An Extract from King’s Man

Outside the walls of Nottingham Castle, March 1194

It was cold; a thick frost had turned the black scar of land between the gatehouse and the first houses of the town into a dull smear of grey. I peered out of the side door of a large wool warehouse on the edge of the grey strip of frosty-burnt ground in front of the eastern wall of the Outer Bailey. It was perhaps half an hour before dawn, and the first inkling of paleness was visible in the sky behind me. I could see my breath steaming in white plumes in the cold air. At my back were Hanno, and Thomas – who was unhappy because I would not allow him to join in the assault on the left flank, the southern side of the massive wooden gatehouse. I knew that it would be a hard, gory slog of an assault – we all did – and perhaps sentimentally, I wanted to spare Thomas, who was still no more than twelve years old, the bloodbath that was about to take place. He was disappointed with me, of course, and letting me know this by his quietness that frosty morning, but his silence was not irksome; he did not sulk. He had assisted me to dress for battle with a smooth efficiency, helping me to wriggle into my old patched mail coat, which I wore over a padded aketon; fitting my helmet on neatly – a plain steel cap with a nasal guard – and strapping it under my chin. My long leather gauntlets, with sewn-in steel finger and forearm guards, had been waxed and oiled until they were supple, and so had my sword belt, with Goody’s silver Christmastide buckle at the front securing it around my waist, cinched tight to take some of the weight of the mail coat. Thomas had cleaned and sharpened my old sword and oiled the misericorde that now sat in its sheath in my boot. I had never been so pampered before going into battle, and I found the sensation a pleasant one. When Thomas handed me my shield, which he had freshly whitened with a thick layer of lime wash and repainted with Robin’s device of the black and grey snarling wolf, I was ready to fight – ready save for the cold, empty feeling in my belly when I dwelt too much on the task we were about to attempt.

I looked behind me into the gloomy interior of the warehouse. The side walls and the far end of the building, twenty paces away, were stacked high with bales of wool; but I was looking at the men. Ninety-four of Robin’s picked men-at-arms filled the space behind me, each wearing a long dark surcoat of green cloth over whatever oddments of armour that he had. Most of the men were watching me, waiting for the signal to proceed; but a few were checking their blades, or the leather straps of their shields, and some were on their knees, uttering a last prayer before we went in to battle. I looked at my company, former outlaws, thieves, runaways and ne’re-do-wells, even some men, I noticed, who had once served in Murdac’s ranks, and I tried to appear unconcerned about the coming slaughter. They were all good men, brave men, I thought to myself, whatever they had done in the past. All was now forgiven. I did not feel worthy to command them. There wasn’t a man in that warehouse who was not afraid; but I knew that every man there would rather die than show it.

We had managed to commandeer five wooden thatching ladders, each more than twenty-five foot long, from the town of Nottingham. And the two men assigned to carry each one were closest behind me. They were unwieldy things to transport, and the men carrying them were the best in the company, men I knew personally from Sherwood or Outremer. They were men that I trusted with my life and, in truth, all our lives were in their hands.

Hanno leaned forward to me, and said in a low voice: ‘Do not worry, Alan. It is good. We can do this.’ And I nodded at him, managed a smile, and said. ‘I know, Hanno, I know. I’m sure it will be a wonderful success.’

I was lying: I was nervous and very far from sure that we could achieve what we had been asked to do that morning. I looked out of the door once again at the gatehouse, a great boxy shape, black in the half-light before dawn, half as high again as the gate that it guarded. We were going to attempt to run towards it, enduring the spears and arrows and crossbow bolts of hundreds of enemy soldiers, prop the thatching ladders up against the palisade, climb up into the teeth of a determined opposition, get over the wall, and fight our way down to the ground and somehow survive long enough to open the gate and allow our mounted troops to gallop into the Outer Bailey and capture it.

It seemed ludicrous; a method of self-immolation, not a serious battle plan. But, if it was that, at least we would not be dying alone. Little John and another hundred or so of Robin’s men would be attacking the north side of the gatehouse at the same time as us. I looked north, up the slope of the hill along the grey frosted line of the burnt area, at the singed line of houses and shops that now marked the new edge of Nottingham Town, and heard a horn sound a single long blast in the chilly air. As I watched I saw a huge warrior, bareheaded and with bright yellow hair in two long, thick braids on either side of his head, stepping out from a big house sixty paces away. He carried a huge double-bladed axe and an old-fashioned round shield. He lifted the axe and shouted something loud and rough and joyful and more men spilled out of the house, carrying their long slender ladders.

I turned into the warehouse, meeting dozens of pairs of expectant eyes, and said in a loud clear voice. ‘Right, this is it. We form up outside, now.’ And then I stepped out into the grey dawn, turned to face the gatehouse and commended my soul to God and Saint Michael.

The enemy in the gatehouse had not all been sleeping; their sentries were alert. There were shouts and angry cries, and whistle and trumpet blasts as the garrison of the wooden fortification was roused as fast as possible from their bed rolls. A hundred and fifty yards away, heads began to appear on the palisade, little round black shapes, clustering thick as elderberries on the crenellated wooden walls. A single crossbow twanged from the gatehouse, a sergeant shouted something angrily, and a bolt whizzed past a good twenty yards to the right of my waiting men, who were by now formed up in a loose mob behind me, the ladder-bearers to the fore.

And then there was more movement to my right. Robin stepped out from between two houses, slightly up the slope from our position, and a great mass of men followed him – archers, more than a hundred of them, all in uniform dark green, but few with more than a scrap or two of armour. They shuffled into a loose line, two ranks deep, between my position and Little John’s men, with Robin at the southern end. My lord raised a hand in cheery greeting to me, put a horn to his lips and blew two short notes.

And the archers began to shoot.

With a great creaking of wood, a hundred men pulled back the hempen string on their great yew bows, and leaned far back and loosed. Up, up, almost vertically, the arrows climbed into the grey dawn sky, and then seemed to pause for a moment at the top of their parabola, and hang in the air, before plunging down, down, the shafts falling on to the gatehouse and into the bailey beyond it, and slamming deep into logs of the building and into the men sheltering behind the wooden walls, driving down into cowering bodies like a solid, killing rain.

Even from more than a hundred paces away, I could hear the cries of pain from the defenders and the lethal yards of ash wood, tipped with four-inch long, needle-sharp bodkin points cascaded down upon them, punching through the padded jerkins of the crossbowmen, and plunging deep into mail-clad shoulders and chests of the enemy men-at-arms with awful force. Robin’s archers had waited a few moments to check their range, and then they hauled back their bows once more and loosed another storm of wood and steel up high in the sky to fall like the wrath of God upon the enemy. And a third wave of death swept up, seemingly swallowed up by a pale and hungry sky, before being spat down venomously on the defenders below.

It was time to go.