‘So … the pig says back to the farmer, “If ye sees what I seen yer wife’s up to, ye’d ’ave a curly tail too!”’ Eddie’s ruddy face crumpled like an old rug on a smooth polished floor. The other soldiers behind him, those within earshot, cackled along with him like a bunch of fishwives, their voices echoing off into the forest either side of the track.
Liam looked at the captain of his escort. ‘Sorry, Eddie, I’m not sure I get it.’
‘Well, sire … See, the pig’s been watchin’ the farmer’s –’
Behind Eddie, one of the soldiers suddenly lurched forward. He dropped his shield and started clawing with both hands at his throat.
‘What’s … ? Whuh?’
Then Liam saw a bright spurt of crimson gushing from the young man’s flapping mouth, and for the first time noticed the stub of a crossbow bolt protruding from the front of his throat.
Eddie responded far more quickly. ‘FORM UP!’ His parade-ground voice filled the forest trail just as another dozen projectiles whistled through the air towards them. Two arrows thudded into the horse’s flank either side of Liam’s right thigh. The horse reared up and he rolled backwards over the beast’s rump to land heavily on the hard mud track. The horse bolted, leaving a wake of dust behind it.
Liam was winded, lying on his back gazing up at a rich blue summer’s sky punctuated by blurred slithers of movement – arrows and bolts passing overhead. He struggled to get a breath in him and then eventually, suspecting he’d spent the better part of a minute on his back, he hefted himself dizzily up on to his elbows.
Through a cloud of dust he could see his men, shields raised above their heads as they clustered around him, squatting down in a protective circle. The peace of the forest was lost in the deafening rattle of arrow tips clattering off their shields.
‘It’s an ambush!’ Liam struggled to gasp as he pulled himself on to his hands and knees.
Eddie looked back over his shoulder and nodded. ‘Worked that out, sire!’
Over the rim of shields, Liam could see their attackers now: flitting dabs of olive and brown rags among the trees and bracken. Impossible to guess how many of them but far more than his escort of twelve, he figured.
He cursed himself for not having Bob come along with them yesterday. But he’d been far more concerned that the rest of the column, laden with wagons of food and several bags of coins, made its way back to Nottingham Castle without incident.
Too cocky, by half.
He’d made the mistake of believing the bandits had fully moved on from Sherwood Forest. That he’d done a better job of shooing them off than he apparently had. If he’d only just taken Bob with him … even just another ten or twenty men?
You idiot.
One of Eddie’s lads grunted deeply and rolled flat on his back, an arrow through one eye. One of his legs twitched and drummed against the hard-baked mud as he went into shock.
‘Sire!’ barked Eddie. ‘We should keep moving!’ He nodded up the forest track, the way they’d been heading. He was right. They’d been well on the way home. Another two hours … and the forest gave way to open fields across a rolling hill down to Nottingham. If they kept in tight formation, kept their shields up, kept moving, they’d have a better chance than they would staying put here.
‘Right … yes!’ Liam nodded.
Eddie barked at his men, ordering them to tighten up closer together. ‘With me now!’ he yelled, and began to step forward. The other men followed suit, with Liam huddled in the middle, pulling the thick velvet cloak round his neck, as if it had any chance of stopping an arrow.
They began to make painfully slow progress along the forest track, little more than a shuffle that kicked dust into the air and filled their eyes and mouths with grit.
Another man went down, howling in agony and clutching at an arrow shaft through his shin.
‘This is no good!’ shouted Liam. ‘We’re not going to get very far!’
He saw Eddie nodding under the shadow of his shield, its thin metal peppered with gashes and dents through which rays of sunlight streamed.
‘We could make a break for it, sire!’
Liam chanced a quick look up the trail. Some of their attackers had spread across the track, a thin line of men in rags casually stringing arrows and firing opportunistically their way. More than a dozen up ahead, but none of them armoured, none of them equipped for close combat.
Eddie and his remaining nine could probably take them, break through, and then after that it would be every man for himself: drop shields, drop swords and just run for it.
‘All right,’ Liam nodded, his mouth dry. ‘Yeah … L-let’s do that, then.’
Eddie cleared his throat and spat. ‘Men! On my word … we charge down the archers ahead! Clear?’
Several heads nodded. A mixture of young and old faces. Some of them he knew had seen a fight before, most of them hadn’t; they were little more than farm workers who’d been taught how to bear a shield, swing a sword and march in a straight line.
‘Make ready!’
Liam felt naked, no chain mail, nor shield or sword. He unclipped the robe from his neck and let it fall to the ground. It was only going to slow him down. He pulled a ceremonial knife from the belt round his waist. An ornate dagger with a beautifully decorated haft and a pointlessly blunt and useless blade. Still, it felt better than having nothing in his hands.
‘Sire?’ Eddie nudged him gently. ‘Ready?’
He nodded, working his tongue round his mouth, trying to find some spittle in there.
The hell I am.
He saw Eddie doing the same and realized in that moment that he wasn’t the only one scared out of his wits. ‘On my word we rush them,’ Eddie’s voice rasped, ‘and make as much noise as ye can, lads. We’ll scare the devil out of them.’
A couple of the older faces grinned at that.
‘Right, then …’ Eddie took a lungful of air. ‘AT ’EM!’
Without hesitation, the men he’d been drilling these last few months, uneducated field hands that he’d managed to build a bond with, surged forward as one, a defiant roar coming from every mouth.
Liam found himself sprinting forward, shoulder to shoulder with them, his own screaming voice filling his ears.
The thin line of archers, twenty yards ahead of them, regarded them with comically round eyes. He saw a couple of them fumble to string and then drop their arrows in panic. Others fired hasty and ill-judged shots that whistled too high over them. But then as the gap quickly closed, he saw one, then several, then the rest, take the first faltering steps backwards which swiftly turned into a full-scale rout.
‘GO ON! RUN, YE COWARDS!’ screamed Eddie, a wide manic grin stretched across his face.
Ahead of them, the archers pelted down the forest trail like startled rabbits. Liam chanced a glance over his shoulder and saw more of them emerging from the woods behind them, loosing off arrows their way, many of them falling short.
We’re gonna do it, he found himself thinking, for the first time daring to wear a defiant grin on his own face.
But then, on to the trail ahead, a tall figure emerged.
CHAPTER 49
1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire
It stood calmly in their way as the bandit archers streamed past. Seven feet tall, a giant swathed in dark robes and a cowl that hid his face in deep shadow.
The sight of the figure caused their charge to falter, and Liam heard the men curse under their breath.
‘The Hood!’ yelled one of the younger soldiers. ‘God help us, it’s the Hood!’ He dropped his sword and shield.
‘’Tis but a man in old cloth!’ Eddie snarled angrily. ‘Pick up yer weapon!’ But the young boy was already gone, scrambling off the trail, through brambles and ferns, and very soon lost from sight.
Their charge was halted now. Just ten nervous men standing in a forest trail, cowering beneath shields. The occasional arrow coming from behind, and the solitary hooded figure ahead
of them, blocking their way.
Eddie turned to his men. ‘Come on, ye fools!’ But Liam could hear even in his voice a wavering uncertainty. It might just be a mortal man … but it was still a huge mortal man, and in his hands he held a broadsword that glinted sunlight as it swung casually back and forth.
The figure suddenly began to stride towards them. The way it moved – long, even, regular strides, arms calmly down by the sides, no sense of flinching or cowering – reminded Liam of Bob. Reminded him of the economical and purposeful way he moved. A memory flashed through his mind, a memory that seemed to come from another lifetime: Bob calmly moving through a prison camp, executing every guard in his way, a pulse rifle blazing in each hand.
Liam reached for the discarded sword and shield. Fumbling and dropping the sword nervously so that he had to pick it up again.
‘Just run!’ he hissed at Eddie and the other men, suddenly certain he knew what was approaching them. ‘You can’t beat this thing! Just do your best to get past it!’
Several of the men took Liam’s word for it, dropped their shields and swords and ran for the treeline either side of the track. But Eddie and four others remained, bunching up close together around Liam, presenting a shield wall to the figure.
‘Run, sire!’ shouted Eddie over his shoulder. ‘We’ll hold him!’
The hooded figure suddenly broke into a run and covered the last ten yards in a silent sprint. He collided with Eddie and his men, bowling them backwards. A roundhouse sweep of his broadsword lopped one of the men’s arms off at the elbow, sending it spinning into the air, hand still clasped round the sword-hilt.
One of the other men thrust his blade at the side of the Hooded Man. The black cloak collapsed inwards, and Liam heard a clunk as the blade met something hard beneath.
The hooded figure reached with a gloved hand for the blade and snapped it with a sharp twist, tossing the broken metal off into the woods. It cocked its head for a moment, studying the man holding nothing but the broken hilt of his sword in his hands … and Liam would swear blind later that he saw the figure wag its finger at the man before picking him up by the throat and hurling him like nothing more than a bundle of twigs off into the trees.
Its head turned back and beneath the shadow of the hood Liam sensed its gaze was locked specifically on him.
Eddie’s remaining two men broke and ran, leaving him alone in the middle of the trail beside Liam. The hooded figure strode past Eddie as if he simply wasn’t there.
‘Sire! Run!’
Liam realized the thing had fixed on him for some reason. He did as Eddie said, dropped the shield and sword he’d picked up and backed quickly away towards the treeline. He saw Eddie lunge with his sword at the hooded figure’s back, ramming it hard into the space between its shoulder-blades.
The figure lurched in response – and Liam thought he heard some sort of wheezing whine come from beneath the hood. Eddie’s blade must have found some chink in the armour beneath. The figure spun round to face him, the blade of the handle protruding from its back.
The response was a savage thrust with the broadsword that punched a hole through the jagged and pockmarked remains of Eddie’s shield, the long blade continuing on into the man’s chest.
Liam watched Eddie gasp, then collapse slowly to his knees.
‘Stuff this!’ He then turned and ran off the track and into the woods, charging through low branches and brambles that whipped and stung his cheeks. His heavy leather boots stumbled over roots and hummocks in the ground; his rasping breath and the snap of twigs and branches beneath him seemed to fill the silent woods around him. He realized the racket he was making as he scrambled away from that thing was giving him away … but he couldn’t bring himself to slow down.
He ran for what he guessed was another minute before he finally stopped and turned to look behind him. He expected to see the wraithlike fluttering outline of black robes weaving past trees and through brambles hot on his heels; instead, the woods were still, empty.
Liam gasped air into his lungs, doubling over and dry-heaving from the sudden exertion, the burn of nerves. He spat phlegm on to the ground and straightened up on legs that felt like jelly.
All he had a chance to notice was the blur of something in motion towards him. Then he was seeing a world of speckled white.
CHAPTER 50
1194, Beaumont Palace, Oxford
Becks looked at the first grey light of dawn stealing in through the tall slitted windows. She calculated that she had another forty-seven minutes until the sun breached the horizon and the city of Oxford began to stir to life.
John, of course, was going to be asleep for another couple of hours at least. She’d worked out the average time that he emerged from his chambers and started bawling for breakfast. It was usually eleven minutes past nine. Although, last night, she’d made sure he’d consumed several flagons of wine which meant perhaps another hour before he stirred.
It would take her precisely twenty-seven minutes to make her way back out of the deserted halls and cloisters of Beaumont Palace, occupied by a skeleton crew of soldiers and servants, and jog the mile back to the walls of Oxford city.
The city’s walls were poorly maintained, and the missing blocks of masonry and cracks in the mortar made it possible to be scaled. She’d get back into the castle itself climbing the rear bailey wall.
Twenty-seven minutes from now she would be back in her chambers, pretending to be asleep.
She continued studying the wooden shelves of scrolls and leather-bound volumes of illuminated manuscripts in Beaumont’s royal library. She pulled them off the dusty shelves one at a time, scanning sample pages of each in an attempt to identify the correct document.
She’d examined seven hundred and twenty-six candidate documents over the last five hours of night. Her hard drive stored their digital images and her processor was working overtime to translate the elaborate swirls of handwriting into recognizable text characters. None of the texts she’d scanned and translated so far had produced anything useful. There’d been endless essays on royal protocol and volumes of romantic poetry but nothing she could classify as vaguely relevant. She had opted for a very simple search algorithm – any text that scored high on a hit-list of terms sorted into relevance by order:
Search Terms:
Treyarch (100% relevance)
Pandora (100% relevance)
Confession (83% relevance)
Templar (79.4% relevance)
Grail (79.3% relevance)
Jerusalem (56.5% relevance)
Code (23% relevance)
So far twelve of the documents had contained three of the seven words. Thirty-two had contained two or more terms and a hundred and five had contained one or more. ‘Confession’ was the highest-scoring search term so far. It seemed a lot of people from this time felt the pressing need to confess something.
She continued robotically pulling out manuscripts amid showers of dust motes, opening them and grabbing snapshot images. But, somewhere inside her head, a part of her AI that wasn’t overloaded with running character-recognition software was wondering whether this approach was going to deliver any useful results.
She paused, a heavy leather-bound volume held in mid-air, dust cascading down in front of her. Her mind was making a quick assessment of the situation, of the amount of time she had left, and of the thousands of scrolls and volumes she’d yet to scan.
Her eyes followed a small tuft of fluff; the small downy feather of some bird that must have found its way in through one of the slit windows. She watched it gracefully seesaw down to the stone floor and then settle. She was about to resume scanning the leather-bound manuscript in her hand when the feather gently stirred. It spun on the spot for a moment before flitting lightly across the floor.
Curious at the sudden movement, she suspended the maths going on in her head and squatted down to look at the feather. She reached out, picked it up and put it back on the floor where it had settled a moment a
go.
It was still for a moment, then it twitched, spun … then once again slid across the floor, in a short stop-start motion away from the wall beside her.
She looked at the wall. Like the rest of the walls in the library it was decorated with oakwood panels.
[Identify: Wall. Wood. Oak. Purpose: decorative]
She ran her fingers down the grained surface, all the way down to the floor, and there, from a gap between the panel and floor – no more than half an inch – she felt a cool draught on the tips of her fingers. She tapped the wood panel with her knuckles. The knock echoed around the cavernous library.
[Assessment: Primary sonic response. 1.3 MHz frequency. Delay 0.56 milliseconds]
She cocked her head and tapped again, certain this time that it meant there was a significant space behind the panel. She pulled her fist back and rammed it forward. It disappeared through a splintered hole with a crack that reverberated around the library. She pulled her fist back out and stared through the hole she’d created. Beyond, she could see a small room, little more than an alcove, lit by the faintest grey light at dawn coming through a tiny slitted window.
She saw what looked like a wooden lectern with a thick tallow candle on one side and, in front of it, a bench with a dust-covered cushion on it. A private reading space of some sort.
She was about to destroy the rest of the panel with a few well-aimed kicks and punches, but found that it swung out on hidden hinges with a soft creak.
She stepped into the small alcove beyond, and now saw, sitting on the lectern, a roll of parchment wrapped around a simple wooden spindle. She unfurled it slowly, hearing the brittle parchment crackling.
Spread across the yellowing page, a spider-crawl of fading ink in lines that sloped and rose untidily. Her forehead creased absentmindedly as she struggled to make sense of the looped letters and errant spelling of a man, quite clearly beginning to lose his mind …
This, the confession of Gerard Treyarch, wryten in the yeare of our Lorde, 1137 …