Warlord(49)
As I lay on my pallet thinking hard, I found that there was something digging into my back. I fished around behind me in the blankets and pulled out a hunting horn. In the guttering light of a tallow candle, I examined its long, twisted shape, the sheen of the polished cow’s horn, and the elegant silver mouthpiece – it was the horn that Robin had given me on the march through the Perche, telling me to sound it if I needed any help while I was flushing out phantom ambushers. In my contemplative mood, I turned this object over in my hands. In a way, I thought, it symbolized Robin himself: elegant, even beautiful, a noble shape yet twisted, and dependent on silver to make it work.
I chuckled to myself: these were not thoughts that I would have been happy to articulate aloud to my lord himself. I hung the horn by its leather strap on the pommel of my saddle, which was on its stand beside the bed, and wrenched my mind back to the subject at hand.
Someone – presumably the ‘man you cannot refuse’ or one of his agents – had killed three men of God to prevent me from discovering any more about my father. And it had worked. I had found out little enough about his time in Notre-Dame and his expulsion from Paris. All that I had learned from Heribert was that whatever had been stolen had been ‘wondrous’ – a relic of some sort, perhaps, a drop of milk from the breast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a fragment of the True Cross, a hair from John the Baptist’s beard or some such treasure; whatever it was, it was certainly something that the Cardinal was very keen to have returned to him. It seemed clear that the candlesticks, however valuable, were not the real objects of the theft after all. The relic was – but why should a relic be so important that someone was prepared to kill three men of God to keep me ignorant?
At that point I fell asleep.
The next morning the whole camp was alive with the news: the French King was withdrawing his forces. Philip was running away! I had barely had time to splash my face with water from a basin held by Thomas before Robin poked his handsome head through the flap in my tent and said: ‘Come on, slug-a-bed, we are summoned to the King. Get moving!’
The King was in a fine mood that morning, full of bounce and energy, issuing orders in rapid succession to his clerks and to various knights and barons who appeared briefly in his grand pavilion and then hurried away to do his bidding. When Robin and I presented ourselves, the King wasted no time in pleasantries, and just said to Robin: ‘The Marshal met a strong force of Philip’s best knights early this morning, and while he took a mauling, he broke them, and drove them off. They are all running now. Philip’s entire army is on the run. Get after him, Locksley – your men are the vanguard. Harry him, chase him, and don’t stop for anything. We’ve a chance to capture the King himself – and end his ambitions for good. But I need you to be quick. Go on, catch him for me. I’ll be following you, hard on your heel with the rest of the army, but for the love of God, go now!’
It was not hard to follow the retreating French army; they withdrew up the main road towards Chateâudun, heading north-east and roughly parallel with the River Loir, leaving a broad trail of debris in their wake. Robin had left his bowmen in camp to pack up and follow us as best they could, and I had left Thomas there with similar duties; on this pursuit my lord took with him only his light cavalry – more than a hundred well-mounted lancers – and we moved fast. The road, a wide, gently meandering dusty track through thick woodland, with a broad swathe on either side of it, had been much disturbed by the passage of thousands of feet and hooves – and it was littered with equipment and possessions abandoned by the French army in their haste to escape. As we galloped along, we even passed a few sick and wounded men and women lying by the side of the road, but we paid them no mind: we had our orders to harry the enemy, chase them hard, and not to stop for anything. We travelled as fast as we were able, in a great dusty, sweaty, jingling mass of men and horses, stopping once an hour to let the horses breathe and to snatch a mouthful of water to wash out our caked throats.
I was puzzled by King Philip’s apparent cowardice. Why, I asked Robin – at one of these brief pauses, when we were about six or seven miles north-east of Vendôme near the hamlet of Fréteval – would Philip bring his army all this way south to confront Richard, then run away with his tail between his legs after only a brief skirmish with the Marshal?
‘I believe he was trying to intimidate us,’ said Robin, wiping his sweating face with a linen cloth, and taking a swallow of water from a leather bag. We were all dismounted and gathered in a clearing in the forest at the side of the road, the empty thoroughfare winding on before and behind us. ‘A big battle is a very uncertain affair,’ my lord continued. ‘It should be the very last resort of any commander to commit his men to the hazards of a full-pitched conflict – it’s like rolling the dice to determine whether you live or die, not something anyone who has any other option would choose to do. I know you would prefer to believe that warfare is all about glory, valour, great deeds, and the thunder of charging horsemen, but, Alan, nobody wants to get killed or maimed, or captured and made a pauper with a crippling ransom. In war, you manoeuvre; look for advantage; try to find a situation in which you have the upper hand. And if you are wise, you avoid battle altogether, unless you are absolutely certain to win.’