Warlord(56)

I tried to match his merriment, but I felt as if a dark storm cloud had crept over the sun. The King carried on speaking, oblivious to my sudden discomfort. ‘Well, Sir Alan, because I am an exceedingly kind and generous lord – and because I have this very morning heard that the French are seeking to negotiate a truce with us – I shall grant your request to depart, and I will go so far as to wish you luck in your quest. May you return soon to my side, wiser and more content with your place among my best men.’

I managed to make my bow, and leave the royal presence with some dignity. But my head was reeling like a drunkard’s after downing a barrel of wine.

Robin had urged the King to summarily hang Murdac! Robin had silenced Murdac and prevented him from speaking to me about the orders to kill my father. A monstrous, unthinkable idea was growing in my mind. Robin himself was the ‘man you cannot refuse’. Robert Odo, Earl of Locksley, my liege lord and master, my dear friend and mentor – Robin Hood was the man who had ordered my father’s death.





Part Two





Chapter Eleven



I have shown these pages to my grandson Alan and, while he read them without pausing and with seeming enjoyment, he is a little bemused by them, I think. He has difficulty in seeing the young warrior that I once was, valiantly defending castles for kings and skirmishing with bands of murderous knights, in the white-capped, dry stick of a man I am now. I believe that he feels I must be playing some sort of trick on him, perhaps weaving too much romance in with the truth. But he tells me that he likes the tale, so far.

‘I am glad that you went to seek vengeance for your father,’ he told me gravely. ‘That is what I would have done – it is a knight’s bounden duty to protect his honour.’

Why is vengeance so appealing, particularly to the young? There is no material reward that springs from it; a man is not richer, or healthier, or even happier as a result of it – quite often the reverse. Why does a young man’s heart beat faster at the thought of bloody vengeance taken for a hurt received? Why do we thrill at a tale of revenge? I know that we do, or at least that most men do; so many of the great lays and stories of knights and warriors are built around this idea. Is it because all men have been wronged at some point in their lives but few have ever received just recompense for their hurts? Is that why the male heart eternally thirsts for vengeance? Perhaps.

I remember on one occasion, when I was newly come to Robin’s band of outlaws and about the same age as my grandson, my lord spoke to me of the virtue of vengeance. I had been weeping over my father’s death and Robin had spoken to me quite brutally: ‘A man does not snivel when a member of his family has been murdered,’ he said. ‘A man does not cry like a babe, seeking pity from those around him for a wrong he has suffered. He takes his revenge. He makes the guilty men, the men who took that kinsman’s life, weep in pain; he makes their widows sob themselves to sleep at night. Else he is no man.’

As a youngster, I had absorbed Robin’s simple but savage message, I had thought on it often in my private moments, and it had become part of my warrior’s creed.

‘And was the Earl of Locksley really the “man you cannot refuse”, Grandpa?’ young Alan asked, when he had finished reading the parchments. ‘And did you ever have your vengeance on him?’

‘You will have to wait until I have written my whole story down to find out,’ I told him.

‘But I must return to my duties at Kirkton tomorrow,’ said young Alan, quite cast down. I confess I was slightly pleased by his sorrowful tone; but then, what storyteller does not delight in delaying the pleasure of his audience?

‘You shall read the whole tale on your next visit to your mother – perhaps at Christmastide,’ I said.

‘That is six months or more away,’ protested the boy.

‘As a knight, you must learn to bear a vast degree of suffering without complaint,’ I said, smiling fondly at him. And young Alan, to his credit, tried very hard not to sulk.


Within an hour of receiving permission from the King, I was on the road. I was heading for Rouen, Richard’s Norman capital, and mounted on Shaitan, with Thomas on his brown rouncey and Hanno reduced to riding a packhorse and leading a mule that bore my possessions, kit and weapons. One should not really ride a costly destrier when merely travelling, but I possessed no other horse, and I would not even contemplate taking one from Robin’s string: I felt the absence of Ghost as an ache in my heart.

I had left the army without speaking to Robin, or any of his men. I could not face him; I was almost certain that he was the ‘man you cannot refuse’ and I knew there would have been bloodshed if I had set eyes on him. My gut roiling with rage and confusion, we took the road west towards Le Mans and I ran over in my mind the workings that had made me believe that my lord, my hero, the man I looked upon as a respected older brother, had, in effect, killed my father.