Scarlet

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  “No? That is the difference between us, Gysburne. I very much would.” He turned and called to his men. “Proceed with the hanging!”

  “You’re insane,” growled the marshal. “You kill these men for no reason.”

  “The murder of my soldiers in the forest is all the reason I need. These barbarians will learn to fear the king’s justice.”

  “This isn’t justice,” Guy answered, “it is revenge. What happened in the forest was your fault, and these men had nothing to do with it. Where is the justice in that?”

  The sheriff signalled the hangman, who, with the help of three other soldiers, proceeded to haul on the rope attached to the old man’s neck. There came a strangled choking sound as the elderly captive’s feet left the rough planking of the platform.

  “It is the only law these brute British know, Marshal,” remarked the sheriff as he turned to watch the first man kick and swing. “They cannot protect their rebel king and thumb the nose at us. We will not be played for fools.”

  He was still speaking when the arrow sliced the air over his shoulder and knocked the hangman backwards off his feet and over the edge of the platform. Two more arrows followed the first so quickly that they seemed to strike as one, and two of the three soldiers hauling on the noose rope simply dropped off the platform. The third soldier suddenly found himself alone on the scaffold. Unable to hold the weight of the struggling prisoner, he released the rope. The old man scrambled away, and the soldier threw his hands into the air to show that he was no longer a threat.

  The sheriff, his face a rictus of rage, spun around, searching the crowd for the source of the attack as an uncanny quiet settled over the astonished and terrified crowd. No one moved.

  For an instant, the only sound to be heard was the crack of the bonfire and the rippling flutter of the torches. And then, into the flame-flickering silence there arose a horrendous, teeth-clenching, bone-grating shriek—as if all the demons of hell were tormenting a doomed soul. The sound seemed to hang in the cold night air; and as if chilled by the awful cry, the rain, which had been pattering down fitfully till now, turned to snow.

  De Glanville caught a movement in the shadows behind the church. “There!” he cried. “There they go! Take them!”

  Marshal Gysburne drew his sword and flourished it in the air. He called to his men to follow him and started pushing through the crowd towards the church. They had almost reached the bonfire when out from its flaming centre—as if spat from the red heat of the fire itself—leapt the black feathered phantom: King Raven.

  One look at that smooth black, skull-like head with its high feathered crest and the improbably long, cruelly pointed beak, and the Cymry cried out, “Rhi Bran!”

  The soldiers halted as the creature spread its wings and raised its beak to the black sky above and loosed a tremendous shriek that seemed to shake the ground.

  Out from behind the curtain of flame streaked an arrow. Guy, in the fore rank of his men, caught the movement and instinctively raised his shield; the arrow slammed into it with the blow of a mason’s hammer, knocking the ironclad rim against his face and opening a cut across his nose and cheek. Gysburne went down.

  “Rhi Bran y Hud!” shouted the Cymry, their faces hopeful in the flickering light of the Twelfth Night bonfire. “Rhi Bran y Hud!”

  “Kill him! Kill him!” screamed the sheriff. “Do not let him escape! Kill him!”

  The shout was still hanging in the air as two arrows flew out from the flames, streaking towards the sheriff, who was commanding the gallows platform as if it was the deck of a ship and he the captain. The missiles hissed as they ripped through the slow-falling snow. One struck the gallows upright; the other caught de Glanville high in the shoulder as he dived to abandon his post.

  Suddenly, the air was alive with singing arrows. They seemed to strike everywhere at once, blurred streaks nearly invisible in the dim and flickering light. Fizzing and hissing through the snow-filled air, they came—each one taking a Ffreinc soldier down with it. Three flaming shafts arose from the bonfire, describing lazy arcs in the darkness. The fire arrows fell on the gallows, kindling the post and now-empty platform.

  Count Falkes, transfixed by the sight of the phantom, stood as arrows whirred like angry wasps around him. He had heard so much about this creature, whom he had so often dismissed as the fevered imaginings of weak and superstitious minds. Yet here he was—strange and terrible and, God help us all, magnificent in his killing wrath.

  The last thing Falkes de Braose saw was Sheriff de Glanville, eyes glazed, clutching the shaft of the arrow that had pierced his shoulder, passed through, and protruded out his back. The sheriff, staggering like a drunk, lurched forward, dagger in his hand, struggling to reach the phantom of the wood.

  Count Falkes turned and started after the sheriff to drag him back away and out of danger. He took but two steps and called out to de Glanville. The word ended in a sudden, sickening gush as an arrow struck him squarely in the chest and threw him down on his back. He felt the cold wet mud against the back of his head and then . . . nothing.

  CHAPTER 29

  See now, Odo,” I tell my dull if dutiful scribe, “we did not plan to attack the sheriff and his men—we were sorely out-manned, as you well know—but we came ready to lend muscle to Abbot Daffyd’s demand to stop the hangings.”

  “But you killed four men and wounded seven,” Odo points out. “You must have known it would come to a fight.”

  “Bran suspected the sheriff would betray himself, and he wanted to be there to prevent the executions if it came to that. As it happens, he was right. So, if you’re looking for someone to blame for the Twelfth Night slaughter, you need look no further than Richard de Glanville’s door.”

  Odo accepts this without further question, and we resume our slow dance towards my own appointment with the hangman.

  Bran was angry. Furious. I’d never seen him so enraged—not even in the heat of battle. When fighting, an icy calm descended over him. With swift but studied motion, he bent the belly of the bow and sent shaft after shaft of winged death to bite deep into enemy flesh. He did not exult; neither did he rage. But this! This was something different—a black, impenetrable fury had swept him up, and he shook with it as he stalked around the fire ring in his hut, his face twisted into a rictus of ferocity. Like a terrible, monstrous beast, anger had consumed him completely.

  Seeing him now, a body would not have known him as the same man from the night before. For as we stood in the town square on Twelfth Night and the realisation broke upon us that Sheriff Bloody de Glanville would hang those three men even after recovering the treasure, Bran simply turned to us as we gathered close about and said in a low voice, “String your bows.”

  Then he calmly set about the destruction of our enemies.

  As I said to Odo, it was no great surprise that the vile sheriff would betray his own promise. Truth be told, we fairly expected it. That is why we had hurried from the abbey to the town ahead of Abbot Daffyd to ensure that the sheriff would release the captives once the stolen goods were returned. I reckon that each of us, in some corner of our hearts, knew it was all too likely de Glanville would show his true colours that grim night.

  Now that it was over, however, Bran had stewed and fretted and worked himself into a towering rampage. “The man is a craven butcher,” spat Bran, pacing around the hearth. Fleeing the town, we had ridden all night to reach Cél Craidd; none of us had slept, nor could we. Though exhaustion heaved heavy rollers upon us, we sat around the low-flickering fire and listened to our lord give voice to his anger.

  In the time I had been among the Grellon, I had picked up hints and suggestions that our Lord Bran sometimes suffered from black, unreasoning rages. But I had never seen it for myself . . . until now.

  “He must be stopped,” snarled Bran, smashing his fist against his thigh with each word. “God as my witness, he will be stopped!”

  “De Glanville had no intention of keeping his word,” Iw
an pointed out. “He meant to kill as many as he could from the start. I’d like to see him dance on the end of that leather rope.”

  “It may be too late for that,” said Tuck quietly. As everyone turned toward him, he yawned hugely and said, “He may be dead already. I saw him struck, did I not?”

  “It’s true,” I affirmed. “I saw it, too.”

  “He took an arrow maybe,” allowed our incensed lord. “But I won’t rest until I’ve seen his head on a pole.”

  “For a certainty,” Tuck insisted, “I saw him go down.”

  “He might have been struck, but was he killed?” Bran glared around at us as if we were a troop of enemy soldiers sprung up to surround him. “Was he killed?” Bran demanded, his voice aquiver with passion. “Is he dead?”

  There was no way for any of us to know that beyond a doubt; when the time came to flee, we had all cleared off like smoke. We had done what we could do, the few of us, and were in danger of overstaying our welcome. So with the confusion at its height, we used the chaos in the town square to cover our retreat.

  “I was not counting bodies,” remarked Iwan; he glanced around, somewhat defiantly. “Nor did I see anyone else with a tally stick.”

  “De Glanville must have been killed,” said Mérian. “If he took an arrow, he must be dead by now. Bran, calm yourself. It is over and done. You saved those men, and the Ffreinc have been dealt a blow. Be satisfied with that.”

  Bran regarded her with a look of cruel disdain, but he held his tongue. When he could trust himself to speak again, he said, “Dead or alive, we must know beyond a doubt. One way or the other, we must find out.”

  “We’ll know soon enough,” pointed out Tuck. “Word will spread.”

  “Aye, but late in coming here,” suggested Siarles.

  “Unless someone went to Llanelli to find out,” said Bran, using the Welsh name for the place. Like all true sons of Elfael, our Bran refused to dignify the Norman name of Saint Martin’s by uttering it aloud.

  “None of us can go,” Iwan said. “They know us now. We’d be caught and strung up on sight.”

  “Someone who has never been there, then,” said Tuck, thinking aloud.

  “Or,” added Bran, glancing up quickly, “someone who goes there all the time . . .” Turning to Siarles, he said, “Fetch Gwion Bach. We have a chore for him.”

  Well, before anyone could gainsay the plan, the boy was found and brought to sit with the council. A quick, intelligent lad, he is, as I say, a mute and such a furtive little sneak that he easily flits from place to place with no one the wiser, and so quiet folk don’t often know he’s around. The townsfolk had long since grown used to seeing him here and there, and it is a fair bet that no one thought anything of it when he appeared the evening following what the alarmed citizens of Saint Martin’s are now calling the Twelfth Night Massacre.

  Iwan and I walked him to the edge of the forest and beyond as far as we dared go, then left him to hurry on his way into town. It was long past dark by the time we returned. Gwion stayed in town overnight, God knows where, and returned to Cél Craidd late the next day. The winter sun was almost down when he appeared, red-cheeked from his run through the frosty air. Bran had food and drink ready and waiting for him, but the boy would not sit down, less yet touch a bite, until he had delivered his charge. He fairly danced with excitement at being included in the plans of his elders.

  “Good lad, good,” said Bran, kneeling down in front of him. “Did you learn what we want to know?”

  Gwion nodded so hard, I thought his head might fall off.

  “Is the sheriff alive?” asked Iwan, unable to restrain himself.

  Bran gave the big man a perturbed glance, and said, “Is he alive, Gwion? Is the sheriff still alive?”

  The boy nodded again with undimmed enthusiasm.

  “And the count?” asked Tuck. “He was hit, too? Did the count survive?”

  The boy turned wide eyes towards the friar and lifted his shoulder in an elegant shrug. “You don’t know?” asked Mérian.

  The boy shook his head. He did not know how the count fared, but the sheriff, it seemed, had indeed survived.

  Bran thanked the boy with a hug, and dismissed him to his supper with a pat on the head and chuck under the chin. “So now!” he said, when Gwion had gone. “It seems the sheriff lives. I think we must invite him to Cél Craidd and arrange a suitable welcome for him when he arrives.”

  The anger, which I had allowed myself to imagine had burned itself out between times, leapt up—renewed, refreshed, and just as poisonous as before—all in that blinding instant. I saw the darkness draw a veil across his eyes and his grin become malicious, frightening. “Hear me now,” he said, his voice a smothered whisper, “this is what we are going to do . . .”

  When he had delivered his demands to us, we were allowed to go rest and eat, and prepare ourselves for the fight ahead. I walked by Nóin’s hut, and although it was early yet, could discern no light from a welcome fire in the hearth. I reckoned she had given up waiting for me and gone to sleep. I was that tired myself that I left her and the mite to their rest and took myself off to my own cold bed.

  Thus, I did not see Nóin until the next day. She had heard all about the Twelfth Night battle, of course, and was that heartily glad we had freed the captives and lived to tell the tale. She was not best pleased, however, to learn that we could not be wed just yet on account of Lord Bran’s plan to host a visit by the sheriff.

  “And how do you imagine the sheriff will agree to come?” she asked in all innocence.

  “I do not imagine for one moment that old Richard Rat-face will agree to anything we say or do,” I replied.

  “Then how—,” she protested.

  “Shh!” I laid a fingertip to her lips, and then kissed them. “Enough questions now. I cannot tell you any more than I have.”

  “But—”

  “It is a secret until all is in order. I’ve said too much already,” I whispered. “Let us talk of something else.”

  “Very well,” she agreed with grudging reluctance, “let us talk of our wedding. Tuck is here now, and I’ve been thinking that—”

  She must have seen my face fall just then, for she said, “Now what is the matter? What have I said?”

  “Nothing,” I replied. “All is well, truly, love. It is just that we cannot be married yet.”

  “And why not?” Nóin frowned dangerously, warning me that my explanation had better be good enough to save a hiding.

  In the end, since I could not tell her what Bran was planning, I simply replied, “It seems I must go away again.”

  “Go?” she asked. “Where this time?”

  “Not far,” I said. “And it will only take a day or so—but we are leaving at once.”

  She sighed and tried to smile. “Ah, well, I suppose I should be grateful you bothered to come back at all.”

  Before I could think what to say to that, she rose. “Come back to me when you can stay,Will Scarlet,” she said. I saw the sheen of tears in her eyes as she turned away.

  “Nóin, please don’t.”

  But she was already gone.

  Iwan found me a short time later. “Ready, Will?”

  “It makes no matter,” I grumbled.

  “Then let us be about our work.”

  Our work was to reassemble the wagons we had taken apart in the Christmas raid. Bran’s plan was simple, but required a little preparation. While Iwan, Tomas, Siarles, and I carried our tools and fittings into the wood and set about putting the wains back together, some of the other Grellon gathered the other items we would need in order to make Bran’s plan succeed.

  In all, it took most of the day to make the wagons serviceable once more and fortify the woodland alongside the road. When we finished, Bran inspected the work and declared that all was ready. Early the next morning, as the others made their way to the wagons leading the oxen, I enjoyed a warm dip-bath and a change of clothes—I was to pass as the servant of a Saxo
n merchant—and then, armed with only a knife in my belt, I lit out for Saint Martin’s.

  After a brisk ride, I approached the town on the King’s Road and entered the square as the bell in the church began tolling. At first I imagined it was some kind of alarm, and braced myself to ride away again in retreat. But it was only the summons to midday prayers; it drew few worshippers and no soldiers at all. Plucking up my courage, I dismounted, walked to the guardhouse, and knocked on the door.

  After a few moments standing in the cold, the door opened and a young soldier looked out. Seeing no one but a rough Saxon standing before him, he said, “Quel est? Que voulez-vous, mendiant?”

  This was spoken rudely, as one would speak to a bothersome dog. I do not think he even expected an answer, for before I could make a reply, he began to shut the door. “Arrêter, s’il vous plaît! Un moment.”

  Hearing his own language spat back at him like that, he paused and opened the door once more. “Please, Sire,” I said, feeling the French words strange in my mouth, “I was told I would find the sheriff here.”

  “You were told wrong,” he said, then pointed to a large house across the square. “He lives there.”

  I thanked the soldier for his trouble and walked across the town square. So far, the plan was holding together. Now that I knew where the sheriff could be found and that I could trust myself in marketplace Ffreinc it was time to get down to business. I knocked on the door that opened onto the street. “A word, if you please,” I said to the man who answered. He appeared to be a servant only—whoever he was, I knew it was not the sheriff. “I have come to see the sheriff on an urgent matter.”

  “What would that be?” inquired the fella.

  “It is a matter for His Honour, the sheriff, himself alone,” I said. “Are you Sheriff de Glanville?”

  “No, I am his bailiff.”Without another word, he opened the door wider and indicated that I was to come inside. “This way,” he said. Closing the door behind him, he led me up stone steps to the single large room which occupied the upper floor. A fire burned in a stone fireplace and, near it, a heavy table had been set up. Richard de Glanville sat in a big, thronelike chair facing the fire, his legs and feet covered by a deerskin robe. There was a young gyrfalcon perched on a wooden stand next to him.