XXXII

 

 

GISBURNE DID NOT know her real name. But “Rose” was what Locksley insisted on calling her. One of the higher class prostitutes in the quarter – and an individual with whom Locksley was obsessed – she looked every inch the classic Arab beauty: olive-skinned, black-haired, full-lipped, fine-featured and curvaceous. Gisburne believed she was actually Greek, though it was hard to know for sure – like so many of her profession, she was evasive about the facts of her own life, and mostly told men exactly what she thought they wanted to hear.

But she was easygoing, coquettish, fun. She would laugh and sing when the situation allowed, with no trace of serious emotion to mar the mood. It was easy to believe she really was enjoying herself. Perhaps she was. Or perhaps she was simply good at her job. Gisburne didn’t suppose it mattered much to Locksley – he suspected that to him she was more cherished possession than lover anyway. And he realised, after a time, that it didn’t matter much to him either. He liked her company well enough – what little he saw of it. She seemed to have a knack for making people feel at ease. What other physical comforts she had to offer, he didn’t know, and maintained a discreet distance in order to avoid finding out. But he had little doubt Locksley was pushing them to their limit.

Rather beyond their limit, as it would turn out.

One night, in late May, Gisburne had been out drinking with Mamdour – a Nubian spice trader who was one of Gisburne’s regular opponents at backgammon and chess (Locksley was the most formidable player of the three by some margin, but lacked the patience for such trivial games – especially on the few occasions that he lost). Mamdour was a small, wiry man with a face like a shrivelled fig, who, to Gisburne’s eyes, looked at least twice his thirty years, but was nonetheless was able to hoist a full barrel with the ease of an oversized Kent brewer. He also had a glint in his eye and a ready wit that he put to good use in his business negotiations. Before making his connections along the Red Sea and settling in the Holy City, he had sailed a felucca on the Nile, and had a seemingly endless fund of anecdotes and jokes, most of which seemed to be at the expense of his fellow Nubians (“Give a Nubian an empty bowl,” he would say, “and he’ll look underneath it to try to find his soup.”).

Gisburne, his head dazed with drink, had returned late to his lodgings that evening, contemplating the thrashing he had suffered at backgammon, but also the harsh revenge he had inflicted on Mamdour – by getting him blind drunk. Muslims who partook could rarely hold their drink. The tactic hadn’t helped Gisburne win at backgammon, but the little man would have a stinking head tomorrow.

He had chuckled to himself as he’d walked up the narrow steps to the apartment. It was a perfect, balmy night. Music and laughter and aromas of spices and grilled meats drifted on the gentle breeze. It was one of those moments when it felt good to be a wastrel.

Then, in the cool of the chamber, he stopped. Everything was perfectly still. A lamp burned. The curtains that opened onto the small balcony blew gently on the breeze, the hangings over Locksley’s bed wafting in sympathy. Nothing was out of place. Nothing out of the ordinary. But something was terribly wrong.

His brain told him to turn left, towards his own welcoming bed. To crash down on it and embrace oblivion until morning. Instead, he turned right, and walked slowly, unevenly, towards the thin curtains billowing before the balcony. As he passed Locksley’s bed, something caught his eye. A reflection. A glint of something covering the tiles of the floor at the bed’s side. He remembered feeling it was out of place before he realised what it was. Before he realised it was blood.

It was a great glistening pool – almost black in the low amber light – stretching at least four feet beyond the bed. As he moved further round, transfixed, his groggy mind spun with the possibilities and what they might mean. That Locksley had been murdered. That he had killed himself. Most shocking of all to him was the thought that came next; how he would extricate himself from this situation, so as not to look guilty. Only then did he realise how successful he had been in detaching himself from the man he had so long thought of as a friend and comrade.

Then the wind blew the hangings about the bed – stained on this side, as he now saw, with crimson flecks and spatters, and a dark, striated smear where a bloody hand had clawed at them – and a worse truth was revealed. Sprawled upon the bed, naked, her eyes staring, was the blood-soaked body of Rose. She had been stabbed, and her throat slashed. It seemed, from the slashes on her arms, that she had tried to defend herself. Her natural beauty clashed with the horrid, awkward pose; Gisburne had seen many dead and dying bodies before – hundreds, perhaps thousands – but somehow he knew, with a kind of wretched despair, that this was the one that would stick forever in his mind.

As he stood, struggling to comprehend the situation and his own response to it, Locksley entered through the balcony curtains, dressed only in a voluminous galabiya that almost hung off one shoulder, an ornate goblet in one hand. He stopped, and for a moment the two stared at each other, the curtains blowing.

“Oh,” he said. “You’re back.”

At first, Gisburne could not quite place the emotion on the man’s face. Then the fog cleared, and he recognised it. Locksley looked embarrassed. Not horrified. Not traumatised. Not guilty. Just embarrassed. It was as if Gisburne had walked in on him playing with himself, or kicking the dog.

Locksley seemed to simply wave it away. “She kept shouting,” he said, a note of irritation in his voice. And he drank deeply from his goblet, and looked back at Gisburne as if the matter were resolved. “Help me sort this out would you, old man?”

Gisburne made two important decisions in that moment. One was to put as much distance between himself and Locksley as possible. He knew, now, that the man was insane. The other was to comply with Locksley’s request. This second decision was by far the more immediate of the two. It was his pragmatic mind working – his soldier’s mind. No matter who you were, what your occupation or how many people you had butchered on the field of battle, murder was murder. It mattered little that he himself was guilty of no crime. If this were found out, they would undoubtedly both be tried and executed. He was too close to this for his pleas of innocence to be listened to. And if he fled now, this same night, and the murder was still found out, the accusation would follow him forever, possibly never to be resolved. In some ways, that was worse. He briefly considered going straight to the court of the King, and reporting the entire sordid scene. But, much as he resisted the feeling, the notion of betraying the man who had saved his life did not sit well with him. And so, although it appalled him, he knew the only course was to dispose of the evidence. Then – and only then – would he leave Locksley to his own devices. He would go far away, to England. It had been long enough since he was there, and there were matters to be resolved back home.

This decision emboldened him for what was to follow.

The disposal was surprisingly easy. Locksley said he knew of a place, and putting the wrapped body, covered, in a barrow, led Gisburne not to a remote spot beyond the walls as he had expected, but through the maze of narrow streets into the heart of the Old City. There, he revealed the crumbling entrance to a vast, ancient cellar, part of which ran under the Holy Sepulchre itself. What it had once been, and how Locksley knew of it, Gisburne could not guess, but now it was clearly being used as a local rubbish dump. And so, beneath the very place where Jesus Christ had suffered his final agony, and offered up his greatest sacrifice, Locksley and Gisburne dumped the murdered body of a whore. Without ceremony, the nameless woman known as “Rose” was tumbled into the clutter of objects and stinking refuse that now filled that dark vault, and the stone slab restored to its entrance.

All that night, Gisburne scrubbed blood from the tiles in a strange, numb daze, and made plans for his departure.

The next day – the day of the arrière-ban – was burned into his memory, its sights and smells as clear as if they were still before him. He could see it now: himself and Locksley perched around a barrel that served for a table on the Malquisinat, the jocularly-named “street of bad food” – between them, a jug of sweet Judean wine and a dish of spiced lamb and artichokes flavoured with lemon, garlic, almonds and saffron, into which they thrust scooped pieces of flatbread, still hot and fragrant with woodsmoke. It all seemed so perfect.

Locksley was smiling, enjoying the morning, as if everything were just as it always was. He ate and drank with gusto, and joked and gossiped with Mamdour. Mamdour’s mood, as always, was playful, if a little subdued. He described how, with Gisburne’s encouragement, he had tested the patience of his god by the partaking of wine from Lebanon – his one weakness. Now, he said, Allah was showing his displeasure by having a herd of cattle bellow and stamp and shit in his head. Locksley roared with laughter, and nudged and slapped Gisburne. Mamdour held his head and groaned in an almost theatrical manner. “Oh, it was a bad night...” he said. “A baaaad night!”

The words seemed to burn into Gisburne. His mind was in turmoil. All he could think of was escape. And yet, he found himself putting it off, going through the same motions as any ordinary day – sitting, eating, drinking – as if in denial of the horrors of the previous night. He did not want to believe it had happened, but knew he must act. Knew, in fact, that he was in a state of shock, and that it was only this that paralysed his limbs. But, for the first time in years, he also felt powerless to break it.

It was Salah al-Din who supplied the solution.

All at once, there was clamour in the streets. There was a blast of a trumpet, and a half dozen of King Guy’s armoured knights appeared, bearing his banner. Gisburne’s heart sank. They had discovered the body. They had found out who was her favoured client and had come to arrest the culprits. He was to end in disgrace, just like Gilbert de Gaillon.

But, at that moment, Christendom had little interest in the petty concerns of Guy of Gisburne.

A knight read out a proclamation from the King himself. They would have to announce this many times today – perhaps had done so several times already. As he did so, the bustle of the street faded until there was silence. It was an arrière-ban – a call to arms for all able-bodied men within the kingdom, with immediate effect. As it was read, Mamdour regarded his friends with a pained, sad expression, suddenly understanding that they were soon to regard each other as enemies.

Salah al-Din was on the move. It was war.

In order to function during wartime, one had to put certain everyday concerns to one side. Gisburne’s chief concerns were hardly everyday – and perhaps he had been rather too keen to put the whole matter out of his mind. But the fact was, there would be no leaving. Not now. He had to make the best of it. And he would have to bury his feelings about Locksley. They were going to war again. He would need him. What troubled him most was the sense of relief he felt at this – the feeling that somehow war felt a more safe, and more secure place than peace.

War had also brought an unexpected master. Henry, the distant English King – who had a hundred times the shrewdness and sagacity of his eldest son – had elected to buy off the Pope with a hefty pledge of money rather than abandon his kingdom for the sake of some damn foreign crusade. The money was to be used to hire mercenaries, for Henry was not keen to lose his knights to the enterprise, either. Little did he realise, his own son and heir – who had learned the power of money but the value of nothing – would, one day soon, abandon everything, kingdom and all, for the chance to spill Saracen blood in that distant desert.

And so it was that Guy of Gisburne and Robert of Locksley found themselves upon this parched rock, fighting side by side under the banner of Henry II of England.