The King’s Assassin (6 page)

Despite Robin’s harsh words about our commander the Earl of Salisbury, the King’s own half-brother, I could see that my lord of Locksley was in high spirits. As usual, nothing cheered him so much as a fat profit. It was slowly dawning on me that we had taken possession of more wealth in the past hour than many a man might gather in a lifetime.

I picked out the few of my men who I knew had experience of sailing the rivers of England at least and put them under the charge of John Halfpenny, a runtish fellow with wispy grey hair and a squashed-in brown face who had been a fisherman and had later served on the merchant ships that plied from Bordeaux to Portsmouth, bringing wine to our shores. They were to sail the captured cog home, and its valuable cargo, with all possible speed. He was a diminutive man-at-arms but utterly ferocious in battle. He wielded two hand axes with deadly skill, and threw knives for sport, too, when the devil was in him. But he was a good man at heart and I knew that many of the others were a little scared of him. I took him aside, gave him his orders and told him the names of the eight men who would be his crew, and added I would personally flay him and nail his carcass to the mast if a drop of the wine in hold was drunk before it was handed over to the King’s men in Dover. He nodded soberly. ‘Aye, Sir Alan, I’ll keep those thieving drunken bastards in line, never you worry.’

‘I mean it, Halfpenny,’ I said. ‘You deliver that craft to England safe and sound, cargo intact, or it’s your ugly head on a spike.’

The little man hurried away, brimming with good cheer, and bawling to his comrades to get aboard right now or face the fucking consequences.

Harold, the snake-boat captain, assured me that the barge we had captured, which was full of wheat and barley, could be crewed by only three men, and I gave him two young men-at-arms who claimed they’d been to sea before and bade him God speed.

All across the Zwin estuary, Englishmen were clambering over their new ships, tugging ropes, loosing sails, hallooing excitedly to their fellows, capering in the rigging for the sheer fun of it. In less than an hour, some of the ships were already under sail and were making their unsteady way under their unfamiliar crews out of the mouth of the harbour and into the broad blue ocean beyond.

We slept in the customs house at Damme that night; Sir Thomas, Miles and myself, along with our depleted squad of a dozen men-at-arms. I allowed a small barrel of wine to be broached with which to celebrate our new wealth, for Robin’s company had captured and dispatched to England seventeen vessels of varying size. There were still hundreds of abandoned French ships in the harbour at Damme, but we simply did not have the crews to sail them home. But, you may be certain, we had made sure that we sent off the biggest ones that were filled with the richest cargoes. By my calculations, each of the dozen men now curled and snoring in his blankets around me was worth at least ten pounds of sterling silver – roughly what a working man might earn, with luck, in ten years. A fortune, in other words. So we had drunk wine in good cheer, more enlivened by our new wealth than the liquor, and feasted on a barrel of oysters one of the men had found and barley bread and fat smoked hams and peaches preserved in honey. The younger men, some of my own Westbury folk, talked of setting up as freemen with their own strips of land, and humbly asked if they might clear woodland on my demesne to begin this new life. I happily agreed. Others thought it might be more pleasurable and profitable to own an alehouse in Nottingham or some other town or port. Another thought the life of a travelling pedlar, a chapman, selling silk thread and ribbons, pins and needles from hamlet to hamlet, would be filled with adventure and the chance to meet willing women. So we passed the evening in delightful contemplation of our new lives as well-to-do men.

My last thoughts as I fell asleep were of Robert’s sweet boyish face. I had packed him off before we departed for Dover to Pembroke Castle in Wales, the seat of William the Marshal, one of the finest knights I had ever known and an old friend of mine. It had wrung my heart to send him away, after we had been so long apart, but I knew it was the correct thing to do. Robert must train as a squire in a great man’s household, and while I knew that William himself would not often be there, I also knew that his wife Isabel would care for the lad and that he would receive a first-class education in the arts of war from the Marshal’s well-trained knights and men-at-arms. Still I worried about the boy and missed him sorely, and the thought of him afraid and alone in a strange castle kept me from slumber.

Our parting had been tearful with Robert pleading that I not send him away. I was firm, however, explaining that he must learn the ways of a knight and asking if he did not wish to be as brave and skilful as Miles or Hugh. Then I told him harshly that it was unmanly to snivel quite so much at his age. He must dry his tears. Try to be a man. It was for his own good, I said, hating myself.

To soften the blow, I had paid a visit to my cutler friend in Nottingham to purchase a new hand-and-a-half sword, a fine light blade of Damascus steel in a tooled leather scabbard. When I presented the new weapon to Robert on the day before his departure, telling him that as a squire in the Marshal household he would need a good blade, his eyes opened so wide that they nearly fell out of his head. He rushed at me and crushed me in a hug so strong I genuinely thought he would crack my ribs – my gift, I believed, had partially reconciled him to his fate. Yet, as sleep finally pulled me down, I wished with all my heart that it could have been I who tutored him in its proper use.

The next morning, we hefted shields, helms and spears, struggled into mail coats, those that had them, or leather armour or quilted gambesons, and mustered on the quay with the rest of Robin’s men. We had set out from England with a company, or battle as it was more properly known, of two hundred men, but fewer than a hundred souls mustered on the quay that morning on the last day of May. We had sent off more than half our number with the captured ships.

My lord of Locksley addressed the remaining men: ‘My friends,’ he began, ‘we had a good day yesterday.’ His remark was met with raucous cheers. ‘And we will have a better day, today. Our scouts have reported that the French army is some thirty miles away, besieging the town of Ghent, which is held by the forces of our ally the noble Count Ferrand of Flanders. This town of Damme is near deserted. It is at our mercy. The denizens, men-at-arms and townsmen alike, have fled.’

More cheers.

‘Our sector is the south of Damme, the merchant’s quarter, and we have orders from the Earl of Salisbury to disperse any enemy force we see and to burn that part of the town to the ground. However, before that, before we set the torches, we may lawfully confiscate any of the enemy’s possessions and claim them as our own.’

The cheers were now deafening. Robin had just given his men-at-arms, many of them former Sherwood outlaws, permission to loot the wealthiest part of Damme.

We formed up in a double file, the men happily jabbering to each other, eager faces alive with joy and anticipation, men boasting of the riches they would take and the destruction they would wreak. As we set off through the warren of narrow streets in the north of the city, passing churches, chapels, abandoned shops and houses already ravaged by our compatriots, and marched over the big wooden bridge that crossed the wide slow river that divided Damme north and south, singing broke out in the ranks. I sang too, and lustily.

We had an empty town to pillage and burn.

After so many years of warfare, as you might expect, I have picked up a thing or two. And here is one thing I have learnt: there are two baneful elements that always go hand in hand with armies and fighting men – disease and fire. I have noticed that more people are killed by disease on campaign than by the swords of the enemy, although, of course, you remember the men who died violently more clearly than those who merely slipped away from life in the infirmary or staggered off the road on the march to die in the fields. The second thing is that the most destruction caused by an army is not done directly by the men in its ranks – despite their most valiant efforts – it is done by fire. In enemy territory, a soldier sets fires by instinct; he steals, he pillages, he takes everything he can get his hands on – then he burns whatever he cannot carry away. There is a sound military logic to this: by destroying goods and crops and houses and shops, he is denying the enemy the comfort of food and shelter and he is directly attacking the power of the lord who holds the land. But there is more to it than logic. There is a wild destructive magic to fire that appeals to the soldier, perhaps to all men. I have never seen soldiers so gleeful as when they have orders to torch a town. Normally steady sober fellows – dutiful fathers, loyal husbands, obedient sons – all become devils with a firebrand in their fists. Their features contort; their hearts are hardened, they set alight homes much like their own with a hearty disregard for the owners, men not too unlike themselves; they fire ripe fields of crops, knowing themselves what an appalling curse a failed harvest is, and that the bite of famine will mean a slow and painful end for the common men who planted the seed. But they burn anyway, with a dreadful, savage joy.

And so it was in Damme.

After we had crossed the bridge to the southern part of town, we looted every house and shop to our hearts’ content, and men emerged from these largely deserted buildings grinning, bearing bolts of cloth, chains of onions, live chickens, silver goblets, even a golden crucifix from a rich merchant’s house … whatever took their fancy. One fellow, a big veteran archer called Peter the Vintenar, who had been with Robin and I at Chalus when King Richard had been mortally wounded, carried a huge carved wooden chair, almost a throne, with him, humping it from house to house as he pillaged the interiors and set his torch to the eaves. I heard one of his mates ask him what he planned to do with the unwieldy item, which must have weighed a hundred pounds at least.

‘Never had no chair growin’ up,’ he said. ‘Just two stools and a bench in our house, and Ma had fourteen children. Sat on the dirt floor until I was twelve and big enough to fight for a place on the bench. When I get back home, I’m going to set this big ol’ bastard by my hearth and sit down and never stir again.’

When the house or workshop was emptied of all valuables, the straw thatch was put to the torch, or fires were set in mounds of broken furniture, and we moved on, carrying our booty and singing as we went.

The wind had veered overnight and now came directly out of the north, and in such dry weather – it was another glorious spring morning – we had to work quickly, for one burning house set fire to its neighbour and so on. The heat soon became infernal. The smoke rolled thick and black through the streets; the flames danced orange in the heat-shimmering air. The men’s faces around me were brick-red and greased with sweat from the inferno and from their own joyous exertions.

We met a few of the ‘enemy’, desperate householders and their servants who had not had the wit to flee and who foolishly tried to defend their own hearths with butcher’s knives and long roasting spits against Robin’s well-armed ruffians. They all died; some swiftly, some in terrible lingering pain. The Sherwood men dispatched them as soon as they emerged from their hidey-holes, chopping them down with their short swords or sticking them through with spears. The men and boys all died; I did not enquire too closely into what happened to their womenfolk.

Such is war.

I kept Miles close by me during the ravaging of Damme, partly to prevent any accident befalling him – the last thing I wanted was for some desperate householder to leap out from behind a door and brain him with an iron skillet – partly to prevent him witnessing anything too horrific.

It was he who first spotted the knight.

We were advancing up a narrow cobbled street on the edge of the town, Miles and I, with three or four of my Westbury men-at-arms. Miles tugged at my hauberk and pointed. There was a lone rider, none too rich by the look of him, but fully armed with serviceable shield, sword and lance. Our street ended in a crossroads, and the knight crossed perpendicular to our line. His horse’s linen trapper, a bright-blue cloth that covered the animal from neck to haunch, was thickly spattered with mud and the horse’s head was drooping with tiredness. It had been ridden hard and far.

I knew he was French for the simple reason that he had to be. By the Earl of Salisbury’s decree we had brought no horses with us in the ships from England. Even the grandest English knight was to fight on his own two feet in this expedition.

So, if my first thought was he’s French, my second was, he’s not alone.

The knight stopped his horse at the centre of the crossroads. He looked directly at us for half a dozen heartbeats, then he whirled his mount, with great skill and speed, and made off the way he had come.

A scout.

I was already shouting for the men to assemble by the time his horse’s haunches disappeared from view. ‘The French are here! On me, on me! The enemy are upon us!’ I dispatched Miles to spread the word that all men were to rally by the big bridge in the centre of the town on the southern side. Now.

I sprinted up to the end of the street to look after the departing knight.

The street the knight had taken led directly to the town’s southern gate, some hundred paces distant. I could just make out the blue mud-spattered trapper of the horse as he cantered through it, and beyond the gate, across the fields outside the town, moving shades of dun and grey, splashes of colour here and there, greens and violets, reds and yellows, and the glint of metal in the sunlight. Thousands of men.

An army on the march.

We hurried back to the bridge in the centre of Damme. I was pulling men out of houses almost every step of the way, bawling that the enemy were coming, and we were dead men unless we could assemble to protect ourselves before the French cavalry arrived. But a soldier in mid-pillage is slow to take orders. One grey-haired fellow, a tall, one-eyed veteran mercenary in Robin’s service called Claes, who was plunging away half-naked on a woman with her skirts around her waist, had the temerity to snarl and swing a fist at me as I pulled him off his paramour. I dodged the blow, stepped back, put a hand on my sword hilt and he was instantly sheepish and obedient – he was a good soldier, Claes, at heart, and we had known each other for many years. He was still tying his belt as I pushed him out of the door of the house, which I noticed as I left was already filling with greasy, pungent smoke.