yourself because they’ll all be coming after you, the whole boiling pot of them looking for revenge. They are as bad as the Murdacs for vengeance, but then, of course, the Murdacs would be on our own side.’
‘What happened?’ I asked, my curiosity aroused in spite of myself.
‘It was just a grubby squabble in an ale-house in Annandale, but tempers flew and swords were drawn, and before I knew it young Archie Douglas was dead at my feet. I went to the castle see the chief of the Brus himself, my uncle Robert, to find out what could be done about the matter, and he was sympathetic, right enough. He was no stranger to an accidental killing himself. And so he gave the Douglases a blood price — wee Archie wasne worth all that much, he was a wastrel and a drunkard, and the Brus was a rich man, but as part of the agreement to save a feud breaking out between our two clans, he had to send me away. The Earl of Huntingdon, who was staying at the castle at the time and who is kin to the Countess of Locksley, suggested that I join Robin’s cavalry and help whip them into shape. And, I’ll tell you this Alan, I’m glad I did. I’ve never been happier since I joined this crew of scruffy layabouts.’ He gave me one of his horrible screwed up smiles again — and I realised that I believed him. He was happy; the scowling and the ferocious demeanor was just his way of disguising his feelings, of protecting himself and his dignity from over-familiarity.
‘What was that you said earlier about the Murdacs,’ I asked.
‘Oh they’re worse than the very Devil himself for vengeance,’ said Sir James. ‘Cross a Murdac and there’ll be murder for sure, as we say at home.’
‘You said something about them being on your side?’
‘Oh aye, my mother was a Murdac; she was the daughter of Sir William Murdac of Dumfries and Mary Scott of Liddesdale. But, of course, her father, Mary’s that is, was a damned Douglas from Lanarkshire…’
I was only listening to him with half an ear, I had other, more urgent things on my mind: I needed to know how Nur felt about me, and for that I needed to be able to speak to her.
I found Reuben in the old town, back at his comfortable lodgings at the Jewish merchant’s home. After a good deal of cajoling, he agreed to teach me the rudiments of Arabic; we would have a lesson every day, and we would start the next day. I could have asked Reuben to act as an interpreter but was determined that I would be able to speak to Nur myself, and divine for myself her true feelings for me. At a moment of tender love, I did not want another man coming between us.
I rode back from the old town and my meeting with Reuben in high spirits: but when I reached the monastery I found the place stricken with terror. The Devil was abroad, one old soldier who guarded the gate whispered to me; and he had laid his red claw on the Earl of Locksley.
It was true that Robin was gravely ill, near death, and had been laid out in his bed, pale and streaked with his own vomit — but I did not believe it was the Devil’s work. Somebody in the monastery had tried to poison my master; the same person, no doubt, who had tried to kill him in Burgundy.
Chapter Ten
The whole of Robin’s force — just under four hundred archers, cavalry and spearmen — was drawn up at the harbour side to witness the punishment. It was a gloomy day, the fat grey clouds lightly spitting rain from time to time, a weak sun only rarely peeping through. The prisoner, a sailor called Jehan from my own hated ship the Santa Maria, had been gambling with a local fisherman. He had lost his dice game and owed the Griffon five shillings; more than he could afford. And so he had refused to pay the man, claiming that, as a pilgrim heading for the Holy Land, his debts should be frozen until he returned from his sacred journey. It was a cheeky way to avoid his debt, for it was true, the Holy Father, the Pope himself, had ruled that the debts of anyone on this Great Pilgrimage should be suspended until the debtor returned home. But that was a move designed to encourage knightly landowners with great mortgages to go off to fight for Jerusalem. His Holiness clearly did not intend his words to allow shifty gamblers to welsh on their agreements. The Griffon fisherman had complained to the Knights Hospitaller, who controlled his part of Messina, and they had reported the matter to the King; and Richard was determined to make an example of the poor man. Jehan should have paid up or, better still, heeded King Richard’s decree that outlawed gambling with the Griffons.
He was to be keelhauled — a harsh punishment that involved dragging the prisoner’s living body under the keel of a ship from one end to the other. And it is much worse than it sounds: after months at sea the keel of any ship is covered with tiny barnacles, sharp rock-like structures less than a quarter of an inch in height but rough and spiky enough to cut through skin and muscle if a naked body is dragged against them. The second danger, of course, is drowning. The man must hold his breath under water while undergoing the agony of being dragged over the keel-barnacles. Many drowned during this punishment; and those who did not were left appallingly lacerated. King Richard had ordered that this man must undergo keelhauling three times on three successive days. It was, in effect, a death sentence.
The man was stripped down to a pair of linen breeches, his hands and feet tied and attached to long ropes. He lay forlornly, eyes closed, skin puckered with cold, at the prow of the Santa Maria, which was moored about twenty yards from the quay, while a priest recited prayers over his thin, shivering frame. The rain began to fall harder.
Our men stood there in silence. Nobody had complained too much about the punishment: Jehan had been stupid and the consensus was that the punishment, while brutal, was not unfair. We had all been warned about gambling; Jehan had ignored that warning and then, much worse, had tried to welsh. The men hated a welsher. Besides, although we knew him, he was not truly one of us; just a Provencal sailor, hired in Marseilles to crew the ship.
I was standing on the harbour wall, chewing on a chicken leg, with William beside me, and thinking about Nur. At my feet was a yellow cur, a foul limping street dog from the stews of Messina; half its fur had been eaten away by mange, exposing scabbed pink skin; its ears were no more than ragged tatters after many a ferocious canine battle and it had but one yellow eye. But the hideous dog seemed to be strangely attracted to me. It had followed me all the way from the monastery as I walked down to the harbour and I could not seem to shake it no matter how many times I kicked at it or shooed it away. It was a bitch, I noticed, and she just stared up at me from her position at my feet on the rough stone of the harbour with her pathetic yellow eye, quietly loving me. It occurred to me that she looked at me in exactly the same way that I looked at Nur.
‘Gi-gi-give her your chicken bone,’ said William. ‘That’s a-a-all she wants, give her the bone and perhaps she will go-go-go away.’ William was always a kindly fellow, and I thought that his plan might work, so I tossed the chicken bone to the smelly yellow mongrel at my feet. The dog snatched the bone out of the air with an amazing swiftness and darted away through our legs. Well, I thought to myself with a smile, so much for love!
On the Santa Maria, Jehan had been picked up, head and feet, by two of his fellow sailors, with two more holding the ropes. With very little ceremony, they threw the man over the prow and with one man holding the rope attached to his feet and another on the rope attached to his arms they began to walk quickly along the two gunwales of the ship, dragging their ropes behind them.
‘Stop!’ a deep voice boomed from the stem of the ship. ‘Stop, you vermin, in the name of the King!’ It was Sir Richard Malbete. He had been given a new role by Richard — he was now the knight responsible for discipline and punishment in the whole army. It was an office that fitted his black soul like a glove. But it troubled me to see the Beast getting close to King Richard and being given responsibilities by him.
At Malbete’s command, the two sailors pulling their unfortunate fellow under the ship stopped dead. I could only imagine what the poor victim was feeling, unmoving, bleeding from a hundred cuts and slowly drowning under the keel of the Santa Maria. ‘You go too fast,’ rumbled Malbete. And summoning two of his men-at-arms, he had them draw swords and stand in front of the rope-bearing sailors, walking backwards along either side of the deck, only allowing the men dragging the victim to advance at a very slow walking pace unless they wished to impale themselves on the swords. Finally they reached the stem and, sheathing his sword, Sir Richard Malbete indicated, at last, that the sailors might pull up their colleague.
The victim was a mass of oozing cuts from his forehead to his shins; he had lost one eye, his nose was split and squashed against his face, and there were deep cuts across his belly and chest where the barnacles had sliced deeply. He looked as if he had been scraped repeatedly and deeply across his body with a particularly sharp
