King's Man (19 page)

Richard could, of course, have been held in the town itself, perhaps in a nobleman’s dwelling. But I had shinned up several tall trees as I was approaching Ochsenfurt and – apart from a large solid-looking church in the centre of the town – I could not make out another stone-built structure that would be suitable for holding a valuable captive for several days or weeks. The towers might be on the edge of town but the walls were patrolled by men-at-arms, and the only way out would have been a locked door at the base of the tower on the inside of the walls.

No, I was almost certain that Richard would be in one of the four towers. But which one?

Ten yards to my left, a well-travelled road ran east–west beside the broad, glinting flow of the Main and it entered Ochsenfurt by a strong-looking barbican beside the tower. The big wooden town gate, studded with iron for extra strength, was barred tight. It would have been closed at curfew, and would not be opened until dawn. On the battlements above the barbican, I could see the warm yellow glow of candlelight escaping from two or three windows, and the occasional moving shadow as a watchman walked past the light. I calculated that there must be about five or possibly six men up there. And these men-at-arms, charged with keeping the safety of Ochsenfurt, were awake and alert. In order to break into this town and
talk face-to-face with King Richard, I would have to swim across a flooded ditch, scale a sheer twenty-foot wall, sneak past these six men-at-arms, or kill them all silently, and then wander around the maze of narrow streets after curfew, and locate my sovereign in one of four strongly defended towers – and do all this in the pitch darkness and without making a sound. To be captured would mean execution as a thief or spy.

I chewed on my strip of jerked beef and pondered the problem. It was impossible, I concluded. There was no way I could get into Ochsenfurt undetected. But that did not mean I would not be able to communicate with my King.

The big double door to the barbican was locked tightly shut, as I had already noted. Nobody could go in through it. On the other hand, it was very unlikely that anyone would come out. What sort of watchman is willing to leave his comfortable spot by a brazier, his allotted post, and venture out into the darkness? Who knows what strange, unearthly creatures, demons or witches, may lurk beyond the safety of the firelight? I thought of the superstitious villagers of Locksley and their fears of the Hag of Hallamshire, and smiled to myself. Then I dug into my back-sack and pulled out my polished apple-wood vielle and my horsehair bow. It was one of my most prized possessions, a gift from my old musical mentor Bernard de Sezanne. The vielle was about two foot long, and made up of about half neck, where I fingered the strings, and half woman-shaped rounded body, which generated its exquisite sound. It was light enough to carry in the back-sack with ease, yet fairly strong.

I repacked the back-sack, and readied myself to flee at a moment’s notice, then I began to tune the instrument as quietly as I could. Mutterings of conversation came drifting down from
the candlelight above the barbican, not thirty yards away, as they heard me plucking at the five strings and adjusting the pegs on the head at the end of the vielle’s long neck. I could not hear the words distinctly, and I would not have understood them even if I had, but I knew that the guards were aware of my presence.

And then I began to play.

My master Robin had almost always been short of money during the Great Pilgrimage. Since he had commandeered the lucrative frankincense trade, that had all changed dramatically, of course, but for most of the time he had lacked sufficient quantities of silver to meet his obligations as the leader of nearly four hundred fighting men. And the fault had been King Richard’s. My sovereign had promised Robert of Locksley a certain amount of silver in exchange for Robin’s promise to come to war and bring his feared Welsh bowmen with him. Unfortunately, as is often the way with rich men, and especially kings, Richard had been slow to pay what he owed to my master, and Robin had suffered a lack of ready funds as a result.

As a favour to Robin, I had used an opportunity to play music with Richard to remind my King of his debt to Robin, and we had enjoyed a sort of musical duel: I had sung a verse suggesting that Richard should pay up promptly and Richard had replied by telling me not to stir up trouble. It had all been done in a spirit of fun and laughter, but the outcome was that Robin was paid a proportion of the silver he was owed, and Richard and I had formed a bond as fellow verse-makers.

That dark night, seated on the cold earth outside the barbican
of the main gate of Ochsenfurt, I played the music that accompanied the song that Richard and I had written together. It was a simple, distinctive melody, repeated twice and then elaborated on in the third and fourth lines, before returning to the main melody again. I bowed the opening notes, and sang:

My joy summons me

To sing in this sweet season …

I bowed the next few chords and continued:

And my generous heart replies

That it is right to feel this way
.

And then I stopped and listened. There were raised voices coming from the barbican, and a few incomprehensible shouts of enquiry, but I tried to erase them from my hearing. I was straining to hear if my sovereign lord, Richard the Lionheart, King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou and Poitiers, would join me in my carolling from inside his prison cell. If the guards in the barbican could hear me, I was sure that anyone kept imprisoned in the adjoining tower would be able to hear me, too.

I waited for a few minutes. In silhouette against the battlements of the gatehouse I could see a man-at-arms standing with a flaring torch in his hand, peering out into the darkness. But I held my peace. I doubted that they would sally forth to find me, and even if they did, I would be able to slip away before they could catch me. The man on the battlements turned
his head and said something to someone behind him. And then fixed the torch in a nearby becket and went back into his warm guardhouse. Once more, I thought, just one more time, and then I’ll go.

And I drew my bow across the strings of the vielle, and once again I sang the first verse of ‘My Joy’. There were more shouts from the guardhouse and two men appeared, this time on the battlements, clutching bright torches. Since I had not received the response that I was looking for, I backed away into the darkness, leaving the men-at-arms atop the barbican to shout their querulous challenges into the empty night.

I walked southwards, away from the river, keeping a little further away from the town wall and the water-filled ditch, but still holding them in sight. It was not just the barbican that had conscientious sentries: each of the four town walls was patrolled by alert soldiers, too. But there were not so many men concentrated near the south-western corner of Ochsenfurt when I arrived there a few moments later and found a spot under a bush from which to observe the second tower. The shouts of the guards at the barbican had drawn a single man, running from the western section of the town wall; I had seen him trotting in the opposite direction to me as I approached the second tower.

Oddly, I also believed that I could hear a strange noise behind me; a heavy crunching tread, like a huge beast moving ponderously through the undergrowth. When I stopped to listen, the noise also stopped. A quiver of ancestral fear ran through me, the notion that something was out there, behind me in the blackness, something that meant to do me harm. I shrugged off my nerves, telling myself to get a grip on my
courage. It was most likely a boar or a stag, raiding the rich farmland for something good to eat; or perhaps a sleepy cow blundering around in the darkness.

The second tower, on the south-western corner of the town, looked deserted. Not a chink of light to be seen; nothing stirring at all. I waited perhaps a quarter of an hour, huddling in my bush, and then, straightening up, I bowed the first chord and sang the first verse of ‘My Joy’. Nothing. No response from the tower, no angry cries of alarm from the guards. I tried the second verse:

My heart commands me

To love my sweet mistress
,

And my joy in doing so

Is a generous reward in itself
.

Again: nothing. That second verse had been written by King Richard himself – it was a witty reply to my own first verse, using many of the same words to give a different meaning to the verses. Richard had been justifiably proud of his composition. I doubt very much he would have forgotten it. But: nothing. So I packed up the bow and the vielle into the back-sack, and began to move off eastwards towards the third tower.

The approach to my third performance spot was easier than the last two as there was a small wood to the south of Ochsenfurt which made it possible to come undetected to a place close to the walls. The third tower looked as unpromising as the second; there were no guards in evidence and not a chink of light showing. I wondered whether I had made a mistake, that Richard was not imprisoned in one of these tall round
fortifications; maybe he was not in Ochsenfurt at all. Perhaps he had been moved once again to another location altogether. Was I just wasting my night, when I could be tucked up in the warm hay of the stable listening to Hanno’s snores?

I unpacked the vielle, feeling a little discouraged, and with very little ceremony I launched once more into the first verse of ‘My Joy’. Again, there was no response, not a sound from either a guard or royal prisoner. Dispirited, I began a listless rendition of the second, the royal verse. And then it happened.

A light showed at a tiny window at the top of the tower; a little spark of good cheer. I stopped playing, dumbfounded. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be …

And then I heard a voice: not strong, nor particularly tuneful, the voice of someone only just awakened – but familiar, very familiar, and it made the skin all over my body pimple like a plucked goose’s flesh. The voice sang:

A lord has one obligation

Greater than love itself

Which is to reward most generously

The knight who serves him well
.

It was Richard. I had found my King. And he had remembered, and sung back to me, the verse I had written so long ago, to remind him of his debts to Robin.

I had tears stinging my eyes as I struck the strings of the vielle for the final verse: and I sang it in unison with my lord, my captain, my King, his voice growing in strength with every note.

A knight who sings so sweetly

Of obligation to his noble lord

Should consider the great virtue

Of courtly manners, not discord
.

When we had finished, there was a long silence. My throat was too choked to speak. And finally, I saw a pale face at the window high up on the tower, and a royal voice called out: ‘Blondel, Blondel, is that truly you? Or are you some night phantom sent to taunt me in my misery?’

‘It is me, sire. It is Alan Dale. It is truly me, and we – myself and my lord abbots Boxley and Robertsbridge – have come to accomplish your freedom. Take heart, sire, your friends are close at hand.’

At that moment, something flashed in the corner of my eye. Purely out of instinct, I moved back half a step as a shining steel sword blade slashed past my face, missing my nose by a quarter-inch. If the blow had landed, it would have hacked straight through my skull, killing me for sure. But, God be praised, I was young then, and very fast. I dropped the bow and turned to face my attacker with only a frail wooden vielle in my hands. He was a tall, very thin man, taller than me by half a foot, and he was not slow either. And suddenly I knew him. He was the man I had seen beside the fire with Prince John, at the siege of Kirkton six months ago. I had no time to reach down for my misericorde, but my beloved musical instrument was enough to deflect the next strike; a lightning lunge at my heart. By God, he was quick! Holding the instrument by the neck, with the sound box towards my enemy, I caught and deflected his sword as it flickered towards me – and what a
sword: a long, slim blade, chased with gold, a crosspiece decorated with ropes of silver, and a large blue gem, a sapphire, I assumed, set in a ring in the centre of the silver pommel. I saw all this in an instant, and at the same time, my vielle swept up and to the right and pushed the magnificent blade safely past my body. I riposted instinctively; hours and hours of training in the strike. And if the vielle had been a sword, my counterblow would have killed him. As it was, the blunt end of the vielle’s round body smashed into his face with enough force to crush his nose and send him staggering back. I fumbled at my boot top for the dagger; I needed steel for this work, not frail wood. He looked angry and surprised as we circled each other. I watched his sword arm, waiting for his next move and trying not to think of how much I wanted to own that lovely blade, but my hind brain was shrieking another warning: one that I could not at that moment decipher.