King's Man (29 page)

‘Every penny goes to the Queen?’ I said, tilting my head in a query.

‘Yes,’ said Robin, pretending to look outraged. ‘Well, I do have some expenses, obviously. But the vast majority of the money – well, most of the money – goes south to London. Don’t you trust me?’

I just looked at him and raised an eyebrow. Suddenly, we were both laughing madly.

Breathless with mirth, Robin managed to splutter out: ‘I’m not doing this to enrich myself, Alan, on my oath. I don’t need it. The Outremer trade still flows like a great glittering river. This is all for Richard. It also happens to amuse me to play the rogue again – but, upon my sacred honour, Alan, this deadly game is to buy King Richard’s freedom.’

I wiped the tears of laughter from my eyes, and said: ‘I think I can carry on the subterfuge a little longer, if you wish me to,
and for the King’s sake, but not past Christmas, I beg you. I’m not sure I could stand it any longer than that without running mad and cutting Murdac’s throat in his sleep.’

‘That’s not a bad idea,’ said Robin. ‘Although you’d never survive to tell me the tale. No, regretfully, you’ll have to play the part for a little longer. Another three months should do it; till Christmas, as you say. But at the first sign that they suspect you – you and Hanno get yourselves out of the castle. Promise me that, Alan? The first sign of suspicion, you get out of there. I need you alive and well, my friend, not dangling from a gibbet in Nottingham market.’

While I had been talking with my true lord and master, Robin’s men had been busying themselves around the wagon train, gathering up weapons and mail coats, giving a merciful release to wounded horses, soothing the nerves of the surviving ox drivers by swearing that they would not be harmed if they co-operated with the raggedy hooded men in green and russet who now swarmed over the wagon train looking for plunder. A couple of the outlaws had been fruitlessly trying to break into one of the silver chests, but its strength had defeated them for the moment.

Little John had had the foresight to post sentries north and south on the road, and it was a rider, galloping furiously towards us down the road from the north, who interrupted my conversation with Robin.

‘Sir, sir,’ the man shouted as he drew near the wagons and flung himself from his horse, ‘there are horse soldiers coming, proper cavalry, about sixty of them, heavily armed, lances, swords, shields, and coming up very fast!’

The laughter was wiped from Robin’s face in an instant.

‘Sixty, you say?’ he asked the sentry.

‘At least, sir, not more than a mile or two away.’

A strange look crossed Robin’s face, one of cold doubt. He looked at me hard – it was not a pleasant expression.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Don’t you trust
me
?’

I was hurt by that look, but then I knew that Robin had a very suspicious mind. I pushed my hurt aside, and continued: ‘Forget about that for now. With only these men’ – I gestured at the twenty or so raggedy outlaws, now joking and laughing among the wagons, so different from the murderous menacing wraiths of a quarter of an hour before – ‘with only these men, you either have to run and leave these silver wagons to the enemy, or fight for it. And if you fight, you will lose. Then we will all die.’

‘Fight or run?’ Robin thought for a moment. ‘I will do both.’ He raised his chin, and using his battle voice, a timbre designed to be heard clearly over the carnage of warfare, he shouted: ‘Archers – form up on the treeline. Now. Move! John, over here, a moment of your time, if you please,’ And in a quieter tone to me he said: ‘And you, Alan, need to get out of sight. I don’t want any of these horsemen seeing you with me.’

I understood him, it was the sensible thing to do, and although I was most reluctant to be dodging yet another fight, I led Ghost into the woodland and tethered him to a small bush fifty yards from the road. Then I crept back towards the highway and began to climb the tallest, leafiest tree I could find, ten yards back from the public thoroughfare.

Peering out between the leaves some little time later, I saw a thin, single line of perhaps three-score horsemen, pennants
flying, spear points glittering, red-and-blue surcoats flapping in the breeze, coming over the brow of the field on the far side of the road about three hundred yards away at a gentle trot. The attacking line looked spindly, elongated, lacking in depth and power – and yet it was the perfect formation to attack archers.

Robin’s meagre numbers – I counted fewer than twenty-five men – were in a loose line on the western side of the road, where the trees began. The archers had planted three or four arrows, bodkin-point down in the ground in front of them, but most still had full arrow bags at their waists. They were waiting for orders. At one end of the line stood Little John, bowless, but with his double-headed axe in hand, feet planted as strongly as the oak tree that stood behind him and a gentle smile on his broad brown face. At the other end of the line was Robin, bow at the ready. He wasted no time.

‘Nock,’ Robin shouted in his brazen war voice. And a score of men put arrows to their strings. The cavalry had seen our men by now and were increasing their speed to the trot – they were perhaps two hundred and fifty yards away and approaching fast.

‘Draw,’ shouted Robin. With a sound like a great creaking barn door, twenty-odd bows were drawn back until the goose-feather fletchings tickled the archers’ right ears. The cavalry were at the full canter now, sweeping down in an irresistible wave of big horses and big heavily armed men; their lances were couched and they were set to crash into the archers, skewering their unprotected bodies, and trample Robin’s few men into bloody rags.

‘And loose!’ said Robin. A score of shafts hissed out in a
grey blur towards the galloping enemy. Even at two hundred yards, half a dozen saddles were emptied in a trice. But still the enemy came on, the line thinner and with many a gap, but unstoppable nonetheless.

Once more Robin gave the orders – nock, draw and loose – but faster now, and once more the arrows slashed out towards the charging horsemen, spitting men and animals indiscriminately. But the cavalry were only a hundred yards away now and the dreadful pounding of the destriers’ big hooves filled my ears.

‘Shoot at will,’ bellowed Robin. ‘Loose, loose, loose!’ The archers were desperately plucking arrows from the ground and, almost without seeming to aim, shooting as fast as they could at the looming mounted warriors. The cavalry line was no more, it was just a collection of knots of charging horsemen filled with battle fury from the killings they had endured, thundering towards the frail line of archers, their bright spear-points seeking our flesh – and they were so nearly upon us!

‘Into the trees! Into the trees!’ I could hear Robin’s bold voice above the war cries of the knights, and the screams of wounded men and horses, above the drumming of hooves on hard earth only fifty yards away. His order came just in time. The archers turned as one man, and pelted backwards into the thick woodland. I saw them running beneath me, bows still in hand, to take up new positions on the far side of a small clearing. As the archers ran across the clearing I saw the taller men ducking in a strange way, all of them bobbing their heads slightly at exactly the same spot in the clearing.

And then I smiled; for I saw what these men were ducking to avoid. It was a stout chain of steel links, rubbed with dirt
to hide the gleam of metal, and it was stretched between two giant oaks twenty yards apart on either side of the clearing, secured fast to the tree trunks. The archers were forming up on the far side of the open space: not hiding, but in plain view, and they nocked arrows once again and waited for the pursuing cavalry – inviting them to attack.

They had only moments to wait.

Some three dozen horsemen came barrelling into the woodland at almost the same time. Seeing the archers in a loose huddle at the far side of the clearing they dug their spurs into their horses’ flanks and, shouting with excitement, charged straight at the footmen. The chain, which had been set at about six foot above the ground, caught two of the leading horses by the throat, and they went down in a tangle of kicking legs. The chain missed a third animal which was charging with its head held low, but swept its rider out of the saddle, almost cutting the man in half. Hard on their heels came the rest of the horsemen, their mounts crashing into the fallen horses with the terrible sound of tumbling half-ton bodies and the awful crisp snapping of equine legs. It was sheer bloody chaos: a seething tangle of horses and shields and lances and struggling men. One horse went mad with fear and began kicking and biting anything within reach. Most of the cavalry, however, stopped their mounts in time, and reined up panting and swearing, seeking a way around the mound of thrashing bloody horseflesh and the stunned and broken men-at-arms.

While this horse-borne carnage was erupting, the archers had not been idle. They nocked, drew and loosed without ceasing, pouring out a torrent of deadly arrows; not the measured volleys of before, but individual shots, well aimed and at
very close range. I saw a shaft, loosed thirty yards away, pass right through a man’s chest and still stick six inches deep in the flank of the horse behind him. Another shaft, shot from twenty yards, punched straight through a man-at-arm’s shield, through his chain mail, piercing deep into his chest. Soon the clearing was filled with heaps of dying men and kicking, screaming horses. One knight managed to make his way around the bloody mound of twitching chaos – and Little John met him with a sweep of his double-headed axe, slicing the knight’s horse’s head clean off with one blow. The knight died moments later as four arrows thudded into his belly.

And the enemy had had enough. The surviving horsemen, those who had come last to the fight in the woodland, the men who had hung back, turned their mounts and fled, streaming away back out of the trees towards the open farm land. Of the sixty men that had come on so proudly against Robin’s archers, I saw fewer than a dozen knights make their escape.

It was a stunning victory. Robin’s tiny force of raggedy peasants and outlaws, armed with little more than a few sticks and lengths of hempen string, had defeated – almost annihilated – a force three times their size of armoured, well-trained men on horseback.

And Robin had lost only a single man. We found his body by the treeline. He was a squat, well-muscled archer but he must have been slow to run on Robin’s command, for he bore the classic death wound of a fleeing infantry man pursued by a mounted knight: a bloody hole in his back where the knight’s lance had pierced him as he ran for his life.

The archers showed no pity to the wounded men they found,
ignoring appeals for mercy and all talk of ransom, and cutting their throats without regard for rank or status. Then they immediately began to search the bodies for coins.

One of the ox-drivers had been killed, too. Some escaping knight, overcome by frustration at his defeat or just plain bloodlust, had hacked into the back of the man’s head as he was passing the wagons, and now the poor driver lay dead at the feet of his draught animals, his brains softly leaking from his cracked skull into the green grass.

‘Greetings, young Alan,’ said Little John. ‘Did you enjoy my little trick?’ He gestured with a vast hand at the mound of dead and dying horses in the centre of the clearing, now being picked over by outlaw archers looking for valuable weapons, armour, silver bridles, expensive horse knick-knacks and, as always, food and drink.

‘It was astounding,’ I said. And I meant it. ‘But where on earth did you get the steel chain?’

‘I made it,’ said Little John, with undeniable pride in his voice. ‘God’s great pimpled buttocks, did you think it fell from the sky or was given to us by the fairies?’

‘But—’ I said, and stopped.

‘Forgive me, Alan. I was forgetting,’ said Little John. ‘You’ve been away from us for a while. I learnt the blacksmith’s trade in London. Just by happenstance, you might say. I needed to be near the Temple Church – Robin’s idea, of course – and there was a blacksmith’s right opposite the place. So, for a goodly fee, and no questions asked, I became a rather elderly apprentice for a few days. I learnt a thing or two, as well.’

My mind went back to a figure I had glimpsed on the day
of Robin’s trial. A tall blond man with an eye patch who seemed to have absolutely no interest in a large force of mounted soldiers appearing right on his doorstep.

‘So it was you who arranged Robin’s escape?’

Little John laughed. ‘My master at the smithy was asked to provide the Templar’s gaoler with the locks and chains to shackle Robin. And I arranged with the blacksmith to have the honour of undertaking the task.’

I snorted at this. The thought of Little John as a biddable blacksmith’s apprentice was almost too comical to believe.

‘I locked up Robin in the presence of the gaoler, but – would you believe it? – I botched the job: loose pin in the locking mechanism. Well, I was so ashamed of my shoddy work that I thought it would be better to take Robin and myself away from there as soon as possible. Once Robin was loose, we only had to kill a couple of Templar sergeants, climb a wall, and ride like Hell for Sherwood. The whole thing went as smoothly as shit passing through a goose.’

The big man was laughing now, and I joined him. I was very pleased to see Little John again: I had missed his rough good humour, appalling impiety, and his unique attitude to life, viewing the world as such an easy place in which to live. As we laughed, Robin came over to me.

‘It’s time you were going, Alan. So, I’m afraid, you need to decide – where do you want it?’

‘What?’ I said, stupidly.

‘Your story when you get back to Nottingham is that you were wounded in the fight – knocked out, perhaps – and when you came to, you were the only man left alive. Does that sound plausible?’

‘Oh, ah, I suppose so …’

Robin looked over at Little John, and gave a tiny nod.

And I ducked.

A fist like a granite boulder whistled over my head, its massive flight ruffling my blond hair, and I turned to look at Little John in alarm.