The King’s Assassin (5 page)

Robin clearly saw my consternation. ‘It doesn’t change anything significantly in England, Alan,’ he said. ‘Everything continues as normal – all that changes is that John now has an overlord…’

Fitzwalter interrupted him: ‘And the French have been told that, on pain of excommunication, they must not invade the Pope’s new territory…’

‘As I said, nothing significant is changed,’ Robin cut through his guest’s words. ‘The French have not abandoned their plans to invade. I have today received a message from William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, summoning me and all my knights to a general muster to combat this invasion. The French are still coming.’

‘What has changed,’ Fitzwalter said sharply, ‘is that as part of the arrangement with His Holiness, my lord de Vesci and I have been pardoned and restored to our lands and fortunes. We find that most significant.’

Robin got to his feet. ‘I must return to my guests,’ he said curtly. It was a barely courteous dismissal of the two rebels. ‘If you have anything further to say to me, I suggest you say it now. I want you gone from this castle first thing in the morning.’

De Vesci drew a big, sharp breath. But Fitzwalter stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. Fitzwalter said: ‘You are a man who has lived outside the law. You have done evil things, do not trouble to deny it … Now we ask you to do something evil again, but for a noble cause. For the cause of this country and her people, we ask you, quite simply, will you help us kill the King?’

‘No,’ said Robin, without hesitation. ‘Putting aside the fact that I do not trust either of you, nor like you, I will not kill the King, nor be party to any plot against his life. And for one simple reason. I swore a sacred oath that I would be his man for ever. And I will add something else for you to consider. It is a relatively simple matter to kill a king, but you cannot kill the idea of kingship. If you kill this king, another will take his place. And will he be any better than John? Who knows? He will certainly be more distrustful, knowing that his predecessor was murdered by his own barons. If you kill John, another will be anointed, perhaps a far worse man…’

‘But as his counsellors, we would guide the new king,’ said de Vesci.

‘I suspect you would seek to rule through him,’ answered Robin.

De Vesci’s face flushed. ‘We would never presume…’

But once again, Fitzwalter stopped him. ‘We have had our answer, Eustace.’ Then to Robin: ‘May I have your word that you will not betray us?’

‘You have it,’ said Robin. ‘I want as little as possible to do with either side in this matter. But I will thank you not to come uninvited to my home again.’

Fitzwalter nodded. De Vesci offered my lord a sneer. And Robin turned on his heel and walked out of the solar and back into the hall.

The two men were making their way to the door of the solar when I stepped in front of them and stopped them with a palm held out flat.

De Vesci looked so angry I thought he might try to strike me.

‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

‘What?’ snapped de Vesci.

‘I’ll kill the King for you.’

As the snake boat approached the flat brown coast of Flanders, I stood in the prow with the wind at my mailed back and rehearsed in my memory the reasons why King John deserved to die. I had to do something to take my mind off the fear that gripped my body and was causing my legs to tremble like those of a man with the palsy. Foremost in my mind was Arthur, Duke of Brittany, who had been my prisoner and later my friend in Normandy. He had been cruelly murdered within my sight in the dungeon of Rouen Castle by two henchmen of John’s, while the King looked on and laughed. I had executed the two henchmen years ago, but I felt that I owed it to the shade of my murdered friend to complete the sentence of death I had pronounced in my mind on all three of them that awful night.

This was the most noble unselfish reason for the murder, I felt. But there were other equally compelling arguments for the King’s death. In my youth, John had tried several times to have me killed. Years later, at Château Gaillard, despite his promises to relieve the castle, the King had callously left us all to die – and many hundreds of good men, including some very close to me, had perished in that protracted and pointless bloodbath. Their souls must be avenged, too. And lastly, apart from his many crimes, there was the man himself: cruel, weak, lecherous, cowardly, suspicious of everyone, close-fisted even to his loyal men, a ravening beast to any who opposed him. If any man deserved to die, I thought, it was him.

I could feel the eagerness of the thirty men behind me in the snake boat. It was like the tension in a newly strung bow-cord. We were inside the jaws of the estuary by then. To the north, the empty mudflats and low sand dunes stretched away into eternity, with barely a living creature to be seen but for a few white storks flapping lazily across the empty brown marshland. The estuary was about a mile wide at that point and the southern shore could not have been more different to the opposite bank. The French ships were clustered in their hundreds along the shoreline, the ones nearest the land tethered to stout posts hammered into the mud, the outer vessels moored to the landward ships.

The nearest French craft were less than a hundred paces away by now, and the alarm had been raised by the enemy long since. They knew we were coming. How could they not? Our white-sailed fleet filled the estuary like a flock of sheep moving slowly down a narrow valley. But there was something curious about the activity aboard the enemy decks: there was too little of it. There seemed to be far too few men aboard for such a huge mass of shipping. I guessed that there might be as many as a thousand ships all crammed along the southern shoreline that led towards the quay at Damme itself, a couple of miles further upstream. And at the quay, I could see that the ships were five or six deep against the wooden platform. I could just make out, beyond the crush of shipping, the tall thin houses that lined the narrow streets of Damme and a single spire of a church. However, despite the mass of sea-going craft, there were no more than a few hundred unarmed sailors in sight – and no sign at all of the French troops. Where were their knights? Could they be hiding?

Some of the smaller vessels, the furthest from the quay at the mouth of the estuary, were cutting their ties, hauling up sail and attempting to escape, but the wind was still north-westerly, coming directly off the water on to the land, and the majority of the shipping was pinned there by it. A few, those smaller vessels on the very edges of the fleet that we had already passed by, were managing to slide away out to sea – with a good deal of furious oar-work. But soon enough our own fast, light ships, the ones we called sparrow-hawks, were lancing out after them, grappling, boarding and swiftly subduing their panicked crews.

We were now only fifty yards from the quay, the centre of the compact mass of enemy shipping. I was standing in the prow of the snake boat, with Miles at my left shoulder, Sir Thomas Blood at my right, and I pulled Fidelity from its scabbard, and hefted my shield. It was eerily quiet, beyond the creak of rope and the splash of sea on wood. Even the sharp cries of the French sailors seemed strangely muted.

I had been in several water-borne assaults before, and by now the air should have been thick with crossbow bolts and arrows, the enemy fighting men packed inside the ship’s walls, but I saw only one lone missile flying out towards us as the fleet bore down remorselessly upon the enemy moored against the grey land. Even that single quarrel, loosed by a single crossbowman in the forecastle of a big round-bellied cog to my left, fell short and splashed into the water before the lead ship.

I looked left at the neighbouring snake boat and caught Little John’s eye. My huge friend too was standing at the prow, round shield in one hand, axe in the other. He was evidently as puzzled as I was by the absence of our enemies. He gave one vast shrug and spread his arms in the age-old sign for ‘I don’t know’.

‘Where are they all?’ asked Miles from behind me. ‘I can barely see a single man-at-arms. They are all just common sailors, no shields, armour, nary a sword between them.’ I thought I detected a certain amount of relief in his voice.

‘Don’t let your guard down, youngster,’ I said. ‘It could be a trap of some sort. The knights may be concealed below decks.’

But I did not believe it myself, and my head felt dizzy from the reprieve. For I could see that the French sailors were to a man abandoning their ships, hundreds of nut-brown bare-legged men in baggy, dirty white smocks were fleeing, bounding across the decks of the closely moored vessels, leaping from ship to ship, streaming away over the wooden quay and disappearing into the town of Damme behind it. Our lead vessel, the Earl of Salisbury’s flagship, had a dozen men aloft reefing its sails and the tillermen were turning the prow to spill their wind, and as I watched, it arced gracefully, slowed and came to rest with only the gentlest of bumps against the round-bellied French cog that seemed now to be utterly deserted. There was no sign even of the lone crossbowman who had loosed at us.

The scores of English fighting men crowding the Earl’s ship gave a roar that came clearly to me across the water, and they surged on to the enemy deck, brandishing swords and axes, their steel glittering in the sunlight to be met by … nothing at all. The English men-at-arms flooded the enemy deck, the blue and gold fleur-de-lys was swiftly hauled down, and I caught a glimpse of Robin leaping up on to the quarterdeck, his sword in his hand, not a foe in sight and a piratical grin on his handsome face. Behind me I heard the cries of Harold, our ship’s captain, to his crew, and, as our own little boat turned into the wind, lost almost all headway and glided up to kiss against the side of a low flat barge, I saw that our enemy vessel too was devoid of Frenchmen.

We tumbled aboard, laughing, for the only living thing to greet us was a one-eyed tabby cat that wound its way around my shins in the hope of a free meal. Trying not to squash it with a careless foot, heavy as I was in my mail and war gear, I led my men across the deserted deck and to the next vessel, a cog with higher sides than the barge, which was lashed to its landward side. We clambered up the steep sides with the aid of netting that seemed set there for that very purpose, and rolled over the top on to the deck of the higher ship, swords drawn.

And once again we found a not a soul.

In the absence of their fighting men, the enemy sailors had all fled their vessels by now – indeed, I could see the last of them disappearing into the streets of the town some fifty paces away – and wisely in my opinion. Why risk slaughter or capture? Their role was to sail these craft, or guard them against thieves in harbour. It was not their task to die fighting a vast host of heavily armoured enemy knights.

I felt the blood in my veins cool and slow. There was no fight to be had today. I was light-headed with relief. No fight; nothing but hundreds of empty ships.

But they were not empty.

‘Sir Alan,’ a voice called from the doorway of the cog’s cabin, interrupting my thoughts, and I looked and saw Sir Thomas emerge, his dark face split by a smile.

‘The knucklebones have rolled in our favour,’ he said, and I saw that he was holding a pair of silver wine jugs in his gauntleted hands, a golden chain was around his neck. ‘Chance smiles upon us for once!’

He lightly tapped the two silver jugs together to produce a musical chime. ‘This ship was the property of a rich man, some baron or count. There is a big chest of coin below, a box of jewels, too – a treasury! Oh, the nights of pleasure I could have with all this! And there’s fine bed linen, armour, weapons, a dozen barrels of wine, too.’

I looked down at the sailing barge tied below the cog and saw that a couple of my men were pulling back the oiled sheet that covered the hold in the centre of the vessel, and wrestling out huge sacks of grain. It came to me then, like a short hard slap, that we had just captured the entire enemy invasion fleet, with all its stores and provisions, all its wine and grain and cheese and meat and flour, and all the personal possessions of much of the nobility of France – and all without losing a single man. It was a genuine miracle. I could feel the Hand of God beyond a shadow of a doubt.

‘Be a good fellow and take that off, Thomas,’ I said, pointing at his golden chain glinting on his chest. ‘And set a guard on the coin chest and the jewels as soon as you can. A reliable man. No, two reliable men, so they may watch each other. And keep an eye on the wine barrels, too. Nobody is to get drunk, Thomas. Not now. Later we can be as drunk as bishops – as drunk as the Devil on Good Friday. But not now. Understand? Good man. I must away and seek orders.’

I scrambled down the netting on the side of the cog, and jumped the last two yards to land with a puff of dust on the huge pile of mounded grain sacks in the hold.

I looked through the rigging of our snake boat, now empty save for Harold the captain, who sat grinning at the tiller, and saw beyond, skimming across the brown water, a little fishing gig, manned by six oarsmen, approaching rapidly from further up the estuary where the bulk of our ships were now inextricably mingled with the deserted French vessels. And I saw that Robin was seated in the bow, looking as happy as a hungry child with his own bowl of sweetmeats.

As I helped the Earl of Locksley to clamber aboard our snake boat, he was already talking, half-laughing, jabbering at me excitedly: ‘I need crews, Alan, crews. Anyone who has ever crewed a ship, anyone who has ever been to sea, or sailed a river, or fished from a coracle on a mill pond – damn it, anyone who has ever got his feet wet when it wasn’t bath day. Ha-ha! Salisbury’s orders. We are to get these enemy ships to sea. As many as we can. Right now. Minimum crews; three or four men, whatever it takes. We must get these captured boats to sea – with all their cargo, oh yes, and get them back to England. There is not a moment to waste.’

‘So we are all going home?’ I said.

‘Not all of us, not yet. First we get these French vessels to sea. The weather is perfect, not a cloud in the sky, they can be home by tomorrow morning – and we are all, all of us, considerably richer. But first we’ve got to burn that town yonder. Salisbury wants to make his mark. “We are not thieves,” he says to me, the impudent devil. “We are not all Sherwood riff-raff out to steal the possessions of gentlemen. We are soldiers at war taking lawful booty from the noble pursuit of arms!” As if that ever made the slightest difference! The fool. Still, we are under his orders, and they are: get all these ships crewed and sailing back across the Channel, quick-smart; and then I’m to take my company and torch the town. It will teach them a lesson, Salisbury says. The half-royal idiot.’