than King Richard himself — I was now entitled to bear, and which I had formally registered with the heralds. A conical steel cap with a heavy nose-guard and a long ash lance with a leaf-shaped blade completed my panoply.
We had sailed from Portsmouth in the middle of May, after a delay of several days due to bad weather, and landed at Barfleur to tremendous celebration from the Norman folk, overjoyed at the return of their rightful Duke. On that fine spring day, a week later, trotting south-east out of Lisieux on my tar-black stallion Shaitan, I felt the familiar lapping of excitement in my belly — I would soon be going into battle for the first time on Norman soil and taking my sword to the enemy. The King had charged me with reinforcing the garrison of the castle of Verneuil- sur-Avre, forty miles to the south-east, which was now besieged by King Philip. In truth, I had volunteered for the task: I had a very good reason for wanting to preserve one of the occupants of Verneuil from the wrath of our King’s enemies. The plan was to use surprise and speed to break through the French king’s lines to the north of the fortress. Once inside, we were ordered to bring hope and good cheer to the besieged, stiffen their defence, and to reassure them that Richard and his whole army of some three thousand men were only a matter of days behind us.
Apart from my private reasons for wanting to succeed in this task, I was very conscious of the fact that, as captain of the Locksley contingent, I was representing Robin. While I knew that King Richard had confidence in me as a soldier, I wanted to do well in this task for Robin, my liege lord, and for all the men of the Locksley lands. But I was more than a little concerned about being able to fulfil Richard’s instructions. He had spoken breezily of our galloping through King Philip’s battle lines, as if they were merely a cobweb to be brushed aside. I didn’t think it would be so easy. So, when we stopped at noon to rest the horses and snatch a bite to eat, I detailed Hanno and two mounted archers to ride several miles forward as scouts and bring back a report on the French dispositions.
As we approached the vicinity of Verneuil the mood in the column changed significantly. I put out more scouts to the east and south and we all rode in our full armour, with lances at the ready, swords loose in their scabbards and our eyes constantly searching the copses, woods and hedgerows for signs of horsemen. The flat land we rode through that afternoon, once so rich and well cultivated, now bore the harsh imprint of war. King Philip’s Frenchmen had been ravaging the farms and villages hereabouts with all the usual savagery of soldiers let loose to plunder and burn at will. It was a common tactic that allowed the occupying army to provision itself at no cost to its commanders and at the same time destroyed enemy lands and deprived the local lord of the bounty of his wheat and barley fields, his root crops, animals and orchards.
We rode through a battered, scorched landscape, the crops burnt down to charred stubble, the hamlets black and reeking, the bodies of slaughtered peasants — men, women and even children — lying unburied at the roadside, with the crows pecking greedily at their singed corpses. We did not stop to bury the dead like Christians, not wishing to delay our advance, though we could all feel the presence of unquiet spirits as we rode more or less in silence through those cinder-dusted, desecrated lands.
I was, however, sorely tempted to have the men stop and dig a decent grave for a young fair-haired peasant that we passed hanging by his neck from a walnut tree. There was something horribly familiar about the canted angle of his neck and the awful vulnerability of his dangling bare feet. I realized as I rode past that gently swaying corpse that it put me in mind of my father’s death, ten years before, in the little hamlet just outside Nottingham where I was born. My father Henry, my mother Ellen and my two younger sisters Aelfgifu and Coelwyn and I all scratched a living from a few strips of land in the fields on the edge of the village. Despite long days of hard labour, we were barely able to feed ourselves; but there had been an abundance of laughter and happiness in our small cottage, and much music and singing. My father had a wonderful voice, slow-rolling and sweet like a river of honey, and my fondest memories of that simple household were of my mother and father singing together, their voices intertwining, their melody lines looping and folding over each other in the smoky air of the low, one-room cottage like gold and silver threads in a fine castle tapestry. My father was the one who taught me to sing — and it was thanks to that skill that I first came to the attention of my master Robin Hood. Six years later, I was his personal trouvere — a ‘finder’ or composer of songs — and also his trusted lieutenant. In a way, I owed my extraordinary advancement from dirt-poor labourer to lord of war to my father’s love of music.
He had been a strange man, my father. I had been told that he was the second son of an obscure French knight, the Seigneur d’Alle and, as such, he had been destined for the Church. He had duly become a monk, a singer at the great cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. But somehow he had been disgraced and forced to flee to England. Robin, who had known him then, had told me that some valuable objects had gone missing from the cathedral and my father had been accused of their theft — accusations that my father had strenuously denied. Nevertheless, he had been cast out of the Church and had had to make a living with his voice. As a masterless trouvere, he had travelled to England and wandered the country singing for his supper and a place to lay his head at the castles across the land, but tidings of his expulsion from Paris ran ahead of him and he could find no secure position; no lord was willing to take a thief into his household. Eventually, during his long wanderings he met my mother, Ellen — a lovely woman in her youth — and married her and submitted to the dull but stable life of a common man working the land. I remember him cheerfully saying to me once, when I was no more than five or six years old: ‘None of us knows what God has in store for him, Alan; we may not have fine-milled bread on the board or fur- trimmed silk on our backs, but we can wrap ourselves in love, and we can always fill our mouths with song.’
My family was a contented one, happy even; I might well have inherited the strips of land my father worked and been trudging behind a pair of plough oxen on them to this day, had it not been for my father’s untimely death. Before dawn one morning, as we slept — my mother, father, myself and my two sisters, all snugged up together on the big straw-stuffed mattress in our tiny hovel — half a dozen armed men burst through the door and dragged my father outside. There was no pretence of a trial; the sergeant in charge of the squad of men-at-arms merely announced that the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire had declared that my father was a thief and an outlaw. Then his men wrestled a rope around my father’s neck and summarily hanged him from the nearest oak tree.
I watched them do it, at the raw age of nine; restrained by a burly man-at-arms and trying not to cry as my father kicked and soiled himself and choked out his life before my terrified eyes. Perhaps I am weak, but I’ve never been able to watch a hanging since — even when the punishment is well deserved — without a sense of horror.
That act of unexpected violence destroyed our family. My mother lost the land that my father had ploughed and, to stave off destitution, she was forced to gather firewood each day and barter it to her neighbours for food or sell it to any that would buy; and few would. Why hand over a precious silver penny for sticks of timber when there was plenty of kindling to be had for free in the woodlands not three miles away? We slowly began to starve: my two sisters died of the bloody flux two years after my father’s death, a lack of nourishment making them too feeble to fight off the sickness when it struck. Faced with a stark choice, I became a thief; cutting the leather straps that secured the purses of rich men to their belts and making away with their money into the thick crowds of Nottingham market. I like to think that I was a good at it — I have always been lucky, all my long life. But, of course, one cannot rely on luck alone. I was thirteen when I was caught in the act of stealing a beef pie; the Sheriff would surely have lopped off my right hand if I hadn’t managed to escape. That was when I went to join Robin Hood’s band of men in the trackless depths of Sherwood Forest.
I never forgot that it was the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire — a black-hearted bastard named Sir Ralph Murdac — who had sent his men to hang my father. Even as a child I swore to be revenged on him. Years passed and I learned to fight like gentlefolk, a-horse with sword and lance, and joined King Richard on the Great Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. At the siege of Nottingham, on our return, I had the good fortune to capture the same Ralph Murdac, who was defying the King, and deliver him bound hand and foot to my royal master. I had meant to kill him, to cut his head off in the name of my father — and I would have done so gladly, but for one thing. As he knelt before me, bound, helpless, his neck stretched for my sword, he told me that if I killed him I would never discover the name of the man who was truly responsible for my father’s death. In the face of Death, Murdac claimed that he had been acting on the instructions of a very powerful man, a ‘man you cannot refuse’. If I spared him, he said, he would reveal the man’s name.
And so I spared him. But, as God willed it, he never told me the name of the man who had ordered Henry d’Alle to be destroyed. King Richard had hanged Murdac the next day, as a warning to the rebellious defenders of Nottingham Castle, before I could thoroughly question him.
I felt the weight of my father’s death — and the need to find the man who had ordered it — like a lead cope around my shoulders. But I was a blindfolded man groping in the dark: I had no idea who this powerful man — this
