walking carefully down the ten-foot wall to the ground below.
All was quiet as I found myself standing in a muddy patch of tilled earth, some sort of vegetable garden from the look of it. Leaving the knotted rope hanging against the outer wall, I set out to the south, following the wall until I came to the corner of the monastery, and then sprinting fifty yards or so into the cover of a copse that ran east- west to the south of Tuckelhausen. As my panting breath subsided, I took stock of my situation: the rain had stopped but the sky was still filled with scudding clouds and a three-quarter moon, which provided ample light to navigate by. Too much light, if the truth be told; I had hoped for a little more cloud cover, as I did not want to be too easy to spot as I went about my business.
It was perhaps an hour or so before midnight, I judged, as I adjusted the straps on my back-sack to allow it to sit more comfortably. Checking once again that the misericorde was still in my boot, I pulled the hood on my cloak far forward and began to march eastward, towards Ochsenfurt; towards the heavily fortified town in which my King was being held prisoner.
Chapter Nine
It took me no more than an hour to cross the three miles of farmland from Tuckelhausen to the high walls of Ochsenfurt. I stayed under the cover of woods and spinneys wherever possible, or walked along the lines of hedgerows or fences to minimize the silhouette that a walking man might make on a bright, moon-filled night. At about midnight, I found myself crouched at the foot of a tree in a scrubby stand of alders, not far from the River Main, chewing on a stick of dried meat that Hanno had thoughtfully placed in the back-sack for me, and looking over at the defences of the north-western corner of Ochsenfurt, which were no more than thirty yards away.
The town was protected by a deep ditch, about three-quarters filled with rainwater, which lay in front of a thick stone wall, some twenty foot in height. At this corner of the western and northern walls, as at every other corner of this square town, was a high, round tower with arrow slits at different heights on three sides. I imagined the arrow slits coming off a spiral stone staircase running around the inside of the tower and leading to a secure room at the top. I was fairly certain that King Richard must be imprisoned in one of these towers. There was one chance in four that I was now looking at the very prison that held my King.
Richard could, of course, have been held in the town itself, perhaps in a nobleman’s dwelling. But I had shinned up several tall trees as I was approaching Ochsenfurt and — apart from a large solid-looking church in the centre of the town — I could not make out another stone-built structure that would be suitable for holding a valuable captive for several days or weeks. The towers might be on the edge of town but the walls were patrolled by men-at-arms, and the only way out would have been a locked door at the base of the tower on the inside of the walls.
No, I was almost certain that Richard would be in one of the four towers. But which one?
Ten yards to my left, a well-travelled road ran east-west beside the broad, glinting flow of the Main and it entered Ochsenfurt by a strong-looking barbican beside the tower. The big wooden town gate, studded with iron for extra strength, was barred tight. It would have been closed at curfew, and would not be opened until dawn. On the battlements above the barbican, I could see the warm yellow glow of candlelight escaping from two or three windows, and the occasional moving shadow as a watchman walked past the light. I calculated that there must be about five or possibly six men up there. And these men-at-arms, charged with keeping the safety of Ochsenfurt, were awake and alert. In order to break into this town and talk face-to-face with King Richard, I would have to swim across a flooded ditch, scale a sheer twenty-foot wall, sneak past these six men-at-arms, or kill them all silently, and then wander around the maze of narrow streets after curfew, and locate my sovereign in one of four strongly defended towers — and do all this in the pitch darkness and without making a sound. To be captured would mean execution as a thief or spy.
I chewed on my strip of jerked beef and pondered the problem. It was impossible, I concluded. There was no way I could get into Ochsenfurt undetected. But that did not mean I would not be able to communicate with my King.
The big double door to the barbican was locked tightly shut, as I had already noted. Nobody could go in through it. On the other hand, it was very unlikely that anyone would come out. What sort of watchman is willing to leave his comfortable spot by a brazier, his allotted post, and venture out into the darkness? Who knows what strange, unearthly creatures, demons or witches, may lurk beyond the safety of the firelight? I thought of the superstitious villagers of Locksley and their fears of the Hag of Hallamshire, and smiled to myself. Then I dug into my back-sack and pulled out my polished apple-wood vielle and my horsehair bow. It was one of my most prized possessions, a gift from my old musical mentor Bernard de Sezanne. The vielle was about two foot long, and made up of about half neck, where I fingered the strings, and half woman-shaped rounded body, which generated its exquisite sound. It was light enough to carry in the back-sack with ease, yet fairly strong.
I repacked the back-sack, and readied myself to flee at a moment’s notice, then I began to tune the instrument as quietly as I could. Mutterings of conversation came drifting down from the candlelight above the barbican, not thirty yards away, as they heard me plucking at the five strings and adjusting the pegs on the head at the end of the vielle’s long neck. I could not hear the words distinctly, and I would not have understood them even if I had, but I knew that the guards were aware of my presence.
And then I began to play.
My master Robin had almost always been short of money during the Great Pilgrimage. Since he had commandeered the lucrative frankincense trade, that had all changed dramatically, of course, but for most of the time he had lacked sufficient quantities of silver to meet his obligations as the leader of nearly four hundred fighting men. And the fault had been King Richard’s. My sovereign had promised Robert of Locksley a certain amount of silver in exchange for Robin’s promise to come to war and bring his feared Welsh bowmen with him. Unfortunately, as is often the way with rich men, and especially kings, Richard had been slow to pay what he owed to my master, and Robin had suffered a lack of ready funds as a result.
As a favour to Robin, I had used an opportunity to play music with Richard to remind my King of his debt to Robin, and we had enjoyed a sort of musical duel: I had sung a verse suggesting that Richard should pay up promptly and Richard had replied by telling me not to stir up trouble. It had all been done in a spirit of fun and laughter, but the outcome was that Robin was paid a proportion of the silver he was owed, and Richard and I had formed a bond as fellow verse-makers.
That dark night, seated on the cold earth outside the barbican of the main gate of Ochsenfurt, I played the music that accompanied the song that Richard and I had written together. It was a simple, distinctive melody, repeated twice and then elaborated on in the third and fourth lines, before returning to the main melody again. I bowed the opening notes, and sang: My joy summons me To sing in this sweet season…
I bowed the next few chords and continued: And my generous heart replies That it is right to feel this way.
And then I stopped and listened. There were raised voices coming from the barbican, and a few incomprehensible shouts of enquiry, but I tried to erase them from my hearing. I was straining to hear if my sovereign lord, Richard the Lionheart, King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou and Poitiers, would join me in my carolling from inside his prison cell. If the guards in the barbican could hear me, I was sure that anyone kept imprisoned in the adjoining tower would be able to hear me, too.
I waited for a few minutes. In silhouette against the battlements of the gatehouse I could see a man-at-arms standing with a flaring torch in his hand, peering out into the darkness. But I held my peace. I doubted that they would sally forth to find me, and even if they did, I would be able to slip away before they could catch me. The man on the battlements turned his head and said something to someone behind him. And then fixed the torch in a nearby becket and went back into his warm guardhouse. Once more, I thought, just one more time, and then I’ll go.
And I drew my bow across the strings of the vielle, and once again I sang the first verse of ‘My Joy’. There were more shouts from the guardhouse and two men appeared, this time on the battlements, clutching bright torches. Since I had not received the response that I was looking for, I backed away into the darkness, leaving the men-at-arms atop the barbican to shout their querulous challenges into the empty night.
I walked southwards, away from the river, keeping a little further away from the town wall and the water-
