a firm grip on the monk’s bare ankle, and as I watched with horror he and his fellows wrestled the limb towards the fire and, with a heave, plunged the bare sole of the foot into a heap of orange-glowing embers at the edge of the blaze. There was a sizzle and a puff of grey-ish smoke and a stench like rancid roasting pork was released into the air.
The monk let out a long, high scream of agony. I felt sick — my mind went back to a damp dungeon in Winchester some years ago, and the pain of a red-hot iron being applied to my soft under-parts.
‘His cries have a somewhat musical quality, do you not think so, Sir Alan?’ said the mounted mercenary captain. ‘Perhaps you might compose something from his noise.’
‘What is his crime, that you should torment him so?’ I asked Mercadier, feeling my anger rise and wishing to Christ that the poor man, clearly the guardian of the shrine, would stop his terrible yowling.
‘Crime?’ said the scarred captain. ‘His crime is that he has failed to render unto Caesar those things that are rightfully Caesar’s.’
‘What?’ I was taken aback. I had not expected Mercadier to quote the scriptures.
He sighed. ‘He will not tell us where he keeps his silver, his coin, his valuables — the rich offerings from pilgrims who come to pray at this holy little shit-hole.’
‘Perhaps he has none,’ I said.
‘That is what we intend to find out,’ was the flat reply.
But I was slipping off my horse by then, all sense of caution flown to the winds. I marched over to the knot of men around the monk and roughly pulled one of them away by the shoulder.
‘Put him down,’ I said, quietly and firmly to the rest of them. Hanno was still in the saddle, but I could see that the loaded crossbow just happened to be resting on the pommel of his saddle and pointing unwaveringly in our direction.
The routiers around the monk were confused; some glanced over at Mercadier for orders, others glared at me for interrupting their sport. They still grasped the monk by his legs, shoulders and arms, but the man was no longer struggling nor, thank God, screaming. I saw his face for the first time: he was old, perhaps sixty, very gaunt, twig- thin, with watery blue eyes and only wisps of white hair on the papery skin of his scalp.
‘Put him down,’ I said again, this time louder and with a little more iron in the tone. ‘Put him down, gently!’
‘Why don’t you fuck off, Sir Knight, and find your own church mouse to play with,’ said a squat red-bearded man who was holding one of the monk’s twig-thin arms. ‘This one is ours!’
Without pausing even for an instant to think of the consequences of my actions, I swayed my shoulders and powered my head down and across in a short hard arc, smashing my forehead with massive force into the bridge of his nose. The redhead staggered back and fell to one knee, blood spurting from his flattened nose. He should have counted himself lucky that it had been too hot that day for me to wear my steel helm. The rest of the men holding the monk dropped their load as if it was a bar of red-hot iron, stepped back and began fumbling for their weapons. My hand went to my sword hilt and I half-drew the blade.
‘Leave him be,’ said a cold, dead voice with a slight Gascon accent, and every man around that fire froze. I ignored the men and their half-pulled weapons and reached down and tried to help the monk to his feet, but halfway through my action I realized that he would not be able to stand, so I picked him up bodily and slung him over my shoulder. He weighed no more than a ten-year-old.
I straightened up and looked round the circle of statue-like routiers, a hard challenge in my stare. And I caught Mercadier’s eye as I began to move away, the monk balanced on my left shoulder, heading back towards Ghost. He was smiling sardonically down at me from his horse. A blur of movement to my right: the redhead I had knocked down was on his feet, an axe in his hand, and he was coming for me. My sword hilt was entangled in the priest’s skinny legs. My heart banged once. The world slowed. I saw the red man, bloodied face snarling, draw back his axe to chop at my undefended head — then there was a twang, a thump and he was swept backwards, off his feet. And I found myself looking down at his writhing body, a black quarrel jutting from the centre of his chest.
Turning my head I saw that Hanno had already slung the crossbow from his saddle and drawn his sword. I moved quickly back towards Ghost, heaved the monk on to the grey’s haunches behind the high wooden saddle, and climbed into the seat as swiftly as I could. The men on the far side of the fire were still frozen, watching me, and making the air heavy with their silent hatred.
Then Mercadier spoke: ‘You have saved one worthless old monk, and killed one of my prime men-at-arms.’ His voice had no emotion in it whatsoever — neither sorrow at his man’s death nor anger at my interference in his actions. ‘I do not think it is a fair exchange.’
‘It is not,’ I said. I was angry then, and I let it show. I jerked my left thumb behind me. ‘This is a man of God, a decent fellow who does no harm but merely prays for all our souls; your man was a cowardly brute, of no more worth than a wild animal. It is certainly not a fair exchange, it is a great bargain for mankind.’
Mercadier said nothing, just stared at me with his cold, brown eyes. I shrugged and, having nothing else to say on the matter myself, nodded to Hanno and turned Ghost around and trotted down the gentle slope to rejoin Thomas and the road north.
The monk’s name was Dominic and he was a deeply pious individual, I soon discovered, even for a man of the cloth. When I tried to question him as to which religious order he belonged to, he mumbled something about the Holy Trinity. I couldn’t make out whether he was praying or trying to tell me something. The poor man’s feet were both very badly burnt, indeed, he was almost out of his mind with pain, and I half-expected him to die as we bounced down the rough track away from that quiet valley and Mercadier’s wolfish men. I had no wish to add to his pains by trying to force information out of him while he was so grievously injured.
When we arrived at the King’s column an hour later, I left him in the charge of some of the half-fit Locksley men who were responsible for our baggage train, spare horses and personal possessions. A strange wise woman named Elise, who had followed Robin from Normandy to the Holy Land and now back to France, undertook to treat his wounds and make sure that he was comfortably ensconced on a baggage wagon as the column trundled along.
Having rescued him, I did not know what to do with Dominic. His shrine had been burnt to ruins shortly after I had ridden away from that valley. I saw the still-smoking charred remains as I rode past it again the next day, delivering yet another message between the King and the Earl of Locksley, and presumed that Mercadier’s men had done it as some sort of revenge for the loss of their red-headed routier. I would not have cared, were it not for the fact that I now had an aged monk on my hands, one who could not walk and had no way of fending for himself. I did not know which high churchman, which prior or abbot, was his lord, nor which monastery he belonged to, and had not had time to visit him and ask him. For the moment, I thought, he could stay under Elise’s care and if necessary, we could find a position for him somewhere in the army; as a chaplain’s assistant, perhaps.
I shoved that thought aside. We were approaching Tours: Robin’s men had been given the task of reconnoitring the city and preparing it for a visit from their rightful liege lord, King Richard. The townsmen must now be very worried, Robin confided in me, as they had been a leaf’s thickness away, on several occasions, from siding with King Philip. The flirting between the merchants of the town and the envoys from Paris had been as falsely coy as the relations between a willing milkmaid and a lusty plough boy, the way Robin explained it.
In truth, Tours was not one town, but two. To the east was the older settlement, containing the castle of Tours, the cathedral and the archbishop’s palace — this was on the north bank of the River Cher, a tributary of the Loire. On the Loire river itself, to the west, further north and clustered around the Abbey of St Martin, was the new town of Tours, known as Chateauneuf. Made wealthy by the lucrative trade down the Loire to the sea, Chateauneuf was walled, neat, opulent and filled with tall timber-framed houses. It was a distinct settlement. The two towns of Tours were separated by fields of green wheat and neatly ordered vineyards. Having crossed the Loire by an impressive stone bridge, it was here that Robin and his men made their camp, directly between the two halves of the city, in a position to threaten either one with siege or assault.
‘The townsfolk are wonderfully nervous, Alan, I can smell it,’ said Robin, after he had summoned me to his newly pitched green woollen tent in the middle of a flattened wheat field. Robin rarely used the tent on campaign, preferring whenever possible to sleep under the night sky, but it was an impressive rig, embroidered with scarlet and gold thread at the seams and constructed of thick, soft woollen cloth of the finest quality. Robin himself was dressed in his grandest clothes — black silk hose embroidered with gold, ending in elegant kidskin slippers and an emerald silk calf-length tunic over the top. His head bore a fine black hat with a jaunty peacock’s feather on the side; a golden chain adorned his neck and his fingers displayed half a dozen rings of silver and gold, studded with
