Free King's Man by Angus Donald Page B

heard …’ said the knight, and then he paused for a heartbeat. ‘I heard that Robert of Locksley, when badlyoutnumbered by his enemies, summoned horse-demons from the very bowels of Hell to help him win a battle in Yorkshire against Prince John’s liegeman Sir Ralph Murdac.’
    He made the sign of the Cross again.
    ‘It was just a trick,’ I said hotly. ‘A ruse de guerre . It was merely a few men in masks, and horse-drawn fire-carts and a little heathen music to put terror in the minds of his enemies. There were no black arts involved. I swear it. I swear by Almighty God, by the Virgin and all the saints, there was no devilry. He was just trying to frighten his enemies. And it worked very well, I may say.’
    ‘Heathen music? Hmm, interesting. Ah well,’ said this pigheaded Templar. ‘If you say there was no devilment involved, I must believe you.’ He clearly did not, and his voice had taken on a distant, chilly tone as if he had already made up his mind about me. ‘Doubtless the truth will be fully revealed at the inquisition.’
    ‘The inquisition?’ I said, now utterly bewildered.
    ‘Did you not know?’ said this monkish knight, feigning surprise. ‘Lord Locksley has been summoned to appear before an episcopal inquisition to be held by the Master of our Order to answer charges of heresy. Pope Celestine sanctioned it personally – and it will be rather a special occasion, I believe. As you must know, all the bishops in Christendom have been charged by His Holiness with suppressing heresy wherever they find it. Mostly it’s a way of extirpating the southern heretics, those damned Cathars, but the Master has been granted a special dispensation by the Holy Father himself to investigate Robert, Earl of Locksley. And so your lord, if he has any respect for the Vicar of Christ, God’s anointed representative on Earth,must attend a tribunal in London on St Polycarpus’s Day on pain of excommunication and an interdict on all his lands.’
    The Templar knight smiled at me grimly. ‘If what you say is true, he should think of it as a welcome chance to clear his good name.’
    I stumbled away from the conversation with Sir Aymeric de St Maur in a state of shock. St Polycarpus’s Day was the twenty-third of February, about ten weeks hence. Did Robin know about this? He must do, which is why he was summoning Hanno and me to his side. Would he then present himself at the inquisition? It would be risky not to. Excommunication was one of the most serious sanctions that the Church could impose on mortal man: it meant that the sinner would no longer be considered part of the Christian communion; once excommunicated he was publicly excluded from the Church and became a sort of spiritual outlaw, unable to receive the Eucharist and therefore damned to eternal torment in Hell. But I also knew that Robin could not give two rotten apples for the Church’s opinion of his soul. I’m not even sure that he believed that he had one. And he never willingly received the Eucharist anyway.
    The interdict on his lands was more serious. It meant that no church services could be performed anywhere on his lands: no one could be married, no child baptized, and no dead man could be buried in a large part of South Yorkshire, and significant areas of Nottinghamshire, too. And this was worrying news. To make an enemy of the Church was no small thing. Children who died in infancy would go to Hell without baptism; corpses would pile up on the sides of the roads. Allhis tenants and villeins would be incensed with their lord over this, perhaps even to the point of rebellion, unless Robin could succeed in getting the interdict swiftly lifted.
    But to attend this inquisition and be found guilty would be worse: the penalty for a man found guilty of a grave heresy was confiscation of all his lands and goods – and, in the most serious cases, death by burning at the stake.
    Two days later, Hanno and I were in the buttery attached to the great