The Hostility of Hanno: An Outlaw Chronicles short story by Angus Donald

rely on luck alone. I was thirteen when I was caught in the act of
     stealing a beef pie; the Sheriff would surely have lopped off my right hand if I hadn’t managed to escape. That was when I
     went to join Robin Hood’s band of men in the trackless depths of Sherwood Forest.
    I never forgot that it was the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire – a black-hearted bastard named Sir Ralph Murdac – who had sent
     his men to hang my father. Even as a child I swore to be revenged on him. Years passed and I learned to fight like gentlefolk,
     a-horse with sword and lance, and joined King Richard on the Great Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. At the siege of Nottingham,
     on our return, I had the good fortune to capture the same Ralph Murdac, who was defying the King, and deliver him bound hand
     and foot to my royal master. I had meant to kill him, to cut his head off in the name of my father – and I would have done
     so gladly, but for one thing. As he knelt before me, bound, helpless, his neck stretched for my sword, he told me that if
     I killed him I would never discover the name of the man who was truly responsible for my father’s death. In the face of Death,
     Murdac claimed that he had been acting on the instructions of a very powerful man, a ‘man you cannot refuse’. If I spared
     him, he said, he would reveal the man’s name.
    And so I spared him. But, as God willed it, he never told me the name of the man who had ordered Henry d’Alle to be destroyed.
     King Richard had hanged Murdac the next day, as a warning to the rebellious defenders of Nottingham Castle, before I could
     thoroughly question him.
    I felt the weight of my father’s death – and the need to find the man who had ordered it – like a lead cope around my shoulders.
     But I was a blindfolded man groping in the dark: I had no idea who this powerful man – this ‘man you cannot refuse’ – could
     be, nor how I might discover his identity and, almost as important to me, to find out
why
he had reached out his long arm to extinguish my father’s existence. So, although I was in France on behalf of Robin, commanding
     his troops, I had chosen to be here because it brought me closer to the place of my father’s birth, and perhaps closer to
     solving the riddle of his death.
    For the moment I pushed these thoughts of vengeance and powerful, shadowy enemies away, to concentrate on the task at hand.
     A scout rode up on a sweat-lathered horse and reported that the enemy lines were no more than three miles away. The sun was
     sinking low in the sky and we made our camp, quiet and fireless in a small copse in a fold of a shallow valley. Sentries set,
     and gnawing on a stick of dried mutton, I conferred with Hanno, Owain and the returned scouts.
    ‘The castle of Verneuil still defies Philip,’ began Hanno. ‘I see Richard’s lions flying above the tower.’
    I nodded and swallowed a lump of roughly chewed mutton with difficulty. I found that my mouth was dry. ‘Earthworks?’ I said.
     ‘Siege engines?’
    ‘They dig earthworks, yes,’ said Hanno, scratching at his round shaven head. ‘But one, two trenches and a little wall to protect
     the diggers; they are not very far along. But I see four big siege engines, three trebuchets, I think, and a mangonel; also
     small stuff, balistes and onagers. The walls have taken some hurt, and the tower, too, but they are holding.’ Hanno paused
     and frowned. ‘But the siege does not feel very … lively, very quick. The Frenchmen are not working so hard, just waiting for
     the castle to fall. There is no discipline, no proper order. The men are taking their ease around their fires – drinking,
     gambling, sleeping. I do not think it will be difficult for us to break through.’
    ‘How many are they?’ I asked the Bavarian warrior.
    ‘King Philip is there; his fleur-de-lys flies over a big gold tent to the east of the castle. And many of his barons are with
     him, too, I think. So, perhaps two thousand