About three dozen of us were waiting to be fed: Robin’s familia — his closest friends and advisers, top lieutenants, and the senior members of his armed troops. Some of the faces about the long table I knew very well — the giant man seated next to Robin’s empty place with a thatch of straw-coloured hair was my friend and sword-teacher John Nailor, who was Robin’s right-hand man, and the iron enforcer of his master’s will; farther along was a squat muscular shape clad in a raggedy brown robe: Brother Tuck, a Welsh master bowman turned monk, who men said jokingly acted as Robin’s conscience; across the table were the gap-toothed grin and red curls of Will Scarlet, a friend of my own age and the nervous horseman I had clashed with that afternoon — but Robin had been recruiting busily in the weeks that I’d been away and at least half the members of the happy throng were unknown to me. Sir James de Brus, I noted with satisfaction, was seated further away from Robin’s place than me, his bulldog face creased in to its habitual scowl. He did not seem to fit in that cheery, easy company, where little distinction of rank was made and, saving Robin’s superiority over us all, every man believed himself to be equal in worth to his fellow.
But, I noticed as I looked round the hall, things at the castle had changed in my absence. Not just new faces, but a new atmosphere: it was more formal, less like our carefree days as an outlaw band. Of course, that was right: we were no longer a pack of murderers and thieves, with every man’s hand against us — we were a company of the soldiers of Christ, blessed by the Church, and sworn to undertake the perilous journey to Outremer to save the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem for the True Faith.
Many of the changes to Kirkton were physical, too: indeed, the bailey courtyard had been almost unrecognisable to me when we had cantered into through the high wooden gates that afternoon. It was filled with people, teeming — soldiers, craftsmen, servants, traders, washerwomen, whores — all hurrying about their tasks, and it seemed crammed with new buildings, too, wooden structures thrown up to house the bustling multitudes. The castle courtyard was designed as a vast circle, about a hundred paces across, surrounded by a high oaken palisade, with a wide empty space in the centre. Before I had left, there had been a handful of buildings around the edge of the circle: the high hall where we now sat, with Robin and Marie-Anne’s solar, or private sleeping chamber, attached to one end; the kitchen, the stables, the stoutly-built counting house that was Robin’s treasury, a few storehouses and that was all. Now, the courtyard almost resembled a small town: a new low building had been constructed to house the men-at-arms, a large two-roomed blacksmith’s forge had been set up against the palisade, and a burly man and his two assistants were hammering endlessly at bright strips of metal, manufacturing the swords, shields, helmets and spearheads necessary for the troops. A fletcher was at work outside a small half-built hovel, watched closely by his apprentice, painstakingly binding a linen thread around the goose feather flights of an arrow to hold them in place, with a stack of finished missiles beside him.
They would both have plenty of work in the weeks ahead. A good archer could fire twelve arrows a minute in battle and Robin was planning to take nearly two hundred bowmen with him to the Holy Land. If they had to fight only one battle, which lasted only for an hour, that would still mean expending a hundred and forty-four thousand shafts. Even if the fletcher was busy for months he could not hope to provide enough arrows for the expedition and so, on the march, the men would make their own arrows, and Robin had been buying finished shafts by the thousand from Wales. Many of Robin’s hired archers came from that land: tough men, often not particularly tall but thick in the chest and short in the arms, and with the immense strength necessary to draw the huge deadly war bow that was their weapon of choice. It was easy to tell the archers in the throngs of people about the castle by their low, powerful shapes. The bow, six foot long and made from yew wood, could sink a steel-tipped ash shaft through a knight’s chainmail at two hundred paces. In the time it took a knight to charge an archer, from two hundred yards away, the bowman could sink three or four arrows into the mounted man’s chest.
The stables had been extended, too, to almost treble their length, to house the mounts of the hundred or so mounted men-at-arms that Robin planned to take with him on the Great Pilgrimage. And, though the horses would be expected to feed themselves along the way whenever possible, vast amounts of grain must still be carried with us to feed the animals when the grazing was poor, or in the dust-dry deserts of the Levant. As well as fodder, the horses needed blankets, brushes, buckets, feed bags and a dozen other accoutrements, as well as saddles, girths, bridles, bits and a host of other straps, buckles and leather gear. Then there was the weaponry: each mounted man would be armed with a shield and a twelve foot spear as his primary weapons, but each would also carry a sword, and many horsemen preferred to bring with them a mace or axe for close-quarter work in the melee.
So, as we entered the courtyard, which echoed with the shouts of men, the whinnying of horses, the ringing of hammers and the bleating of livestock, I was mildly shocked. I marvelled at the castle’s transformation from sleepy family home to hive of warlike activity. Even the strong high tower, the motte, which stood on its own hill behind and above the bailey courtyard, was buzzing with activity as a stream of men carrying heavy burdens struggled up the steep earthen ramp to the small iron-bound oak door. The tower was the castle’s last line of defence: when an enemy threatened to breach the palisade of the bailey, the occupants of the castle would retreat to the tower. It was always well provisioned and kept stocked with a vast supply of fresh water and ale in giant barrels. Now it was being used as a storehouse for the baggage necessary for the great adventure and it was packed with sheaves of arrows, bundles of swords and bow staves, sacks of grain, barrels of wine, boxes of boots, bales of blankets… everything that would be needed to feed, clothe and arm four hundred soldiers on a two thousand mile journey to the Holy Land.
The food, whose smell had been tantalising me, finally arrived. Robin was still absent, which concerned me as I was bursting to deliver my news to him and I hoped he had not been called away on some errand before I had the chance to speak to him. However, despite his high-backed chair being empty, the meal was carried in by a train of servants and placed on the long table with little ceremony, and we all fell to eating with a will. The evening repast consisted of vast tureens of hot thick vegetable soup, or pottage, and platters of bread, cheese, butter and fruit — but no meat. It was Lent, and while we at Kirkton ignored the usual religious strictures on cheese and eggs, we did normally forgo meat for form’s sake. Robin cared nothing for these matters and always ate what he wished.
I filled a wooden bowl with the thick, wonderful-smelling soup and with a horn spoon in one hand and a chunk of fresh bread in the other I began to fill my growling belly.
‘God’s hairy backside,’ roared a deep familiar voice, ‘our wandering minstrel has returned!’ I looked up to see that Little John was saluting me with a huge, old-fashioned horn of ale. ‘And you’re sucking up that soup like you haven’t eaten for a week! What news, Alan?’