Outlaw (37 page)

From the safety of my fallen beech tree, I waved at Thomas and he gave me a grin and a jokey salute. Then, gathering his bow and arrow bags, he suddenly sprinted a few paces, away from the big old oak and the fast-approaching Flemings, to the safety of another tree. I saw him conferring with another green-clad bowman and his friend, who in turn ran in a crouch back to another tree and another bowman to spread the message. I began to crawl away too. Not daring to lift my head, nor run upright, I snaked my way through the undergrowth on my elbows and knees, making for my horse. A part of me felt guilty at leaving the bowmen to their unequal fight but, I told myself, my duty was to Robin. Though I could not repress a feeling of relief to be escaping that silent slaughter in the treacherous murk of the greenwood.

Something of the terrible atmosphere in that deadly wood had affected my horse. He was trembling with fear and whinnied with pleasure at my return. That friendly noise was nearly the death of me.

I had the grey’s reins in my fist, my sword was sheathed, and I was soothing him with my free hand when some instinct, some God-given warning, caused me to turn my head and at that moment, out from under the low-hanging branches stepped a tall lean figure in the green and red checked surcoat of a Flemish crossbowman. He was a big man of about thirty years, round-headed with greasy light brown hair. He was pointing his weapon directly at me, the stock snuggled into his right shoulder, string drawn back taut, the quarrel lying innocently in the groove to the front. I was staring at my own death. And the man smiled, revealing his yellow rotten teeth, an awful grimace of victory.

Chapter Eighteen

Training is a wonderful thing. Even a little goes a long way when you are in a tight corner. The dusty, sweaty hours that I had spent with Sir Richard in the courtyard at Thangbrand’s and at Winchester Castle saved my life more than once that day. With a sword in my hand, much of the time I didn’t need to think; one stroke naturally flowed from another, the muscles remembering the moves as if my arm had a mind of its own.

I stared at the crossbowman and, for a heartbeat, I was frozen in surprise. Then I moved. I dropped the reins, I grabbed at my sword hilt with one hand and my battered scabbard with the other. In one smooth movement my sword was free. The tall man, still grinning triumphantly, pulled the lever at the bottom of his crossbow, the string twanged, the bolt shot towards me in a grey flash and - he missed. I heard an equine scream from behind my head as the quarrel smacked into my poor grey gelding, a bare inch from my left shoulder, and then I was charging the Fleming, a wordless cry of rage in my throat. I feinted at his head with my blade and he blocked it desperately with the crossbow. Steel cracked against wood but he stopped my swing, the blade a mere six inches from his face, and then I shifted my position and straightened my arm into the lunge, a move Sir Richard had made me practise no more than three or four hundred times. The tip of my sword punched forward, with the full weight of my shoulder behind it, smashing through his yellow teeth and on into the depths of his mouth; onward through his brain, my sword plunged, through the killing area where his brain joined the spine, until the tip came to rest six inches out of the back of his head. Hot blood sprayed from his ruined mouth, splattering my hand and sword arm, and suddenly I felt the dead weight of his body on the end of my steel, dragging it down, and, as he crashed to the floor as dead as a stone, I yanked my sword free of his distorted head, ripping sideways through the cheek and bringing with it a fresh gout of bright gore. It had taken no more than a dozen heartbeats, from his appearance to his death. And as I looked down at the corpse at my feet, the slashed mouth a gaping red hole of blood and fragments of teeth, and knelt to clean my sword on his surcoat, I felt nothing, no remorse, no pity but, instead, a surge of joy - and of pride. I had killed my enemy alone in single combat. He had tried to kill me, and yet I was the better man. I had boasted to Robin, all those months ago, that I would become a warrior one day. And I knew, at last, that I truly was one.

My lovely grey gelding had fallen to his knees. His eyes were rolling madly in his head. The quarrel was embedded in his side, a foot of steel-tipped oak buried up to the leather flights. He was sweating and shivering and, with every shuddering breath, bright pink bubbles formed at his mouth. I knew he was wounded hard in the lungs; that he would never run again. So, stroking his poor twitching head, I drew my poniard and cut deep into his throat, slicing through the big vein in his neck. He died under my hands. I stroked his long ears and he lay quietly, the blood running in a thick river down his wide grey chest.

I could not stay beside him long, however. Other crossbowmen might be close and my duty was to seek out Robin. So I left the humped body of my poor brave grey and crept further south to the edge of the forest and climbed to the topmost branches of a luxuriantly leafed tree to get a safe vantage point from which to survey the battlefield.

Things were not going well for Robin. The hedgehog was surrounded by a furious ring of enemy infantry; on all sides hundreds of black-clad sword- and spearmen were hacking and chopping at the small circle of our men, who were dying by inches, despite a valiant defence. Every so often the thick outer ring of enemies would withdraw, each man stepping back a dozen paces to glare, panting, at the outlaw foe who faced him, snarling, over the rim of his shield. Then, on command, Murdac’s men would surge forward, to batter again at the hedgehog’s thinning ranks.

We were fighting like the heroes of legend. I saw John, unencumbered by a shield, only protected by his hauberk and ancient helmet, swinging his great axe and cutting great holes in the enemy ranks with each gory swipe. He split a man straight through the centre of his head with one blow, and then stepped aside to dodge a spear thrust and lopped the spearman’s arm off at the elbow. The bowmen were shooting their deadly missiles into the wall of enemies, each arrow passing through the first man and into the man behind. Robin was fighting like a madman: as he hacked and lunged, a spray of fresh blood flew from his sword at each stroke. Then the enemy pulled back again a few yards, the gap between the lines strewn with bodies and the crawling shapes of broken men. I could hear the screams clearly, even in my tree a hundred yards away.

Away from the hedgehog, black-garbed cavalry men roamed the field; sergeants, I assumed, who had been routed in the first disastrous charge of Murdac’s men. They seemed to circle around the great boiling mêlée in the centre of their field like great dark ravens, waiting for the hedgehog to burst apart, as it had done at Thangbrand’s, so that they could ride down the fleeing men and cut them to bloody ribbons. There was no way that I could rejoin Robin and give aid in that desperate fight. Once I left the safety of my treetop eerie, on foot, out in the open field, I would be hunted down and slaughtered by the roaming horsemen before I got halfway to Robin’s side. There appeared to be more cavalry, too, I saw, far back to the south in Murdac’s lines. He must have had more than a thousand men in total. What madness had possessed Robin, I wondered, for him to invite battle at Linden Lea, when his forces were so overmatched? Was it arrogance? Or had he just made a fatal miscalculation? Then my eyes lifted away from the battle’s bloody pulsing heart, to the hills at the far side of the valley - and I saw Hugh, faithful Hugh, riding to rescue his brother, at the head of his men.

Trotting in a great loose mass, a dust cloud in which appeared, fleetingly, horses’ heads and glinting spears and dark green surcoats, under a flag decorated with a snarling wolf’s head, our own horsemen swept down from the hillside where they had been concealed and spurred into the valley. The spear points dropped and with a drumming of galloping hooves they launched themselves towards the mass of dark-clad men clustered around the hedgehog.

They never arrived.

From the south, out of a fold in the valley floor, unseen by Hugh’s men, a fresh conroi of cavalry trotted forward. Wearing the same green-and-red surcoats as the Flemish crossbowmen, but mounted on big horses and armed with long spears, half a hundred fresh mercenary horsemen galloped out of their hiding place and smashed straight into Hugh’s exposed flanks and rear. There was chaos; our line of attack completely disrupted, and all but a handful of horsemen at the head of our charge were immediately engaged in a fight for their lives with the Flemish cavalry. Spears were soon abandoned in the close-quarter carnage, and horsemen wheeled and hacked at each other with sword and axe and mace. They were evenly matched, at first. But then the mounted sergeants, the remnants of the first disastrous cavalry charge, who had been roaming the field in ones and twos, flocked to join the cavalry battle and our horsemen began to die. A few, a pitiful few, managed to break through the enemy lines and, forcing their mounts through our weary ranks of spearmen, joined their comrades in the relative safety of the hedgehog. But many men in Lincoln green were cut down in their saddles, surrounded by two or even three black and green-and-red-clad killers on horseback. A few of our men, shamefully, turned their horses north and rode hard for the hills and safety.

I looked away from the battlefield, away from the blood-drenched mayhem of struggling, dying men on horse and on foot. I blocked my ears to the screams of the wounded. I could not bear to watch the final onslaught that would see the dark ranks of my enemies swamping that exhausted ring of my friends. I looked up at the deep blue sky, at the bright sun blazing above the western hills and a flight of swallows arching over that God-forgotten field of blood, high above the pain and gore and the stench of death. I closed my eyes against the bright sunlight, and listened to the wind in the treetops around me . . . and I realised that I could hear something else, too. A rustling sound, and a noise that was almost like a murmur. I imagined I could hear voices, I could hear voices, and then the drums began.
Ba-boom-boom; ba-boom-boom; ba-boom-boom
. . . I couldn’t believe my ears. I shook my head but the noise was still there and growing stronger.
Ba-boom-boom
;
ba-boom-boom
;
ba-boom-boom
. . . I had heard that pagan sound before, months ago on a blood-soaked night near Robin’s Caves.

I looked down at the ground, twenty yards beneath my feet and through the leaves I could make out the top of a man’s head, shaved into a tonsure, the reddish-brown hair surrounding a sun-browned bald pate. It was a monk, and I saw then that he was carrying a war bow. And beside him sat his two great and terrible beasts: the wolfhounds Gog and Magog. My heart gave a great leap. It was Tuck.

With a shout of joy I shinned down the tree as fast as I could, nearly breaking my neck as I fell the last few yards. It was indeed Tuck, and he was not alone. There were a dozen shadowy figures in the gloom of the forest behind him. I welcomed him with an embrace, crushing his strong squat body to mine and smelling once again the homely earth scents of his brown robe. My mind was bubbling with questions. But before I could get them out, Tuck held up a hand. ‘Answers later, Alan, we have work to do now.’ The drums were still booming, slapping the air with their ancient call to battle, and I saw that the forest was thick with people, scores, hundreds even. A woman approached through the trees; she was clad in a long dark blue robe decorated with stars and crescent moons. Her forehead was painted in what looked like dried blood with the Y symbol. In her hands she held a thick black staff of hawthorn. It was Brigid. In my happiness, I embraced her too. She smiled at me, but a little oddly, blankly, without the comforting brown warmth that she had displayed when healing my bites and burns. She seemed filled with a cold hatred, a black fury, only just contained within her body, and I instinctively recoiled from her as if repelled by an invisible force. Over her shoulder, I saw more comforting figures. Little Ket the Trow, in a leather breastplate, holding an enormous club almost as tall as he was; his brother Hob grinning at me through the leaves of a low-slung branch; and many more: outlaws who were not members of Robin’s band, travelling beggars, Sherwood villagers, wild men from the deep forest . . . They had all come to battle. The drums were booming, battering the inside of my head and then Tuck said in a calm, cool voice, ‘Madam, I believe you must attack now, or it will be too late.’ Brigid nodded, she paused, took a deep breath and threw back her head. And, with a wild, ululating scream that set the hairs all over my body standing on end, she hurled herself past me and burst out of the treeline and on to the field of battle. Behind her streamed hundreds of men, and even a few women, screaming just as wildly, many with the pagan Y painted on their foreheads, just as many without, but all armed with whatever they had brought: clubs, rusty swords, axes, mattocks, scythes - I even saw one old man with a grain threshing flail - and all of them crazed with the blood-lust of battle.