the time it had taken for Milo — who was on the seat of ease in the privy — to finish his business, wipe himself, drop his tunic and do up his belt, and come to see what all the clang and clatter was about in Murdac’s chamber.
Milo saw me standing over the bloody dead body of his friend, blinked, scowled, gave a feral shout — and charged. And though his left leg, above the knee, had been replaced with a strappedon leather cup attached to the stump of his thigh, and a stout bar of wood to walk on, he moved at a pretty decent lick. I knelt quickly beside the tall swordsman’s gory corpse and picked up his lovely weapon with my left hand; then I stood to meet the ogre’s hobbling charge, a sword in each fist.
In the three heartbeats before he reached me, I had time to notice that he still bore the marks from our battle in the lists on his face. He had but one good eye; small and piggish, and glaring with bottomless rage, and his hairless head was a crumpled mass of scar tissue from the battering my boots had given him, all yellow and shiny and furrowed, with barely any recognizable features at all. A flashing image of Nur came into my head: and indeed they would have made a pretty pair. His head was like a ball of beeswax that has melted after being placed to warm too near the fire. He looked even more monstrous than he had before our battle. Yet I was amazed that he lived at all, for I had been sure that I had stamped his vital spark to extinction — but live he did, and now he sought revenge.
When Milo was a mere yard from me, I twisted to my right out of his path like the Saracen dancers I had seen in Outremer, twirling in a complete circle, fast, and hacking down hard on his outstretched left arm with Rix’s gorgeous sword. The blade sliced clean through the thick knotted muscle and solid bone just below his elbow, cutting away his forearm with a single blow and leaving him, roaring with pain, the blood jetting from the stump. But I wasted no time in gloating at his injury; instead, continuing my twisting manoeuvre, I found myself behind him and cut down with a smooth sweep into the slab of solid muscle of his right thigh using the plain old sword in my right hand. There was not enough power in my strike to cut through that knotted limb, but he did fall to his knees squealing with pain.
I took his remaining hand then: a neat downward blow with Rix’s incomparable sword slicing all the way through like a hot blade through butter, sending his pudgy, ham-like fist thumping to the floor. He was a dead man then, of course: both arms useless and unable to rise on his one wounded leg. And I stood before Milo, between his half-kneeling, blood-drenched massive body and the long heap of his friend, and looked at him for a moment or two, remembering the wrestling match in the list, and the crunching explosion of his boot in my ribs in Germany, and the sight of the torn bodies of Perkin and Adam as we found them on the bank of River Main. He stared back at me with his one mad eye. There was nothing to say, and so I held my tongue: I merely gave him a merciful end, thrusting with both swords simultaneously into his huge breast, the two long blades plunging deeply into the chest cavity, driving towards his engorged ogre’s heart.
‘Not so bad,’ said Hanno from the bed, where he was still holding Ralph Murdac securely around the neck. ‘But very far from perfect. I think the tall, skinny one is going kill you, for sure. You are sloppy, too confident and your attacks are obvious. You must practise, Alan. Practise more. You must try to do better in future.’
I stood there between the corpses of the two men I had just killed, and nodded my head in agreement. Hanno was right, I had not deserved to win the fight against Rix. It was all very well being able to dispatch a half- trained man-at-arms in a mad battlefield melee, but faced with a serious swordsman such as Rix I had very nearly lost my life.
‘Shall I do this one for you?’ said Hanno, jerking his chin down towards Ralph Murdac’s terrified little face. ‘Show you the proper way?’
I shook my head. ‘Just tie his arms and bring him out here on the floor. I want him for myself.’
While Hanno bound Sir Ralph Murdac with his belt and a strip torn off the bed-sheet, tying the man’s elbows behind his back and his wrists to his feet so that he was in a permanent kneeling position, I moved the heavy table up against the door, blocking it. Milo’s roars must have roused some of the garrison, I reckoned, and it would not be long before someone came to investigate. The big table, heavy as it was, would not hold Murdac’s men back for long, but it might give us an extra moment or two to escape. And we were not planning to leave by the door anyway.
I shoved the plain old sword back in my scabbard and came over to where Murdac was kneeling, with Rix’s magnificent, gore-smirched blade in my hand.
Murdac could not take his eyes off the sword. When I held it low before me, he seemed fascinated with it, watching the red blood drip slowly from the tip on to his wooden floor.
‘Stretch out your neck,’ I said. ‘It will make it cleaner, and quicker for you.’ And I lifted the long blade, holding it cocked in two hands above my right shoulder like a professional executioner.
Murdac turned his face up towards me, his pale cheeks stained with tears. ‘Please, Alan,’ he said. ‘Please, do not kill me, I am begging you.’ And the tears rolled down his handsome cheeks, and dripped from his perfect little chin.
‘You deserve it many times over,’ I said, and I had to harden my heart, because the sight of his small quaking, sobbing body was weakening my resolve.
‘Please, Alan. By all that is holy, spare me. Spare my life. I will go away, I will leave England and never return. I have money, you know…’
‘We do not have time for this nonsense,’ said Hanno. ‘Strike, Alan, and let us be on our way.’
I moved my arm back another inch, and Murdac shouted: ‘Wait! Wait — if you kill me Alan D’Alle — which I know is your true name — if you kill me, you will never know the secret of your father’s death.’
I rocked back on my heels, as if I had been struck a blow. ‘What secret?’ I managed to stammer out. ‘What is this secret?’ I lifted the sword higher.
Just then there was a loud hammering at the door of the chamber, and the sound of rough soldiers’ voices.
‘Alan, we have no time. Strike!’ said Hanno.
There was more hammering on the door, and a man shouted: ‘Sir Ralph, Sir Ralph, is all well with you in there? Constable, are you unharmed?’
‘What is the secret? Tell me now or die.’
‘It concerns your father’s time in Paris. I know the name of the man who ordered his death.’
‘You ordered his death. I know this to be true.’
‘It is true that I ordered him hanged, but I received orders from someone, a very powerful man, a man you cannot refuse. He told me to accomplish your father’s death. Swear before Almighty God and on the Holy Virgin that you will spare me — and I will tell you his name.’
‘Constable — Sir Ralph, are you there? Are you all right?’ the man-at-arms outside the door demanded.
‘Tell them that all is well in here or I will kill you now, I swear that before Almighty God.’
‘All is well,’ shouted Murdac immediately. ‘There is no cause for alarm. Go back to bed!’
The hammering stopped. I saw that Hanno was uncoiling a long thin rope that he had taken from his back- sack — and for a second I wondered if it would be long enough, and strong enough for what I had in mind. We needed a hundred and fifty foot of very strong rope for my plan to succeed. I shrugged off my own back-sack and kicked it over to Hanno.
‘Who is in there with you, Sir Ralph?’ shouted the man from beyond the door.
‘I am with my friends. Go away and cease troubling me with your impudence!’ Murdac sounded convincing. Pleased with his performance, he was nodding and smiling at me in an eager manner.
I swung my hands down in a short hard arc — and smashed the silver pommel of the sword into Murdac’s temple. He gave a soft sigh and flopped to the floor.
‘We are taking him with us,’ I told Hanno. And to his credit, my doughty German friend merely nodded, shrugged and moved off towards the privy, carrying the bundles of rope in his arms.
There are some experiences that are almost too unpleasant to recall, and so I will only briefly tell of the passage down the exit chute of Murdac’s privy. After I had recovered my misericorde — it took a deal of strength to prise if from Rix’s foot bones and the grip of the polished wooden floor — we dropped the unconscious Ralph Murdac down the chute first, after tying him securely to the end of Hanno’s rope and lowering him none too gently
