Warlord(123)
He laughed and hugged me, and I broke away and tried to lift up a corner of the bandage that covered the right-hand side of his face. ‘What’s this, John? Did one of your catamites get jealous and try to scratch your eyes out?’
Little John actually blushed. ‘It’s just a scrape; a French knight got lucky with his lance at a tiny dust-up we had near Vernon. It will heal in a day or two.’
‘You’re getting old and fat and slow, John,’ I said, grinning cheekily at him, and poking a finger into his big, steel-hard belly. He nodded in agreement and then, noticing my disappointment – I had been hoping for our usual friendly exchange of insults – he added quickly: ‘Not too ancient to put you across my knee, you, you, you … battle-dodging brat!’
I could tell by this lacklustre response that even Little John was weary to the bone; and I felt a sense of shock and sadness. I had never seen the big man flag before, either physically, mentally or verbally. He had always been a pillar of strength and I was oddly embarrassed, even a touch shamed, by his weakness.
Then I was engulfed by a crowd of familiar smiling faces, my back slapped, my shoulder pounded and my hand shaken vigorously by calloused archers’ paws. Robin’s warriors were making me welcome. Lastly I spotted a mounted figure in red at the back of the sea of green-clad men-at-arms, a tough, lean-faced fighter armed with lance and sword, and bearing a red shield marked with a fierce wild boar device; I almost didn’t recognize my squire Thomas.
He dismounted and greeted me shyly and I saw that he had grown taller in the year since I had seen him. He would never be as tall as me, but I was standing in front of a man – and a formidable one at that.
Robin took me aside: ‘We have work to do, Alan, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Nothing too onerous, but we’re to escort a pack of chattering English masons and a train of building supplies to Château-Gaillard, and we must make haste, the King insists that we make haste.’
Château-Gaillard – the ‘saucy’ castle. Even far away in northern England there had been much talk of the cunningly fashioned, gigantic, apparently impregnable stronghold that Richard was constructing on the very edge of his territory, right on the threshold of the French King’s possessions. Rumours of the vast expenditure in silver that the King had poured into this undertaking had reached my ears, even in such a backwater as Westbury, as had stories about his feud with Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, who had once been his staunchest supporter. The rift had come about because Richard had insisted on building his huge new ‘saucy’ castle on the Archbishop’s land – at a crook on the River Seine in the manor of Andeli – without that venerable prelate’s consent. In protest, the Archbishop had gone so far as to place an interdict on the whole of Normandy, which in effect caused all offices of the Church to cease. But Richard had taken the case to the Pope in Rome and, there, old Celestine had sided with the Lionheart. It had been smoothed over now, and King and Archbishop were reconciled: probably because Richard had promised Walter two other rich manors and the port of Dieppe as a douceur.
‘How go things with the King?’ I asked Robin, as we walked our horses along on the road south from Barfleur at the head of a lumbering train of supplies and a marching double column of burly masons in square white aprons, their precious tools slung in sacks on their broad backs. At first Robin did not answer: he merely frowned down at his hands holding the reins. ‘Between you and me, Alan, last summer was disastrous for Richard,’ said my lord finally, in a low voice. ‘Philip got his tail up, and snatched the advantage in the field several times; and now the French have made alliances with the counts of Boulogne and Flanders …’ These were two very powerful princes, I mused, lords of the rich lands to the north of the French King’s domains, and with very strong trading connections to England, in wool and cloth and wine, mainly. This was bad news indeed.
Robin was still quietly speaking: ‘… and no doubt emboldened by this diplomatic coup, Philip sallied out last July and besieged Aumale. He’s learned a lot from Richard since the early days of the war – he’s still cautious, but when he moves, he moves very fast. And now his siege train is even bigger than ours – with at least two dozen “castle-breakers”, I’m told. It was certainly powerful enough to knock the mortar out of the walls of Aumale. When he heard the news of the attack, Richard rushed up there with too few men, in his usual gallant, reckless fashion; he took Nonancourt, and ravaged Philip’s territories, but when the French King declined to come away from Aumale and fight him like a man in open battle, Richard charged in and attacked him before its walls and got himself very badly mauled. The French were prepared for him, well dug in behind ditches seeded with wooden spikes, and our knights got handed a bloody whipping – our Locksley boys weren’t with Richard that time, mercifully, but the Marshal’s men were badly cut up. Richard had to withdraw and shortly afterwards the Aumale garrison was forced to surrender to Philip. To make matters worse, Richard got himself wounded a few weeks later – shot in the knee outside Gaillon by a crossbowman – and that put him out of action for the rest of the summer.’