the worst hurt and praising their valour. One man, a cheery rascal with a great hole in his shoulder, pulled a white dove trailing a scrap of green thread, from his ragged, blood-slimed jacket. Robin solemnly accepted it and scrabbled in his pouch to find a silver penny with which to reward the man. Most of the wounded, though, were more despairing; they drank greedily at the wine flasks that were passed around the hall and the sounds of pain increased as the sun finally sank behind the hills to the west. They all knew that Robin had thrown the dice and lost. Murdac’s troops had surrounded the manor and, in the morning, he would overrun the place and we would all die.
The fall of night had ended hostilities and Robin had sent out emissaries to Murdac for a truce to gather our wounded from the field. Murdac agreed and all through the night parties of men walked in and out of the manor bearing stretchers. Soon the hall and all the outhouses were packed with wounded and dying men; the courtyard, too. The warm night was filled with the moans of the wounded and the sharp cries of those receiving medical attention. Tuck went round those near death offering the last rites and he prayed with those who in extremis looked to Our Lord Jesus Christ to save their souls. Brigid did likewise with the pagan wounded. Marie-Anne was haggard with tiredness: she was trying to nurse all the wounded men, hundreds of them, with only the help of a few hall servants. John was organising the collection of wounded from the field; the dead we left where they lay.
Into this man-made Hell of death and blood, into this gore-splashed slaughterhouse, echoing with the awful screams of souls in pain, stepped Bernard de Sezanne. He was dressed in the finest yellow silk tunic, spotless and embroidered with images of vielles, flutes, harps and other musical figures. He was clean shaven and his hair had recently been trimmed. He held a scented handkerchief to his nose and he walked straight up to me, stepping delicately over the dead and dying on the floor of the courtyard without paying them the slightest heed, and, as I gawped at him stupidly, he said: ‘Let me see your fingers, Alan, quick now.’
I was astonished; I could not believe this clean and scented apparition was real. It must be a figment of my battle-addled brain, but the figment insisted that I hold out my hands in front of me, like a schoolboy showing his mother that his grubby paws were clean. And I complied. Clean, they were not, crusted as they were with blood, earth and green tree lichen, but Bernard solemnly counted the fingers and professed himself relieved. ‘All ten, that
I was bursting with questions: where had he come from? What was he doing in the middle of a blood- sodden battlefield? But he hushed me and made me lead him over to Robin, who was helping a wounded man drink from a cup of wine.
‘I have a message that I must deliver to you in private,’ Bernard said to Robin. And my master, wordlessly, ushered him away to a private chamber at the end of the hall and the door was shut in my face.
They were inside for an hour or more, and after a while I was sent to fetch wine and fruit but forbidden to join their private counsels. Finally Robin and Bernard emerged, and Robin told me to find Bernard a jug of wine and a corner to sleep in, while he went back to caring for the wounded. Bernard would tell me nothing but that I should sleep easy, for all would be well. But sleep did not come. We shared the jug of wine, that is to say I managed to get a few sips down, while Bernard seemed, as usual, to have the thirst of ten men. Then I lay in the straw next to my musical mentor, listening to him snore, and trying to fathom what his coming could mean. Finally, I did fall into an uneasy sleep, only to be awakened before dawn, once again, by ugly old Thomas shaking me by the shoulder.
I sat up, my whole body stiff from the unaccustomed exertions of the battle the day before, and I was no more than half-awake when Thomas said: ‘Robin wants to see you.’ And so I left Bernard to his hoggish slumber and followed the one-eyed man through the courtyard to a corner of the hall.
Robin looked fresh, although I knew he had not slept. He handed me a pure white dove, and as I looked down at the gorgeous bird, and felt its fluttering heartbeat beneath my fingers, I noticed that it had a long red ribbon tied to its pink left foot. ‘Go to the palisade and release this,’ he said.
‘Just one?’ I asked in surprise, ‘What does it mean?’
Robin looked at me for a moment, and I saw a gleam of sadness in his silver eyes. ‘It means simply: I accept.’ And then he turned away to return to the wounded.
I walked to the palisade and climbed the steps to the walkway and, with a silent prayer to God the Father, his Son, and the Holy Ghost beseeching them all to come down from Heaven in their Glory and save us, I threw the bird up into the air. It flapped its perfect white wings, circled the manor, and then flew off to the West, disappearing over the hills and trailing its thin red message of acceptance behind it.
As I watched the bird fly to freedom, the sun came up in all its blinding majesty over the woods to my left, and I looked out on to the field of battle at the beginning of what was already looking like another beautiful day. During the night, Murdac’s troops had completely surrounded the manor of Linden Lea; a thin black ring of men and horses and wagons on all sides, campfires already burning and skeins of grey smoke beginning to drift in the light wind. I saw crossbowmen, spearmen, and conrois of cavalry stirring among the various parts of the lines of tents and piled war gear. But they had suffered in yesterday’s battle, too. They still outnumbered us, but this was not the invincible black horde that had marched on us the day before. Almost directly ahead, opposite the main gate, perhaps four hundred yards away, I could see the standard of Sir Ralph Murdac himself, the black flag with red chevrons, rippling in the breeze atop a large pavilion. And there was the man, riding across the front line, his face clearly visible under a simple helmet with a large triangular nosepiece. I thought I could see something glinting redly at his throat, but I told myself it must be a trick of the light. He was heading towards the great box- like wooden structure of the mangonel, which had been moved much closer to the manor overnight.
Murdac arrived at the machine, consulted with the officers there, and with a chop of his hand to the men standing in groups around the weapon, the mangonel fired. The great spoon swept up and banged against the crossbar; a boulder the size of a small cow came screaming straight towards us and, with a deafening crash, it ripped a hole two yards wide in the palisade just a few feet from where I was standing. Half a dozen wounded men, who had been sheltering inside the wooden wall, were crushed to bloody pulp in an instant. The boulder rolled a few yards and came to rest almost in the centre of the courtyard.
I realised, with a sickening twist in my gut, that we had no protection against Murdac in this manor house. That infernal machine could strip away our feeble wooden defences at a whim, and then Murdac and his black cavalry would leap the moat and ride over our splintered walls and chop us all into offal. By noon, I reckoned with a sinking heart, we would almost certainly all be dead.
Chapter Nineteen
In many years of hard skirmishing, bloody battles and close escapes, I have never felt so close to despair as I did then when that great rock came smashing through the wooden palisade at Linden Lea. Except once. This spring, as my grandson Alan lay sick with a fever and near to death, I felt that the whole world would end with him. He is well now, God be praised, and his recovery was amazingly fast, or perhaps only amazing to an old man like me, whose cuts and bruises heal so slowly these days. I fed Alan the dark potion concocted by Brigid, when Marie, his mother, was sleeping, exhausted with worry, in the next room. It was a foul smelling brew and, no sooner had I got him to swallow it, than Alan’s stomach threw it straight back at me. But I mopped up and tried again and finally I managed to get some of the noisome liquid to stay inside him. Then he slept.
The next day I dosed him again, as Brigid had instructed, with a half-strength mixture with plenty of water which had been boiled by moonlight and then allowed to cool. The day after that he was awake and asking for gruel. Marie is beside herself with happiness and has vowed to light a candle to the Virgin every Sunday for the rest of her life in thanks for his recovery. I sent a side of bacon, three chickens, a dozen loaves of bread and a purse of silver to Brigid.
Every day that followed, young Alan grew stronger. Now, as I write this tale of death and destruction at Linden Lea, my grandson is playing outlaws and sheriffs in the woods outside the manor, with some of the local boys. And with his return to health, my melancholy has lifted. The days seem bright again; I go about my tasks with fresh vigour; I even laugh with Marie of an evening by the hearth fire when the day’s tasks are done. I shall
