The King’s Assassin (9 page)

John gave an enormous roar, like a wild bear untimely ripped from his winter slumber, and he began to run.

But he did not charge the line of galloping Frenchmen. Little John turned towards me, towards the black square of the window. He ran full tilt, bellowing ‘Out. My. Road.’

I just had time to shove Miles away from the window, and duck below the lintel myself, as Little John sprinted to the wall of the lane and dived up and through the square space, two hundred and fifty pounds of warrior hurtling into the small room that sheltered Miles and me, and crashing down on a small rickety wooden table in the centre of the room like a trebuchet ball.

I bobbed up, hauled the shutter closed, and slammed down the stout locking bar.

Leaving the three of us in utter darkness.

The sound of metal blades hacking against the exterior of the wooden shutter began only a few moments later. But John’s curses and groans were louder still as he struggled to his feet in the wreckage of the table.

‘God’s great pus-filled bladder. All we do today is run away!’

Already there were chinks of pale light gleaming through the shutter, where the swords and axes of the French cavalry outside were splintering the wood. I could clearly hear their excited cries. I grabbed Miles by the collar of his mail coat and hauled him towards the far side of the small room, scrabbling for the door latch. And we tumbled through into another chamber, far larger than the first, filled with smoke and a grey sickly light. A hearth smouldered with an iron soup pot suspended above it. Platters and pans hung from the walls. A huge mounded fishing net sat in one corner. A few stools were pushed back against the wall next to a trestle table filled with dirty bowls, cups and half a loaf of rye bread. The door stood ajar and light spilled inwards and beside it stood a man.

He was old and frail, his body emaciated, his eyes huge with fear in his wrinkled face. He was dressed in the rags of a grimy once-white smock of the kind that the seamen of this land wore aboard their open vessels. It flapped about his white skinny bare legs. He held an old bread knife in his shaking hand.

‘Go away! Go away, English killers!’ he said in French in a quavering, reedy voice. The knife was whittled down to a thin, curved strip of iron from years of sharpening. He could barely hold it still in his trembling hand.

Miles gave a shrill cry; his long sword was in his hand. He raised it, rushed at the man and hacked downwards, the blade chunking deeply into the old fellow’s skull. The ancient crumpled to the floor.

As Miles levered the bloody blade out of the grip of the dead man’s crown, he caught my eye. His face was shining with battle joy, glowing in the gloomy shack.

‘Another kill, Sir Alan! I killed another of the French rascals,’ he said, his young voice barely lower than a girlish shriek.

I frowned at him. There had been no need to destroy the old man. A hearty shove would have got him out of our path, perhaps even a word of command. I had no time to contemplate that now. Little John was at the door of the hovel, his wide shoulders filling the frame as he peered into the smoke-filled street.

‘All clear,’ he said.

We bundled out the door and found ourselves in another lane, almost identical to the last, except that – praise God – it was empty of enemies. And looking to my right I saw above the smoke blue sky and fleecy clouds – and through the murk the wooden walls and soaring masts of moored ships.

We ran, coughing in the ash-heavy air, down the lane, and there we were at last at the quay of the harbour. The muddy water of the estuary had never looked so inviting. I could see ships, a long line of them, each one crammed with our men making their slow progress away and out towards the sea. The lions of England flapped proudly from the masts. And fifty-odd burning vessels right across the sweep of water roaring like funeral pyres. Smoke from the burning town rolled across the bay in thick black banks. The quay itself was splashed with blood and strewn with dead men and broken weapons. There had been a hard fight here, too, it seemed.

It also seemed there would soon be another. A dozen French men-at-arms, a hundred yards distant, boiled out of a side street that opened on the far end of the quay. They saw us and began to shout and point.

There was no sign of Robin.

There was no boat to take us away to safety.

I scanned the wide quay. Burning boats, dead men and empty brown water. There was loot scattered all over the wooden planks of the quay: silver ewers, copper pans, legs of mutton, bolts of cloth, smashed barrels of ale. A huge throne-like wooden chair sat forlornly a dozen yards from me, and I saw the body of the big archer Peter the Vintenar lolling in it, his belly a mass of black blood, his eyes staring sightlessly. Our living men were all gone, that was clear, embarked on the last ships to leave the harbour of Damme. And Robin had gone with them.

There was to be no escape. No salvation.

I could see more horsemen now, too, a fresh
conroi
of cavalry in sky-blue surcoats, lances high. And more men-at-arms, this time a score of crossbowmen in green and red particoloured tunics.

The cavalry began to trot forward, lances dipping. I saw that the crossbowmen were busily spanning their bows. And then a low voice behind me, below me, from the brown water said: ‘Alan, over here!’

There at the harbour’s edge, in a tiny fishing smack, just coming into sight around the prow of a burning warship, was Robin, standing beside a wizened little sailor in the bow working the steering oar who was plainly terrified out of his wits.

‘Ah, there you are, Alan,’ said my lord. ‘Where on earth have you been? This is no time for standing around gawping at the enemy. You’ve surely seen a few angry Frenchmen before. Quickly now. Jump aboard. It’s time we took our leave.’

We watched the town of Damme burn from the quarterdeck of a slow fat cog that was so laden with looted treasure it could barely swim. Robin, Miles, Little John and I sipped goblets of delicious sea-cooled red wine as the ship wallowed out towards the ever-widening green-blue ocean, looking back at the destruction we had wrought. The death of a town is a terrible and strangely beautiful sight: the roiling black and grey banks of smoke, licked by blasts and gouts of yellow-orange flame; burning red embers riding paths through the air like fireflies; the taller buildings roaring like vast torches, the wall of flames reaching up to the dark shifting heavens. A holocaust of houses, a conflagration of the citizens’ hopes and dreams, even houses of God merrily ablaze; whole streets sheeted with wave upon wave of dancing crimson destruction.

There was no sign now of the French troops. I presumed that the army and anything that could still move had retreated to the safety of the surrounding countryside as the whole town howled, billowed and burned.

‘…and then I killed him, Father. Overhand lunge, a blow as deadly as any Templar’s, and down he went like a wet sack of sand. I did it, Father! I killed him.’

I closed my ears to Miles’s excited prattle and sipped my cool wine. I recalled the feeble old man with the bread knife in the fisherman’s hovel needlessly cut down by this eager boy. But I said nothing either to the lad or to his proud father.

Such is war.

Although William Longsword, the Earl of Salisbury, was half-brother to King John and in many ways resembled him, he had an entirely different and far more pleasing character: he was open-handed, honest, fair and brave, if perhaps not as bright as he might have been. Every man, even the lowliest camp servant, who survived the attack on Damme was well rewarded for the success of the raid. And, in truth, they were a depleted number, for our losses had been grievous: five hundred or so men killed in the whole army and a thousand injured and wounded. King Philip’s response to our unexpected attack on Damme had been swift. His army had abandoned the siege of Ghent the moment he had heard that our ships were approaching Damme, and his men had ridden and marched all night to confront us at the port that morning. Our little action at the bridge had been a mere skirmish compared with the main fighting to the east and south-east of Damme, where the Earl of Salisbury’s men had been caught completely by surprise by the French. The casualties, I’d been told, had been horrendous, as vengeful knights rode down the drunken, loot-happy English men-at-arms, killing at will. It had been a massacre. Our Sherwood men, it seemed, had got off lightly. Indeed, in later years I heard young Frenchmen saying that the battle of Damme had been a victory for Philip’s brave knights who successfully drove the cowardly English into the sea.

That is a lie. The honours of battle must surely rest with our arms. We came upon the enemy by surprise; we seized the town and everything valuable in it – then we destroyed it; and we either captured, or burnt Philip’s entire invasion fleet to the waterline. It would take months or even years for Philip to muster such a force again.

England was safe.

As our ships made landfall at Dover, and the exhausted army disembarked, the Earl had his stewards set out a trestle table on the very quayside and each man who came down the gangplank was given a handful of captured silver pennies there and then. And there would be more to come, the Earl promised, when the goods and captured ships were valued and sold. But the soldiers’ satisfaction was palpable. The alehouses of Dover were thronged for three days and the sturdy whores of the old port, reinforced by their sisters from all over the south-east of England, had never seen such a time of plenty. My own share of the booty from the raid on Damme, which was paid over to me not at the quayside but within a month or two of my return to England by a clerk of William Longsword’s household, was twenty-five pounds sixteen shillings and sixpence. My fortunes were repaired overnight. But I did not debauch myself in Dover, much as I was tempted to. For it was there that Robin received the news from the north.

A messenger, filthy with sweat and dust from the road, found Robin not long after dawn in one of the stables of Dover Castle, which had been turned into a makeshift hospital. My lord had been visiting some of his wounded men, bringing them wine and soup and dispensing the victuals along with lavish praise for their courage at Damme. I was a dozen yards away speaking to a Westbury man who had a broken leg, and I clearly heard the messenger’s words.

‘My lord, it is my duty to report that Kirkton has been attacked.’

Robin’s face went white as bone.

‘Has Marie-Anne been harmed?’ He seized the man by the shoulders and looked hard into his face. I saw the messenger wince at the power of Robin’s grip.

‘The Countess has not been harmed, but the attackers have done considerable damage to the castle and some men-at-arms have been killed and injured,’ he said.

‘Tell me the rest on the road,’ Robin said, releasing the man. Then: ‘Alan, find Miles, Hugh, Sir Thomas and Little John, and gather a dozen fit men-at-arms. I want them all dressed, sober and in the saddle within the hour.’

We were on the old Roman road, pelting towards London long before noon. By nightfall we were in sight of London’s bridge, and turning left off the road on to the south bank of the river. Robin announced himself at the shut gates of the Priory of St Mary’s in Southwark and demanded entrance. He was immediately granted it, despite the lateness of the hour, and as we stepped down from our horses, a very fat little man in a black robe and tonsure came hurrying out of the refectory to greet us.

I knew who he was, even though I had never met him before. It was Henry Odo, a distant relative of Robin’s, some sort of cousin, and my lord’s protégé. Robin had mentioned Henry to me several times and it seemed that the young man was a clever fellow but with little money and few prospects. I knew that my lord had sponsored him during his clerical studies at the University at Oxford, and had subsequently arranged for his position as sub-prior in the Southwark priory. I also knew that Robin had corresponded with him regularly during the years we were in the south. Henry had supplied Robin with news and gossip about London and the country as a whole; Robin, on his part, gave Henry a generous stipend that allowed him to enjoy his vast appetites to his heart’s content.

Robin embraced Henry briefly but that was as far as his courtesy extended. ‘What news of Kirkton?’ my lord said brusquely.

‘Welcome to St Mary’s, my lord,’ said the fat man. ‘I have prepared some refreshments in the refectory, some fine Surrey ale, a rather wonderful Somerset cheese, delicate…’

‘Come on, Henry, tell me what you know.’

Henry looked crestfallen and he glanced at the armed horsemen milling about the dark priory courtyard. ‘We’ll talk inside,’ he said.

Robin said: ‘Alan, if you would be so kind – get the men and horses fed, watered and bedded down and then join me in there.’ He pointed to a large building to the left of the courtyard. I merely nodded at my orders and watched as my lord strode away with fat little Henry bobbing along beside him.

It was not far off midnight before I had arranged the comforts of the men and horses, and I was able to join Robin in the refectory. He was waiting for me at a long table with a jug of ale and a plate of bread and cheese. There was no sign of Henry. Little John had disappeared with Sir Thomas off into the stews of Southwark and I sat down alone with my lord.

‘Have you ever noticed how even-handed Fate is?’ my lord asked.

I knew that I was not expected to answer this question. So I merely poured some of the nut-brown Surrey ale into my cup and gave a sympathetic grunt.

‘Fate gives with one hand – our great victory at Damme, for example, all the rich booty, our escape – then She takes with the other.’

‘Do you know any more about what happened at Kirkton?’ I said.

‘I have discovered little more than we had from the messenger in Dover – that there were about thirty fellows, who came over the walls at dead of night. Thieves, by the sound of it. They killed three sentries and broke into the hall. Marie-Anne, mercifully, got herself into the keep in time, and with her man Sarlic they held the men off from the battlements. Killing more than a few, apparently. But the thieves ransacked the hall, tore it apart, Cousin Henry says, and pillaged the solar where we sleep, and they went through Marie-Anne’s private chapel, too. Boxes smashed, floorboards prised up, mattress slit and rummaged, cushions ripped open, all the plates and bowls and boxes smashed to pieces…’ He emptied his cup.