He looked at me and said gravely: ‘I’m sorry, Alan, but I must ride south to join Queen Eleanor. She is travelling the land and taking homage from the barons of England on behalf of her son Richard. My brother knights of the Order and I are our future King’s trusted counsellors — we ride with the Queen as an escort, but also we hope to persuade many of England’s nobles to take part in the holy pilgrimage that Richard has sworn to undertake next year. I would like to help you but I am engaged in God’s work, far, far more important than the outcome of this brawl.’
‘But this is your family’s land. This was your father’s house. Will you not fight to protect it?’ I asked.
‘It is mine no longer,’ said Sir Richard. ‘Our Order demands a vow of poverty. When my father died, I made over this hall and these lands to the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. This place belongs to God, now. He will protect it. And have no fear, Alan, my friend, God will keep you safe through this battle, too, I am sure of it.’ He smiled. ‘That is. . as long as. .’ he stopped again.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘God will keep me safe as long as. . as long as what?’ There was a note of desperation in my voice that I wasn’t proud of.
‘God will keep you safe. . as long as you remember to move your feet!’ And with a grin and a gentle cuff to my head, he strode away to the stables. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
God might well have been keeping me safe, but I made my own preparations for surviving the battle. I sharpened both my sword and my poniard on a whetstone; I mended a rent in my aketon and padded the inside of my helmet with scraps of wool for extra protection. Around me the men were making similar preparations. I saw with a twinge of unease that Marie-Anne was busy cutting linen sheets into long strips to make bandages and I wondered how many of us would need them the next day.
My job during the fight was to act as a messenger for Robin. He would be with the infantry and I was to ride out to his captains — bowmen and horse, on either flank — and deliver his orders. It was a dangerous job that would depend on the speed of my horse to evade capture and death at the hands of the enemy. So I went to the stables and, on Robin’s authority, I chose the best horse I could find for the job: a mettlesome grey gelding, young and feisty; in fact, the same horse I had ridden on the night of the rescue. I had found that I liked him, and he seemed to like me. I brushed him down myself until his grey coat gleamed, and made sure he was well fed that evening with a hot bran mash. Then I went up to the walkway that ran all the way round behind the palisade to watch the sun sinking over the hills to the west. There were a dozen fellows with me, idling, gossiping, spitting over the rampart into the moat, and, as we watched the great red orb slide down behind the bare hillside, a stir of movement rippled through the men on the ramparts. Somebody pointed and I looked due south to the end of the valley and saw horsemen; a line of mounted men trotting down the valley towards us. They looked to be too few, no more than four dozen men, perhaps a three score at most, and I felt my spirits lift. We had about the same numbers of cavalry. In that arm, at least, we were equal. Perhaps God was looking out for us after all. And then, to my left, there was a gasp and I looked again and saw, on the horizon in the gathering gloom, a skyline thick with black figures, hundreds and hundreds of them, horses and foot, wagons and pack animals. It was a proper army, a horde. That thin line of horsemen, I realised belatedly, stupidly, had just been the scouts. A mere skirmish line that was equal in numbers to our entire mounted force.
Sir Ralph Murdac had come to Linden Lea.
Chapter Seventeen
As the light fled from the valley of Linden Lea, Sir Ralph’s vast host settled itself for the night, spreading out over the fertile land like a pot of spilled ink. They set up camp a mile from the manor, their cooking fires making dozens of pinpricks of light, winking in the blackness like the myriad eyes of an enormous beast that was waiting to devour us.
Robin’s estimation of their strength had clearly missed the mark, or he had been misled; their numbers must have been at least three or four times our own. When I mentioned this to Little John, who had come to stand by me on the rampart in the dusk and survey the enemy host, he merely shrugged, and said: ‘So we’ll have to kill a few more of the bastards, then.’ He seemed wholly unconcerned and that made me feel a great deal better. Looking at this giant of a man, standing with wide-spread legs, idly twisting his great double-bladed war axe in his ham-like hands, ancient horned helmet crammed on his straw-coloured head, I could not imagine him being defeated by any number of enemies — he looked like some invincible Saxon deity — and that gave me heart.
When it was fully dark, Robin called all of us together again. He addressed a packed courtyard, but his talk had none of the flamboyant rhetoric of his speech earlier that day. He simply said: ‘The plan stands. It’s a good plan. Yes, there are a few more of them than we thought, but don’t be down-hearted, they’ll die just as easily. Just obey orders, do the bloody work that you all do so well, and we’ll be celebrating victory this time tomorrow.
‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘If the battle goes awry, and I truly do not believe it will, I will give three long blasts on my horn.’ His hand went briefly to the hunting horn at his belt. ‘If you hear this horn ring out three times, you are to retreat, all of you, you are to break off the fight immediately and get your raggedy outlaw arses back here’ — there was a faint ripple of laughter — ‘any way you can, as fast as possible, get back here. I really don’t think we will need to retreat. I believe we will beat them out there. But if you hear my horn, it’s back to the manor. Once we’re in here, if necessary, we can hold them for weeks.’
Then he ordered the archers, sixty men led by ugly old Thomas, to form up in silence, ready to take up their positions out in the forest. Each man had two full arrow bags at their waists, each holding thirty shafts fitted with mail-piercing razor-sharp bodkin heads. They left from a side gate in the palisade, crossing the moat on a bridge of planks, formed up in groups of ten on the other side, hardly visible in the darkness, and sprinted the hundred yards to the welcoming cover of the woodland. There was no sign of movement from the enemy as the little groups of bowmen scuttled through the darkness and into the trees. Confident of their superior numbers, Murdac’s camp seemed happy to ignore us. Perhaps they thought we were running away.
Next, the cavalry under Hugh: fifty-two hard, well-disciplined men, clad in chain-mail and armed with twelve-foot spears, with horses trained to rear and stamp and kill, trotted out of the main gate and rode away towards the hills behind the manor house. Before he left, Will Scarlet sought me out and clasped my hand. He said: ‘If I have ever wronged you, Alan, I ask for your forgiveness now. I would part as friends so that, if misfortune befalls either of us tomorrow, we will not die with any ill-feeling between us.’ I was moved and, with a tear in my eye, I embraced him. ‘There is nothing but friendship between us,’ I said. And he grinned at me again before vaulting on to his horse and disappearing out of the gate. It was only after he left that I thought about what he had said. Had he wronged me? How had he wronged me? Was he the turn-coat? The thought curdled my good feelings at our parting like a splash of vinegar in a bowl of sweet milk.
With the archers and the cavalry gone, the manor seemed a half-deserted place. We ate a subdued meal in the hall and I spread my blankets by the banked logs of the central fire and tried to sleep. But the night was hot and I could not find rest. The men were talking in low tones, gathered in small groups of friends; some were drinking quietly, others were praying, or moving about the hall restlessly. And always, as a low accompaniment to the dull hum of nervous humanity, there was the constant scraping of whetstones on steel blades — sheek, sheek, sheek — as men sharpened their swords and spears obsessively to ward off the terrors of their imaginations. I thought of Bernard and Goody, safe in Winchester, with good food and wine and the protection of the royal household, and to my shame I envied them. When I closed my eyes, I saw the great grim host of Sir Ralph Murdac; and imagined that malevolent nobleman high above me on a great horse, swinging his bright sword and slicing its blade deep into my body.