Warlord (Outlaw 4) (12 page)

Robin smiled at me. ‘She is a fine lass, Alan, and you are a
lucky man. Yes, she is healthy, and all is well at Westbury. It seems that she and your steward Baldwin have made an alliance and are turning Westbury into an orderly, productive and well-run place. She wants to please you, Alan, she wants you to be proud of her. So take a note of what she has achieved at Westbury, when you return, and make sure you praise her for it. But there is one thing that troubles me …’

‘What? What is it?’

‘It may be nothing, Alan, but … I still have many friends in Nottingham and in Sherwood from the old days who tell me things from time to time. And I have heard rumours, evil rumours of black magic and witchcraft …’

‘It’s Nur, isn’t it?’

‘It is. It may all be overblown, Alan. And it may well come to nothing. But they say she has been gathering followers – the mad, the deformed, the ugly, and some unhappy women who have run from their menfolk. And I have heard she has sworn vengeance on you and Goody.’

Nur. I felt a shiver run down my spine at the mention of her name. Nur, once the most beautiful, exquisite girl I had ever seen, had been my lover on the Great Pilgrimage to Outremer. I had sworn to protect her, but had failed. My enemies had taken her and destroyed her beauty, cutting away her nose and lips and ears, and leaving her alive, a monstrous mockery of her once-lovely self. I had not protected her, neither had I continued to love her after her awful mutilation. And her love for me had turned to hate: she had followed me, alone, on foot, all the way home from the Holy Land, becoming wild and mad and richer in malice with every step, and she had burst into my betrothal feast and cursed Goody and myself in front of hundreds of guests. And yet Goody, my fiery, passionate Goody, had rebutted her curse and had beaten her to within an inch of her life before expelling her from the hall. And now Nur wanted revenge for all the humiliations inflicted on her. Suddenly the breeze seemed to blow cold.

‘Alan! Listen to me,’ said my lord. ‘I have sent a dozen good men to Westbury as a garrison, and Marie-Anne and Tuck to keep Goody company there. She is safe, among good friends, surrounded by guards, and that poor, mad, bedraggled creature can do nothing to hurt her. Alan – trust me on this. Goody is perfectly safe!’

I prayed that Robin was right.

It took us more than a week to travel down to Tours, and while we encountered no enemies of any significance, it was still a busy time for me. One evening, bone-weary and lying in my blankets in camp, I reckoned that I must have travelled ten times the distance of a knight riding with the King’s household, for I was constantly galloping back and forward, ferrying messages between Richard and the Earl of Locksley. I had come to the conclusion that Robin was right about Goody. She had proven herself more than a match for Nur at my betrothal feast; and Tuck, a man of God, would easily be able to counter any magical nonsense the deformed madwoman might concoct. She was safe, spiritually and physically. And I was comforted.

I was riding Ghost, my grey gelding, one day, to allow the courser to rest, and had a message from Robin for the King in my saddlebag, when I heard the sound of screaming on the still June air. Hanno and I reined up simultaneously, and Thomas, who had been riding some twenty yards behind us, clattered up and stopped his mount to my right. We were passing through a wide, shallow valley, a sheep pasture with a stream trickling down from a spring to the east and heading away south. The rutted earth road we were on ran straight through the centre of the valley. The three of us sat in silence for a moment, and then a hideous wail of agony split the morning once again. It seemed to be coming from a small shrine – a one-roomed wooden-framed building no bigger than a cottage but with a tall cross on the roof ridge – built beside the spring, halfway up the side of the valley. I had ridden past this
place the day before and had assumed that it was deserted. Now I could see a thread of smoke coming from behind the building and four horses tethered to a rail at the front of it.

Another scream wrenched at our ears. And I thought,
A wise man, knowing he had an important message to deliver to his King, would just ride on by
…

Hanno and I approached the shrine cautiously, having told Thomas to stay back on the road and if we got into trouble to ride for the safety of the main column, which we knew to be only half a dozen miles to the north. Our blades loose in their sheaths, all senses extended, and Hanno cradling a powerful crossbow that had been spanned and loaded with a foot-long steel-tipped oak quarrel, we walked our horses around the back of the wooden building. There we came across a knot of about a dozen rough-looking men gathered around a campfire. My eyes took in many things at the same time: something of a party or feast seemed to be in progress, the men were red-faced, glowing and some had hunks of bread and meat and what appeared to be cheese in their hands, and I could see a couple of half-empty skins of wine lying on the grass. One man was asleep in the lee of the wall of the shrine, cuddling a half-eaten joint of meat.

But this was no celebration; in the centre of the group of revellers was a tight knot of men subduing a struggling bundle in brown wool – a man, and by his robe I could tell he was a monk. His feet were bare and red and blistered, and I knew with a lurch to my stomach what had been taking place here. Only one man of that company was still a-horse, gazing down on the proceedings with a crooked little smile on his lips – a mop of shaggy black hair and a deep scar diagonally across his dark face; it was Mercadier.

He looked over at me, incuriously, and slightly inclined his black head. ‘Sir Alan,’ he said in his deep, stony voice. ‘Good morning to you.’

I said nothing, staring at the writhing scrum around the
struggling brown-clad monk. One of the
routiers
had a firm grip on the monk’s bare ankle, and as I watched with horror he and his fellows wrestled the limb towards the fire and, with a heave, plunged the bare sole of the foot into a heap of orange-glowing embers at the edge of the blaze. There was a sizzle and a puff of grey-ish smoke and a stench like rancid roasting pork was released into the air.

The monk let out a long, high scream of agony. I felt sick – my mind went back to a damp dungeon in Winchester some years ago, and the pain of a red-hot iron being applied to my soft under-parts.

‘His cries have a somewhat musical quality, do you not think so, Sir Alan?’ said the mounted mercenary captain. ‘Perhaps you might compose something from his noise.’

‘What is his crime, that you should torment him so?’ I asked Mercadier, feeling my anger rise and wishing to Christ that the poor man, clearly the guardian of the shrine, would stop his terrible yowling.

‘Crime?’ said the scarred captain. ‘His crime is that he has failed to render unto Caesar those things that are rightfully Caesar’s.’

‘What?’ I was taken aback. I had not expected Mercadier to quote the scriptures.

He sighed. ‘He will not tell us where he keeps his silver, his coin, his valuables – the rich offerings from pilgrims who come to pray at this holy little shit-hole.’

‘Perhaps he has none,’ I said.

‘That is what we intend to find out,’ was the flat reply.

But I was slipping off my horse by then, all sense of caution flown to the winds. I marched over to the knot of men around the monk and roughly pulled one of them away by the shoulder.

‘Put him down,’ I said, quietly and firmly to the rest of them. Hanno was still in the saddle, but I could see that the loaded crossbow just happened to be resting on the pommel of his saddle and pointing unwaveringly in our direction.

The
routiers
around the monk were confused; some glanced over at Mercadier for orders, others glared at me for interrupting their sport. They still grasped the monk by his legs, shoulders and arms, but the man was no longer struggling nor, thank God, screaming. I saw his face for the first time: he was old, perhaps sixty, very gaunt, twig-thin, with watery blue eyes and only wisps of white hair on the papery skin of his scalp.

‘Put him down,’ I said again, this time louder and with a little more iron in the tone. ‘Put him down, gently!’

‘Why don’t you fuck off, Sir Knight, and find your own church mouse to play with,’ said a squat red-bearded man who was holding one of the monk’s twig-thin arms. ‘This one is ours!’

Without pausing even for an instant to think of the consequences of my actions, I swayed my shoulders and powered my head down and across in a short hard arc, smashing my forehead with massive force into the bridge of his nose. The redhead staggered back and fell to one knee, blood spurting from his flattened nose. He should have counted himself lucky that it had been too hot that day for me to wear my steel helm. The rest of the men holding the monk dropped their load as if it was a bar of red-hot iron, stepped back and began fumbling for their weapons. My hand went to my sword hilt and I half-drew the blade.

‘Leave him be,’ said a cold, dead voice with a slight Gascon accent, and every man around that fire froze. I ignored the men and their half-pulled weapons and reached down and tried to help the monk to his feet, but halfway through my action I realized that he would not be able to stand, so I picked him up bodily and slung him over my shoulder. He weighed no more than a ten-year-old.

I straightened up and looked round the circle of statue-like
routiers
, a hard challenge in my stare. And I caught Mercadier’s eye as I began to move away, the monk balanced on my left shoulder, heading back towards Ghost. He was smiling sardonically
down at me from his horse. A blur of movement to my right: the redhead I had knocked down was on his feet, an axe in his hand, and he was coming for me. My sword hilt was entangled in the priest’s skinny legs. My heart banged once. The world slowed. I saw the red man, bloodied face snarling, draw back his axe to chop at my undefended head – then there was a twang, a thump and he was swept backwards, off his feet. And I found myself looking down at his writhing body, a black quarrel jutting from the centre of his chest.

Turning my head I saw that Hanno had already slung the crossbow from his saddle and drawn his sword. I moved quickly back towards Ghost, heaved the monk on to the grey’s haunches behind the high wooden saddle, and climbed into the seat as swiftly as I could. The men on the far side of the fire were still frozen, watching me, and making the air heavy with their silent hatred.

Then Mercadier spoke: ‘You have saved one worthless old monk, and killed one of my prime men-at-arms.’ His voice had no emotion in it whatsoever – neither sorrow at his man’s death nor anger at my interference in his actions. ‘I do not think it is a fair exchange.’

‘It is not,’ I said. I was angry then, and I let it show. I jerked my left thumb behind me. ‘This is a man of God, a decent fellow who does no harm but merely prays for all our souls; your man was a cowardly brute, of no more worth than a wild animal. It is certainly not a fair exchange, it is a great bargain for mankind.’

Mercadier said nothing, just stared at me with his cold, brown eyes. I shrugged and, having nothing else to say on the matter myself, nodded to Hanno and turned Ghost around and trotted down the gentle slope to rejoin Thomas and the road north.

The monk’s name was Dominic and he was a deeply pious individual, I soon discovered, even for a man of the cloth. When I tried to question him as to which religious order he belonged to, he mumbled something about the Holy Trinity. I couldn’t make
out whether he was praying or trying to tell me something. The poor man’s feet were both very badly burnt, indeed, he was almost out of his mind with pain, and I half-expected him to die as we bounced down the rough track away from that quiet valley and Mercadier’s wolfish men. I had no wish to add to his pains by trying to force information out of him while he was so grievously injured.

When we arrived at the King’s column an hour later, I left him in the charge of some of the half-fit Locksley men who were responsible for our baggage train, spare horses and personal possessions. A strange wise woman named Elise, who had followed Robin from Normandy to the Holy Land and now back to France, undertook to treat his wounds and make sure that he was comfortably ensconced on a baggage wagon as the column trundled along.

Having rescued him, I did not know what to do with Dominic. His shrine had been burnt to ruins shortly after I had ridden away from that valley. I saw the still-smoking charred remains as I rode past it again the next day, delivering yet another message between the King and the Earl of Locksley, and presumed that Mercadier’s men had done it as some sort of revenge for the loss of their red-headed
routier
. I would not have cared, were it not for the fact that I now had an aged monk on my hands, one who could not walk and had no way of fending for himself. I did not know which high churchman, which prior or abbot, was his lord, nor which monastery he belonged to, and had not had time to visit him and ask him. For the moment, I thought, he could stay under Elise’s care and if necessary, we could find a position for him somewhere in the army; as a chaplain’s assistant, perhaps.

I shoved that thought aside. We were approaching Tours: Robin’s men had been given the task of reconnoitring the city and preparing it for a visit from their rightful liege lord, King Richard. The townsmen must now be very worried, Robin confided in me, as they had been a leaf’s thickness away, on several occasions, from
siding with King Philip. The flirting between the merchants of the town and the envoys from Paris had been as falsely coy as the relations between a willing milkmaid and a lusty plough boy, the way Robin explained it.

In truth, Tours was not one town, but two. To the east was the older settlement, containing the castle of Tours, the cathedral and the archbishop’s palace – this was on the north bank of the River Cher, a tributary of the Loire. On the Loire river itself, to the west, further north and clustered around the Abbey of St Martin, was the new town of Tours, known as Châteauneuf. Made wealthy by the lucrative trade down the Loire to the sea, Châteauneuf was walled, neat, opulent and filled with tall timber-framed houses. It was a distinct settlement. The two towns of Tours were separated by fields of green wheat and neatly ordered vineyards. Having crossed the Loire by an impressive stone bridge, it was here that Robin and his men made their camp, directly between the two halves of the city, in a position to threaten either one with siege or assault.