Free The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) by Angus Donald Page A

lord after a mile.
    ‘No idea,’ was the terse reply. ‘But I will not sit idle in Normandy while Marie-Anne is at the mercy of our enemies. That royal bullfrog would have done nothing and squandered his chance. It might work, it really might, with a bit of luck.’
    ‘I didn’t know you were familiar with Mirebeau,’ I said.
    ‘Never heard of the place before tonight,’ said Robin, and in the moonlit darkness I could just make out his crooked smile.
    We rode all through the night and by dawn had reached Le Mans, where the bulk of William des Roches’s men were quartered. We stayed in that town only long enough to eat a hurried meal, feed and rub down our horses, and before the sun was a hand’s breadth above the horizon were back in the saddle.
    It was a hellish journey – indeed, as with so many unpleasant experiences, I cannot recall the full details of it now. I just have a vague memory of aching thighs, battered knees and bruised buttocks; numb fingers and a crushing weight of exhaustion pressing on my shoulders; the stink of sweat, both from horse and man; the constant jingle of metal accoutrements and the creak of leather. We rode without Robin for much of the time. My lord felt it wiser to be at the King’s elbow, in case the wretched fellow changed his mind or his resolve failed him.
    Little John and I rode side by side, with Kit and Vim on our heels and the uncomplaining Wolves behind us. Hour after hour we rode. The sun arced across the Heavens before us. We crossed rivers great and small, by bridge and ford, but tiredness blurred the hours, day and night, into one seamless agony of protesting bodies and jolting movement, of orders passed up and down the column. My head felt as if it was being squeezed in a vice, yet still we rode, endlessly pushing southwards. But William des Roches, who with Robin led the army on that awful, endless march, knew that we must rest our horses and ourselves. It would do no good to arrive at Mirebeau without the strength to fight.
    We stopped a few miles before the city of Tours, at a small castle still loyal to des Roches whose name I never learned. We had been riding for almost twenty-four hours without cease, and there we slept for four short hours. The King commandeered fresh horses for every man, some two hundred knights and three times as many mounted men-at-arms: we must have taken up every rideable beast within miles – and a good thing too, for my bay was nearly dead with exhaustion, his neck lathered with foam, his eyes rolling, his feet unsteady, legs shaking. I was not in a much better state. When I collapsed into my blankets in the straw of the castle stables, I slept immediately and, it seemed, had to stagger to my feet immediately, rouse the men, snatch a mouthful of cold porridge and a cup of water from Kit, and mount an unfamiliar horse, for the nightmare to begin all over again. Twelve hours of ceaseless riding later, twelve hours of agony, at a village a little to the west of Châtellerault, an hour or so after dusk, we stopped again, and once more fell into slumber like dead men. This time, however, with a sense of accomplishment in the back of our exhausted minds. We had ridden more than eighty miles in forty-eight hours. We were a handful of miles from Mirebeau.
    Robin summoned me from my blankets a little after midnight, and I cursed him as I struggled to stand. My back was one long sheet of pain; my thighs were chafed raw, the thick woollen hose worn away against the saddle to expose inflamed skin; my head felt as if it had been stuffed with burning wool.
    ‘The King wants to see all the commanders of his contingents in the church – now,’ he said. I saw the bulk of Little John standing in the blackness behind Robin.
    ‘Come on, Alan, we’ve done well, very well indeed to get here so fast, with all our men,’ Robin said. ‘But we need to be clear about the attack on Mirebeau, and how we should proceed. William des Roches’s scouts are back