whole roasted pig, but he seemed distracted and uneasy and he left after a short while without getting drunk. We carried on carousing without him. Then, early one morning, at the beginning of January, I was wrenched out of my vinous slumber by Goody, who was vigorously shaking my shoulder. I stared blearily at her. It was not long after dawn, far too early to be up and about after the revels of the night before. Then I noticed that she was whey- faced and crying, the tears rolling down her grubby cheeks cutting pallid channels in the grime.
‘Those horsemen, those men, they are killing everyone. . it’s horrible, horrible. And the hall is burning,’ she was babbling and pulling wildly at my clothes. ‘All of them: Mother, Father, Hugh. . everybody. . they’re burning. .’ She burst into a frenzy of sobbing and instinctively I opened my arms and the child fell into them. Then she pushed herself away, drummed her fists on my chest and shouted: ‘Come
With growing dread and cold-swollen fingers, I buckled on my belt, with the poniard and waist pouch attached, and tugged on my boots. My sword, I remembered, was in the hall. I could hear Bernard snoring like a trumpet in his chamber and decided that to wake him before I knew what was going on would be a waste of time. So out we went into the cold morning. Goody led the way, down the familiar path through the snow to Thangbrand’s, tugging my hand to make me hurry. I was reluctant; I could sense that I was walking into catastrophe. The smell of smoke was growing stronger and I could hear faint indistinguishable cries in the morning air.
‘Come on! Come on!’ pleaded Goody, trying to pull me bodily towards the settlement. I could see a thick cloud of smoke hanging over the place where the hall was. Then I stopped and crouched down to Goody’s height. I looked into her wide, frightened blue eyes: ‘I want you to stay very close to me and, whatever happens, to keep very, very quiet.’ She nodded dumbly. ‘We have to get off the path,’ I said and, with Goody following, we waded into the snow at right angles to the path and into the welcoming shadow of the treeline. It took nearly half of an hour to circle around the settlement, with the snow sometimes up to our knees, so that we could approach from the south, via the main track. Then, hiding in the trees, with Goody held tightly under one arm, and the snow falling gently, we looked through the main gate, which had been ripped from its great hinges, and gazed upon a scene from a nightmare.
The courtyard was strewn with bodies, lying in strange poses, arms and legs out-flung, scattered like dolls that a child has discarded. But they were not dolls: even from the treeline, a hundred paces away I could see the gaping wounds, red spattered tunics and hose, great swathes of bloody slush across the battle practice ground where we had all so often moved mechanically to Thangbrand’s commands. Mailed horsemen now picked their way among the mangled dead. These men wore the colours of Sir Ralph Murdac — black and red — their swords and spear tips dyed in gore, a strange colour-echo of the sheriff’s markings on their shields.
And there was the man himself. Astride a great black charger, bare-headed, his handsome face alight with battle joy. He was issuing orders to the mounted men and they formed up at the edge of the practice ground and faced the hall. The door of the hall, three inches thick of solid oak, was shut tight, but a ring of dead men — ours — was sprawled about it. The thatch above was well alight, sheets of smoke rolling from under the eaves and forging upwards to join a great black column that poured up to heaven. The outhouses were burning too; the horses in the stables hamstrung, slaughtered and roasting in the flames. Here and there patches of thatch of the hall roof would burst spontaneously into flames, even the wattle-and-daub walls were smouldering. And then I realised: the closed door, Sir Ralph’s men forming up in a conroi, ready to charge. . Of course, there were too few bodies! Only a dozen or so and our company was fifty souls at least. Not everyone was dead. Thangbrand, Hugh, all the fighting men, they were still inside the hall. Soon they would sally out and. . I felt a flicker of hope. And then it was gone. Murdac’s men ordered their dressing. More horsemen joined them. A second conroi was forming up on the other side of the courtyard. They were waiting for the sally. Waiting to slaughter the outlaws when they rushed from the burning hall. I could imagine the horror of the scenes inside the hall, the choking smoke, burning cinders falling from the roof, the knowledge that death awaited outside, the bitter despair, women and children weeping, shielding their heads with cloaks wetted in ale, Thangbrand giving orders, calm and brave, the men hitching up their belts, gripping their swords, wiping the sweat and tears away from smoke-shot eyes and waiting, waiting for the order to charge. .
When the sally finally came, to my surprise, and to that of the sheriff’s men, it didn’t come out of the smouldering oak door but from the end of the hall, where Thangbrand and Freya had their chamber. The whole end of the hall fell away in one piece with a huge crash and out came the outlaws in a boiling rush. A ring of snarling, shouting swordsmen, clothes singed, faces blackened, surrounding our women and children. They held together well, twenty or thirty folk, jogging as a compact group toward the ruined gates, slipping in the slush, coughing smoke and screaming defiance and trying not to stumble over the dead on the ground. And then Murdac’s cavalry charged.
The steel-clad horsemen smashed into the ring of charred outlaws like an iron fist punching through a rotten reed basket. Immediately the cohesion of the circle was gone. Outlaws were fleeing in all directions, pursued by the men on horseback. It was sheer bloody slaughter. Some folk ran for the palisade, leaping up the wooden walls and trying to scramble over to escape and find safety in the forest. Very few made it. The horsemen murdered them, skewering backs as they clambered, pinning bodies to the wood with their spears. Those of our people still on the practice ground were swiftly cut down. The horsemen riding by at the trot, hacking down at heads and shoulders with their swords as they swept past, crushing skulls with mace and axe, and wheeling to ride and slash and bludgeon again.
There was little resistance as the horsemen, almost casually, carved our little band — men, women, even children — into bloody carnage. I saw Cat, beautiful, wanton, sinful Cat, with her red hair flowing free, running from a horseman, who caught her and caved in her skull with his mace, hard-ridged iron smashing through springing red hair, to leave her staggering, blood-washed, her head grotesquely deformed, before she dropped and never rose again. A knot of men and women, no more than a dozen, reformed by the gateway, clustered around Thangbrand, who stood above a cowering Freya wielding a great two-handed sword and bellowing his war cry at the circling horsemen. Outlaws, those who were still on their feet, some with horrendous wounds, gashed arms and sliced open faces, pressed around him, kneeling at his feet and looking outwards in a loose circle, clutching shields, if they had them, or holding out swords and spears, defying the enemy with a desperate courage. For a few seconds it resembled what it was supposed to be: the hedgehog, an ancient defensive manoeuvre against cavalry that Thangbrand had drummed into our heads over many hours on that very practice ground. But only for a few seconds. The second conroi of cavalry poured over the hedgehog like a great waterfall of horses and men, of sharp hooves and swinging swords, washing it away in a welter of blood. I saw Thangbrand take a spear to his throat that hurled him to the ground and then the outlaws were scattered again, the horsemen everywhere, scarlet-dappled swords rising and falling on running figures, blood splashing the horses’ flanks and fetlocks as they reared and trampled among the dying and the dead.
I was clutching Goody, my cloak wrapped around us both, and I covered her eyes with my hand as her father coughed out his last bloody breath on that gore-slicked stretch of mud and snow. ‘We must go,’ I whispered to her. ‘They will be searching for survivors soon and, if they find us, they will kill us.’ Goody said nothing. She just looked at me, her blue eyes huge in that deathly white face, and she nodded. She was a brave girl, that one. I urged her on and we began pelting back through the trees to Bernard’s cottage.
I pulled him from his bed, as he cursed me to Hell and beyond, thrust his shoes into his arms, and I made him understand by shouting and slapping at his boozy sleep-sodden face that we must run, now, no time for explanations. I grabbed a loaf and the remains of cold leg of pork, a tangle of cloaks and hoods from a nail behind the door and, as we tumbled out of the cottage into the bright light, I looked round and my heart jumped into my throat as I saw the first of the cavalrymen — half a dozen grim, blood-splattered riders — come trotting up the path from the hall. We sprinted for the thick cover of the trees, Bernard ahead holding tight to Goody’s arm, sometimes even pulling her off her feet as we fled. I followed behind, arms full of clothing and food, stumbling, sliding through the snow that seemed to suck at my boots. I imagined I could feel the thudding pulse of hoofbeats behind me and the wind before the slice of an unseen sword into my face. We ran, hearts pounding, breath sawing in our throats and burst through the undergrowth into the safety of the forest. Still we ran, lungs bursting with effort, away from the cottage and its clearing and deeper, deeper into Sherwood. At last we stopped and burrowed under a huge ancient holly tree, the spiky leaves scratching our faces as we scrambled deep inside its
