Then Mercadier spoke: ‘You have saved one worthless old monk, and killed one of my prime men-at-arms.’ His voice had no emotion in it whatsoever – neither sorrow at his man’s death nor anger at my interference in his actions. ‘I do not think it is a fair exchange.’
‘It is not,’ I said. I was angry then, and I let it show. I jerked my left thumb behind me. ‘This is a man of God, a decent fellow who does no harm but merely prays for all our souls; your man was a cowardly brute, of no more worth than a wild animal. It is certainly not a fair exchange, it is a great bargain for mankind.’
Mercadier said nothing, just stared at me with his cold, brown eyes. I shrugged and, having nothing else to say on the matter myself, nodded to Hanno and turned Ghost around and trotted down the gentle slope to rejoin Thomas and the road north.
The monk’s name was Dominic and he was a deeply pious individual, I soon discovered, even for a man of the cloth. When I tried to question him as to which religious order he belonged to, he mumbled something about the Holy Trinity. I couldn’t make out whether he was praying or trying to tell me something. The poor man’s feet were both very badly burnt, indeed, he was almost out of his mind with pain, and I half-expected him to die as we bounced down the rough track away from that quiet valley and Mercadier’s wolfish men. I had no wish to add to his pains by trying to force information out of him while he was so grievously injured.
When we arrived at the King’s column an hour later, I left him in the charge of some of the half-fit Locksley men who were responsible for our baggage train, spare horses and personal possessions. A strange wise woman named Elise, who had followed Robin from Normandy to the Holy Land and now back to France, undertook to treat his wounds and make sure that he was comfortably ensconced on a baggage wagon as the column trundled along.
Having rescued him, I did not know what to do with Dominic. His shrine had been burnt to ruins shortly after I had ridden away from that valley. I saw the still-smoking charred remains as I rode past it again the next day, delivering yet another message between the King and the Earl of Locksley, and presumed that Mercadier’s men had done it as some sort of revenge for the loss of their red-headed routier. I would not have cared, were it not for the fact that I now had an aged monk on my hands, one who could not walk and had no way of fending for himself. I did not know which high churchman, which prior or abbot, was his lord, nor which monastery he belonged to, and had not had time to visit him and ask him. For the moment, I thought, he could stay under Elise’s care and if necessary, we could find a position for him somewhere in the army; as a chaplain’s assistant, perhaps.
I shoved that thought aside. We were approaching Tours: Robin’s men had been given the task of reconnoitring the city and preparing it for a visit from their rightful liege lord, King Richard. The townsmen must now be very worried, Robin confided in me, as they had been a leaf’s thickness away, on several occasions, from siding with King Philip. The flirting between the merchants of the town and the envoys from Paris had been as falsely coy as the relations between a willing milkmaid and a lusty plough boy, the way Robin explained it.
In truth, Tours was not one town, but two. To the east was the older settlement, containing the castle of Tours, the cathedral and the archbishop’s palace – this was on the north bank of the River Cher, a tributary of the Loire. On the Loire river itself, to the west, further north and clustered around the Abbey of St Martin, was the new town of Tours, known as Châteauneuf. Made wealthy by the lucrative trade down the Loire to the sea, Châteauneuf was walled, neat, opulent and filled with tall timber-framed houses. It was a distinct settlement. The two towns of Tours were separated by fields of green wheat and neatly ordered vineyards. Having crossed the Loire by an impressive stone bridge, it was here that Robin and his men made their camp, directly between the two halves of the city, in a position to threaten either one with siege or assault.
‘The townsfolk are wonderfully nervous, Alan, I can smell it,’ said Robin, after he had summoned me to his newly pitched green woollen tent in the middle of a flattened wheat field. Robin rarely used the tent on campaign, preferring whenever possible to sleep under the night sky, but it was an impressive rig, embroidered with scarlet and gold thread at the seams and constructed of thick, soft woollen cloth of the finest quality. Robin himself was dressed in his grandest clothes – black silk hose embroidered with gold, ending in elegant kidskin slippers and an emerald silk calf-length tunic over the top. His head bore a fine black hat with a jaunty peacock’s feather on the side; a golden chain adorned his neck and his fingers displayed half a dozen rings of silver and gold, studded with fine jewels. He was unarmed except for a dainty pearl-handled eating knife next to the pouch at his waist. He rarely dressed this way – and never on campaign. And I realized that he was dressing to play the part of the great magnate, the noble earl. I also had the feeling that he was intending to use the tent for a small piece of theatre. The sides of the tent had been raised and buttoned back to allow cool breezes to temper the warm June day and, from my stool at the campaign table in the centre of the space, I could, with a slight turn of my head, clearly see both parts of the town of Tours.