Robin continued: ‘Take heed, Alan, and be extra vigilant. Any man may take your life now and claim the reward, and if word gets out that you are carrying large quantities of specie, half the footpads in England will be lying in wait for you. And if you lose that money, I will be extremely displeased.’ And he gave me a cold, hard stare.
Then his expression softened. ‘When you get to London you can give my love to Marie-Anne, and little Hugh — and to Goody, of course.’ And he smiled at me, with a glint of something knowing in his odd grey eyes.
Despite his warning, I was feeling very pleased with myself. A pound of precious silver for my life — it was a goodly sum. I thanked Robin, and was about to leave the cave when a thought struck me and I turned back to my outlawed lord. ‘What is the price on your head now, Robin? Tell me honestly, I beg you.’
For a moment my master seemed almost embarrassed. Then he looked straight at me: ‘I’m told it is up to a thousand pounds by now.’
I felt instantly deflated. ‘A thousand pounds! A thousand pounds!’ I said the words too loudly, almost shouting — in that company, nobody raised his voice to Robin — and a tense silence descended over the supper table. But for some reason I couldn’t stop myself: ‘And what about John Nailor?’ I demanded of Robin, once again too loudly, and nodded over to the giant form of my blond friend who was watching us, grinning evilly from the far end of the table.
Robin coughed: ‘Ah, um, I think it is five hundred pounds of silver at present!’ He smiled mockingly at me. ‘And I believe even Much the miller’s son is worth ten pounds — and that’s dead or alive, of course.’
‘This is outrageous!’ I was suddenly very angry. ‘Why am I only worth one paltry pound of silver? That is nothing — nothing but a damned insult! I’ve a good mind to complain…’
‘To Prince John?’ said Robin, with a straight face, and the whole table — thirty big, tough, dirty outlaws — erupted in a deafening wave of laughter. I flushed a deep red, turned on my heel and stalked out of the cave with as much dignity as I could gather around me, while a cascade of boozy laughter and crude half-heard jests swept me out into the chilly night.
I rode south on a blustery October day with twenty heavily armed, mounted men at my back; half Welsh archers and half men-at-arms, guarding five packhorses each with two stout wooden chests strapped to its back. Beside me rode Hanno — and Thomas ap Lloyd. The dark Welsh boy had told me that he wished to become my squire, and train to be a fully fledged warrior one day, and while at twelve summers he was a little old to begin training, I felt he had promise, and that I owed him something for showing me the wrestling trick that I had used to defeat Milo. So he came, too, trotting along on a pony that was as brown, quiet and well mannered as he.
When he asked if he might serve me, I had asked him one crucial question in return.
‘What do you know of your father’s death,’ I said, looking directly into his calm oak-brown eyes.
He looked right back at me, his gaze perfectly level, and said quietly and soberly: ‘I know that he was offered money by Sir Ralph Murdac to kill the Earl of Locksley. I know that my life and the life of my mother were threatened by Murdac to encourage my father to comply. And I know that, instead of attacking our lord, he attacked you in the dark in the Earl’s bed-chamber, by mistake, and that you fought and killed him.’
‘Do you blame me for his death?’
‘No, sir, I do not,’ he said, and I was certain, as certain as I am of Damnation or Salvation, that he was telling me the truth. ‘My father was forced to do what he did by Murdac, and you killed him in self-defence,’ he continued. ‘He died by your hand, but his death is not to be laid at your door. You were protecting yourself, and your lord, which is right and proper. I blame Sir Ralph Murdac for my father’s death — and if I ever have the opportunity, I shall have my vengeance upon him.’ He said these words quietly, calmly and with an incredible conviction for one so young. I believed him utterly.
‘Then we shall get along very well,’ I said, and took him into my service.
We had ridden no more than ten miles south of Robin’s Caves, and our horses were only just getting into their stride for the long journey, when one of the scouts who had been ranging ahead of the column rode back to me and reported that there was a strange woman, apparently alone, chanting nonsense by an old stone preaching cross a mile or so down the road. I had told the scouts that they were to report anything out of the ordinary to me directly they saw it — for I went in mortal terror of a well-laid ambush or some ruse by Prince John’s men that would rob me of the silver hoard the packhorses carried.
As we approached, I saw a small figure, hooded and swathed in heavy black wool, with her arms stretched out sideways in imitation of Our Lord’s Passion, standing beside the cross which stood on a mound of earth next to the highway. It seemed that she was speaking to that holy symbol. And with a shock that was like a plunge in an icy mountain tarn, I realized that she was speaking in the Arabic tongue.
Suddenly the woman turned her body towards us and swept off her hood. I held up my hand to halt the column but I believe the whole cavalcade would have been stopped by her appearance alone. She had a truly hideous face, mutilated so much that it was almost beyond recognition as belonging to a human being: the nose was missing, leaving two large holes in the centre of her face, surrounded by ridged scars, like a truncated pig’s snout; I saw that her ears, too, had been hacked off crudely, and her lips were gone as well, so that her narrow yellow teeth showed in a dreadful skull’s grimace. Her hair — grey and long and matted into rats’ tails — was whipped about her gaunt white face by the wind, and two dark eyes glowed in their sockets like the black-burning fires of Hell. She looked like a witch from a child’s nightmare. From behind me I could hear the frightened muttering of the mounted men. And yet, for all her cruel looks, I knew she was no hag; in truth, I knew that she was not yet twenty summers old.
You see, I recognized her. This wreck of a young woman, this demonic personification of ugliness, with a face that would curdle fresh milk, had once been my lover. I had once smothered that terrible visage with my kisses and received them, too, from her now absent lips. For this was Nur, the once-exquisite Arab slave girl that I had met on the long journey to Outremer. There was a time when I had been entranced by her beauty — by her midnight hair that spilled like dark oil down her back; by her huge brown eyes and snow-white skin; by the soft, generous curves of her body and the way she gave it up so joyfully for my pleasure. But then my enemy, Malbete, had taken her and his men had abused her brutally before hacking away her luminous, radiant looks with their blades; desecrating her perfection to punish me. She had shown her mutilated face to me, one dark night when I lay in a sickbed in Acre, and I had screamed in horror at her disfigurement — and she had fled. That had been two years ago, and I’d not seen her since. Yet here she was before me, in Nottinghamshire, as real as the rough stone cross on the grassy mound behind her.
‘Nur,’ I said. And then was lost for words; pity and shame welling up inside me in equal parts.
‘Alan, my love, we meet again,’ she said, holding out her arms as if to embrace me.
I flinched at her use of the words ‘my love’. And I tried to ignore the invitation in her open arms. With her beauty gone, I had been forced to face the truth: that I was a shallow man, interested only in the outward form of a woman. I discovered that I was a man who could not love, truly, deeply, with the heart and not just the eyes, as women claim to do. I had behaved most ignobly — for, although she had run from me, I had not searched for her. It was my fault that she had come to look this way, yet I could not even make amends by giving her the love that she surely deserved for all her suffering.
‘Nur — what are you doing here?’ I said, trying to sound as if I had just encountered an old acquaintance in a tavern — and hating myself even as I spoke. ‘Why did you leave your homeland? We all thought you must have gone back to your village, to your family. But here you are!’
‘I followed you, my love’ — I flinched once again at those words — ‘I followed you halfway across the world, through storm and drought, through pestilence, fire and battle; I followed you hungry and shoeless…’
As she spoke, my mind traced her journey. I could only dimly imagine the hardship and dangers she must have faced, a woman alone, travelling so many thousands of miles of wild and lawless road.
‘But why?’ I said. ‘Why follow me? What do you want from me?’
‘Did you not promise, when you held me in your arms aboard that Frankish ship, to love me for ever? Did you not vow it? I have come to you. I followed you to prove that, despite my misfortune, despite my ugliness, I am worthy of your love. My darling, my true love — I have come back to you. We can be united once again.’
My stomach felt as if it were filled with clay. I had promised to love her for ever; I had said so many things in the heat of passion, then — but now I could not even bear to look at her, let alone touch her; the idea of kissing her made my belly squeeze tight up into my chest.
How could I tell her that I would never love her again, that I could never love her again?
‘But why were you waiting here, on this spot?’ I asked, still in the same jolly tavern-acquaintance tones.
