beckets on the wall. And I saw that I had walked into a slaughter yard. The stone floor was literally running with blood, trickles of the liquid oozing between the cobbles, and the naked form of two young women were lying curled together on the floor, their plump white lifeless bodies resembling the carcasses of butchered pigs in the flickering torchlight. A third girl was hanging limply from an upright wooden frame in the shape of an X. It was a whipping frame, I realised, and I knew I was in the slave quarters of a merchant’s house. The girl was obviously dead. Though her back was towards me I could see that her throat had been cut to the bone. And the man who killed her was standing by the whipping frame gaping at me in surprise. The girl had been whipped, stabbed through the buttocks and no doubt raped before the man had ended her life. He wore a scarlet and sky blue surcoat, spattered with her blood and the blood of her dead sisters. And he carried a long, smeared knife in his right hand.
I said no words of challenge but simply took two steps towards him and swung my sword at his head in a fast round-house cut. He desperately tried to block my strike with his gore-smirched dagger, and it saved my blade from burying itself in his skull, but then I stepped in towards him and smashed the iron pommel of my weapon into his mouth, shattering teeth, smearing lips and dropping the man to the floor. He stared up at me, as I stood over him, and he just had time to scream through his broken mouth, ‘My lord, help me!’ in English before I plunged the sword point down hard into his throat and silenced his voice for ever.
I stood away from him. In my black fury, I could have hacked his dead body into morsels — but I managed to control myself. I had done murder, although I did not regret it for a moment, and I knew I must leave this place as quickly as possible. King Richard had vowed that he would execute anyone who killed a fellow pilgrim: on the voyage from Marseilles, he had had a murderer tied to his dead victim and thrown into the sea to perish. I cocked my head to one side: could I hear singing coming from somewhere? It must be my imagination. As I looked around the courtyard before making my departure, I noticed a fourth girl, bound and gagged and crouching naked in the corner of the space by a shadow-dappled whitewashed wall. She was so still and white, she almost seemed part of the wall. But when I went to her, I saw that eyes were huge and dark with horror, and her hair was a slick of shining black down her naked back almost to her tiny waist. Even terrified as she was, and in that place of blood and pain and death, I saw that she was beautiful; extraordinarily beautiful. But she had seen me kill the man-at- arms. She was a witness. A thought flashed across my mind: I knew what Robin would do in these circumstances; she was a witness to a capital crime, she would have to die. In our outlaw days in Sherwood, Much the miller’s son had once killed an innocent page boy because he was a witness to a murder Little John had committed. Much even boasted about it until I told him I would shut his mouth for him, if he did not. So I knew what Robin, in his ruthlessness, would advise me to do. But I was not Robin.
I went back into the front room and seized a silk wall hanging that was lying on the floor, but which was mostly clean, and brought it back into the slave quarters. The girl had not moved. I cut through the ropes that bound her and wrapped her snugly in the silk cloth. And all the while she stared at me with her huge, beautiful eyes. I thought I could hear boots moving about on the floor above and I tried to hurry the girl along as gently as I could. But she did not seem to understand my words. With gestures and pointing I finally managed to communicate the urgency to her, and get her to understand that we must leave that house — now! And in a dozen heartbeats I had her outside in the street. I could definitely hear the sound of drunken singing: soldiers, no doubt, who were looking for another victim to rape, another house to plunder, and the sound was coming closer. I wanted to get the girl on the horse and lead her away from that place of death as quickly as possible — I could feel my skin crawling in anticipation of deadly danger — but she seemed very worried about her silk wall hanging coming open and was refusing to mount up on Ghost until she had fixed her dress. So I cut a hole in the hanging for her head, and cut a strip off the end to make a belt, and with her head poking through the priceless silk and the material tied to her waist, she at last consented to climb into the saddle.
I had just settled her in her seat when a voice behind me spoke; a slow, deep voice I had heard before: ‘You killed my man, singing boy; you murdered my sergeant!’ The voice sounded mildly annoyed rather than madly enraged. I spun as fast as I could, my sword in my hand, and there in the doorway of the house loomed the tall form of Sir Richard Malbete, with four men-at-arms holding torches and peering out from behind his bulk. ‘And I have not forgotten that you gave me this,’ the Beast said, running a finger down the red scar on the side of his face. ‘I have not forgiven you, singing boy, and I remember well your Jew-loving master’s tomfoolery at York,’ he rumbled, his feral eyes glittering madly in the torchlight. ‘You, and your so-called Earl, will pay a pretty price for standing in the way of my pleasures.’
I don’t believe I felt fear when I saw Malbete standing there with his four men — more swords than I could expect to fight and survive — and it wasn’t hatred either, although I had long dreamt of killing him. Instead, I felt a strange calmness, a clearheaded detachment. I was very conscious of my body, how I was standing, sword in my right hand, my left foot slightly in front of the other, and I was beginning to think about the exact moves I would make when the fighting began. The first thing would be to get the girl away. She was well seated on Ghost, bare feet in the stirrups, and looked as if she knew how to ride, and so a hard slap on my animal’s rump should set him off at the gallop. I was confident that Ghost could carry her to safety. It is strange that my first thoughts should have been of her. I had not formed any attachment to her, I was not in love with her; I saw that she was beautiful, yes, but she was nothing to me and yet my first instinct was to see her safe, at the risk of my own life. Truly, God moves in mysterious ways.
My next thought was that, in fact, there were too many of them to fight only one man efficiently, they would get in each other’s way, and they were standing crowded in a doorway behind Malbete. Therefore, I realised, I had to go forward, towards them, to take the fight into that doorway. If I stood there in that narrow opening, only one or possibly two men could come at me at a time, until one or two of them took it into his head to climb out the window, and come at me from behind. Then I was probably dead. But for several precious moments, if I could hold the doorway, the girl would have the time to get away.
So. Now. Time to move, Alan: I’d slap the horse with my left hand, make a lunge at Richard Malbete’s head to make him move back, and then get into the door to hold that space as long as I could. The singing was growing louder, the singers were in this very street, and just before I launched myself into my doomed attack, a wonderful thought struck me. God was surely with me: I knew that song! I had heard it sung, many, many times over the long miles between England and the Mediterranean Sea. It was a song in the Welsh language! And the men singing it…
‘Ho there, it’s young Alan; joy to you on this fine night,’ said Owain, his voice thickened with wine. ‘How’s about you give the boys a tune?’ I turned my head slowly, my neck muscles seeming to be stiff and unyielding, and there was Owain standing like a Visitation of Christ, at the head of about thirty red-faced archers — bows unstrung, it was true, and all drunk as lords, but each with a short sword in his belt, which I had personally trained them to use. God be thanked for his mercy.
‘Look, he’s found himself a woman; and, by Jesu, she’s a tasty piece,’ shouted one of the archers. He was quickly shushed into silence by his drunken fellow bowmen. Sober, on the whole, they showed great respect for me.
‘Are you all right, Alan?’ asked Owain, ‘only you look a little pale. Have a drink.’ He held out a flask.
I turned back to look at the doorway. Sir Richard Malbete was gone. And halfway up the street, walking away from us at a brisk pace, was a knot of men-at-arms in surcoats of scarlet and sky blue. I was content for now to let them go.
I sheathed my sword. ‘I am well, thank you Owain,’ I said. ‘But I would be grateful if you could provide me with an escort to take this lady back to headquarters. There are a lot of drunken, disreputable types on the streets tonight.’ I looked down my nose like a school-master at the gang of tough, wine-flushed men who had undoubtedly just saved my life. And the Welshmen all cackled merrily at my feeble jest.
Love is perhaps the strangest of all human experiences; the moments of happiness it offers are truly sublime, but I’m not sure you could describe it as pleasant, and often it is a source of great torment; yet we seem to seek it out all our lives like moths drawn to a deadly flame. In a matter of days, I was deeply in love with Nur, for that was the name of the slave girl that I rescued from the grand house in the old town that night. It started for me with a terrible kind of lust; when I looked at her slim body, her great dark eyes, her perfect skin, and plump, almost bruised looking mouth, I wanted to possess her, to wrap her in my arms and kiss her, to encompass her with my body so that we were joined, made one. I don’t mean in the crude physical way that ordinary men and
