I have this to say in Father Simon’s favour. He did not set himself above the men, as some priests are wont to do. He just got on with his allotted tasks. Before we embarked on to three great cargo ships at Southampton, Father Simon insisted on blessing the vessels to protect us from the dangers of the deep; and his prayers seemed to work. The crossing was smooth and uneventful, and took only a day and a night before we were trooping out at the quay at Honfleur, King Richard’s port at the mouth of the great river Seine in Normandy.
I had never been out of England before, and was astounded to find that Normandy looked almost exactly the same as my homeland. Perhaps I had expected the grass to be blue and the sky green, I don’t know. But the sensation of familiarity was extraordinary. The fields looked the same, the houses were similar and, until they opened their mouths to speak French, the people could have been easily mistaken for good honest English folk.
During the march through the Norman countryside, as we made our way southwards, there were certain elements of our army — mainly the folk who had previously been outlaws — who held the opinion that the French peasants existed solely to provide us with free food and drink. Robin had other ideas and was determined to maintain strict discipline. This land was the patrimony of our King, he said, and we were not to ravage it. Little John caught and summarily hanged two cavalrymen for stealing a chicken on the first day on Norman soil, and Robin gathered the men together and made a quiet, determined speech directly under the swinging heels of the looters.
‘You think I’m being harsh?’ he asked the four hundred angry men who were assembled before him. He used his loud, carrying battle voice. ‘Do you think I’m being unjust? I don’t give a damn. No man under my command steals so much as a penny, desecrates a Church, or beds any woman without her consent — unless I have given them permission. I will hang any bastard who does so from the nearest tree. No trial, no mercy, just a final dance at the end of a rope. Is that clear?’
There were a few sullen murmurs from the men, but they knew that there had to be discipline, and the former outlaws among them also knew that Robin could be a great deal more brutal if he chose to.
But Robin had not finished: ‘And that goes for the officers, too. Any captain who robs or rapes will be whipped in front of the men as a lesson to all, and then demoted.’ This was most unusual. Shocking, too. By common custom the officers were disciplined under different rules to the men, and their chastisements never included corporal punishment. Perhaps Robin had said this because we were, unusually, an almost entirely basebom contingent of King Richard’s army. Although led by an Earl, we were mercenaries — or we would be when Richard paid Robin the money he had promised. I saw Sir James de Brus glowering at Robin, and fingering his sword hilt. He was the only man among us, apart from Robin, who had been born noble, and I could almost hear him thinking: I will die with my sword in your belly before I submit to a whipping like an errant serf. But he said nothing. He was, after all, a good, professional soldier and he knew when to hold his tongue.
There was little need for rape: as we marched through Normandy, women seemed to appear from nowhere and attach themselves to our column, like bees attracted to a honey-pot. Some were whores looking for rich pickings, and some were fairly virtuous women who were looking for adventure and who believed that by attaching themselves to a strapping young man-at-arms they would see the world. And, as they made no complaints to Robin, he did not need to enforce his discipline. One extraordinary creature caught my eye, though not for the reasons you might expect a young man to find a woman interesting. She was a very tall woman of about thirty or 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.