The next performer was an old friend of King Richard’s: a grizzled warrior of fifty years, much hated by the other courtiers, and known as Bertran de Born, viscount of Hautefort, who had a reputation for raping his female servants and stirring up trouble between the great princes of Europe whenever he got the chance. He got up and launched into a long unaccompanied song in praise of warfare, all axes clashing and shields splintering, broken heads and pierced bodies, which ended
… ‘Go speedily to Yea-and-nay, and tell him there is too much peace about.’ In fact, the poem was rather good, a bit old fashioned but darkly funny and very stirring; and much as I disapproved of the old man’s trouble-making reputation, I could not fault his music.
‘Yea-and-nay’ was Bertran’s nickname for King Richard, something to do with his supposed indecisive-ness as a youth, which our sovereign lord seemed not to mind at all — but then they had known each other for a very long time. Afterwards, I did wondered if Richard and Bertran had secretly been in collusion because the moment his poem was done, a knight burst into the garden and, without the slightest ceremony, blurted: ‘The Griffons are rioting; and they are attacking Hugh de Lusignan!’
Hugh was one of the barons of Aquitaine, a vassal of King Richard’s and a member of a powerful family that included one of the claimants to the throne of Jerusalem. Hugh had, perhaps unwisely, taken up a comfortable residence in the old town of Messina despite the fact that tension between the pilgrims and the locals was running so high.
‘What!’ roared the King, leaping to his feet. To give him due credit, he did sound quite genuine in his anger.
‘Sire,’ said the messenger, ‘there has been trouble all morning, great insolence from the Sicilians, our men-at-arms pelted with stones. Then fighting broke out and now a large force of armed Griffons has surrounded Lusignan’s house and seems determined to break in and do murder.’
‘By God’s legs, that is enough,’ said the King. ‘To arms, gentlemen, to arms! We will teach these riotous dogs some respect for Christ’s holy pilgrims.’
He beckoned Robin, Robert of Thumham, Richard Malbete and the other knights. ‘There is no time to waste,’ he said. ‘Arm yourselves and gather what men you can. We will take this town in the time it takes for a priest to say Matins. Do not tarry: to arms! And may God preserve us all.’
The King then strode over to where Philip was still sitting, surrounded by his French knights. ‘Cousin, will you join me in subduing these insolent curs?’ Philip’s expression was blank. I could tell he was furious from his clenched jaw muscles — perhaps he too suspected that Richard was stage-managing the events — but he merely shook his head and said nothing. Richard stared at him for a moment, then nodded, turned on his heel and strode from the garden.
The speed and fury of Richard’s attack was truly astonishing. It might have appeared reckless, to attack a town of more than fifty thousand souls with no more than a handful of knights, but it proved an extraordinarily effective strategy. I was later to discover that King Richard was quite capable of subtlety in warfare, and subterfuge, finesse, and fine generalship, when it was appropriate, but what he loved most was a mad, all-out rage-fuelled charge, with himself in the lead, wading into the enemy with his great sword swinging, and slaughtering his foes by the dozen.
We gathered outside the monastery, some thirty armoured horsemen, ready to fight and die beside our King. I had struggled into a mail hauberk, crammed a plain steel cap on my head and strapped on sword and poniard, grabbing my mace as an afterthought, before mounting Ghost in the monastery forecourt — but I noticed that the King had dressed himself for war even more quickly. He was outside the big gates of the monastery, literally bouncing up and down in the saddle, urging his knights to ‘hurry, hurry, for God’s sake!’
We had sent off Owain with messages for the rest of the army to come and join us but King Richard was like a man possessed: he could not wait another moment for battle to begin. And, bizarrely, his haste made the task of capturing Messina far easier than it would have been if we had waited for the army to get organised and come up.
The King ran an eye over the handful of assembled knights, nodded, and said: ‘Right, let’s go and teach these scum some manners.’ And with that we were off galloping down the hill in a mad scramble towards the old town, the King in the vanguard, Robin just behind him and myself somewhere in the middle of the pack, with Little John beside me on a giant white horse, grinning with pleasure at the thought of imminent slaughter. I too was filled with a euphoric sense of excitement. For some reason, I felt that I could not die if I followed King Richard into battle, that somehow the sacred aura of kingly power that radiated from him would protect me. Absolute nonsense, of course: being in the King’s company was no safer than being anywhere else in a battle — quite the opposite given his reckless streak, if the truth be told.
Outside the main gate of the old town a mob of about four hundred Sicilians had formed up in what I can only assume they thought was a military manner on a small knoll. The Griffons were armed with a random assortment of weapons and armour, some with swords and spears, some with crossbows and round shields, some helmeted with leather caps, a few with large wood axes, some even carrying fishing tridents. They pushed and shoved at each other, and a dozen men, their leaders, I suppose, seemed to be shouting at the tops of their voices at each other and at their men and trying to squeeze the loose, unruly crowd into some semblance of order. I learnt later that they had planned to march on the monastery and hold the King to ransom. They would never have succeeded; they couldn’t even form up properly without jostling and shoving each other.
When Richard saw them he did not slacken his mount’s pace for an instant. He just shouted: ‘For God and Holy Mary!’ and charged straight up the hill and into the mass of Sicilians, whirling his sword in a near-berserk fury, hacking and stabbing, cutting down men and forcing his way yard by yard into that huge sea of confused humanity. And we all piled in right after him; thirty steel-clad knights at full gallop in a tight wedge, with Richard as the point. It was like an axe blade chopping into a rotten cabbage.
God forgive me, but I enjoyed that fight. Ghost leapt into the ranks of the enemy, knocking two men down with sheer momentum, and I skewered a third through the gullet on the point of my sword as we followed our battle-mad King into the fray. Little John was wielding his giant axe with terrifying skill to my left, cutting down foes with short controlled sweeps of the double-edged blade. I had my reins looped over the pommel and with sword in one hand and mace in the other, I lashed out left and right slicing into unprotected bodies and crushing skulls, controlling Ghost with my legs alone. The mace was a vicious weapon: a two-foot steelshafted club with a ring of eight sharp, flat triangles of metal welded to the heavy head; it had the power to punch through iron helmets and breach the skulls beneath. Swung at full strength against chainmail, it could easily break an arm or leg. I crushed the jaw of one man with an upward blow, then scythed the mace laterally at another man-at-arms, cracking into his temple. A great jet of blood sprayed in my eyes and I was momentarily blinded. I half-sensed, half-saw someone lunging at me with a spear from my right hand side and knocked away the point on pure instinct with my sword, then reversed the direction of the blow and chopped the blade down into his skull.
The noise was deafening: the battle cries of our warriors, the clash of steel, the neighing and squealing of horses and the shouts of rage and agony from wounded men. I spurred Ghost forward, felt a hard blow against my left boot, hacked at a retreating back, and suddenly the mass of Griffon soldiers had broken, like a smashed cage of doves, all the birds set free at the same time, and hundreds of men were streaming back towards the gate of the town — which I noticed with disbelief was slowly opening to receive the fugitives. It was a terrible, fatal mistake on their part.