying the fire safe from the darting quarrels of the defenders.
I lost one man killed and two injured in the process, and it was grim work. We were not taking part in a mad rush for glory, with the rage of battle pounding in our ears, but doing heavy, difficult, dirty work. What is more, destroying the outer bailey’s defences made the sacrifice of precious lives that morning seem a terrible waste. But when a King commands, you obey.
It was gone noon by the time we finished, and I released the men to find food and rest as the first flames began to crackle and burn along the line of palisade. I put the torch to that damned gatehouse myself, piling straw and brushwood on either side of the wooden doors, then throwing a burning length of pine into each pile and retreating beyond the burnt strip as the column of smoke rose into the blue March sky. My task accomplished, I walked back into the town to seek out Robin and receive fresh orders.
I found the Earl of Locksley in a big townhouse in the centre of Nottingham, drinking red wine and joking with Little John. Robin was sitting on a stool in the corner of the room with his left leg extended. He had a bloody bandage on his thigh, but he assured me jovially that it was a clean javelin wound and would surely heal, given time – if he was only allowed a little peace and quiet. Little John was lying flat on a big table in the centre of the hall, naked from the waist down. His right buttock was swollen and bloody and the black shaft of the quarrel was sticking up vertically, protruding about six inches from the mound of pink-white flesh. Nonetheless, John seemed to be in very good spirits. A nervous barber-surgeon was fussing around the big man’s nether regions, mopping at the blood that was trickling down his hip and muttering. The man, who was clearly rather frightened, kept picking up an instrument that resembled two spoons fixed together – the bowls facing each other, and the whole contraption attached to the end of a short, thin iron shaft – then putting it down again.
Robin saw me peering at the instrument and said: ‘It’s a tool for removing arrow heads from deep wounds. The spoony part is inserted into the wound, closed around the arrow head, which allows the head to be withdrawn without causing any more damage. Totally unnecessary, in my view – Flemish crossbowmen don’t use barbed arrows for warfare. But Nathan here insists it is a marvellous invention and the decision must be his: after all, Nathan is the man who is to operate on John, when he can summon up sufficient courage.’
I looked at Robin quizzically. And my master said: ‘John has threatened to break both of Nathan’s arms if he causes him any unnecessary pain.’ And he gave me a lop-sided smile.
Little John was grinning owlishly at me from his position on the table. I could see that, unlike Robin, who was merely relaxed, John was thoroughly drunk. He had also been tightly strapped to the table, with several thick leather bands securing his huge chest and both meaty legs. I walked over to him. ‘Now then, John,’ I said, selecting my most patronizing tone. ‘There is no need to throw your weight about here and make such a childish fuss about a little thing like this.’
And with my index finger I flicked the shaft of the quarrel that was sticking out of his arse cheek – hard.
It wobbled satisfyingly, and John bellowed with rage and pain and tried to struggle free of the leather bonds that strapped him to the table. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Nathan the barber-surgeon looking stunned and Robin, heedless of his javelin wound, convulsed with laugher on his stool in the corner.
‘That,’ I said to the red-faced giant now writhing on the table and trying to reach me with great backward sweeps of his massive hands, ‘was for the punch in the face that you gave me at Carlton.’ And I grinned broadly at him to display the tooth he had chipped.
‘And this is to teach you not to bully poor barber-surgeons—’ I grabbed the shaft of the quarrel and pulled it free of the wound with one swift, clean jerk of my wrist. It came free easily, accompanied by a splash of black blood.
Followed only by John’s booming roar of outrage and the sound of Robin’s helpless laughter, I ran from the room and tumbled out into the street, hardly able to contain my own mirth. It had been a long, difficult day, but that image of Little John’s crimson face, contorted with impotent fury, was one that would warm me on many a cold night for years to come.
At dusk, the King summoned his chief counsellors to his big pavilion in the deer park. I accompanied Robin to the meeting, but only after I had ascertained that Little John was hors de combat, sleeping off a vast quantity of drink in a comfortable bed in the town, his bum cheek now cleaned, stitched and bandaged by the surgeon. I had resolved to stay well out of his way for a few days, at the very least, until he had calmed down; possibly a month – maybe even a year or two.
All the King’s senior barons and knights were there, crammed into the stuffy tent, some bearing the marks of the day’s battle. The Scotsman, David, Earl of Huntingdon, was chatting to Earl Ferrers, who had been lightly but unluckily wounded in the face that afternoon by a quarrel fired from the castle. His men had made a valiant attack on the barbican of the middle bailey, and had very nearly taken it. But the falling of dusk, and a surprisingly determined resistance by the defenders, had forced them to retreat at the last, leaving their dead in piles in the ditch below the middle bailey’s stone walls. William, Baron Edwinstowe, standing alone near the back of the pavilion, gave me a cautious nod and a half-smile; I bowed slightly in return. Ranulph, Earl of Chester, stood with Sir Aymeric de St Maur and another grey-haired Templar knight talking quietly in a corner of the tent. While we waited for the King, Robin and I passed the time in conversation with William the Marshal – he had been one of the knights who had charged to our rescue that day with Richard, and he had slain many of the enemy that morning with his own hand. I thanked him for saving my life, and the lives of my men.
‘I should be thanking you,’ said this grizzled old war-hound. ‘Without your valiant assault on the gatehouse, we’d never have taken the outer bailey.’
‘Not that it has done us much good,’ said Robin with a grimace. ‘Ferrers’ assault on the barbican failed. We are still no closer to taking the stone heart of Nottingham. You might say that we just wasted the lives of a good many men today – mostly my men.’
I knew that Robin’s wound was paining him, but he was also genuinely angry about the carnage that had occurred during the taking of the gatehouse. Of the one hundred and ninety-odd men-at-arms who had charged with Little John and me that morning, more than two-thirds were now dead or wounded. And many of the badly wounded would not live through the night. Robin’s forces had been severely depleted by the attack, and we could not even say that we now had mastery of the outer bailey. No one did.
‘I don’t care for that sort of talk,’ growled the Marshal, looking sharply at Robin. ‘It was bravely done, and Alan here is to be congratulated for a difficult task accomplished.’ I smiled gratefully at William. And Robin grinned a little ruefully at me. ‘You are right, Marshal,’ my lord said. ‘That was remiss of me. You did very well today, Alan. And I thank you from my heart for your gallant efforts.’
I wasn’t sure I liked the word ‘efforts’, but before I could raise the matter, Robin changed the subject.
‘What news from the heralds, Marshal?’
The old warrior scratched his grey head. ‘Nothing very surprising: the castle still formally defies us. The only ray of sunlight is that the heralds have reported that there are those inside who, it is believed, would surrender to the King in the right circumstances. But not while the Constable, Sir Ralph Murdac, is in command there. The wretched fellow is apparently devoted to Prince John, and he has told the heralds that he does not believe that the foe encamped before him really is King Richard. He is saying that our army is commanded by an imposter, some jumped-up knight pretending to be Richard!’
Robin snorted. ‘That’s a good one – the King is an imposter! And the idea of Ralph Murdac being devoted to anyone is quite amusing, too. That little hunchbacked rat has nowhere else to go, and he knows it, so he’s dressing it up as knightly loyalty. But that’s all by the by. I take it that there is no chance of a nice peaceful surrender, then?’
‘None – while Murdac remains Constable,’ said William. ‘We must take the castle by force. It will have to be done the hard way, the old-fashioned way.’
‘Maybe – but then again, maybe not,’ said Robin, musingly. ‘Will you excuse us, Marshal? I need to speak to young Alan on a private matter.’
And, hobbling slightly from his javelin wound, he pulled me aside and began to whisper quietly into my ear.
By rights, I should not have spoken out at the King’s Council. Although I believed Richard was fond of me, I was a nobody, a mere captain of men, a youth, not yet twenty years old, of no family to speak of, and with only one small manor to my undistinguished name. But I did speak, and it changed my life. And, as it was his idea, I have Robin to thank for the results.
The meeting began with the King addressing the assembled barons and bishops, offering a brief word of thanks to the Marshal, the Earl of Locksley, Earl Ferrers and several of the other knights there for their actions that day. Then he moved on to give a résumé of what the heralds had reported: namely, that the castle still defied us, and would continue to do so under the command of its present Constable. The King did not mention that Murdac considered him to be a jumped-up imposter. Rightly so: even royalty must safeguard its dignity.
‘So, gentlemen,’ said the King, ‘what we need to do is bring those big walls down. I will teach Sir Ralph Murdac to defy me, by God’s legs I will! I have given orders to my artificers to build a couple of siege engines by morning, a powerful mangonel and a good-sized trebuchet, and over the next few weeks I plan to reduce the east wall of the middle bailey to rubble. I took Acre, and that was considered an impossible task, and I can damned well take Nottingham. But I’m afraid, gentlemen, it will take some time …’
‘Sire,’ I said. I still find it hard to believe that I had the courage to interrupt my King in mid-flow, and I would not have done so were it not for Robin’s insistent elbow nudging my ribs, but I did. And this is what happened.
At first the King did not notice me. ‘We need to bottle them in securely,’ he was saying. ‘I want no food, water or provisions, and particularly no men or information going in or out of the castle. You, my lord of Chester, will take the southern section, by the cliffs …’
‘Sire,’ I said again, and this time the King noticed me.
He looked slightly annoyed to be interrupted, and I suddenly wondered if I was making a huge mistake.
‘What is it, Blondel?’ the King said, coldly.
‘Sire,’ I said for the third time. And my tongue shrivelled in my mouth.
‘Yes?’ The King was definitely getting testy. ‘Now that you have interrupted me, Alan, speak if you have a mind to.’
I finally managed to get my words out: ‘What if we were to, ah, get rid of Murdac? What if we were to – well, ah, kill him, or remove him from command of the castle in some way? Wouldn’t that change things for us?’ As I said it, I knew it sounded absurd, the sort of thing a silly child might say, and I could feel my cheeks redden as some of the most powerful barons in England stared at me, astonished at my impudence.
The King looked at me for a long, long moment, and for an instant I believed that he would order the guards to drag me away from the tent and have me hanged, drawn and quartered.
‘And how would you accomplish this?’ the King asked, frowning.
‘I know of an old servants’ entrance into the castle, sire. It is forgotten; I believe it remains a secret known only to a very few. It leads from a tavern below the southern wall of the outer bailey to a small unused buttery inside the upper bailey of Nottingham Castle itself.’
My voice was growing in confidence as I spoke. ‘It is a narrow passage, and I do not believe that a large number of men-at-arms could use it. The noise a large party of men would make would ensure detection. And once detected, they could be easily slaughtered one by one as they emerged into the castle. But one man, treading lightly, could secretly gain access to the castle this way, I believe. He would then have a good chance – if he did not put too high a value on his own life – of finding Sir Ralph Murdac and killing him. Perhaps in his chamber at night as he slept, perhaps in some other way – but I think it could be done.’
‘You may have something, Blondel,’ said the King, and he smiled at me. And instantly, all the other great men in the tent were beaming, too. ‘Without Murdac, as you say, we’d have a much better chance of getting these rascals to surrender my castle. Would you do this for me, Alan? It is a risky – one might say downright foolhardy – proposition …’
‘Yes, sire,’ I said simply. And what else could I say? He was my King.
Richard nodded to himself as if confirming something that he already knew, and then he looked over at Robin. ‘Do you know about this forgotten servants’ hole, Locksley?’
‘No, sire,’ lied Robin. ‘But I have full confidence in Alan of Westbury. If he says it exists, it surely does, and, if anyone can accomplish this most dangerous and difficult task, it is he.’
I looked at Robin, a little surprised at his praise and by his denial of all knowledge of the tunnel. He grinned over at me and gave me a suspicion of a wink. And I smiled back.
When I tell the old tales of Robert, the cunning Earl of Locksley, of the wily outlaw Robin Hood, all too often I stress the times when he behaved badly. I tell far too often of his cruelty, or of his greed for silver, of his indifference to the sufferings of those outside his family circle, and his contempt for Holy Mother Church. And all too often I forget to mention the one thing that was perhaps his most outstanding characteristic: his kindness. If you served him well, he would pour out his benevolence on you without ever counting the cost to himself. He was, at heart, a very kind and generous man – at least to those whom he loved.
Robin had wanted me to raise the subject of the tunnel with the King because he wanted Richard to know how resourceful I was; and for the King to reward me in due course. Robin could have claimed credit for the scheme himself; he could have said that he had shown the tunnel to me, and used it to rescue me from imprisonment inside Nottingham. But he did not. That was the sort of man he was. And so, with a careless smile and a half-wink, he secured the King’s personal favour for me, and dispatched me on a great and perilous adventure – and quite possibly to my death.