Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (3 page)

Little John’s mouth opened but he said nothing for a couple of heartbeats; out of shock, I am quite certain, rather than fear. But I do not believe he had been seriously threatened for many a year. Young Curly-hair took a step forward, but John put a massive hand on his chest that stopped his advance and said, ‘Hold up, Gavin.’

There was a long, awkward silence, during which John and I stared at each other. It was finally broken by Robin. ‘He’s right, John. That was most discourteous of you. I think you should make an apology to Alan for speaking ill of his lady.’

Little John looked over at Robin in disbelief. ‘Apologize? You want me to say I’m sorry?’

‘I accept your apology, John,’ I said, grinning at him. ‘And I particularly appreciate the handsome way in which the apology was made. Now, this fellow here made a mention of dinner. Was that merely a ruse to bring me here without a fight?’

That golden July afternoon, at a long trestle table of greenwood planks set up in the centre of the clearing, we ate roasted venison, pigeon pie and barley bread and a simple sallet of wild leaves and herbs, washed down with a goodly quantity of freshly brewed ale. As we ate, I studied my lord, the notorious Earl of Locksley, and I was struck by his simple, radiating happiness; his deep, uncomplicated enjoyment of life. Here was a man entering the middle years, although still as slim and fit as a twenty-year-old, who had been one of the greatest nobles at the court of King Richard, and one of his greatest warriors – and he was living like an animal in the wilderness of Sherwood, surrounded by a score of cut-throats, with a price on his head. Yet, while I’d known Robin for ten years or more, and knew him as well as any man, I’d never seen my lord more contented.

He had been recently outlawed, of course, and not for the first time. As a youngster he had been declared beyond the law – after he had killed a bullying, abusive priest – and Robin had taken to the predatory life of a thief in the woods like a pike to a fishpond. He had robbed from the rich who were foolish enough to travel through his part of Sherwood, and taken their silver by the sackload, and he had given protection to the poor from other bandits and evil men, and even from the law – for a price. Robin was known then across the land for his ruthlessness to his enemies and for his reckless generosity to his friends – to cross him meant death or mutilation, but if you were inside his circle, quite simply, he would die for you. At the height of his fame, he was one of the most powerful men in the country, able to purchase a full pardon from King Richard with barrels of stolen silver, and be granted the fair hand and fair estates of the Countess of Locksley, his sweetheart Marie-Anne.

After his pardon, Robin had served Richard well: in the Holy Land fighting the Saracens, in England during the rebellion, and in the long bloody wars in Normandy against Philip of France. But our hero-king Richard was dead, killed by a crossbow bolt outside an insignificant fortress in Aquitaine. And the new King, Richard’s weak, vengeful and duplicitous brother John, had no love for Robin and had repaid my lord’s loyalty to his older sibling by declaring the Earl of Locksley an outlaw, whose head was worth a small hill of silver to any man bold enough to try to take it.

There had been no trial, no assembly of the barons to weigh the merits of the case: a proclamation had been issued by the new Sheriff of Nottinghamshire – a greedy, short-legged crony of King John’s named Sir William Brewer – and a strong force of knights and men-at-arms had galloped north to occupy Kirkton, Robin’s castle in South Yorkshire that overlooked the Locksley Valley. They had found the place deserted; an echoing shell without a soul in residence, without beasts, fowls or a roaming stray dog. Even the fishpond had been emptied, every pot and pan packed up; every bale of hay and peck of corn long gone. Robin had given his goods and chattels to his friends, sent his horses, trained men and armour to his elder brother William, a petty baron who held the honour of Edwinstowe, and sent his wife and two boys across the sea to live under the protection of the Queen Mother, the venerable Eleanor of Aquitaine, where they would be safe from John’s vengeance. Robin himself had slipped away into the vast, tangled depths of Sherwood, the haunt of wild men cast out by decent society, my lord’s old playground – and his true home.

I had served King Richard too. He and I had even made music together, as we were both
trouvères
– poets who ‘found’ or composed songs during our leisure hours. And I mourned the loss of the Lionheart deeply, I had liked and admired him as a man and a fellow warrior, and he had been most generous and kind to me – knighting me personally, despite my lowly origins, and granting me lands and a place among his trusted companions. But I mourned him too because I hated his brother John perhaps even more than Robin did. I had served John once, reluctantly, and had vowed that I would never do so again. Indeed, I had no obligation to do so: one of John’s first acts as King was to appropriate the lands that Richard had granted me: the rich manors of Burford, Stroud and Edington in England, and the war-ravaged manor of Clermont-sur-Andelle in Normandy. But I considered myself lucky – I had not been outlawed like Robin and, had I still had possession of these lands, I would also have owed John my service as a fighting knight. However, on that gorgeous summer afternoon, as I feasted with Robin and Little John, and jested and swapped stories, all that I had to uphold the dignity of my rank was the small manor of Westbury, which I held of the man sitting across the table from me, the outlawed Earl of Locksley.

While we ate, we passed the time in idle conversation: how was Marie-Anne, and her two boys? All well, Robin assured me, the boys growing up fast in Queen Eleanor’s travelling court. And was Goody pregnant yet? Robin knew that a son to follow in my footsteps was my heart’s desire. No, not yet, but it was still early in the day. I looked at John sternly, half-expecting him to utter some crude comment about our attempts to make a baby – I had meant what I said about fighting him if he showed the least disrespect to Goody – but he seemed to have taken my threat to heart, and the big man merely grinned at me, winked cheekily and busied himself stripping the flesh from a whole haunch of roasted venison with his teeth.

‘So you’ve had men looking for me about Nottinghamshire,’ I said, when I had finally eaten my fill and I was sitting back, picking my teeth with a splinter from the table. ‘Why did you not just send a messenger to Westbury? Or come and see me yourself. Goody would have been delighted to receive a visit from you.’

‘I’m a wanted man, Alan,’ said Robin with a happy grin, ‘I can’t go wandering about the countryside paying calls on the gentry whenever I feel like it. The Sheriff of Nottinghamshire is after my blood and I tremble at the thought of his terrible wrath.’

‘Could it be, just perhaps, that the Sheriff is wrathful because a party of his tax gatherers was ambushed last week and robbed of nigh on ten pounds in silver up by Southwell?’ I asked.

‘Could be, could well be.’ Robin’s grin had become dangerously close to a smirk. ‘Who knows what makes that funny little mountebank angry? Silly man. He stamps around Nottingham Castle, ranting and raving, pulling his own hair out – his
own
hair, mark you – and issuing dire threats that he cannot possibly fulfil – no sense of moderation, no sense of dignity and no manners either. I sent him a pair of venison the other day, two fine plump hinds. A noble gift, you might well think. But did he have the courtesy to thank me? No. My people in the castle tell me that he harangued his men-at-arms for an hour, then raised the price on my head to fifty pounds! Fool.’

I laughed. ‘Are you deliberately trying to goad him?’ I asked. ‘Sending him a brace of the King’s deer, poached from under his nose? What did you expect – a big wet kiss and an invitation to keep Christmas with his wife and family this year?’

‘I have no desire at all for his company, still less that of his appalling wife and her snotty brats – a simple thank-you would have sufficed. People are so ungrateful these days. But that brings me rather neatly to the reason why I wanted to see you.’

‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘The answer is no.’

Robin looked hurt. ‘I haven’t even asked you the question.’ He looked over at Little John. ‘You see what I mean – there is no gratitude in the world. None at all.’ Then to me: ‘Come now, Alan, don’t you even want to hear my proposal?’

‘You want me to help you do something bad, I feel it in my bones, something far beyond the law and very likely immoral too – you want me to murder or kidnap someone; or, most probably, to help you steal something valuable that you have set your heart on. And that will put me afoul of the Sheriff, and have him coming after
my
blood. The answer is, no, thank you, Robin. I just want to stay quietly at home at Westbury, write a few half-decent
chansons
, tend to my lands and put a baby in my wife’s womb. That’s all I want. I don’t want to go on a wild escapade with you; I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’m sorry, Robin, but whatever your proposal is, the answer must be no.’

‘I want you to help me right a great wrong,’ said Robin, looking absurdly pious. ‘I want you to help me help a poor man, a friend of a friend of ours, who has been cruelly ill-used by a powerful lord. I have always thought of you as a decent man, Alan, a man on the side of all that is good and right. And now you have the chance to do something fine in this ugly world.’ Robin fixed me with his odd silver eyes. ‘Surely, as a good Christian, you want to make the world a better place, to help the poor and weak. Will you do that, for me, Alan? Help me to help someone. For the sake of all that we have done together, for our friendship?’

I said nothing, but I felt my heart beginning to sink.

‘Allow me to tell you a little story,’ said Robin, smiling like a fox outside a chicken run. ‘Then you can give me your answer.’

‘Malloch Baruch is not a rich man,’ Robin began, ‘although to make his livelihood he deals with expensive materials, and must keep a goodly store of them. He is a goldsmith by trade, a Jew, of course, and he and his family lived in York – until ten years ago.’

My lord paused and looked at me, to see if I was attending closely to his words. I nodded, and swallowed thickly, as the memories came flooding back. A couple of years after I had joined Robin’s men, he and I had been caught up in a bloody, Devil-inspired frenzy in York, during which almost the entire Jewish population of that city had been hounded to death by crowds of Christians fired by religious zeal. The Jews had been assaulted and robbed and forced to take refuge in the King’s Tower at York Castle – and there, for several days of brutal siege, they were surrounded by a boiling sea of Christian citizenry crazed with hatred for the un-believers. Until the entire surviving community of York Jews – about a hundred and fifty men, women and children – decided to take drastic action. On the ground floor of the tower, trapped and desperate, the men of each family cut the throats of their wives and children, and then took turns to end each other’s lives. For a moment, I recalled the lake of gore and its meaty stench, and the pathetic curled bodies carpeting the slick floor, their white throats sliced open by loving familiar hands. Robin and I, and our Jewish friend Reuben, had escaped only by the skin of our teeth, and Reuben’s only daughter Ruth was killed in the mêlée while we were cutting our way free.

It was not a memory I relished.

Robin could see that he had my full attention. ‘By luck, or the Hand of God, if you prefer, Malloch Baruch happened to be away from York on an errand in Lincoln during that time of madness,’ he said, ‘although his wife and young children perished in the King’s Tower with all the rest of them.’

Robin paused again and scratched his growing beard. He had stopped smiling by now. ‘So Malloch lost everything: his family were dead, his precious metals stolen from his workshop, his house burned to the ground. But he did not give in to despair, as might many a man. After he had buried his wife and children in York, and said the traditional words of mourning over them, he returned to Lincoln and began again. Reuben helped him in those early days: he arranged for Malloch to borrow money to buy gold to work with; he found him a new workshop and generous clients in and around Lincoln. Malloch worked hard, long days and nights hunched over his workbench patiently fashioning gold and silver trinkets for his clients, and with the passing of time his spirit revived. He married again, his new wife bore him a son, and then a daughter, and his fame as a goldsmith grew with his new family. Ten years on, and his reputation as a goldsmith is as one of the finest craftsmen in England. But, in spite of this, his living is still precarious; he took on heavy debts to rebuild his life, and he has not yet redeemed them. You must remember that he lost half a lifetime of savings in the disaster at York and that scale of loss is not recovered by a few years of hard labour. Then, two years ago, Malloch had a stroke of fortune – or so he believed.’

The shadows were lengthening in the clearing and the men and women of Robin’s band were making their preparations for nightfall: wide deer skins were being laid out on the grass for the family groups over by the tree line, while the single men and women laid their blankets and furs by the fire. Cut branches were being stacked in high tottering piles by the stone-lined hearth to fuel a damped blaze during the night. In the rough wooden shelters, mothers washed their children’s grubby faces, men took a last tankard of ale or scrubbed their teeth with salt and well-chewed willow twigs.

‘Gavin,’ called Robin to the ruffian who had brought me here, as he passed by the long table with an armful of firewood, ‘fetch us some of that cheese, would you, and some more ale.’ He turned to me: ‘You’ll stop with us tonight, Alan?’

I muttered something to the effect of Goody worrying about me, but Robin waved that idea away. ‘I sent word that you were with me,’ he said. ‘She’s a sensible lass who won’t be overly concerned if you don’t come home till the morrow.’

I privately noted that Robin had messengers at his beck and call who
could
visit Westbury any time they pleased. And realized that the only reason I had been waylaid in that alarming manner earlier was because Robin wished it so. He could easily have summoned me in many other ways. I wondered why he had chosen that dramatic method, and knew then that the answer lay within the question: Robin often loved to pose and strut and perform like an actor in an Easter mystery play – it was in his very bones. He loved the idea that he was the hero of his own
chanson
or epic poem, and he was prepared to go a good deal out of his way to make his actions seem larger than life. But Robin had picked up the threads of his speech, and I was caught up once again in the tale of the unfortunate Jewish goldsmith.