King's Man (25 page)

Feeling the stirrings of rage in my belly, I suppressed them
almost immediately. For the weeks and months ahead I needed to be what Tuck would have called a ‘cold-hot’ man; that is, a man who keeps his rage hidden deep inside and only shows an icy indifference to the world. Robin was such a man, I remember Tuck telling me shortly after I joined the band of Sherwood outlaws in what seemed like another age. But like the shivering thief I had once been, I was hungry now, and even as I eyed Murdac’s golden rings with a larcenous envy that I had not felt in years, my stomach growled, a long, low sound like a war hound giving warning that it was about to attack. The noise was loud enough to startle Ralph Murdac and his royal master from their crisp, golden chickens. And they simultaneously looked up at me.

‘I beg your pardon, sire,’ I said, spreading a servile grin across my lips.

The Prince must have known that Hanno and I were standing there, for we had been but ten paces from him for some while, but it had amused His Royal Highness to ignore us. My wayward stomach, it seemed, had forced him to acknowledge our presence.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said the Prince, suddenly all smiles and affability. ‘It is young Alan of Westbury, if I am not mistaken; the famous
trouvère
and noted swordsman. And my servants tell me that you are the man we have to thank for locating my noble brother King Richard in his stinking German prison – you know, I had feared that he might be dead …’

As he said this, something flashed across his face, just for an instant, a look of – was it fear? Anger? Then it was gone and he was all bland smiles again.

‘Well, don’t stand on ceremony, my boy, come and join us.
Could you manage a little chicken?’ The Prince clapped his hands and a servant appeared suddenly, as if by some mountebank’s conjuring trick. ‘A cup of wine and a stool for my young friend, and be quick about it,’ he ordered in his harsh cracked voice.

So I sat down at the board with Prince John and Sir Ralph Murdac. It was a situation that I could never have conceived of five years ago. I could scarcely believe it now. I saw that Hanno was being led away by one of the servants – presumably he was to be fed in the kitchens or somewhere more suited to his lower rank. I helped myself to a small piece of chicken breast, and a hunk of fine-milled white bread.

‘You know Sir Ralph Murdac, of course,’ said Prince John, nodding at my mortal enemy, the man I most wanted to kill in the world, who sat on the other side of the table from me chewing a drumstick and regarding me down his nose with those icy blue eyes.

‘Sir Ralph,’ I said, managing a condescending smile, and nodding my head in a casual manner as if I regularly sat down to break bread with murdering little shit-weasels.

And then I spoilt it all. I caught a waft of Murdac’s perfume, some foul lavender-based concoction and, as I always did when its odour raped my nostrils, I gave a mighty sneeze, a huge nasal trumpet blast, and then another. A chunk of half-chewed chicken shot out of my mouth and spattered the crisp white linen tablecloth.

‘I see your base-born manners have not improved,’ sneered Murdac. ‘But then, blood will out, as they say …’

‘Good God,’ croaked the Prince, interrupting his friend. ‘Are you sick, young Alan? You haven’t caught some Oriental plague,
I trust, from your long sojourn in the Holy Land? Or some German ague? He-he-he!’ He seemed to find this very funny and chortled to himself for several moments, the red ringlets of his shoulder-length hair dancing with his merriment.
Do not punch him in the face, Alan; do not do it
, I thought.
Be the cold-hot man. Be calm, or all is lost
.

‘I am quite well, sire. It is perhaps a slight chill, that is all. I thank you for your royal concern.’

‘Well, I won’t keep you long, not if you’ve got a chill – or the dreaded plague. He-he-he! I understand that you wish to serve me – is this the truth?’

I merely nodded; I did not trust myself to speak.

‘Well, you are in luck. Sir Nicholas de Scras, one of my finest knights, has personally recommended you. And that is good enough for me. We know whom you served before, and indeed
why
you are seeking a new lord, but I think the least said about that affair on St Polycarpus’s Day the better. Don’t you?’

‘I don’t trust him,’ Murdac said bluntly. ‘I think he is a spy sent by Locksley and he means to betray you.’

I stared hard at Sir Ralph, boring into his chilly blue eyes with my own angry brown ones. But I kept my mouth shut. The cold-hot man, that was me.

‘Nonsense, Ralphie,’ said Prince John. ‘We were both there in the Temple Church when he betrayed his heretical master. We saw it with our own eyes; heard it with our own ears. And now that Locksley is loose, he will surely be coming for this fellow; very fond of vengeance is our Robert Odo. The boy’s clearly desperate; masterless, damn near penniless – he’s got nowhere else to turn.’

The Prince had dropped his shallow pretence of being a friendly, jolly companion; he was talking about me as if I were not even in the great hall, let alone seated two feet away from him.

‘We’ll watch him, of course. He has a well-earned reputation as a slippery fellow. Low-born fellow, too, I hear. But if he plays us false – well … we will deal with that if and when. I need fighting men, Ralphie. Besides, Nick de Scras vouches for him, and that’s good enough for me.’

Prince John looked at me directly now, and his voice changed and became harsh once more. ‘Let me speak plainly, Dale. I will give you the manors of Burford, Stroud and Edington. They lie in the West Country, not far apart from one another, and make up one knight’s fee. I expect you to do me faithful service in return. If you betray me, if you even disobey me, you will lose the manors – and your head. Am I clear? Now, do you accept my offer and will you swear to serve me loyally?’

‘I accept,’ I said.

‘Good,’ said the Prince. ‘I will have the charters drawn up and we will do the homage ceremony tomorrow at noon in the chapel. Now get out.’

I was on my feet before I knew it. ‘I thank you, sire, from the bottom of my heart for this opportunity to serve you,’ I said, bowing low. ‘I am most grateful for your royal kindness.’

But the Prince had returned to his plate of greasy chicken and so I bowed once more, ignoring Sir Ralph completely, and reflecting, as I made my way out of the great hall, that I would have to get better at this royal boot-licking. After all, I might be required to do it on a daily basis.

The next day after a solemn Mass in the great chapel, during which I prayed even more fervently for my soul than usual, I knelt before Prince John, placed my hands between his, and swore a solemn oath before God. We then exchanged the kiss of peace and I ceremonially received three bulky parchment scrolls, hung with big green and black discs of sealing wax, which confirmed me as the lord of the plump West Country manors of Burford, Stroud and Edington. It would seem that I was going up in the world.

After the ceremony, my new master called his knights together to witness what he called an ‘amusement’. A local freeman known as Wulfstan of Lenton had been accused of moving a marker stone, so as to encroach on some ploughland on one of Prince John’s estates. In reality, I had been told by a castle servant, a Nottingham man whom I knew slightly from earlier days, Prince John’s steward had moved the stone and Wulfstan had merely restored it to its original position. Normally, since good King Henry had reorganized the law, the case would have been tried by the defendant’s peers, twelve good men and true from the surrounding area, but Wulfstan clearly did not believe that he would receive a fair trial in a court packed with Prince John’s tenants and cronies. Thus, claiming that he was the great-grandson of Saxon thanes, and therefore had the right to bear arms, he demanded the old-fashioned wager of battle – to the death: a trial by combat.

He was a rather slack-witted man, as fair-haired as Goody and with a bushy beard obscuring his face, but he was as proud as Lucifer. And I cheered him, silently, deep in my heart, for preferring to fight than allow his ancestral lands to be encroached on by his powerful royal neighbour.

A square area about sixty foot on each side had been marked out with ropes in the outer bailey of the castle, inside the long wooden stockade that surrounded the entire fortification, but outside the stone walls of the castle itself. The stone core of Nottingham Castle was shaped like a swaddled baby, with a circular upper bailey at the south end – the baby’s head – and a slightly bigger oval middle bailey – the baby’s swaddled body – connected to it and lying directly to the north. Both upper and middle baileys were built on a massive sandstone outcrop, the highest landmark for miles around, and they were walled with granite and dotted with high square towers every fifty paces or so for extra strength. Between the upper and middle baileys, indeed connecting them at the baby’s neck, loomed the great tower, a high square stone fortress that was the ultimate stronghold of the constables of Nottingham, the final place of refuge in a siege, if all went badly for the defenders. On the eastern and northern sides of the castle was a wide area known as the outer bailey, filled with tradesmen’s shacks, animal pens, stables, workshops, cookhouses, a few guest halls, some storehouses and, next to a deep well, a large newly built brewhouse where the ale for the whole castle was made. The outer bailey was protected by a twenty-foot-high earth-and-timber stockade – the castle’s first line of defence.

The area roped off for the list lay to the north and east of the stone-built part of the castle, and it was thronged by castle denizens and by people from the thriving market town outside the walls to the east – my old hunting ground in my days as a hungry cutpurse.

The crowd was packed three deep around all four sides of the list and already there was a hum of excitement at the coming
contest. Each combatant was to be armed with a sword and shield, and I suspected that Wulfstan might have believed that he was actually going to fight Prince John himself. If that was true, he was in for a shock, for John had naturally delegated a champion to do his fighting for him. I confess, when I saw who the champion was, I had to suppress a start of unease myself. And the sight of his huge companion had me reaching instinctively for my sword hilt.

The man who would do battle with Wulfstan was the tall, thin swordsman who had attacked me outside the walls of Ochsenfurt. His ogrish companion stood guarding Wulfstan with one massive hand holding him casually by the back of the neck as if he were measuring it.

I nudged a knight next to me and, indicating the two grotesque assassins, asked, ‘Who are those men?’

‘Have you not yet had the pleasure of their acquaintance?’ He smiled at me in a not altogether friendly way. ‘The tall one is called Rix,’ he continued. ‘The quickest man with a sword you will ever see. His gigantic friend is Milo – and, as you can judge for yourself, he is barely a man at all.’

‘They serve the Prince?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer.

‘They kill folk for him,’ was the knight’s terse reply. And he would say no more on the matter.

At a signal from Prince John, Milo released Wulfstan and gave him a little push so that he staggered into the centre of the roped-off square of packed earth. The freeman stood straight, rolled his shoulders, shook his arms to loosen the muscles and used a piece of leather thong to tie back his long thick blond hair. He was a man of about thirty, I guessed, of
middle height, deep in the chest and strong from long days of labour in the fields. Wulfstan went over to the far corner of the list where a standard yard-long sword with a leather-wrapped wooden handle and a stout six-inch crosspiece had been propped next to a kite-shaped shield. These were weapons that were carried by any ordinary man-at-arms in England; indeed, their like could be seen slung on the backs and about the waists of about two dozen of the men who were crowded round the square field of battle at that very moment. I myself was carrying arms that were not dissimilar.

Then Rix entered the list, hopping over the rope on his long legs like a stork. He was dressed in a homespun tunic the colour of straw, belted at the waist, with his long sword hanging in a scabbard on his left side. He was bareheaded and his brown hair was cut short across the brow and shaved on the scalp at the back, high, from the neck up beyond his ears, in an old-fashioned style that would have suited a Norman of his great-grandfather’s day, one of William the Bastard’s men. His face, like his body, was long and lean, and he seemed entirely calm, like a man going about his daily business, rather than one about to engage in mortal combat to determine the Judgement of God.

Rix pulled the slung shield off his back and slid his left arm through the grips, and then he drew his sword. Once again I was struck by how beautiful the blade was: slightly slimmer than a normal weapon, and tapering gracefully to a razor point, the blade engraved with tiny golden letters along the fuller that ran down its centre. From where I stood, it was impossible to decipher their meaning. The magnificent blue sapphire, set into a thick ring of silver at the pommel, flashed as it caught the
light on that bright spring day. It was a sword fit for a king, an Emperor even, and I wondered where he had obtained it. No doubt from some nobleman that he had slaughtered. I wanted it. I lusted after that sword; I desired it so much it was an ache in my heart.

But there was no time then for these covetous thoughts. At the crook of a finger from Prince John, who was seated in a high-backed chair in the middle of the northern side of the square and surrounded by his closest knights, Rix and Wulfstan came and stood before him, the blond Saxon eyeing his opponent with just a hint of trepidation. He was right to fear him, I thought. Standing in the eastern side of the square, I could see both men in profile, and I saw that Rix was a full head taller than his adversary, although with Rix’s slimness I would have guessed that Wulfstan weighed a shade more. Both men made a solemn declaration that they had not eaten that day and that they had no hidden witch’s enchantments or magical gewgaws about their bodies that would give them an unfair advantage in battle. Wulfstan then declared loudly that he was fighting to preserve his land, the land that had belonged to his father and his father’s father before that, and he called on God Almighty, Jesus Christ, and all the saints to aid him in this matter and prove for once and all time that his cause was right.