I felt the first flickering of hope. He was slow, he was very slow — and that kick to the knee had hurt him.
I moved backwards towards the western end of the list. I could hear booing from the crowd at my cowardly retreat, but I knew that if I wanted to live long enough to take my vengeance I had to stay away from his crushing embrace. Milo growled something unintelligible and charged at me. I feinted to the left and as he moved that way to grab me, I dived to the right under his arms once again, landing on the hard-packed earth of the list but immediately flipping my body over, swinging my leg and landing another hard kick on his left knee. He howled and went down on the injured joint, his broad, fur-matted back towards me.
Then I made a mistake.
I jumped to my feet, leapt on his back and locked my left forearm around his neck from behind, squeezing it tight with my right forearm in a choke-hold. By God, his neck was thick — it must have been a good foot wide. But though I squeezed with all my considerable strength, hoping to cut off his wind and prevent the blood getting to his massive head, it was like trying to strangle an oak tree. Milo rose to both feet, with me clinging tightly to his sweat-greased hairy back, lifting me off the ground as if I were a child and he were giving me a piga-back ride.
I could dimly hear the roar of the crowd, sounding like the beating of the angry sea against a cliff. Milo shook his body in a series of enormous heaves, to the left and right, trying to dislodge me. My stranglehold seemed to be having no effect on him whatsoever. As he shook his great squat body, mine flew from side to side with each heave, but I clung on for dear life, trying to keep my purchase on his neck and exert as much pressure as possible. I could feel the rumbling of his ogre’s rage through the bones in my left forearm. Then he changed tactics. His huge right fist swept up and backwards over his own shoulder, smashing into the right side of my head. It was an awkward blow, and only delivered with half-force, but it slammed me to the left and I could feel my grip slipping; then he punched me with his left hand, catching me full on the left ear and sending me crashing to the ground, my head spinning. He turned and stamped at my chest and just in time I rolled, and rolled again on the hard earth as he came raging after me, stamping and roaring. If a blow from one of those huge feet had landed on me it would have crushed my chest like a rock dropped on an egg. But I kept rolling and rolling just ahead of his stamping boot. In desperation I swung my own boot at him laterally, and by God’s grace I caught the left knee again, from behind, kicked it right from under him, and he dropped to the floor with a bull-bellow of rage.
As I scrambled to my feet I saw that he truly was hurt. But I found I was breathless and still dizzy from the punches I had taken to the head, my legs felt like water, and I had a strong urge to vomit. Milo struggled to rise, and could barely put any weight on the injured limb once upright. Yet for all his inhuman looks, he was no coward. He roared: ‘Now you die, you little worm.’ And he came charging at me once more, his feral anger giving him the strength to run on that injured knee.
And I knew what I had to do. It was a move that little Thomas ap Lloyd had shown me many months ago in Kirkton, a wrestling trick that he had devised himself, he claimed, to use a bigger, stronger man’s weight and momentum against him. He had used it on me, and easily thrown me — and it was not only my pride that had been bruised that day. I offered up a very quick prayer to Michael, the warrior saint, and, as Milo charged at me once more, hobbling forward with a surprising turn of speed, I committed myself to little Thomas’s strange wrestling manoeuvre.
As Milo’s enormous hands reached out to grab my body, I fell straight back before him, tucking my knees up into my stomach and rolling backwards on my spine, curled up like a new-born baby. When Milo stumbled over my prostrate body, his meaty hands groping the air, I grabbed his wrists, jerked him forward and shot my feet suddenly upwards into his stomach — and, using all the main strength in both my young legs, I heaved him up and over my body.
He flew.
He flew over my extended legs, sailing into the blue sky, his huge body turning a full circle in the air and smashing down a full three yards away, landing with an earth-jarring crash — on his left leg.
I jumped up and ran at him, my mind barely registering the broken left limb sticking out under his prone body at an unnatural right-angle. His screaming drowned out the roar of the crowd as I raced in and smashed my right boot as hard as I could, squarely into the side of his face as he lay on the ground, roaring with agony. His head jolted with the impact of my foot, but still he seemed hardly to notice it and continued groping madly at his twisted knee, and squealing like a halfbutchered pig. I shouted: ‘For Perkin!’ — and stamped with the full weight of my boot-heel on his broad cheekbone, and was rewarded with a loud and welcome crack. He was trying to move, to sit up, so I gave him another belting kick to the right eye, pulping it and knocking his giant head backwards with its impact, and another hard-swung scything boot to the temple, and yet another that must have dislocated his jaw, and another, smashing into his cheekbone. His head was now bloody and raw, and hanging loose on his bull neck, but I did not let up — thinking of the deaths of my friends, I carried on kicking and stamping, landing blow after blow with my booted feet into that huge bloody baby-giant poll. I was filled with a black and terrible rage that afternoon, fuelled by fear of this monster sprawled before me and a deep well of hatred for all those around me, and for longer than I like to recall I kicked and hacked, stamped and ground at his gory, pulpy head, until my stout leather boots were slick with his blood and skin and tissue, and he moved no more.
I finally stopped, panting, shaking with emotion, and looked around the crowd of men-at-arms at the ropes. They were absolutely silent and none would meet my mad, glaring eye. I looked over at Prince John; his mouth was hanging wide open, showing little yellow teeth and a bright pink tongue. Sir Ralph Murdac beside him looked white and shocked.
Prince John recovered first. He croaked, ‘Seize him!’ and suddenly I was surrounded by a dozen men-at-arms with drawn swords. I readied my soul for death. ‘Take him… away,’ the Prince managed to say.
And as I was being dragged back towards the keep by rough hands, I heard Prince John shout after me, his voice shaking with emotion: ‘You are not free of this matter, you filthy cur. You will not escape your crimes. You will hang for this, you will hang for this, you diabolical, blood-crazed… animal; before God, I swear you will hang at dawn tomorrow.’
Back in the storeroom, I wept. I do not know why, but often after a fight I feel a terrible sadness, a soul- sickness, come over me. It is one that I can usually control, but in that dark, desperate place, still trembling with rage after beating Milo, I allowed myself the weakness and comfort of a woman’s tears. It did not last for long and I must admit that, afterwards, I felt a good deal better.
Over the next few hours, I took stock of my situation: to the good, I had defeated a monster who had sought to tear me apart; my enemies had arranged a humiliating death for me and by great good fortune — and here I blessed little Thomas ap Lloyd and his oddly effective wrestling tricks — I had avoided my fate and taken a suitable revenge for Perkin and Adam. I still lived. More than a little bruised around the face and neck, I grant you — I had taken savage punches from both Little John and the monster Milo in less than two days — but for the most part hale and well.
To the bad: I was to be hanged like a common criminal in the morning.
I bathed my sore face in what was left of the water, and drank some of it too, tasting the metallic tang of my own blood in the jug. I prayed once more for salvation — either in this life or in the next. And then I lay down once again on the barley sacks and tried to sleep.
I had barely closed my eyes when the door of the storeroom opened and two men entered. One of them fixed a burning torch to a becket in the wall and when my eyes had adjusted to the harsh light, I saw that it was Sir Nicholas de Scras. I had half-expected a visit from my friend, but his companion came as a complete surprise: it was Sir Aymeric de St Maur, the Templar knight.
Sir Nicholas handed me a jug of ale, a loaf of rye bread and a small bowl of cold mutton stew. And I found that I was starving. The two knights watched me as I ate hungrily and slaked my thirst, saying nothing, only staring at me by the flickering light of the torch. When I had wiped the last of the gravy from the bowl with the remaining crust of bread, I broke the silence: ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And to what do I owe this unexpected courtesy?’
‘You know what we want, Dale,’ said Sir Aymeric. ‘Or rather, who we want. You are Locksley’s man and you must know how we can find him. And we can force you to tell us if we have to.’ He smiled cruelly. ‘I find that a hot iron applied judiciously can loosen the most stubborn tongue.’
I could not suppress a quick shudder. I had once been tortured by Sir Ralph Murdac with hot irons and that foul memory is one I do not care to contemplate. And I remembered the poor wretch dragged to the centre of the Temple Church at the inquisition, and tried not to imagine what Aymeric de St Maur had done to him to secure his testimony against Robin.
