‘Back to the road, they may need our help!’ yelled the constable and when they had recovered their horses, they walked out on to the road, Gwyn dragging the wounded man by his arms, to dump him at the side of the track.
There was confusion at the scene of the ambush, as the men-at-arms were pacifying the frightened horses and trying to attend to the wounded travellers. John now saw that the two females were nuns and that the immobile figure in the road, who appeared to be dead, was a priest. The tall man who had struck one of the attackers — who now lay whining in the dust, clutching his bleeding shoulder — stumbled across to Ralph.
‘Thank God you came in time, sir!’ he panted. ‘I am Justin, one of the proctor’s men from the cathedral. I must attend to those poor ladies!’
John and Ralph went with him to assist the pair of nuns, who were clutching each other as they sat in the dirt. One was elderly and was muttering prayers with her eyes firmly shut, while her companion was a much younger woman, doing her best to console her sister-in-God.
‘Are you hurt, ladies?’ asked John gently, looking at their torn habits and the dirt on their white wimples.
The younger one smiled bravely and shook her head. ‘Thank you, sir, not wounded, but bruised and shaken from being pitched from that litter.’
The soldiers had now managed to force the fallen horses to their feet and as they struggled up, the covered litter, supported by long poles slung between the harnesses, righted itself. Leaving Justin and two of the other servants to get the two nuns back aboard, John and Ralph went to assess the damage to the ecclesiastical party.
‘The priest is stone dead, I fear,’ growled Gwyn, who was standing over the inert shape of a fat, middle-aged cleric. ‘He’s had a blow on the head that’s stove in his skull.’
The other injured man was one of the cathedral servants, who had suffered a severe blow from a mace to his shoulder and chest. ‘His arm’s broken and I think some ribs are stove in,’ announced Gabriel. ‘But he should live, if we get him back to the cathedral infirmary.’
Gwyn had appointed himself gaoler to the two injured robbers, as he had grabbed the one with the broken shoulder and dragged him across to lie in the weeds of the verge, alongside the man with the arrow still projecting from his chest. This one was already in extremis, being semi-conscious and gasping for breath as blood began bubbling from his mouth. The other one was bleeding from a wound across the top of his shoulder. He was moaning with pain, but Gwyn felt that his shifty eyes were looking for a chance to leap up and make a run for the trees.
Meanwhile, John went across to the litter to see how the two nuns were faring. They had been helped back into the long, hammock-like device which had a tent-like roof and side curtains. The younger one, who sat behind the one with the thin, lined face, again thanked their rescuers, but was herself crying at the death of their priestly colleague.
‘Father Edward was escorting us to Glastonbury, where we are to join the community of sisters at the abbey,’ she sniffed. ‘We have come from Tavistock, stopping at Buckfast Abbey and Polsloe Priory in Exeter. We left there several hours ago, with a new escort kindly arranged by the Archdeacon.’
Justin, the man from the cathedral, told John that Father Edward was a canon of Tavistock Abbey and had been killed when he tried to stop one of the outlaws seizing the purse of silver he carried for expenses on the journey.
Within a quarter of an hour, order had been restored and Ralph Morin announced that he would take the travellers back to Exeter, escorted by his men. ‘We can take the ladies to Polsloe, where the injured fellow can be treated.’
Polsloe was a small convent a mile outside the city, run by a few sisters whose main function was medical care, especially of women’s ailments. John said that he would stay with Gwyn and deal with the two remnants of the robber band, one dead, one alive. After the cavalcade had gone, they went to stand over the survivor, a skinny fellow of about thirty, dressed in a dirty red tunic with gold embroidery, obviously stolen from a previous victim. He had a few blackened teeth in his mouth, visible when he cursed both of them, using some of the foulest language that even the campaign-hardened de Wolfe had ever heard.
Gwyn gave him a hefty kick in the ribs as he lay in the grass. ‘Keep that filthy tongue in your head, you murdering bastard!’ he growled. ‘Or use it to say your last prayers for killing a priest and attacking nuns!’
‘Are you going to kill me here and now?’ snarled the man.
John looked down at him with distaste. ‘You’re going to die, that’s for sure — either at the end of a rope or having your head taken off.’
‘That’s the best way,’ said Gwyn. ‘We can get five shillings bounty for it if we take it to the sheriff.’ In an undertone, he added: ‘If we had a sheriff.’
John knew he could not bring himself to kill the man in cold blood. Since Acre, where he had seen several thousand Saracen prisoners beheaded in a mass execution, he could not contemplate the act, even though it was perfectly legal for anyone to kill an outlaw on sight. ‘There’s some rope on my saddlebow, Gwyn. Tie his hands and he can walk back to Rougemont behind your horse. If he can’t keep up, just drag him along, it’s far less than he deserves.’
‘What about the corpsed one?’ asked Gwyn, as the arrowed victim was now well and truly dead.
‘Leave him, like the ones in Haldon Forest. Our furry friends will soon get rid of him.’
In spite of their threats, the two horsemen went at a sedate pace back to Exeter, so that the prisoner could keep up with them without falling down and being dragged. Exhausted, he toiled up the slope to the castle and was hauled over to the keep, where the prison was situated in the undercroft. This was the basement, partly underground and completely separated from the upper levels. The only entrance to the keep itself was up the wooden stairs to the main door on the first floor, a safety measure in case of siege.
The warder was an evil, obese Saxon called Stigand, a sadistic man of low mentality who was both gaoler, torturer and storeman. The undercroft, a gloomy vault bounded by the slimy stone arches that supported the upper storeys, was divided in half by a rusty iron fence into an area which held the stinking cells, the rest being storage. Stigand lived here, in a foul nest under one of the arches, where a mattress accompanied a brazier that both cooked his food and heated the branding irons and ploughshares for Ordeals.
Gwyn untied his prisoner, who claimed to be Arnulf of Devizes, and prodded him down the few steps that led from the inner ward into the semi-darkness of the undercroft.
Stigand appeared from his den, his waxy face and piggy eyes gloating with anticipation. ‘I heard from the others who came back just now, that you were bringing an outlaw. Is he to hang straight away or do you want me to first make him suffer a little?’
‘Just put him in a cell until we know what’s to happen to him,’ snapped de Wolfe, who could not stand the sight of the foul custodian.
Before Arnulf was pulled away towards a gate in the iron stockade, he pointed a finger of his uninjured arm at John’s belt. ‘How did you get hold of that, then?’ he croaked. ‘I’ve only seen one like that before, a dragon in a circle.’
Surprised, John held up a hand to stop Stigand tugging at the prisoner. ‘Where did you see it?’ he demanded, putting a thumb behind his belt to push Roger Smale’s buckle forwards.
Arnulf shrugged indifferently, with the desperate bravado of a man already marked for execution. ‘I’m going to be hanged whatever happens, so I may as well tell you. It was on the belt of a man we slew, up Crediton way. Never seen a design like that before.’
‘When was this? Another highway robbery?’
Arnulf shook his head wearily. ‘No, it was a bit unusual, that killing. A month or two back, our leader, Walter Hamelin, was paid to ambush a certain man, kill him and steal any parchments he might be carrying.’