Robin had left England two and a half years ago to take part in the Great Pilgrimage to the Holy Land with a small, well-trained army of archers, spearmen and cavalry, but battle, disease and the fleshpots of the Levant had thinned our ranks so that when we landed at Dover ten days ago, seasick, sore and wet through from a rough Channel crossing, we had only thirty men-at-arms capable of straddling a horse, and a score or so of Robin’s surviving archers. But though we were a ragged lot, battered by much hard travel and the loss of many comrades, the fires of war in the Holy Land and the brutal journey home had tempered us like the finest steel, so that we believed ourselves to be the equal of any company twice our strength. Yet for all that we were hardened by battle, and confident in our abilities, we could not face a force such as the one Sir Ralph Murdac had mustered here — six times the size of ours — in honest, open battle and expect to be victorious.

Murdac was a loathsome man, a short, dark Norman lordling with the Christian kindness of an angry adder and the trustworthiness of a rabid rat. While he had been High Sheriff — before King Richard came to the throne — my master had been a very successful thief and outlaw, the famous Robin Hood of song and tale, no less, and he had humiliated this sheriff in many ways, robbing and killing his servants without the least compunction. They had long hated each other but had clashed in full battle only once before, more than three years ago at the manor of Linden Lea, north of Nottingham. On that occasion, after two days of the most appalling carnage, Robin had emerged the victor — but only by the skin of his teeth. Murdac had fled the country, avoiding the righteous wrath of King Richard, who wished to interview his sheriff about a vast quantity of missing tax silver, and the little shit-weasel had then taken refuge in Scotland, staying with powerful relatives. But when Richard departed his realm to undertake the Great Pilgrimage across the seas, Murdac had emerged from his Scottish bolthole and taken service with Prince John, King Richard’s treacherous younger brother. Now protected by John, Sir Ralph Murdac had offered a huge bounty in silver for Robin’s head, and at least one man to my knowledge had died trying to claim it.