The King’s Assassin (21 page)

How we take our daily bread for granted! I dreamed of food at the beginning, I thought of it every waking minute, too, as my belly shrank and whimpered and ached. After four or five days, when my gut was calling piteously, I hunted insects and beetles, which must have come up through that stinking drain – and ate them, crunching them up or swallowing them down still wriggling. But soon they disappeared, or were all eaten up, and there was only my empty insides shrieking at me for nourishment. I retreated into the land of dreams, for there I could eat my fill: I must have recalled every feast I had ever attended, I relived every pie, every dripping roast, every fragrant bowl of creamy pudding. I tormented myself with thoughts of the meals I would never enjoy again. I made up lists of what I would eat in Heaven – roast pork was the centrepiece of the feast, a whole gleaming piglet with rich wine gravy and the crackling, crisp and salty. But there would be fresh baked bread too with a slathering of yellow butter and soft crumbly white cheese and crunchy apples. And nuts and wine and singing and laughter.

But all pain eventually comes to an end. My hunger raged like a furnace for some days, perhaps a week, and then, as if burnt out, it subsided to a vague cold feeling of loss, an emptiness that was always present but duller than the agony of before. I began to die. And also to think clearly without the distraction of my belly.

I thought about Goody, my beautiful dead wife, with whom I longed to be reunited in paradise – but not yet; I thought about Tilda, and our one night together long ago in Normandy. I thought about Robert, about his sweet face screwed up in concentration over the chessboard. Then I thought about Westbury. I wished once more to be riding free on my own lands, with my hounds and huntsmen, with Robert and perhaps Robin and his sons for company. If I ever emerged from this dark place, I vowed to myself, I would never take the feel of sunshine on my face for granted again, nor the feel of a running horse between my legs and the wind in my hair.

I thought about Lord Fitzwalter and wondered if he, too, and Eustace de Vesci as well, were sitting somewhere in the darkness, with an echoing belly and nothing ahead of him except madness, despair and death. I doubted it. Robin had been right. I had been used by him and de Vesci. They had gulled me like a child into this mad scheme that, now that I truly considered it, had had scant chance of success.

I thought, too, about King John’s words before I was taken: how he had called me assassin before I had even drawn the misericorde. And in the clarity of my own head, in the silence of the cell, and in the deepest part of my soul I knew I’d been betrayed. Someone had informed on me to the King. Someone had told him that I was planning his murder and told him when I would strike – for the King had been expecting me. He had surrounded himself with his Flemish crossbowmen, Stevin and his mercenary ilk, and they had been primed to locate and intercept me.

But who could it be?

Fitzwalter and de Vesci knew of the plan – but why would they betray me? They wanted me to succeed. And the only other person who knew that I meant to kill the King was Robin. But he would never inform on me to the King. Would he?

I believe that my soul left my body in that deep dark place. The days passed with no marking them, no day, no night. I drank the water. I hunted anything that scuttled in the darkness and I dreamed: of food and revenge, or the smell of sweet flowers; of the taste of Goody’s kisses. My beard grew in fuller, my skin became loose. And my soul left me for hours at a time. I found myself at one point looking down on my sleeping body from above. The cell was filled with a weird blue light and I could see every inch of that square stone box with absolute clarity.

I had ceased to exercise my body by then. I had not the strength to force my muscles to work. And when my soul rose out of me, I looked down at the wasted body, the bearded head pillowed on the rolled leather coat, my bony shoulders almost poking through the green blanket. I wanted to be gone. I was tired of the cold and the darkness. I was tired of being alone. I heard the Voice of God calling me, calling me by name, and looked upwards towards a great, warm golden light …

‘Christ’s foul flapping foreskin – the stench in here would stun a bull,’ said a deep and familiar voice. Then an enormous sneeze. And there was light. A harsh, burning dazzle that seared my eyeballs and made me whimper in fear and pain.

‘Just get him out of there, John,’ said another voice, equally familiar. ‘Gently now. You’d best pick him up and carry him.’

I was lifted from the hard floor and borne out of that cell by powerful arms. I knew I was dreaming. I heard the second voice, close to my ear, saying: ‘Alan Dale, I swear you’re the most inconvenient, ungrateful, insolent, mutton-headed oaf that I have ever had the misfortune to take into my service.’

I ate soup, nothing more, for three days. And not too much of that. There was no roast pork with crisp crackling and wine-gravy. Robin knew, as I did, that to feed a starving man rich food will kill him as quickly as the hunger itself. After three days, I began to drink milk and took my first piece of bread.

Robin and Little John had taken me out of Brien’s Close and installed me in a small shed – an abandoned blacksmith’s forge to be accurate – on the south side of the castle. There was no subterfuge, none of the cunning tricks that Robin was so well-versed in. No ruse at all. It was not bribery, nor yet force of arms. Robin had arrived with a small escort of thirty Sherwood bowmen and a royal warrant ordering the constable of the castle to surrender my person immediately to the bearer of the parchment without delay. Then he insisted that suitable accommodation be found for my recovery under the rough care of Little John.

I was only dimly aware of what was happening. I was sleeping half the day and all the night, but when I did manage to rise and stagger to the door of the stable and look out one afternoon, I was amazed to see the whole place was filled with men-at-arms in different coloured surcoats swaggering about the courtyard as if they owned it. On the far side of the castle, high on the square keep atop the motte, I could see two dozen flags flapping in the grey air. A gathering was in place. Beside the royal standard, the lions of England, I could see the banners of a handful of barons whose arms I recognised: William the Marshal, the Earl of Salisbury, the earls of Norfolk, Essex, Oxford and Hereford, Lord Fitzwalter and de Vesci were there too – even a white banner with a black wolf’s mask on it, which was Robin’s own device.

Little John, who was about some business of his own in the castle that day, returned at dusk. The big man was carrying a heavy sack that clanked as he walked. ‘You’d best get your rest tonight, Alan,’ he said, and gave a sneeze like a trumpet blast. ‘For there will be some hellish noise tomorrow.’

‘From the gathering?’ I asked. ‘There seems to be some sort of conclave in the castle of all the great men of England.’

‘No, not from all those high and mighty folk up in the keep – from me,’ said the blond giant with a smile. And he emptied out the sack he was carrying on the straw of the floor and began to sort through the twisted lumps of iron that it had contained.

I had not the strength to ask what he was about. My incarceration had left me with a fever and a hacking cough, and I returned to a pile of straw with a cup of mead, and after I had drunk it I coughed myself to sleep. I awoke late in the night, or rather very early in the morning, to find that Little John had built a huge fire in the abandoned forge and seemed to be piling shovel after shovel of black charcoal on to the flames. I thought he was trying to be sure that I was warm enough, and I was grateful for his solicitousness, for the nights were cold and damp and it seemed to me that I was getting sicker rather than stronger.

I found out what he was really doing the next day. He had set up an anvil and found a set of hammers and tongs from somewhere, and not long after first light he began heating various pieces of metal in the cherry-red fire, hauling them out when they glowed, and beating them with powerful strokes that seemed to drive a spike through my temples.

‘Told you there’d be some noise,’ he said, grinning over his shoulder.

‘Do you have to do that?’ I shouted to the big man.

‘Have to. Got to beat it while it’s the right heat. Can’t wait around for it to cool. Why don’t you go and stretch your legs? Robin’s in the stable just now.’

Little John turned back to his hellish hammering.

I got down another cup of mead and ate a piece of bread with a sliver of cheese. It had been five days since my release and I was a little shocked at how feeble I still was. I pulled on the clothes that Robin had left for me and, shivering like an ancient and coughing like a Cornish tin miner, I ventured out into the drizzle of the courtyard.

I found my lord of Locksley in the stable about a hundred and fifty yards from the forge on the extreme far side of the courtyard. Once again, as I staggered across the open space, I received a barrage of looks of astonishment and contempt. ‘God damn, you all,’ I thought. ‘When I am well, if any of you dares to look at me like that, I will cut you a new shit-hole.’

I was exhausted by the time I arrived at the stables to find Robin overseeing the shoeing of his favourite horse, a blood-red mare called Eva.

Robin took one look at me and said: ‘Damn it, Alan, what are you doing out of bed? You need to rest and sleep and take some soup. This is no time for gallivanting about the castle. Get back to bed.’

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I said, and gave a cackling laugh.

‘Well, sit down here and have a sup of ale at least. Are you hungry?’

I shook my head but gratefully sat down by the water butt. I happened to catch my reflection in the surface of the water and nearly expired of shock. An evil old man stared back at me. My hair, which I usually kept cropped short anyway, appeared to have disappeared from large patches of my head, the bald skin showing cleanly through. My beard, normally a lightish brown, which I had not yet had the strength to shave off, was streaked with lines of white. My face was that of a grandfather – but covered with scabs, old yellow-brown bruises, half-healed cuts and fresh pink scars.

No wonder the men-at-arms in the courtyard had stared at me. I was, at that time, not far off forty and I looked double that age.

I turned away from the reflection.

‘Tell me what is going on at the castle,’ I asked my lord.

He was peering at his horse’s off hind foot, which the farrier had lifted and held between his two legs.

‘What?’ said Robin. ‘Oh, everyone is here. We were summoned, all the great and the good – and the bad, too, for that matter. It’s the same go-around as at St Paul’s last month, of course – but you won’t know about that. My apologies. The northern barons are here, the rebels, the undecided, the malcontents and the genuinely aggrieved, along with the King and the men who are still loyal to him, or who desperately need him; and the bishops and archbishops, the whole merry cavalcade. All the nobility of England, more or less, is here at Wallingford. That’s why you’re sleeping in a forge.’

‘But what are they here for?’

‘They are here to try to prevent the whole country falling into another Anarchy,’ Robin said grimly. He murmured something to the farrier, pointing to a curl of yellow hoof that required clipping.

‘More, please,’ I said holding out my cup.

‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ said Robin, straightening up and bringing the jug over to me. He filled my cup and said: ‘It’s the same old thing at the root of it, Alan. Put simply, the King wants to get back his lands in Normandy and France. To do that he needs the barons to go to war, he also needs money to pay for the war. In raising the money for his wars, he has taxed the country until it is bled white, and then asked for more. The barons resent this – my God do they resent it – and that is fair enough; you and I both know what it is like to have a sheriff constantly hounding you for silver.’

I thought of Philip Marc’s visit to Westbury and his threat to have his huge monster tear the living head from my son.

My thoughts must have been written on my face, for Robin suddenly said: ‘Last week, Alan, I sent Hugh to Westbury with twenty Sherwood men. And I hear that Sir Thomas Blood has been drilling your own folk like a moon-crazed sergeant-at-arms. You can set your mind at rest. Between the two of them they will keep Robert safe.’

‘Thank you!’ I would have said more but I was cut off by a vicious fit of coughing. It took an age for me to recover myself.

Robin waited patiently until I was still again and quiet. ‘Where was I? Oh yes, the King wants the barons to fight for him in France. As you know, many of them refused his call to arms. So the King can fight them, or he can talk to them and try to persuade them to follow his banner abroad. The barons want an end to harsh taxation, to the practice of mulcting every man at every available opportunity, of putting men into debt with arbitrary fees and taxes and then imprisoning them till they pay up or die. And a host of other things besides. They want their grievances addressed before they will consent to fight.’

‘But how can they trust the King?’ I said. ‘He will say one thing today and another tomorrow when the battle is fought.’

Robin frowned. ‘I don’t want to burden you with the details now, Alan, I can see that you do not have your full strength yet. But suffice it to say, an agreement has been struck and many of the barons have now agreed to take part in the King’s expedition to Poitou after Christmas and to fight at his side to help him recover his lands and titles in France. Other men have agreed to go to the Low Countries under the Earl of Salisbury and to fight there.’

‘Who in their right mind would volunteer to fight for this King anywhere in Christendom?’ I said. ‘What sort of idiot would trust John to keep his word?’

‘This sort of idiot,’ said Robin quietly. ‘I have agreed to follow Salisbury to Flanders again. And you are coming with me. I’m to take a strong force of spearmen and bowmen and we are to attack France and win Normandy back for King John.’

‘For God’s sake – why?’ I was near exploding. Instead I coughed like a dying man. ‘Have we not served the wretched fellow long enough? Have you forgotten Château Gaillard and the men who were uselessly slaughtered there? Why, Robin, why?’