more years, extremely thin with long hands and feet. She dressed in a long, dirty green robe that covered her from shoulder to ankle and she seemed to have no breasts or womanly curves at all. Her hair, though, was a magnificent explosion of tangled white locks, which stood out straight from her scalp. She resembled nothing so much as a dandelion about to shed its seeds. And her name was Elise.
‘Read your fortune, master?’ she called to me in camp one evening as I was replacing a broken strap on Ghost’s saddle-rig. Amused, I allowed her to look at my right palm.
‘I see great love in your future,’ Elise said, peering up into my face. I nodded indulgently: it was a fairly standard, almost obligatory prediction for a young man. She went on: ‘And I see great pain. You will think you are strong in your love; that your love is a castle that cannot be broken, but you are not as strong as you believe. And you will betray your love with the sight of your eyes. Love comes in by the eyes — and leaves the same way. On that day; you will wish you were blind, for your sight will have killed all the love in your heart.’
I snatched my hand away. It was all nonsense, of course, but it sounded suspiciously like a curse. And, to be truthful, these women who claim to have second sight make me uneasy; some of them have real power given to them by the Devil, so it does not do to cross them.
‘You do not like my prophecy,’ she said, looking at me curiously. ‘Very well, I will give you another: you will die an old man, in your own bed, at your own hearth.’ It was a standard piece of nonsense, given out to many a fighting man to gain favour, I assumed, and thought no more about it. I merely smiled, gave her a farthing and told her to be off.
But Elise stayed with our column; she rarely spoke to me, and I avoided her, but she became, I noticed, the leader and spokeswoman of the women who had joined our pilgrimage. Robin saw that she kept the peace between the women, who before she had joined us often argued like cats and dogs, and he did not care that she made a few coppers here and there telling stories and reading palms; he reckoned her harmless and tolerated her presence, and the presence of the other women, on the march.
But two weeks into our journey across France, Robin was forced to show his steel. Will Scarlet was exposed by Sir James de Brus as a thief. And worse, he had stolen from a church. It was sheer weakness of character: Will had always been an accomplished pick-pocket and lock-breaker, as a boy outlaw he had been known as ‘scoff-lock’ because of the contempt with which he treated the big iron devices that rich men used to secure their money chests. With the right tools he could have any lock opened as fast as a whore’s legs. But he was not an outlaw any more, he was a holy soldier of Christ, a pilgrim, and Robin was ready to make this point clear with brutal force.
Will had been in charge of a patrol of twenty mounted men-at-arms, a conroi as these squadrons are called, but I knew he had been having trouble getting the men to obey him. He was younger than most of the troopers, and if the truth be told, while he was a gifted thief, he was not a gifted soldier. He did not even ride very well. It seems that the men had come across an empty church while on forward patrol and they had egged Will on to pick the lock of the coffer where the church’s silver was kept. It was a foolish thing to do a mere week after Robin’s edict, particularly since his own men had later turned traitor and informed on him to Sir James. But I imagine that Will wanted to show the men under his command that there was something he could do well.
Actually, I blamed Robin. Will Scarlet was not the man to lead a conroi of twenty tough, salty cavalrymen and Robin should have known that. The young red-head — he was my age, fifteen summers — had been given the command as a reward for serving Robin loyally during the outlaw years. But Will was a fool, too: firstly, he had trusted his men to stay silent about their crime; and he had thought that by playing the good fellow with them he would gain their respect; lastly, he had relied on his long relationship with Robin to protect him. He was wrong on all three counts.
He was roughly stripped to his braies and hose and lashed to a tree in a peaceful woodland clearing and, while Sir James, Robin and Will’s conroi looked on, Little John cut his naked back to ribbons with a horsewhip. Although they were old friends, Little John laid on with fury — he was not overly concerned about a theft from the church, but he did not like Robin’s orders to be flouted.
Will screamed from the first blow, which echoed like a meaty slap around the clearing, and by the time Little John had reached the allotted number of twenty lashes, and the blood was running thickly down his ripped white back and soaking into his braies, Will was mercifully unconscious.
The boy was cut down, and tended to by the strange woman Elise, who gently washed his back free of blood, then smeared it with a goose fat salve and bandaged it with clean linen, and the whole column was given a day of rest. Before Will’s conroi were allowed to disperse, Robin spoke to them: ‘You are disgraced,’ he said coldly, his eyes glinting like cold metal in the morning sunshine. ‘Not only did you steal from a church, against my express orders, but you also betrayed your captain — which is a far worse crime, to my mind. I should hang every man jack of you.’ The men-at-arms were looking at the ground, fiddling with their bridles and the manes of their horses, their shame written clear on their faces. ‘But I will not do that.’ There was a collective exhalation of breath, audible where I was sitting on Ghost across the clearing. ‘Instead,’ Robin continued, ‘I have decided that, as a conroi, you are disbanded. This unit is no longer part of my force. Any man who wishes to leave, may return his horse, saddle and weapons to John Nailor and depart this company, immediately, on foot, never to return. The men who wish to stay, Sir James will allocate to a new conroi; if the officer will take traitorous curs such as you. You are dismissed.’
And he turned his back on them and rode away.
The men of the disgraced conroi, some of whom looked mightily relieved, were divided between the other squadrons; but I was interested to see that not a man elected to leave the army. I was glad, too, that Robin had shown mercy — but a part of me suspected that my master knew that he could not afford to sacrifice so many men over what was, in truth, a fairly trivial affair.
Will recovered swiftly and with in two days he was back in the saddle, as an ordinary trooper, of course. He bore his hurts without complaint, but seemed strangely quiet, never speaking unless it was absolutely necessary. The episode left a slightly bad taste in all our mouths, but it was soon forgotten in a fresh crisis — a week later somebody tried to murder the Earl of Locksley.
On the march through France and Burgundy to Lyon, we avoided castles and towns, partly to keep the men away from temptation, and partly because, as we had found in England, a large group of heavily armed men is seldom given a warm welcome in any settlement. So every afternoon, our scouts guided us into the camping ground for the night, usually a large field near a stream, or a piece of common ground. Occasionally we would descend on an isolated farm, where Reuben would silence the protests of the farmer with a gift of silver, and we would pack ourselves into the outbuildings where we were guaranteed a dry night. But most of the time we pitched tents, twenty men to each one, and cooked on great communal fires. Robin had his own tent, which a couple of the archers would set up for him every night. Robin had the tent to himself but, until he retired, it was the hub around which the whole camp revolved. His officers, and even some of the men, those who had known him since their outlaw days, felt free to come in and out of the tent almost at will. It was only when he retired for the night, usually long past midnight, that he had the space to himself.
One night, we were somewhere near the great city of Tours, after I had been trying out a new canso on my master, I saw that he was tired and, picking up my vielle and bow, I left him to his rest. I laced the tent flaps shut behind me and had taken no more than two steps away towards my own tent, when I heard a sharp cry of pain, followed by a series of crashes and metallic bangs, exactly as if someone was sword fighting inside the tent. Not bothering with the tent flap, I plunged my poniard through the canvas and ripped a great hole in and then I ducked into the tent, blades in both fists.
The candle was still lit and I could see Robin, shirt-less, sitting on the edge of his sleeping pallet, drawn sword on the floor below him, clutching his bare lower arm, and cursing quietly under his breath. The tent’s meagre furniture looked as if it had been hacked apart and in the centre of the floor was a thin jet-black snake, originally more than two or three foot long, an adder I assumed, that had been hacked into three bloody pieces.
‘Get Reuben,’ Robin croaked. His right arm was turning an angry red colour and it was beginning to swell.
‘Are you all right,’ I asked stupidly.
‘No, I’m not… go… get Reuben… fast,’ Robin could hardly speak for the pain, and I cursed myself for hesitating and rushed out of the tent. In less than thirty heartbeats I had Reuben, hair tousled from sleep, eyes
