and his men broke into a heavy run and charged, heedless to all danger, across the open ground before the castle, sweeping Mercadier’s men out of their path, bounding up the gore-greased stairway and into the steel fence of the breach.
William and his knights smashed into the line of defenders and I could hear the crunch of wood, the squeal of metal and clash of blades as the two lines collided. The enemy line sagged, pushed back by the force of fresh men pressing against it; and I saw Mercadier, limping a little, shouting at his men from below the walls, urging them to add their weight to this fresh attack. Sword drawn, he joined his raggedy warriors scrambling up behind the Marshal’s fresh troops. I saw William himself, taller than other men, on the very lip of the breach, laying about him with a long sword, and dropping enemies with every stroke. And beside him his superbly trained household knights, their mail gleaming silver in the sunlight, hacked and carved their way forward, inch by bloody inch.
The resistance began to melt, the Marshal and his men were pushing forward, the defenders’ line was buckling backwards; there was a tremendous howl and a surge forward by Mercadier’s men as they pitched in behind the Marshal’s knights, adding their fury to the melee, and suddenly they were all through the breach, like a great dam bursting, our men flooding forward, washing the enemy from my sight.
The slaughter after the taking of Loches was appalling. William the Marshal’s men and Mercadier’s rogues — those who had survived the horror in the breach — killed every living soul they could find inside the castle. The castellan and his wife and baby daughter, and a pair of priests, managed to surrender to the Marshal himself when he and his closest knights had fought their bloody way to the top of the tower — and they were the lucky ones. Everyone else inside the walls of Loches perished. Mercadier’s men, who had shown immense bravery in attacking that hellish gap, showed the other side of the routiers ’ reputation when they had broken through the outer wall, and overcome the slight resistance of a few young squires in the smashed north-western corner of the keep. They sank to the level of beasts: a group of routiers discovered the cellars and they drank deeply of the rich yellow wine of the region, and this fuelled their depravity in the captured stronghold. Men, whether armed for war or not, servants, priests, monks — were all put to the sword. Women, old and young, were raped by long queues of routiers, who shouted jests and drained tankards of wine while they waited their turn to defile some unfortunate belledame, whose only crime was to have been married to a French garrison knight.
Loches was ours by mid-afternoon — it had only taken King Richard a matter of hours to reduce this formidable stronghold — but the looting, raping and murders continued until long after midnight.
At dawn the next day, King Richard set about restoring order. He had a gibbet set up in the bailey of the castle and hanged three of Mercadier’s men that his household knights caught in the act of raping an old woman. And the message to all the troops was clear: that devilish playtime was over; the King’s army was being called to heel.
As ever, the sight of the hanged men put me in mind of my father’s death. And I gave thanks to God that Robin’s men had not been called upon to perform the executions. But an execution of a wholly different sort had taken place, which I only discovered when I returned to my tent later that evening accompanied by Thomas and Hanno.
Under a large blanket at the back of the tent, where he had been resting, and keeping the weight off his burnt feet, I found the skinny, blood-sodden corpse of Dominic.
His throat had been cut from ear to ear.
Chapter Eight
With Loches subdued, King Richard left a small garrison to repair the walls and drove south with the army into Aquitaine. After hearing of the bloody fate of Loches, castles now held by the foe in my lord’s vast southern dukedom opened their gates to us and threw themselves on Richard’s mercy: and, as ever, it delighted the King to be magnanimous in victory. The forces of Geoffrey of Rancon, Richard’s enemy in the south, and Philip’s ally, dissolved before us; some surrendered, were forgiven and renewed their allegiance to our King, others fled east into Burgundy. None could stand in the face of Richard’s righteous wrath — and the might of his castle-breakers.
We had buried Dominic in the monastery churchyard inside the walls of Loches before we left that sad citadel, and the old man lay next to some hundred or so of the French garrison who had died so bravely in its defence. As Hanno shovelled the earth over his shrouded body, and one of Richard’s priests mumbled prayers for his soul, I could feel a deep rage rising in my stomach. I felt almost certain that I knew who was responsible for the death of this good man — Mercadier. He could not have accomplished the deed himself, of course; we had all seen him heroically storming the breach with his men, and then less than heroically sacking and looting the castle. But I was sure that one of his routiers, one of his cut-throats who had not taken part in the assault, had done the deed to strike back at me for killing his red-headed man-at-arms.
There was nothing I could do. Nobody could remember seeing one of Mercadier’s men entering my tent while we were watching the battle. But then, encamped shoulder to shoulder with at least two thousand other souls in a vast township of woollen tents and roughly built shelters, and living on top of each other as we were, there was a constant stream of people — soldiers, squires, farriers, whores, pedlars — walking past my tent day and night, and nobody would notice one murderous routier among that throng.
I told Robin and he was characteristically uninterested.
‘That will teach you to annoy Mercadier,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘You should count yourself lucky that he didn’t decide to cut your throat at the same time.’
But despite his apparent callousness, I heard later from Little John that the Earl of Locksley had been to see Mercadier privately, taking John with him, and had told the mercenary captain quite bluntly that if any harm at all were to come to his friend Sir Alan of Westbury, he, Robin, would take it as an act of provocation and there would be very serious, painful and fatal consequences for Mercadier.
‘Give the black-souled bastard his due, he didn’t turn a hair when Robin threatened him,’ Little John told me. ‘And Robin can be very unsettling when he chooses to be. The man just smiled, cool as a trout, and said: “I hear you, my lord — young Westbury is your man, and is under your protection.” And he flatly denied having anything to do with the old priest’s murder.’
I was touched that Robin should take my side, but a little irritated too. Did he think I could not take care of myself? And, in our tent, I noticed that Hanno and Thomas also took turns to stay alert all through the next few nights — Robin was not the only one who seemed to believe that I needed protection.
Then word reached us that the King of France, Philip Augustus himself, was heading down towards us with an enormous army to confront Richard and to try and salvage something, after the fall of Loches, from the collapse of all his carefully wrought schemes in the south.
So we turned back north to meet him and, by the beginning of July, Richard and his entire force of knights, footmen, mercenaries and mighty castle-breakers, were camped outside the gates of Vendome — and I must confess that I was well pleased. I felt that finally I might have the chance to arrange an audience with His Grace Cardinal Heribert of the Holy Trinity Abbey to ask about my father, the theft and his fateful visit to Paris two decades ago.
The city of Vendome was held against us by a small and presumably rather nervous French garrison — like Loches, it had been handed over to Philip by Prince John while Richard was imprisoned the year before — but the garrison was attempting to hunt with the hounds and run with the hart, and it was in almost constant communication with Richard’s heralds, sending costly gifts to Richard, and dispatching embassies from the various city guilds and religious institutions. The feeling in our camp was that, if we were to beat the French in the coming battle, Vendome would happily surrender to King Richard without a fight and accept his magnanimous forgiveness. If we were to be beaten by Philip — and I could not for a moment imagine that we would be — then Vendome would remain in French hands, and would no doubt welcome Philip with flower-strewing maidens and sung hosannas. It was a truly practical, unsentimental arrangement — Richard did not have to waste lives and materiel capturing Vendome, which would fall into his arms like a swooning virgin if he managed to see off the French King. This unspoken agreement also meant that there was a large amount of daily traffic between Richard’s camp and the great men of Vendome, negotiations of all kinds were taking place, knights inside the walls were looking for future favours from the King, merchants were making discreet deals with the army’s quartermasters to supply them with food and equipment that was badly needed. And I had decided to take advantage of this unofficial accord to go
