‘… and we are pretty much down to our last barrel of flour,’ Tuck said. ‘The water and ale are holding out, of course, but then I’ve been rationing from the beginning of the siege…’
Murdac’s men, I gathered from Tuck’s happy prattle, had arrived a month ago, unheralded, and had immediately launched an attack on the castle. But the garrison of forty men that Robin had left behind to protect his wife and child had been supplemented by a force of another two score menat-arms who owed allegiance to William of Edwinstowe, Robin’s elder brother.
The combined force inside Kirkton had managed to fight off two determined assaults and then Murdac’s forces, bloodied but unbeaten, had set up camp in the fields around the castle and seemed to be attempting to starve the inhabitants of Kirkton into submission.
‘Lord Edwinstowe is here?’ I asked Tuck.
‘He is now snoring like summer thunder through yonder door,’ my friend replied, nodding at the entrance to the solar at the end of the great hall, Robin and Marie-Anne’s private chamber.
‘And Marie-Anne?’ I asked Tuck, incredulous.
‘She has taken up residence in the tower. It’s the safest place for her if the enemy ever gets into the castle. She is in good health and quite comfortable, she tells me, and it allows her to keep an eye on the stores, which we have stockpiled there. Her little boy Hugh’s in fine fettle, too.’
‘Robin’s brother William threw Marie-Anne out of her own bed, in her own castle…’ I was beginning to feel the stirrings of rage at this insult to my master’s lady, who was now forced to sleep in the motte, the stout square wooden tower that loomed over the bailey. It was the castle’s last line of defence, and a powerful two-storey fortification, situated on a great mound of earth, which a handful of good men could hold against many enemies if the bailey was overrun, but it was a rough-and-ready structure, built with an eye on military strength, not comfort, and it was no place for a gently born lady to reside.
‘Peace, Alan, be at peace,’ said Tuck. ‘Lord Edwinstowe is the master of this castle — for the time being. Doubtless things will change now that Robin has returned. It was right that he should have the master’s chamber. He saved us, you know; without his men-at-arms we would have been overrun when Murdac attacked. It is true that the siege has been quiet for a while now — bar the odd exchange of arrows and insults — but it would not do for him to be offended. It is his men who keep the enemy beyond our walls.’
I could see his point, yet a part of me still wished to kick open the door of Marie-Anne’s chamber and drag the sleeping baron out into the courtyard. But I said nothing and merely shot a hot glare at the solar door.
‘You’re different, Alan,’ said Tuck. ‘You’ve changed since I last saw you; become harder, more wrathful. But never mind all that, tell me, how was the Holy Land, was it wonderful? Did you pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? Did you feel the living presence of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?’ Tuck’s eyes were shining; he had wanted badly to join us on the Great Pilgrimage and it was only out of a strong sense of loyalty to Robin that he had remained in Kirkton to watch over Marie-Anne. I was glad that he had stayed; whatever he said about William of Edwinstowe, I knew that it had been Tuck who kept my lady safe in Robin’s absence.
‘It was… hard. Very tiring; exhausting and bloody, and many good men died for nothing… But I will tell you all about it later,’ I told Tuck.
‘Of course,’ he said, bowing his head in acquiescence. ‘We have more urgent matters to attend to. Where is Robin now? What are his plans?’
So while Tuck bustled about and fetched me a mug of ale and a plate of bread and salty ham, I told him of Robin’s plans for lifting the siege. When I had finished explaining how a small force could defeat a much larger army, and exactly what Robin wished us to do to help him accomplish this, Tuck sat back, his mouth slightly open, and said with genuine awe in his voice: ‘That man has the Devil in his marrow bones. It is an excellent plan, Alan, and it might even work, but it is not a scheme that could ever have been devised by a good Christian. I pray for his soul, I truly do, for I fear that in the next world Robin will burn for eternity.’
He ran over the details once again with me, but my tiredness was overcoming me like a sickness. It was nearly dawn and I could barely keep my eyes open when, finally, Tuck said: ‘So this will all take place at midnight tonight?’
I nodded, yawning.
‘Well, God have mercy on their souls. But you must rest, Alan.’ And he lent me an old blanket and guided me over to a pile of greasy furs at the side of the hall, where only moments later I slid down into grateful slumber.
I awoke in broad daylight, with a vision of loveliness, a blonde angel standing over me. Her behaviour, though, was far from angelic. She was booting me none too gently in the ribs with a dainty kidskin slipper and crying: ‘Alan, Alan, get up. I’ve been waiting ages for you to wake. This is no time to be a slug-a-bed — get up! I want to talk to you. I’ve got so much to tell you!’
As I knuckled the sleep from my eyes, I saw that it was Goody, more properly Godifa, Marie-Anne’s ward and an old friend from my days as an outlaw. She must have been nearly fifteen, I calculated swiftly, an age when many country maids would have already been betrothed, even married with children, and she was a rare beauty: fine gold hair, tied in twin plaits, framed a sweet oval face with a small, short nose, and a healthy blush of pink in the cheek. Her eyes were the violet-blue of a thistle in bloom, and her loveliness almost took my breath away. I realized I was gawping at her, trying to find words of greeting and failing.
‘Stop flapping your mouth at me like a freshly caught fish and come and have some breakfast,’ she said. ‘I want to hear everything, absolutely everything about your adventures in the Holy Land. Is it true that the Saracens are cannibals? I’ve been told that they eat the raw flesh of the Christian children that they capture…’
I silenced her foolish questions and salved my own inexplicable speechlessness with an embrace. For a moment, when I put my big clumsy arms around her, she melted into my body, before struggling away and crying, ‘Oh, Alan, you smell — in fact, you stink! You stink of blood, sweat and worse, and… Oh, you smell of men. You must have a bath immediately…’
I was suddenly aware of the clothes I stood in, still stiff and creased from having been soaked and then slept in; my face was crusted with dried mud and, looking down at my fingers, I saw that they were still spattered with the young sentry’s dried blood. When I pushed a dirty hand through it, I could feel that my cropped blond hair was standing in stiff spikes on my crown.
‘I have travelled three thousand weary miles to get here, suffering untold hardship and danger in foreign lands, not to mention killing a man and sneaking through the enemy’s camp last night — I think it would be strange if I came out of all that smelling of rose water!’
I was stung, just a little, to have this gorgeous, sensestrumming girl complaining of my soldierly odour. Although I knew I did not look my best, I wanted to be treated as a returning hero, a victorious warrior, not a malodorous vagabond.
‘Anyway, I have no time to waste splashing about like a silly little girl in soapy suds and hot water; I must speak to Lord Edwinstowe without delay.’
It was Goody’s turn to pretend to be offended. ‘Do only little girls wash? Very well, sir, I shall inform His Lordship that a certain uncouth and very smelly soldier-boy requires his company immediately.’ And she stuck her tongue out at me and swept away. But for the mocking tongue, she would have appeared quite the grand, well-born lady, and I realized that she had changed in more than just her looks.
I fetched my own breakfast from the kitchens, and spent half an hour idling in the bailey courtyard chewing on a dry crust and looking about me in the September sunshine like a yokel at a county fair. It was hard to believe, given the placid yet bustling air of the place, that outside the wooden walls of the bailey were hundreds of enemies intent on our destruction. But the bailey was rather full, I noticed; I assumed that all the people in the surrounding villages and smallholdings had been gathered into the castle to keep them safe from Murdac’s pillaging men-at-arms. I was wondering if any of the peasant men here could fight worth a damn when I noticed two boys scuffling in a ring of their cheering fellows. One was short and dark, about ten or eleven, the other tall, an adolescent, almost a man. The match looked so uneven that I was sure the small, dark boy would be badly injured. And it crossed my mind to intervene, give the taller boy a cuff or two and send him on his way. Instead, to my surprise, after ducking a couple of haymakers from the tall one, the dark boy grabbed his opponent’s right arm as it flashed past his head, tucked his right shoulder into the tall boy’s right armpit, pulled down, hunched over and hurled him on to the packed mud of the courtyard floor. The tall adolescent was as surprised as I was. And while the little dark lad pulled the dazed fellow back to his feet — I could see that it was not a serious fight, mere playful rough-housing — I saw Tuck making his way into the throng of chattering boys and shooing them towards a stable-shed that had been converted into a schoolhouse. As the flock of boys passed me, I called out to Tuck and beckoned him over.