“My serjeant says you know who Hood is,” said Wendenal in his careful, precise English. Much as he detested speaking the language, it was still better than hearing someone mangling his native langue d’oïl. “So, we make this simple. You tell me what you know, and I tell you whether it gets you a reprieve. If you delay, or say nothing, I assume what you know is nothing.”
The man did not respond. For a moment, Wendenal was unsure if he had even heard. “Well? Can you tell me who Hood is?”
“No one can,” came the dour reply.
Wendenal gave a snort of exasperation. “As I thought,” he said, reverting to his own language. “Pointless. A waste of time.” He raised his hand.
“But I am the only man alive who knows the true madness in that mind.” Wendenal stopped mid-gesture. “I can find him. I can identify him. I can stop him. And nothing would give me greater pleasure.” The reply was in perfect langue d’oïl.
Wendenal looked at the man with narrowed eyes. “How can you claim this?”
“I fought alongside him for two years and more. We ate and drank together.”
“And yet you say you do not know who he is?”
“I know what he called himself: ‘Robert of Locksley’. But I do not believe he knew anything of the village whose name he bore – nor it of him.”
Wendenal snorted dismissively. “It’s in your interest to maintain that little mystery, of course. Suppose he is exactly who he says he is?”
“Then I am the Earl of Huntingdon. I don’t doubt there was a Robert of Locksley once. Perhaps there still is. But I am certain it is not he.”
Wendenal threw up his hand in frustration. “This is absurd. You say you know him better than any man, then that you do not know him at all. That you have information, and that there is none to have. Which is it?”
“I never met anyone who knew him before. It is as if he stepped out of a void. He is without name, without lineage – outside of history. He is like the biblical plague of locusts – he consumes everything of worth in one place, then, when it has nothing left to offer him, he moves on. Changes his name. His appearance. His voice.”
“His voice..?”
“I once saw him conversing with a Scotsman over drink. At the start, you’d swear he was from England’s northern shires. By the end, one could not tell the difference between his voice and the Scot’s. It was as if he was consuming him. Becoming him. As if he could not help himself from doing so. As if he needed others’ souls in order to continue his existence.” He let his head drop. “Unless, of course, he really is a Scot, and the accent I knew was an act.” He looked up again, his eyes suddenly keen and urgent. “This man is a danger. To me, to you, to everything. Just now he is the famed outlaw of Sherwood. That game will last him a good while. Through it he unexpectedly finds himself on a par with kings. He has never tasted that kind of power before. And having tasted it, he will not loose his grip. Believe me when I say he will push this game to its ultimate conclusion.”
There was an air of doom in the man’s final words. Of apocalypse. Wendenal forced a sceptical laugh – an attempt to hide the extent to which they had disturbed him. “Or he will be brought to justice like any other rogue.”
“That would be preferable, yes,” said the man, softly. “That’s what I offer.”
“And only you can achieve this?”
“This man is not like any other rogue.”
“So, you are suggesting I simply let you loose to go galloping after him?” Wendenal laughed, his guards joining him.
“It would be a start,” said the man, and the laughter stopped.
“This is ridiculous. Just words. Wild stories. Perhaps you should’ve considered a career as a storyteller rather than a poacher. You certainly seem to have more skill in the former than the latter. But so far you have not given me one hard fact. Not one!”
The man’s brow creased in frustration. He made as if to step forward but was restrained by his guard. “He has a cross tattooed on the inside of his left wrist. Like this...” He pulled back the sleeve of his tunic to reveal a small, blue-black symbol, its ink blurred at the edges. “We had them done at the same time. Also his right hand is smooth. No wrinkles or marks. It was thrust into a fire during a skirmish in Sicily. For a time he could not shoot a bow. There were those who said he never would again, but he proved them wrong. He delights in proving people wrong. There is also a star-shaped wound on his right thigh, from a mace blow. Again, he was lucky.”
“His thigh..?” said Wendenal, his voice rising as he spoke. The underlying question was clear. The man almost smiled.
“He’s not my type.” Then, after a pause, added: “We lived and ate and drank together for thirty months. Mercenaries. Through driving snow, heaving seas and parched desert. At Hattin...” Wendenal’s eyes widened at the mention of that name. “You get to know a man, whether you like it or not.”
“And yet, in all that time, there was not one clue as to who he really is?”
“Just one.” His face darkened, as if at some troubled memory. “A name. ‘Rose.’ It is dear to him. It recurs, over and over. But whether it was a mother, a sister, a wife or a lover...” He shrugged, looking defeated, as if finally acknowledging the paucity of the information. “Perhaps one day we shall know.”
Wendenal stared at him for a long time. Part of him wished only to have this man dragged away and flogged. God knows, he’d taken up more than enough of his time and energy. He was arrogant, defiant. Possibly a fantasist. Yet there was something... Something Wendenal could not place. Something that – against all reason – rang true, and that stayed his hand. He mulled over the man’s words. Mercenaries. That was what he had said.
“He is not a knight?”
The man’s jaw clenched. “He is not.”
“But then, who exactly are you?”
The man’s eyes remained cast down at the floor. “I’m no one.”
Wendenal had to admit that the man, infuriating and baffling as he was, had a knack for keeping one’s interest. “Well, let’s see...” With a gesture, he indicated for his serjeant to search the man’s baggage, scanning the gear as it was spread before him. “Are you a knight?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then you’re a thief. This hauberk is a knight’s property.”
“I am no thief!” snapped the man, his eyes blazing. The guards gripped his arms again, and he calmed himself. Wendenal indicated for them to release him. “I am not a knight. I was denied that honour. But the mail is mine nonetheless.”
“It’s of little interest to me what wager or bartering delivered this into your hands. Only the deserving have the right to wear it.”
The man shrugged and nodded. “I’d dearly like to see a world in which only the deserving wore mail. We’d have fewer knights, I grant you, but the quality would certainly go up...”
This was too much. Outraged, Wendenal struck the man a heavy blow across the face. “Who are you to pass judgement on the quality of knights?” he snapped.
The man staggered, straightened, and stood firm, wiping the blood from his lip. “One who has seen the best and the worst of them,” he replied. He fixed Wendenal’s burning eyes with his own. “Enough to know that apparel may be deceptive. That a man may wear the crown of a king, though there be a more deserving head.”
Wendenal stared at him in stunned silence. How was he to respond to this? Was it possible, after all, that this man had some powerful information – that he knew of his allegiances? “Now you add treason to the crime of killing the King’s deer,” Wendenal said, carefully. “If you thought to talk your way to leniency you’re going about it the wrong way.” The guards stifled a laugh.
“I merely speak my mind because I tire of doing otherwise,” said the man. “But no deer died at my hand.”
“Ah. Now we come to the heart of the matter. ‘I didn’t do it.’ Serjeant?”
The serjeant flushed, and stepped forward. “He was caught standing over the bod
y of a stag, his arrow in its eye. Had his horse not been lamed in its pursuit, he would surely have made off before we got to him.”
The man gave a sigh of exasperation. “My horse was not lamed in the pursuit, but cut with a knife. As you’d know if you bothered to look.” The serjeant glared at him. “And where is the bow I am supposed to have used?”
Wendenal frowned at the serjeant. “Well?” There was certainly no bow among the accoutrements spread before them. The serjeant simply looked embarrassed and cornered, then finally shook his head in defeat.
“A longbow is hard to hide. So, am I supposed to have shot an arrow with no bow, and then hamstrung my own horse?”
“If not you, then who?”
The man reached into his jerkin. All the guards about him flinched. The serjeant gripped his sword – but before he could act, the man had pulled out a broken arrow and flung it to the ground before his captor.
Wendenal fumed in the tense silence, his eyes fixed on the eight-inch length of ash shaft. “Was this man not searched?” he rumbled.
The serjeant flushed, his eyes panicky. “I don’t know how he...”
“Never mind,” snapped Wendenal.
The man pointed at the broken fragment. “This is the arrow that killed the king’s stag.” The goose feathers on its fletched end were dyed green, bound with green linen thread. A distinctive touch. “I dare say you’ve seen the like before, piercing the bodies of men you sent into the forest.”
Wendenal did not raise his eyes. “I know from whose bow this arrow comes.”
“I saw him. Spoke with him. Moments before your men arrived.”
“You saw him?”
“That is how close your men came to the one known as Hood.”
Wendenal heard a sound behind him, in the shadows. A clearing of the throat. A low whisper. He nodded, and looked the man in the face.
“Tell me what happened.”
XLIX
GISBURNE KNEW TOO late that he was riding into trouble. The stag had crashed to the ground just fifty yards ahead, almost as if hurled from the greenwood. It had been running full tilt, Gisburne realised, and felled whilst doing so. A stunning shot – or a lucky one.
Moments later, a small man in a dirty brown hood had leapt out after it. Gisburne had not paused, not hesitated in his progress. In truth, he had little interest in the man or his business. He would ride on his way and leave him to it. Where Gisburne was riding to, he did not know. He hardly cared. The past few days – days that had robbed him of the last few things of any value – had left him exhausted, his heart empty. Even Marian, who had seemed so warm during these difficult weeks – enough to inflict upon him the curse of hope – had finally said adieu with disheartening ease. Now there was only this old horse left. His father’s horse. Painful as it was, after so long in the saddle, riding was a comfort. The only comfort. He would, therefore, keep riding until something else presented itself.
As he neared, he saw the man had a drawn knife, but no bow. At that, he felt his neck prickle, and his throat tighten. When the man then turned and gestured in triumph towards the forest, Gisburne knew for certain that he was not alone.
They were around him in seconds – crashing out of the wood, bursting from the leaves and branches like beetles from a rotting log, a dozen rough-looking men. The horse shied and stumbled on the rooty path, almost throwing Gisburne headlong. He overbalanced, gripped the reins and slithered off the saddle in an awkward dismount. When he turned, arrows and blades were pointed at him. He had seen them poaching – in some quarters, a capital crime. They would not let him live.
Gisburne turned about, calculating his chances, when a familiar voice turned his every muscle to stone.
“Well, well, old man – I see you escaped the Devil’s horns after all!”
And there he stood, like some kind of vision – inextinguishable, imperturbable, impossible.
Locksley.
“Good to see you. You look like shit.” And with that he planted his fists on his hips and threw his head back in a great, raucous laugh.
After Hattin, Gisburne had given Locksley no thought. The man, and his crime, had ridden into oblivion. He existed afterwards not even as a memory, but as a remnant of a bad dream that had no bearing on waking life, and which could now be allowed to simply melt away. His intrusion back into this world – into this place – shook Gisburne to the core. And yet, now he looked upon him, he had the uncanny feeling that he should have expected it. That it was somehow inevitable. But of course... Locksley could not be expected simply to die. Not after that. Gisburne did not believe in fate – in lives being somehow arranged by the cosmos. And yet, as he looked upon this man – who, like him, had done the impossible, and walked out of the Hell of Hattin – he felt the earth beneath his feet, the air in his lungs, the sky above his head, vibrate with a weird expectancy. A strange feeling of the two of them being connected forever by that shared, impossible moment.
Good to see you. That was what he said. He did not mean it, not as others meant it. Yet it was as hard to resist as always. Gisburne clenched his teeth, exhumed a memory from some dark oubliette in his brain. An image of a lamplit chamber; of billowing curtains. And blood.
“What do you think of my little band of thieves?” Locksley grinned, as if it were all a grand children’s game. But he had not ordered them to stand down, and showed no signs of doing so.
“So is this what you do now?” he said, surprised by the bitterness in his own voice. “Poach deer and rob poor wretches who have lost everything?”
A flicker of something akin to confusion – or perhaps it was petulance – flashed across Locksley’s features.
“Oh no,” he replied with a shrug. “We rob the rich, too.” There was a ripple of laughter from the men.
Gisburne felt an urge to warn them, but did not know how. What could one say about a man who did not exist? He recalled an occasion, just before Thessalonika, when he had asked Locksley about the village whose name he carried. In truth, he had been feeling homesick, and yearned for an excuse to talk of his own home. Locksley was dismissive, moving the conversation rapidly on. At the time, Gisburne had thought it typical of Locksley’s impatience and lack of sentimentality – his total, sometimes baffling absence of interest in things past – and that he had dismissed it because he wished to stay focused on the coming conflict. Now, looking back, Gisburne sensed something more evasive in the response. The uncovering – almost – of a lie. What did he really know of him, after all? There was not a single thing upon which he could rely – no glimpse in any of their conversations, he now realised, of family, of childhood, of anything. As if he had stepped out of a void.
Gisburne looked down at the deer. The arrow that had pierced its left eye bore a familiar green fletching. He poked it with his foot. “Only you would aim for an eye when the body presents a target as big as a barrel.”
Locksley grinned. “There must be challenges in life.” Then, suddenly, he turned.
Gisburne, too, felt the rumble beneath his feet. Horses approaching at the gallop. The men began to back away into the trees. Locksley looked back at Gisburne and narrowed his eyes as if weighing up his options. Gisburne felt they looked at him now as they never had before – that he had revealed something of himself, and in doing so had stepped outside of Locksley’s circle, and into a far more dangerous realm. He was uncertain whether the approaching horsemen meant his salvation, or were hastening his death.
“Time we went,” said Locksley with a jaunty smile. Then, pulling a knife, he stepped up to Gisburne’s horse and slashed the blade across the back of its hind leg.
There was a horrifying screech as it collapsed and thrashed on the ground, blood coursing from the wound.
“No!”
“Sorry, old man...” Locksley shrugged, and became one with the greenwood.
L
WENDENAL TURNED ANOTHER circle of the room, hand clasped behind his back, as the man reached the end of his account.
He stopped and frowned when he realised there was no more to come. “Why cripple your horse?” he said. “So you were captured in his stead?”
“To stop me going after him.” The man’s voice was expressionless.
“If that’s the case, why not kill you?”
The man looked oddly pained. “Because,” he said, “he wants me to go after him.”
Wendenal stared at him for a moment in silence, wondering at this paradox. He gave a dismissive snort. “The portrait you paint is of a man as slippery as an eel. How do I know you are not Hood?”
A laugh rose in the man’s throat, became a guffaw. “Even Hood is not mad enough to kill the king’s deer and then cripple his own horse.” The laugh died away, his expression becoming suddenly dark – even, Wendenal fleetingly thought, shot through with – what was that? Grief? “It was my father’s horse,” said the man distantly. “Old, but... A knight’s horse. A destrier. If you had seen it, you would know.” Wendenal glanced at his serjeant, who nodded in confirmation. “All I had left of him, but for this hauberk and sword. He is – was – a knight. He served King Henry all his life, with a loyalty that never faltered. Even in... the most difficult of times.”
Wendenal knew at once to what the man referred. His father had stood against Richard when the rebellious prince had tried to take the crown from the old king. Richard had failed, and Henry had pardoned his sins. But now Henry was dead, and Richard king. This ragged man’s ill fortune was beginning to make some kind of sense. The man straightened and looked Wendenal in the eye. His voice was firm, resolute.
Guy of Gisburne- The Omnibus Page 29
