gummy, kneeling beside Robin and examining two swollen puncture wounds on the outside of Robin’s right forearm. Then Reuben had a knife in his hands — as usual I didn’t see where it came from — and he was cutting a strip from Robin’s shirt and tying it around the Earl’s upper arm above the elbow. Then he gently pushed Robin down on to the pallet and tied his wounded arm loosely to one of the struts that supported his bed. Now, with Robin lying white-faced on the pallet, his right arm tied below him, Reuben began very gently to sponge the puncture wounds with diluted wine.
‘Are you going to cut the wound and suck out the poison?’ I asked Reuben, perhaps a little ghoulishly. An old outlaw had told me once that this was the only way to prevent death after a snakebite. He joked that the only problem with this infallible cure was that if you got bitten on the arse, nobody would volunteer to save you.
‘Of course not,’ snapped Reuben. ‘What a ridiculous idea! He’s already been wounded, should I make the wound larger and spread the poison around in a bigger cut? And I certainly don’t want any of that venom in my mouth. Just bring me some bandages, Alan, and hold your silly tongue.’
At that moment, Robin rolled over on to his side and vomited copiously over the edge of the bed, only narrowly missing the arm that Reuben was so tenderly washing. I retreated to fetch clean bandages, and some holy water, hurriedly blessed by Father Simon, for Robin to drink.
When I returned, Robin was unconscious. His face was white, but sweating heavily, his arm purple-red and hugely swollen below the tourniquet. Reuben was sitting beside him on a stool, calmly drinking a beaker of wine.
‘Will he live?’ I asked Reuben, trying hard to keep the tremor out of my voice.
‘I expect so,’ said Reuben. ‘Although he will doubtless be ill for some days. He’s young and strong and, while adders do kill people, it is usually the old, the very young and the weak who die from their bite. A more interesting question is: how did the adder get into his bed?’
‘Could it have crawled there to hide from people, or perhaps to sleep?’ I suggested, and I already knew the answer before Reuben supplied it.
‘No wild serpent is going to voluntarily enter a camp full of hundreds of men, dodge all those pairs of booted feet and decide to take a nap in a bed two feet off the floor,’ Reuben said scathingly. ‘Someone put it there. The question is who?’
It was a question we pondered fruitlessly over the next few days. Clearly it had been an assassination attempt, if a clumsy one, but who could have been responsible? Was it another archer trying to claim Ralph Murdac’s hundred pounds of silver? Almost everyone in the camp had access to Robin’s tent, and people were in and out every day. It would have been relatively easy to slip a sleepy adder from a bag into Robin’s blankets with nobody the wiser.
I posted two men-at-arms outside his tent every night from then onwards. And kept an eye on them to make sure that they didn’t sleep. I also told them that Little John would have then flayed alive if another assassin got past them, which was quite unnecessary as the whole camp was outraged by the cowardly attempt on Robin’s life, and a murderer, once unmasked, would have been hacked to death in moments by a mob.
Little John had taken command, and we didn’t let Robin’s unconscious state affect the march. He was merely strapped to his pallet each morning with stout leather belts and carried by four strong archers in the centre of our column. For the first day, when he merely lay there, whey-faced, wounded arm bandaged, I had the powerful illusion that he was dead, and we were carrying his bier in a ceremonial procession. I felt an unexpectedly powerful stab of grief, a physical ache in my chest, before I told myself sternly to pull myself together. Gradually Robin improved, and after two days the swelling in his arm began to subside.
When we reached the outskirts of Lyon, Robin had regained his senses but was still as weak as a kitten. He insisted on mounting a horse, though, and looking like a three-day-old corpse he rode up and down the length of the column to show the men that he was fit and well. They cheered him, God bless them, and Robin just managed to lift his sword with his bandaged arm to return the salute.
As we marched down the Saone Valley towards the city of Lyon, just inside the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, it became clear that we were not the first large force to have passed that way in recent weeks. King Richard and King Philip had joined their vast forces at Vezelay, a hundred and twenty miles to the north in Burgundy, a few weeks ago and had marched the grand army down to Lyon, in a magnificent parade of their joint strength. The road was dusty and worn down; the grass verges had been stamped flat and were littered with the detritus of a passing multitude: broken clay cups, bones and scraps of food, abandoned boots, hoods, old rags, even a few good blankets had been tossed aside as the mighty host had flowed past.
And then, one day, we came over a rise and I looked down at the largest assembly of souls I had ever seen. I stood breathless; stunned that there could be so many people in the whole world, and all crammed into such a small area of land. Between the arms of the rivers Saone and the mighty Rhone was massed the chivalry of Western Europe; more than twenty thousand souls, the population of a large city, was encamped there in a gigantic heaving sprawl of gaudy tents, glinting steel, mud and humming humanity that stretched almost as far as the eye could see. Horse lines, fluttering pennants, burnished shields, rough buildings of turf and wood, bright striped pavilions for the knights, blacksmiths in canvas tents beating out helmets, barbers pulling teeth, squires bustling about their duties, heralds in particoloured tunics announcing their lords with a brave squeal of brass. At the edge of the field a horse race was in progress, watched by ladies and gentlemen in their finest clothes. Knights in full armour practiced combat with each other, men-at-arms sat drinking outside makeshift taverns in the summer sunshine, whores paraded about in their finery seeking trade, priests preached to gatherings of the faithful, mendicant friars in brown robes begged alms for the poor, dogs barked, beggars whined, children played tig around wigwams of stacked lances…
We were in the presence of the greatest, most powerful army the world had ever seen. Surely, with this vast assembled might, Saladin and his Saracen army of infidels was doomed and Jerusalem, the blessed site of Christ’s Passion, would soon once again be safe in Christian hands.
Chapter Eight
The Messina strait was a sheet of pure dark blue water, only wrinkled by a few petulant white-capped waves. I had been told by the sailors that in ancient times, it was home of two monsters called Scylla and Charybdis, but they were full of such ridiculous tales, as I had discovered over the past few weeks, and it seemed altogether too harmless a stretch of water for such an evil reputation. The late September sun smiled down with a friendly warmth, the sky was untroubled by a single cloud, and a fair wind pushed our massive fleet of ships swiftly across the channel between the scuffed toe of Italy and the golden island of Sicily — the rich land of oranges, lemons and grain and sugar cane, of Norman kings and Greek merchants, of Saracen traders and Jewish money- lenders, of Latin priests and Orthodox monks living side by side in a colourful mix of creeds and races. Sicily was where the fabulous East began, and it had been chosen by our sovereign lords as the launching off point of our great and noble expedition.
King Richard’s mighty force — more than ten thousand soldiers and seamen, with more men expected to join him in the coming weeks — was packed into an armada of more than a hundred and thirty great sea-going ships. There were scores of big, lumbering busses — great fat-bellied craft used for transporting bulky stores, some fitted with special berths for the war horses; dozens of smaller cogs that carried men-at-arms and their mountains of equipment; swift galleys packed with knights, with ranks of chained Muslim slaves at the oars; there were flat-bottomed boats that could be used for landing men and horses directly on to beaches, and snacks, or snake boats as they were sometimes called, the slim, elegant descendants of the Viking longships; and a host of smaller fry, fast with low, triangular sails, which zipped between the large craft and communicated the King’s commands to the fleet. The whole sea-bome pack of us, perhaps the greatest force ever assembled, was advancing in one great colourful, cacophonous swarm towards the ancient harbour of Messina. Pennants were flying from every masthead, trumpets and clarions blared, and drums beat out the time for the slaves at the galley’s oars. It must have been a daunting sight for the thousands of local people who lined the Sicilian shore to watch our approach.
The city of Messina was laid out on the coast roughly on a north-south axis and we approached it from the
