by Rachel Ford
She groaned. “Good God. You’re worse than Alfred.”
At this, the taxman’s brow furrowed. “Wait, what?”
She shrugged apologetically. “Come on, babe. You know it’s kind of true: you’re a bit of a luddite.”
His frown did not ease. “I am not.”
“Well, Freddo definitely is,” Justin laughed. “I had to talk him into getting onto social media.”
Nancy’s eyes widened. “Oh my God – I had to talk Alfred into it, too.”
The two Faveros stared daggers first at Nancy, then Justin. “Social media is a waste of time,” Alfred said.
“It’s a high-level marketing scheme to sell us products and dumb us down,” Freddo declared.
The taxman nodded, adding, “And if the state of society is any indication, it’s clearly working.”
“What’s working now?” a voice asked, and they all started. It was Robert Whod, and he had come up behind them unnoticed.
“Oh, nothing. Just a type of entertainment, back home,” Alfred said quickly.
“Ah. Well, I see you’re all dressed. You ready to head out?”
“We are.”
“Great. You men follow me. Miss Nancy, I believe the women are making some kind of pie out of yesterday’s kills. You’ll find them by the ovens.”
Nancy raised a quizzical eyebrow at him, and Alfred felt it best to interject, “Oh, Nance is coming with us.”
Robert blinked. “You want to take your woman? You realize it will be dangerous, right?”
Alfred saw her jaw tighten at this description, and he hastened to reply, “Nance can handle herself.”
“You’ll find I’m a better fighter than cook,” she declared, a little frostily.
“Hmm.” The outlaw glanced her over, then shrugged. “Well, it’s your hide, I suppose. Just so long as you know, Rickman’s men aren’t likely to show you mercy just because you’re a woman.”
“That’s alright,” she returned. “Because I won’t be showing them any, either.”
He grinned now, nodding at Alfred. “Feisty, that one. Alright, I’m going to get the rest of the men. Let’s meet up at the fire.”
He strolled off now, and after he was out of earshot, Freddo said, “Good God. ‘Feisty’? What century is this again?”
“I don’t know,” Justin shook his head. “But I sure as shit wish we could get out of it.”
“You and me both,” Nancy agreed. “You and me both, Justin.”
They’d set out not long after that, with a few comments from some of the band about Nancy’s presence. Robert, though, shrugged. “If bards can pick up blades for the cause, I don’t see why a woman can’t. Anyway, she can’t cook.”
“Can’t cook?” John Naylor repeated with so much amazement he might have just accused Nancy of a crime.
“Have you much skill with a blade?” William asked.
“A little,” she said. She’d learned to fence, Alfred knew, through one of her medieval groups. How she’d fare against men who fought for a living, he hoped they would not discover. Not only because he feared for Nancy’s sake – and he did – but because he feared for all of them. Justin had taken an archery class in high school – which was a lot longer ago than the other man would have been keen to admit – and he and Freddo had no training in any medieval weapons. Heck, he’d only really learned to shoot during the Futureprise case; and he had no guns with him. They would be in a sorry state, if called on to defend themselves. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
The trek through the forest was a long one, and as the day wore on, he slipped the cape off.
“We’re nearing Warwick-on-Eden,” Robert called after a space.
Justin sidled up beside him. “What’s the plan? Once we get there, I mean?”
“Well, they’ll be christening the new building today. They’re going to be letting people tour it. That’ll be a good opportunity for some of our men to get inside. Specifically, faces he doesn’t recognize yet.” He glanced back at Alfred and his companions. “In fact, the woman’s presence might be a help to us.”
“Wait,” Alfred said, “you mean…you want us to infiltrate this place? Whatever it is?”
He nodded. “Exactly. Me and my men? Our faces are known. But you all? You’re new to these parts. They won’t be looking for you. And, like I say, a woman in the mix is even better. Especially a pretty face like yours, Miss Nancy.” He seemed not to notice the glower Nance turned his way, because he continued unphased, “See, you’ll go in. Figure out where they keep the medicine. It’ll probably be a locked room, but if you can get inside and open a window, that’ll be our marker.”
“So you don’t just want us to scope the place out, you want us to break into wherever they’re holding the medicine?”
Robert nodded, oblivious to the skepticism in Alfred’s tone. “If they have the place under watch, it may be difficult. But if you can make a satchel of your cloaks, and fill them with supplies, you can lower them out the window when I give the signal.”
“What’s the signal?”
Robert Whod grinned. “Oh, you’ll know, bard. Believe me, you’ll know. All of Warwick-on-Eden will know.”
That sound ominous, but Alfred decided to focus on the hare-brained-scheme. “So…break into this place, steal the medicine, wait for a signal, and lower it out the window?”
“Precisely.”
“And then what do we do?”
“Well, get out of there.”
“What if we get caught?”
“You can try to fight your way out. But…” He shrugged. “You’ll be better off not getting caught.”
“You can always jump out the window,” Allan Clare offered.
“What is this place, anyway?” Justin asked. “You said they just finished building it?”
“That’s right. It’s supposed to be some new kind of center, for caring for the sick.” He shook his head grimly. “It’s just another monument to his vanity: a great edifice to glorify his lordship. Another marker, to show how much the great Lord Rickman cares for the common man. He calls it a hospital, but it’s really just another statue to himself.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Wait,” Alfred said, certain he’d misheard. “Did you say…a hospital?”
“Yes. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
He ignored the question. “So, you’re saying, you want us to break into a hospital and rob it? That’s our target?”
Robert Whod nodded. “With all the congestion from the event, and then the confusion from our distraction, it will be perfect. You should be able to slip out unnoticed.”
Alfred was incredulous. He was duly skeptical of the other man’s plan in general, but he was struggling in particular with the bit about robbing a hospital. “I…but…that is…”
Justin found his tongue first. “So, why are we ‘liberating’ this medicine again? I mean, isn’t a hospital the right place for medicine?”
“It’s one of Rickman’s projects,” the outlaw answered. “He robbed the people to pay for it.”
“You mean…taxed them?” Freddo ventured.
Whod scowled at the word. “Indeed. So the medicine was paid for by the people. Now, we’re liberating it, to return to the people.”
“Out of curiosity,” Nancy asked, “are you going to leave it in Warwick-on-Eden?”
“I thought of it, Miss Nancy. It is where much of the taxes came from. But, then, I realized the tyrant would find it if we left it there, and reclaim it.”
“So…what are you going to do with it?”
“We’ll take it to the Freemen’s Forest. We’ll use it as we need it, and for anyone who comes to us in need of aid.”
A murmur of approbation sounded from the band. “That’s how things are done in the Forest,” John nodded proudly.
Alfred, though, frowned. It sounded to him much less like the liberation he’d been sold on this morning, and a lot more like common thievery. These men didn’t pay taxes. They proud
ly said so. Now, they would take medicine from a hospital built by others, for their own uses, and justify it by calling taxmen thieves. This last part in particular rankled the taxman.
It seemed to him that his kind was being blamed for the vices of Robert Whod’s band, and while it was not the greatest moral failing at play, it was the one that hit closest to home.
Nancy, meanwhile, sidled up to him, catching his eye. She said nothing, but her expression was worried. He nodded, conveying that he felt the same.
Justin fell back, now, so that he was beside them. He flashed Nancy and Alfred a wide-eyed expression full of angst. Freddo’s brow was creased into a deep frown.
They all, the taxman thought, were as uneasy with this proposition as he. But at the moment, they had no opportunity to discuss it. Not without being overheard by these tax-evading psychopaths. “Alright,” he said aloud, “that sounds like a good plan.”
“It does?” Justin wondered.
Nancy shot him a warning look, and Freddo managed a weak, “I like it.”
“Excellent,” Robert beamed. “You boys’ll do us proud. And you, of course, Miss Nancy. We’ll strike a blow for the Freemen! And we’ll bring that medicine home for the people, where it belongs.”
“Yeah,” Alfred said, trying his best to feign enthusiasm.
“Let’s do this,” Nancy agreed, making a better show of it than he had.
The outlaw nodded. “I knew helping you folks was the right call. I just had a feeling about you. You can always tell honest people.”
The last leg of their journey seemed at once interminable, and yet far too short. He couldn’t wait for it to be over, in that he wanted to be away from the outlaws sooner rather than later. But the idea of what might await downright terrified him.
It seemed to Alfred he was, as the saying went, between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he was faced with reckless tax cheats, who flouted the social contract and embraced a kind of parasitic anarchism, eschewing the trappings of civilization while clinging onto whatever they could steal from it.
On the other, was the tyrant, whose vanity and cruelty fueled these madmen, whose army apparently persecuted them. Whose army would, no doubt, persecute him, Nancy, Freddo and Justin, if it got the chance.
He felt something like a pawn on someone else’s board. And while he usually loved chess analogies, this one left him uneasy simply because it encapsulated the situation perfectly. He was a nobody, pushed by forces beyond his control into a conflict that was not his own, to further someone else’s ends. On his side of the board, the mastermind shoving him into danger was Whod, who seemed more than willing to risk a few pawns to get what he wanted. And on the other was the defender, who wouldn’t think twice to exterminate a row full of enemy pawns if he got the chance.
And here he was, with no other options, no other plays. He could only move forward in the direction Whod pushed him; forward, into danger; forward, to death or capture, like a good little pawn.
Warwick-on-Eden was a smallish city, situated on the banks of two intersecting rivers. They approached carefully, and Alfred had the opportunity to get a good look at the town. There was, he thought, a distinct transition in the architecture and borders. Near the river, there seemed to be an older settlement. The buildings were humbler and more weathered.
Stretching out from this central area, though, the city expanded in newer buildings, wider streets, fresher facades. He saw shops and a great, bustling, open-air market. There was a cathedral, too, its spires reaching high into the midday sky. At the outskirts of Warwick-on-Eden, farms dotted the landscape. Sheep grazed in pastureland, and fields of crops stretched down the river banks in all directions.
And for half a minute, Alfred forgot his fear and anxiety, and simply marveled at the sights before him. In all his life, he’d never imagined he would see history like this, so fresh and real. It was like stepping into the pages of a textbook, except that that textbook was living and breathing all around him. These buildings were not reconstructions, not ruins from a thousand years ago. The people were not long dead and buried, pieced together snapshots of lives come and gone. These medieval structures, these medieval people, were as real as he was.
And, for better or worse, Alfred was one of them now. That rather sobered the taxman. It was one thing to appreciate the spectacle of medieval life as a casual observer. He could appreciate the thrill of that. But to live it? Images of parasites and disease, of hunger and malnutrition, crowded his brain, driving away any of the charms that had filled it a moment before.
“You see the building near the cathedral?”
“The one with the crowds outside it?” Alfred wondered, peering at a large, two story stone building. It looked so fresh and new that he could imagine construction wrapping up a few minutes ago. The great windows that lined its face glimmered in the sunlight. A dais had been erected in the square outside, and throngs of visitors mulled around it.
“That’s the one.”
“We’ll never get by that many people,” Nancy protested. “Especially if we try to sneak something out the window: someone will see us.”
“It’s early yet. The ceremony starts at twelfth bell.”
“Oh.”
“Once it starts, that prat will give a speech. Then the doors will open, and people will start milling in.” He shook his head. “Trust me, Missy Nancy, they’ve seen the exterior. They’ve seen it being built. They pass it every day on the way to their fields or the mill or the mine. What they’re really interested in is the interior. Once those doors open, they’re all going to be inside.”
“I’m not sure that helps us,” Justin observed. “That just means there’ll be a crowd of people inside, between us and the medicine.”
Here, the outlaw shrugged. “Well, that’s where your ingenuity comes into play. You’ll have to figure something out. I’m sure you’ll do just fine.”
“Well,” John said, “you jesters ready?”
“Bards,” Alfred reminded him.
“Whatever.”
The taxman frowned. He was trying to think of some way to stall, and trying to think of a scathing comeback; and the multitasking was not going his way. He was drawing blanks on both fronts.
Here, Nancy intervened. “We’re ready.”
“We are?” Freddo asked.
She nodded briskly. “We are.”
“Great,” Robert nodded. “You should head out then and start mingling. Try to act like locals, so you don’t draw any eyes.”
“Got it.”
“Oh, and one other thing.”
“What?” Alfred wondered.
“You’ll need to leave your weapons.”
“Wait…what?”
Robert nodded. “The tyrant won’t allow weapons on the streets. You’ll need to leave your weapons behind.”
“Hold on,” Freddo said. “You mean…we’re supposed to go rob some place – unarmed?”
“And you’re only mentioning this now…because…?” Justin added.
“I don’t write the laws, friends,” Robert protested. “If you march into town with a sword strapped to your belt, they’re going to arrest you before you get near the hospital.”
“It’s fine,” Nancy said. “We don’t need swords.”
“It is?” Alfred asked, his eyebrows making a beeline for his hairline. “We don’t?” She flashed him a look – the kind of look that said don’t argue. And, mustering every ounce of restraint, he said, “I mean, yeah. We’ll be fine.”
Robert clapped him on the back, and he nearly toppled under the blow. “Good. Excellent. Good luck to you, my friends. We’ll give you a quarter hour after we see you go in. Then, we’ll make our diversion.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Tell me you’ve got a plan, Nance. Please tell me you’ve got a plan,” Alfred pleaded as soon as they were out of earshot of the outlaws.
“Please tell me it doesn’t involve robbing a freaking hospital,” Justin added.
“Yes. Well, kind of. For the plan, I mean. And, no, I have no intention of robbing a hospital.”
Justin breathed a sigh of relief at the same moment Alfred did. “What’s the plan, babe?”
“It’s not a full-fledged plan, exactly. More like a…a strategy.”
The taxman glanced askew at her. “How detailed is this strategy, exactly?”
“Not very.”
He groaned. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
She took his hand and squeezed it. “I think we need to get the hell out of here.”
“So…your strategy is ‘run away’?” Justin frowned.
“Pretty much. The Freemen are clearly nuts. But this Lord Rickman? We know nothing about him. With our luck, he’s as batty as they are. Maybe worse.”
“We could use the crowd as cover,” Freddo agreed. “Head into the hospital, wait for whatever distraction they’re planning, and then disappear into the forest in the opposite direction.”
“Preferably,” Nancy agreed, “following a road this time.”
“God yes,” Justin nodded. “From what I can tell, Yngil-wode goes on forever. We could end up starving to death before we found the next town.”
“We don’t know what’s out there, though, darling,” Alfred worried. “What if the next town we come to is hostile? What if Rickman’s men find us, and don’t buy our traveling-bards routine?”
“I don’t know,” Nancy admitted. “But we can’t stay, Alfred. We can’t help them rob a hospital.”
“No,” he agreed. “We can’t.”
“And if we go back empty-handed…”
“Robert’s men already want to string us up for target practice,” Freddo reminded him.
“Oh Nance,” he said, and his tones were raw. The enormity of their shared misery for a moment overwhelmed him. It had been one thing among friends, as he’d thought the outlaws not long ago. But now to find themselves alone in this strange and hostile world? To know that Nance, his Nance, would be stuck here, without any of her computers or her gadgets or the awful tv shows she loved so much? Without real medicine or good doctors, in a world where a scratch could lead to death? He cursed the miserable luck that sent them to a time like this, that had opted to strand them in a strange past instead of a technologically advanced future. They could have been sent into a world where medicine had evolved, where life was easier and better. Instead of this place and this time. “Oh my Nance.”
