fetters at the stroke of midnight, fleeing in the company of a ferocious blond giant who wielded an enormous axe. He had then disappeared into thin air, some said flying on a dragon’s back, evading his just punishment for heresy at the hands of the Templars.
My mood was lifted by this news, even if it came to me in such a garbled form. But my pleasure at Robin’s escape was soon dampened. The fugitive nobleman, this Lord Otto, I was told, had since been excommunicated by the Holy Church and, at the prompting of Prince John, the shire courts had declared the escaped lord an outlaw in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. The Prince’s vassal — one Rolf Meurtach, according to the German knight — had immediately marched north with an army of more than a thousand men loyal to the Prince. Finding Lord Otto’s castle abandoned, Rolf had burnt it to the ground. The Lord Otto was now on the run, in fear of his life, hiding in the haunted forest of Sherwood — a place of witches and demons and wild men — where the fearless Lord Rolf would no doubt run him to earth and bring him to a place of execution forthwith.
I smiled at that, and the German knight looked at me strangely. Even if Robin had been hounded out of Kirkton by Ralph Murdac, he would be far from destitute in Sherwood. There were plenty of men there who would hide him, feed him, and fight to the death for him, if necessary. Sherwood was, as it had been for many years, the home of his heart, his spiritual sanctuary, his woodland fortress. He would be quite safe there.
So Robin was an outlaw once again, I mused to myself, with no constraints of law, or even common morality upon him. That could be very bad news for his enemies; it could be doubly dangerous to anyone who he felt had betrayed him.
But my master was far away in Sherwood and I needed to apply myself to the task at hand. So I thanked the knight, bade him farewell and concentrated on the most pressing question: Where was our King? Where in the vast wooded expanse of Europe was King Richard?
We had expected Richard to be moved from prison to prison quite regularly by his captor, Leopold of Austria. For one thing the Duke had to support an enormous household and it is the custom for great men to move about their domains spreading the load of supporting their followers evenly about their lands; and where the Duke went, Richard would go. But it also made sense for Richard to be moved from time to time. He was worth a great deal of ransom money to anyone who held him, and so long as the King’s friends — or for that matter, his enemies — did not know where he was, they could not easily mount an attempt to snatch him. Not that we had rescue in mind — we would have needed a mighty army for that, not six clerics and two men-at-arms — we merely wanted to find him and begin the negotiations that would bring him safely home.
If we could establish contact with Richard, then we could be sure that Queen Eleanor, and England itself, were part of the negotiations for his ransom. The danger was that his captors — Duke Leopold, or his master Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor — would sell Richard to King Philip of France. With Richard languishing in a French prison, perhaps being beaten and starved, Philip could demand that our King hand over a substantial part of his French dominions, perhaps the whole of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, maybe even Aquitaine itself. He would be at the mercy of his mortal enemy. And that was not the worst of it. King Philip might well come to an arrangement with Prince John. I could easily imagine Prince John agreeing to hand over Normandy and some of the other French territories in exchange for Richard’s discreet death and Philip’s support when the upstart John claimed the throne of England.
If we could only make contact with Richard, then these dangers would recede, although not disappear entirely. We could make a compact with the Germans, and possibly save Richard’s life, by outbidding Philip and John for his living body.
There was one factor in our favour: Henry VI proudly called himself the Holy Roman Emperor, heir to the Caesars. He liked to think of himself as the greatest nobleman in Christendom, the premier knight, a wise and beneficent ruler of millions of Christian souls. And yet, by capturing and holding a returning pilgrim from the Holy Land, he was breaking one of the fundamental laws that he had sworn to uphold. Although there was far too much cold hard cash at stake for him to simply let Richard go, he could be embarrassed into doing the right, honourable and Christian thing and releasing the King back to his own people, in return for a substantial reward — rather than delivering this hero of the holy war into the hands of his enemies. But everything depended on Richard’s whereabouts being generally known. If all the world knew where the famous King Richard was being held, and if senior English diplomats were in contact with him and engaged in public negotiations with the Germans to secure his freedom, it would be that much more difficult for Henry to make a discrete, lucrative, and from our point of view disastrous, deal with Philip of France or Prince John.
Sixty miles upriver from Cologne, at the strongly fortified town of Koblenz, the enthusiastic Damian returned from a trip to the bath-house with more news of the King. A monk there had told him that in mid-February Richard had been moved to the citadel of Augsburg, in south-western Bavaria. As it was, by this time, early March, we felt we were closing in on our royal quarry. It was also heartening to know that, as we sailed southwards, Richard was being moved north by his captors, towards us.
I could finally see the sense in Queen Eleanor’s plan to send us questing up the Rhine. That wide, slow river was the main artery of Europe, and it was not just the mighty torrents of water that flowed down from its source high in the Swiss mountains to the North Sea: it also carried goods, people and, most importantly to us, information.
Hanno was the next to uncover details of Richard’s whereabouts. One night while I was performing some of my music for the Archbishop of Mainz, bowing my vielle exquisitely at a lavish feast given in honour of the two English abbots, Hanno had set about pursuing his love of ale in a back-street tavern in the stews of that city. One of his drinking companions turned out to have a cousin in the service of Duke Leopold, and he told Hanno that the King would shortly be moved to Ochsenfurt. At first the abbots were sceptical; Ochsenfurt was, after all, just a small, relatively unimportant town, a rustic backwater. Besides, what would rough, drunken soldiers know of the whereabouts of a king? But I believed him, and pressed my authority as leader of the expedition, insisting that Hanno would not lie. And so, having overridden the protests of the clerics, we turned the sailing barge east off the Rhine at Mainz and began to make our way slowly up the brown River Main towards Frankfurt.
At Frankfurt — a bustling place filled with hundreds of merchants from all over the Holy Roman Empire intent on making themselves rich, their shops and storehouses and myriad taverns, cook houses, brothels and churches that served their needs, huddled around the skirts of an imposing cathedral — Abbot Boxley (or possibly Robertsbridge) was able to confirm what Hanno had asserted so confidently several days before. King Richard, the Bishop of Frankfurt’s slack-witted cellarer had let slip, was indeed at Ochsenfurt, only two days upriver. The cellarer had been asked to send several barrels of the finest wine to the town, which was currently accommodating a very special guest. How Robertsbridge (or Boxley) had succeeded in worming this information out of the cellarer, I never discovered, but our spirits soared at the discovery we were on the right path, and closing in fast on King Richard.
After several hours spent haggling with the Frankfurt merchants, Adam finally swapped his cargo of Flemish cloth for a load of cut timber, a rare hardwood that was prized for its density, and we set off fully laden the next morning, heading eastwards in the driving rain to bring succour to our captive King.
Two days later, the wet conditions had left us all tired, dripping and irritable. With the exception of Hanno, who was delighted to be back in his homeland, a wide grin splitting his round shaven head and showing off the wreckage of his teeth. It was late afternoon by the time we came round a bend in the river and moored at a wide wooden wharf on the southern bank that belonged to the Premonstratensian monastery — or more properly canonry — of Tuckelhausen. Ochsenfurt was less than a mile away upstream, but we hoped that, in making Tuckelhausen our avowed destination, we might go some way towards averting suspicions as to our true purpose.
Our story, which I had discussed at length with Boxley and Robertsbridge, was that they were paying a visit to Tuckelhausen because they wished to see its famous scriptorium and peruse a rare copy of the Holy Gospel that was housed there. In truth, the Gospel in question was not of any outstanding merit, but few people would question the movements of two such august abbots who had travelled so far to see it. They would tell their hosts how they had taken passage with Adam and Perkin, a couple of fellow countrymen who were transporting a cargo of building timber upriver to Sweinfurt, where the local margrave was strengthening the fortifications of his town. We agreed that I should be presented at Tuckelhausen not as an exalted member of the company but an ordinary man-at- arms, brought along as protection for the churchmen. This was not so far from the truth, and suited me well: I had plans that would be better served if I were not shown any of the few courtesies due to my rank as lord of a small manor.
After announcing the abbots’ names and the purpose of our visit to the surly, white-robed canon who had
