Rothgar nodded and hastened back into his shop, bellowing for his apprentice.

Joscelin moved quickly across the narrow, muddy street and started up the hill towards the alehouse. Folk were emerging from their shops and houses, exclaiming, looking anxious, demanding to know what was happening. Other townsfolk were pouring down the hill away from the marketplace, fleeing in panic.

‘Soldiers!’ A panting merchant paused to cry warning. Tucked under his arm, a goose wildly paddled its orange feet. ‘Derby’s men. Save yourselves!’

Joscelin thrust himself against the tide of panicking humanity, shouldering through them until he reached the Weekday. The evergreen bush that was usually suspended on a horizontal pole from the gable, advertising the place as an alehouse, was trampled down outside the door, and smoke billowed in thick clouds from the interior. The empty yard showed no sign of the landlord’s guard dog, only its kennel and the length of bear chain that usually leashed it.

People streamed away from the marketplace, heading for the sanctuary of the churches. Smoke belched from a row of merchants’ houses on the King’s road leading to St Mary’s. Fire crowned the thatch in sudden licks of flame but no one stopped to organize a bucket chain. With life and limb at stake, houses could burn.

Joscelin was buffeted like a rock in the midst of a turbulent sea by the crowds milling around him. Then he saw the soldiers. Reflected fire from the torches they held glinted on their helms and mail. In and out of houses and shops they darted, setting alight thatch and straw, kicking apart hearths, scattering embers to consume homes and shops in the fury of flame.

He came across two bodies sprawled in the street. One of them was a whore, her gaudy yellow gown splashed with blood. The other, his arm still across her body, was Gamel. His carpentry tools were scattered across the street and his wooden leg stuck out at an awkward angle. Appalled, Joscelin crouched and made the sign of the cross over the bodies, closed Gamel’s staring eyes and rose to his feet. Fear and anger surged through him. Where in God’s name was Conan?

Church bells clamoured from all quarters. His thoughts flashed to Linnet and Robert. With his father absent on business and just a few servants in the house, they were vulnerable. His father’s townhouses stood almost on top of Derby’s. That might protect the dwellings from fire but it also meant there would be a high concentration of Derby’s men in the area.

He began to force his way along the narrow street, pushing himself against the tide of humanity striving towards the sanctuary of St Peter’s church. The ground underfoot was muddy and he slipped and skidded. Behind him there was panic as a barrel of pitch in a carpenter’s workshop exploded, showering the crowd with flaming debris. A globule landed on his hand and sizzled into his flesh before he was able to brush it off. He was pushed and jostled, almost forced by the surge of the crowd to enter St Peter’s, but managed to thrust his way out of the press and across the street to a narrow passageway that progressed in a crooked dogleg to the backs of the houses lining the Saturday market square.

Here, too, there was chaos, and Joscelin realized with a renewed leap of fear that the assault on the city was widespread. Surrounded by the sounds of looting and burning, he crouched for a moment in the garden of one of the houses to recover his breath. He wondered if the constable would send soldiers into the city or just hold fast to the castle and hope that Ferrers’s attack was more an act of spite and bile than an attempt to subjugate city and castle to his will.

Brandishing his new dagger, Joscelin straightened and moved up through the garden. Suddenly, an enormous black sow galloped around the corner of the building and almost bowled him over. He leaped aside and found himself confronted by two foot soldiers, their own knives to hand for the purposes of pig-sticking. The sow snorted away down the garth, wallowed across the damaged wattle fence at the foot and disappeared into the noisome alley beyond. The foot soldiers and Joscelin appraised each other over their poised weapons.

‘I have no quarrel with you,’ Joscelin said. ‘Let me go my way in peace and I will let you go yours.’

The men exchanged swift glances and returned their scrutiny to Joscelin. He was suddenly very aware of the gold braid edging his tunic, the quality of his cloak and its ornate clasp - temptations far greater than a prospective haunch of roast pork that was already halfway to Broadmarsh by now.

‘We wouldn’t rightly want to quarrel with you either,’ said the older of the two men, ‘but we’d like you better if you was to hand over that cloak and clasp as a sign of goodwill.’

‘Your purse and belt, too,’ added the second, whose quick crafty gaze had not missed the promising roundness of Joscelin’s money pouch and the gilding on the tooled leather belt.

One soldier moved right, the other left. Joscelin ran at the latter, dagger lifted to strike. His attack was blocked as the man grasped his knife hand. Joscelin responded in a similar manner by grasping his opponent’s wrist and used their grip on each other as leverage to hurl the man hard to the right, fouling the other soldier’s path. Having broken free, Joscelin ran. He heard the sound of rapid footfalls in pursuit but he had a start on them and, being faster into the bargain, reached the market square well in front. Across it, Joscelin saw soldiers rolling wine barrels out of a vintner’s cellar while the vintner and his family watched in helpless shock. A hauberk-clad soldier sat astride his war-horse conducting operations, a long whip dangling from his fist.

Behind Joscelin, there was a triumphant cry. ‘There he is, the whoreson, get him!’

Flashing a glance over his shoulder, Joscelin saw the two soldiers he had just evaded running out of the doorway of a house on Cuckstool Row. Joscelin took to his heels, knowing that if they caught him they would kill him.

The marketplace was a shambles of overturned booths and stalls, the looters picking among them like scavengers at the scene of a larger animal’s kill. Joscelin sought the shelter of these booths, dodging in and out between them, weaving from one to the other across the square towards Organ Lane. Near the low wall that separated the corn market from the rest of the stalls, a looter threatened him with a short knife but backed off the moment he saw the gleam of Joscelin’s dagger and went in search of easier prey. Joscelin was preoccupied in watching the looter and did not see the body sprawled behind one of the raided booths until too late. He measured his length across the corpse and lay upon it, momentarily too winded to move. When he drew his first breath he almost choked, for the stench emanating from the dead man’s garments proclaimed him an employee of one of the numerous tanneries down by the Leen bridge. Essence of excrement mingled with that of putrefaction, rancid mutton fat and the metallic tang of tannin. The stink was so powerful that Joscelin retched. In the background he could hear his pursuers approaching and knew that in a moment they would be upon him.

In haste, Joscelin tore off his mantle and gilded tunic. Stuffing them beneath the trestle in the booth, he rolled the corpse over, dragged off its cloak and stained tunic and dressed himself in the foulsome rags. A greasy, louse-infested hood and a knobbled quarterstaff completed the ensemble - and not a moment too soon. As Joscelin started to walk away from the corpse, his two pursuers ran panting round the side of the booth.

His fall had been greatly to his advantage. Still winded, Joscelin did not stride out as he might have otherwise done, which would have given him away immediately. Instead he moved with a shuffling walk more reminiscent of a peasant.

‘Ho!’ cried one of the soldiers. ‘You there, have you seen a noble running this way? Tall, wearing a dark-red cloak?’

Joscelin shook his head and mumbled a reply in the rustic Anglo-Dane of the countryside. At the same time, he gestured with his arm so that the dreadful stench of his garments wafted towards the men. Neither of them, he hazarded, would want to move in as close as it would take to kill him.

‘Ah God, he stinks as if he’s been dead a week!’ declared the other soldier. ‘Can you tell what he’s saying?’

His companion shook his head, equally baffled. ‘His accent’s too heavy. Come on, we’re wasting our time. Let’s search round the other side.’

Cold sweat clasping his body, Joscelin watched them walk rapidly away. He breathed out hard, then in again. The smell from his garments was not as bad now that he had grown accustomed and it had quite probably saved his life. Turning, he cut his way across the marketplace and up towards the town gate near Derby Road. The looted houses of Long Row bordered the marketplace with a ragged line of fire. As he hurried up the muddy thoroughfare, Joscelin hoped desperately that his father’s houses were close enough to Derby’s not to have been torched.

From a dark alleyway, a band of hurrying soldiers emerged like wine running from an open flask. They spilled over Joscelin before he could avoid them and then they drew back, exclaiming at the stench of him.

Joscelin’s hand relaxed on the grip of his dagger. ‘Where in God’s name have you been!’ he roared at Conan.

His uncle set his hands on his hips and stared Joscelin up and down. ‘I might ask the same of you.’ His scarred lip curved lopsidedly towards his left nostril. ‘Christ’s buttocks, but you stink worse than a three-week-old battlefield! ’

‘I had to exchange clothes with a tanner’s corpse to keep myself from being skewered by two routiers,’ Joscelin said shortly. ‘I thought you’d be in the Weekday.’