from one another, and make up one knight’s fee. I expect you to do me faithful service in return. If you betray me, if you even disobey me, you will lose the manors — and your head. Am I clear? Now, do you accept my offer and will you swear to serve me loyally?’
‘I accept,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said the Prince. ‘I will have the charters drawn up and we will do the homage ceremony tomorrow at noon in the chapel. Now get out.’
I was on my feet before I knew it. ‘I thank you, sire, from the bottom of my heart for this opportunity to serve you,’ I said, bowing low. ‘I am most grateful for your royal kindness.’
But the Prince had returned to his plate of greasy chicken and so I bowed once more, ignoring Sir Ralph completely, and reflecting, as I made my way out of the great hall, that I would have to get better at this royal boot-licking. After all, I might be required to do it on a daily basis.
The next day after a solemn Mass in the great chapel, during which I prayed even more fervently for my soul than usual, I knelt before Prince John, placed my hands between his, and swore a solemn oath before God. We then exchanged the kiss of peace and I ceremonially received three bulky parchment scrolls, hung with big green and black discs of sealing wax, which confirmed me as the lord of the plump West Country manors of Burford, Stroud and Edington. It would seem that I was going up in the world.
After the ceremony, my new master called his knights together to witness what he called an ‘amusement’. A local freeman known as Wulfstan of Lenton had been accused of moving a marker stone, so as to encroach on some ploughland on one of Prince John’s estates. In reality, I had been told by a castle servant, a Nottingham man whom I knew slightly from earlier days, Prince John’s steward had moved the stone and Wulfstan had merely restored it to its original position. Normally, since good King Henry had reorganized the law, the case would have been tried by the defendant’s peers, twelve good men and true from the surrounding area, but Wulfstan clearly did not believe that he would receive a fair trial in a court packed with Prince John’s tenants and cronies. Thus, claiming that he was the great-grandson of Saxon thanes, and therefore had the right to bear arms, he demanded the old-fashioned wager of battle — to the death: a trial by combat.
He was a rather slack-witted man, as fair-haired as Goody and with a bushy beard obscuring his face, but he was as proud as Lucifer. And I cheered him, silently, deep in my heart, for preferring to fight than allow his ancestral lands to be encroached on by his powerful royal neighbour.
A square area about sixty foot on each side had been marked out with ropes in the outer bailey of the castle, inside the long wooden stockade that surrounded the entire fortification, but outside the stone walls of the castle itself. The stone core of Nottingham Castle was shaped like a swaddled baby, with a circular upper bailey at the south end — the baby’s head — and a slightly bigger oval middle bailey — the baby’s swaddled body — connected to it and lying directly to the north. Both upper and middle baileys were built on a massive sandstone outcrop, the highest landmark for miles around, and they were walled with granite and dotted with high square towers every fifty paces or so for extra strength. Between the upper and middle baileys, indeed connecting them at the baby’s neck, loomed the great tower, a high square stone fortress that was the ultimate stronghold of the constables of Nottingham, the final place of refuge in a siege, if all went badly for the defenders. On the eastern and northern sides of the castle was a wide area known as the outer bailey, filled with tradesmen’s shacks, animal pens, stables, workshops, cookhouses, a few guest halls, some storehouses and, next to a deep well, a large newly built brewhouse where the ale for the whole castle was made. The outer bailey was protected by a twenty-foot-high earth-and-timber stockade — the castle’s first line of defence.
The area roped off for the list lay to the north and east of the stone-built part of the castle, and it was thronged by castle denizens and by people from the thriving market town outside the walls to the east — my old hunting ground in my days as a hungry cutpurse.
The crowd was packed three deep around all four sides of the list and already there was a hum of excitement at the coming contest. Each combatant was to be armed with a sword and shield, and I suspected that Wulfstan might have believed that he was actually going to fight Prince John himself. If that was true, he was in for a shock, for John had naturally delegated a champion to do his fighting for him. I confess, when I saw who the champion was, I had to suppress a start of unease myself. And the sight of his huge companion had me reaching instinctively for my sword hilt.
The man who would do battle with Wulfstan was the tall, thin swordsman who had attacked me outside the walls of Ochsenfurt. His ogrish companion stood guarding Wulfstan with one massive hand holding him casually by the back of the neck as if he were measuring it.
I nudged a knight next to me and, indicating the two grotesque assassins, asked, ‘Who are those men?’
‘Have you not yet had the pleasure of their acquaintance?’ He smiled at me in a not altogether friendly way. ‘The tall one is called Rix,’ he continued. ‘The quickest man with a sword you will ever see. His gigantic friend is Milo — and, as you can judge for yourself, he is barely a man at all.’
‘They serve the Prince?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer.
‘They kill folk for him,’ was the knight’s terse reply. And he would say no more on the matter.
At a signal from Prince John, Milo released Wulfstan and gave him a little push so that he staggered into the centre of the roped-off square of packed earth. The freeman stood straight, rolled his shoulders, shook his arms to loosen the muscles and used a piece of leather thong to tie back his long thick blond hair. He was a man of about thirty, I guessed, of middle height, deep in the chest and strong from long days of labour in the fields. Wulfstan went over to the far corner of the list where a standard yard-long sword with a leather-wrapped wooden handle and a stout six-inch crosspiece had been propped next to a kite-shaped shield. These were weapons that were carried by any ordinary man-at-arms in England; indeed, their like could be seen slung on the backs and about the waists of about two dozen of the men who were crowded round the square field of battle at that very moment. I myself was carrying arms that were not dissimilar.
Then Rix entered the list, hopping over the rope on his long legs like a stork. He was dressed in a homespun tunic the colour of straw, belted at the waist, with his long sword hanging in a scabbard on his left side. He was bareheaded and his brown hair was cut short across the brow and shaved on the scalp at the back, high, from the neck up beyond his ears, in an old-fashioned style that would have suited a Norman of his great-grandfather’s day, one of William the Bastard’s men. His face, like his body, was long and lean, and he seemed entirely calm, like a man going about his daily business, rather than one about to engage in mortal combat to determine the Judgement of God.
Rix pulled the slung shield off his back and slid his left arm through the grips, and then he drew his sword. Once again I was struck by how beautiful the blade was: slightly slimmer than a normal weapon, and tapering gracefully to a razor point, the blade engraved with tiny golden letters along the fuller that ran down its centre. From where I stood, it was impossible to decipher their meaning. The magnificent blue sapphire, set into a thick ring of silver at the pommel, flashed as it caught the light on that bright spring day. It was a sword fit for a king, an Emperor even, and I wondered where he had obtained it. No doubt from some nobleman that he had slaughtered. I wanted it. I lusted after that sword; I desired it so much it was an ache in my heart.
But there was no time then for these covetous thoughts. At the crook of a finger from Prince John, who was seated in a high-backed chair in the middle of the northern side of the square and surrounded by his closest knights, Rix and Wulfstan came and stood before him, the blond Saxon eyeing his opponent with just a hint of trepidation. He was right to fear him, I thought. Standing in the eastern side of the square, I could see both men in profile, and I saw that Rix was a full head taller than his adversary, although with Rix’s slimness I would have guessed that Wulfstan weighed a shade more. Both men made a solemn declaration that they had not eaten that day and that they had no hidden witch’s enchantments or magical gewgaws about their bodies that would give them an unfair advantage in battle. Wulfstan then declared loudly that he was fighting to preserve his land, the land that had belonged to his father and his father’s father before that, and he called on God Almighty, Jesus Christ, and all the saints to aid him in this matter and prove for once and all time that his cause was right.
Then they began.
Wulfstan wasted no time. He charged at Rix with a wild yell and began to batter at the taller man with a welter of hard blows, wildly swinging with his strong right arm, and battering his opponent with powerful cuts at his head and shoulders. Rix fended off the attack with ease, blocking with his sword and letting the blows slide off his shield, slowly retreating before the fury of his foe. Wulfstan, I could see, was not unused to the sword: someone had instilled the rudiments in him and he would have made a decent if not particularly skilful manat-arms. I had trained worse men than him for Robin, and he had a passion, too, a rage in him that gave force to his sword cuts —
