The Death of Robin Hood (44 page)

‘I’m going to kill you now,’ I said to the man in silvery mail standing before me.

‘I think not,’ he said. ‘I think I shall kill you. I think a greybeard like you has no place on the field. You should be tucked up in bed, old man, with a warm cup of milk.’

He sprang at me, a sweeping blow across his body that hacked down at my left shoulder, and I caught it on my shield, shrugged it aside and lunged at his belly in counter-attack. He danced back and came at me again, a sweep at my ankles – just a feint – and an upward lunge at my groin at the last instant. I twisted out of the path of his blade. He was fast, I will give him that, but he could not have been more than twenty-two. He was good, too. Well schooled. A cut at my right thigh nearly caught me – I got Fidelity down in time, but the blade banged painfully against my knee, thankfully well protected by my chausse.

I hopped back. ‘I’m going to kill you now,’ I said.

He snarled and slashed at my head. I blocked with my shield and stabbed at his chest. He jumped back. I stabbed at his right forearm, but he got it out of the line of my strike just in time. Then I bored into him, Fidelity cutting left, right, left, right, hard overhand blows that hammered at his defences and forced him back towards the cathedral. Using my weight and strength to weary him. He ducked under a heavy blow aimed at his head and circled away, keeping his distance. He was wary now, his confidence leaking away as he recognised my skill and experience. Greybeards who have survived more than a score of battlefields have often survived for a good reason.

‘I’m going to kill you now,’ I said.

‘Stop saying that!’ he shouted – and feinted at my belly, trying to turn the blow into a sweep at my knees – and I stabbed him in the
top of his left shoulder, quick and hard above the shield, punching Fidelity through the mail, cloth, skin and muscle to draw a gout of red blood. The White Count stepped back, panting. His helmet was obviously restricting his breathing. Despite the burden of my years, with my conical, open-faced helm I did not have the same problem. He tugged at his right gauntlet with his left hand. I looked at his glove and felt the burning of pure anger in my belly.

‘I’m going to kill you now,’ I said.

I attacked his left side, his wounded side, and the instant I moved I saw he could not fully raise or lower his shield. He was a dead man. I stopped a hay-maker blow from his sword with my shield and in riposte cut hard at the back of his left knee. He could not get the shield down in time and my blade thwacked into the side of the joint. He stumbled, but kept his feet. There was blood on his leg, welling through the mail. I circled to the right, forcing him to move on the injured limb. Fidelity flicked out – a feint – and when he jumped back the left knee failed him and he tumbled to the floor. I leaped forward, my left foot landing hard on his right wrist, the gauntleted hand holding his sword. I heard the crunch of breaking bones. I kept my full weight on his broken wrist. He was making small mewling noises of pain as I stood over his prone form grinding my foot on the break. He could barely move his wounded shield arm; his chest pumped up and down desperately sucking in air, and from inside the mask of his helmet, his pale blue eyes looked up at me in terror.

He screamed: ‘I yield, I yield to you, Sir Knight.’

‘I’m going to kill you now,’ I said.

He screamed again: ‘Surrender, I surrender!’

‘I only wish I could make this more painful,’ I said, bouncing my weight on his shattered wrist. I placed Fidelity’s tip in the eye slit of his helmet. ‘But sadly I do not have the time to spare. This is for my friend Mastin,’ I said, and thrust down hard with all my strength. I
felt the blade go through his eye, encounter the resistance of bone and then punch into the brain.

‘And for that poor kitten in London, too,’ I added.

But I do not think he heard me.

We
left the prisoners under a guard of Kirkton archers – Lord Fitzwalter, captain-general of the Army of God, was one of them, having surrendered personally to Thomas without them exchanging a single blow – and my friend and I plunged down the hill in our lord’s footsteps and in the wake of the fleeing French army. A few hundred yards into the lower town it became apparent that few of the enemy would escape. A huge mass of them had congregated at the bridge over the River Witham at the bottom of the hill, and such was the press of bodies that it was jammed solid. Only a handful were managing to make it across and out on to the southern road behind it.

Robin had cornered Miles, with a gang of French stragglers, outside a high stone wall fifty yards north of the bridge and the struggling mass of humanity. Miles had his sword drawn and the men with him looked desperate, some wounded and bloody, all wielding weapons of some kind or another. They were surrounded by a ring of thirty or so men-at-arms, crossbowmen and archers – and Robin.

‘There is no escape, Miles. Be sensible, for God’s sake. This foolishness has
gone on for far too long,’ my lord was saying as Thomas and I panted up behind him.

‘Just lay down your sword and I can protect you. The alternative is … unthinkable.’

Some of our crossbowmen had their weapons spanned and all the archers had arrows on the string. It would have been the work of a moment to annihilate the Frenchmen pressed together by the wall. They lived only because Robin had stayed the archers’ hands.

‘Put down the sword, Miles. Just drop it. Look, whatever your grievance with me is, I am sure we can work it out as a family. See – I am sheathing my sword,’ said my lord and he slid his blade back into its scabbard and stood two yards from his son, holding his empty hands up and spread wide as if in surrender.

‘You always think it is about
you
,’ said Miles. ‘It can’t always be about you.’

I took a step closer to Robin. Miles’s face was a picture of misery, white and red, and none too clean, the marks of fresh tears clear against his grubby white skin.

‘Miles,’ said Robin, ‘my dear boy, you must know that everything I have done has been for you and Hugh.’

Miles laughed then. An ugly sound.

‘When I give the word, men,’ he said in French. ‘Be ready! Death before dishonour.’

The raggedy crew around my lord’s son tightened their grips on their weapons.

‘Miles, don’t do this!’ Robin was pleading. I’d never heard him speak like this. I’d never heard him beg.

Miles lifted his chin, took a breath, opened his mouth—

And Robin dropped his hand. The archers and crossbowmen loosed and in a whistling flash of white goose feathers and black streaking bolts every man on either side of Miles was struck by many shafts, almost simultaneously jerked this way and that by the punch of the arrows. They all fell, some quickly, some more slowly. Only
Miles was untouched. He looked about him, the only man standing, gave a shout of rage and plunged his sword deep into Robin’s belly, thrusting hard with both hands.

My lord screamed: ‘Miles!’ and fell to his knees, and the boy tugged out the blade and raised its red length high over Robin’s head for the coup de grâce.

I was already past my lord’s kneeling form, Fidelity whirling, and with one savage blow I sliced through Miles’s forearms, separating the raised sword and both his gripping hands from his body.

He fell backwards with a cry, crumpling to the cobbles, lying amid the feathered bodies of his dead and dying comrades, staring in amazement at the stumps of his arms, now pulsing out twin red jets in time with the beats of his heart.

I dropped Fidelity and knelt beside my lord, looking into his face. He stared at me blankly, both hands folded over the spreading stain on his surcoat. Inside my head I was shouting:
No, no, please God, no
… My vision was blurring; my belly felt cold as ice.

‘I didn’t think he would do it. I didn’t think …’ Then Robin closed his eyes, his shoulders slumped, and he gently slipped sideways to the cobbles.

Boot carried Robin up the street to the Jews’ House, striding along at a brisk pace with me running alongside talking desperately, trying to get my lord to open his eyes. Like many of the richer denizens of Lincoln, the Jews had left the city when the French invaded, and we found their hall abandoned. But we made Robin a bed on the ground floor from our cloaks and pillowed his head on a rolled-up pair of hose.

We cut the mail hauberk from his body to get a sight of his stomach. It was bad, very bad. The sword had punctured the lower left side, just above the groin, and I knew it had entered the intestines and perhaps the bowel. The blood flowed thick and heavy, streaked with brown, and much as we tried to staunch it with rags
they soon became sodden and useless. I got Robert to apply pressure on the wound with a wadded shirt and for the first time in an hour, Robin stirred. And screamed.

He opened his eyes and screamed again – the noise tore at my soul.

‘Less pressure, Robert,’ I said. ‘Just keep it firmly in place.’

The first thing Robin said, in a weak, reedy voice was: ‘Where is Miles?’

I confess this was the first time I had thought about Robin’s son since my lord had been carried from the street.

‘You hurt him,’ said my lord. ‘You cut him with Fidelity.’ He said it in a wondering tone as if he did not quite believe it. The tears started to flow down his lean cheeks. I tried to give him watered wine to drink but he would not take it. He weakly shoved my hands away.

‘Go and find Miles, Alan, go on. Make sure he is safe,’ he whispered.

I got up from my knees and stumbled out into the street, my tears flowing too by now. As I headed down the street I ran head-first into Hugh coming up the hill. He was slathered in blood from thigh to neck, the iron mail on his arms thick with clotting gore.

‘Miles?’ I said.

‘He’s dead,’ said Hugh, with a grimace.

‘How did he die?’

‘Badly,’ he said. ‘He started trying to walk down to the bridge, bleeding all the way, and collapsed in a gutter. No one offered to succour him. I found him half an hour ago, still living. I held him while he died.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Don’t thank me – I don’t want your thanks. You’re the one who killed him.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Hugh looked
at me. He seemed to be struggling to find any words to say to the man who had killed his brother.

‘He always liked you, admired you. Did you know that? When we were children he used to say that you were the deadliest swordsman in the world. He boasted that one day he would be better even than you. He talked of you when he was dying. Said you were still pretty quick for a broken-down old man.’

I sighed. There seemed to be nothing useful to say.

‘Me, of course, he abused with his last dying breaths. The little shit. Called me a bastard. A cuckoo. Called me Cain. Accused me of stealing his birthright.’

‘What did you do with his body?’ I asked.

‘I left it there.’

‘In the gutter? In God’s name why?’

‘They are excommunicate – all the rebels are. They cannot be buried in a churchyard. My father is not exactly going to give him a hero’s burial at Kirkton. Let him be buried with the rest, with his comrades, in the mass graves. Serve him right.’

I stared at Hugh. How could he misunderstand his father so badly?

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘we can carry the body up to Robin together.’

The pain grew worse over the course of that night. Despite Robin’s efforts to hide his suffering, his face was taut with agony and from time to time he gave out a whimper. Outside the walls of the Jews’ House, Lincoln suffered too. Victorious men-at-arms who had survived the bloody assault on the north gate took their revenge on the city in a brutal fashion. Boot kept the door for us, his bulk warding off even the most determined looters, but the rest of the town was subjected to one of the worst sackings I have ever seen. Gangs of drunken armed men lurched up and down the hill ransacking the houses of rich men and poor alike; women and children were raped, whole streets were set ablaze. Men-at-arms capered about
draped in expensive lengths of dyed red and green wool stolen from the merchants’ houses, quaffing from jugs of wine, joking, quarrelling and fighting with their fellows over the division of the spoils.

During all the chaos, I sat beside Robin and watched as he suffered, the sweat starting from his white face, his teeth grinding together. He grew weaker and weaker; the flow of blood slowed but never quite stopped, and I changed the sopping pad at his waist every hour or so. When the sun had gone down and the men were yawning, I sent them all upstairs to sleep, determined that I would keep my vigil with Robin alone. Hugh protested somewhat, but he had fought hard all day and eventually I persuaded him to retire on the promise that I would wake him in a few hours and rest myself. I had no intention of keeping that promise.

At around midnight, I awoke from a light doze to see Robin staring at me in the candlelight. His eyes seemed to shine with pain like silver mirrors but his voice when he spoke was serene.

‘You killed my son,’ he said. ‘You took little Miles from me.’

‘My lord, forgive me,’ I said, fresh tears running down my cheeks. ‘I would do anything to take back that blow. But I cannot. You must understand that I did not mean … I was trying to save …’ I broke down into incoherent sobs.

‘Shh, shh,’ said Robin. ‘Calm yourself, Alan. What is done is done and I will gladly forgive you, if you will do one small thing for me. One little service.’

‘Anything, lord, just name it,’ I said, cuffing away my tears.

‘Do you still have your misericorde?’

The realisation hit me like a hammer blow.

‘No, no – not that,’ I said, flinching away from him.

‘Alan, listen to me, we both know how this will end. Days of indescribable pain, hours of agony as I get weaker and weaker. Then, inevitably, death.’

I stared at him.

‘You know
that what I say is true,’ he said.

I did know it – but what he was asking was too much.

‘Please, Alan – a quick, painless end is all I ever wanted. It is all any warrior wants. Give it to me. We did it for Mastin. Your last service to your lord. I beg you. If Little John were here, he would do it, in an instant. Please, Alan.’