The Robin Hood Trilogy

by Marsha Canham

  Contrary to her earlier fears, she had been enjoying the best night’s sleep she’d had since leaving Chateau d’Amboise, when she was wakened—not by visions of demonic witches and ritual sacrifices, but by an uncomfortable fullness in her bladder. Twice before retiring she had ventured out into the night air and picked her way along the well-worn path to the lean-to that sheltered the privy holes. The fact that she needed to venture out a third time was threatening to keep her wide awake until something was done about it.

  If I were a man, she thought miserably, I could simply piss in the corner pot and be done with it. But there was only one pot and it was a tall, long-necked thing she would probably knock over in her attempts to straddle it.

  Apparently monks did not allow for pilgrims to have more pressing needs during the night.

  Ariel lifted her head and searched the gloom, but there was not much to see. She pushed herself cautiously upright and swung her legs over the side of the cot. The dull red glow from the fire gave the bound staves at the ends of the pallets the slightest hint of shape and substance, and allowed her to steer her way across the chamber without tripping over packs, saddles, armour, and furniture.

  Like most doors in a monastery, the hinges were well oiled to prevent the devil from knowing there were souls wandering about. Ariel slipped through the arched portal of the pilgrim’s hall and hurried along the stone corridor that divided the hall from the almonry. Exit through another silently swinging door let her out into the clammy dampness of the evening air. The rain had stopped but the mist was thick and pervasive, wetting her skin almost instantly and clinging in tiny droplets to the blanket she had draped around her shoulders.

  Hemming in the fog, the pale walls of the abbey were her only link with reality. Here and there, the branches of a low bush plucked at the dragging ends of her blanket, and twice she managed to shrivel her own skin with lurid images of crouched, stalking grotesques with bony fingers and grasping claws.

  At first she thought it must be nearer daylight than she had supposed, for the fact that she could see the walls at all suggested a general easing into daylight. But then she quickly realized there was a source of light somewhere up ahead, a concentrated source that bore the acrid tang of a pitch torch.

  The stable where the horses were kept was directly behind the pilgrim’s hall, and it was from there the torchlight bloomed, yellowed and hazed by the mist. Ariel guessed it was a monk going early about his chores, and she remembered to pull the blanket up over her head to conceal the length and colour of her hair.

  Her footsteps slowed, however, as the sound of voices came toward her. They were familiar voices, one of them as readily identifiable as her own.

  “If you are worried about the state of the road between here and Rennes,” Henry was saying, “surely there is a way to bypass the town entirely.”

  “There is,” Eduard agreed, “but one of us will still have to ride into the city to see if the lord marshal managed to dispatch a messenger there. He mentioned Rennes or St. Malo as being places where a courier would be sent to meet us; both towns are big enough to show little interest in pilgrims passing through.”

  “And if you are wrong? How will we know to stand fast?”

  “I will have Sparrow with me. If there is any reason why you should not come near the city, one or both of us will double back to warn you. In truth, though, I do not anticipate any trouble. The leader of the rebelling forces is Hugh of Luisgnan—doubly vexed with the king for divorcing his first wife and taking Hugh’s betrothed as his new queen. He is a good man, not known for wanton pillage and murder. If his armies have occupied Rennes, he will be more concerned with restoring the peace than prolonging open hostilities. He wants all of Normandy to unite against the usurper; he cannot do that if he rouses sympathy for the English king.”

  The light shifted and the fog swirled, retreating before the heat of the torch as three men emerged from the stables. Ariel, not wanting to be caught on the path spying on them, slipped behind the bulky shadow of an ancient fig tree a step before Henry, Sedrick, and FitzRandwulf materialized out of the fog. FitzRandwulf was leading Lucifer behind him. The enormous rampager was fully geared and as Eduard spoke he adjusted the corner of the saw-toothed saddle cloth.

  “Leave here as close after dawn as possible and keep to the main road. If neither Sparrow nor myself rejoin you before midday, assume the way is clear and push on to Rennes.”

  “Will you find us, or will we find you?” Henry asked.

  “If I am not there to meet you at the town gates, go directly to an inn called the Two Fighting Cocks. The hostler is a friend and will provide all your needs. Whisper the words à outrance in his ear and he will know you come from Amboise.”

  “The Two Fighting Cocks. A outrance.” Henry nodded. “And if you are still not with us when we are ready to leave again?”

  Eduard smiled grimly. “Then I am undoubtedly dead and your sister will have realized her fondest desire.”

  FitzRandwulf led Lucifer forward again, seemingly toward the solid wall that enclosed the monastery grounds. But as the torchlight burned away the fog, a postern gate took shape amongst the withered ivy and overhanging tree branches. It was just tall enough and wide enough to allow Eduard to lead the destrier through, and once on the other side, he swung himself up into the saddle and was swallowed into the darker mist without so much as a fare-thee-well.

  Henry and Sedrick stood at the postern until the sound of Lucifer’s heavy hoof beats had faded into the woods.

  “He’s a hard fellow to like,” Sedrick commented. “Cocky as well.”

  “Cocky,” Henry agreed, “but tolerable for another fortnight or so. In truth, I have never had a great love for these provincial barons—nor their bastard cubs—but this one seems to know what he is about.”

  Sedrick chuckled gruffly. “The Lady Ariel might find cause to argue his worth.”

  Henry glanced back at the ghostly silhouette of the abbey. “In this, Ariel will do as I say. She already has the means, with the Welsh princeling eager to climb into her bed, to win back the estates and titles rightfully belonging to the De Clare name. Once we have the Pearl in our possession, we will have the means to ensure those lands and titles remain ours for a very long time.”

  Sedrick’s frown, as slow to form as some of the thoughts in his head, regarded the young lord speculatively. “Ye would fain help steal the Pearl to use as barter? But ye swore—we all three swore an oath on our lives, that once stolen, the Pearl would be placed in safekeeping, far out of reach of the king.”

  “So we did. And I have no intentions of breaking that oath, nor do you. But keeping the Pearl out of the king’s hands, and well within our own, are two different matters.”

  Sedrick’s scowl turned dubious. “I would not want to let FitzRandwulf hear ye say such things. He’s prickly enough as it is planning one theft without having to worry about planning another.”

  Henry sighed as if greatly put upon to explain the obvious.

  “We do not have to steal the Pearl a second time in order to keep the king on tenterhooks. It is enough to know. … and to have him know …”

  “That we know where the Pearl is,” Sedrick concluded brightly.

  “Thy wit is unsurpassed,” Henry said, laughing dryly. “Now come, man, these are heavy thoughts to burden so tender a brain at such an hour and place as this. God’s truth,” he added, shivering as they started walking back along the path, “I will be happy to be quit of this place. I swear the shadows move and the fog has eyes.”

  Sedrick crossed himself hastily, his hand falling to the hilt of his sword as the gnarled trunk of a fig tree took shape beside them. He too could have sworn he saw movement, but there was nothing there, only the moving, swirling banks of opaque mist.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ariel had dashed back to the pilgrim’s hall and made it into her pallet a scant few seconds before she heard the faint rasp of the door and the sound of stealthy feet seek
ing out their beds in the gloom. Her heart had pounded in her throat and her lips had curled between her teeth in an effort to counter the pain of a stubbed toe, and for the next hour she had lain there wide awake, her bladder throbbing while she replayed a bewildering array of thoughts, most of them centring around the exchange she had overheard between Henry and Sedrick.

  What was this talk of a jewel—a pearl valuable enough to use as barter? Barter with whom? For what purpose? It had to be extremely valuable if the king possessed it … doubly, trebly so if it was worth the risk of all their lives to steal it.

  And the thought of FitzRandwulf as a common thief, willing to travel so far to steal a pearl? It made no sense whatsoever. Not for any of them.

  Henry, with his own modest successes on the tournament circuits, was neither so penniless nor so witless as to resort to such desperate measures as stealing from the crown. Wealth, in any form, had never been of prime consideration in any of Sedrick’s plans either. He was the marshal’s loyal liegeman and as long as he had ale to drink, food to fill his belly, a wench to bed, and heads to break, he was content.

  FitzRandwulf’s capacity for avarice was unknown to her, but from what Ariel knew of his personal worth—admittedly not much more than what she had gleaned from Robin’s stories over the past few days—he was not suffering from a cringing poverty. He had estates in Touraine and the Aquitaine, possibly more in Lincolnshire that would have come to him through his mother. Would he kill for a pearl? Would he travel to England and risk all for the sake of stealing a polished bit of stone?

  Moreover, had he not already admitted he was going to England because of a woman? Had he admitted it … or had he simply not disagreed with Ariel’s supposition? And if it was a woman luring him out of his lair in Normandy, was it a woman in possession of this mysterious pearl?

  Ariel had barely sifted her way through these convoluted deductions when she heard Henry’s call to rise. Determined not to betray any knowledge of their conversation—and here, she at least had the satisfaction of knowing she had not imagined the whisperings and intrigues—she made her prayers and greeted their meal of ale and bread with her usual morning scowl. Knowing it would be expected of her, she made a point of inquiring where their choleric guide had taken himself, and of expressing her heartfelt opinion that they could do just as well without him.

  They left the abbey when the sun was still a pale blot on the horizon. They took infrequent stops along the way and by noon had left the thickest tracts of forest well behind them. Fields began to look well tended, hemmed with stone fences and hedgerows. Haystacks were built up around the trunks of trees, so high only the topmost branches showed. Flocks of sheep dotted the hills and once a black and white dog ran along the road beside them, loudly protesting their trespass.

  There were increasing signs of pedestrian traffic as well. Fresh cart tracks and footprints had been set in the mud by farmers hoping to find eager buyers in the city. Several times they passed men on foot who glared at them with wary eyes and closed mouths, but there were no overt signs of an army on the move, or of the burning and pillaging King John had alleged was running rampant through Brittany and Normandy.

  There was no sign of FitzRandwulf or Sparrow either. Henry and Sedrick held a huddled discussion when they broke for the noon meal, including the Welshman out of respect for his princely state, no doubt, but leaving Ariel and Robin to pack away the remains of their food and utensils. She at least knew where FitzRandwulf was, having been privy to their strategies last night. But Robin, his face mostly concealed beneath the hood he had taken to wearing against the cold, was not so much concerned over his brother’s absence as he was hurt over being left behind. He was, after all, Eduard’s squire. He, not Sparrow, should have accompanied his lord into Rennes, regardless of any threat of peril.

  All told, it was not a happy group of three knights and two squires who approached the gates of Rennes. The city itself was indistinguishable from most others that had grown up around a Norman stronghold. The first sighting was of towers and needle-thin spires rising above the crest of a hill. Boundary stones placed beside the highroad marked the beginnings of the town’s land and divided the arable strips of meadow where the residents grew their crops and grazed sheep. Running alongside the city were the brawling, turbulent waters of the river Vilaine, a tumbling rush of wicked currents into which a man crossing the draw could fall and be swept a dozen leagues downstream before popping up to catch a breath. Entry into the walled city was through a stone archway and vast wooden gates that were kept closed and guarded from sundown to sunrise. A fat wart of a porter with a bulbous red nose and runny eyes collected a toll from the five travellers, allowing them to pass only after they and their packhorses had been thoroughly inspected.

  Here too were the first signs of open defiance against the English king. The pennons of Brittany and France flew prominently over the main gate; the leopards of England were conspicuously absent.

  Glancing past the shadowy arch of the tollgate, the new arrivals had no difficulty envisioning a bullhide-clad sentry lowering his crossbow upon the gatekeeper’s signal. There were more sentries boldly placed on top of the walls and in the watchtowers, all of them wearing the blazons of Hugh of Luisgnan.

  Inside the walls, the narrow, winding streets that formed a labyrinth of districts and guilds around the heart of the inner city were crowded, bustling with vendors and peddlers hawking their wares. Ariel strove to keep her head down and her face shielded under the brim of her hat, but there was too much to look at, too many sights that offered a change from the damp isolation of the past few days. Shop windows were open and goods displayed on hooks and tall, heaped shelves. Wooden booths were crammed into every nook and corner, selling everything from soap, garlic, and coal, to grindstones, shovels, and honey. The din was fierce and only grew in measure as they rode deeper into the city. Everyone shouted to be heard over their neighbour; church bells tolled unceasingly, babes screamed and dogs yapped. There were people and horses everywhere, knights with glinting bits of armour pushing through slower-moving groups of churchmen or ruffians. Once, Henry had to signal the others to move aside for a pair of hand-carried litters bearing two noble young ladies in a laughing, pointing hurry to spend their rich husbands’ money.

  Most of the buildings were built from timber, three and four storeys high, with a tendency to sag with age. With streets rarely more than seven or eight feet wide, the upper levels of the buildings hung over the alleyways, creating a tunnel-like effect with scant space between for daylight to shine through. Painted signs swung and creaked over doorways, some low enough to whack an indolent horseman to attention. With three and four families living over each shop, the stench of so many closely packed bodies was nearly as overwhelming as the din. Household refuse and ordure were heaved out of the windows with little warning, scavenged by pigs and kites that contributed their own slimy offerings to the general ambience.

  For convenience and protection, most bakers and cook shops were located in one warren, goldsmiths in another, linen makers, tanners, fish merchants all in their own. A blind man could find most by smell alone, following the sweet and heady scents of the bakers to the acrid mix of tannin and mashed brains for the leather makers. Worst was the butchers’ row, where the gutters and cobbles ran red with blood. Here the beggars and those of lowly descent fought with the dogs and gulls over dripping strings of entrails tossed into steaming heaps and deemed worthless even for the making of soap or casings.

  In the centre of the town were the fine stone houses of the richer citizens, the guildhall with its belfry tower, the marketplace where ladies and their tiring women congregated to inspect the newest velvets imported by the Venetian merchants. Linens from Flanders were sold here, almonds and spices were offered in fragrant handfuls by swarthy-skinned Greeks. At the very heart was the town square with its raised dais and tall wooden cross where the town crier stood to make all public pronouncements.

  As in most cities,
there were nearly as many churches as houses, built to play on the guilty consciences of the masses of sinners. There was a monastery for training acolytes and a nunnery for the welfare and safekeeping of beautiful or rebellious young daughters. In almost as great a number were the taverns, inns, and wine shops located where merchants could eat, sleep and drink with other merchants, Jews with Jews, sellers of iron and bronze with the brawny men who fashioned weapons and suits of fine chain mail. These, like all other establishments, bore no written names on their signposts, for only the very rich and privileged could cipher lettering. They were identified with graven pictures carved and painted brightly—a snarling boar to depict the Boar’s Head Inn, or a sprig of yellow weeds to harken patrons to the Golden Thistle.

  The inn where Henry finally called a halt boasted a swinging wooden sign painted with two strutting red cocks. At first, Ariel could scarcely believe it had been FitzRandwulf’s choice, for it was surely the most squalid, drunken tilt of warped boards and half-rotted thatching they had encountered. After an intense few minutes spent contemplating their surroundings, her brother was of the same shocked opinion.

  “I am not keen on the look of this place,” he said unnecessarily.

  “Aye,” Sedrick mused. “He might have chosen a place less extravagant nearer the butchers’ mart.”

  “Are you certain this is where Lord Eduard instructed us to meet him?” Dafydd asked in an awed whisper, his eyes rounded and fixed upon a man and woman strolling past, the latter scantily clad and screeching with laughter as the man thrust his hand under her bodice and gave her breasts a hearty fondle.

  Henry peered up at the sign to doubly verify it in his own mind. “Robin … perhaps you and Ariel should remain out here with the horses until we have had a look inside.”

  Ariel, already dismounted and standing on the cobbled street with the others, laid a hand on the hilt of her shortsword and shook her head. “I go where you go, brother dearest, and in this case, I prefer to have a look myself, thank you.”