'Right, everyone take what they can carry and let's clear out.' Nicholas de Arundell spoke urgently, his commanding manner, honed on the battlefields of Palestine, spurring his men to frenzied activity. Peter Cuffe had just sprinted into the compound, bringing news of the approach of many armed men.
'I reckon we've got about half an hour before they're within sight,' he panted, as he seized a bow and bag of arrows that had been propped against the wall near the pile of ferns that was his mattress. The other men ran to the other two huts and collected their arms, as well as a few treasured possessions. Robert Hereward took the time to dump a bucket of earth on the fire, in the faint hope that the smoke would not give away the position of the ruined village. Others grabbed the best parts of their food supplies, a haunch of venison, some bread and two dead coneys.
Within minutes, they had assembled within the stone walls that marked the yard, ready to flee from the place that had been their home for many months.
'Who d'you reckon it is, Peter?' snapped Nicholas as he stared down the valley.
'Too far away to see, but I'm sure there were two destriers carrying men in long riding cloaks. The rest were a mixed bunch, at least twenty armed men.'
'Those bastards Henry Pomeroy and Richard Revelle, I'll wager,' snarled Hereward. 'Thinking they'll catch us unawares.'
'They want to finish us off,' growled Philip Girard.
'Maybe they've had wind of the coroner's promise to plead our case with the king?'
Nicholas tore his eyes away from the distant opening into the valley and turned to face the bleaker hills to the north.
'Let's go, we can talk about it later. Did you see any bowmen amongst them, Peter?'
The red-headed youth shrugged. 'Hard to tell, but I don't think so. They seemed a ragged lot, except for a few who may have been from a castle guard.' As they spoke, Nicholas led the dozen men towards the gap in the wall that led up on to the moor on the western side of the valley.
'We'll get up high and walk along the crest of the down, then cross the valley at Headland Warren, up on to Hookney Tor.'
As he left the compound, he cast a regretful glance at the tumbledown huts that had been their home. He wondered how many times it had been abandoned like this since men first came to Dartmoor. As they were filing through in orderly haste, the last man, Robert Hereward, suddenly stopped. 'Gunilda. What about Gunilda?' he exclaimed.
The others halted in their tracks and stared at each other. 'She went to the other side of the valley to set rabbit snares,' said one of the men. 'That was a couple of hours ago.'
'We can't leave her,' said Peter Cuffe, to whom the old woman had become a second mother.
'She'll hear these swine coming,' said Girard.
'Gunilda's a tough old bird, she'll go to ground until they're past.'
Nicholas swore all the oaths he had picked up in years of soldiering.
'We can't go looking for her now, we'd walk right into the path of these bastards.'
There was a hurried debate and though opinions were divided, de Arundell was forced to make a quick decision. 'We have to leave her or we'll all be caught down here in the open. I'm sure she'll hide out somewhere. God knows there are enough holes in the ground around here.'
Reluctantly, they began hurrying up the hillside, half a dozen of them carrying long yew bows over their shoulders. Within ten minutes, Challacombe Down looked as deserted as on the Day of Creation, the outlaws having vanished into the grey-green void that was the moor in winter.
The solitude did not last long, however: before long a faint jingle of harness and soft thud of hoofs could be heard as the intruders came tentatively into the valley of the West Webburn stream. Richard de Revelle did not like the feel of this country, he was tense and his eyes roved ceaselessly from side to side, in spite of Henry's brash assurances that they would wipe out these outlaws like a pack of rats. Once again, Richard earnestly wished that he was back in his hall at Revelstoke instead of sitting on a horse in the cold damp of Dartmoor, where violence and mayhem might break out at any moment.
'God's teeth, where are those swine hiding themselves?' growled Henry, his square head swivelling back and forth as he surveyed the bare hills and the scrubby trees along the stream. 'Ogerus, come here,' he yelled and the bailiff wheeled his horse around and walked back to his master.
'Do none of your men know this damned place?' he demanded. 'Where are we supposed to be looking for the bastards?'
Ogerus Coffin shook his head. 'We are all from down south, sire, this is a foreign land to us. But according to that man who gave the information, there is a ruined village here where the outlaws set up one of their camps.' Half a mile further on, he was proved to be right, for one of the men-at-arms from Berry Castle gave a shout and pointed over to the left. 'There are some buildings of sorts, across the stream, my lord,'
They looked past some shabby trees bare as firewood, and saw the dark shapes of a few huts, built of almost black moorstone. There was no movement anywhere and no smoke wreathed up into the leaden sky.
'We'll go across and look, but it seems our birds have flown,' snarled Henry, angry and disappointed. The posse turned off the track and began treading carefully through the boggy ground to the bank of the stream.
Before the leading man reached it, there was a sudden commotion behind them, on the far side of the track.
The four hounds belonging to the huntsman began barking furiously and streaked away up the lower slopes of the hill.
'They've scented something, bailiff,' yelled the huntsman, slipping from his saddle and running after his dogs. A moment later, as the halted cavalcade turned to watch, the man vanished from view, apparently into a hollow in the ground. His shouts of command silenced the dogs, then he reappeared, dragging what seemed to be a large bundle of damp rags. Ogerus Coffin turned his horse and walked it up towards the huntsman, then turned in his saddle and shouted back.
'It's a woman, sir. By Jesus, the ugliest old hag you ever saw.'
A mile away, Nicholas led his men down into a bowl of marshland, where the stream spread out before the valley narrowed and bent to the left. Ahead was the high swell of Hookney Tor with a clump of misshapen stones on top. Between that and Hameldown Tor was the small pass through which the coroner had been taken on his journey from Moretonhampstead.
'Any signs of them?' Nicholas asked Peter Cuffe, who had been in the rear, but who now came running up as the column merged into a ragged circle.
'Nothing yet, though I fancied I heard hounds barking just now.'
De Arundell stared back down the silent valley. 'I hope to God that Gunilda has hidden herself somewhere. It never occurred to me that they would have dogs with them.'
Hereward was philosophical about it. 'God wills whatever is to happen, Nicholas. We have to look after ourselves now, until we can get back down there when they have gone.' He looked up at the slopes of rough grass, clumps of it in yellowed tussocks where it had died back for the winter. 'We must get up there and lie low.'
They moved on, climbing up steeply alongside a stream that had cut deefa, irregular channels in the black peat. In a few minutes they were on the sloping saucer between the two high tors, where the ancient circle of Grimspound sheltered a dozen crumbling huts, tiny structures like stone rings, some with a tattered roof of branches and turf.
From there, they could look down on the upper end of the valley, but could not see back to Challacombe because of the bulk of Hameldown Tor on their left.
'You are our best pair of eyes — and have the fastest legs, Peter,' said the leader to the ginger lad. 'Get up along the ridge again and keep a sharp lookout down towards the village.'