The King’s Assassin (35 page)

The wood was still five hundred yards away and our men were strung out in a line, knots of two or three men, perhaps a hundred yards long. I saw a man to my left running at me – a sword and shield in his hand, a dismounted knight, perhaps, or a squire. He shouted an invitation for me to stand and fight and for a moment I hesitated, and I swear to you, on my honour, that I looked to see signs of wealth about his person. He was a shabby specimen, his mail old and rusty, and I ignored his challenge and put my head down and ran, ran with all my might south, south for the woods and safety.

Two hundred yards to go. As I leapt over a dead horse in my path, a crossbowman popped up from nowhere and loosed a bolt at me from twenty paces away and – miraculously – missed. I ran on straight past him, legs pumping, sucking down the sharp air, feeling the red-hot pain in my back stab me with every stride.

A hundred yards now. The first of our men were now at the treeline. I saw Little John and Thomas charge a group of the enemy gathered there. John decapitated a French man-at-arms with his poleaxe, Thomas neatly disembowelled a second, and the rest of the enemy section ran like rabbits before their fury, heading west towards the marshes.

Little John stood next to an ancient oak shading his eyes with his hand and looking north towards our men as they straggled to him. Thomas was helping a wounded archer limp into the shelter of the trees.

I was thirty yards away from the woods, clear of the enemy now and with nothing but half a dozen corpses between me and safety. I turned and looked back up the field. Many of our men had not been sufficiently fleet of foot, or had lingered to take their revenge on the crossbowmen. For those unfortunates, the cavalry were upon them. I saw a Sherwood archer ridden down with almost contemptuous ease by a French knight. He did not bother to use his lance, merely crashed his horse into the running man and trampled him under its churning hooves. Another man, a Kirkton cavalryman, now without a horse, dodged left and right, ducking under the following horse’s neck, almost escaping before tripping on a tussock of grass, stumbling, and being dropped by a swung sword to his neck from a clearly irritated French knight.

And there was Robin fifty yards behind me, with Miles and Hugh, and another man-at-arms, running in a pack, all four of them carrying swords and shields – with three French cavalrymen hard on their tails. The enemy were no more than twenty yards behind them, long blades bright in their hands, their expressions wolfish.

Robin glanced over his shoulder and shouted for his sons to halt. They obeyed immediately. And all stood together back to back, shields high, swords extended, as the cavalry rushed at them, cutting at their up-held shields as they surged past. I saw one enemy blade slip through their defences and come back bloody. Then they were past the three men on foot. The man-at-arms who had been running with them either did not hear Robin’s cry or decided to ignore it. When Robin, Miles and High formed their back-to-back triangle defence, he ran on heedless – and was overtaken in a trice by a French knight who dispatched him cleanly with a lance-lunge through the small of his back that lifted him off his feet before dumping him dead on the turf.

The cavalry was not done with Robin and his boys. Not nearly. They circled back and made another pass at my lord and his boys, a clashing of steel on wood, and again I saw them bloody their long blades, and beyond these three knights, to the north, I could see a dozen more riders approaching, lances in their hands.

Robin was a dead man and so were his sons.

And I had a choice to make.

I could carry on running, following Robin’s orders to run for the trees without stopping for anything. Or I could go back to help my lord in his hour of peril.

It is at these times that a man learns if he is a coward or not. Thirty yards way from me was Little John, the woods and safety in the growing darkness. Behind me was Robin, Miles, Hugh – my friends, my saviours, and almost certain death.

I hesitated. God forgive me – I could not make up my mind. I could not push myself into death; I could not run for cover either. My legs would not move. I seemed to be frozen in my abject cowardly state. I believe that I might still be standing there to this day if what happened next had not happened.

I heard a great shout from the treeline. Turned and saw Little John bounding towards me, his poleaxe in his hand, the cry of ‘A Locksley!’ on his lips. The big man hurtled past me like a force of nature, like a great rushing wind, and he charged straight into the nearest horseman of the trio raining blows on Robin and his sons.

The passing of Little John unlocked my courage. I took a double-handed grip of Fidelity and charged after the big man – to the rescue of my lord.

Thank God, for I could not have lived with myself else.

Little John lunged with his poleaxe, driving the spear-tip deep into the back of the horseman, splitting mail links and grinding the sharp steel into the flesh beyond. The horseman gave a howl and spurred away, but he was a dead man.

A second horseman rode directly at John, slashing at his head, but Robin and his sons had broken out of their back-to-back position, exploding outwards in a blur of steel and movement, and Hugh neatly lopped off the horse’s forefoot with a single blow, causing knight and mount to tumble. Robin finished him as he sprawled on the ground. The third knight nearly had me, his sword blow from behind whistled over my helmet, but I twisted and caught him with an upward lunge that punched through the mail around his inner thigh and slid my blade up into the meat of his leg, scraping the long bone inside. He screamed horribly and rolled away from me out of the saddle.

Robin was shouting: ‘Run, all of you, run! Alan, help Miles! Take his arm!’ And I caught Robin’s youngest as he staggered towards me, still grinning but with his side streaked with red and his face as pale as death.

There were more horsemen only twenty yards away, half a dozen knights in a pack, and beyond them a score of running crossbowmen. Little John stood facing his enemies, his long poleaxe held horizontally across his chest in both meaty hands, as if he planned to deny them further passage south with its wooden shaft.

Robin shouted: ‘John, leave them, we must run!’

The treeline was fifty yards away, and a handful of Sherwood archers were nocking, drawing and loosing their last remaining arrows at the oncoming cavalrymen. I was hauling, half-carrying Miles towards the wood as fast as my churning legs would carry us. I turned my head, and saw Robin just behind me with his arm around the bloodied form of Hugh. Beyond them a feathered shaft smacked into the chest of the leading knight, spinning him out of the saddle and away.

Robin shouted: ‘John, come now!’

For the big man was thirty yards behind – directly between us and the five advancing cavalrymen, facing the enemy, his feet planted. John looked over his shoulder at Robin. He favoured me, Robin, all of us with a long, happy smile.

He shouted: ‘You go along without me. I’m tired of running. Besides, I haven’t finished with these French fellows yet.’

And the big man charged straight at the oncoming cavalry, his poleaxe swinging, a titanic roar of battle on his lips.

I did not see John die. It brings tears to my eyes even to remember those last few moments of his life. But he saved us all from the pursuing enemy and ensured that Robin and myself, Hugh and Miles, and all the rest of our men, made it safely to the treeline and into the darkness of the woods, and so I think that by his lights it was a good death. I pray that he is reunited with Gavin in Heaven or wherever their souls travelled to after their time on this earth. I wept that night, too, as we bound up our wounds and made a fireless, cheerless camp in the deepest part of the wood, sleeping in utter exhaustion wrapped in our cloaks.

A little before dawn, Robin and I ventured out, just the two of us. The victorious King had made his camp in the far northern part of the battlefield, away from the blood and the bodies, in a great enclosure surrounded by his baggage carts. I could clearly hear the sounds of drunken French revelry from a mile away, shouts, snatches of song, laughter, and see the merry twinkling of campfires.

In the cold grey light I could see little on the battlefield but the mounded forms of dead men and horses. There was no sign of the once-impregnable circle of spears, no sign of any remnant of the Earl of Salisbury’s men – I found out later that Boulogne and Salisbury had been taken captive, as had Count Ferrand of Flanders earlier in the day, but that all the surviving common men-at-arms had been executed on Philip’s orders.

We found Little John’s body without too much difficulty a dozen yards from the place he had begun his mad charge, half-buried by a dead horse with a scatter of corpses beside him. His huge body had been hacked, sliced and battered in the most appalling way; there were three crossbow bolts in his chest and belly and his big skull had been staved in, but it was clear that he had fought as well as he had ever done, and taken a good many of the enemy with him when he went onward.

The fact that Robin and I were still breathing was the greatest testament to his self-sacrifice. And I can say no more of my old friend, except to say that he was a fine man, a superb warrior and, until the last, a true hero.
Requiescat in pace
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Robin and I were both weeping unashamedly as we carried his body with us back into the woods. We washed it ourselves and wrapped it in green cloaks, sewn tight around his huge form as a shroud. And then we moved out, carrying all our weapons and gear and with four strong men carrying John’s body – heading south through the trees, aiming to strike south and west for the coast and the hope of a ship for home. Our hearts were bruised raw, our heads fogged with grief, exhaustion and the awful knowledge of failure.

We had lost a great battle; we had lost a great friend.

Such is war.

We walked south for many hours in the morning after that battle, to put some distance between us and the enemy knights, then turned north-west. All of us were hurting in some way or another and we were a miserable, raggedy crew on the march, hiding from any horsemen we saw and sleeping in the woods, under hedges or in lonely barns. My wounded back bled and bled and refused to close up, even after Thomas put a red-hot knife blade to the wound on the second night of our journey. Miles had a bad wound to his shoulder, a sword cut that had sliced deep into the muscle; and Hugh had been stabbed in the meat of his waist, and like mine, the wound did not stop bleeding for several days. Most of the surviving men had cuts or wounds, or punctures from quarrels, but we could not afford to move too slowly, nor rest long. God knew when Philip’s cavalry might find us, and we were in no condition to fight them off. We had to march on – or die.

I do not think we would have got more than a dozen miles had it not been for Robin. He seemed to shrug off the fatigue of a hard-fought battle as if it were no more than a dirty cloak and on the road he was filled with a strange and manic energy. He was once more the young outlaw I had known in bygone days, carefree but cunning and filled with an almost supernatural vitality. Perhaps it was the loss of Little John that fired him to strive so hard to keep us moving, I do not know. Perhaps it was to ensure safety for his boys. But he was truly tireless, cajoling or bullying stragglers to keep up with the column – for if they were left behind they were dead men – ranging ahead to scout out the land and guide us to safer paths away from the dwellings of the local people. His eyes glowed like molten metal day and night, and though his face was more gaunt than ever, I never once saw him flag. He urged us onward, promising a safe camp and a decent rest that night if only we would march another few miles. His example was magnificently inspiring: even badly wounded men staggered on long past their limits, binding their wounds tighter and putting one leaden foot before the other with faces set hard against their agony. Once, when my own weariness and pain forced me to my knees by the side of the road, I found Robin at my side, his white face inches from my own.

‘Come now, Alan, this won’t do. I need you to set an example. What would young Robert say if he could see you defeated by this?’

Robert: that pain was worse than the wound by far. I had failed him. There would be no rich ransom with which to secure his freedom, and the feast of Lammas, when the next payment to the sheriff was due, was but days away. I was almost blind with despair but, for Robin, I straightened my spine and took another step forward.

Half a dozen men died of their wounds on that march. And it took us four brutal days to reach Calais, sixty miles of creeping though enemy territory, fearful of every man and wary of every village. But we made it, and all thanks must go to Robin for that feat. When at last we came in sight of the high walls of Calais town, I confess I sat down and wept.

Robin did not slacken his zeal even after our arrival at the port: he shed the outlaw persona that he had employed to bring us safely through hostile country and once more he was an English earl, a man of wealth and consequence. Within an hour of our arrival he had arranged hot food, wine and accommodation for all of the seventy-odd men-at-arms who had come through this ordeal with him.

He even took the time to secure a barrel of double-boiled vinegar to house the mortal remains of our dear friend. We had brought Little John’s body every step of the way on that cruel march from Bouvines, and every fit man had done his share of carrying that burden, even I with my wounded back had done my part. But, by God, when we arrived in Calais, my old friend was smelling ripe.

Robin had insisted. And I was glad of it afterwards. He wished his friend’s bones to lie in a place south of Kirkton called Hathersage – it was a manor that Robin had granted to a cousin of the big man long ago. That was typical of Little John: he had taken nothing for himself from Robin in all the long years of service to him. When his lord had wished to reward him – as he had me with the gift of Westbury – John had told him to give the manor of Hathersage to William Nailor, his first cousin, a farming man with a large young family. John asked nothing for himself but the honour of serving Robin. And he had died, as he had lived, serving his lord.