Knight of Shadows Read online

  HUNTER OF SHERWOOD

  KNIGHT OF SHADOWS

  A GUY OF GISBURNE NOVEL

  TOBY VENABLES

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2013 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Commissioning Editor: David Moore

  Cover Art: Luke Preece

  Design: Pye Parr

  Marketing and PR: Michael Molcher

  Publishing Manager: Ben Smith

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Hunter of Sherwood created by David Moore and Toby Venables

  ISBN (.mobi): 978-1-84997-644-2

  ISBN (.epub): 978-1-84997-645-9

  Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  To Felicity and Alice,

  who also set out on this journey,

  and to little William,

  who was born along the way.

  I

  ENGLAND

  I

  The Tower of London

  5 November, 1191

  THE GAUNT EDIFICE of the Conqueror’s great keep stood skull-white against the dark winter sky. He could see it more clearly now, illuminated by the cold light of the waxing, three-quarter moon. Crouched low in the small, blunt-ended craft, he stilled the oar and allowed the boat to drift for a moment on the icy, ink-black flow of the evening tide. Drops of freezing water flicked his face as, with numb fingers, he hauled the oar aboard. In the near-impenetrable dark of the boat’s interior, the damp, heavy wood jarred noisily against the thwart. He uttered a curse, his eyes darting to the shoreline. No movement; just the shifting, black mirror of the water, his own foggy breaths and the powdery swirl of fine snow that blew about him, its dusty specks glinting coldly in the moonlight – colourless ghosts of the sunlit motes of summer.

  In the past hour, the sky had cleared to reveal a starlit canopy. It would get colder yet. His curious garb gave back almost no light – rendered him little more than shadow – yet he had hoped the moon would maintain its shroud a little longer to better mask what lay ahead. There would be no more snow, at least, and only the foolish or desperate would venture out on such a bitter night (he laughed to himself – which was he?). He had seen a few lingerers, further upriver: London’s lost and helpless, or those hurrying to finish their day and reach their hearths – if hearths they had. But here, there was no life at all. Spitting length to his left, on the northern shore, a jagged fringe of dirty ice edged the lapping water, giving way to a pitch-black inlet. A blunt spur of water that thrust a full furlong into the land, but only upon the west side; the failed attempt at a moat, over which – though he could not yet see it – stood the stone bridge that led to the Tower’s gatehouse.

  Beyond it, where the bank resumed, the cold, curved stonework of the Bell Tower marked the southwest corner of the new outer walls that rose up from the riverbank ahead. On the bank, patches of virgin snow sparkled in the dim light like ground glass. No foot trod here – human or animal. There were not even the forked marks of birds.

  He knew there should be guards upon the new battlements, but he also knew that they relied on precisely this assumption. In reality, night patrols of the riverside curtain wall were lax and erratic – especially after midnight, and all the more so since the dramatic siege of the past month. But now, the Most Hated Man In England having been ignominiously ejected, the crisis was thought to be past. The decimated Tower guards – stretched beyond the limit of their capabilities, but not dreaming of further assault upon the most secure place in England – were weakened, disorganised and complacent, a fatal combination. And while its thick walls and iron-strapped doors afforded prisoners no chance of escape, information, he had discovered, was not so easily contained. He knew, for example, that the nearest guard would not be on the parapet at all, but in the octagonal Bell Tower on the new outer wall’s southwest corner, partly the worse for drink, and clinging to a brazier. They did not expect trouble. They could not even imagine what kind of trouble could threaten them. They did not expect him.

  He turned his attention back to the grim turrets and stern, square walls of the White Tower, thrusting above the castle’s new ramparts like cliffs of ice. It would be a different story there.

  The great keep was visible all over London. By day, its whitewashed exterior shone blindingly over the mud and squalour of the city. By night, it loomed like an ominous phantom rising from the darkness of the boneyard. Everpresent, watching, warning. That had been its purpose from the start. This was no cathedral to inspire men to great deeds. It was a demonstration to all, of the Norman invader’s fierce dominance over his newly conquered capital.

  He had been dead a century, but, by accident or design, the White Tower had captured in stone many of that king’s own qualities. It was implacable, grim – even brutal. It had sophistication of mind in its features, but little time for delicacy. It did not seek to hide its purpose. Even in its stark, simple beauty – the unfussy, towering pilasters, the simple, arched and slotted windows – it was practical, stern, plain. It did not do anything by half measures. Its stout stone walls – entirely square, entirely vertical – stood almost a hundred feet high, and were fifteen feet thick at the base.

  Turning from the Tower’s grim face, then, he took up the oar and let his eyes scan the gloomy, lifeless shores once more, glancing back briefly at the dark bundle of equipment in the boat – the crossbow, the thin rope, the slender steel grapple, its metal entirely sheathed in delicately stitched brown leather. The preparations had been thorough. But as he drew silently closer, the oar dipping in the near-frozen swell of the Thames, he watched the task grow more formidable before his eyes.

  It was a calculated effect. The Tower was not only built to withstand brute force, but to crush and wither resistance before it even began; to inspire awe in the hearts of all who stood for the King, and sap the will of those who would stand against him. And this, he knew, was no empty threat. Its reputation went before it. A supreme symbol of royal power and military might, long envied across all Christendom, its walls had never been breached.

  Until tonight.

  II

  JOHN BREKESPERE PEERED over the northern battlement of the White Tower and shuddered. The dizzying expanse of pallid stone stretched away beneath him, finally disappearing into an endless blank gloom – a channel of impenetrable black between the walls upon which he now stood guard, and the snow-capped edge of the outer wall floating in a sea of darkness beyond.

  As he stared, and his eyes adjusted, he fancied he could just make out the ground of the inner ward far below, a dusting of light snow picking out its frozen ruts. He swayed, and drew back from the edge. He’d never been good with heights – a curious trait, given that he stood at least a foot taller than most men – yet somehow, the compulsion to subject himself to them had driven him to the edges of things throughout his whole life. It had been like that at Dover. Something – some
morbid compulsion – had made him gawp over the dizzying brink of the white cliffs, even as his brain was screaming at him to back away. He’d stood there, toes on the crumbling edge, hair standing on end – or so it felt – swaying towards the yawning abyss, unable to banish the image of his great bulk cartwheeling down past cackling, shrieking birds, clothes whipped and tugged by the wind in a moment of tranquil suspension, before bursting like a sack of manure on the rocks below. He sometimes thought it must be the Devil taunting him with these desires, these terrifying pictures. Each time, he’d pull himself back – but the weird thrill of it haunted his nightmares.

  These walls reminded him of those cliffs. He idly wondered if they had always been whitewashed like this, and whether the Conqueror had, in fact, meant to echo Dover.

  As he stared out over the dim, barely perceptible lights of London, a bitter wind from the north shook his frosted beard and flung icy flecks against his face. One of the lights – ahead and some little way to the right, though weaker than the weakest star – was in all probability that of his own home. He briefly tried to identify it, as he had striven to do on countless other nights, knowing all the while that the attempt was futile. It was late, anyway; perhaps, by now, it was extinguished and his wife slept soundly there. He hoped this might be the case. They were so close, and yet he hadn’t seen her for so many weeks. As the wind buffeted his face from the direction in which she lay, its frozen pinpricks stinging the half-numb flesh, he was suddenly gripped by a familiar, terrible yearning, pulling at his innards like a physical pain. His rational mind struggled to subdue his rebellious heart – but no sooner had the feeling gone than part of him ached for its return.

  It had been hard for her, coming from the Holy Land. Not that it hadn’t been hard for him, after the horrors of Hattin, after imprisonment, after the slow return to life. But he had been able to leave that behind – physically, at least – and had been granted a homecoming. She had left everything she knew for this land of soul-crushing winters and staring, suspicious, hate-filled eyes. Sosa was a Syriac Christian, as devout as any man or woman he had met. But when they looked at her here, he knew they saw only “Saracen” – whatever that meant. He wasn’t sure himself any more. These things seemed so simple at a distance; far less so when seen up close. It was, he noted, often the women who were the most spiteful towards her. Perhaps they had lost someone to the crusade. Still, he found he constantly tried to reassure her that their situation was otherwise, wanting her to see the best in his fellow countrymen – hoping, somehow, that plain old good cheer could yet carry them through it. She would smile, and put a hand to his face, and kiss his broad brow, the light glinting in her beautiful dark eyes, and tell him she was happy. Yet he could not quell the growing conviction that he, and this whole great kingdom of which he had told her so much, had failed her.

  Another deep shudder racked his huge frame. He was chilled to the marrow, and he needed a piss. He stamped his feet in a hopeless attempt to coax his benumbed toes back to life, passed his spear from one hand to the other, flexing his frozen fingers, and tried to think of something else.

  It was Longchamp who had kept them apart, Longchamp who was responsible for all their recent woes.

  John Brekespere had been recruited to the Tower guard over a year ago by William Puintellus, Constable of the Tower, as a personal favour to a knight named Geoffrey of Launceston. Launceston had also fought at Hattin – if briefly – with the advance guard of Count Raymond of Tripoli. Raymond’s cavalry had charged through Saracen lines only to find themselves outside the fray, with the remainder of the Christian army encircled and overwhelmed. They had not returned to the battle.

  It is said that the guilt of the survivor is the heaviest to bear. So it was with Launceston. From that day, wherever he could, he had sought to make amends by engineering advantages for veterans of Hattin who had gone through what he had not. John Brekespere did not know how Launceston had come to hear of him – perhaps those differences that made Sosa so stand out amongst the English had, for once, worked in their favour. Whatever it was, he did not tempt fate by questioning this stroke of luck.

  Puintellus was a dour but supremely practical sort – lacking humour, but organised and fair-minded in his dealings with other men – ideally suited to the responsibilities with which he was charged. It was said he was more mason than soldier, but Brekespere liked and respected the constable. All the garrisoned guards did. It was Puintellus who had managed the building of the new walls, Puintellus who had maintained the security and daily life of the Tower – a complex enough task even without the logistical challenges of the building works.

  Puintellus, however, was directly answerable to Longchamp. Norman by birth and upbringing, William Longchamp – Bishop of Ely, Lord Chancellor, Chief Justiciar – was the most powerful man in England. Personally appointed by King Richard to manage his realm – even though he knew little of its ways, cared even less, and spoke no English – Longchamp was monarch in all but name. Wherever he went in his diocese or the city of London, the people noted the vast retinue of servants and the menagerie of animals that accompanied him on his travels, and weighed the need for them against their crippling taxes. Where other, more subtle leaders would have sought to engender loyalties, Longchamp somehow succeeded in alienating entire populations, and inspired only resentment and hatred amongst the barons. To secure his position, he granted castles to his own relatives, and when faced with resistance from existing castellans, attempted to remove them by force of arms. It was Longchamp who was behind the project of improving and expanding the Tower’s defences. Though this undoubtedly had the approval of the absent King, Longchamp clearly saw within it an opportunity to secure his own position at the heart of the realm, and to these ends had put Puintellus and his men under the lash.

  In their struggle against this scheming usurper, the barons had found an unlikely ally.

  Prince John was little loved in England. Of late, however, he had unexpectedly redeemed himself by rallying an army in defence of the beleaguered castles in the north. Few doubted that the prince – humiliatingly sidelined by his brother Richard – had an agenda of his own, but for now anyone was preferable to Longchamp. “Better the Devil you know,” became a familiar truism.

  John succeeded in halting Longchamp’s territorial ambitions. For a time, there existed an uneasy truce. Then, the Lord Chancellor went too far. Seeing a chance to discredit and eliminate another potential rival to his authority, Longchamp had had his brother-in-law, the castellan of Dover, arrest Geoffrey, Archbishop of York. The archbishop resisted, was besieged in St Martin’s Priory, then violently dragged from a place of sanctuary and flung into a cell on a trumped-up charge of treason. The fact that a holy place had been violated and the right of asylum rent asunder was an unsettling enough echo of Thomas Becket as it was – but this archbishop was also brother to Prince John and King Richard. It was all the excuse John needed to rid England of Longchamp for good.

  What happened next burned hot in Brekespere’s memory.

  It had been a bright, cold day in October and all was proceeding as normal – the familiar buzz, if anything, lightened in spirit by the arrival of the sun and its banishment of the fog of previous days. The masons continued the works on the new walls and towers. Surveyors and enginers continued to scratch their heads over the issue of the moat – one of Longchamp’s ongoing obsessions. Guards were changed, food was cooked and consumed, horses were stabled, groomed and shod. Everyone complained about the hours of work forced upon them. Nothing was out of the ordinary.

  At the time the news broke, Brekespere was not on watch. He had just made the climb up to the west battlement of the keep to inform the duty guard that an inspection would be made later that morning (Puintellus liked to give the guards warning about surprise inspections, in spite of Longchamp’s wishes to the contrary – or perhaps because of them) when he had spied a single figure approaching the Tower at a run. News. There followed a commotion at the g
atehouse. The man was admitted, but soon disappeared from view, having crossed the outer ward in haste, accompanied by a watchman and two guards. Moments later, the whole place was in an uproar, its orderly routines replaced by urgent cries and frantic preparations. Still aloft on the battlements, Brekespere had called out to those below. Their hasty, half-heard replies were disjointed, the story – perhaps already third or fourth hand – confused and contradictory, but the nub of it was clear. A great army was coming. Prince John was marching on London.

  Brekespere’s guts lurched. Was it possible? Having restored Lincoln and taken the castles of Nottingham and Tickhill, had John’s successes made him hungry for greater glory, and had he now set his sights on the greatest prize in the kingdom? Brekespere broke into a heavy run towards the northwest tower. Before he could reach it he saw, out to the west, a great throng surging towards the Tower precinct along Eastcheap – its progress rapid but disordered, a colourful entourage at its head.

  By the time he had emerged from the keep into the inner ward, it had become clear that this rabble was not the expected army – which, he also learned, was many times its size – but Longchamp, fleeing ahead of it. The Chancellor was seeking refuge in the Conqueror’s impregnable White Tower – the king’s tower, his tower – with his entire personal guard behind him. As Brekespere strode across the courtyard of the outer ward, his eyes searching frantically for Puintellus, the gates were flung wide, and in poured a great mob of puffing, sweating humanity. Longchamp had arrived.

  Never was there a more graphic demonstration of the scale of the man’s vanity and the paucity of his wisdom. He had brought wagons laden with boxes, barrels, bolts of rich cloth, pieces of furniture and every kind of unnecessary thing, unidentifiable animals – some in cages, some cavorting on chains, often threatening to break free in the disordered crowd that swarmed after him. There were dogs in eager, darting packs, horses of all sorts – some laden, but many not – and more ladies and ladies’ maids, pages and stewards, cooks and servants, grooms and standard bearers than one would have thought to find attending anything less than an Emperor. Behind this, his army – mostly mercenaries from the Lowlands, judging by their looks – trudged in a surly, seemingly unending torrent, their austere demeanour an absurd contrast to the foppish opulence and gaudy colours of Longchamp’s entourage.