‘How does the King?’ I asked him as we stood side by side, looking up the slope at the gap in the wall, which was still shrouded with billowing clouds of rock dust.
‘Not well, Alan, not well, indeed.’ Robin was one of the few barons who had been allowed to visit him in his tent: the King wished to keep his injury a secret from the troops for fear of their losing heart. It had not worked; despite his seclusion, every man in the army knew that the King had been badly wounded, and the sense of raw, vindictive anger among the ranks against the defenders of the castle beat like a feverish pulse.
‘He tried to pull the quarrel out himself,’ Robin continued, speaking quietly in a toneless voice in the hope that he would not be overheard by the nearby men. ‘But he made a mess of it and the shaft snapped off in his hand. Then he called a surgeon, that fat little butcher Enguerrand, who hacked him about something awful – it was dark by then, and Enguerrand was, of course, drunk – but after digging about in his shoulder for most of an hour he managed to get the quarrel head out and bandage him up. But it’s not healing cleanly; the rot has begun and the smell of corruption in that tent is foul enough to make you gag.’
‘The King has been sorely wounded before,’ I said, ‘and has eventually recovered to full health.’
‘Several times, yes, he has, so let us all hope …’ Robin’s words were cut off by a trumpet blast. ‘Time to go, Alan; see you inside the castle – and be a good fellow and take the Master alive, if you can; beat him, maim him, cut him up as much as you like, but alive, if you please: I want to have a talk with him before we send him to Hell.’
Robin strode out in front of the troops. He turned to face them, raised his sword in the air: ‘In the name of God and our King – for Richard! For England! Forward!’ And the Locksley men cheered and, led by Robin’s nimble feet, with a deep, angry roaring, they charged up that slope.
It may sound absurd, but almost the hardest part of that assault for me was the run up that very steep, grassy hill, and the scramble up the rocky staircase to the breach. Although my wounded chest was long healed, my wind was still not as sound as I would have liked and I found myself breathless, red-faced and panting when I eventually reached the breach in the wall. The Westbury men and I were not in the vanguard, thank the Lord; and we ran hard, but my lungs felt as if they were on fire, and by the time we reached the gap in the fortifications, a flood of angry Locksley men had swept it clear of enemies. As I stepped over the broken rubble of the wall and down into the tiny courtyard, still breathing heavily, Thomas was at my side, carrying a crossbow he had acquired from somewhere, and a loose cloud of Westbury men were all around me. The first thing I saw was that almost all the fight had gone out of the garrison. Enemy men-at-arms were lying dead in bloody heaps, and others were attempting to surrender or being cut down by furious Locksley men; on the far side of the courtyard a lone knight, Viscount Aimar himself, I believe, battled against a mob of green-clad men. He killed one of our fellows with an elegant backhand, and then was himself overrun by a mass of stabbing, hacking, yelling fiends. To my right, at the foot of the round tower, a scrum of men were fighting outside a small door that led into the castle’s last redoubt. I saw flashing white surcoats adorned with a blue cross: and for the first time that day the battle-lust surged through my veins. I rushed forward, shouldered a Locksley man out of the way and engaged the nearest Knight of Our Lady. He snarled at me and cut; I blocked, feinted, ducked a blow and swept him off his feet with a sword strike to the ankles, and the Westbury men swarmed over him, stabbing down with awful efficiency. The other knight was very fast on his feet; he was already inside the tower and was desperately trying to swing the heavy wooden door shut in my face.
But I was faster.
I took a quick step towards him, punched the cross-guard of Fidelity into his face, crunching teeth and knocking him to the floor, then I stabbed down hard, plunging my blade through his heaving belly. And I was inside the door, in the tower, climbing and glaring upwards, the blood rushing hot in my veins. A stone, spiral staircase turning to the right, a dim form above me. I stepped back just in time as a spear clattered on the stone steps in front of me. Then I started to climb again. My sword arm, my right arm, was impeded by the central core of the spiral stairway, but this was not so for the knight above me; he smashed a blow down on me, aiming for my head, and I caught it on my shield, feeling the manic force of the strike right down through my spine. I was knocked back two steps, and looked upwards to see the mad, gleaming black eyes of Sir Eustace de la Falaise staring down at me through the gloom. He had a sword in his right hand, an axe in his left, and he smiled happily as he took a step down towards me, and unleashed a ravaging storm of blows from both hands.