‘man you cannot refuse’ — could be, nor how I might discover his identity and, almost as important to me, to find out why he had reached out his long arm to extinguish my father’s existence. So, although I was in France on behalf of Robin, commanding his troops, I had chosen to be here because it brought me closer to the place of my father’s birth, and perhaps closer to solving the riddle of his death.
For the moment I pushed these thoughts of vengeance and powerful, shadowy enemies away, to concentrate on the task at hand. A scout rode up on a sweat-lathered horse and reported that the enemy lines were no more than three miles away. The sun was sinking low in the sky and we made our camp, quiet and fireless in a small copse in a fold of a shallow valley. Sentries set, and gnawing on a stick of dried mutton, I conferred with Hanno, Owain and the returned scouts.
‘The castle of Verneuil still defies Philip,’ began Hanno. ‘I see Richard’s lions flying above the tower.’
I nodded and swallowed a lump of roughly chewed mutton with difficulty. I found that my mouth was dry. ‘Earthworks?’ I said. ‘Siege engines?’
‘They dig earthworks, yes,’ said Hanno, scratching at his round shaven head. ‘But one, two trenches and a little wall to protect the diggers; they are not very far along. But I see four big siege engines, three trebuchets, I think, and a mangonel; also small stuff, balistes and onagers. The walls have taken some hurt, and the tower, too, but they are holding.’ Hanno paused and frowned. ‘But the siege does not feel very… lively, very quick. The Frenchmen are not working so hard, just waiting for the castle to fall. There is no discipline, no proper order. The men are taking their ease around their fires — drinking, gambling, sleeping. I do not think it will be difficult for us to break through.’
‘How many are they?’ I asked the Bavarian warrior.
‘King Philip is there; his fleur-de-lys flies over a big gold tent to the east of the castle. And many of his barons are with him, too, I think. So, perhaps two thousand knights and men-at-arms; crossbowmen, too — yes, two thousand men in all, maybe more.’
I blinked at him. ‘Two thousand?’
‘I think so,’ said Hanno. ‘But they will never expect us. We can get into the castle without much difficulty, if they will open the gate to us. After that…’ He shrugged.
I had been told that the besieged garrison of Verneuil numbered just over a hundred men, and I looked at my own little command, my puny war-band, wrapping themselves in their thick green cloaks and bedding down for the night around me, and thought to myself — ten to one. Not good. But I said nothing, trying to appear as if I had absolute confidence in the success of our mission.
‘Then we’d better kill as many Frenchmen as possible on the way in,’ I said, achieving a shaky nonchalance. ‘I think we will play this one straight as an arrow; we’ll go in early tomorrow morning, kill the picquets, ride hard, cut through the enemy lines and proceed directly up to the castle’s front gate. Hard and fast. Understood?’
There were murmurs of agreement.
‘Fine. Now, let’s sleep. But might I have a word with you, Owain? I need your bow to get a message into the castle. I need to make damn sure they open the gates to us.’
The French sentry was alert: from his position on a small rise perhaps half a mile outside Verneuil he saw our column approaching slowly from the south-west. Though he had been reclining on the grassy ridge, taking his ease, he leapt to his feet the moment he spotted us emerging from a small wood a mile away and shouted something inaudible over his shoulder. As we walked our horses up the slight slope, affecting the tired boredom of men at the end of a long and uneventful journey, two horsemen in bright mail, with gaudy pennants on their lances, cantered down the slope to meet us.
With Hanno at my side, I spurred forward to greet the two knights, leaving the column behind me with strict instructions to continue their pose as exhausted travellers until I gave the signal. When we were twenty yards from the two strangers, the foremost one called loudly, angrily in French for us to halt. And Hanno and I reined in and sat obediently staring at the two heavily armed men.
‘Who are you?’ shouted the first knight in French. ‘What is your name and what business have you here?’
‘I am the Chevalier Henri d’Alle,’ I said in the same language. For some reason the only false name I could think of was my father’s; but then he had been much on my mind of late. ‘I serve Geoffrey, Count of the Perche,’ I continued, ‘and my men and I are riding to join my master’s liege lord, King Philip of France, at Verneuil.’
My answer seemed to calm the knight. He glanced at my boar-shield and nodded to himself; it was common knowledge that Count Geoffrey had revoked his proper allegiance to King Richard and come over to King Philip’s side. It was also known that, despite pleas from King Philip for him to join the fight in Normandy, Geoffrey had refused his blandishments and had stubbornly remained in his fortress of Chateaudun fifty miles to the south of Verneuil. It was a plausible enough story, although it would not bear too close a questioning. The knight nodded and beckoned us to approach. ‘We will escort you to the King,’ he said in a more friendly tone.
Signalling to the company to come forward, I walked my horse over to the two knights. The four of us began to climb the gentle slope up to the ridgeline together. The knight beside me, who had politely introduced himself as Raymond de St Genevieve, started to question me about recent events in the Perche, which I answered only in monosyllabic grunts — I knew almost nothing of the county bar that it was famous for its horses and reputed to be full of hills and valleys and dark haunted forests. As we reached the top of the rise, the knight was frowning at my surly answers to his friendly questions and beginning to look at me curiously. I changed the subject.
‘What news of the King of England?’ I asked my companion. ‘Will he attack here?’
‘Oh, he is still in Barfleur, we are told, marshalling his forces. His rabble of an army, many of them no more than filthy paid men, routiers and the like, is far away…’ said St Genevieve with a dismissive roll of his shoulders.
I could hear the company coming up on to the ridge behind me, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Hanno fiddling with something out of sight, apparently a loose strap on the far side of his saddle. My own right hand went to the belt at my waist. Before me, spread out in a wide semicircle, was the encampment of the soldiers of King Philip — all two thousand of them — a great swathe of drab blue tents and brightly coloured pavilions and browny-green brushwood and turf shacks, a spill of campfires, a smear of grey smoke, the mounds of fresh earth from the siege workings, neat lines of tethered horses, stacks of fodder, weapons, shields and spears, and piles of baggage. Beyond the army, I could see the fortress of Verneuil, a grey, stone-walled block crouched on the north bank of the River Avre, with four square towers, one at each corner, and a large wooden gate in the centre of the front wall. A gaudy red-and-gold flag fluttered from a squat stone keep in the middle of the castle, and I knew that Hanno had spoken true: the little garrison was still bravely defying the King of France and all his legions.
‘What was that you said?’ I cupped my left hand to my ear and leaned forward from the back of Shaitan towards the knight. ‘What did you say just then about the English?’
The knight looked perplexed. He leaned towards me in the saddle and enunciated loudly and clearly as if I were an imbecile. ‘I said: King Richard is in Barfleur — those cowardly English rascals are still many leagues away.’
‘Let me tell you a secret,’ I said quietly, leaning even further towards him and placing my left hand in a companionable fashion on his right shoulder. Obligingly, he bent his head to me until it was only inches from mine.
‘They are not.’ And I swung my right hand up, hard, and slammed the point of my misericorde, my long killing dagger, through the soft skin under his chin and on, up through the root of his tongue and the roof of his mouth and deep into his skull. His whole body jerked wildly upwards with the force of my sudden blow, but I kept him firmly in the saddle with my left hand on his shoulder. His eyes, massive with shock and pain, stared into mine as he took leave of his life. He coughed once, expelling a great scarlet gobbet of blood, and his hands scrabbled briefly at my right fist on the handle of the long blade still embedded under his chin, then he very slowly slid over backwards out of the saddle and away from me, hitting the earth like a loose sack of turnips, his tumbling fall tearing my dagger free from his throat.
‘Perfect,’ said Hanno, grinning at me savagely from his saddle and displaying his awful rotting teeth. He wrenched his own small hand axe from where it was embedded in the top of the second knight’s spine and callously kicked the unstrung, speechless, dying man out of the saddle. ‘A perfect kill, Alan!’ Hanno it seemed was very pleased with my performance. ‘A soldier should be very happy to die from such a perfect strike. I teach you well.’
Neither of our victims had made more than a moan of complaint before we sent them to God. My mounted
