Warlord (Outlaw 4) (51 page)

As I looked on, I saw the other
routiers
guffawing with laughter as they cut the poor man loose and shoved him into a corner against the wall, one
routier
hurling a wine-soaked cloth after him to allow him to bind up his burnt face. Then another French knight, this one fighting like a madman, was wrestled by a dozen of Mercadier’s cut-throats down on to the table. He was secured in a few efficient moments and, as the man jerked his body against
the ropes frantically and whipped his head left and right, I saw with a horrible, sickening sense of despair that it was Roland d’Alle.

He caught my eye, stopped his wild thrashing and fixed his terrified gaze on mine in mute appeal, but I was already striding over to the mercenaries, my hand on my sword hilt.

‘Hold hard,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘What does it look like … Sir Knight?’ said the man by the brazier, and I realized that I recognized him from that long ago day when he and his mates had held Brother Dominic in their grasp, and Hanno had shot their red-haired friend stone dead with the crossbow bolt. I would have given my right arm, at that moment, to have Hanno, shaven-headed, fully armed and growling by my side.

‘These men are prisoners of war,’ I said. ‘They are knights who have surrendered and given their word that they will not escape, and who will be ransomed by their families in the fullness of time.’

‘We know who they are … Sir Knight,’ said the man by the brazier, leering at me. I noticed that the lump of charcoal held in the iron pincers in his fist had been extinguished. He saw where I was looking, dropped the black lump into the brazier and selected another, this one glowing the colour of a ripe cherry. He moved towards Roland and I was transported back nearly a decade to a stinking cell in Winchester where an enemy of mine had threatened me with a similar torment.

‘No, wait,’ I said. ‘I forbid you. You cannot do this!’

‘And why not, Sir Knight?’ said a cold voice, chilling as the grave, that came from behind my right shoulder.

I turned to look upon Mercadier. His scar was a furrow of black that cut across his swarthy face; his eyes stagnant pools of malice.

‘Why can I not do this?’ he repeated.

‘It is inhuman – it is immoral. It runs against all the laws of God and chivalry.’

‘Chivalry?’ said Mercadier. ‘There is no true chivalry in war, that
is a mere fancy, invented by milk-sop poets such as yourself for the amusement of bored ladies. There is only victory or defeat; the living or the dead; friend or foe.’

‘These men are prisoners; they have surrendered and so must be treated honourably. They can do us no harm.’

‘They are the enemy,’ he said in his quiet, stone-like tone. ‘Too often we have taken men in battle, accepted their surrender, handed over their living bodies for silver and then had to fight them again the next year. That will not happen with these knights. We will ransom them, yes. But they will never fight again against King Richard.’

‘Does the King know about this … this outrage?’ I was beginning to feel desperate.

Now Mercadier laughed, a slow, evil grating sound. ‘Do you think the King does not know what I do for him?’ he said. ‘Everything I do, Sir Knight, I do with his royal blessing.’

The man with the hot coal moved forward towards Roland. My cousin closed his eyes, and lay there, his brow beaded with sweat but immobile, accepting his fate.

‘Stop,’ I shouted. ‘Stop, right now. I will buy this man from you – unharmed! I will ransom him from you. Name your price, Mercadier.’

‘You, Sir Knight? You will ransom this Frenchman?’ For the first time, Mercadier showed emotion, if greed can be called an emotion. ‘Now that is an interesting idea: what price shall I name then?’

I said nothing. Roland had opened his eyes and was looking at me. I kept my gaze fixed on him, willing him to take courage, silently promising him that I would not let him suffer this awful mutilation.

‘You can have him for a hundred pounds in silver,’ said Mercadier blandly.

‘What!’ I was genuinely astounded by the price. ‘A hundred pounds? You are jesting. He is a young knight, not a duke. His ransom should be no more than ten.’

I was not haggling for the sake of it; ten pounds was a year’s revenue from Westbury, and the most I could raise in Normandy, even if I went to the Jews of Rouen.

‘You refuse? Very well, Jean, carry on – blind him.’

‘Wait,’ I shouted, ‘wait!’ I thought about the King’s offer of a dowry of a hundred pounds – it was a huge sum of money, and if I promised it to Mercadier, it would mean that I might never be able to rebuild Clermont or buy another, better fief.

‘I will pay it,’ I said. ‘Release the prisoner.’

‘You want him very badly, it seems. But I think a man who will pay a hundred pounds for one enemy knight will willingly pay two hundred. The new price is two hundred.’

For a fleeting moment, I thought about drawing my sword and slicing my blade into his ugly face; but I knew I would not live to boast of my actions: Mercadier had thirty men there, I was alone. But I honestly could not pay the sum he asked. I did not have two hundred pounds and I had no way of raising it. I looked at Roland, and my despair must have been apparent. But he was smiling at me ruefully, and shaking his head. ‘I thank you for your efforts, Sir Alan,’ he murmured. ‘But apparently it is God’s will that I must suffer this.’

‘I cannot pay it; I truly cannot!’ I said, speaking to the friend, the cousin whose sight I could not afford to save.

‘But I can,’ said a voice, a strong, commanding voice, the voice of an outlaw, or an earl. ‘I shall pay this trifling ransom. You have made an offer of two hundred pounds, and I accept it. There will be no further negotiations. Cut the Frenchman free.’

Mercadier looked over at Robin who had appeared at my shoulder. He frowned at my lord, confused and angry. ‘Very well, my lord. I will release him to you – when I have been paid the full amount – in silver.’

Robin turned his head and shouted across the courtyard: ‘John, be so good as to bring me two of the chests from Paris. Quick as
you like.’ A few moments later, Little John and two Locksley men came lumbering over with a pair of heavy wooden boxes, which they dumped on the ground at Robin’s feet.

‘Open them, would you, John; their contents are for our zealous friend here, Captain Mercadier.’

I think I was as astonished as the mercenary to see what the boxes held: each chest was packed with small, lumpy white canvas bags marked with a bold red cross. It was a symbol I had seen before. Each bag was the same size as the one Robin had given me after fleecing the merchants of Tours and, as I knew very well, they contained five pounds in silver pennies. If each chest held twenty bags, and they looked as if they did, I was staring at two hundred pounds in silver: to be exact, two hundred pounds of silver that had come from the vaults of a Templar preceptory.

Roland gulped at his wine cup, emptying it and silently holding the vessel out to be refilled; and who could blame him? My cousin, Robin and I were sitting at a table on the ground floor of the Dangu keep, in an area that the Locksley men had made their own. A few of Robin’s men-at-arms looked at the young French knight curiously – word of the vast sum that Robin had expended on him had spread speedily through their ranks.

From the courtyard outside came the sound of screams – although we had rescued Roland, the blinding continued. Mercadier was making sure that these French knights would never fight again. Each time a scream echoed around the courtyard, Roland flinched. I did too – I thought of Mercadier’s parting words as we walked away with our shivering captive and shuddered: ‘Would you like any more of them, my lord?’ the scarred mercenary had asked with elaborate courtesy. ‘I have another ten of these French rascals, if you have the silver to spend on saving them.’

Another agonizing scream tortured the night; another brave man’s sight was burned away.

‘The Seigneur d’Alle will return the money to you, my lord,’ Roland said, looking earnestly at Robin. ‘Though it will take a while, even for him, to raise that amount of coin, he will pay it. But, as God is my witness, I can never repay what you – both of you – did for me tonight.’

‘That is very good of you,’ said Robin. ‘But there is absolutely no hurry; after all, you are one of the family, in a manner of speaking.’

I looked at Robin, his face kindly in the candlelight: and I felt a strange mélange of emotions. This man, who so often appalled me with his ruthless money-grubbing, with his unstoppable lust for silver, had saved my cousin with an act of stunning, reckless generosity. And I knew that it was entirely in character. He had lightly mentioned the word ‘family’ when referring to Roland, but I realized then how seriously he took that word. I was inside his circle, that charmed circle of friends, family and servitors, for whom Robin would give his all, and so Roland, my cousin, must be saved – whatever the cost. Robin’s relentless money-chasing, his silver-greed, his methods of enriching himself, were always at the expense of people
outside
that circle. They were his prey.

The Templars were outside that circle: they were prey. For I had worked out by then how Robin must have obtained those chests of silver, the gleaming bounty that he gave away so lightly. He must have copied the letter of credit that I had received from the Templars, or found some clever man in Paris, perhaps a former disgruntled Templar clerk who understood the codes, to do it for him; he had then changed the sum denoted and presented the copied letter at the Paris Temple. I could imagine his cold smile when the forged paper was honoured by the Templar clerks, and his satisfaction as several chests of their silver, in bags marked with a red cross, were delivered up to him.

A part of me admired the scheme, and I found that I could fully understand Robin’s motives. To his mind, the Templars had deprived
him of the lucrative frankincense trade in Outremer, and when Richard had disappointed him, he had taken his compensation directly from the Knights. Another part of me was incandescently angry: I was the man who had been issued with the promissory note by the Templars in Paris. The theft would be discovered at some point; perhaps not for a while, if the clerks were none too rigorous, but at some time in the future Robin’s crime would be detected, and I would be blamed. It might be that the Templars would seek to revenge themselves on me. And who would protect me against the wrath of the mighty Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon? Who else but Robin?

I took a sip of wine and smiled reassuringly at my cousin, who was still badly shaken. But I was thinking that Robin had, indeed, been rather clever. He had revenged himself on his enemies the Templars; and he had drawn me even further into his tight circle. It occurred to me that, after Robin’s massive fraud, there was no way that I could join that band of holy warriors now, even if I had wanted to. But then there was Roland: Robin had saved my cousin from a horrible fate, and it had cost him dearly. Would I have stolen from the Templars to save Roland? Yes, the truth was that I would. In that terrible moment when Mercadier ordered his blinding, I would have done almost anything to save him. And so I could not reproach Robin for his crime. I did not even find myself surprised by his actions. That was my master, my friend: a cunning thief, an outlaw still in his heart of hearts, and a truly generous lord.

King Philip called for a truce again that autumn, and Richard, perhaps surprisingly, agreed to it. Before we had had time to bring our full strength against Gisors, news came in that a large company of French knights was loose in Normandy to the south of the Seine, burning and pillaging manors to the south and west of Château-Gaillard. They had penetrated as far as Évreux, we heard, and burned the town to the ground. And Richard was obliged to send
many of his best men south to push them out of his lands. We also retaliated to the wanton destruction of Évreux with an attack in the north: Mercadier raided Abbeville during a trade fair there and slaughtered hundreds of unarmed merchants from all the lands of northern Europe, very few of whom were enemies of King Richard. Both the French and we, by this time, were quite regularly blinding our prisoners; and I made a silent vow to myself that I would not allow my person to be captured – I would rather die in battle, I told myself, than live the life of a helpless blind beggar. Such is youth: today I know that life, almost any life, even that of a despised blind man, is better than death.

So when Philip asked for a truce, Richard agreed. The cruel fighting that bloody year had thinned the ranks of his knights, and the King needed time to recruit more. Also, the completion of the fortifications of Château-Gaillard meant that the swarming workmen were now at liberty to begin work repairing and improving the other castles that Richard had taken that summer. But a period of peace was urgently needed to allow the necessary work to be done.

Richard had demanded possession of Gisors as part of the truce negotiations, but Philip had sensibly refused to surrender the key to the border. However, our sovereign did make other significant gains as part of the new accord. As the King said to me, shortly before Christmas that year: ‘King Philip has given up almost everything in Normandy, except Gisors, and next year, Alan, we shall take that too.’

I recalled that he had said something similar the year before, but held my tongue. Our position had improved a good deal since then: on the border we held Dangu, Courcelles, Boury and Sérifontaine; we had recovered large stretches of lands to the north of Gisors, west of the River Epte, and the broad fields of grain north of the Avre were ours once again: even poor ruined Clermontsur-Andelle was back in our hands, although I had not attempted
to return there and rebuild the manor, and I had not troubled to ask Richard to confirm me in its possession. Maybe this time, I thought to myself, maybe this time King Richard was right, perhaps next year we would hold our Christmas feast in the great keep of Gisors, and this long war would truly be over.

On a freezing January morning, the two Kings met to discuss the truce in quite extraordinary circumstances. Philip, protesting that he did not trust Richard not to attack his person, insisted that Richard remain on one of our trading galleys in the middle of the Seine for the meeting, which took place a few miles to the south of Château-Gaillard. Meanwhile, Philip and his knights remained a-horse on the bank of the river, able, should their trembling terror of our lionhearted king overwhelm them, to rush away at a moment’s notice. It was an insult, we all agreed; King Richard had always rigorously observed the codes of honour in war, and he was not a man to break his sacred word. Nonetheless, despite this grave affront, a solemn truce was agreed for five years – although I don’t think a man present believed it would last for even half that time.