The King’s Assassin (24 page)

Once again I had been moved by Robin’s generosity. He had his faults – God knows he could be self-serving, ruthless and cruel – but he was always, always loyal to his
familia
, those chosen few in his inner circle. I vowed to remember that, above all else about my lord. But I had bigger things on my mind than Robin’s character flaws: the sheriff’s threat to have his monster rip Robert’s head off was paramount among them. Philip Marc and his loathsome toady Sir Benedict Malet wanted my money – I had refused it to them – and so far I had heard nothing more of the matter for several months. Indeed, I had not thought of it in weeks. But now it seemed blindingly clear that they would be bound to act: I had defied them, insulted them, and no man likes to take that humiliation without seeking revenge at some point. I only prayed that I would reach Westbury in time.

Robin drove his men hard, and I felt my weakness as a kind of constant guilt as we thundered along – if I had not been so ill, I would have been at Westbury preparing it for whatever lay ahead. If I had not involved myself in the plot against the King, I would not have become so weak. And I was still very feeble. I struggled to keep up with the other riders, even the novice horsemen, but the image of a headless Robert spurred my body onwards, forced it to conquer its frailty.

We reached the woods around Alfreton, a handful of miles from Westbury, at sunset and Robin called a halt for the night. I said that we should push on and reach the manor that night, but Robin stopped me.

‘We need to know what the situation is before we go charging in,’ my lord said. ‘Hugh is there and Sir Thomas – and they will not let anything happen to Robert. Calm yourself, Alan, this is no time for recklessness. We sleep here and let the scouts do their work.’

In truth I was almost destroyed with fatigue. So after making a fireless camp in the deep woods and eating well from a basket of luxurious provisions that Marie-Anne had provided for us, I rolled myself in my cloak in a deep drift of leaves and slept like a dead man for eight hours. Robin woke me three hours before dawn with a cup of wine, a piece of buttered bread and a lump of cheese.

‘They are there, Alan,’ he said, before I had even scraped the sleep-sand from my eyes. ‘I don’t know who they are, but there is an armed camp halfway around Westbury. Maybe a hundred fighting men: knights and men-at-arms, mostly. But the scouts think they have not been there long, and the gates are still firmly closed to them. Westbury has not fallen, Alan.’

I sat up and immediately began to struggle into a borrowed hauberk that Robin had found me in his armoury the day before.

Robin said: ‘This is what I think we should do…’

The Earl of Locksley’s plan was simple but contained his usual measure of cunning. We could not hope to destroy a company of nearly five times our number, but we could sow confusion and panic and allow those two time-honoured military forces to even the balance. We were in the deep woods to the north-west of Westbury, near Alfreton, and the main enemy encampment, bar a few pickets, was spread out in a wide crescent shape to the south of the roughly circular walled compound that was my home, on the slope below its main gate. Little John and five dismounted men – the least skilled riders in the troop – would approach on foot as stealthily as they could and attack the western end of the enemy crescent. Their orders were to run into the camp, hopefully without being seen by the pickets, and to begin killing quickly and silently, slaughtering the sleeping men, and moving generally towards the centre of the camp. The alarm would surely be raised as soon as they began their bloody work and when the camp was astir, they would split up and fight their way to the main gate of Westbury where they should receive protection against their enraged enemies from the bowmen on the walls. Little John was big and ugly enough to be easily recognised by Sir Thomas or Hugh or any of the men inside the manor – even in the half-light of dawn – and so they should not be mistaken for attackers. But I was aware that the big man and his section were playing the most dangerous part in this operation – six men on foot attacking an armed camp of a hundred or so enemies. We could only hope that having six killers loose in the camp would make the direction of our attack hard to locate and so create shock and fear among the enemy troops.

Meanwhile Robin, Miles, myself and the remaining fifteen cavalrymen would circle round to the east of Westbury on horseback and when we heard the noises of alarm and Little John’s fight begin in earnest, we would blow trumpets, make our war cries and attack as noisily as we could from the east. Robin hoped that the enemy – terrorised by assassins within the camp and faced with a disciplined cavalry charge from the outside – and whatever assistance the Westbury garrison could afford us – would flee the field.

‘That is our objective,’ said Robin, as we gathered in a loose group in the dark woods for a final conference before the attack. ‘We want them to run south as fast as they can. Westbury is to their north, Little John comes in from the west; the cavalry from the east – we want them to run south. This is not about trying to slaughter every single one of the enemy –’ I heard a muted cry of ‘Spoilsport!’ from Little John, which Robin ignored – ‘this is about driving them away. Does everybody understand? Do not drift to the south, that is their exit route. Do not get between the enemy and the sheep pastures to the south by the river. We want them to run. If they don’t, and it goes badly, head for the main gate. If the attack fails to drive them away, we need to be able to get inside the walls as quick as we can.’

Our movements shrouded by the grey blanket of the hour before dawn, I led the cavalrymen around the north side of Westbury, keeping a good three-quarters of a mile from the compound and travelling as quietly as we could. Little John and his section of men had departed a good half-hour earlier, as they were taking the shorter route round the west. I was glad that we were moving over my land, land that I had walked and ridden over for nearly twenty years, for I was able to select the quieter paths through the many thickets of vast bramble and along the tracks through the woodland that I had hunted since I was not much more than a stripling. Before long we were in place on the banks of the river, a mere two hundred yards from Westbury itself but hidden in a fold of land underneath a stand of beech trees. It was a favoured place to fatten the pigs and the beech mast was thick on the ground, muffling our horses’ hooves. I stopped the troop, got down from my horse and squirmed forward on my belly ten paces to the top of a small rise from where I could see the Westbury compound and the pasture lands before it. Behind me the pinkish stain on the horizon signalled the coming of the sun. But I shivered in the chill air.

I had been feeling the usual stomach-clenching fear before action, a dryness in my mouth and a tremble in my hands, as we walked our horses around the back of my home – but now that I could clearly see Westbury and the great smear of canvas tents staining the land in front of my gates, my trepidation was for the main part displaced by raw anger. How dare these men come to my home and threaten those whom I loved? I would hit them with all my strength; they would pay with their lives.

I made my way back to Robin and the troop and reported: ‘Their horse lines are to the south, and I’d say, yes, there are at least a hundred men, maybe more, plus camp followers and servants. A few are awake, I can see half a dozen campfires alight, and there is a pair of alert sentries about fifty yards beyond the rise. But I see no reason not to ride straight over them.’

A hair-raising scream ripped through the air, the last agonised cry of a man departing this world. It was the awful music of a battle begun.

I could now make out Robin’s handsome face in the half-light: ‘I believe Little John has already begun the party,’ he said. ‘Let us join him in his revels.’

We came over the top of the dip at the canter, in a tight wedge, with Robin at its point and Miles and I directly behind him. Behind us came the rest of the troop; each man armed with helmet, shield and hauberk and a twelve-foot lance. I had no lance, of course, I would not have had the strength to wield it effectively, but I had the borrowed shield on my left arm, a steel cap on my head, and Fidelity’s shining naked blade in my right hand. The two sentries between us and the enemy took one look at the pack of cavalry that appeared, thundering towards them, as if from nowhere, and immediately ran yelling in two separate directions. We let them go and moments later we smashed into the camp with our formation intact.

We shouted our war cries with all our might – myself bellowing ‘Westbury!’ – and came crashing in through a space between two big grubby white tents, our horses’ hooves ripping the guy-ropes and their pegs from the ground. As the tents collapsed behind us, Robin drew first blood, his lance leaping forward to skewer a sleepy man-at-arms in a black surcoat who was standing by a fire rubbing his face in astonishment. He abandoned the lance in the man’s body and drew his sword, and by then the troopers were in among the enemy killing and screaming like devils. I saw Miles put his horse at a pair of dismounted knights, one with an axe, the other half-dressed but holding a sword. The boy took the axeman beautifully, hitting him plumb centre and lifting him off his feet with the force of the spear, and the other jumped aside as the horse came past and slashed at Robin’s son with his sword. Miles took the blow harmlessly on his shield, turned his horse as neatly as a dancer and without even bothering to draw his sword, rode the man down, crushing him with the weight of his destrier, shouting ‘Locksley! Locksley for ever!’

A young man came blundering out of his tent, dressed in hauberk and helm and carrying a long spear, and I slashed at him with Fidelity, catching his helmet with my blade and knocking him flat on his back. Between my horse’s ears I caught a glimpse of Little John, his feet planted in the centre of the camp, whirling the poleaxe to devastating effect, keeping three armed men at bay, and then stepping in and disembowelling one of them with the axe-head, then, when a second man ran at him from behind, smashing the butt-spike full into his face with no more than a casual glance over his shoulder. I lost sight of him as my horse ran between two large black pavilions with scarlet trimmings. A long-haired fellow ran across my path, a knife in his hand, and I cut him down as I passed with a looping side-blow that sliced the top off his scalp like a boiled egg.

The camp was in disarray by now, tents collapsed, horses running free, men scrambling to get away from the deadly lances of our men. But these were well-trained troops and their recovery from the twin attacks was admirably swift. I found myself coming round the side of a tent to see three mounted men in black-and-white surcoats, two with long lances, one wielding only mace and a shield. They saw me and immediately spurred their horses to meet me. Three knights against one in my weakened condition – indeed, had I been in any condition – was no more than a form of suicide. Still, it was too late to play the coward and I took a firmer grip on my shield and spurred in to meet them.

They were but ten paces from me when, from an alley between the tents to my left, one of our troopers came galloping. He was a good man, brave as a lion – for, as far as he knew, he was taking on three knights on his own. His horse came charging in from the side, he shouted something and plunged his lance deep in the side of the leftmost knight, just under the armpit, almost certainly killing him immediately. His horse carried him forward and the second enemy knight, moving slightly out of his path, chopped his mace into my bold comrade’s spine as he passed. I heard the snap of bone like a dead branch breaking.

The third knight, his horse pushed out of line by the attack on his flank, came at me, his spear flicking out towards my belly. I twisted in the saddle, my horse sidestepped and I felt the hard impact of the lance head as it skimmed past my hauberk and slammed into my mount’s hindquarters. With my horse dying under me, I cut hard at the knight’s neck as he passed, the blade crunching against mail. Then the mace-wielder was on me from the other side and I took a pounding blow on my shield, and ducked as another whistled over my head. I got the horse, just, to turn and face the two men, but she was staggering, jelly-limbed, and I recognised that she was finished. The lance-man’s head was flopping loosely on his torso; I had broken his neck. He slid slowly, almost gracefully, from the saddle. But the fellow with the mace had turned his mount and was back and coming in on my right-hand side. I pounded my spurs into my horse’s flanks and she gave a last lurch forward towards my attacker. Fidelity flicked out, a straight lunge to his chest, and the man on the charging warhorse impaled himself on my blade, the combined impetus of our two converging horses driving the blade through his mail, through his ribs and deep into the cavity beyond. I felt the force of my blow rocket up my arm, slamming me back against the cantle of my saddle, and I lost my grip on the hilt as his momentum carried him past me. His horse charged on for a dozen paces and then came to a halt, confused, the man on his back, his master, dead in the saddle with Fidelity stuck halfway through his torso.

My own horse collapsed at that point, and I had to be quick, kicking my feet out of the stirrups, not to be tumbled to the turf or trapped under his falling body. I managed not to crash to the earth, landed on two feet and staggered towards the dead knight and his forlorn destrier. I had no sword, only a shield, and I wanted Fidelity back in my hand a soon as possible.

I could hear the battle raging around me: screams and yells and the crack of metal on wood. That was bad. The enemy was supposed to be running by now. Instead they were fighting back.

A tall bearded man ran at me – I never saw where he came from – wearing nothing but a chemise and braies, but he had a long hand-and-a-half sword held in both fists. He attacked immediately. I took a heavy double-handed blow on my shield that had me staggering backwards, but I had no sword with which to respond. He cut at me again, a pounding chop that, while I managed to catch it safely on my shield, felt like a strike from a battering ram. A third strike skimmed across the surface of my shield and clanged off my steel cap, and I felt my legs fail me. Down on one knee and cowering under the shield, I endured a storm of blows aimed at my head and shoulders. I could see his bare legs clearly on the green turf before me.