They were inside for an hour or more, and after a while I was sent to fetch wine and fruit but forbidden to join their private counsels. Finally Robin and Bernard emerged, and Robin told me to find Bernard a jug of wine and a corner to sleep in, while he went back to caring for the wounded. Bernard would tell me nothing but that I should sleep easy, for all would be well. But sleep did not come. We shared the jug of wine, that is to say I managed to get a few sips down, while Bernard seemed, as usual, to have the thirst of ten men. Then I lay in the straw next to my musical mentor, listening to him snore, and trying to fathom what his coming could mean. Finally, I did fall into an uneasy sleep, only to be awakened before dawn, once again, by ugly old Thomas shaking me by the shoulder.
I sat up, my whole body stiff from the unaccustomed exertions of the battle the day before, and I was no more than half-awake when Thomas said: ‘Robin wants to see you.’ And so I left Bernard to his hoggish slumber and followed the one-eyed man through the courtyard to a corner of the hall.
Robin looked fresh, although I knew he had not slept. He handed me a pure white dove, and as I looked down at the gorgeous bird, and felt its fluttering heartbeat beneath my fingers, I noticed that it had a long red ribbon tied to its pink left foot. ‘Go to the palisade and release this,’ he said.
‘Just one?’ I asked in surprise, ‘What does it mean?’
Robin looked at me for a moment, and I saw a gleam of sadness in his silver eyes. ‘It means simply: I accept.’ And then he turned away to return to the wounded.
I walked to the palisade and climbed the steps to the walkway and, with a silent prayer to God the Father, his Son, and the Holy Ghost beseeching them all to come down from Heaven in their Glory and save us, I threw the bird up into the air. It flapped its perfect white wings, circled the manor, and then flew off to the West, disappearing over the hills and trailing its thin red message of acceptance behind it.
As I watched the bird fly to freedom, the sun came up in all its blinding majesty over the woods to my left, and I looked out on to the field of battle at the beginning of what was already looking like another beautiful day. During the night, Murdac’s troops had completely surrounded the manor of Linden Lea; a thin black ring of men and horses and wagons on all sides, campfires already burning and skeins of grey smoke beginning to drift in the light wind. I saw crossbowmen, spearmen, and conrois of cavalry stirring among the various parts of the lines of tents and piled war gear. But they had suffered in yesterday’s battle, too. They still outnumbered us, but this was not the invincible black horde that had marched on us the day before. Almost directly ahead, opposite the main gate, perhaps four hundred yards away, I could see the standard of Sir Ralph Murdac himself, the black flag with red chevrons, rippling in the breeze atop a large pavilion. And there was the man, riding across the front line, his face clearly visible under a simple helmet with a large triangular nosepiece. I thought I could see something glinting redly at his throat, but I told myself it must be a trick of the light. He was heading towards the great box-like wooden structure of the mangonel, which had been moved much closer to the manor overnight.
Murdac arrived at the machine, consulted with the officers there, and with a chop of his hand to the men standing in groups around the weapon, the mangonel fired. The great spoon swept up and banged against the crossbar; a boulder the size of a small cow came screaming straight towards us and, with a deafening crash, it ripped a hole two yards wide in the palisade just a few feet from where I was standing. Half a dozen wounded men, who had been sheltering inside the wooden wall, were crushed to bloody pulp in an instant. The boulder rolled a few yards and came to rest almost in the centre of the courtyard.
I realised, with a sickening twist in my gut, that we had no protection against Murdac in this manor house. That infernal machine could strip away our feeble wooden defences at a whim, and then Murdac and his black cavalry would leap the moat and ride over our splintered walls and chop us all into offal. By noon, I reckoned with a sinking heart, we would almost certainly all be dead.
Chapter Nineteen
In many years of hard skirmishing, bloody battles and close escapes, I have never felt so close to despair as I did then when that great rock came smashing through the wooden palisade at Linden Lea. Except once. This spring, as my grandson Alan lay sick with a fever and near to death, I felt that the whole world would end with him. He is well now, God be praised, and his recovery was amazingly fast, or perhaps only amazing to an old man like me, whose cuts and bruises heal so slowly these days. I fed Alan the dark potion concocted by Brigid, when Marie, his mother, was sleeping, exhausted with worry, in the next room. It was a foul smelling brew and, no sooner had I got him to swallow it, than Alan’s stomach threw it straight back at me. But I mopped up and tried again and finally I managed to get some of the noisome liquid to stay inside him. Then he slept.
The next day I dosed him again, as Brigid had instructed, with a half-strength mixture with plenty of water which had been boiled by moonlight and then allowed to cool. The day after that he was awake and asking for gruel. Marie is beside herself with happiness and has vowed to light a candle to the Virgin every Sunday for the rest of her life in thanks for his recovery. I sent a side of bacon, three chickens, a dozen loaves of bread and a purse of silver to Brigid.
Every day that followed, young Alan grew stronger. Now, as I write this tale of death and destruction at Linden Lea, my grandson is playing outlaws and sheriffs in the woods outside the manor, with some of the local boys. And with his return to health, my melancholy has lifted. The days seem bright again; I go about my tasks with fresh vigour; I even laugh with Marie of an evening by the hearth fire when the day’s tasks are done. I shall never tell Marie that I sought Brigid’s help in saving Alan, but there is no shred of doubt in my mind: the witch cured him, and she cured me, too. Maybe Robin was right all those years ago: God is all around, in everything, and everyone, even in a witch. For the salvation of my boy could not have been an act of the Devil, whatever Father Gilbert, our parish priest, may say about Brigid’s skill. And I shall pray for her soul, and count her a good friend, all the days that are left to me.
There were two things I had not yet realised about Robin, as that giant boulder smashed our hopes of safety behind the palisade at the manor of Linden Lea: first, he planned battles like a chess player, meticulously thinking ahead, anticipating the moves his enemy might make, and making his own preparations to counter them; and, secondly, he always had the Devil’s own luck when it came to warfare.
That first missile from the mangonel must also have been a devilishly lucky shot, for the next boulder rolled to a halt a good twenty yards short of the palisade. The next after that whistled over the top of the manor and churned through the field of corn behind. But, by then, we were all shaken in the courtyard and the atmosphere was close to panic. Robin was quick to take action — he ordered all the wounded to be taken into the hall of the manor, though there was scarcely room for the men already there, and they would not be offered much more protection from the great machine than in the courtyard; he also had three men move the boulder so that it partially filled the gap in the palisade; then he set us to strengthening the wooden walls, buttressing them with logs and planks. I believe he just wanted to keep the men busy and prevent them brooding on what the mangonel meant to our chances of survival. Certainly our strengthening work had no effect when the next great boulder struck. It smashed straight through the three-inch thick round wooden pallings, despite our reinforcing logs and planks, and continued on, rolling at the pace of a trotting pony, to rip out a bottom corner of the hall itself.