King's Man (2 page)

But I could certainly feel the heat of someone’s gaze upon me – I was being watched myself just then, but not by this stripling soldier tramping the road before me. My friend Hanno, formerly a celebrated hunter from the inky forests of Bavaria, and now the chief scout for our small band of warrior-pilgrims, was lodged in a tree just below the skyline some two hundred yards away, his body wrapped cunningly around the trunk and branches like a serpent so as to appear part of the wood in the darkness. I knew he was watching me and I hoped that my approach had met with his approval. He had taught me everything he knew about stealthy movement on the long journey home from the Holy Land – in daylight and darkness, in forest, mountain and desert – and what he knew was considerable. He’d also personally tutored me, painstakingly, over many months, in the art of the silent kill. And he had suggested that I take on this deadly task as a test of my new skills. Everyone in our ragged band seemed to think it was a good idea, except me. So here I was: wet, cold, lying in a sheepshit-dotted pasture in the middle of the night, face blackened with mud, waiting for the right moment to slaughter an unsuspecting child.

I heard the boy reach the end of his tramp at the bottom of the track, cough, spit, and turn to begin his journey slowly back up the hill. He was out of my line of sight but audibly coming ever closer to the wall. He passed me and then suddenly stopped a few yards further up the track. Had he seen me? Surely he must hear my heart banging like a great drum in my chest? But no, he had merely paused to stare dully at the fingernail of moon that adorned the sky, trying to guess the
hour. He did look so very young, I thought, although a part of me knew he was only perhaps a year or two junior to me. He switched the long spear he held from one shoulder to the other and with his free right hand he scratched at the inflamed spots on his cheek. He was close enough now, no more than two long paces away; close enough for me to strike, now that I was free of the drag of the sodden sack. And when he turned away to resume his march I told myself I would rise up and strike him down. I tensed my body, flexed my toes, hand on the dagger handle, waiting for him to move. I searched the surrounding area, eyes narrowed and roving slowly lest the slightest flash of white eyeball should attract attention; no one was stirring, the camp was silent as a stone at that hour. It was all clear. The moment he turned away, I’d be up and on him like a creeping farmyard cat on a sun-dulled dove.

But the boy remained still, half-turned towards me, and he continued to gaze like a simpleton at the moon, now picking at something stubborn inside his nose.
Turn away, turn away, you dolt
, I shrieked inside my head.
Turn away and let this deed be done
. But he stood like one of the marble statues I had seen on my Mediterranean travels, and continued to stare upwards at the star-sprinkled sky and to mine away inside his nostril.

My body was beginning to shake, not just from the cold and the wet: my pent-up muscles were demanding violent action. I wanted to move while I still had the courage to commit this murder – for foul murder it was; although the black surcoat he wore, with its blood-red chevrons across the chest, marked him as my enemy. Nevertheless, I knew in my heart that this cold killing was no better than a shameful piece of butchery, an execution – and I did not relish its accomplishment. He would
not be the first man or boy that I had killed, no, not by a long summer’s day. I had killed before many times in my young life, in battle and out of it – but this felt different. And wrong. It was not only my friend Hanno who was watching me from on high; I felt that God Himself was looking down on my actions. And the Lord of Hosts was telling my conscience loud and clear that this was a mortal sin.

I knew that Robin would laugh if he could read my thoughts before this kill: he would think me soft, womanish. He would shrug and half-smile, if I were to voice my doubts about murdering this boy. And I knew exactly what he would say if he were by my side: ‘It is necessary, Alan,’ he would whisper, and then he would take the misericorde from my hand and do the deed himself – quickly, efficiently, without a moment’s pause. And never lose a wink of sleep afterwards.

Finally the boy stopped gawping at the moon, turned his back to me and took a first reluctant step up the path. I swallowed, blinked, and forced myself to rise as silently as I could from my dark corner, leaving the heavy sack in the shadows, but pulling the dagger from my boot as I did so. I kept my mind almost blank, thinking only,
Now I will do this, now I will do that
. And I took the first unsteady step, my foot squelching loudly in a patch of mud. I checked myself and stumbled slightly on wobbly legs, but my victim heard nothing. Suddenly my courage rose in me like a pot of water boiling over: I took three fast running steps and threw myself at his back; my left hand snaking around his head to clamp over mouth and nose and prevent him making a sound as my chest thumped into his spine. He fell forward, slamming into the turf bank at the side of the muddy track with jolting force, with me on top of
him, the impact of our landing nearly causing me to drop the dagger. Nearly – but drop it I did not. He squirmed wildly under me but I got the blade of the misericorde into the right position on the back of his neck, in the hollow at the base of his skull, the thin point resting between the mail links of his coif, and shoved once, upwards, very hard, sending the eight-inch triangular blade up through the mail rings, splitting them apart, through skin, muscle, spinal cord and deep into his soft brain. I twisted the misericorde left and right, like a man scrambling a pot of buttered eggs with a spoon. His body gave one more frightful spasm under mine, as every muscle in his body twitched and then relaxed, and I felt him soiling himself in a loud farting rush of fluid, but then, God and all His holy saints be praised, he moved no more.

My panting breath was sawing in my throat, my hand was crushed between his face and the turf; my heart was beating as if it would burst out of my chest – and I wanted desperately to vomit, to piss, to void my own bowels. I could feel tears burning the backs of my eyelids, and it was only by using a great deal of force on myself that I fought back these unmanly urges. I turned my head and looked over my shoulder at the sleeping camp. All was quiet. So far, it seemed, no one had noticed anything. But for the limp, shit-drizzled corpse lying under me, it might never have happened.

I tugged my jelly-slick blade from his lolling head, plunged it into the turf to clean it, wiped it on my sleeve and shoved it back into the leather sheath in my left boot. I saw that in his death spasm he had bitten into the meat of the middle finger on my left hand, but I could feel no pain in that moment as I bound the finger tightly, quickly, with a scrap of linen torn
from my undershirt. Then I pulled his corpse off the road and, with some difficulty, stripped the black-and-red surcoat from his dead weight and pulled it over my own sodden black clothes. I took off his helmet and gathered up his spear and sword and set them to one side. Then I recovered the bag from the lee of the stone wall and, peeling back the moist sacking, I pulled out a massive sticky lozenge of meat and bone, about a foot and a half long, complete with pointed ears and white, still eyeballs; it was the severed head of a wild moorland pony, cut from the neck below the animal’s square jawline, and very nearly drained of blood. I looked round anxiously at the sleeping camp; there was still nothing stirring.

Using the boy’s own sword, I hacked off his young head as neatly as I could, a difficult job in the dark with a long unwieldy blade, sawing and slicing through spine, windpipe and the muscles and tendons of his neck as quietly as possible. The sword was a cheap one, blunt, notched and with the wooden handle loose and rattling on the tang. It was not neatly done, and I was terrified that the wet sounds of my cack-handed butchery could be heard in the camp, but finally I finished my grisly work and, trying my best to avoid bloodying my clothes, I propped the headless corpse in a sitting position in the ditch by the side of the track and balanced the wild horse’s head on the trunk, between the shoulders, where the boy’s would have been. I secured the beast’s head in place with the thin muddy rope that had been attached to the sack; tied it over the equine crown in front of the ears and round under the boy’s armpits, then sat back and surveyed my handiwork with a shiver of satisfaction. It looked truly gruesome; eerie and unnatural – a man’s body with a long horse’s head atop. The boy’s own
sightless poll I grasped by its lank hair and hurled as far as I could, away into the darkness. It might be recovered, eventually, but the terrifying animal-headed corpse would still do its work on the men who discovered it.

I made the sign of the cross over my gory confection to keep his spirit quiet, mumbled an apologetic prayer to St Michael, the sword-wielding archangel and patron saint of battle, and gathered up my victim’s helmet, sword-belt and spear. Then I began to trudge up the muddy track. My whole body was shaking, every step I took was unsteady, and suddenly the pain in my bitten hand came roaring out of nowhere like an angry bear. I switched the spear to my other hand and fought the reeling giddiness in my head. My victim had been slightly shorter than me, even before I hacked off his pimply head, and a shade thinner, but I calculated that on that dark night, from a distance of a hundred yards or so, if I walked in his tracks, I could pass as his double before an unsuspicious eye. I finally won control of my body and mind and banished the thoughts of the infernal deed I had just done; I slumped my shoulders a little and tried to emulate his resentful slack-kneed slouching as I walked away from his mutilated cadaver.

As I reached the brow of the hill, and paused, pretending to scour the area with my eyes like a dutiful sentry, I heard the mournful call of a barn owl hooting three times from the tree on the ridge away to my right. And for the first time in hours, I cracked a smile.

Hanno.

It was the signal, a message as warming to my heart as a hug from a loving mother.

If I had heard the sour barking screech of a mating vixen,
the message would have been:
Run for your life, the kill has been discovered. Run
.

But Hanno’s skilful imitation of a hunting owl was telling me that, for the moment, I was safe. And in that moment, I loved him for it.

I could imagine his ugly round face, his stubbled, badly shaven head and wide grin, and hear his harsh foreign-accented words of praise at my completion of an unpleasant, difficult, bloody task, and I turned towards the tree where I knew he was concealed, a mere hundred and fifty yards away now that I was at the top of the track, and had to resist the urge to raise my hand to him in salute. Instead, I turned on my heel and, walking boldly, even jauntily, surcoat swishing around my shins, spear casually on my left shoulder, I made my way downhill, away from the muddy road, away from my friend Hanno, and plunged into the heart of the enemy encampment.

I walked with purpose, quietly but never stealthily, through the sleeping tents of my enemies, with what I hoped was a nonchalant grin fixed to my face – though it was, of course, too dark to see my expression. A few campfires were still smouldering between the tents, and a handful of men-at-arms dozed beside them wrapped in blankets, or sat slumped over jugs of ale. The September night still retained a little of the warmth of summer, but most of the men had retired to the large, low, saggy woollen tents that were dotted over almost all the surface of the open field.

Somewhere in the sleeping camp, I knew, was a friend and comrade, a strange middle-aged Norman woman named Elise. She had attached herself to our company on the way to the
Holy Land, and had become the leader of the women who had joined our marching column. A healer of no little skill, she had undoubtedly saved many a life on the long journey to Outremer and back, tending the hurts of battle. Some whispered that she had other, darker skills and could read the future, but while I had found that her prophecies for the most part seemed to come true, they were always vague enough to be interpreted in several ways.

My master had sent Elise into the camp two days previously, to read the soldiers’ palms, tell wondrous and bone-chilling fireside tales – and to deliberately sow a particular fear among the enemy’s ranks. I hoped that she was safe: had she been captured and found to be a spy, she would have faced a slow and painful death.

I had half-overheard Robin give her orders the day before she left us to wander in the guise of a travelling seller of trinkets into the camp – to be honest, I had been hanging around him hoping to persuade him that I was not the right man for the task of dealing with the sentry; but I had the impression he knew this and was avoiding a conversation with me.

‘Elise, you are sure that you can do this; that you wish to do this?’ Robin said, fixing her with his strange silver eyes, his handsome face concerned and kindly. They were equals in height, but she was as thin as a straw, clad in a long shapeless dark dress that had once been green, her lined face topped with a mass of white fluffy hair. She looked like nothing so much as a giant seeding dandelion.

‘Oh yes, Master Robin, I can do this. It is but a small thing to spin a few tales at a campfire.’

‘And you know which tales you are to spin?’ asked my master.

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ she said impatiently, ‘the spirits of dead men are trapped inside the wild ponies hereabouts, and horse-headed monsters patrol the night stealing men’s souls for the Devil … Wooooooah! Hooooagh!’ She made a series of loud eerie noises in the back of her throat and waggled her fingers in the air like a madwoman. It should have been ridiculous, comical even, but on that warm September afternoon I felt my blood chill a little. ‘Don’t you worry, master, they will all have nightmares,’ this odd woman continued. ‘And don’t you concern yourself about me, sir; no harm will come to me. I have seen the shape of the future in a bubbling cauldron of blood soup, and all will be well; you shall have your victory, sir. Mark my words. A great victory after a night of fire and mortal fear.’