I took his remaining hand then: a neat downward blow with Rix’s incomparable sword slicing all the way through like a hot blade through butter, sending his pudgy, ham-like fist thumping to the floor. He was a dead man then, of course: both arms useless and unable to rise on his one wounded leg. And I stood before Milo, between his half-kneeling, blood-drenched massive body and the long heap of his friend, and looked at him for a moment or two, remembering the wrestling match in the list, and the crunching explosion of his boot in my ribs in Germany, and the sight of the torn bodies of Perkin and Adam as we found them on the bank of River Main. He stared back at me with his one mad eye. There was nothing to say, and so I held my tongue: I merely gave him a merciful end, thrusting with both swords simultaneously into his huge breast, the two long blades plunging deeply into the chest cavity, driving towards his engorged ogre’s heart.
‘Not so bad,’ said Hanno from the bed, where he was still holding Ralph Murdac securely around the neck. ‘But very far from perfect. I think the tall, skinny one is going kill you, for sure. You are sloppy, too confident and your attacks are obvious. You must practise, Alan. Practise more. You must try to do better in future.’
I stood there between the corpses of the two men I had just killed, and nodded my head in agreement. Hanno was right, I had not deserved to win the fight against Rix. It was all very well being able to dispatch a half-trained man-at-arms in a mad battlefield melee, but faced with a serious swordsman such as Rix I had very nearly lost my life.
‘Shall I do this one for you?’ said Hanno, jerking his chin down towards Ralph Murdac’s terrified little face. ‘Show you the proper way?’
I shook my head. ‘Just tie his arms and bring him out here on the floor. I want him for myself.’
While Hanno bound Sir Ralph Murdac with his belt and a strip torn off the bed-sheet, tying the man’s elbows behind his back and his wrists to his feet so that he was in a permanent kneeling position, I moved the heavy table up against the door, blocking it. Milo’s roars must have roused some of the garrison, I reckoned, and it would not be long before someone came to investigate. The big table, heavy as it was, would not hold Murdac’s men back for long, but it might give us an extra moment or two to escape. And we were not planning to leave by the door anyway.
I shoved the plain old sword back in my scabbard and came over to where Murdac was kneeling, with Rix’s magnificent, gore-smirched blade in my hand.
Murdac could not take his eyes off the sword. When I held it low before me, he seemed fascinated with it, watching the red blood drip slowly from the tip on to his wooden floor.
‘Stretch out your neck,’ I said. ‘It will make it cleaner, and quicker for you.’ And I lifted the long blade, holding it cocked in two hands above my right shoulder like a professional executioner.
Murdac turned his face up towards me, his pale cheeks stained with tears. ‘Please, Alan,’ he said. ‘Please, do not kill me, I am begging you.’ And the tears rolled down his handsome cheeks, and dripped from his perfect little chin.
‘You deserve it many times over,’ I said, and I had to harden my heart, because the sight of his small quaking, sobbing body was weakening my resolve.
‘Please, Alan. By all that is holy, spare me. Spare my life. I will go away, I will leave England and never return. I have money, you know…’
‘We do not have time for this nonsense,’ said Hanno. ‘Strike, Alan, and let us be on our way.’
I moved my arm back another inch, and Murdac shouted: ‘Wait! Wait — if you kill me Alan D’Alle — which I know is your true name — if you kill me, you will never know the secret of your father’s death.’
I rocked back on my heels, as if I had been struck a blow. ‘What secret?’ I managed to stammer out. ‘What is this secret?’ I lifted the sword higher.
Just then there was a loud hammering at the door of the chamber, and the sound of rough soldiers’ voices.
‘Alan, we have no time. Strike!’ said Hanno.
There was more hammering on the door, and a man shouted: ‘Sir Ralph, Sir Ralph, is all well with you in there? Constable, are you unharmed?’
‘What is the secret? Tell me now or die.’
‘It concerns your father’s time in Paris. I know the name of the man who ordered his death.’
‘You ordered his death. I know this to be true.’
‘It is true that I ordered him hanged, but I received orders from someone, a very powerful man, a man you cannot refuse. He told me to accomplish your father’s death. Swear before Almighty God and on the Holy Virgin that you will spare me — and I will tell you his name.’
‘Constable — Sir Ralph, are you there? Are you all right?’ the man-at-arms outside the door demanded.
‘Tell them that all is well in here or I will kill you now, I swear that before Almighty God.’
‘All is well,’ shouted Murdac immediately. ‘There is no cause for alarm. Go back to bed!’
The hammering stopped. I saw that Hanno was uncoiling a long thin rope that he had taken from his back-sack — and for a second I wondered if it would be long enough, and strong enough for what I had in mind. We needed a hundred and fifty foot of very strong rope for my plan to succeed. I shrugged off my own back-sack and kicked it over to Hanno.
‘Who is in there with you, Sir Ralph?’ shouted the man from beyond the door.
‘I am with my friends. Go away and cease troubling me with your impudence!’ Murdac sounded convincing. Pleased with his performance, he was nodding and smiling at me in an eager manner.
I swung my hands down in a short hard arc — and smashed the silver pommel of the sword into Murdac’s temple. He gave a soft sigh and flopped to the floor.
‘We are taking him with us,’ I told Hanno. And to his credit, my doughty German friend merely nodded, shrugged and moved off towards the privy, carrying the bundles of rope in his arms.
There are some experiences that are almost too unpleasant to recall, and so I will only briefly tell of the passage down the exit chute of Murdac’s privy. After I had recovered my misericorde — it took a deal of strength to prise if from Rix’s foot bones and the grip of the polished wooden floor — we dropped the unconscious Ralph Murdac down the chute first, after tying him securely to the end of Hanno’s rope and lowering him none too gently through the shit-rimmed hole to a shoulder of sandstone rock thirty feet below. Then, reluctantly, we followed him down.
Our boots sunk deep in crusted ordure, we paused on that foul shoulder a moment before dropping Murdac before us once again, then climbing down the slippery hundred foot or so of sheer cliff to the ground — mercifully, without being seen by the sentries on the castle’s western battlements — all the while trying to make minimal contact with the evil-smelling, slimy sandstone cliff wall. My mind, however, on that noisome descent was split between two equally pressing questions: would the men-at-arms in the castle break into Murdac’s chamber and cut the rope that held us? And what had Murdac meant when he said, ‘I received orders from someone, a very powerful man, a man you cannot refuse.’
Praise be to God: they did not cut the rope, and we reached the ground in safety. All three of us were well befouled, though, by the time we had made it to the bottom. And as we hurried away from the black bulk of the castle, circling round the fish pond and heading north-west towards the King’s pavilion in the deer park with Murdac slung like a sack of turnips over Hanno’s shoulder, I wondered whether it might not be better to bathe and change our clothing before presenting our trussed prize to Richard. But, as it turned out, we were given no choice in the matter. We were stopped by a couple of sentries in the park and shown directly, stinking, into the King’s presence.
Though it must have been nearly three o’clock in the morning, our sovereign was still awake, poring over his plans for the next day’s artillery assault which were set up on a trestle table in the centre of the pavilion. The King shouted for wine, and hot water and towels, and we made a hasty toilet in front of our sovereign lord as he rubbed his hands together with satisfaction and looked down at the bound and helpless Sir Ralph Murdac trussed up like a pedlar’s package in front of him.