The Hostility of Hanno: An Outlaw Chronicles short story Read online

  ‘God save you,’ sang out Alan in French. ‘And what have we here?’

  ‘A miscreant facing just punishment,’ said the vintenar, in that same language.

  ‘And what has the poor fellow done to deserve death?’

  The man laughed bitterly and said, ‘His crimes are far too numerous to list but he will see the face of God today at the Archbishop of Pisa’s orders because he has slain several of His Grace’s followers.’

  Alan watched the noose being pushed over Hanno’s hairless head and the Bavarian, standing halfway up the ladder, looked at him intently, a sly grin on his ugly face. Alan hated that look. It was too expectant; it placed obligation like a lead cope around his young shoulders.

  ‘Friend, will you do me a great boon?’ he said to the vintenar. ‘Will you sell me this man? I have a purse of silver here – three English shillings – which I will gladly exchange for his living body. I will take him away and you and the Archbishop need never see his face again. I swear it. I am bound for England any day now and I will take this fellow with me. He will be gone and you need not trouble your conscience with his death at your hands.’

  ‘His death will not trouble my conscience one jot – this man deserves to die. He is a killer, a murderer many times over. He was born to hang. Did I mention that the men he killed were my brothers? I will watch him hang for their sakes, and for my pleasure.’

  ‘What is your name, friend?’ said Alan softly.

  ‘I am Ignatio Chiavari, at your service,’ said the man, bowing in the saddle.

  ‘I am Alan Dale, a trouvère in the service of the Earl of Locksley,’ replied the Englishman. He thought for a moment about the reputation of the Chiavaris, and of the yellow-faced one he had already met in the tavern at Acre. ‘Tell me, friend,’ he said, ‘are we not all killers, murderers, to one degree or another? Who among us can say that he is without mortal sin, so blameless that he is fit to judge his fellow man? I know that I am not. My sins weigh heavily on me. In the name of mercy, I ask you one more time, give me this man; allow me to purchase his life, to pay with my silver for his sins.’

  ‘What is this murderous villain to you? Why do you pester me on his behalf?’

  ‘So many of my friends have already died – in the struggle against the Saracen, and out of it – on this God-forsaken pilgrimage. The Holy Land has been awash with blood since we came here – perhaps I do not want another corpse on my conscience.’

  ‘That man is already a corpse,’ said Chiavari, and he lifted his voice to the mass of men-at-arms holding Hanno on the ladder. ‘Carry on, Sergeant!’

  ‘Sir, I beg you,’ Alan protested.

  ‘Stand aside, sir,’ said the man, and drew his sword.

  And as Alan watched, appalled, the men-at-arms bundled Hanno off the ladder and into space without the slightest ceremony. The rope went taut as iron as it took the Bavarian’s weight; Hanno’s face began to swell, blood red and then darker; his tongue was forced between his teeth, fat, ugly and purple; and his short legs began to kick futilely at the air.

  Alan said, ‘No!’

  His sword in his hand, he urged Ghost forward. Chiavari moved forward to block his path, cutting out at him with his long blade. Alan blocked the sword blow, purely by instinct, pushing it away, and riposted equally without a moment’s thought, scything his own heavy blade into the man’s unprotected face, crushing his nose and cutting deeply into his head across both his eyes. Chiavari gave a great shout of pain and fell back in the saddle, his face a mass of blood and jelly. He would never see again, but Alan was already past him, Ghost’s muscular body forcing his horse out of the way. The men at-arms scattered before the gelding and its snarling, sword-wielding rider. Alan turned his horse by the gibbet, his right arm licked out, his blade sliced through the rope, and Hanno’s body tumbled to the earth like a sack of dirt.

  Alan circled Ghost around the fallen man, the menace of his long sword keeping the leaderless men-at-arms at a respectful distance. From a dozen yards away, Chiavari, shouting with pain and fear through a bloody mask, urged the men to attack the brutal madman who had just blinded him. But, sensibly, if perhaps ignobly, the men-at-arms kept their distance. Hanno was on his feet by now, tugging at the cut rope around his neck, and Alan extended his left hand. Hanno grasped it with both his bound ones, gripped and leapt up on to the back of Ghost. Alan cursed and cut hard at a man-at-arms who had come too close. The man dodged the blade, staggered back and sprawled on to his backside. They were clear of the crowd. Alan put spurs to Ghost’s sides and they galloped away.

  ***

  The Archbishop’s men came for them the next day. Alan and Hanno were in the Englishman’s tent, a green woollen affair that he had pitched in an olive grove half a mile outside the ruined city of Acre. Alan was drinking wine and tending to the bruises that marked the Bavarian’s already battered face. The first he heard of their coming was the soft murmur of voices, the click of hoof on stone and the jingle of metal accoutrements. He pushed open the cloth flaps, stepped out of his abode and into bright sunshine; Hanno, his face still black and red from the bruising earned in the struggle before his hanging, was hard on his heels. Both men had steel in their hands, violence in their hearts. They were confronted outside the tent by four Italian knights on big gleaming horses, with pennant-streaming lances and red-and-silver shields, and four elegant squires also mounted in a rank behind their lords. Alan Dale looked up at them all, squinting his eyes against the harsh Mediterranean light, the handle of his sword slick against his palm.

  ‘You are Alan Dale, a man-at-arms in the service of the Earl of Locksley?’ said the foremost knight, scowling down beneath the brim of his heavy helmet.

  ‘I am. What is it to you?’

  ‘You are charged with obstructing the Archbishop’s men in carrying out his justice, namely in seizing that villain, that foul murderer’ – he jerked his chin at Hanno – ‘and unlawfully bearing him away, thereby preventing the …’

  A huge man stepped out of the green flaps of the tent next to the one that had held Alan and Hanno. He had a vast, ugly, battered red face framed with two braided yellow pigtails, a short-sleeved coat of iron mail that was too tight around his massive chest, and a double-headed axe in one meaty fist. Around his brawny shoulders was draped a long green cloak. He looked fearsome and irritated.

  ‘Save your stinking breath,’ the big blond man said to the knight.

  He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Men began to appear from all around the camping ground, emerging from other similar tents, from behind trees, from under crude shelters made of turf and olive branches, many wearing the same distinctive green cloak as the big man, some bearing war bows and nocked arrows, others armed with axe or spear or sword. None of them looked soft; each man looked exactly like what he was – a proven warrior, a seasoned fighting man with the scars to demonstrate that claim and the pride to match. Scores of men appeared, and more, perhaps as many as a hundred, and they flowed towards Alan Dale’s tent and the Italian knights before it, surrounding the aliens almost silently, with a quiet discipline but also with an unmistakable sense of deadly menace.

  The foremost knight stared at the blond giant before him. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I am John Nailor, but they all call me Little John.’ He spoke clearly and slowly in English, watching to see that the knights comprehended his words. ‘I serve the Earl of Locksley, as do all these good men here.’ He waved generally at the villanous-looking cloaked army that surrounded the Italians. ‘We are all Robin Hood’s men.’

  Then John pointed a sausage-like finger at Hanno. ‘This ugly fellow is a friend of Alan Dale’s. That means he is a friend of mine, of all of ours. Do you understand?’

  The foremost Italian knight licked his lips, and nodded.

  Little John continued in slow, measured English. ‘So, if you have a problem with this man, you have a problem with all of us. If you offer him the threat of violence, you are threatening all of
us. Am I being clear?’

  The knight nodded again.

  The big man said, ‘Now – if you like, if you are feeling particularly rash, you can fight us for him, all of us, right now. But, alternatively, you could quietly turn your horses and ride away, and tell your master that you weren’t able to find the fellow after all, and you fear he may have slipped away from the army and left the Holy Land altogether. Indeed, in truth, we will all be taking ship in a couple of days and we’ll be gone from the Holy Land for good. So, you must choose: do you pull your swords and die, right here, right now? Or do you ride away with honour?’

  The knight said nothing. He looked around slowly at the sea of green-cloaked warriors, at the nocked bows and bright-whetted spears, then merely gave a small, delicate shrug and began to turn his horse. The army of Locksley men opened a path before them, a green corridor, and the four knights and their squires rode quietly through it out into the olive grove.

  ‘Well,’ said Little John, his face creasing with satisfaction. ‘That seems to be that.’ He looked hard at Hanno. ‘I hope you prove to be worth all the trouble, baldy,’ he said. ‘Your mangy carcass is only walking around today because young Alan here’s got a tender heart. So you might see if you can think of some way to repay his kindness. You are going to England, my fine German felon, and if you want to keep that carcass intact until we get there, you’d better behave yourself. I hope you’re well pleased with our company because, for better or worse, you’re one of us now. What say you to that?’

  ‘It is perfect,’ said Hanno.

  Discover the fate of Hanno

  in the latest epic novel of

  The Outlaw Chronicles

  Warlord

  Read the first chapter now…

  I have been thinking much upon Death of late; my own demise mostly, but also that of beloved comrades. I do not fear the Reaper – I like to think that I never have – and yet I can sense his presence just over the next rise. Death is not the enemy; no, he is an old, old friend coming as promised to collect me and take me on a strange journey. And perhaps when he raps at my chamber door with his bony knuckles I shall even be pleased to see him, weary as I am: for he will take me to a place where I shall see the face of God and, I earnestly pray, be reunited at last with those whom I have loved and who went on before me.

  Friend or enemy, he is coming, and soon. I can feel it in my old and creaking bones; I feel it in my bladder that now needs to be emptied almost hourly in the long night-time, or so it seems. I feel Death in my aching kidneys, in my shortness of breath and my constant, grinding weariness. But I have a task to complete before his shadow stains my threshold: I must set down another tale of my young days as a bold warrior, another tale of my friend Robert Odo, Earl of Locksley; a lord of war, a master thief, King Richard the Lionheart’s loyal lieutenant, and the man the people remember best as the outlaw Robin Hood.

  I have not recalled this part of my life for a long time; it has been five years since I last took up the quill to write about my strong, youthful self. My daughter-in-law Marie, who, with her husband Osric, runs this manor of Westbury on my behalf, had convinced me that it was not good for me to be dwelling on ancient battles and fruitless quests. She told me with uncommon firmness – it was indeed little short of a command – that I must pay attention to the present, that I must accept the life of the man I am today, white-haired, stooped, and well past sixty winters, and not pine for the man I was and for all my glorious yesterdays. And I think she may be right; for a while, for a year or more, I spent my days at Westbury inside the hall at my writing stand, setting down the old stories of Robin and myself. It was not a healthy life: my eyes grew blurred and tinged with blood, my hands ached from the long hours of scribbling, and my legs protested at their forced stillness, for I stirred little beyond the courtyard for months on end. The unbalanced humours in my torpid body made me irritable, even angry; worse, my mind became clouded and confused. In these past five years, with the writing stand dismantled and packed away and my quills curling, moth-chewed and dusty in an old wooden mug, I have rediscovered the joy of fresh breezes and bright sunlight, and of riding, if only on a gentle ambling mare, and I have joined my hunt servants in flying noble falcons and running the eager hounds over my lands.

  However, a visit to Westbury this week by my only grandson, Alan, has changed my mind, and decided me that I must grind black ink, cut a fresh goose feather or two, and pore over parchment once again. That and the fact that Marie has gone to visit her sick cousin Alice in Lincoln, and will not return for a week or more. So here I stand in the hall of the manor of Westbury, in the fair county of Nottinghamshire, casting my mind back forty years, scratching out these lines as quickly as I may and rekindling my old, half-forgotten skills.

  He is a delightful lad, Alan; strong-limbed, cheerful, clean and obedient, with a fine seat on a horse and an ear for a pretty tune – though he cannot sing a true note. He serves as a squire to the Earl of Locksley, not my old friend Robin, who has long been in his grave, alas, but his vigorous son, the new earl. Alan is being trained in warfare and gentility at Kirkton Castle, and seemingly has a respectable amount of talent with a blade; and I have received good reports of his courtly conduct, too. But my grandson has almost no notion of events that took place before his birth, fourteen short summers ago. He knows nothing and is oddly incurious about his grandmother Goody, my beloved but blazing-tempered wife, and about his own father Robert, our son. Alan seems to believe that our good Henry of Winchester has been on the throne of England for an eternity, since time began, when it has been no more than four and twenty years. And, while he has heard garbled tales of the noble sovereign King Richard and his long wars in France, he once asked me, I believe quite seriously, if it was true that he had a lion’s head. So it is for young Alan, in order that he might learn the truth of these long-ago struggles and the men and women who took part in them, that I set down this tale, this tragic tale of cruel wars and savage devastation, of ugly, unnecessary deaths and the inevitable search for bloody vengeance.

  Prince John was on his knees. The youngest son of old King Henry, second monarch of that name, and brother of Lionhearted Richard, now cowered on the greasy, fishy-smelling rushes on the floor of a run-down manor house in Normandy. Tears streamed from reddened eyes down his pale cheeks and he clutched at the right hand of his elder brother, who was standing over him. John’s thick shoulder-length reddish hair brushing the back of Richard’s hand, his oily teardrops anointing the King’s knuckles as he babbled of mercy and forgiveness, swearing before Almighty God and all the saints that he would be a loyal man, a true subject from this moment forth and for ever, if only his generous brother could find it in his heart to forgive him. Richard remained silent, looking down coldly at his dishevelled sibling. But he did not pull his hand away.

  I was watching this strange performance in the solar of the old manor house of Lisieux, in northern Normandy, some thirty miles east of Caen. I was in the small, crowded room off the main hall, standing with a score of knights a pace or two behind King Richard, and I must admit that I was thoroughly enjoying the spectacle. Prince John, once titled Lord of Ireland and Count of Mortain, who had until recently enjoyed the enormous revenues of the plump English counties of Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, was once again John Lackland, a man without a clod of earth to his name. Yet his fall was richly deserved, for John had a list of black crimes to his credit as long as my lance: when King Richard had been captured and imprisoned in Germany the year before, this snivelling prince had made an attempt to snatch the throne of England – and he had very nearly succeeded. He had schemed with Richard’s enemy, King Philip Augustus of France, to keep the Lionheart imprisoned, hampering the collection of the enormous sum in silver that Richard’s captor, the Holy Roman Emperor, had demanded – and even going so far as to join the French King in making a counter-offer to the Emperor if he would hold his brother in chains for another year. But he had
failed, God be praised: the ransom had been painfully gathered from an already tax-racked English populace and paid over, and Richard had been freed.

  On his release, the Lionheart had crushed the rebellion in England in a matter of weeks. Then, just a few days prior to this painful scene, he had crossed to Normandy with a large, well-provisioned army of seasoned fighting men. His avowed aim was to push King Philip and his French troops out of the eastern part of his duchy, which they had annexed during his long imprisonment, and contain them in the Île de France, the traditional land-locked fief of the French kings. And Prince John, who had so treacherously sided with Philip, was now on his knees before his brother, weeping and begging for forgiveness.

  Truly, John had been a bad brother; disloyal, duplicitous and treasonous, and all of this despite Richard’s great kindness to him before his departure for the Holy Land. I despised the man – and not only for his underhand actions against my King; I hated him on my own account, too. The previous year I had found myself, unwillingly, in John’s service – and I had seen, at close quarters, his evil deeds, his callousness towards the people of England and his unholy delight in wanton cruelty. He had, in fact, ordered my death on two occasions, and it was only by the grace of God and the help of my friend and comrade, my lord Robert, Earl of Locksley, that I had escaped with my life.

  I found that I was actually grinning while watching John’s kneeling discomfort. King Richard was quite capable of inflicting a terrible vengeance: in the Holy Land, victorious after the fall of Acre, he had ordered the public beheading of thousands of helpless Muslim captives; and while he was retaking the fortress of Nottingham on his return to England, he had casually hanged half a dozen English prisoners of war, just to make a point to the occupants of the castle about his very serious intent. So there was no doubt that Richard was equal to the task of punishing his brother in a fitting manner; but I also knew deep in my heart that he would not. Richard would forgive John, and almost every man in that small overcrowded chamber knew it. For the King loved to show mercy, whenever and wherever he could; it pleased him to display a magnificent clemency as much as to demonstrate his wrathful vengeance. More to the point, he had very a strong sense of family duty. Whatever his crimes, the fellow now snuffling wetly on the floor before him was his own flesh and blood. How could he tell his mother, the venerable Queen Eleanor, that he had executed her youngest son?