Warlord (Outlaw 4) (42 page)

I paused and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Be careful, Thomas, and for God’s sake don’t get yourself killed!’

My squire saluted, smiled, climbed on to his horse and, followed closely by his three men-at-arms, he clattered out of the big gate and embarked on the long road to war.

I was sad to see him go, but at the same time I could not deny a surge of pride. He was not my son, it was true, but Goody and I were both very fond of him; he was a fine young man – a man, I realized, no longer a boy.

I had cause to regret the loss of four of my fighting men not two days later.

It was the night of the full moon, and our rest was interrupted by the sound of drums. I had been sleeping, unusually for me at that time, and awoke with a sense of irritation and grievance rather than fear. I knew that it was Nur before I stepped out of the hall with Fidelity in my hand and crossed the courtyard to climb up to the walkway that ran around the inside of the palisade. I saw Goody emerging from her guest house, tousled, rubbing her eyes and wrapped in a woollen shawl, as I hurried up the steps to the cloaked figure of the man-at-arms, a young fellow called Kit, waiting at the top.

Kit pointed, wordlessly and unnecessarily, at a pin-prick of light about three hundred yards away to the west, a fire. It burned in front of a copse that stood beside the stream that ran through my lands. At that very stream, a mere quarter of a mile from the hall, Goody and the village women did their weekly washing, beating the cloth against the rocks and spreading it to dry on the sheep-cropped grass. In choosing that place for their midnight gathering, I felt that Nur was deliberately desecrating my lands, befouling them with her presence. I felt as insulted and perturbed as I might if she had emptied her bowels in the well in my courtyard. The drums beat a simple rhythm – and I realized that it was the rhythm of the curse: one-two, one-two, one-two-three, one-two – or one year, one day, after you wed, you pay.

I called loudly for Thomas, then realized stupidly that he was no longer with me, and sent Kit down the steps to rouse the manor; I wanted all the men arrayed for battle, armed and mounted as soon as possible. This was a gross provocation, an insult – one I could not ignore.

The courtyard, below and behind me, flared to light as torches were lit and soon began to echo with the shouts of men and the protesting whinnies of tired horses woken from sleep and hastily saddled. As I looked out over the palisade, I saw the distant fire leap higher and I could make out what appeared to be two posts
planted either side of the blaze, and slim figures dancing wildly through the firelight. The drumming continued and I heard snatches of song and shrieks and cries either of pain or ecstasy. Then a number of the figures lifted a pole, with a large lumpen shape in the centre of it and set it horizontally across the two vertical poles above the fire. Something was tied to the pole, a sheep, perhaps, or a pig for roasting –
These god-damned witches are having a full-moon feast from one of my slaughtered beasts
, I thought with a spurt of savage anger. I would not stand still and let it pass.

In the darkness, with sleep-dogged men and horses, it took an age to get ready to ride out and challenge the revelling madwomen. But finally we were prepared and, wrapped in righteous fury, I trotted out of the gates of Westbury at the head of six mounted men. Two of them bore burning torches, but the other four, and myself, carried twelve-foot man-killing lances. We had been openly challenged by Nur, and our response would be swift and deadly. I anticipated punching the steel point of my lance into Nur’s belly, and imagined her expression of shock and surprise as the spear-head went home, and she writhed around the shaft in her final agony.

But the women did not wait to receive our charge; they fled the very moment they saw our cantering horses approach. And I did not catch even the merest glimpse of my former lover. The women melted silently into the copse at our advance and, when we arrived at the fire, there was not a living thing to be seen.

There was however a sight that chilled our very souls. The lumpen shape that had been roasting over the fire, while these women cavorted about it, was no pig, nor sheep: it was the naked body of one of the men-at-arms who had ridden with me in the disastrous foray against the women’s woodland village the previous week. I could see by his tortured frozen expression that he had been alive when he was lowered over the flames and that he had subsequently died, slowly, in screaming, unquenchable agony.

And there was worse: some parts of his half-cooked body had been cut away by sharp knives, several strips from the brown, crisped buttocks, arms and thighs. Until we interrupted them, the witches had been gorging on his poor roasted flesh.

My head reeled, and I had difficulty keeping my supper where it belonged. This was a monstrous, demonic, almost unbelievable act. I ordered two men to cut down the body and wrap it in cloaks, so that we could bear it back to Westbury for a decent Christian burial. One of the men I detailed to cut our comrade free suddenly bent double and vomited copiously bedside the dying fire, and I had to fight the urge to do the same myself. I was helped in my task by a distraction.

‘Sir Alan, sir,’ cried Kit, perhaps the sharpest-witted of my men. ‘The manor, the manor – it’s burning,’ he said, pointing away behind us towards Westbury, where the first yellow flames were licking the black night sky.

Three days later I went to Nottingham Castle, a notional begging bowl in my hands, and a very real and heavy purse of silver in my saddlebag.

We had vanquished the fire after a long, long night of brutal hard work by every living soul in Westbury who could hold a water bucket. The guest house was utterly destroyed, as was a storeroom next to it, and the stables were also badly burned, but by dawn it had been completely quenched and one quarter of the Westbury compound was a charred mess of burnt beams and soggy cinders. Goody was not harmed, thank God. Rather than going back to bed, when we rode out for the courtyard so boldly, Goody had decided to go into the hall and find something to eat from the sideboard there. She was eating by the light of a single candle at the long table when the fire broke out in her guest house. Nobody had seen any strange folk around, but we all assumed that one of Nur’s madwomen had crept into Westbury and set the fire in
Goody’s apartments while all the fighting men were busy charging out to challenge the witches at their awful feast.

I had not credited Nur with such cunning, and I had made a bad mistake. Now it was time to end this deadly game before my beloved was seriously hurt.

I presented myself to the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Sir William Brewer, in his private chambers in the Great Tower of Nottingham Castle. I did not know the man, except by reputation: he came from a family of hereditary foresters in Devon, and was said to be vigorous, ambitious – and utterly venal. He greeted me graciously, insisted on feasting me in the big hall in the Middle Bailey – which I knew of old – and for a consideration of five pounds in silver, he lent me a
conroi
of twenty of his best cavalry for a month.

For two weeks, aided by a man from Alfreton, who knew the land well, we scoured the woods in search of Nur and her gaggle of God-cursed wretches. In vain. We swiftly found the clearing and its circle of mean huts and hovels, and burnt everything in it to the ground – but the only soul we found there was an aged woman, blind, and unable to walk, who revealed nothing under questioning except that Nur and her coven, some forty females of varying ages from barely ambulant children to toothless hags, had left some days ago and headed north. The old crone seemed almost to welcome the knife, wielded efficiently by a Nottingham sergeant, that slit her throat and ended her miserable existence on this Earth.

It was a frustrating time. I had been out-fought by a woman with no deep knowledge of war nor the stratagems of battle, and made to look an utter fool. She eluded me, and left no trace. I sent messages north to Kirkton and Robin’s garrison there, but nothing had been seen or heard of the Hag of Hallamshire or her coven. We scoured the wilder parts of Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire by night and day, and found nothing. I was at a loss. After four fruitless weeks, I dismissed the
conroi
men back to
Nottingham, and returned, shamefaced, to Westbury and Goody. Perhaps Nur had worked some kind of charm of concealment. Or maybe, more simply, after years of living wild without the comforts of civilized life, she was adept at moving through the countryside without disturbing a soul.

There was one great boon that my otherwise fruitless struggle with Nur had bestowed on me. That embarrassing contest with the witch had cured me of my malaise. I worked hard in that time; I slept little, but deeply, and drank hardly at all. Without knowing it or wishing it, the mutilated Saracen bitch had cured me of my melancholy, when no other remedy could.

Nevertheless, that summer saw the beginning of a long period in which I never truly managed to find ease. A time of nervous uncertainty, of general but constant fearfulness, a time that frayed the nerves and made everyone short-tempered and quick to anger: it was the season of the witch.

Country folk are superstitious. They always have been and always will be. So in Westbury, from the summer of the Year of Our Lord eleven hundred and ninety-six until the early spring of the next year every minor disaster was an attack of witchcraft, every accident must be black magic: if a cow gave birth to a stillborn calf, it was Nur’s malice; if a bucket of milk, left out too long in the warm sun went sour, it was her sorcery; a frail grandfather of four score years died suddenly in the village – Nur must have stolen his soul. Every misfortune, every setback – even those with patently obvious causes – was laid at her door; and folk whispered that it was in truth my fault for angering her. People spoke openly – though wisely not in my presence – of the curse that lay over Westbury, and wondered how it might be lifted. To make matters worse, the harvest was bad that year – Nur had clearly brought the rain clouds in August and a succession of heavy, pounding rainstorms to crush the standing wheat.

I asked Arnold, the local priest, to exorcize any evil spirits that inhabited the village and the manor, and the little man made a great show of bumbling about the place in his best robes with his servant holding a huge leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible, mumbling prayers in bad Latin and splashing holy water about with enthusiasm. But the villagers refused to believe it had worked, and when a nervous girl claimed she had seen Nur and her witches riding broomsticks across the face of the full moon, nobody was inclined to disbelieve her.

We saw no sign of Nur at all in that period, but there was evidence from time to time that she had not forgotten us and that she had agents of her evil in the area. Not long after the meagre harvest, in late August, Goody found a figure made from plaited wheat straw in her bed in the newly rebuilt guest house; long black thorns had been stuck in the belly of the doll, and through its eyes. Goody was shaken and brought the horrible object to me, and I burnt it – and from then on Goody abandoned the guest house and slept in my chamber. Chastely, I hasten to add, with a long round pillow separating us in the big bed. Though I did on more than one occasion feel the stirrings of an almost overwhelming lust, watching her lovely sleeping face, or catching a glimpse of her white body as she dressed in the morning, I restrained myself. It was a small price to pay for the reassurance of having her under my watchful eye.

In October, we received a letter from Robin telling us that Thomas was impressing all in the army with his courage and prowess, that Little John had been ill with an ague but had now recovered, and that the Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully had finally succumbed to the Crab that had been slowly eating his belly, and all Paris, all France, was in mourning for him.

Robin’s letter brought the events of my time in Paris back into my mind; it felt long ago and far away – as if those terrible occurrences had happened to another man, a stranger. I wondered idly
where the Master was hiding, and whether he would surface now that his old spiritual lord was dead. But I could not bring myself to care overmuch; my time in Paris seemed like a bad dream, and one that I had no urge to recall. Hanno’s death was still a deep and painful wound, only lightly scabbed by time.

The months passed with a surprising swiftness. The Feast of the Nativity came and went, and in January I was forced to dole out grain from my store houses and open several casks of salted pork to distribute to the poorer villagers of Westbury in the harsh winter months, else they would have starved to death. But I received scant credit for my largesse. Even that cruel winter, with drifts of snow covering the iron-hard fields, was said by some to be the work of the black witch. And, of course, it was I who had rashly brought her wrath down upon our community.

Our spirits began to lift with the coming of spring, as they always did. And I began to feel restless. I thought of my friends in Normandy and began, for the first time in many, many months, to feel the pull of war.

I broached the subject with Goody after dinner one blustery March day while she was spinning wool sheared from our sheep into fine thread – a seemingly endless task – by the hearth in the centre of the hall.

‘Yes, we are rather stuck,’ she said. ‘We fear the curse too much to be married, and yet we cannot find that wretched woman either to make her lift it or, indeed, to kill her. And while she is out there somewhere, you fear that by going off to war, to do your duty as a knight to the King, you will leave me in danger. We are trapped by our fears.’

I looked at Goody with no little surprise. It was an intelligent, candid, merciless expression of our situation. And one that was absolutely true, of course.

‘So what should we do?’ I asked.

‘We must do what good men and women have always done
when beset by fear. We face it, we walk up to it, nose to nose, and spit in its eye – and we do what must be done regardless of our fears. You must go to Normandy; I will pack up Westbury and go back to living with Marie-Anne in Kirkton until you return. And when you return victorious from the war, my dearest love, we shall be wed here, in our home, and to Hell with that foul bitch and all her works.’