The forest echoed with the metallic clank of buckles and belts, the rasping of chain mail and the drawing of swords from scabbards.

‘Step aside now! Or … I will have one of my men fire upon ye,’ said Geoffrey, beckoning forward Bates, one of the sergeants in his retinue and reliable with a crossbow. Bates drew up beside him, ratcheting back the drawstring and slipping a bolt into place.

‘A warning shot is it, sir?’

Geoffrey pressed his lips tightly. The warning had already been given. Nonetheless, he decided if one more caution could save bloodshed on such a cold and Godless day it was a breath worth expending.

‘Step aside, or ye shall be fired upon!’

For a moment the man’s response was the same. Nothing. Then, slowly, he began to stride through the ankle-deep snow towards them.

Bates turned to him. ‘Sir?’

This foolish man was going to die, then. Perhaps that was what he wanted: a martyr’s death. Geoffrey had seen too much of that these last few years — men hungry to die on the battlefield for all the promises they’d been made about sins forgiven.

‘Take him down.’

Bates swiftly shouldered the crossbow, aimed and fired. The twang of the string echoed off the trees as the bolt flickered across the twenty yards between them. With a smack it embedded itself into something beneath the flowing dark robes. But the man’s stride remained unbroken.

‘Good God!’ Geoffrey whispered under his breath.

The hooded man, now no more than a dozen yards away, produced a broadsword from beneath his cape with an effortless sweep of his arm.

‘Prepare to fight!’ shouted Geoffrey over his shoulder at the others. ‘Sergeants, defend the cart!’

He was joined by the other three knights, all younger, some fitter than him, but all of them prepared to die to safeguard what lay behind them, secure in a nondescript wooden box and nestling in the back of their baggage cart.