Warlord (Outlaw 4) (3 page)

I was, however, sorely tempted to have the men stop and dig a decent grave for a young fair-haired peasant that we passed hanging by his neck from a walnut tree. There was something horribly familiar about the canted angle of his neck and the awful vulnerability of his dangling bare feet. I realized as I rode past that gently swaying corpse that it put me in mind of my father’s death, ten years before, in the little hamlet just outside Nottingham where I was born. My father Henry, my mother Ellen and my two younger sisters Aelfgifu and Coelwyn and I all scratched a living from a few strips of land in the fields on the edge of the village. Despite long days of hard labour, we were barely able to feed ourselves; but there had been an abundance of laughter and
happiness in our small cottage, and much music and singing. My father had a wonderful voice, slow-rolling and sweet like a river of honey, and my fondest memories of that simple household were of my mother and father singing together, their voices intertwining, their melody lines looping and folding over each other in the smoky air of the low, one-room cottage like gold and silver threads in a fine castle tapestry. My father was the one who taught me to sing – and it was thanks to that skill that I first came to the attention of my master Robin Hood. Six years later, I was his personal
trouvère
– a ‘finder’ or composer of songs – and also his trusted lieutenant. In a way, I owed my extraordinary advancement from dirt-poor labourer to lord of war to my father’s love of music.

He had been a strange man, my father. I had been told that he was the second son of an obscure French knight, the Seigneur d’Alle and, as such, he had been destined for the Church. He had duly become a monk, a singer at the great cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. But somehow he had been disgraced and forced to flee to England. Robin, who had known him then, had told me that some valuable objects had gone missing from the cathedral and my father had been accused of their theft – accusations that my father had strenuously denied. Nevertheless, he had been cast out of the Church and had had to make a living with his voice. As a masterless
trouvère
, he had travelled to England and wandered the country singing for his supper and a place to lay his head at the castles across the land, but tidings of his expulsion from Paris ran ahead of him and he could find no secure position; no lord was willing to take a thief into his household. Eventually, during his long wanderings he met my mother, Ellen – a lovely woman in her youth – and married her and submitted to the dull but stable life of a common man working the land. I remember him cheerfully saying to me once, when I was no more than five or six years old: ‘None of us knows
what God has in store for him, Alan; we may not have fine-milled bread on the board or fur-trimmed silk on our backs, but we can wrap ourselves in love, and we can always fill our mouths with song.’

My family was a contented one, happy even; I might well have inherited the strips of land my father worked and been trudging behind a pair of plough oxen on them to this day, had it not been for my father’s untimely death. Before dawn one morning, as we slept – my mother, father, myself and my two sisters, all snugged up together on the big straw-stuffed mattress in our tiny hovel – half a dozen armed men burst through the door and dragged my father outside. There was no pretence of a trial; the sergeant in charge of the squad of men-at-arms merely announced that the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire had declared that my father was a thief and an outlaw. Then his men wrestled a rope around my father’s neck and summarily hanged him from the nearest oak tree.

I watched them do it, at the raw age of nine; restrained by a burly man-at-arms and trying not to cry as my father kicked and soiled himself and choked out his life before my terrified eyes. Perhaps I am weak, but I’ve never been able to watch a hanging since – even when the punishment is well deserved – without a sense of horror.

That act of unexpected violence destroyed our family. My mother lost the land that my father had ploughed and, to stave off destitution, she was forced to gather firewood each day and barter it to her neighbours for food or sell it to any that would buy; and few would. Why hand over a precious silver penny for sticks of timber when there was plenty of kindling to be had for free in the woodlands not three miles away? We slowly began to starve: my two sisters died of the bloody flux two years after my father’s death, a lack of nourishment making them too feeble to fight off the sickness when it struck. Faced with a stark choice, I became a
thief; cutting the leather straps that secured the purses of rich men to their belts and making away with their money into the thick crowds of Nottingham market. I like to think that I was a good at it – I have always been lucky, all my long life. But, of course, one cannot rely on luck alone. I was thirteen when I was caught in the act of stealing a beef pie; the Sheriff would surely have lopped off my right hand if I hadn’t managed to escape. That was when I went to join Robin Hood’s band of men in the trackless depths of Sherwood Forest.

I never forgot that it was the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire – a black-hearted bastard named Sir Ralph Murdac – who had sent his men to hang my father. Even as a child I swore to be revenged on him. Years passed and I learned to fight like gentlefolk, a-horse with sword and lance, and joined King Richard on the Great Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. At the siege of Nottingham, on our return, I had the good fortune to capture the same Ralph Murdac, who was defying the King, and deliver him bound hand and foot to my royal master. I had meant to kill him, to cut his head off in the name of my father – and I would have done so gladly, but for one thing. As he knelt before me, bound, helpless, his neck stretched for my sword, he told me that if I killed him I would never discover the name of the man who was truly responsible for my father’s death. In the face of Death, Murdac claimed that he had been acting on the instructions of a very powerful man, a ‘man you cannot refuse’. If I spared him, he said, he would reveal the man’s name.

And so I spared him. But, as God willed it, he never told me the name of the man who had ordered Henry d’Alle to be destroyed. King Richard had hanged Murdac the next day, as a warning to the rebellious defenders of Nottingham Castle, before I could thoroughly question him.

I felt the weight of my father’s death – and the need to find the man who had ordered it – like a lead cope around my shoulders.
But I was a blindfolded man groping in the dark: I had no idea who this powerful man – this ‘man you cannot refuse’ – could be, nor how I might discover his identity and, almost as important to me, to find out
why
he had reached out his long arm to extinguish my father’s existence. So, although I was in France on behalf of Robin, commanding his troops, I had chosen to be here because it brought me closer to the place of my father’s birth, and perhaps closer to solving the riddle of his death.

For the moment I pushed these thoughts of vengeance and powerful, shadowy enemies away, to concentrate on the task at hand. A scout rode up on a sweat-lathered horse and reported that the enemy lines were no more than three miles away. The sun was sinking low in the sky and we made our camp, quiet and fireless in a small copse in a fold of a shallow valley. Sentries set, and gnawing on a stick of dried mutton, I conferred with Hanno, Owain and the returned scouts.

‘The castle of Verneuil still defies Philip,’ began Hanno. ‘I see Richard’s lions flying above the tower.’

I nodded and swallowed a lump of roughly chewed mutton with difficulty. I found that my mouth was dry. ‘Earthworks?’ I said. ‘Siege engines?’

‘They dig earthworks, yes,’ said Hanno, scratching at his round shaven head. ‘But one, two trenches and a little wall to protect the diggers; they are not very far along. But I see four big siege engines, three trebuchets, I think, and a mangonel; also small stuff, balistes and onagers. The walls have taken some hurt, and the tower, too, but they are holding.’ Hanno paused and frowned. ‘But the siege does not feel very … lively, very quick. The Frenchmen are not working so hard, just waiting for the castle to fall. There is no discipline, no proper order. The men are taking their ease around their fires – drinking, gambling, sleeping. I do not think it will be difficult for us to break through.’

‘How many are they?’ I asked the Bavarian warrior.

‘King Philip is there; his fleur-de-lys flies over a big gold tent to the east of the castle. And many of his barons are with him, too, I think. So, perhaps two thousand knights and men-at-arms; crossbowmen, too – yes, two thousand men in all, maybe more.’

I blinked at him. ‘Two thousand?’

‘I think so,’ said Hanno. ‘But they will never expect us. We can get into the castle without much difficulty, if they will open the gate to us. After that …’ He shrugged.

I had been told that the besieged garrison of Verneuil numbered just over a hundred men, and I looked at my own little command, my puny war-band, wrapping themselves in their thick green cloaks and bedding down for the night around me, and thought to myself –
ten to one. Not good
. But I said nothing, trying to appear as if I had absolute confidence in the success of our mission.

‘Then we’d better kill as many Frenchmen as possible on the way in,’ I said, achieving a shaky nonchalance. ‘I think we will play this one straight as an arrow; we’ll go in early tomorrow morning, kill the picquets, ride hard, cut through the enemy lines and proceed directly up to the castle’s front gate. Hard and fast. Understood?’

There were murmurs of agreement.

‘Fine. Now, let’s sleep. But might I have a word with you, Owain? I need your bow to get a message into the castle. I need to make damn sure they open the gates to us.’

The French sentry was alert: from his position on a small rise perhaps half a mile outside Verneuil he saw our column approaching slowly from the south-west. Though he had been reclining on the grassy ridge, taking his ease, he leapt to his feet the moment he spotted us emerging from a small wood a mile away and shouted something inaudible over his shoulder. As we walked our horses up the slight slope, affecting the tired boredom of men at the end of a long and uneventful journey, two horsemen in bright mail,
with gaudy pennants on their lances, cantered down the slope to meet us.

With Hanno at my side, I spurred forward to greet the two knights, leaving the column behind me with strict instructions to continue their pose as exhausted travellers until I gave the signal. When we were twenty yards from the two strangers, the foremost one called loudly, angrily in French for us to halt. And Hanno and I reined in and sat obediently staring at the two heavily armed men.

‘Who are you?’ shouted the first knight in French. ‘What is your name and what business have you here?’

‘I am the Chevalier Henri d’Alle,’ I said in the same language. For some reason the only false name I could think of was my father’s; but then he had been much on my mind of late. ‘I serve Geoffrey, Count of the Perche,’ I continued, ‘and my men and I are riding to join my master’s liege lord, King Philip of France, at Verneuil.’

My answer seemed to calm the knight. He glanced at my boar-shield and nodded to himself; it was common knowledge that Count Geoffrey had revoked his proper allegiance to King Richard and come over to King Philip’s side. It was also known that, despite pleas from King Philip for him to join the fight in Normandy, Geoffrey had refused his blandishments and had stubbornly remained in his fortress of Chateâudun fifty miles to the south of Verneuil. It was a plausible enough story, although it would not bear too close a questioning. The knight nodded and beckoned us to approach. ‘We will escort you to the King,’ he said in a more friendly tone.

Signalling to the company to come forward, I walked my horse over to the two knights. The four of us began to climb the gentle slope up to the ridgeline together. The knight beside me, who had politely introduced himself as Raymond de St Geneviève, started to question me about recent events in the Perche, which I answered
only in monosyllabic grunts – I knew almost nothing of the county bar that it was famous for its horses and reputed to be full of hills and valleys and dark haunted forests. As we reached the top of the rise, the knight was frowning at my surly answers to his friendly questions and beginning to look at me curiously. I changed the subject.

‘What news of the King of England?’ I asked my companion. ‘Will he attack here?’

‘Oh, he is still in Barfleur, we are told, marshalling his forces. His rabble of an army, many of them no more than filthy paid men,
routiers
and the like, is far away …’ said St Geneviève with a dismissive roll of his shoulders.

I could hear the company coming up on to the ridge behind me, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Hanno fiddling with something out of sight, apparently a loose strap on the far side of his saddle. My own right hand went to the belt at my waist. Before me, spread out in a wide semicircle, was the encampment of the soldiers of King Philip – all two thousand of them – a great swathe of drab blue tents and brightly coloured pavilions and browny-green brushwood and turf shacks, a spill of campfires, a smear of grey smoke, the mounds of fresh earth from the siege workings, neat lines of tethered horses, stacks of fodder, weapons, shields and spears, and piles of baggage. Beyond the army, I could see the fortress of Verneuil, a grey, stone-walled block crouched on the north bank of the River Avre, with four square towers, one at each corner, and a large wooden gate in the centre of the front wall. A gaudy red-and-gold flag fluttered from a squat stone keep in the middle of the castle, and I knew that Hanno had spoken true: the little garrison was still bravely defying the King of France and all his legions.

‘What was that you said?’ I cupped my left hand to my ear and leaned forward from the back of Shaitan towards the knight. ‘What did you say just then about the English?’

The knight looked perplexed. He leaned towards me in the
saddle and enunciated loudly and clearly as if I were an imbecile. ‘I said: King Richard is in Barfleur – those cowardly English rascals are still many leagues away.’