Warlord (Outlaw 4) (10 page)

‘God’s bulging ball-bag, young Alan, you are as jumpy as a lady rabbit in a fox lord’s bedchamber,’ said Little John, shaking his head in mock sorrow. ‘It must be a bad conscience. Feeling guilty about something, are you? Been indulging in one of your legendary bouts of onanism again, eh? Have you, lad? You can tell your old uncle John. Bit too much of the old hand-to-cock combat, eh? You’ve got to leave it alone sometimes, you know, Alan. You can’t go on threshing the barley stalk all day and night. It weakens your nerve, rots your brains, can make you go blind, too.’

‘You do talk some rare horseshit, John Nailor. My nerves are absolutely fine. Nothing wrong with them at all.’

I was blushing and I could see Robin trying hard not to laugh, covering his mouth with his hand and making as if to scratch his chin.

I summoned my wits: ‘I must say, John, it’s very good of you to finally turn up. We might have had a use for you a couple of days ago, before the battle – there was a good deal of heavy lifting to be done: boxes, bales, cauldrons of hot oil … Donkey work, of course, but it would have suited you perfectly. And I say “before the battle”; I doubt an idle fellow like you would have been much use during it.’

‘Aye, I can see you’ve had a bit of a scrap here,’ John said,
looking around the battered castle, his eye fixing on the half-burnt front gate. ‘But I worry about you, Alan, I truly do. I’m not sure that you’ve got a firm grasp of proper tactics yet. It is generally not considered a sound idea to burn down your
own
defences. You know, I think it’s rather frowned upon by real soldiers. I can see I still have a lot to teach you.’ He shook his massive head sorrowfully, and made an infuriating tsk-tsk noise behind his big teeth.

I glared at John and opened my mouth to reply, but Robin interrupted our familiar bickering by handing me a heavy package, wrapped in sheepskin and tied with twine.

‘It’s a gift from Godifa,’ said Robin. ‘And it comes with all her love. Marie-Anne and Tuck send theirs, too.’

‘Is all well in Yorkshire?’ I asked my lord. He nodded. ‘Marie-Anne and Tuck have moved down to Westbury to be with Goody. And Marie-Anne is with child again.’ I looked at him and I could tell that he was much pleased by his wife’s condition.

‘I heartily congratulate you, my lord,’ I said formally, but with a happy smile.

‘Yes, it is good news,’ said Robin modestly. ‘I’ll tell you all the rest later. Are you not going to open your gift?’

‘I expect it’s a dozen pairs of fresh, clean braies,’ said John with an evil smirk. ‘She will know that, with all these nasty Frenchmen about, you’ll have been shitting yourself in fear like a stomach-sick goose …’

I weighed the package in my hands. Godifa, known as Goody, was my betrothed – a girl of startling beauty and immense courage, with an alarmingly violent temper, who had been raised by rough outlaws in Sherwood, and who was now attempting to learn to be a fine lady under the tutelage of Robin’s wife, Marie-Anne, Countess of Locksley.

I fumbled open the sheepskin and discovered inside a mace – a beautiful flanged mace: two-foot long with an iron-hard oak shaft
and half a pound of wrought steel on the end. I had used one on the Great Pilgrimage, but lost it in battle in Cyprus. Goody knew that I prized it as a weapon, and that I missed the one I had lost. In the right hands, a mace was a fearsome killing tool. The head of the mace was covered with flat triangular pieces of steel welded in a circle around the head, the points facing outwards. It was brutally effective in battle, designed to smash bones and crush organs through a knight’s mail, but it was somehow an object of great beauty, too. I turned it over in my hands, thinking:
How typical of Goody! How useful and how ungirlishly practical a gift this is
. There was a scrap of parchment inside the package, and in a shaky, childish hand that I could barely make out in the gloom of the courtyard, these words were written in splotched Latin:
God keep you safe, my love
.

I felt a tremendous surge of emotion at those words; and I realized how much I was missing my beloved girl, my wonderful wife-to-be. I longed to be near her again, to kiss her perfect red lips, to stare into her lovely violet-blue eyes, to wrap her tightly in my arms …

‘You are probably puzzling over what it is,’ said John, crudely breaking in on my thoughts. ‘Let me enlighten you. It’s called a
mace
,’ he spoke the last word deliberately, as if I was a simpleton – ‘it’s a big club for hitting Frenchmen. If you are a very good boy, Uncle John will show you how to use it one day—’

‘Be quiet now, John,’ Robin said with absolute authority. He could see that I was struggling to keep my composure under the storm of emotions that were besieging my heart.

‘Owain is dead,’ I said, my throat swollen and clogged.

‘Yes, I know,’ said Robin. ‘He was the best of men.’

‘I miss him already,’ I said.

‘It’s all right, lad. We all miss him,’ said Little John.

‘Shall we go into the hall?’ said Robin, after a moment’s silence, and all I could manage was a snuffling grunt by way of an affirmative.

* * *

I performed ‘King Philip’s Folly’ for the French monarch’s royal cousin Richard the Lionheart that evening. In the castle’s small and rather shabby hall, now made as regal as possible with golden firelight and many beeswax candles, our knightly company enlivened with good wine, good meat and good cheer, I mocked the French King and made my own sovereign laugh until he wept, his white teeth flashing in the candlelight, his red-gold hair seeming to dance and sparkle with his immoderate joy.

The King had come to Verneuil with most of his strength, and among the faces that I glimpsed through the smoky hall were of some of the noblest and most powerful men in Europe: William the Marshal was there, his battered soldier’s face split with a huge grin at my impudence to French royalty, while Sir Aymeric de St Maur, representing the English Knights Templar, and Robert, Earl of Leicester, both seemed a little shocked at the crudity of my
fabliau
. Scar-faced Mercadier, Richard’s fearsome mercenary captain, stared at me steadily and soullessly. Gloomy John of Alençon seemed to be almost cheerful for once, and Sir Nicholas de Scras, an old friend and former Knight Hospitaller, who now served the Marshal, applauded my music vigorously whenever I paused, while Sir Aubrey de Chambois looked on, pale but contented, sipping his wine slowly and savouring his continued existence. A couple of Anglo-Norman barons whose names I did not know peered at me quizzically through the smoky gloom as I sang and played my vielle for Richard’s travelling court, but they laughed in all the right places – while the Earl of Locksley watched me perform with the air of a proud older brother.

I had recovered my composure during the course of the feast, and I followed my raucous performance of ‘King Philip’s Folly’ with a tender
canso
directed at my lovely Goody. King Richard was especially kind to me when I had finished, uprooting several barons from their places and seating me beside him; sharing his golden goblet of wine with me and asking me to recount the tale of the
siege and my part in it. He was treating me as a hero, and I must confess that I did not find it a distasteful experience.

I took the circumstance of my King’s good favour to ask his permission to travel to Vendôme and seek an audience with Cardinal Heribert at the earliest opportunity. I told him of my desire to discover my father’s killer, but the King, to my surprise, was guarded in his response. ‘We will see, Alan, we will see,’ he said. ‘I am going to need every fighting man I have to push Philip and his allies back in Normandy and in my lands to the south as well. So, I regret that I cannot allow you at this moment to go galloping off on a private quest – however important it might seem to you. But we will see how things turn out. It may well be that I shall be heading in that direction myself in the next few days, and perhaps I shall be able to grant you the freedom to follow your heart then.’

And I had to be content with that.

The next morning Richard summoned all his knights and barons for a council of war in the castle courtyard. It was another bright spring day, and I stood beside Robin in glorious sunshine to hear what our sovereign had planned out for the coming campaign.

The King was in a buoyant mood, seemingly glowing from within, as if lit by the inner torch of his own enthusiasm. Without the slightest formality, without even a prayer from one of his priests, the King began: ‘Many of you already know this, but I think it is worth repeating so that we are all clear about the situation as it stands. For the past two years, King Philip has been pushing west-wards into Normandy, taking my castles, either by treachery or force, and extending his rule into my dominions. He has taken Gisors, perhaps the most important castle on the border, the key to the whole of eastern Normandy, and has fortified and reinforced it so that it is virtually impregnable. He also now holds a tongue of land thirty miles deep inside Normandy to the north-east of
here from Tillières on the Avre, north to Beaumont-le-Roger and Le Neubourg, and east to Vaudrail – but for the moment his advance has been stopped here at Verneuil by the gallant actions of Sir Aubrey de Chambois and Sir Alan Dale. And I salute them both for their exemplary valour!’

There was a murmur of congratulation from the assembled knights; I could feel my cheeks flushing with embarrassed pleasure. I was aware that it was a rare honour to be praised by the greatest monarch in Christendom in front of the cream of its knighthood.

King Richard continued: ‘This is the turning point. While I have been indisposed, Philip has advanced. That stops now. From now on we go on the attack. From now on he is on the defensive. From now on, we start to win.’

The King said these words casually, without any special emphasis, but I found that I believed him utterly. He had that quality, a quality that made you enormously confident of success just because he was with you. It was absurd, of course, but it worked. Richard’s presence on the battlefield, it was truly said, was worth a hundred knights.

The King was still speaking: ‘The heart of the French enclave of conquered land is the castle of Evreux, which until recently was held by my brother John, for Philip.’

There were a few murmurs, grumbles and muttered oaths, but Richard’s face was a picture of seriousness. ‘For those of you who do not know this already, my brother has seen the error of his ways and has renewed his allegiance to me. I have forgiven him. I have absolved him of his crimes. He has since returned to Evreux with a strong force of our knights and that fortress is now back in our hands.’

Once again a restrained babbling broke out, but as Richard raised a hand to quiet the crowd of barons and knights around him, a strong voice cut through the general murmuring. ‘Is it true that Prince John slaughtered all the French inhabitants of the town of
Evreux? Cut down all of them – peasants, merchants, artisans, monks, nuns, priests – men, women and children …’ I recognized the familiar growling tones of William the Marshal, and sensed a hum of righteous anger behind his question.

‘Why would he do that?’ I said, without taking time to think. ‘What would be the point of such savagery?’

For the tiniest part of a moment, Richard looked uncertain; he opened his mouth to speak but he was superseded before he could utter a word.

A cold, lapidary voice spoke instead. ‘It is true. He killed them all. Slaughtered every one of them. And I helped him do it,’ said Mercadier, who was standing at the King’s elbow. ‘They were traitors, they were scum who served Philip and they all deserved to die.’

The scarred man seemed to be speaking directly at me. I was drawing a deep breath, ready to condemn his brutality, when King Richard spoke: ‘Yes, my brother and Mercadier killed many in Evreux – and God may well judge them for it in the next world. But you should consider this, Sir Alan: in doing so, Mercadier and John saved your life.’

I was completely wrong-footed, baffled, and it must have shown. How could a massacre of townspeople thirty miles away have saved my life?

Richard smiled sadly at me: ‘Why do you think King Philip disappeared so quickly with most of his army? Did you think your handful of men had frightened him away?’

‘No,’ I said, a little nettled, ‘I thought that you had.’

‘It was neither of us, I am afraid,’ Richard replied. ‘It was John. When King Philip heard what my brother had done in Evreux, he hurried there with all possible speed to avenge his people. And while we still hold the castle there, Philip is now furiously besieging our loyal men inside it.

‘But not for long. I will come back to that in a few moments,
if I may. For now, let us continue.’ Richard cleared his throat. ‘There are three main areas of operation in this war against Philip. The first theatre is here in Normandy; the second is south around Touraine and the Loire Valley; and the third is in the far south in Aquitaine, my mother’s homeland. In all three areas, Philip will seek to cause mischief, either in person or through his allies; he will bribe and buy support from my vassals where he can, and intimidate others. He will be up to his knavish tricks from Rouen to Toulouse, and I must show my vassals, wherever they are, that I will not forgive treachery and I will put down any rebellion with speed and determination, and I will smash Philip’s armies wherever and whenever they can be brought to battle. And so, we must be prepared to tackle him on all three fronts – simultaneously, if necessary.’ The King took a deep breath. ‘Accordingly, I’ve decided to split the army into three parts.’

There was another outbreak of muttering among the assembled knights. Dividing an army weakened it and if the entire enemy force was able to concentrate against any one part, it could prove disastrous.

‘I have no choice,’ Richard said, answering a rumble of half-asked questions. ‘I must act immediately in several regions hundreds of miles apart, and I cannot be in all places at the same time. Anyway, I have made my decision. This is how it will go: firstly, Prince John and the earls of Leicester and Arundel will hold Normandy for me. They will protect Rouen from Philip’s depredations, and attempt to take back as much territory as they can without endangering their own ability to operate effectively in the northern theatre. Secondly, in the centre, Alençon, I want you to go down to Maine and link up there with my knights from Anjou, who are presently at Le Mans. Your task is to take Montmirail and destroy it and, if he ventures out of his bolt-hole at Chateâudun, I want you to give Geoffrey of the Perche a bloody nose. Thirdly, the earls of Striguil and Locksley, Mercadier and myself, and the
bulk of the army will push on further south. We will join my ally and friend Sancho of Navarre and retake the castle of Loches.’