The King’s Assassin (2 page)

Robin’s nonchalant words to me at the quayside at Dover, before we parted and he made his way to his own ship, echoed in my ears: ‘Keep an eye on Miles, will you, Alan. Marie-Anne would be most upset if anything were to go amiss…’

It might have sounded as if Robin was unconcerned about the safety of his second son. But I knew him better than that. He had been commending Miles into my care, asking without asking that I watch over him like a mother hen in the coming storm of steel. And I would, fear or no fear. For the debts of honour I owed to Robin, and the love I bore for him, were bigger than all the terrors of the world. We had fought together on more than a dozen battlefields from the Holy Land to the fields outside his home castle of Kirkton in Yorkshire. He had saved my hide so many times I could not count them. I would look out for his younger son as if he were my own.

Miles’s elder brother Hugh, who was Robin’s heir to the Locksley lands, was in the lead ship, a proud high-ended cog, with his father and William Longsword, the Earl of Salisbury, the leader of this seaborne expedition.

Hugh was a very different man to Miles. Where Miles was tall, fair and willowy, Hugh was shorter, dark and strongly built. While Miles was whimsical, dreamy and prone to laziness, though a dazzling fighter with sword or dagger; Hugh was studious and level-headed, a talented horseman and a dogged if unimaginative swordsman. Although they were separated in age by four years, they were very close, devoted to each other, and to insult or injure one was to bring down the wrath of the other.

I swung my legs over the bench so that I was facing back down the ship and face to face with Miles.

‘Here, lad,’ I said proffering the hilt of Fidelity. ‘See if your young fingers can fix this loose bit of silver wire. Can you tuck it under there, under that loop…’

Miles bent his head over the weapon for a few moments, his nimble fingers tucking and tugging. The ship’s captain altered course slightly, the sail cracked like a breaking branch, a rogue wave slapped the ship’s side and a salty packet of water leapt up and dashed itself against the shield on my back and over my neck, sending freezing trickles down my back under my iron mail. I tried not to shiver.

‘It is a truly wonderful sword, Sir Alan,’ said the lad, handing it back to me, the loose end of wire neatly out of sight. He was right: a blue sapphire set into a ring of silver made the pommel, the long silver wire-wrapped grip allowed it to be wielded with one hand or two, the cross-guard was thick squared steel ending in two sharp points, which I used as a weapon almost as much as the yard-long shining steel blade.

‘It’s certainly an old one,’ I said. ‘I killed an evil man for it before you were born. But it has served me well over the years. Very well.’

There was a silence between us, as we both admired the play of light on the naked steel. Then the young man cleared his throat a little unnaturally.

‘Sir Alan,’ he said, ‘is it true what Father says about you, that you have killed many, many men?’

I squinted at him in the bright sunlight, shrugged and said nothing.

He had the grace to colour at this gaucherie.

‘I mean no disrespect, Sir Alan,’ he said. ‘Nor do I mean to pry into your affairs. I merely wanted to ask … I just wondered what it feels like, you know, to kill a man. To take everything he has – and will ever have.’

I thought for a moment. Facing battle, he deserved to hear the truth.

‘It is hard,’ I said truthfully. ‘It is very hard the first time.’ My mind went back to a woodland glade in England more than two dozen years earlier, and a dead knight on the ground by my feet, a boy not much older than I was then, with his neck broken by my blade. ‘It feels wrong,’ I said. ‘Like the worst sin imaginable. But it does get easier each time you do it. Much easier. Then it becomes no more than something that you have to do, a task, a labour, something that must be accomplished.’

He looked me straight in the eyes, his deep-blue eyes in his father’s face.

I said: ‘There will be killing aplenty today, lad, and we will do our part. But I want to ask a favour of you, a boon, if you will. When we go in, I want you as my shield-man. Will you do that for me? Sir Thomas Blood will be on my right, as usual,’ I nodded over to the far side of the boat where a short, dark-eyed warrior in full mail was putting a final edge on his sword with a whetstone. ‘But I want you on my left. In the thick of battle, I want to know I’ve got a good man on my shield-side. Will you do that for me? Stick by me; guard my flank?’

Miles nodded and gave me a beautiful, beaming smile. ‘I am deeply honoured, Sir Alan. You can rely on me. To the death!’

I nodded and swung my legs back over the bench to face forward again. I wondered how soon he would realise that the ‘favour’ I had asked of him – that he stay close by me on my left-hand side – was in fact no more than a ruse to ensure that he was under the protection of my shield in the coming fight.

And I wondered what he would say when he did find out.

No matter. There was grim work ahead and no time for niceties. And I would not be able to look Robin in the eye – or Marie-Anne – if their son was killed under my protection. I’d see him safely through this blood-bath or die trying.

The land had jumped a little closer and I stood up from the bench and looked out under a hand. There were sandbars visible, patches of lighter blue amid the turquoise, and I felt the snake boat shift direction slightly as the captain, a dour man called Harold, guided our vessels between two of the larger ones. But I could also make out the spindly masts of ships ahead by the smear of coast. Many, many ships spread right across the wide mouth of the estuary, with more concentrated at the centre where the river debouched brown from the muddy flatlands. As we came closer, I could make out the masts and rigging of hundreds, no, maybe more than a thousand ships, seemingly stacked against each other. In the late afternoon sun they looked like a great tangled forest in winter, the trunks and limbs bare of their leaves. My God, I thought, this is the whole enemy invasion fleet. Right here. All of it. King Philip’s whole force is spread out before us, riding at anchor, or drawn up and beached on the sandy shore as carelessly as if they were in the port of Harfleur.

Our lead ship, a big cog with a high castle-like fighting platform at each end, and which flew the lions of England from the mast, was signalling to the fleet. I though I could make out Robin on the deck of the vessel with his back to me, conversing with a knight in glittering mail. Robin’s long green cloak fluttered behind him in the north-westerly breeze. He was pointing upwards to where coloured pennants, tiny at a distance, were being hauled up the mast. A hundred yards behind the lead ship, I followed the line of his pointing finger, and could easily make out the message the flags revealed. We knew our orders, we’d been thoroughly drilled in the flag codes and, as they fluttered cheerfully in the salt-tanged air, their daunting instructions were startlingly clear.

I turned back to the body of the snake boat and addressed the score of men-at-arms sitting eagerly on the benches – men in mail and leather, bowmen, spearmen, swordsmen, helmeted and helmless – and said: ‘It seems, lads, that we are not going to waste any time. No scouting, no hesitation, no parley. We go straight into the attack this afternoon. We are going in to take, burn or sink any French ships that we can. Lace up, men, and draw steel. Battle is upon us. May God Almighty go with us!’

I fumbled for my gauntlets, which were tucked into my belt, and in doing so I looked down at my naked left hand. The shaking had completely stopped.

My hand was as steady as a stone.

As I pulled on my stiff gauntlets, reinforced with fat strips of iron sewn into pouches in the thick leather, and flexed my fingers vigorously to try to loosen them, I remembered the last time I had worn them, not much more than a month ago, and wished I had taken the time to dry and oil them properly before they’d been put away.

I had trotted up to the gates of my estate of Westbury in the dusk of a Sunday in mid-April, having ridden hard from Portsmouth the morning before. I was greeted at the wide-flung gates of the manor compound by Baldwin my steward and, to my delight, by Robert my son, a tall, shy, and strikingly handsome boy of eleven. I had pulled off the heavy war-gloves, tossed them to Baldwin with a warm smile as he gathered the reins of my horse, and scooped the surprised boy up in a vast bear hug.

After a long absence, I was home.

The subsequent evening had been one of merriment. Robert, once he had overcome his diffidence, had been keen to tell me everything that had happened to him since I had left for the south of France some years before and to show me his new treasures: a hunting dog called Vixen, an over-excited lurcher puppy in truth, woefully lacking in discipline; a new hunting knife that one of the few Westbury men-at-arms had made for him; a rock that glittered like gold; a phoenix’s feather, or so he claimed; and a genuine unicorn’s horn, which on closer inspection I recognised as once belonging to a mountain goat – despite Robert’s fanciful insistence that he had seen the legendary beast with his own eyes and hunted it to death with Vixen.

I partook of a delightful supper with my son and heir, served by Alice, Baldwin’s younger sister, a plain, competent unmarried woman of thirty or so years who ran the manor household with her brother with a silent competence and grace. We ate a thin venison stew and bean pottage and a sallet of wild leaves – a rather meagre feast for a returning lord, I remember thinking – and for an hour or so afterwards he and I had made not-very-tuneful but perfectly joyful music together – he on the shawm, a flute-like instrument that he had learnt to play, after a fashion, in my absence, and I on my old vielle. Then Baldwin, on the pretence of bringing me a cup of hot, spiced wine, interrupted our play and tugged me away. He insisted on speaking to me about the manor accounts. It was late for such a task and I had only been home for a few hours, so I was more than a little puzzled by his insistence. I could tell that something was amiss and so I packed Robert off to bed and he went, reluctantly, after extracting a promise from me to go riding with him in the morn.

As Baldwin and I burned a cheap tallow candle and pored over the rolls, the gauntlets lay on a window sill in the hall where my steward had left them and that, I recall clearly, was the last I saw of them before packing for the voyage across the sea.

For the news that Baldwin had for me drove everything else from my head.

I had been away from Westbury, from England, for some years, involved in that bloody carbuncle on the honour of Christendom, the hounding to death of the Cathars of Toulouse and the pillaging and destruction of their lands, but even in the far south of France I had been dimly aware of events in England during this period.

Baldwin filled in the close details: King John’s sheriffs had been rapacious in their quest for silver for their royal master, and none less so than Philip Marc, the current High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests, who had dominion over a huge swathe of central England. Marc was a mercenary, a low-born Frenchman from Touraine who had risen in King John’s service over the past ten years through his utter loyalty to the King and his savagery in dealing with the King’s enemies. And among that number were included those landowners who the King claimed owed him money. I knew Marc slightly from my days in Normandy, and liked him even less. The number of the King’s ‘enemies’ had, I gathered, risen greatly in the years I had been away. After the loss of Normandy some nine years before, John had made increasing demands on any man of even moderate wealth. Tax after tax, relief after relief, as these demands for silver were known. And these extortions – there is no better word for it – were backed up by the full force of the local officers of the law. Indeed, no fewer than six times had the King declared ‘scutage’, an arbitrary levy on men of knightly rank and above, in the time that I had been away, and not a week before my return a full
conroi
of the sheriff of Nottinghamshire’s mounted men had come to Westbury in mail and helm, swords drawn, and had demanded a payment of fifty marks from Baldwin.

Fifty marks! In a good year, the revenues of Westbury in total might have amounted to fifteen. Under good King Richard – and he was no sluggard at milking the country for money for his wars – I had paid two or at most three marks each year. Fifty marks was a veritable fortune.

My poor steward, with only a handful of men-at-arms to protect the manor, was outnumbered and overawed. When the knight in command, some fat-faced deputy sheriff, backed by a dark-skinned mountain of a sergeant – a demon, if Baldwin was to be believed – had threatened to burn the place to the ground if some payment in silver were not made immediately, Baldwin had believed it was his duty to protect the manor as best he could and had surrendered all the coin that Westbury possessed to the King’s enforcers: a matter of twenty-six marks, more than three hundred silver pennies, a couple of small barrels full. The sheriff’s men had taken the silver and ridden away – but they swore that they would be back for the balance in due course.

‘I am so sorry, Sir Alan,’ he said. ‘But I did not know what to do. With you away … It was not their first visit, nor yet their second or third. And each time they take something and their demands increase. I did not know what else to do, sir.’

I soothed him with the best words I could find, but my head was reeling. I had sent that silver to Westbury, as and when I could, and I had received occasional reports from the manor about Robert’s progress and a tally of the rents and so forth. But nothing for many months. I had believed that all was well, that I might return to Westbury to find the place moderately well stocked with produce and with a goodly store of cash to tide us over lean times. I’d been wrong.

Baldwin showed me on the big parchment rolls that in the past year the sheriff’s taxmen had requisitioned from me six milk cows; a dozen black pigs; a pair of oxen; two riding horses; eighteen bushels of wheat; twelve bushels of barley; three of rye; five big round yellow cheeses, and, of course, twenty-six marks of sterling silver. As the rolls proclaimed, Westbury was near destitute. Almost its entire portable wealth was now in the sheriff’s hands – and still, Baldwin told me, he was demanding more.