My bitten finger throbbed from misuse, even though I had strapped it tightly before the battle last night. I looked at my friend a little sourly and I marvelled at his use of the word ‘beautiful’ for such a sordid piece of butchery.
‘What do you mean, nearly perfect?’ I said. ‘I took him down without a sound.’ I was feeling the melancholy humour I always felt after a bout of bloodletting, when the world seemed flat and grey, and my soul was heavy with regret at the men I had killed. My finger was paining me more than a little, too.
‘Ah, Alan, do not mistake me,’ said Hanno, all seriousness now. ‘I am most proud of you — but next time you must take him while he stands, left hand and dagger together’ — he mimed clamping a hand over an invisible victim’s mouth and shoving the blade into the back of his skull at the same time — ‘not use your weight to knock him to the ground, and then kill him while you both roll around like happy pigs fucking in the mud.’
‘Well, next time, I’ll try to do much better,’ I said with a grimace. I was feeling slightly sick at the memory of that bloody murder in the black field. Hanno was a passionate advocate of perfection, endlessly harping on about it: the perfect ale, the perfect woman, the perfect sword blow. He also had no ear at all for when I was being sarcastic.
‘This is the correct spirit, Alan,’ said Hanno, nodding earnestly. ‘Each time you perform a task, you must try to do it better than the last time — until it is perfect. I recall my first silent kill… oh, it is many years ago, in Bavaria. I am in the service of Leopold, Duke of Austria, a great and powerful man, and the orders come down to me from the renowned and most noble knight Fulk von Rittenburg…’
At that moment, I was spared having to hear a story I had heard a dozen times before by the arrival of Robin, still wearing the long dark cloak that had been part of his horse-demon costume the night before, accompanied by Little John and Marie-Anne and a nursemaid who was carrying a small, solemn-looking, slightly pudgy boy — he must have been about two and a half years of age, if my calculations were correct.
Robin stopped in front of the prisoners and quietly drew his sword. His face was as bleak as a full gibbet in mid-winter. Behind him I could see Marie-Anne looking strangely frightened and confused. John, on the other hand, looked unconcerned and he shot me a cheery wink.
‘Get them on their feet,’ Robin said curtly to the archer guards. And while the prisoners were roughly pulled into a standing position, Robin studied them, his eyes as coldly metallic as the naked blade in his hand.
‘You came to this place and laid siege to my castle with your master, the coward who calls himself Sir Ralph Murdac, seeking to murder my servants and despoil my lands, while I was away fighting for Christendom in the Holy Land. Is this not true?’
The bound men said nothing, shuffling their feet and staring at the packed-earth floor of the bailey. One fellow began to weep silently. Robin continued: ‘And yet did not His Holiness Pope Celestine declare that a man’s lands and estates are under the protection of Mother Church while he takes part in a holy pilgrimage? To attack such a man’s property is to break the Truce of God, which is a grave sin, as despicable as attacking Church property itself, is it not?’
The men remained silent. Robin paused for a beat, and then went on: ‘And so, by God’s holy law, by the law of His Holiness the Pope, you all richly deserve death for your crimes outside these walls. Do you not?’
I was privately amused that my master, a man who I knew did not have the slightest allegiance to the Pope in Rome, or any high Christian churchman for that matter, should use this law as a justification, I assumed, for executing these men. Get on with it, I thought to myself. If you have decided to kill them, get it done. Don’t give them a long sermon to take with them to their graves.
‘But what angers me more than a cowardly attack on my lands while I was fighting the good fight in Outremer,’ Robin continued, ‘is that your master has cast suspicion on the honour of my lady wife, the Countess of Locksley.’ Robin’s gaze lashed the cowed men, many of whom were now mumbling prayers under their breath, convinced their time on Earth was nearly ended.
‘The coward Murdac claims that Hugh here, my little son,’ Robin emphasized the last word, ‘is not truly my son, but his.’
For more than a year, I knew, Sir Ralph Murdac had been spreading the rumour that he had lain with Marie-Anne and got her with child. The rumours had reached us as far away as the Island of Sicily, and they had made Robin heartsick, and a figure of ridicule, the cuckolded husband — something Robin could not abide. Worse still, the rumours were true. Murdac had lain with Marie-Anne when she was his captive, during Robin’s outlaw days, and although it was surely a forced coupling, the boy was undeniably his. I was shocked that Robin should speak publicly about these intensely private and shameful matters. Even I, one of his closest men, had never dared to speak of it to him. But it seemed he was now determined to make the subject an open one.
‘Before the Virgin, does any man here support the liar Murdac’s claim, and say that my boy Hugh is his whelp?’
The prisoners stared at the little boy sitting quietly in his nursemaid’s arms. The boy stared back with his huge pale blue eyes from under a mop of jet hair. God forgive me for saying this, but he was the very image of Murdac, a miniature Sir Ralph — and every man here could see it. Still nobody said a word.
Fast as a cut snake, Robin lunged forward with his sword, sinking the blade a foot deep into the naked belly of the nearest prisoner, who screamed in pain and collapsed bleeding and whimpering to the floor, clutching his punctured midriff. Even though I believed that Robin meant to kill them all, I was as surprised as any man in that courtyard by the suddenness and callousness of his strike.
Robin held the sword up towards the morning sky, the unfortunate prisoner’s bright blood trickling down the central channel of the blade towards the hilt. ‘I will be answered,’ my master said quietly, his voice ice-hard. ‘And so I ask you again: Does any man here maintain Sir Ralph’s claim that this is not my son?’
There was an immediate chorus of ‘No, my lord!’ and ‘By my faith, he is your son, sir!’ and similar answers from the prisoners. The man who had been stabbed gave a groaning cry, a little writhe and, mercifully, appeared to pass out from the pain.
But one of the standing prisoners took a half step forward. He was a handsome man, tall and proud. ‘I will not lie,’ he said, looking directly at Robin, matching his stare. ‘I will not go before the face of God with a lie on my lips. He is not your son — you only need to look at him to see that. Clearly his true father-’ Robin’s sword flashed out and ripped through his throat, and he dropped to his knees, gouting blood between clutching fingers as his precious life-fluid cascaded down his white chest.
‘Anyone else?’ said Robin, as still and cold as a gravestone.
Another loud chorus of ‘No, my lord! He is surely your son!’
‘You all deserve death for your actions over the past few weeks… but I am a merciful man,’ said Robin. And behind him, I saw Little John explode in a loud coughing or choking fit, covering his mouth with one huge hand, his face glowing a bright rosy red as he struggled to regain his composure. My master gave John a stern flick of a glance, and twisted his mouth very slightly in rebuke, then he continued: ‘I am a merciful man, unless I am crossed, and I may, I may now be moved to show mercy. If any man here will swear before God and the Virgin, and all that he holds dear, that he will serve me, and my son Hugh, faithfully, all his days, with all his might and main, I shall grant him his miserable life. Is any man here prepared to take this solemn oath?’