The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) by Angus Donald Read Free Book Online

cool, pink air of a Norman dawn, riding into the gently forested hills between Falaise and the County of Maine. I slightly regretted my intemperate words to the men the night before because, while the Wolves might have looked a rough crew – dirty and unkempt, with patches of animal pelts sewn on to their mail, and armed any old how with a variety of swords, long knives, poleaxes, spears and even the odd spiked cudgel – they were, in fact, very competent soldiers. Robin had been training them for a year or more and they obeyed orders immediately and without question. They knew how to patrol, with scouts on each flank, and a pair of riders ahead and behind the main column, and they were alert and reasonably quiet as they rode – very little banter or raucous laughter. Solid, professional men, doing a job they knew well. Their leader and Little John’s deputy for keeping order in the troop was a vintenar called Claes, whom I knew as one of Vim’s original men. He was a steady, fair-haired fellow with one eye – the other had been lost two years before in a desperate battle at the fortress of Montségur, where he had fought at my side. I was comforted by his presence: he knew his men and he knew me, and a hard-earned respect existed between us.
    Claes told me that in the past year the Wolves had seen little fighting – a few skirmishes in the eastern marches against the French there – and the men were eager for battle and the promise of loot from a defeated enemy or the prospect of a rich knight captured for ransom. They were almost all Flemings, with a scattering of Normans, some French and even a German or two, and it was the threat of starvation, one bad harvest or a crop destroyed by war, that had driven most of them to sell their swords to Robin. Some were veterans, such as Christophe, a scruffy grey-beard nearly fifty who before I was born had served as a man-at-arms with lionhearted Richard in his days as a rebellious prince in Aquitaine. He was nicknamed ‘Scarecrow’ by the other men for his perpetually raggedy clothes and odd hair that stood out stiffly from his head in random clumps, and had fought everywhere, it seemed, and knew the many aspects of battle as well as he knew his own calloused hands. He had been a cavalry trooper, a crossbowman, a spearman, even a miner – gouging into the bases of besieged castles to bring down walls. Some of the men were relative newcomers to war, such as Little Niels, a tiny joker who resembled a hedgerow bird, all quick jerky movements and bright inquisitive eyes. Niels was not yet seventeen and he seemed to think the soldier’s life was a grand adventure. He had been an apprentice in a wealthy cloth town, had hated it, and had run off to seek his fortune. Now he was a Wolf.
    As we rode out, Little Niels moved his horse up alongside mine, and with much tugging of his forelock, smiling and bobbing nervously in the saddle and other outward semblances of respect, humbly begged if he might ask me an important question.
    ‘What is it?’ I asked, looking down into his cheery little face. I could hear Little John just behind me growling like an angry bear at the intrusion, but I stilled him with a hand.
    ‘Come on, man, speak up.’
    ‘Well, sir, it’s like this. We was wondering, all of us, like, about the spoils, and how they might be divided among us.’
    Some of the men in the column had quickened their pace and I could sense their horses at my back and ears straining to hear my words.
    ‘A very good question,’ I said. ‘It will be like this. Any spoils of war, goods that we take as legitimate prizes – cattle, gold or jewellery, fine cloth and the like – will be sold in the market at Falaise, or elsewhere, and the coin will be divided among all of us. Ransoms, too. But I do mean
legitimate
prizes. I don’t want the Norman people preyed upon. That is an iron rule. Understand? But we may find ourselves in enemy territory, and if we do, the pickings might well