The Death of Robin Hood (26 page)

Or so they thought.

We blew no trumpets. We uttered no war cries. But just before dawn on the twentieth day of July in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and sixteen, sixty-six iron-mailed English horsemen came out of the tree line half a mile east of Dover Castle with absolutely no warning and tore into the French encampment like a mailed fist punching through a rotten pumpkin.

Hubert de Burgh led the charge. During the night the Norman lord had steered us unerringly around the enemy lines, crossing both the Canterbury road to the west and the one to Sandwich to the east of the castle, so that by the small hours we were positioned in a wood above the famous white cliffs. With his three knights, de Burgh made up the narrow front rank, the spear point, of our column. They were armed with twelve-foot steel-tipped lances, as well as sword and mace. Three horse-lengths behind them, also wielding lances, came Robin and myself and a dozen of our best cavalry – mostly men Robin had trained himself at Kirkton. Behind our rank came the rest of our force: more than two score riders, well mailed and helmed and eager for the fray, armed with swords, shields, long axes and burning pine-tar torches. They were
mostly new recruits, farmers from the Wealden lands whom I had tried to form into an effective fighting unit in less than two months. In truth, I had not made them particularly skilful, but I was proud of them. They might not stand a chance against a
conroi
of fully trained French knights but now they could all ride and wield their weapons from the back of a horse with some degree of competence and, more importantly, without injuring either themselves or their horses – harder to do than you might think – and they had no lack of one of the most important qualities of a warrior: raw courage.

We took the sleeping French camp almost entirely by surprise, the only sound the pounding thuds of our horses’ hooves. In the grey light before true dawn, the tents and shacks of the enemy seemed like monstrous black shapes and the dull glow of the scattered campfires like the eyes of huge wild beasts hidden by the darkness. I saw Hubert de Burgh, galloping half a dozen yards ahead of me, draw first blood. He burst out of the night like a dream-demon and plunged his lance into the belly of a man standing outside his pavilion on the edge of the encampment, yawning and stretching his arms to the lightening sky. The fellow screamed, curled around the lance as it punctured his half-naked body, and de Burgh hurled the shaft away, swiftly drawing his sword as he thundered past.

The quiet spell was broken by the man’s appalling death shrieks and we began to sing out our own war cries – I was pleased to hear the men giving the screams they had practised so long with wild enthusiasm. I guided my galloping horse between two tents and found myself facing a man with a long dagger in his hand, staring stupidly up as I thundered down upon him. He shouted:
À l’armes! À l’armes. Les Anglais
…’ Yelling ‘Westbury!’, I thrust the lance hard into his chest, smashing through his ribs, knocking him off his feet, silencing him for good.

I hauled out Fidelity and began chopping at a line of guy-ropes holding up
a tent to my right. Robin had been clear in his instructions: our objective was to cause fear and mayhem – to kill and maim as many as we could, of course, but to sow confusion as much as anything. It would safeguard us, he said, for in the chaos of battle who knows who is an enemy and who a friend? And that would help us to withdraw from the field in due course. We were just three score men, he said, attacking more than a thousand. We could not hope to win a proper battle. But we could cause them serious harm and shatter their sense of safety and confidence.

I could smell smoke now and burning canvas. Here and there I saw dark horsemen flitting between the tents, blazing torches in hand, leaving a trail of red fire behind them. The new recruits had been told to set alight anything that would burn and as I rode into an open area before a circle of gold-and-black-striped pavilions, I saw that the whole eastern edge of the camp was now merrily aflame. A French squire, crouched with laced hands, was hoisting his man into the saddle, and the knight, armoured in helm and coif but without his mail hauberk or leggings, saw me and began hallooing to summon his compatriots.

I rode straight at him but before my horse had taken more than three strides, the knight kicked back his heels and, leaving his astounded squire with fingers still interlaced, cantered his horse around the back of his gaudy pavilion to escape me.

The coward.

Now two men-at-arms on foot were rushing at me from my shield side. The squire – who had more courage than his master – snatched up the knight’s sword and ran at me from the right. Enemies on both sides, I spurred straight forward, forcing my horse to charge into the side of the pavilion, which thank God sagged and then collapsed under its high stepping forefeet.

The squire seemed outraged at the destruction of his master’s property and slashed at my horse’s rump with his blade. I flicked Fidelity backwards, caught the blow and at the same time took one of
the men-at-arms’ sword hack on the front on my shield. I urged the horse forward, trampling through thick folds of black-and-gold canvas as the tent billowed and sank before me. A tricky overhand blow, across my line, cracked the helmet of one of the men-at-arms to my left, dropping him like a sack of meal, but the squire behind was readying for another double-handed swipe at my horse’s rump, so I swivelled in the saddle to slice at his face. I missed by inches but he jumped back, tripped over a guy-rope and fell hard on his behind. I urged the horse on again and we were free and clear of the trampled tent and in space. I spurred onwards, away from the wreckage. We had to keep moving, Robin had said.

I caught a glimpse of Hubert de Burgh, nearer the centre of the camp, laying about a crowd of footmen on both sides of him with a long sword, doing terrible destruction, clots of blood and matter flying with every stroke. I rode down a spearman and neatly lopped the wrist off a swordsman who ran at me swinging from my right. A riderless horse ran across my path, followed incongruously by three bleating sheep. A scarlet, pure silk pavilion took fire twenty yards from my horse’s nose and was burned to nothing but wisps before I got within spitting distance. Then Robin was shouting from my left: ‘Push on to the road, Alan. That way! Follow me! Don’t stop for anything!’

The whole camp was wide awake now and men were emerging from their tents, armed, alert and as ready for battle as any man can be who has been asleep a handful of moments earlier. I ran Fidelity’s steel through the side of a naked fat man’s stomach just as he stepped blinking out of his pointed ash-pole shelter, and ripped the blade free, spilling his blue-white guts around his ankles. He fell to his knees, soundless with shock and then, keening, desperately began trying to scoop his innards back into his ripped belly.

By sheer chance, a few instants later I lifted my left arm to check my
horse with the reins and caught an unseen crossbow bolt in the top of my shield – it would have pierced my cheek, had I not. I charged the man who had loosed it and he fled. Following him at the canter around an abandoned trebuchet, I caught him against its side and hacked through his face, slicing off the jaw in a spray of red while he desperately tried to fend me off with his unloaded bow.

I pushed onwards, north-west mostly, as best I could, heading towards the Canterbury road, as Robin had commanded. Men ran at me, I cut them down. Others ran from me and, mostly, I left them alone. The encampment was filled with noise. The shouts, the war cries, screams of pain from men and beasts. Laughter sometimes. Howls of rage. The crackle of flames. The shrill clash of steel and thud of wood on iron. Once I heard the sound of a man singing, a filthy French ballad, I think. My sword was dripping. And sweat oozed from under my helmet into my eyes, stingingly salty. A mounted knight shouted a challenge and came at me. I blocked his strike with Fidelity, swung back at him as he passed, but missed and was dangerously unbalanced as a spearman charged in and lunged at my face with his pole arm. I just got my head out of the line of attack and as my horse stepped forward towards him, I hacked down, cutting deeply into his shoulder. He screamed and fell.

It was much lighter now and I could see men running everywhere. Occasionally though, through gaps between the tents, I saw my comrades fighting, men whose faces I knew well, chopping into their foes, trampling tents, firing wooden structures, hooting with joy. These Wealden men were simple folk, suddenly unleashed from the shackles of family, community, law – from their humanity even. They were free to kill – and die – like wild animals. I saw two of them walking their horses over a Frenchman, stabbing down again and again with their swords. Then they were surrounded by a mob, a score at least, of angry Frenchmen on foot: knights, men-at-arms, servants,
too, I think. Too far away for me to help them. Their beasts were hamstrung and both were pulled down into a scrum of flashing knives, screaming faces, spraying gore.

I spurred onwards into an open space. And there I found my anger. A square platform had been set up in the centre of the circle and a long cross bar set above it. I saw the forms of two men hanging by their arms from ropes tied to the cross beam. Both were naked. One was covered in blood and, though it was barely dawn, the flies were already crawling over his red, glistening body. Only one arm and part of his left side remained untouched, the skin horribly white. Beside him, at about knee height, a box-like frame had been set up, like the contraptions washerwomen use to dry laundry on the march. But the thick strips of material stretched over the bars of the frame were not wool or linen. They were his peeled skin.

I felt my stomach squeeze and hot bile shot up my throat. With my anger, the world became sharper, more real. The noise of the embattled camp became louder. This was why I fought. To end this sort of barbarity. To stand against a man who thought that he could do this to anyone – friend or foe.

The second man hanging by his arms was completely untouched but had clearly been driven mad with fear as he watched the torture of his friend. He was babbling, ‘Christ our Saviour, Christ our Saviour – a saviour with a blood red shield,’ as I sliced through the ropes holding him to the beam. He collapsed in a heap on the platform and began praying and calling on God Almighty and all the saints.

‘Run, you fool,’ I said. ‘Run while you can.’

I cut down his companion, the flayed man, but by the way he landed in a boneless heap, I knew his soul had already departed from his body. Thank God.

Horns sounded to my left and behind me. I looked and saw the big gates of a powerful stone barbican at the northern end of Dover Castle
swinging open. Wider, wider, the doors gaped. Now cavalry was coming out at the trot in a neat column of twos in perfect formation. A sortie. The trumpets sounded again and these men – a heavy
conroi
of at least forty knights, all comrades of Hubert de Burgh and probably some of the best men the castle had to offer – burst into a gallop and hurtled towards the French encampment. They smashed into a knot of a dozen French men-at-arms who were either trying feebly to oppose them or just too slow to run, scattering them and leaving at least four bodies lying on the ground.

The cavalry roared into the heart of the camp. I heard them shouting ‘England! For England!’ and ‘God save the King!’ as they took their swords to the foe. Their timing was flawless: the impetus of our attack from the east was dying, almost extinguished; our Wealden men were scattered, many dead or wounded, and the rest were trying desperately to extricate themselves from the fight, escape the overwhelming number of their enemies and make for the Canterbury road. Still the French were not yet organised; indeed many newly awakened men had no idea what was happening and I had seen some of the more faint-hearted scrambling into the saddle, panicked, and riding away hard north-east.

The battle raged in the middle of the camp. I saw Hubert de Burgh greet his comrades with a cheer, join up with a dozen of them and charge a perfectly formed wall of mounted French knights as if they were at a tournament.

Then I saw him. The White Count. The man who had flayed the two men from Penshurst and the two I had just cut down from their gibbet; the man my cousin Roland had warned me about. He was bare-headed, mounted on a huge black stallion and clad in a long silvery-white woollen cloak over his mail that reflected the first rays of the rising sun like a mirror. And he was entirely in command of the situation. He was gathering mounted men around him, many in various states of undress, yet all armed with lance
and sword. He had a dozen about him now, then a score, and he was moving to tackle the English knights who had made the bold sortie from the castle.

It crossed my mind that I would be doing a great service to mankind if I spurred at the White Count and took his head off this instant – and I might well have attempted it, despite the crowd of knights around him, solely because of the rage washing through my belly from encountering the flayed man and his crazed companion.

Whatever I might think about the White Count, he was a soldier and his knights were equally of the first rank. They were fifty yards distant now and heading away from me. But they had formed a line at the canter, at the canter by God, twenty men on charging horses, and they swept into the surging mêlée in the centre of the camp.

I was tempted to follow them but I recalled Robin’s orders. Besides, I had my own problems. A pair of crossbowmen, fifty yards downhill on the northern edge of the encampment, had picked me as their target. The first loosed and the quarrel glanced off my shield and snagged harmlessly in the bunched mail around my neck. He then ducked behind an upright pavise to reload while his mate popped out with a spanned bow ready to take another shot at me. I was moving by then, galloping down the slope away from the tents, closing the distance and fast, but the second man was not intimidated. He waited until I was ten yards from him, put his crossbow to his shoulder almost slowly and loosed. The bolt cracked a corner of my shield, snapping off a triangular piece the size of an apple, and smashed painfully into my right shoulder. My whole right arm went numb. I couldn’t raise Fidelity, let alone strike with it. The man cast away his bow and dived out of my path. I let the horse do the work my arm could not, charging straight into the pavise that sheltered the first man, who was now reloading, knocking the big shield flat with momentum alone and clattering over
it and the screaming man underneath. I did not stop to engage the second sprawling bowman but carried straight on, my itching back anticipating a bolt, making as fast as I could for the Canterbury road now some two hundred yards ahead of me due west.