shrugged and released my hilt. ‘Guard him closely,’ I said, moving out of the way of Mercadier’s men, who went forward swiftly to seize the Master. ‘I shall certainly want him back from you when you are done with him.’
I expected Robin to be angry with me for allowing the mercenary to steal our prisoner but he merely smiled and said: ‘Persuasion is an ugly business, and that scarred brute is more practised at it than I am; better that he should do it.’
But it galled me to have had to surrender the Master to my enemy, and I said as much. ‘There was nothing you could have done,’ said Robin. ‘Mercadier had a warrant from the King to seize him; he would have killed you had you resisted him. Besides, all is not lost. When Mercadier is finished, we will reclaim him; and perhaps the Grail, too.’
The King died the next day. Quietly, holding his mother’s hand, having made his last confession, the Lionheart took his leave of this earthly life. The first I heard of it was a deep hollow baying, like a pack of hounds at feeding time, the cries of many hundreds of grief-stricken men, and word spread throughout the camp in a ripple of sorrow growing louder and louder. Knights wailed and tore their hair; I saw grizzled men-at-arms who would cheerfully murder a child or loot a church weeping like girls. And quietly, almost imperceptibly, that very same day the royal army began to melt away.
I drank a cup of wine in the Marshal’s tent that evening, with Robin, some of the Marshal’s knights, and Sir Nicholas de Scras. I was stunned, unable quite to compass what had happened — the King was truly dead and yet the world still existed. I would never see his face again, nor joke with him, nor sing for him, nor ride into battle at his side, and feel the exhilaration of his reckless enthusiasm for war. It seemed unreal, and yet I saw everything with an unusual clarity. The Earl of Striguil’s lined face had aged another ten years that day: he looked like an old, old man, his hair now entirely grey, black pouches of tiredness below his eyes. For a long while in that gloom-filled tent, nobody spoke.
Then Robin spoke for us all: ‘Well then, what now?’
‘Now,’ said the Marshal, lifting his heavy head, ‘now, we all have a choice. We do homage to Arthur, Duke of Brittany, Richard’s little nephew…’
‘That brat? He is but twelve years old,’ protested one of the knights. ‘The English barons will never follow him.’
‘I said we had a choice,’ the Marshal rumbled. ‘We may swear allegiance to Arthur of Brittany… or to Prince John. Richard named him as his heir, almost with his last breath — and Queen Eleanor witnessed it and approves. He is her son, too, after all.’
There was a long, long silence.
‘So it is John,’ said Robin with a deep sigh.
‘I fear it must be John,’ replied the Marshal.
At some point during the pale orgy of grief and uncertainty that followed King Richard’s death, the Master talked one of his captors into releasing his bonds, and he slipped away from the camp unseen. Mercadier’s men cared little about their prisoner’s escape — he was but a monk, after all, not a magnate who might provide a rich ransom. And each individual routier was busy considering what he might do, now that the army was disintegrating and the prospects of payment had died with the King. Some rode out of the camp and immediately took up the wild life of bandits, squeezing the last few drops of nourishment from a ravaged landscape; others gathered their weapons, women and loot, formed disciplined bands and marched north to seek employment in Flanders or the German lands. Mercadier himself, black-faced with an icy rage, located the red-headed crossbowman who had loosed the deadly quarrel against the King and had him publicly flayed alive, although the wretched man insisted, screaming, that he had had an audience with the King before he died and had been granted a full pardon for his crime.
In all this confusion, the Master disappeared. And by the time the thought had pierced through the bitter fog of my grief, and it occurred to me that I should attempt to reclaim him, as Robin had put it, he was long gone.
Oddly, I did not rage and curse at Mercadier, or myself, after his disappearance: he was bound for Hell, I knew, and God would punish him in due course, or so I earnestly hoped. With Richard gone, I found it difficult to care for anything, anything at all; all strength seemed to have seeped from my limbs; I could barely stir myself to eat, drink and empty my bowels.
Eventually, after days of sorrowful idleness, I pulled myself together, slowly gathered up the Westbury men, as Robin gathered up his Locksley folk, and we packed our traps and folded our tents, and mustered on horseback in the dawn. Then, dolefully, we took the road north; north towards England, home and family. North to Goody.
I married my beloved — Godifa, daughter of Thangbrand — at the door of the little church in Westbury on the first day of July in the year of Our Lord Eleven Hundred and Ninety-Nine. Robin gave her away to me, while Marie- Anne, Countess of Locksley, and her women looked on and wept for joy. There would be no rich dowry from the King — that generous offer had died with him — but Robin provided Goody with a half-dozen lumpy linen bags, each displaying a bright red Templar cross. And we celebrated the marriage with a solemn Mass inside the village church afterwards, conducted not by Arnold the local priest but by Marie-Anne’s chaplain and our old friend Father Tuck, and with a feast the like of which Westbury had never seen.
After the meal, Little John and Thomas stripped to the waist, greased their torsos with goose fat and took on all comers in a roped-off wrestling enclosure. And after having defeated a dozen local men, and encouraged by a great deal of mead, they fought each other in a friendly bout that Little John narrowly won, and only then because he lost his temper and dislocated Thomas’s right shoulder. Bernard de Sezanne, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine’s famous trouvere and my erstwhile music master, arrived and sang and laughed and sang again, and then became so drunk that he had to be carried to bed; William the Marshal and a dozen of his knights attended also, including my friend Sir Nicholas de Scras, and they consented to give a display of skill at arms that had the villagers of Westbury gasping with awe. And, afterwards, fired with martial ardour, half a dozen of the local lads came to me and asked if they might have the honour of serving me as men-at-arms.
It was a happy, happy day. And when I took Goody’s hand in the porch of the church, and Tuck blessed us and wrapped a band of silk around our joining, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that, not only did I love her with my whole heart, my body and my soul, but that I would love her for the rest of my days. And so I have.
And later, breathless in the warm dark of the great bed in my chamber, after we had made love for the first time, and I was still tingling at the touch of her lips and breasts and warm loins, and wondering at the magic in her being, I knew that God had smiled on me, and I was truly blessed.
And as I drifted into sleep, I heard a tap-tapping of a thin branch against the wooden window shutter, and drowsing, sinking into delightful sleep, I heard that insistent but light rattling form a rhythm, a dry whispering beat that my sleepy mind only dimly recognized: one-two, one-two, one-two-three, one-two.
Epilogue
My hands ache from scribbling these words, and it seems to me that this must be a good place to end this tale of my young self, and Robin, and my beloved sovereign the lionhearted Richard, and finally to lay down my quill. Writing of the King’s death has brought back all the sorrow of that time in a bitter flood. I truly loved him, my King, my hero, and when I think on his death, I feel the prick of hot tears once more in my old, dry eyes. I sometimes wonder what Richard might have achieved if he had deigned to sport his shield that black day outside Chateau Chalus-Chabrol. Would he have finally taken Gisors and driven the French King from Normandy? Would he have begat sons to rule after he was dead and denied the throne to his brother John? We shall never know. But I comfort myself with the thought that, like Hanno, King Richard shall never grow old and tired and frail, as I have — and that, like Hanno, he died a warrior’s death, with brave words on his lips and defiance in his heart. I think that perhaps only a fighting man can understand that satisfaction. Hanno and Richard lived and died as men — and their memory will ever be honoured among those warriors who shared their perils.
I have shown these pages to my grandson Alan and he told me after supper one day that he liked them very much. But he was also a little confused and full of questions: ‘What of your vengeance, Grandpa?’ he asked, wrinkling his young brow. ‘Did you not have your revenge on the Master as you did on Sir Eustace de la Falaise?’
‘I did,’ I replied, ‘but not at this time.’
