Greenwode

by J Tullos Hennig

  History is chronicled by conquerors.

  At best we have a narrow and polarized viewpoint of any given event. Which is, sort of, what good storytelling is about anyway.

  Questioning any source is a fine thing. Questioning an “authority” is always a fine thing.

  I think Robyn Hood would agree.

  —JTH

  Autumn 2012

  Night Before ACre

  A Tale of the Wode

  “SWEET LADY, listen to it! It’s breathing.”

  “Breathing.” Said with a hint of skepticism; Gamelyn knows his eyebrows are disappearing upward and into his coppery bang even as a slow, indulgent smile tugs at his lips.

  At times like this, Rob is more child and wild, more ingenuous than anything he’s ever claimed of Gamelyn.

  But Rob doesn’t answer, standing... no, swaying with every rush and ebb of foam and wave. The beach is endless, fathomless pale against dark gray sea. The cliffs reach up so high behind, even Rob couldn’t tickle an arrow to crest them—but Rob has no mind for archery now. His bare toes clench against the wet sand, and pressure marks of silt and wet shimmer, ripple outward. Those traces remain, stray shadows as Rob lurches forward, running for the surf.... Nay, it’s more half-trip and stumble as he peels from what remains of his clothing, and Gamelyn is laughing, bending down beside the footprints, arms wrapped around his knees. Watching.

  A yip as cold waves hit, a laugh slapped with salt as Rob throws his arms wide and welcomes it. Dives in.

  How odd that still, between Gamelyn’s own bare toes, Rob’s footprints remain, marking where he’s been. An aura. A wish.

  A memory.

  Gamelyn bends to trace them, light and curious. A memory? They have never been to the storm-tossed English coast....

  The laugh dies in his throat. Apprehensive, he peeks upward.

  Yet Rob is there, sporting in the foam, diving and fetching like some sea creature. Yips and yowls of pure joy rise and merge with the rush and roar of surf; somehow Rob is one with an element he’s never before experienced. But it’s cold, the wild water, and it isn’t long before Rob retreats, rising from the waves all blowing and shriveled and shivering, ebon hair hanging like seaweed trails over skin tinged distinctly blue. He looks nothing less than a kelpie from the depths, sleek and windswept, eyes all brassy-bright.

  “It’s breathing, I tell you!” Rob manages between chattering teeth. “Like t’ breath of a stag blowing fierce, but also hummin’ sweet.”

  It’s Gamelyn’s, this time, to yip as fully over six feet of wet-cold and naked lad curls against him.

  “Christ, Rob—!”

  “Warm me up, then,” Rob purrs, then sighs. “Mm, you’re warm as a good hearth, y’ allus are.” Then, like a dog worrying a bone, “Surely you could hear ’t, did you try.”

  “I do try.”

  Rob’s fingers are trailing at his breastbone, making Gamelyn squirm. A crooked, wayward smile tilts Rob’s narrow face, quite impenitent as he leans in closer for a kiss. He tastes of brine and mist, heat within a chill, fresh wind. “Not half hard enough... or happens you are.” This, as those fingers trail even lower. “Hard enough, leastways.”

  And they’re bloody cold—but indeed, it doesn’t seem to matter. “You never play fair,” Gamelyn protests.

  “’Tis only unfair if you ent fetching what you want.” A chuckle, and fingers exploring light enough to tease Gamelyn mad. “Seems plain t’ me you are.” A pat to his belly as Rob rolls to crouch on his haunches, gestures outward. “But this ent. Plain, that is. Close your eyes. Listen.”

  Not without a sigh, Gamelyn tucks his chin and obeys—slowly, for to watch Rob is always a pleasure. The footprints are still there, between his knees and next to Rob’s haunches. The sight fills him, nigh to bursting, with sudden yearning and a foreign-delicious pain. Riveting. He cannot close his eyes to it.

  “Quit staring at my arse, you. You ent half tryin—”

  “Shut up, Hob-Robyn!” Gamelyn snaps, squeezing his eyes shut, and thinks, Not all of us are forest spirits. Sea serpents. Whatever you are.

  The thoughts fade away as he finds it: the wonderful necessity/escape of silence and self where nothing can reach—can’t touch me, I’m not here—the fierce inner focus that is his alone. His own breaths slow, commingle with Rob’s against the sand and sea, then that, too, fades. Only the water, roaring and churning. Only the water....

  And Gamelyn hears.

  Hears it: coupled with and beneath the fierce roil of water, of shifting sand. Feels it: ebb and flow, intake and exhale, as if some giant sleeps in the cliffs, to rise only when the full moon calls. Surf furls in, foaming at his knees and tickling the sand from beneath them.

  It licks the long toes of Rob’s footprints with luminescence, wet and gleaming in the last rays of sunlight.

  Gamelyn’s legs quiver; he shakes his head, gives himself fully to the great breath gusting against his being, leans back on his heels. The vast bowl of sky presses down upon him, but it is a weight he can bear, a held breath in his belly, a mirror against the sea. There is nothing but him and the sand, the water and the sky....

  “See?” Rob whispers, reaching out to stroke his arm. “’Tis time y’ understood, aye?” The words turn teasing. “Past time, ‘milord’—”

  “—PAST TIME, milord.”

  And the sky... shuddered. Shivered from sunset into a night pocked with stars. Chill, yet the sand was... dry. Desiccated. Gamelyn half opened his eyes, gluey with matter and dust. The footprints were still between his hands—a ghost of what was—yet the more he opened his eyes, the more those footprints began to shrivel and dry, swirl away on a heated breath. The hand was still on his arm; it tightened, slight but insistent. Gamelyn shut his eyes, clenched his teeth—sand and grit—and splayed his hands, clutched, dug into the sand. Searching for the wet, and the spray, and—

  The memory....

  “AYE, FEEL it breathing.” The voice—the voice—and wet, goose-pimpled flesh curling against his back, and quick, excited breaths heating his nape; sensation brings him back, tilts the sky into sunrise once again. A callused hand, stealing around his waist to nestle in the curve of his belly. A low plea, burring homely-soft upon his shoulder, and tendrils of ebon hair tickling his collarbones. “We could swim in the sound of it... come on, then. Come with me. I won’t let y’ drown, I promise. Just come with me.”

  He wants to go. Somehow he wants to dive—dive deep—and never surface again.

  “Please, come with me. Please, Gamelyn...?”

  “...GAMELYN?”

  He shuddered, still lured by the call of the surf, the hope of that slender figure trailing kisses down his back, the sand mirroring wet ghosts against his reaching fingers....

  And woke to darkness.

  Waves broke and spilled over the sand; they had never stopped, only grown more distant. Commingled with watery breath of impact and retreat, roar and hiss, was the insistent rhythm of predawn preparation: low voices snapping orders, the dull, metallic susurrus of chainmail, the jingle of spurs and bits, the snorts and nickers of excited horses, the dance of hoofs against shale and beach-pan. A murmur lost into the vast, starry night, dreams insubstantial beneath the thrum of tension, and waiting.

  This land breathes. Aye, it breathes warm water to foam, exhausts chill air to turn upon a sunrise, whispers with ice-white stars, pants with heat-shimmered sun. It kisses his cheeks, murmurs through his close-cropped hair, tastes of salt, baked ash, and grit.

  And leaves no footprints that wind and wave cannot wash away.

  A hand at his back, nearly as familiar to him now as Rob’s had once been. Gamelyn shuddered again, though he tried not to.

  “’M sorry, milord.” The voice was soft, concerned, slurred with home. Only they weren’t. Home. “They’re callin’ us t’ arms,” Much furthered. “’Tis time.”

  Time. The surf, breathing, and hot sand folding, slipping beneath his hands. The shuss-grind of his sweat-stained white h
abit, its bloody cross imprinted into the sand like a forlorn, futile prayer. No more lasting than those footprints in the sand, swirling away with the wind to shimmer on the horizon, beckoning....

  Then, gone.

  ’Tis time. Aye, past time.

  To arms. To battle.

  And Acre, waiting.

  “I’m all right,” Gamelyn took a deep breath, held it, let it out as his heart began to slow to normal. He rocked up slowly, to hands then knees.

  “Another nightmare, then.” Much phrased it like a question—yet not. He squeezed Gamelyn’s shoulder, released him, and stood.

  “Nay,” Gamelyn answered nonetheless, a faulty whisper as he stared across the black and blood-warm expanse of the Sea of Faith. “Waking is the nightmare.”

  And his breath rose into the star-pocked desert sky, a frosty cloud which tore itself into silence beneath pounding surf.

  Exclusive Excerpt

  The King of the Shire Wode. That is what they will call you.

  Years ago, a pagan commoner named Rob of Loxley befriended Gamelyn Boundys, a nobleman’s son, against seemingly insurmountable odds—and with horrific consequences. His home razed by order of the Church, Rob was left for dead, believing his sister, Marion, and his lover, Gamelyn, had perished.

  But Gamelyn yet lives. Guilt-ridden by his unwitting betrayal of Loxley, one of the last bastions of the Old Religion, Gamelyn rides off to seek absolution in the Holy Land. Rob vanishes into the greenwode and emerges as leader of a tight-knit band of outcasts who revolt against the powers that be.

  When the two lovers meet again, it will be in a brutal, blindfolded game of foxes and hounds that pits Templar assassin against Heathen outlaw. Yet the past cannot be denied, and when Rob discovers Marion is also still alive, the game turns. History will chronicle Robyn Hood and Guy of Gisbourne as the deadliest of enemies, but the reality is more complicated—and infinitely more tragic.

  Avaible from

  www.dsppublications.com

  Prelude

  Deep in the Shire Wode

  Waning of Beltain, 1190 ACE

  “I AM a stag of seven tines.”

  The old man sits at the fire, breathing smoke, invoking flame. Humming an elder bard’s song of island magic, old when he was young.

  “I am a tear the sun lets fall.”

  The young Hunter is flung at the old man’s feet, sacrifice to the rocks, to the earth, to Mother. Nearly bled white, there is a great and gaping hole breaking the usual line of tensile muscle along his breast. The arrow has been cut out, but the damage is great. The poultice has been replaced, over and over, furs laid and the fire drawn hot.

  “You are a hawk above the cliff.”

  But his tynged lies still-quiet. A skein spinning outward, vivid sparks of warmth amidst the violated aubergine of viscera, into indigo and then fraying into the black against moonlight. The moon is waning; Her dance now has him, tripped and tangled, Her voice drawing him down into the death spiral. She would take him back, set him free.

  The Horned Lord would foil Her, have his weapon back. And Cernun is the Horned Lord’s: spirit and body.

  “I am the womb of every holt.”

  Cernun uses every wile, every healing mantra and simple, every bit of magic in his aging frame. Twice already has he drawn the shroud over the Hunter’s face, sung the death song. Twice has the thin flax lay still then, impossibly, sucked inward, breath still stirring, faint.

  Blooded. Broken. Yet still the Hunter fights, knowing his fight is not yet begun. The magic would take him down and he would seem to have no choice but to let it swamp him—Death breathes his name even as She heats him with fever and infection.

  Part of him welcomes Her….

  …all of them dead… lost… mam!da!mari!… burning… hanging on the cross… death of me, deathofme… loved him… loved him!

  …treachery… betrayer… murderer….

  And despair leads to pain leads to rage back to pain… but rage is always the stronger, and pain but feeds the fury in his blood. The Hunter refuses to bow, to bend. Incites the darkness. Shows throat, but with a snarl.

  So the old man snarls back. Touches death. Tries to weather the squall. Breathes the spells to set the Hunter back into thisworld.

  “Take my life for his,” Cernun chants. “Mine for his. He is our future, our purpose, our hope. All that is left. You have his blood, Lady, my life is forfeit. I am but Your Hermit, old and spent. This boy has purpose, yet; he would be Your Darken King.”

  He is wounded too grave, heart and body. The Lady’s voice is a soft echo within the caverns. Would you countenance a crippled King?

  “Who walks unburdened, in thislife?” is Cernun’s quick riposte. “Together, we can make him whole.”

  Are you so sure? Nay, my own, it is finished. All things must end.

  It is not yet Our time! Her consort protests, muted thunder in the depths. It is not yet Our ending!

  I am Death—

  And I am Your spear roaring for blood. I am Time, the meaning of Death. The meaning of—

  Life, She must concede.

  “His blood is Yours, the teind paid, Holly King fallen beneath the Oak King’s sword,” Cernun murmurs. “He has been broken, bound, the Sacrifice endured. If You must hold a spirit’s hem, grasp mine.”

  She turns great, luminous eyes upon him. I shall. Never doubt that.

  Silence falls, truncated softly by the drip of water against rock, the crackle of the flames, the hoarse, faint breaths of the wounded. Even the presence of the lad who sits watch outside is magnified, held in thrall of the magic. Then:

  What of the others? She asks. The Pale Knight and the Maiden?

  They are taken by Our enemies, flung to wind and water, to barren stone. They are lost to Us. The Horned Lord pauses, then says, fecund with meaning, He is the only one who can bring them back.

  The Lady Huntress concedes, bows Her bright head, turns aside. And the Horned Lord grabs his Hunter by the hair, kisses him, all passion and cold fire and indomitable will.

  Breathe the fire. Breathe your destiny. Breathe, Hob-Robyn.

  I am the tomb of every hope, comes the answer, teased wavering from the black. I have no breath. I am a ghost, howling in the night, disappearing in the trees, dreams of hope and love twisted into betrayal and nightmares….

  You are. Breathe them. Anadl tynged, my own. You are all of those, and more.

  You told me. Told me… told me he would betray us all. And I didna listen. And now… I canna See….

  Cannot, or will not?

  It is… gone. All I See is the ending. The precipice. I hang with bloodied fingers over a thick, black void, and tynged is frayed, burnt beyond any hope. Burnt like Loxley. Like my heart. He… he let us fall, his Maiden and his lover both….

  And you will take your vengeance. That I promise you. You will have what is yours by rights, and see the traitors writhing at your feet. The cowl upon your heart will also shroud your head. It will be your protection, your being. It will be how your people will know Hob-Robyn is not dead. The Hunter will never die. He is resurrected into the Hooded One.

  The Hooded One is a spirit.

  Aye, as you will be a spectre, a cry in the night, fae green Wode sprite, breath of nightmares and dreams. The Hooded One is Mine, My soul, you are Me. My avatar and all of ours is both spirit and flesh, blood of the King who has bled and died and lives again through the love and tears of his people.

  The King….

  The King of the Shire Wode. It is what they will call you. Rob in th’ Hode.

  Robyn Hode. Aye. That is who we are.

  The coast of Normandy

  End of May 1190, ACE

  “SO THIS is the new one, eh?”

  Dead. They’re all dead. While he is alive.

  There is an irony in it. Something twisted and injured, like an animal in a trap waiting for the coup de grace, the hand to break its neck, the edge to open an artery. The relief of ending….

 
He does not deserve relief.

  “Sacre tête, boy, you look like Hell. Your trip across the Channel was not so kind, eh?”

  Gamelyn bowed his head lower, gave a small shrug. It had in truth been miserable; a high wind filling the sails and heaving waves slamming the bow, which in turn had him heaving his guts over the railing for nearly the entire trip.

  “I imagine once the mal du mer passes, you will be glad to finally see the land of your people.” A grim chuckle. “Not that we will have much time to entertain the sights of Normandy.”

  Gamelyn should be awed. Respectful. His father had come from here, and some of his dam’s people; they had traveled across the English Channel in the wake of Hastings and the one Rob’s people still called Willy Bastard….

  Rob. Marion. Their… people, dead. All of them, cut down like animals and none to mourn their passing, none to even express regret….

  Even his own remorse was a silent and castrated hollow place within, one he had dug himself and kept backfilling with rage and grief. Over and over and over.

  Now there was only a queasy gratitude that his feet were once more on solid land, Norman or no. Even if a sadistic little pig of a guard captain had nigh dragged a tottering Gamelyn from the gangplank and quick-stepped him, horse and all, from the portside to the encampment. Once there, Gamelyn had been marched through the chaos of soldiers sparring, shouting and armoring, to this tent where he now knelt in the chill, stomped-down mud to meet chevalier de Gisborough, his new master.

  Who just happened to be a Templar Knight.

  Gamelyn had heard stories of the Templars. They were uncompromising fanatics, zealots. They put entire towns of Jews and Saracens to the torch: men, women, children—it didn’t matter. If they were deemed to have offended God, the last sight beheld would be the white tabard and crimson cross. It was said Lionheart himself owed much of his working capital to what funds had been passed to him by the Templars: they held power over a king….